Movies I Want Everyone to See: Ishtar

I have been defending this movie for thirty years and I stand by it today. This is exactly what it set out to be, a comedy that is a throw back to the Hope/Crosby road pictures, with a little contemporary humor thrown in. From before it even opened however, "Ishtar" has been the subject of invective, disinformation and derision, usually without having been seen. The fact that the most prominent TV critics of the era, Siskel and Ebert, panned it, probably contributed to the premature grave to which it has been buried for most of the last three decades. Look, I'm not saying it is an essential classic, I am simply arguing that it is an entertaining couple of hours that an open mind can get some enjoyment out of. Humor is subjective, my guess is that a lot of people don't get "The Three Stooges" and they don't think it is funny, but millions of others do. This film is the same, and I am challenging you to watch it and figure out which group you fall into.

I will structure my argument that Ishtar has good humorous value in a chronological fashion. The opening of the film features Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as songwriters trying to put together a new song. "Dangerous Business" may not be a good song, but it is a good example of the song writing process. These two bandy back and forth with lyrics and lines that try to move the structure of the song forward. They make several wrong turns and most of them are funny. When the word "herb" gets thrown in, that was funny, but it was even funnier when it got thrown out. We get some other quick instances of their terrible instincts in a series of songwriting attempts during some flashback sequences.

I'm Leaving Some Love in My Will

Chuck Clarke has written a song for an elderly couple celebrating at the restaurant he plays piano at. This is their third year coming back to celebrate an anniversary, and Chuck promised to commemorate their long time marriage with an original composition. It is so accurate but also tone deaf that it defies reason that the songwriter doesn't get it. Except that he is so sincere and also so confident in his unrecognized talent, he doesn't even see the horrified faces of the couples family.

Lyle Rodgers is equally as blind to his lack of talent. He is so involved with the song he is working on,  that he doesn't notice all the customers he is driving by in his ice cream truck. Every kid in the neighborhood wants a drumstick, and all he can think of is "Hot Fudge Love".

Cherry ripple kisses.

These are two obtuse individuals with the same dream and they happen to find each other. Academy Award nominated actresses Tess Harper and Carol Kane play the romantic partners of the two nitwits, but they are in the movie for all of two minutes. They clearly are aware enough that dumping these two is the only logical course. The fallout from these break-ups is part of the awkward humor in the opening act of the film. Lyle is devastated but it is Chuck, who was commitment phobic who really goes off the deep end. They attempt to bury themselves in work, but the guy who they approach to represent them suggests that they put together a singing act to launch their songs. This is where the second layer of comedy comes in. Chuck has the will but very little talent at performing and Lyle is so shy and introverted that he looks incredibly uncomfortable on stage.  They are also both a little long in the tooth.

The sequences with them trying out their own songs are plenty funny because most of the songs were written by Elaine May, the director and a well known comic mind, along with Paul Williams, one of the most prolific songwriters of the era. I remember reading back in 1987, that Williams was planning a release of the fifty or so songs or parts of songs that he and May had put together for the film. It would have been comedy gold. Of course since the film did not live up to it's potential, the album never got made.

Interestingly, the characters do actually progress a little bit as entertainers. Of course improvement is a relative term.



The astonished looks on the faces of the audience also mimic the looks on our faces as we are watching this. This is a very self aware presentation and it is supposed to be deliberately awful. It's why their agent Marty Freed. played by the worn out and down trodden Jack Weston, can only get them a booking in Honduras, where the death squads are active, or in Morocco, which is next to Ishtar, where revolution is blooming in the desert.

After a most humorous interlude [which includes Rabbis and SWAT]on the ledge of Chuck's apartment building, where the two handle the most embarrassing suicide attempt since Dirty Harry or Lethal Weapon, they choose North Africa.

So far, this movie has sustained it's tone, created characters that we can laugh at and even sympathize with in spite of their deficiencies, and it has provided us with a justification for the change in scenery. Now the one section that is a bit of a slog, involves the set up of the two musicians with a plot device to put them in over their heads. There is a convoluted story about a map that portends the fall of a kingdom and two messengers from God. While the film skirts the contentious issues in the Middle East concerning Israel, the Palestinians and the Sunni Shiite rift, it does presciently forecast the fanaticism that is sometimes found in this part of the world. Cultures that can produce riots where people die as a result of a cartoon published in another part of the world, or a rumor over mistreatment of a Qua-ran can bring unrest, are on display in the fictional Kingdom of Ishtar.

Hope and Crosby also got mixed in, usually by accident, with some big plot involving a power struggle in the places they visited. So too do Hoffman and Beatty. Chuck, who prefers the nickname "The Hawk" is approached by a mystery woman, posing as a boy, to obtain his passport so she can move freely between Ishtar and Morocco. He falls for the line "The Dome of the Emir's Palace is made of gold. The people have never seen a refrigerator".This becomes the insertion point for Isabella Adjani into the story and she serves as the Dorthy Lamour in this updated Road picture.

At almost the same time a fourth character is added to the story, the mild mannered and duplicitous Charles Grodin as Jim Harrison, the local CIA station chief. I can say with confidence, that if you do not find Grodin's dry delivery and feckless spy craft funny, you will probably not enjoy the rest of the film. Most people however recognize that Grodin is an under appreciated comic treasure.  Adjani is sometimes a protagonist but usually a love interest, Grodin is the real villain of the film and he is hysterical.
The sight of him in a djellaba and fez is pretty damn funny in itself. The notion that other agents might get away with it is even more amusing. There is a good chase scene where the two Americans, who have been labeled dangerous because they might be conflated with the messengers of God foretold in the map, are followed by the CIA, the KGB, the Emir's Secret police and the revolutionaries trying to recover the map all at once. The costuming provides a large amount of the humor there.

A whole variety of mistaken intentions, cross purposes and back stabbing behavior ensue. The third act of the film builds from the moment that Beatty's Lyle buys a camel. Well not exactly, here is how he puts it:

 Chuck Clarke: You mean you bought a camel?

Lyle Rogers: No, I didn't really buy it. They SOLD it to me!

Lyle Rogers: Oh no. I think that something went wrong and now I own a blind camel. A blind camel!

The mistaken identity them reaches it's climax as , after being lost in the desert, Rodgers and Clarke end up impersonating a Berber translator and a tribesman anxious to buy guns. I haven't even mentioned the lengthy vulture and camel interludes that lead up to this moment. Suffice it to say, the dialogue is loopy, philosophical and matches the tone of the whole film.  

I have read some material that suggests that the film represents the naivete of Americans in the Middle East and that makes it a politically aware and forward thinking film. I'm not going to defend that point of view, I will simply say that all foreign policy is tricky and this film takes advantage of that. There is a pretty good summary of some of the misadventures of American policy  "The enemy of my enemies is my friend." I'll leave the politics of the film to someone more motivated to discuss that. I just want to argue that the movie is funny. 

I sat and watched it with my daughter who was born the year after it came out, and she was laughing so hard at some of the camel bits, it echoed down the hall and my wife called down to see what was going on. Like I said earlier, humor is subjective, and maybe because she is my kid she shares some of my perception, but we are not alone in this assessment. Gary Larson, who drew "The Far Side" cartoons, once lampooned "Ishtar with this panel:

Larson later apologized in one of his printed anthologies, stating "When I drew the above cartoon, I had not actually seen Ishtar.... Years later, I saw it on an airplane, & was stunned at what was happening to me: I was actually being entertained. Sure, maybe it's not the greatest film ever made, but my cartoon was way off the mark. There are so many cartoons for which I should probably write an apology, but this is the only one which compels me to do so."

There were even critics who offered praise but they were somehow drown out by the negative buzz. I read the Sheila Benson review in the LA Times and I remember thinking she was pretty brave to be swimming against the stream. Almost every review of the time focused on the cost of the picture and not it's entertainment value. The long knives where out before the movie opened. The dean of the LA Times Critics community, Charles Champlin put it this way, "Memory does not immediately yield a film for which so many critics, reporters and industry members were lying in wait, avid for signs of terminal weakness and early demise."

Ishtar Blu

Ishtar Laser Disc

The nice thing about films that get a home video release is that they can be reassessed years later by audiences without those preconceptions, as long as they ignore the prior invective. 

This coming week, I will be hosting the Lambcast Movie of the Month. I championed "Ishtar" in the voting, and I look forward to doing the same in the discussion. I will post a link for you when it goes up. I lost the 1987 Draft on the Lamb by a few votes last summer, I suspect my inclusion of this film is part of why that happened. I can't complain about it, because the words of Rodgers and Clarke already told us this was true...

"Telling the truth can be dangerous business;/ Honest and popular don't go hand in hand."

Fan Art by Adam Keene

The Shape of Water

A fable is a story that uses animals or other creatures to teach a moral lesson, so clearly "the Shape of Water" fits that definition. There is an animal at the center of the story, an ethereal "princess" that moves the action forward, and there are morality tales everywhere in the events that take place. Keeping track of the main theme might be the most complicated issue related to this movie, because everything else is a little too spoon fed to us. The shifting of the story to another time period, but one that feels familiar, and in fact has been referred top by many as "Camelot", makes it all seem even more like a fairy tale.

Guillermo del Toro has a mixed record of success as far as I can tell. "Pan Labyrinth" is a well respected and widely loved success. "Pacific Rim" was successful but not as widely admired, and the two "Hellboy" movies worked for fans but they don't seem to have connected with many outside of the comic book world.  This is a film that would probably bring him a wider audience with one significant issue that is going to hold it back, the explicit sexuality. This is a beauty and the beast match which adds more to the story than our imaginations might need. For adult audiences with mature tastes, it is well presented and beautiful. An adolescent audience might find it gross or something to titter over. Younger audiences will probably find it creepy and that is what I mean about it being a bit too direct.

Ultimately the morality lesson that should be the central focus of the story is about the danger of loneliness and isolation. Elisa, the mute woman at the center of the story, has a solidary life with an older man as a friend and a co-worker that she can talk to, but she has no romantic life. The sadness of that is demonstrated almost immediately in the film by letting us in on her morning bathroom routine. Sally Hawkins is an average beauty but one that clearly has a spark of life that needs to be fed. Her mostly mute performance is designed to deliberately emphasize her separation from almost everyone else in the world. Del Toro shows her intimately but it is her face that gives us the greatest cues as to her feelings. Like Elisa, her neighbor Giles, played with fussy perfection by scene stealer Richard Jenkins, is isolted as well. He is an artist living in the post atomic age, he is a homosexual without the ability to create a connection that he so desperately crave. Octavia Spencer is Elisa's work friend Zelda, a black woman working in a white mans world with a husband who largely ignores her. Michael Stuhlbarg as Dr. Hoffstetler is also mostly on his own but for very different reasons. The character that ultimately connects them all is the amphibian man who is the most lonesome of all. He has been dragged away from his domain, locked in a vault, chained and for the most part mistreated.
Elisa's efforts to reach out to this unusual creature starts to unlock the loneliness surrounding her and the creature. As in most fables, before we can learn the lesson there have to be failures. This is the role that Giles fulfills. Unable to make a romance with a man he is attracted to, and clearly empathetic to the black residents of Baltimore who are also isolated in spite of their population, he capitulates to the needs of his one true friend and makes a gallant and dangerous stand against the oppressive feeling of being an outsider.

So far I have not mentioned the other major character of the film. He clearly qualifies as the villain of the piece, but his connection to the theme is interesting. Head of security at the facility to which he has brought his prize, Strickland has difficulty relating to others as well. He is verbally respectful at first of the two women who work as custodians at the facility, but that is all undermined by his non-verbal indifference to them. In one of the dangling strings of the story, he also has a sexual attraction to verbal silence. Elisa becomes an object of fascination and revulsion to him. The writer/director I think gives too much time to his personal peculiarities without connecting them very well to the morality lessons. Michael Shannon is a fine actor and he easily gets us to dislike him, we really don't need to see his sexual hangups or the awkward family life. Except for how it fetishizes the culture of the early sixties, his whole sub-plot about buying a Cadillac is a trip to no where.

Doug Jones has done these creature characters in a number of other movies and his body language is the main skill he is called upon to use. He manages to convey some emotions quite clearly with his posture. His arm movements are the tender element that allows us to accept Elisa's attraction to him. The make up and special effects prosthetics help his performance but he shows he is an actor with range, even if he does not have the name recognition of Andy Serkis.

As I mentioned, except for the explicitness of the relationship, this movie follows the patterns of a hundred other variations of the Beauty and the Beast motif. It is incredibly lovely to look at but it has a lot of side trips that lead to dead ends. You can get the impression that there is a social critique here but it is truncated at best and certainly heavy handed as it is being delivered . The love story works against every expectation, but you have to be a fairly sober viewer to appreciate it.

Lambcast Acting School 101: Faye Dunaway

KAMAD  Rejoins the Lambcast for Acting School 101 with Movie Rob and Faye Dunaway. 

KAMAD Top Ten Films of 2017

The video will give you a list but if you want to read a little about each film or click on a link to the original post, then all you have to do is continue to the next page.

I, Tonya (Updated)

The problem with doing your top ten for the year before Midnight on December 31st is that you could see something that would force you to adjust your list. That's exactly what's happened with this film, and now I have to revise the video and post that I had planned for tomorrow.  Since it is late on New Years Eve, and my tail end is dragging from a outdoor project I worked on today, I will ask your indulgence and tell you that you have to wait for the full review until later. However, my comments here should make it perfectly clear how I feel about this film.

Till tomorrow then my friends.

UPDATE

So it took a little longer to get back to this than I'd hoped but it is still worth it. This is a film that deserves to be talked about. To start with, I remember the events that this film covers in vague outline form. Many people watched it closely but our lives were taking dramatic new directions 24 years ago so it was not a daily download for me as it was for so many others in that period of time. As a soap opera in real life it was compelling, but my recall of all of it was that a bunch of stupid people were involved in doing something stupid, which happened to be taking place on the world stage.

The movie claims to be based on interviews with various participants in the whole affair, and when they all agree on the events, that's how they are depicted on screen. There are however wild divergences in how the story plays out, and what screenwriter Steven Rogers does in those instances is contrast the two versions with slightly different emphasis and typically a great deal of humor. It seems apparent to me that in the long run he does come down on the side of Tonya Harding herself. When it comes to credibility, although she does not seem very reliable, in contrast to everyone else telling their version of the story, she is the voice of reason. Her husband/ex-husband Jeff Gillooly, is as unreliable a person as you are likely to ever see in a film much less meet in real life. As portrayed by Sebastian Stan, he seems ineffectual and pathetically needy. He is also an abusive spouse who strikes out in a way that most of us would see is a problem from the beginning, but that based on Harding's life, might simply be a minor character flaw which can be forgiven. Since there was a record of what was said between him and his dim witted friend, the "bodyguard" Shawn, it seems that the only intelligent thing he did in the whole process was cut himself off from Shawn at the set up arranged by the FBI.

Harding's status as an athlete in the world of competitive Ice Skating is vividly realized with true discomfort as we see the elitism and snobbery that she faces despite being the most physically talented woman on the ice. At the end of the film there are clips of the interviews used to put the story together with many of the actual people involved[not Tonya herself]. When you see the clip with LaVona Golden, Tonya's Mother, you will see the true genius of Allison Janney's performance. That woman was a nut job and the number she did on her kid had to have been something. Again, this is Tonya's version of events that drives that part of the story but it explains the chip on her shoulder and the willingness to put up with abuse for far too long. Janney is always a welcome performer in any film I see. She is dead eyed and without redemption as LaVona. The same "damn the consequences to hell with you" self centeredness displayed by Francis McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is present here. Janney is willing to play the most unlikable character in a manner that is based in the reality that the character doesn't give a f##k what anybody else thinks. That has got to be a freeing experience for an actor and she makes the most of it.

The performance that stands out the most of course is the title character played by Margot Robbie. Costuming and hair-styling accomplish a lot, but the range of the performance goes well beyond that. The two girls who were the younger versions of Tonya were both excellent and they set up this character as much more sympathetic than you would ever have believed. When Robbie steps into the fifteen year old Tonya's skates, she has to be proficient at skating, angry at perceived injustice,  and resentful of the way that the world demands a hero and a villain in this sort of competition. Her desperation at the sentencing after all the events take place feels like the most authentic human moment that Harding had in the film. In all that precede this moment, Robbie was chillingly direct. This one counter-point shows how broad her emotional vocabulary is and it makes the other moments in the film feel more important as a consequence. Of course she did not learn to do the triple axle, but Director Craig Gillespie, manages with technical prowess to make you think she did. 

This is a serious biopic about a much derided pop culture figure that also happens to be hysterically funny. You probably would not imagine yourself feeling much empathy for the central figure at the start of all this, but by the end, you hope her version, as sad as it is, is the most accurate. You also hope her life has gotten better, because despite being the greatest woman ice skater in the world at one point, her life pretty much sucked up to the "incident" and after that, it did not get much better. The two women's performances are awards bait, but the film deserves to be seen as worthy also. This was a real surprise and a pleasant one despite the tawdry topic. 

Call Me By Your Name

This film is getting a lot of praise for the performances of the two leads, Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet. It is a love story between an older man and a 17 year old boy, but Kevin Spacey is nowhere to be found. The pace of this film is leisurely to say the least. The story is set in Northern Italy during the summertime so there is plenty of lovely scenery to surround the two attractive leads as they engage in a protracted dance of "love that dare not speak it's name".  The nature of the romance is about the only reason I can think that the movie is set in 1983, except for the ubiquitous presence of the Psychedelic Furs.

The story meanders through a whole lot of plot points that end up going no where. Elio, the boy, gets nosebleeds. Don't worry, there is no terminal illness coming, it is simply an incident that has no bearing on the characters and their relationships, but it does allow the movie to add two minutes to it's running time. There is also a seemingly competing romantic interest for each of the young men. One is more developed than the other, but again, neither has much to do with the central relationship.

Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar are Elio's parents. They are erudite, sensitive and well educated. They are the kind of family that sits together in the afternoon, and has Mom read out loud 16th Century literature, which she is translating from German for them, and which also happens to pose the exact philosophical question facing Elio at this moment. Should the Knight reveal his affection for a forbidden love?  This screenplay is too precious for it's own good. Near the end of the film, Professor Perlman has a long talk with his son, which reflects his deep understanding of romance, human experience and poetry. The words sound like they were composed with great care but they are delivered as if they are random thoughts that a warm hearted parent can trickle off the tongue at a moments notice.

In addition to the slow pace of the movie, and the erotic theme, there are two or three other clues to show you that this is the indie darling of the moment. There are at least seven company credits at the start of the movie, which are of course referenced then in the title. Three sections have the obligatory cruise through the countryside accompanied by an indie alternative pop tune that is slow and meditative. If you thought that Rooney Mara eating pie in "A Ghost Story" was the weirdest food moment you would get in films this year, well be prepared to be surprised by Chalamet and his peach.

The actors are fine. Armie Hammer is appropriately casually arrogant in the way a young American must be. He flexes and poses in all the right ways to get the girls in the story hot, and of course it has the same effect on the lead. Elio is an artist, musician and intellectual with a brooding demeanor that suddenly warms up in a much too unclear manner. Staring out the window and  saying nothing is visual but it does not reveal the inner needs of the young man. Some of the events that take place are more useful at doing so, but they are often randomly distributed and the movie never seems to develop and dramatic urgency until the last ten minutes. It was a interesting story, that was told in a loose manner. A few good performances can't overcome the issues with the screenplay however.

Darkest Hour

Viscount Halifax: "He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle."

With all due deference to screenwriter Anthony McCarten, who has crafted a solid narrative around the early days of Winston Churchill as Prime Minister, much of the success of this film must go to another writer. That author is the central character of this film and perhaps the most important historical figure of the last century. The high points of this film all center around addresses that he made to Parliament,  the Nation, or to an inner circle of confidants and political rivals. As a Speech instructor, it is understandable then how I can be moved and consequently passionate about this movie.  

There is something in the air this last year because this period of time has been the subject of several films over the last twelve months. "Dunkirk", "Their Finest", and "Churchill" have all been released in 2017. While I have not seen the later, the other two are strongly related to the events depicted in this film. One of my colleague on-line, a British citizen, schooled me in the attitudes toward patriotism in Great Britain. He suggests that it is acceptable to be proud of the history and heritage but not to draw attention to it as we Americans are wont to do. I can appreciate the cultural norm of humility, but being an American I do not feel bound by it. Great Britain stood up to one of the greatest evils in the history of the world, and for a time stood alone. The wherewithal to do so was inspired substantially by their wartime leader, a man that every free person should be willing to acknowledge. Churchill was far from perfect, he had a history of failures and his views on some subjects would be viewed very dimly by most people today. He was however, the right man at the right time and place.

Speaking of the right man, actor Gary Oldman, who has been a favorite of mine since the days of "Sid and Nancy", rightly deserves the talk he is getting about winning an Academy Award. This is a intricate portrayal of a complex character, who was fiercely convinced of his correctness but was also cognizant of the circumstances he found himself in. Certainly the make-up artists that transformed his visage into Churchill will deserve a share of the credit, but the lion's share goes to Oldman. He is able to summon doubt and conviction almost simultaneously in some scenes.If you have ever listened to Churchill's wartime speeches, you will hear the grumbling and muttering and dry delivery. Oldman manages to duplicate the manner of those speeches but imbue them with enough theatricality to make them compelling to watch in a feature film. He stays true to Churchill's demeanor but adds a spark of charisma to the settings.

Director Joe Wright has made very good films in the past (Atonement/Pride and Prejudice), but he has also stumbled at times (The Soloist/Pan). He makes several choices here that I think work well for the focus of the film. Although the subject is war, the depiction of the war is cinematically visualized without dwelling on the combat. A series of overhead shots, usually accompanied by an airplane swipe across the screen, gives us a bird's eye view of the events that are taking place on the ground without turning the movie into a combat film.   In a similar fashion, Churchill is shown at times as an isolated figure in a sea of hostility by lighting and again the use of an overhead shot.

The contributions of the screen writer probably include the frequently uncomfortable conversations that Churchill had with the King. Certainly, the inspiring ride on the underground is an imagined event that helps the Character know the mind of the British people more forcefully. My memories of my British Public Address graduate seminar, helped give me a little context to the Parliamentary process, but I think anyone would be able to fathom what is going on and what it all means by simply following the cues that McCarten has laid out for us. It may be an old school concept to give us a running slide of calendar days but it works well in building some urgency, even though there is little action in the story. The film makers have managed to put together a very watchable narrative that is not driven by great events but rather by great oratorical moments. I may sometimes be blinded by my own sense of righteousness concerning the events of World War II. I like history and I admire the figures who made a difference in the world, regardless of revisionist social norms. Let's hope that enough young people get exposed to this story before they start reading about this in school. I don't think movies should be our main source of knowledge about history, but like Spielberg's "Lincoln", "Darkest Hour" manages to make an historical figure the giant that he truly deserves to be.