Taking Off (1971)

Directed by Milos Forman
Lynn Carlin, Buck Henry

Bearing evidence of an outsider’s inquisitive eyes, Czech director Milos Forman’s first American feature took an even-handed, humorous look at the parents of the Me Generation. Though the title ostensibly refers to the runaway teen plot that opens the film, its more accurate enactment comes much later when, after getting high at an SPFC (Society for the Parents of Fugitive Children) meeting, the home-again, gone-again girl’s parents play (and lose, horribly) a game of strip poker with another child-searching married couple (the husband of which is played by Paul Benedict, a tall, strong-jawed man whom observant viewers will remember as the guy who showed up in Blaine, Missouri instead of Mort Guffman near the end of Waiting for Guffman).

If the daughter’s (Linnea Heacock) stoic desertions and an inter-cut reel of folk music concert auditions establish the post-60s hippie-beat subcultural setting, most of that scene is gleaned at one remove, from the perspective of the bewildered parents (Carlin, Henry). In an agile balance of middle-class suburbanite parody (think Woody Allen in West Chester) and earnest mid-life crisis and parental distress, Forman (who subsequently blended comedy and drama so nicely in Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The People vs. Larry Flynt) humanizes the distraught adults, all the while mining their idiosyncrasies for laughs.

Addressing issues for youth and parents of the time, Taking Off is inseparable from its historical context, an eloquent time capsule for the movies and larger cultural trends on the threshold between the 60s and 70s. After the youth audience-tapping successes of Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, faltering studios saw the marketing potential in giving young, highly film-literate directors (Coppolla, Lucas and Spielberg among them) small budgets and total artistic license. As such, Taking Off is a market-conscious product, saturated with the music, lingo and recreational drug use of the youth movements, but seeing the lot from an outsider’s (we future movie-goers, parents, foreigners, studio execs, etc.) perspective.

Accordingly, fashion, music slang and drug paraphernalia appear as so many archeological artifacts, indecipherable to common adults and only intelligible with the assistance of a complicit youth – one incredible scene after a gaudy SPFC gala dinner features a suited beat teaching confused parents how to smoke a joint under the pretext that doing so will help them understand their runaway childrens’ thinking: “It’s like a strange,” muses Not Guffman, “a strange fuzzy.” Estranged from their kids as they are, the adults are the focus of the film, and Forman’s attitude towards the fuzzy and largely undeveloped youth characters is distinctly ambiguous. Still, there’s a clear fondness for the era’s music, as the recurring acoustic musical numbers (including Kathy Bates singing a nostalgic ode about unicorns) and a chance drink at an Ike and Tina Turner concert confirm. As a film about age, Taking Off’s cultural referents probably seemed dated within a few years of its release, yet its humor and psychological portraits have grown middle-aged very nicely.

Shorter versions of this review will appear in the June 17 issue of The L Magazine, and on the magazine's website.

Quid Pro Quo

Directed by Carlos Brooks
Nick Stahl, Vera Farmiga

Regarding his debut’s aesthetic – wherein a wheelchair-bound radio journalist investigates handicap wannabes – Brooks explains trying to evoke those seconds “between deep sleep and wakefulness.” Too much vacillating between stories and styles, sadly, is exactly what keeps his film from being astute social commentary (delving into victimhood envy and fetishism) or an immersive psychological drama addressing embodied trauma. Instead we get whiffs of both but chewy chunks of neither; all tagged with an inexplicable R-rating (save for some intense dry-humping).

This review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.

28 Days Later… (2002)

Directed by Danny Boyle
Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris

In the early naughts the world’s movie houses were dank and dreary, reeking of over-priced popcorn, low expectations and lurching, pulse-less bodies. Then, amidst the staggering, groaning action-horror films, a long-dead genre came back to life with more oomph and chutzpah than before: zombie movies returned after being dead for nearly 20 years (since George A. Romero’s 1985 Day of the Dead, for the record). The most lively and original entry in this traditionally American genre came from England with terrorism, environmentalism, gender and class relations on its Rage-infected brain. Boyle (of Trainspotting fame) keeps the action moving swiftly from London’s 9/11-echoing streets into Britain’s (no longer) quaint countryside, the lot done in crisp visceral video – save the final cottage scene, shot on film (in this movie, going away from London means going back in time, and in filmmaking media). The pace keeps social commentary from feeling forced – except maybe when the soldiers want to establish a monstrous bourgeois patriarchy with red-gowned sex slaves in their fortified Victorian mansion – but also means the final role-reversal between kick-ass Selena (Harris) and wimpy-ass Jim (Murphy) doesn’t seem as glaring a sexist concession as it should.

This review will appear in the program for The L Magazine's Summerscreen outdoor cinema series.

Mean Streets (1973)

Directed by Martin Scorsese
Harvey Keitel, Robert DeNiro

At the risk of overstating how autobiographic this film is, Scorsese might as well have re-titled it My Streets. Many of the Little Italy locations were his childhood hangouts, he speaks Charlie’s (Keitel) interior monologue, and the delightfully eclectic soundtrack was culled from his personal record collection (half the film’s budget then went to clearing rights to the songs). Still, thank San Gennaro (during whose annual feast the film takes place) he didn’t keep the original title, “Season of the Witch” (which gets name-dropped right after a William Blake reference, how’s that for self-aggrandizing?). These friends are no literati gang though, and amidst the shenanigans of perpetual-adolescence all other name-dropping (aside from confusion over the term “mook”) signals alternately misogyny, racism and homophobia. This lashing out signals an immigrant community’s uneasy adjustment to fading family and religious rituals, and intimates the general crisis in masculinity that’s preoccupied Scorsese since. Mean Streets also marks DeNiro’s first (and funniest, save perhaps King of Comedy) collaboration with Scorsese, and the director’s most darkly funny (aside, perhaps, from Taxi Driver) wink-nudge out-Hitchcocking-Hitchcock cameo.

This review will appear in the program for The L Magazine's upcoming Summerscreen series.

Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine

Directed by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach

A fiery, well-read mind in a small, wrinkly vessel – and, occasionally, a hot pink fake fur coat – Louise Bourgeois muses knowingly: “My emotions are completely inappropriate to my size.” Appropriately then, her most famous artworks are monumental symbols of melancholy, nostalgia and trauma, a kind of therapy worked through on a massive scale. The stroke of genius in Marion Cajori (who died in 2006 while the film was still being edited) and Amei Wallach’s documentary is filming Bourgeois’ artworks in a way that conveys their imposing emotive presence. In the opening scene their camera approaches a circular room-sized installation in a series of curving, see-sawing dolly shots that echo the outer walls of the piece. Later, a dizzying spinning shot taken from beneath one of Bourgeois’ iconic works – a giant spider sculpture named after her mother – captures the dark, primal fascination these creepy and calming creatures evoke. In such moments, Cajori and Wallach’s long-titled film extends the effects of Bourgeois’ artworks as much as it prods their sources.

In wordy yet accessible interviews – delivered in verbose English that still bares the charming edge of a French accent and, occasionally, lapses into more flowing digressions spoken in her native language – Bourgeois discusses formative factors like her childhood in war-scarred France, her father’s affair with her governess and her experiences as a female artist, but refuses to endorse strict historical, psychoanalytic or gendered interpretations. She concedes that her work is about pleasure and pain – or, more precisely, the pleasure of overcoming her pain – but why pain? “Why pain? Because it’s obvious,” she tells an interviewer matter-of-factly. “Okay, that’s it. Sorry to say it’s obvious, but you have to work a little yourself.” This funny moment encapsulates why Bourgeois is a terrific artist and thrilling documentary subject. She’s tiny, and yet behind her small, coiling frame lurks the immense form of her experiences and achievements, a life that has seen most of our modern era from the fairly fascinating vantage point of an outsider at the highest reaches of the art world. It also speaks to a balance of intellect, fame and modesty, a charming smile that deflects the flattery of being addressed as a know-it-all, then volleys a pandering question with a quizzical deadpan.


Cajori and Wallach’s film, here, gets at the heart of what makes Bourgeois a great artist (indeed, what makes anyone a great artist): her work reveals as much about her as our reactions to it reveal about us. This point is exemplified later, when art activists The Guerilla Girls claim Bourgeois (against her stated non-affiliation with feminism) as one of their great successes in the crusade to forge a more inclusive art community in New York. In the early 90s, her work was added to an otherwise all-male exhibition at the Guggenheim after sustained protests organized by the Guerilla Girls. How poetically just, then, that this film should be released over a decade later in conjunction with a major retrospective of Bourgeois’ work at the very same museum (opening June 27).

Perhaps most striking, in the end, is this divergence between Bourgeois’ diminutive stature and the thematic and material size of her oeuvre. The inklings of her artistic and personal sensitivity are scrawled in the wrinkles around her eyes, her grateful smiles and disappointed grimaces, but they take on so many rich forms in her works – a veritable alphabet of spiders, cells, mirrors, dolls, sculptures, stones and homes. Bourgeois’ lasting strength is her ability to make this alphabet legible to her audience, something personal but – with a little work – functional for her public. With a lot of work (they began shooting in 1993), Cajori and Wallach’s film documents and extends the reach of Bourgeois’ art.

A similar version of this review appears in the June 18 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.