2 Movies, New To Me!

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My stepdaughter lent me a copy of Three Amigos, which I first saw when it came out, back in 1986.  I remember being vaguely embarrassed by it then, but amused, as well.

My wife promptly said, before I even brought the movie home, to make sure that she wasn't around when I watched it.  I was puzzled, and I'm still puzzled, because, watching it again, I have to say that it is in fact an absolute jewel.  I have to admit, it might not have the staying power of, say, Blazing Saddles.  But the most important thing is that the writing is really good.  My wife, notwithstanding her earlier remarks, could not help slipping in to join me for the last several minutes of the movie, and observed that it had a sort of Saturday Night Live-ishness about it.  That must come purely from the personnel: the three stars, Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short are all SNL alumni, and so is Producer / Writer Lorne Michaels.  But I think the movie transcends its humble origins.  In fact, if I may be permitted to question it, I do question the supposed humbleness of these origins: SNL in the 1980's was not such a terrible show.

I think one of the funniest things about it is the timing and the surprises.  Every point at which we expect a cheap joke, we are surprised, and there is usually a good joke a few seconds later.  The fake sunsets in some of the backdrops cracked me up early on, and even Steve Martin's painful humor was funny.  Chevy Chase was stunningly understated, and was fairly hilarious as a sort of ensemble player.  And, not least, Randy Newman's songs and Elmer Bernstein's score were perfect.  I wish I had the energy to pick up my own copy of this, movie.  (Santa Claus, if you're reading this, just check to see whether there is a Blue Tooth of this available, if Blue Tooth is the phrase I'm searching for?)

Cate Blanchett, Jude Law (as Errol Flynn)

My Stepdaughter also lent me a copy of The Aviator, this one with the full endorsement of her mother.  (Those two are out on a mission to educate me.)  And I must admit, Aviator is awesome, just as promised.

The movie is, as many of you must know already, the story of Howard Hughes.  It stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Alec Baldwin, and a number of other well-known actors.  The big surprise was Cate Blanchett, playing Katharine Hepburn brilliantly.  I have seldom seen a more persuasive movie, unless it was Amadeus.  I suppose I'm particularly gullible, because these movies seem to be pitched to gullible folks like me.  But I, for one, can't help feeling that I understand Howard Hughes, even if I see Leonardo Di Caprio doing things that are jarringly unconvincing.  Somehow the movie transcends the limitations of its resources, and indeed one can't see how it could have possibly been improved upon.  In places, Leonardo mutters phrases repeatedly "... the way of the future ... the way of the future ..." but you see what he's trying to do.  This is common in Theatre, of course.  You're two people, one analyzing the technique of the production, and the other completely buying the illusion, which isn't really an illusion.

Martin Scorcese is truly brilliant, and that could be a very relative statement.  I enjoy all, or certainly most, of the movies directed by him that I have seen.

Anyway, the movie was certainly educational.  I heard about the Spruce Goose way back in the seventies, and it never really made any sense to me: did it fly, or didn't it?  And why was it called the Spruce Goose?  All these matters are made clear in the movie, as are Howard Hughes's confusing life and achievements.  I encourage everyone to watch this movie; it explains an enormous number of things entertainingly and convincingly.  It is difficult to watch the depiction of Hughes's mental illness (which comes across as something in the general area of Schizophrenia, but that could be simply because Schizophrenia---complicated though it is---has a history of successful depiction in Cinema, which Scorcese could draw on.  In fact, Scorcese might have been instrumental in building up this body of cinematic depiction of the ailment).

What a wonderful world we live in, that has such things as movies and literature in it!

I was just watching a movie of Leonard Bernstein's opera Candide, based on Voltaire's eponymous novella.  Leonard Bernstein, as you must know, was a compulsive explainer, and he had to explain: "Why Candide?"  He does so briefly, at the beginning of the movie (which is a film of a concert).  "I know what you're thinking," he says, "here's the professor come to lecture us again!"

Candide was an extreme reaction to Leibnitz's philosophy of optimism, which said that anything that exists (or, anyway, anything that has survived to come down to the present) has to be good.  (I understood it as a sort of theory of philosophical Darwinism, in the sense that if it wasn't good, it couldn't last.)  But, says Bernstein, there was a huge catastrophic earthquake in Lisbon in Portugal, and Voltair ---together with most of those alive at the time--- could not reconcile this disaster with the existence of God, or with the belief that we lived in a friendly universe, and certainly not with the philosophy of Optimism.  This was not the Best of All Possible Worlds, said Voltaire, and evidently Bernstein felt impelled to second the motion.

But we have to admit, that this world is a heckuva lot better than a world without movies would be!

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