In the Latest Shards from the Fractured Mirror I Cover Brigsby Bear, Celebrity, Hearts of Darkness, The Life Aquatic, Mulholland Drive and The Way We Were

For the last two years or so much of my time and energy has been devoted to working on The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about movies about the movie business. I’ve posted much longer versions of some of the pieces that I’ve written for the book on this website but the vast majority I only shared with people who pre-ordered the book through Kickstarter and Backerkit or who donate to this site’s Patreon page. 

I’m quite proud of the work I’ve done on the book, as well as the kooky assortment of movies I’ve covered so I figured that every month I would share a handful of pieces I’ve written for The Fractured Mirror with y’all. I’ve written up 361 movies so far and will cover 400 to 420 in total so I am very open to recommendations on movies to write about. 

In conclusion, please donate to my site’s Patreon page. I desperately need the income and I’d love to share these new pieces with as many people as possible. 

Brigsby Bear (2017) FM

Kyle Mooney’s non-ironic embrace of the transcendent cheesiness of 1980s children’s television finds its purest, most poignant expression in 2017’s Brigsby Bear. It’s a disarmingly sweet celebration of the life-affirming power of make believe about an emotionally stunted man-child finding his way as an adult after being locked away from the rest of humanity by abductors he knew only as parents and protectors.

Kyle Mooney brings a doe-like innocence and disarming sweetness to the role of James Pope, a man who was kidnapped as a baby by wealthy, eccentric couple Ted (Mark Hamill) and April Mitchum (Jane Adams) and led to believe that the world had suffered some manner of apocalypse.

James leads a sheltered, lonely but mostly happy life thanks to his doting parents and the primitive adventures of Brigsby Bear, a cute anthropomorphic animal who has unnecessarily complicated space adventures he watches on videocassette.

Then one day James’ abductors are arrested and he’s reunited with biological parents he's never known. James’ world is rent asunder and he can’t find comfort through Brigsby Bear since Ted was the mastermind behind videos only James would ever see.

In an attempt to gain closure on his old life as an unknowing abductee James decides to make a movie that will provide a satisfying end to the Brigsby Bear saga and provide a way for him to make friends in the new, scary and exhilarating world he finds himself in.

James joyously goes from being a consumer to a creator, from an overgrown child who lost himself in Brigsby’s stories to an adult with the power to shape and mold his story however he sees fit.

Brigsby Bear is so deeply empathetic that the couple who stole James from his parents and immersed him in a weird world of their own design are depicted with more compassion, tenderness and understanding than the heroes of most movies. There are no villains in Brigsby Bear, just flawed human beings trying to navigate a world that’s almost unfathomably complex even if you haven’t been abducted and hidden from the outside world for decades.

Dave McNary’s directorial debut is a heartwarming, heartbreaking coming of age story about the unlikely maturation of something with a unique life story that nevertheless feels universal in its reverence for the awesome power of friendship and escapism.

Celebrity (1998)

After ripping off 8 1/2 for 1980’s black and white Stardust Memories Woody Allen turns his attention to La Dolce Vita for 1998’s black and white Celebrity. Only instead of a wide variety of beautiful, much younger women hurling themselves at a prickly narcissist played by Woody Allen some of the most gorgeous women alive develop intense instant sexual attractions to a protagonist who acts and talks exactly like Woody Allen in addition to having all of his mannerisms but is played by Kenneth Branagh. In the long, unfortunate history of Woody Allen movies with lead characters played by actors other than Woody Allen slavishly impersonating their director no one has ever done Allen worse than Branagh. This isn’t a performance; it’s the kind of dodgy impression you trot out at cocktail parties.

Branagh plays Lee Simon, a struggling 40 year old novelist who is desperate to break into screenwriting. To help him achieve his very original goal he takes a job doing profiles for a magazine as a way of hobnobbing with the rich and the famous and trying to get them interested in his dumb script.

All the while the poor man must deal with the feverish sexual advances of stunning starlets. He gets oral sex from a movie star played by Melanie Griffith and briefly becomes the object of erotic desire for a beauty played by a young, ravishing Charlize Theron before having an ongoing sexual relationship with an actress played by Winona Ryder.

The creep’s steady girlfriend Famke Jannsen is plain-looking and elderly by comparison. A young, doe-like Leonardo DiCaprio enlivens the proceedings with crazed self-parody as a debauched movie star brat with a nose perpetually full of blow and multiple adoring women in his bed. DiCaprio had incredible presence at this point in his career but Allen neglected to write him any comic dialogue, which is not a problem a joke machine like Allen generally has.

Judy Davis costars as Lee’s ex-wife, a neurotic caricature who makes an unlikely and unconvincing evolution from intellectual to TV gossip columnist. Celebrity chases after the cultural zeitgeist but Allen seemingly hasn’t paid attention to pop culture since FDR was in office. Celebrity is an insufferable look at the emptiness and superficiality of American pop culture that couldn’t be emptier or more superficial.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) FM

With 1979’s Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola decided, consciously or otherwise, that the best and most authentic way to make a dazzling, kaleidoscopic spectacle about a general who goes mad and loses his way in the jungle was to become a general who goes mad and loses his way in the jungle.

Some directors are poets. Some are generals. Some are both. When Coppola was choreographing a surreal spectacle involving massive explosions and machine gun fire and boats and the entirety of the helicopter fleet of the Philippine government while managing the egos of Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando he was in general mode.

Like kindred soul Werner Herzog while making Fitzcarraldo, Coppola became his movie. It got under his skin and infected his body, mind and soul like a fever. The Godfather director famously proclaimed that Apocalypse Now wasn’t just about Vietnam; it was Vietnam. By Coppola’s own admission, for much of the shoot, his creative war seemed as doomed as the United States’ regrettable entanglement in Vietnam.

Coppola’s madness began with the excessively passionate filmmaker turned wine-maker flagrantly ignoring the first rule of the movie industry and sinking millions of dollars of his own money in a film that seemed about as safe a bet as betting your life savings on a single hand of cards.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse combines vintage behind the scenes footage shot by Francis’ plain-spoken, gentle wife Eleanor, including recordings of phone calls that are as uncomfortably voyeuristic as they are fascinating, with contemporary talking head interviews.

In the new interviews, the cast and crew, all of whom miraculously survived the shoot and lived to tell the tale, look back on the terrifying, exhilarating movie-making experience of a lifetime from a place of reflection, stability and astonishment at the masterpiece they created and the turmoil they endured.

These cast members include Laurence Fishburne, who was only fourteen years old when he headed to the Philippines for an endless and exhausting shoot filled with bad vibes, egos, danger, insanity, copious drug use and other elements wildly unsuitable for someone barely in their teens.

These Hollywood professionals seem a little too sane. The boilerplate aspect of the storytelling puts the insanity of the shoot safely and tidily in the past. It’s a trauma that can’t hurt them any more.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse is a conventional documentary about a movie that was wildly, wonderfully, transgressively and historically unconventional.

Hearts of Darkness is an essential exploration of one of the great American films but its exploration of personal and creative insanity feels just a little too sane.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) FM

Wes Anderson got a fifty million dollar budget from Touchstone Pictures for his fourth film, 2004’s The Life Aquatic. That’s not much by blockbuster standards but for someone like Anderson it’s a fortune. Anderson made the most of his resources, most notably in the form of a massive, elegantly designed set for the ship where much of the action takes place. The Belafonte isn’t just the proverbial character in itself; it’s one of the best characters of the aughts. Anderson has assembled his usual stacked cast full of repertory players but the adroitly cast players risk being upstaged by a very impressive boat.

Anderson’s melancholy look at bad dads, sad dads and dads who never wanted to be fathers in the first place stars Bill Murray as the title character, a documentarian and explorer loosely based on Jaques Cousteau.

The film opens with its troubled protagonist at a low ebb. His best friend and partner Esteban du Plantier (Seymour Cassel) was killed by a sea creature many folks don’t believe exists. Steve’s glory days are behind him and the future is scary and uncertain.

The depressed filmmaker’s aimless existence gains a sense of purpose when he vows to make the hunt for the jaguar shark that killed Esteban the subject of his next documentary.Owen Wilson, who is never better than when he’s being directed by his friend and collaborator Anderson, costars as Edward 'Ned' Plimpton, a Southern gentleman who believes he is Steve’s illegitimate son. Anderson is disarmingly sweet as a soft-spoken Southerner with a charming drawl and a desperate desire to get closer to a man he has admired from a distance but has never known as a man or a dad.

To get closer to Steve the polite young man joins his professional family of oddballs, eccentrics and unpaid interns. They embark on a journey of revenge and redemption involving pirates, a very pregnant journalist played by Cait Blanchett and Steve’s professional rival Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum).

Anderson, cinematographer Robert Yeoman and animator Henry Selick of Nightmare Before Christmas fame have crafted an achingly sad movie full of underwater wonder and enchantment. It’s a meticulously stylized masterpiece that also works on an emotional level.

The Life Aquatic has aged beautifully with the very notable exception of the title character’s unfortunate predilection for casually dropping homophobic slurs. Steve’s potty mouth is supposed to show that he’s blunt and rough around the edges but that kind of language doesn’t belong in a Wes Anderson movie, or anywhere else, for that matter.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Mulholland Drive’s origins as a television pilot that ABC rejected might seem strange or inauspicious considering the film’s universal acclaim until you remember that about a decade before writer-director David Lynch made acid-spiked lemonade out of lemons he co-created one of the most cinematic and acclaimed television shows of all time in Twin Peaks.

Twin Peaks was so influential that it is invariably invoked whenever discussing a television show that’s a little on the strange side. Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost’s beloved brainchild was heralded as a game-changer that single-handedly elevated television from a cultural plague to a respected art-form.

Lynch escaped the limited world of entertainment and became legitimate news by making a television show ambitious and artful enough to make it on the big screen.

With Mulholland Drive Lynch went even further by transforming the messy clay of a ninety minute small screen pilot into a dazzling, nearly two and a half hour big screen experience, a waking dream in movie form.

In the role that made her a star Naomi Watts plays Betty Elms, a wide-eyed innocent from Canada who comes to Hollywood to make it in the motion picture business as an actress.

While staying at her absent aunt’s palatial apartment the pure-hearted upstart becomes intimately acquainted with a dark-haired beauty who calls herself Rita played by Laura Harring whose actual name and history are mysteries to her because she has amnesia.Like grown-up arthouse Nancy Drews, these two very different yet complementary beauties set about solving the mystery of Rita’s identity. Along the way this Betty and Veronica of surreal existential dread fall in love and in lust as the world around them spirals out of control.

Watts brings a Grace Kelly-like elegance to Betty. During a standout scene where Betty goes from blushing coquette to steely-willed vixen in total control of her scorching sexuality during an audition opposite an older actor both excited and intimidated by her talent and sensuality you can feel the then-obscure actress becoming a movie star.

The shimmering, illusionary and fundamentally sinister nature of Hollywood and the motion picture business perfectly suits Lynch’s seductive sensibility. In its famously inscrutable final act Mulholland Drive goes from trippy to intriguingly incomprehensible. Lynch plunges audiences into a world of innocence and perversion, old school glamour and newfangled transgression. Lynch’s towering masterpiece aroused, engaged and confused a world that didn’t know what to make of it.

It’s tempting to imagine what thirteen episodes of this divine madness would look and feel like on television but it’s impossible to conceive of Mulholland Drive as anything other than a movie designed to infiltrate the subconsciouses of the dreamers in the dark watching it on the biggest screen possible.

The Way We Were (1973)

The Way We Were’s status as an all-time romance classic is attributable largely to the explosive chemistry of stars Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, Marvin Hamlisch’s poignant score and Hamlisch, Alan and Marilyn Bergman’s Academy-Award-winning title song. Without Barbra Streisand’s hit ballad, the top-charting song of 1974, yanking relentlessly and effectively at our heartstrings The Way We Were would be a dour, almost perversely pessimistic melodrama about an innately doomed relationship between lovers so different from one another that they can’t possibly make it work. Sydney Pollack’s Arthur Laurents-written hit is less bittersweet than sad.

Barbra Streisand rocketed to giddy new heights of super-stardom playing Katie Morosky, American film’s most lovable Communist. She’s a hardcore Marxist intent on elevating the status of the working class, single-handedly if necessary. Robert Redford plays Hubbell Gardiner, her soulmate and attitudinal opposite, an impossibly beautiful WASP golden boy who is attracted to Katie’s intelligence, beauty and charisma but put off by her abrasive self-righteousness.

The Way We Were opens with Redford and Streisand, who were in their thirties when the film was made, playing suspiciously long in the tooth college students. Katie is the campus activist. Hubbell is an athlete and precociously gifted writer whose beauty and talent Katie finds irresistible.

Hubbell’s gifts land him in Hollywood working on the feature film adaptation of a novel he wrote but his job and Katie’s extremely public politics put them on the radar of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Like most movies about the Blacklist, this has nothing to say about it beyond the Blacklist being bad for the innocent souls stuck in its web and for our country as a whole.

The Way We Were is a film of confusing contradictions. It’s deeply moving, even heartbreaking at times, yet strangely inert. In that respect it reflects the divergent possibilities of its star-crossed lovers. The film wants to be like Katie: fiery, passionate and full of love, life and longing. Instead it’s more like Hubbell: beautiful, gorgeously put together, classy and intelligent but also oddly distant. It’s a curiously chilly romance with ice at its core instead of fire.

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