The Button Down Blog

Let’s talk about The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. (It’s a long title, but that’s okay. It’s appropriate.) I had high hopes for it when I first saw the posters and online clips, and it turns out to be one darn good film.

Usually I follow that up with something negative, but not this time. Director Andrew Dominik made an interesting choice, deciding to lay the cards on the table at the beginning of the film; to tell the audience right out who was killed, when he was killed, how he was killed, and by whom. Rather than spending energy trying to keep the audience guessing about those details, he exposed the characters.

In many ways The Assassination of Jesse James is a character study. As we get to know these men their motives become crystal clear, until the conclusion isn’t just the natural one, it’s the only one that makes sense.

First of all, let’s talk about the good Mr. Pitt. In a role that could have been played as a caricature of a bad guy or a misunderstood good guy, he walked the line between, showing Jesse’s changing moods and complex point of view. Make no mistake, Jesse James was a bad motha, but there was more to him than that. He was a family man, a practical joker. In the end, he was unable to integrate the two opposing personalities.

I’m actually surprised at the maturity of Brad Pitt’s work here. One of the producers for the film, Pitt was clearly passionate about the part, and that passion shines through. The most impressive part, though, is that he was willing to step out of the limelight and give Casey Affleck (below) room to stretch in his portrayal too. And his work in The Assassination of Jesse James is just as impressive as I was told.

Affleck the Younger appears as Bob Ford. This guy’s a little terrifying, of the stalker variety. His voice falters and cracks as his youth and inexperience show themselves. He knows everything about Jesse James, he’s catalogued the ways in which he’s like Jesse James, he’s clipped newspaper articles about Jesse James, and now he’s got himself a spot in the James gang.

The only problem is that the real Jesse James is nowhere near as captivating and amazing and super-cool as the Jesse James in Bob’s head. And that’s where the problems begin. As it becomes clear that the real Jesse doesn’t want to be Bob’s BFF, he becomes slightly and calmly unhinged, agreeing to deliver Jesse James to the government.

There’s one more major character in The Assassination of Jesse James, and he’s Charley Ford, Bob’s older brother. Played by Sam Rockwell (above), Charley doesn’t work just as comic relief, though he was certainly that. I recognized Rockwell from his turn as Stella‘s fake mustache dealer Gary Meadows, so I was ready for all-laughs all-the-time, but not so in this film. Charley is a tragic, almost Shakespearean character as well, using his natural humor to break the tension, becoming darker and darker as the movie progressed.

Art direction was instrumental in the film’s success. Whereas most films are more than happy to move you from one scene to the next with no thought to transition, Dominek set the mood with the fast-motion interstitials showing fields of snow as the sun moved from east to west. He used large, almost graphic elements to shape the mood. One of my favorites was the focus on the spoon in a cup of tea as Jesse learns of Bob Liddil’s capture. The narrator’s voice calmly gives the facts of the case, reducing major developments to dispassionate recitation. Here the first lines of the film set the tone for the next two and a half hours.

He was growing into middle age, and was living then in a bungalow on Woodland Avenue. He installed himself in a rocking chair and smoked a cigar down in the evenings as his wife wiped her pink hands on an apron and reported happily on their two children. His children knew his legs, the sting of his mustache against their cheeks. Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them. Rains fell straighter. Clocks slowed. Sounds were amplified. He considered himself a Southern loyalist and guerrilla in a Civil War that never ended. He regretted neither his robberies, nor the seventeen murders that he laid claim to. He had seen another summer under in Kansas City, Missouri and on September 5th in the year 1881, he was thirty-four-years-old.

Finally, there’s the music. The score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is somber and cold. Emphasizing the inevitable march to Jesse James’s murder, the music under the interstitials is carried by a slow, steady drumbeat, with simple melody on piano and violin chanting above, leading us to the inevitable slaughter.

Oddly enough, I was almost surprised when the killing happened. I almost expected Robert Ford to drop the gun that Jesse had given him. Maybe Charley would kill his brother to save his friend. Maybe they would just leave Jesse James to live on with his wife and children. That would have been the happy ending.

But as we know, happy endings rarely come true in life.

Here’s an odd little movie. To call it a dark comedy is a bit of an understatement. To Be Or Not To Be starts with Jack Benny playing a Nazi officer getting information from a young boy and getting a visit from Adolf Hitler. Thankfully, there’s a quick reveal and it turns out that he’s a Polish stage actor playing a part. Whew.

To Be Or Not To Be follows actor Joseph Tura (Benny) and his wife Maria as they try to keep a German spy from completing his mission. The rest of the company helps out along with Maria’s admirer, a younger Robert Stack.

I’m not one to say you can’t find humor in tragedy. There are too many shouldn’t-be-funny comedies to believe that. And there are plenty of laughs in To Be Or Not To Be. The problem has to do with when the film was made. In 1942, the German occupation wasn’t a piece of history, it was current news. That makes it a bit harder to laugh about.

The filmmakers had to address the point, so they brought the comedy to a screeching halt when it was time for the actual invasion to happen. There was a good sized section of film spent reflecting on the real-life drama, after which they tried to start the comedy back up. It was necessary, for sure, but it resulted in a disjointed film that felt a little schizophrenic.

The good news is that when it’s in comedy mode, it really is funny. Jack Benny’s comic timing is terrific as always, especially in a scene when he discovers Robert Stack in his bed. It’s a great scene between the two of them, and when Carole Lombard joins them it gets even better as they all argue past each other. It’s almost like they’re online or something.

And the Nazi scenes are surprisingly well done. The contempt is just slathered on. The Nazi officers are shown as ineffectual buffoons for the most part, kind of a precursor to Hogan’s Heroes. At one point Tura impersonates a Nazi (for real this time) and gets curious about what the Nazis think of Josef Tura. It’s classic Jack Benny like this that makes me love him so.

Josef Tura: [disguised as Professor Siletsky - speaking about Maria Tura]: Her husband is that great, great Polish actor, Josef Tura. You’ve probably heard of him.
Colonel Ehrhardt: Oh, yes. As a matter of fact I saw him on the stage when I was in Warsaw once before the war.
Josef Tura: Really?
Colonel Ehrhardt: What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland.

While it certainly isn’t my favorite film, To Be Or Not To Be is a fair movie. The performances were reasonably good, and it’s well paced, dramatic section notwithstanding. The comedy is wonderfully done given the constraints, and it never goes so far as to point and laugh at real-life war.

One of the most interesting parts about watching it was seeing little tidbits that marked it as being from that era. The fact that they pronounce the word Nazi differently than we do now fascinates me. It’s something I would never have known if it had been made at a later date, and in the end, that’s what endears the film to me.

When I reviewed [cref 116 Toy Story 2], I wanted to mention this beautiful song, but there just wasn’t room. I’ve found some interesting clips in my research, and decided it deserved its own post.

The song is Jessie’s Story. It’s a marvelously constructed little song called “When She Loved Me” from Randy Newman. Sarah MacLaughlin was the perfect choice to sing the song, and the dialogue between Jessie (Joan Cusack) and Woody (Tom Hanks) was written and played perfectly.

Better than that is the fact that Jessie’s Song is beautifully performed in several translations. The DVD contained Spanish, French, and Portuguese, but when I went online I also found Japanese and Arabic! I don’t know who the performers are but they sing beautifully, don’t they?

Below are videos for five of the languages, starting with the original English, which contains some mild spoilers for the movie. I couldn’t find the French version online. If someone runs across it, drop me a line and I’ll add it.

I collect with vodpod

Since I’m sure there will be people coming in from Google looking for the similarly titled “Jessie’s Song”, I’ve included it too. For those unfamiliar with “Jessie’s Song”, it’s only the most awesome episode in Saved By The Bell history!

That’s right, this is the one where Jessie gets all hopped up on caffeine pills and freaks out. My personal theory is that she actually got them from Screech, who laced the pills with cocaine.

[cref.from 116]

After all the westerns and older classics I’ve been watching lately, I decided it was time to catch a film told from a woman’s point of view. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore seemed to fit the bill pretty well.

Starring Ellen Burstyn and directed by Martin Scorsese, the film follows Alice Hyatt as she learns to fend for herself after her husband’s death. Great pains were taken to show Alice’s transformation from a spiritless, cowed housewife with an annoying son and an abusive husband to a firm, compassionate, in-control woman. With an annoying son. A really, really annoying son.

You can’t have everything, I guess.

It’s an interesting metamorphosis. In the beginning, we meet an Alice afraid of her husband, yet defending him to her best friend and mourning him when he dies suddenly. After the funeral Alice makes the drastic decision to move away and try to restart her singing career, with her son Tommy in tow.

Before long Alice starts a relationship with a young Harvey Keitel. Ellen Burstyn’s scenes with Keitel were simply amazing. You know how good he is at the “scary dude” thing? Well, she’s just as good at the “Oh God don’t kill me please don’t kill me” thing. I read somewhere that she had to go cry for an hour when they got done shooting the scene, and I don’t doubt it for a minute. It’s one of the standout scenes in the film.

Before long, Alice moves again and takes a job at a local diner, meeting and falling in love with local rancher David, played by Kris Kristofferson. After about twenty minutes of scenes in and around the diner, I finally realized why it seemed so familiar. The Linda Lavin show Alice was based on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. I never knew that.

The rest of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore deals with her budding independence, how it works with her relationship with David, and how Tommy’s acting out (and his friendship with Jodie Foster) leads to near disaster.

Another good film, worthy of the praise given it. I’m not surprised; the fact that Martin Scorsese directed Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is a big tipoff to its quality. The framing of the above shot of Alice and Flo (played by Diane Ladd) on a break and sunning themselves is a perfect example of his artistry.

It’s damn brave to do such an extreme closeup with such inconsequential dialogue. It easily could have come off ho-hum, but Scorsese made a potentially throw-away scene into one of the more important of the film. Here he showed not just the easy friendship between the two ladies, but also Alice’s comfort in her own skin.

It’s a good image. One that people need to see, both then and now. Ellen Burstyn has long been a reliable player, and her ability is evident here. Her Alice, by the end of the film, finally becomes someone we hope to recognize from within our own selves. Never a bad message, but rarely is it told with such elegance.

You know, The Sting is one of those films that I’ve never given much thought to watching. I always assumed it was a good film, but didn’t feel any motivation to watch it. It came out at an awkward time; when VCRs became popular a decade after the film was released, it was too recent to be considered a classic but too old to be rushed out to the video store shelves.

When I realized that seven months into this thing I still haven’t taken a look at any films from the 1970s, I decided to pull this one out first. Boy am I glad I did. It really is a great movie.

First of all, take a look at the picture above. But for the generation gap, I’d swear Robert Redford and Brad Pitt were brothers. Redford plays the part of Johnny Hooker, a young grifter in the depression-era seedier side of Joliet, Illinois. When his partner leaves, Hooker heads for Chicago where he’s taken under the wing of Henry Gondorff, an older con-artist who hasn’t had a good sting in a long time. Amid crosses, double crosses, and triple crosses, Gondorff manages to lead a band of swindlers in conning mob boss Doyle Lonnegan.

The art direction on The Sting leaves no doubt that we’re in 1936. From the title cards between acts to the drab interior sets and streets lined with winos to the old piano rags of Scott Joplin on the brilliantly sparse soundtrack, we know we’re seeing the underbelly of a world that’s seen better days. And that helps dispel any moral questions before they’re asked and allows us to watch as our heroes make a living by stealing from others. There’s never any doubt that what they’re doing is reasonable and just, especially since they tend to take from other crooks.

Paul Newman’s Gondorff has a couple things going for him. First of all, he’s got those piercing blue eyes and a confidence in his swagger that fits him just so. He also gets all the good lines. Gondorff’s been around the block a few times, and it’s clear that while he may have fallen on hard times, he’s still got what it takes to pull this off. Surrounding himself with a veritable legion of associates in a complex plan, he plays his mark like a fiddle.

The poker game is an amazing showcase of close-quarters comedy. Newman’s just stellar, making the whole situation so deliciously uncomfortable. Then as the stakes get higher and higher, the comedy slowly fades while the drama is turned up to eleven. George Roy Hill won an Academy Award for directing The Sting, and quite deservedly. I’m leaving out buckets and buckets of plot because I don’t have room for all of it, but the film never felt too weighed down by the number of plotlines or players.

Speaking of the number of players, this film is a prime example of pitch-perfect casting. There are so many recognizable faces, but there’s no stunt casting. Each actor suits his part perfectly. Ray Walston is the only choice for a race announcer. No one else (nevermind The Sting II) could play Lonnegan the way Robert Shaw did. Eileen Brennan was a fabulous choice for the sultry vixen, bringing a guarded femininity to this otherwise masculine cast.

The Sting is definitely a film I’ll be watching again. I do wish I’d been able to rent a better print. The one I got was a messy full-screen DVD from 1998. I’m seeing reports that the film may have been shown in 4:3 in a conscious decision to make it look like old movie, but then I see that newer restored HD versions of the film are made in 1.85:1.

Hrm. I’ll have to find out which one’s true before I watch it again.

Season 3, Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington

Season 9, The City Of New York Vs. Homer Simpson