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Movie
Review: Cradle Will Rock; Touchstone
Films (1999); Starring: John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Cary Elwes,
Bill Murray, Susan Sarandon; MPAA Ration:
R (soft), 140 Minutes, Panavision, Grade:
8.5/10
Also: Magnolia
(New Line Cinema - AOL Time Warner), with Tom Cruise,
Jason Robards and William H. Macey, 190
Minutes, Panavision. MPAA Rationg: R Grade
9.0/10, and Moulin Rouge (20th Century
Fox), 126 minutes, PG-13, Panavision and modified 3-D, 9.0/10
As for the
Cradle (not to be confused with the thriller The Hand that Rocks the
Cradle): This curious film is a "Magnolia" style hodgepodge of
musical comedy and drama, period piece, and satire, all to convey to the
viewer a political exercise asa docu-drama. And the
concerns of the script with Free Speech are very compelling, and complement
material that I present elsewhere on this site.
The particulars
are that a theater troupe has been funded by the FDR/WPA "Federal
Theater" during the Depression, and then wants to mount a vaudeville
musical "Cradle will Rock" to advance the cause of worker's
rights. The government barges in, orders 20% job cuts, closes the
theater down, and conducts McCarthy-style "anti-Commie"
hearings. There are wonderful lines in the script about
"Jewish Fascists" and "rich Communists," and at one point
one of the troupe's actresses tells Congress that she would support a play
that advocates public ownership of utilities but not of all land, because
that would "overthrow the government." Then, she admits
that she advocates revolution "by degree." In another
episode, a sculptor/painter insists on presenting Lenin on a mural in the RCA
Building (now GE - I worked there myself in the 1970's for NBC!!) because
Lenin was a wonderful revolutionary. Cusack (playing John D
Rockefeller) had suggested Thomas Jefferson (yup,
the slaveowner). And one of the actors refuses to accept
money from his family (to feed his kids) if accepting the money would
undermine what he believes in.
Of course, the
problem was that these writers, actors, puppeteers, ventriloquists and
artists were all trying self-expression on someone else's dime. In
the age of cheap publishing and the Internet, that's no longer
necessary. But the free speech paradigm is curious
indeed. I hardly agree with labor union "mentality" but
I support the idea of anyone to advocate them in his own intellectual
property (well, can you get in trouble for trying to organize your own
workplace?) Odd, too, is the government clamping down on the
"Red Scare" when FDR New Dealism, certainly socialistic, might
have seemed almost as left wing. Or that the government, in 1936,
still didn’t see that Fascism was every bit as "collectivist" as
Communism, and that authoritarianism in any form orbits 180 degrees away from
liberty.
Magnolia (as had American
Beauty) , also, shows how a slow buildup of intersecting stories
among previously unrelated characters can become effective. And these are
stories mainly about character, as the Tom Cruise talk show character spends
his life teaching other men to be proud of who they are "as men,"
and then calls his dying father (Robards) a "prick" for neglecting
his wife and leaving the younger Cruise to take care of his mother for three
years. There is the talk-show host who collapses on the set, aware
of the bankruptcy of his own manipulations, and the little quiz-show kid
("What Kids Know") who pees in his pants, on camera. At
the climax, the blizzard of frogs falling from the sky (they sound like
gunshot when they hit your car) is plain bizarre -- but the world survives
for one more day. (Magnolia's TP was the name of a gay bar
in Dallas before it became the Village Station; there is a
Magnolia's in St. Louis also).
Moulin Rouge (20th Century Fox,
2001, with Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman) is a collage musical
remake (in the style of both Casino Royale (1967)
and That’s Entertainment (1974) with a mixture of all kinds
of movie-musical styles, from the period 1890s thru The Sound of
Music to today’s disco. (‘NSync doesn’t walk in, but
I expected it!) The original 1952 movie (based on the life of
dwarf Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec) was (after The Prisoner of Zenda) one
of the first movies my parents took me to see. The dwarf is pretty
much an extra in this version, which focuses on a newcomer writer, limited to
a pica typewriter by the technology of the times, who suddenly notices his
moral dilemma: he wants to write about love, but he has never loved (or
fallen in love—there is a difference!) He does fall in love with a
show girl with consumption (tuberculosis, “the white plague”, the AIDS of
that era) and the idea that he can help her stirs up his basic humanity, Okay. Of
course there is a duke who will marry her as if she were a
prostitute. There are great lines: “I’m not a duke, I’m a writer!”
and later “we’re members of the underworld; we can’t afford to love.”
20th Century
Fox (not Y2K compliant yet!) does a cute thing with its trademark, framing it
with the cabaret curtains in the opening scene. I liked it when
the possible murder weapon bounces off the Eiffel Tower as if
it were a baseball as it is thrown away—couldn’t happen.
The Player (1992, Fine Line Features, dir. Robert Altman)
is a famous slow-moving mystery about the politics
of Hollywood. Studios do hire theater and film school
graduates to read scripts (I’ve met one), and in this movie a writer tries to
blackmail a script reader after his script is rejected – but which one? He
accidentally gives the writer real material for blackmail, leading to
catastrophe. One wonders how the story would play out in the Internet age
where ideas can flow much faster and where personal contact between stars and
directors and the interested public is becoming much more open, at least in
my experience. But for its time a great film. An indie film that
cost $20 M. Tim Robbins and Greta Scacchi star. The
Dying Gaul (2005) is a somewhat simpler version of this kind of
story.
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