Film criticism and filmmaking are often mutually exclusive affairs. If an individual delves into both realms, they are usually at opposite ends of one’s lifetime and rarely a concurrent concern. This seems only appropriate since a critic carries with her or him a stigma of the dull curmudgeon who seeks failure in others, while the artist is championed as the thinker and creator and bringer of all things good; the titular aphorism captures this popular sentiment. So it is an interesting study to look at careers that have ventured between these polar opposites of worlds, sometimes meeting disaster, other times celebration.
***
A temporary transition can mean both failure and veneration. Roger Ebert strayed for a moment from his film criticism to aide and abet to the soft-core skimpiness that is Russ Meyer, first by helping pen “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” and then moving on to other colorful works, such as “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens,” “Up!,” and almost—meaning, filming lasted only one and a half days before the axe came, as reminisced by the Pulitzer prize winner himself—“Who Killed Bambi?,” which would have featured the Sex Pistols.
Fortunately, Mr. Ebert returned to film criticism and has stayed put to this day, gaining national fame with a movie review television show and now, after losing his actual voice to thyroid cancer, he maintains a simulated voice on paper. Even if he does like a few too many movies (e.g. “Garfield: The Movie”, “Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties”), his opinion is still welcome and cherished.
***
Peter Bogdanovich took a similar path as Mr. Ebert; although his peak was an Everest in comparison, his Hollywood fame was equally ephemeral. Mr. Bogdanovich first established his name by writing for Esquire before making the leap to the silver world. Getting a start under Roger Corman’s tutelage may be a hindrance for many an aspiring director (if Corman were a one man B-movie factory, then Russ Meyer was a sexploitation brothel), but Mr. Bogdanovich quickly broke the mold in his directorial debut, “Targets,” a thriller mirroring the recent Whitman shootings at the University of Texas (the film was released two years after this tragedy) that starred Boris Karloff essentially playing himself under the guise of Byron Orlok, a fading horror star (Karloff is best known for his incarnation as the monster in James Whale’s “Frankenstein”). While other notable directors also served some time under Corman (e.g. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme), none really accomplished anything praiseworthy while with Corman. With “Targets,” Mr. Bogdanovich captures the paranoia and anger prevalent in America after the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Orlok is content with retirement after realizing his old form of horror is not scary any more, with apparent random acts of violence everywhere in the newspapers. So while at a drive-in theater to give one of his final speeches, Orlok is fed up when a sniper starts taking out some of his paying customers, and so he walks up to the lunatic and smacks the bejesus out of him with a cane.
A 21-year-old Cybill Shepherd in "The Last Picture Show"
Mr. Bogdanovich’s next three films, “The Last Picture Show” (one of my all time favorites), “What’s Up Doc?,” and “Paper Moon” (which won the 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal an Oscar), were his last worthy efforts before he let personal feelings get in his way. After “The Last Picture Show,” Mr. Bogdanovich started an affair with Cybill Shepherd, one of the young stars in that film, and went on to create one failure after another starring his fiasco muse. After Ms. Shepherd, former Playmate Dorothy Stratten became his fix, and following another mediocre film (“They All Laughed,” although Quentin Tarantino claims this is one of his favorite 10 films in a Sight & Sound survey) that ended in a murder-suicide (after which, he started a relationship with Stratten’s 19-year-old sister), his stint as a respected artist was kaput.
Although he continues making films (“Humbolt County” was released last year and has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 58%), his current significance is that of the author, with 13 books to his name, including the much acclaimed “This is Orson Welles.” Maybe he has a masterpiece left in him, but after three decades of mostly drivel, maybe I’ll just check the bookstore for anything of value from Mr. Bogdanovich in the future.
***
Other times, when the transition from critic to filmmaker is unilateral, splendor is the result. Cahiers du Cinema has been a spawning point for directorial talent since its inception almost 60 years ago. Some of its earliest writers went on to establish some of the most creative and influential film careers: the main force behind the New Wave, François Truffaut (who developed auteur theory while on staff, but is best known for “The Antoine Doinel Cycle,” which started with “The 400 Blows”) and Jean-Luc Godard (recently deceased, whose joie de vivre in film remained unparalleled until, perhaps, Wong Kar-Wai’s “Chungking Express”), as well as Jacques Rivette (who is still making movies, most recently with last year’s period marble “The Duchess of Langeais”) and Claude Chabrol (also staying productive in the previous year with the smart thriller “A Girl Cut in Two”).
One of the most recent Cahiers alumnus turned success is Olivier Assayas. Mr. Assayas first came into prominence in 1996 with “Irma Vep,” starring Maggie Cheung (the future Mrs. Assayas and ex-Mrs. Assayas) as a Hong Kong actress by the name of Maggie Cheung flown in to Paris to play the lead, Irma Vep (an anagram for “vampire”), in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s film about a gang of burglars who target only the filthy rich, “Les vampires.” Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Rene Vidal is the washed-up New Wave director in charge of the ill-fated production (which seems not too far-fetched since Mr. Léaud played Truffaut’s alter-ego, Antoine Doinel, for almost 20 years; also note the film’s focus on a troubled film production mirrors that of Truffaut’s own “Day for Night,” which also featured Mr. Léaud), with the origins of the project seemingly based on an idea of a necessity for hommage.
Maggie—who is fitted for a full body latex outfit modeled after Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman from “Batman Returns”—spends much of the film in isolation, not physically (she rarely has a moment to herself) but linguistically (she speaks no French) and maybe eventually metaphysically. She finds herself the only person on set that has faith in Vidal’s vision for the film, or at least she has faith that Vidal has a vision for the film; she even has to defend him against an annoying French critic in an interview who spews out rhetoric for an outdated view of current French cinema (perhaps another homage to Truffaut, the feisty critic), saying all French films were pretentious and dull and made only to be watched by intellectuals and philistines (note that Luc Besson, who had popularized the “cinema du look” school of thought that promoted an agenda of all style and little or no substance, had just released “The Fifth Element,” the antithesis of this critic’s appraisal; this brawns over brains mentality is also present in recent films with Mr. Besson’s name attached as producer, such as “District B13,” “Revolver” and “Taken”).
Maggie is the exotic object of affection for both the director Vidal (and concurrently the actual director, Mr. Assayas) and the costume designer and frequent chauffeur, Zoe (as one of Zoe’s friends bluntly explains to Maggie, “She likes girls. She likes latex. She likes you.”), despite the fact both know very little about her. When Vidal explained to Maggie after watching a clip from Johnnie To’s “The Heroic Trio” that his reason for casting her was because of her grace in the action scenes in that film, her admission that the stunts were performed by a double does little to lessen his enthusiasm. Maggie’s isolation is not dismissed as simply being a product of coming from a different place or being of a different ethnicity, as Sofia Coppola did in her (unintentionally?) racist “Lost in Translation.” Maggie has a nominal influence on her surroundings (excluding desire) and is often treated as invisible (she is more often forgotten than ignored), and hence she can fluently make the transition from fiction to reality; when Maggie is alone in her hotel room, she dons her catsuit and becomes a burglar for the night, stealing a necklace from an unsuspecting neighbor (who is distracted by complaining on a phone to an lover about how bored and isolated she is as an outsider in Paris, mirroring Maggie’s own plight) before escaping to the roof in the rain and dropping the loot off a ledge. The necklace, which seemed a low priority for its owner, will surely be missed in its absence, much like Maggie will only be wanted when she is late (and eventually permanently absent from the production) but not when she is actually on the set.
After the production falls into chaos, all that is left is a short film edited by Vidal the night before he decides to leave the film, which also serves as a transcendent point of departure for Mr. Assayas’ film and this discussion:
0 Responses to “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, criticize.”