Fall Movie Preview

I love fall. Growing up in Idaho, autumn generally just meant snow, but here in Michigan it’s a whole other thing that I’ve come to love. Leaf watching drives and cider mills are something I look forward to all year round along with supplies for back to school, bright-eyed and ambitious students in my classes, and a new crop of new movies going into the wintertime awards season. The end of summer is sometimes a garbage dump of movies studios don’t care about, but once the Labor Day weekend rolls around, it’s a parade of big-name, high-budget prestige pictures that get me excited to get back to the theater. 

I’d like to preview a few of the more interesting and provocative films that are coming our way.

Opening September 21 is a new documentary by raconteur and fellow Michigander, Michael Moore. Riffing on the title of his 2004 film about the September 11^th attacks, his new project is called Fahrenheit 11/9, election day for Donald Trump. In the film, Moore criss-crosses the country, interviewing people about the effects the current presidential administration has had on them. I’m not sure how it relates exactly, but the trailer features Moore pulling a tanker truck up to the gates of Governor Rick Snyder’s mansion and using a hose to spray the Flint water onto his yard. Agree or disagree with Moore’s politics and tactics, Fahrenheit 11/9 will surely have people talking this fall.

On September 28^th, we’ll have what is apparently our final opportunity to see Hollywood icon Robert Redford on the big screen. In The Old Man and the Gun, Redford plays Forrest Tucker, a real-life career criminal and prison escape artist who, according to his own words, escaped prison “18 times successfully and 12 times unsuccessfully.” In the film, Tucker escapes San Quentin and goes on one last bank robbing spree. An old man who is retiring playing an old man who is retiring strikes me as really interesting and makes me think of John Wayne’s final film, 1976’s The Shootist in which Wayne, who was dying of cancer, played a legendary cowboy who was dying of cancer.

October 19^th brings Melissa McCarthy in a rare dramatic role as Lee Israel in Can You Ever Forgive Me. Israel was a real-life literary biographer who fell on hard times and began a career as a forger and thief. De-glammed in a story based on actual events and switching from comedy to drama is one of the combinations the Oscars and Golden Globes love to reward, so we’ll see how this turns out for McCarthy.

While it will only appear on Netflix and not in theaters, the November 9^th release of The Other Side of the Wind bears mention. It is the final film of Orson Welles, the idiosyncratic writer, director, and actor who changed film forever with Citizen Kane and then could never quite seem to catch a break after that. Filmed between other projects throughout the 70s as money became available, The Other Side of the Wind stars the legendary John Huston as an Ernest Hemingway type fictionalized as a movie director. Apparently the film is a Hollywood satire in which Welles laments the passing of the lions of classic Hollywood and fears the modernity of the upcoming film school generation. Between never having enough money and a ridiculous amount of legal trouble involving the rights to the film, Welles never finished it before his death in 1985. As much as I begrudge Netflix for pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into lame movie and tv projects in a throw-it-all-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy, I do appreciate that it’s is a platform for projects like The Other Side of the Wind that would otherwise never been seen.

So there are plenty of interesting films coming out this fall along with new mainstream tent pole and superhero movies, of course. Make some time between your foliage drives and cider mill trips to see some of them.

Magnolia

Paul Thomas Anderson is the auteur’s auteur. His films are always bold, idiosyncratic, and assured in their technique and craft in ways that make other filmmakers drool with envy. Unlike the similarly named but unreleated Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas makes a radically different film every time he gets behind a camera. On their surface, his films about 1970s pornographers, a turn-of-the-century oil baron, an out-of-luck gambler, a pushover with anger issues, or the founder of a Scientology-like cult don’t have much in common. But beneath the disparate eras, characters, and story structures, most of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films deal with two things: the problem of ambition and the difficulty of human connection. Anderson’s protagonists often suffer from either a profound abundance or lack of worldly ambition. Complicating that is their inability to maintain connections with other people – family members, lovers, co-workers. Anderson’s characters stumble through their lives trying to accomplish their goals, while needing other people badly and yet often being unable to articulate that need. 

Anderson won acclaim and attention for his first two films, Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, but it was 1999’s Magnolia that pushed him from being a talented, young director to being a great filmmaker of the first order.

Taking place over the span of one day in California’s San Fernando valley, Magnolia tracks no fewer than nine main characters as their stories arc, intersect, and then go their own way again.

One of the storylines follows a former television producer played by Jason Robards as he is swiftly dying of cancer. While his much younger trophy wife, played by Julianne Moore, descends into grief and drug addiction, his nurse played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, tries to reach out to the dying man’s estranged son. Tom Cruise plays the son who has renamed himself Frank “T.J.” Mackey and now teaches a brutally misogynistic “self-help” course on picking up women called “Seduce and Destroy.” 

Other storylines include a child genius appearing on the TV quiz show that Jason Robards’ character used to produce; the host of the show trying to reconnect with his daughter who is now a drug addict; the cop who falls in love with the drug addict daughter while on a routine call and who also catches a former child quiz show genius as he’s in the process of committing a crime.

The entire film is about the interconnectedness of life and also its unresolved, inexplicable nature. We see each character either directly interact with or at least brush against the lives of the others. However, despite the web of seeming coincidences and the film’s oddball, half-miraculous/half-apocalyptic climax of raining frogs, Magnolia doesn’t necessarily tie everything up with a tidy bow. There is reconciliation and atonement but not complete resolution. Frank Mackey weeps at his father’s death. The cop and the drug addict want to make their relationship work. But the movie only brings us to that point without suggesting that things are actually going to work out just fine.

Jason Robards and Tom Cruise are particular standouts. Robards’ performance as a man weaving in and out of consciousness and presence of mind is scapel sharp and as accurate a portrayal of the process of death as anything I’ve ever seen. Cruise made the bold choice of taking on a character who says and does legitimately horrible things and is completely gleeful about it. Cruise is always at his best as an actor when he takes chances and goes beyond his charming action hero standard setting. You won’t enjoy anything Frank Mackey has to say, but you will be wowed by Cruise’s skill in making him a real person.

At three hours and eight minutes, Magnolia is an investment. Its oddball moments like the entire cast singing an Aimee Mann song together or the cloudburst of frogs that brings Los Angeles to a halt may stretch your credulity, but for myself, I loved it and I’m sorry it took me all these years to finally get around to see it.

Born on the Fourth of July

Oliver Stone is a fascinating figure in the film world. He began as a screenwriter in the 70s and 80s and wrote successful scripts for Midnight Express, Scarface, Conan the Barbarian, and The Year of the Dragon. In the mid-eighties, he got his first directing gig with Salvador and then hit a hot streak with Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio, and Born on the Fourth of July. In many ways, his films are pure representations of 1980s culture. His preoccupation with the conflicts, music, and intrigue of the 1960s along with his sharp critiques of contemporary 1980s excess and consumerism made his films potent and memorable documents of the decade.

 One film of his I hadn’t seen was 1989s Born on the Fourth of July starring Tom Cruise. It’s based on the autobiography of the same name by former Marine and disabled Viet Nam vet, Ron Kovic. Kovic is a gung-ho, America-love-it-or-leave-it patriot who grows up in working class Long Island. Relentlessly competitive, he volunteers for the Marines as soon as he’s eligible and is sent overseas to fight. During his second tour in Viet Nam, Kovic has a catastrophically bad day. All in one maneuver, he’s party to accidentally killing a small village of old women, children, and babies; killing one of his own men with friendly fire; and getting shot himself and having his spinal cord severed with the bullet, permanently paralyzing him from the chest down.

The second two thirds of the movie revolve around Kovic first fighting his disability, then succumbing to depression and bitterness and alcoholism, and then finding new purpose as an anti-war activist, culminating with the moment when Kovic addresses the 1976 Democratic National Convention following the publication of his book.

Oliver Stone is not a restrained filmmaker. In fact, the first movie review I read that ever really stuck with me as a kid was of Platoon and the reviewer wrote that Stone “directs with all the subtlety of an earthquake.” And it’s true. He’s a maximalist who layers on thick helpings of period music, extreme hair and make-up, and sometimes far too close for comfort camera work. In the case of Born on the Fourth of July, his version of late 1950s Long Island is as ideal and red, white, and blue as you can imagine. His Viet Nam is saturated with sunlight and blood. The underfunded, understaffed VA hospital where Kovic finds himself after his injury is practically a Dantean circle of hell. I’m not saying these aren’t accurate representations of Kovic’s real life experiences. It’s just that Stone’s middle name might as well be “In Your Face.” Sometimes that intensity serves the story and other times, it just makes you a little nauseated.

Born on the Fourth of July was one of Tom Cruise’s first bids to be taken seriously as a “real” actor instead of just a good looking kid with a megawatt smile. He hadn’t yet developed the now tired Cruise-isms that have made so many of his recent performances basically interchangeable, and he gives Kovic a real visceral punch and vulnerability. With the exception of some pretty bad wigs, Cruise’s transformation from 18 year old super jock to a middle aged man in a wheelchair is convincing and his physical commitment to the role is apparent throughout. The commitment paid off as Cruise was nominated for an Oscar and won the Golden Globe that year for Best Actor. The film was nominated for a total of eight Oscars and won two, including Best Director. Stone has produced a lot of provocative, in-your-face films like Natural Born Killers, JFK, and Nixon. He’s still working today, and his most recent film was 2016’s Snowden. However effective his newer films may be, it’s unlikely that Oliver Stone will ever hit another high point like he did with his 80s hot streak that culminated with Born on the Fourth of July.