ArtsBeat

Who's Unhappy at Movies This Summer? Not Me.

I seem to be having a much better time at the movies this summer than the consensus at Rotten Tomatoes wants me to.

For those out of the Web loop, Rottentomatoes.com is a terrific catch-most movie website that, among other things, collects movie critic reviews, averages their ratings out and tells you a percentage of critics who thought an individual film is either "fresh" or "rotten." You can also read many individual reviews there.

It's one of a few places online which many say have made it easier, in the current journalistic nervous breakdown, for newspapers and magazines to jettison movie critics. To which the most obvious counter-argument is that consensus gave us the presidency of George W. Bush and look how that worked out. Consensus can tell you a lot of interesting things but not often whether a movie is enjoyable or not.

My personal problem seems to be that I'm enjoying myself entirely too much. Until last week, in fact, I hadn't assigned myself to a single cinematic mega-turkey since Michael Haneke's vile remake of his self-righteously sadistic Austrian swill "Funny Games." Last week, though, I knew it would be worthwhile to see exactly how on earth the cloudland geniuses allowed Steve Carell and Mike Myers to go toe to toe at your local megaplex. That meant I saw Myers' "The Love Guru," a deposit left in Hollywood's litterbox that verily screams for immediate scoop and removal.

Otherwise, my usual low summer expectations for cinematic art have meant that I've had a pretty good dumb time at the movies. I wish I hadn't had to sit through the first hour of "Chronicles of Narnia" but it was fascinating to see, afterward, how much difficulty people in the people, inside the critical consensus and out, had amitting that the movie's first hour is heavy-going.

That's because so much taste is hopeful self-definition. Working critics--those actually paid to express their taste to others--are just as liable as insecure teenagers to be saying "I am the sort of person who hates 'You Don't Mess With the Zohan' for such and such reason" or "I am the sort of person who's much too good for the likes of 'The Strangers.'"

We all do this. It's part of life from teen years on. It's called "individuation." The more you see it in a critic, the less useful he or she probably is (except as a NEGATIVE guide.) Just as high school kids can develop a consensus that Mr. Schmidt the chemistry teacher is the meanest SOB in school when he's, in fact, the best teacher, a critical and even audience consensus can be very wrong for years, even decades. All it means is that people, to be thought of a certain way, are saying "we're the sort of cool people who don't like (fill in the blank)."

I defy anyone now with a good heart and open mind to see "Ishtar" and "Heaven's Gate" and find them the calamities that critical consensus once did. (I defended them years ago, knowing that there were a few other eccentrics out there crying out in the wilderness with me.)

I think this summer, when movie critics have been on the occupational bubble, has been a kind of quiet purity exam for those doing the job. The questions it asks are "Can see how radical it is for Adam Sandler to make a movie as unabashedly Semitic in America as 'You Don't Mess With the Zohan?'" And "Can you see the secret sophistication and merriment of 'Iron Man?'" And "Can you enjoy the B-movie maker who has finally come out to play in M. Night Shyamalan's 'The Happening?' where the hilariously overhyped 'New Spielberg' and 'New Hitchcock' used to be?" And "Can you get down with the elementary and hearteningly traditional fright film craft of 'The Strangers?'" (whose great line--prominently quoted in the trailers--is the memorably chilly reply to the question shrieked by the harrowed victims of home invasion 'why are you doing this to us?' To which their torturer, wearing a white hood, replies "because you were home," an answer, I submit, we'll be hearing in our heads for years.)

It's very simple really: I know going in this stuff isn't Bunuel, or Bergman or Antonioni or Kurosawa but in a Hollywood truism oft-quoted by Gore Vidal, sometimes "s---- has it's own integrity."

Some of it has this summer anyway.

--Jeff Simon

Cyd Charisse: 1921-2008

It was physically painful to shake hands with Cyd Charisse. Literally.

It wasn't because her fingers were long and bony (which they were) but because the huge rings she wore on her right hand ensured that everyone would know they were there. Anyone who squeezed too hard was likely to wind up with a bruised palm. The size of the rings and the beauty and understated elegance of the woman in every other way didn't quite go together. Not, that is, until you thought a little about the utility of those rings in deflecting the glad-handing over-enthusiasm of those who might meet her.

I interviewed her in 1974. Back then, every major performer at Melody Fair would be made available to the local press after the engagement's first night. Critics and reporters would meet them serially as they sat waiting for us at a table in a local restaurant near Melody Fair. Every local journalistic venue -- all newspapers, radio stations and TV stations -- at the time participated. Because Melody Fair producer Lew Fisher liked us at The News, respected what we did and understood our deadlines, we'd usually be scheduled to talk to them first.

But not always.

It was a bizarre but interesting ritual. I remember interviewing comedian Pat Cooper and asking about the extraordinary amount of detail in his routines about growing up Italian in America. "You're some sort of college boy, aren't you?" he said. And then, literally, proceeded to growl at me for the next five minutes -- whenever he wasn't answering my questions, that is. To this day, I have never actually been growled at by any other interview subject.

A reporter for radio preceded me with Charisse. You could see from afar she was a bit stricken by the whole process. To understate the case, Santora's La Stanza Restaurant was not exactly the usual kind of place frequented by members of Beverly Hills aristocracy. Nor could meeting the local press serially be among the favorite activities for a former beloved co-star of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.

She was 53 at the time, only 10 years younger than my mother. I was 29. She already had a 33-year-old son. But those palm-slicing rings on her finger and her wariness from the reporter preceding me told me where she was coming from. My heart bled for her -- a little anyway. She seemed like an elegant woman of my mother's generation who'd suddenly and unaccountably suffered a breakdown of her Jaguar Saloon on the Kensington Expressway. I was determined, in that pre-cellphone era, to be a Good Samaritan and give her as comfortable and easy a ride to the Gas Station as I could. I acted, then, like the most polite schoolmate of her son's she could possibly meet.

I asked standard Hollywood historical questions almost any critic might ask. "Silk Stockings" was her favorite of her films, and Vincente Minnelli her favorite director. Her worst film, she said smilingly, was "one with Rock Hudson at Universal" that she refused to remember (detective work revealed it to be Joseph Pevney's "Twilight for the Gods").

Mostly, though, I remember now nothing but how stunningly beautiful she was.

And how differently she looked at me, at the end of the interview as I walked away, than she had the previous occupant of the chair. So help me, there was a faint glimmer of gratitude in her face.

It seems I'd gotten her to the gas station the smoothest and best way possible.

What happened after that, I have no idea.

--Jeff Simon

(Photo: Associated Press)

PG-13 or R: YOU Decide

Look at it this way: the way I see it, not every error is a mistake.
I erred Thursday in reporting that the rating of Adam Sandler's comedy "You Don't Mess With The Zohan" is R, but I wasn't wrong. Sure, it's actually rated PG-13 but R, I think, is what it should be. That's what it would be if Hollywood weren't so blindly driven to haul every teen male carcass into movie theaters that it can find. R is what Sandler's movie would be rated if the rating system made a lick of sense.
There is, to be sure, no frontal male nudity in "You Don't Mess With the Zohan" as there was in the R-rated "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." But Zohan, in its zestful and merry way, is a much dirtier movie. Or, to be scrupulously accurate, not dirtier but raunchier.
Take away the sex and the dangling participles in the grammar of the star/writer's' mopey performance in "Sarah Marshall" and you've got a self-pitying wallow that is almost annoyingly chaste. "You Don't Mess With the Zohan," on the other hand, is merrily filthy--locker room filthy.
Not that I mind the slightest, you understand. I had a great time with some of it, as ashamed of myself as I couldn't help being. But if that stuff is thoroughly appropriate for 13-year olds, I'm Vladimir Putin. Imagine an 8-year-old seeing it, for instance, and you've got nothing but questions, in the movie and on the car ride home. I know that from personal experience because some parent at the screening actually brought an 8-year old, which is about as responsible as inviting one into an NBA locker room jokefest or letting one play in highway traffic at rush hour.
"Zohan" is sweetly and good-naturedly filthy, of course, but, at heart, its jokes are more raucous and raunchy than the jokes in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" ever thought of being.
So, sure, I made an error, but not a mistake in assuming an R rating.
The way I look at it is this: when I die and get up to the pearly gates and St. Peter asks "why should I let YOU in? What have YOU done to get a pass?"
And I'll answer, "well, I'm the guy who assumed 'Zohan' was rated R and said it should have been."
The answer I'm anticipating is "come right in. We've got a penthouse suite for you. What time do you want breakfast delivered?"
--Jeff Simon

The Best Film Ever Made In Buffalo

So where were you in the summer of 1983 when Robert Redford, Barry Levinson and Co. came to Buffalo to film "The Natural?"

Were you at Ming Teh in Ft. Erie on one of the many occasions that Robert Duvall dropped in to discover it was "a world-class Chinese restaurant" and to fall in love with the place? Or at the Amherst Theater on a weekend night when some cast members went to the movies there?

I was watching some of it be made, talking to producer Mark Johnson and, on the final day after shooting at the Masten Avenue Armory (a makeshift studio), interviewing Robert Redford in his trailer for the entire afternoon. He'd had a healthy fish lunch and proceeded to discuss his entire film career up to that point--a distinct rarity at the time.

He also discussed his regret that he couldn't see more of Buffalo--and too, his dismay at the quality of local driving skills (it seems that every time he drove his tinted-glass Volvo into town from the lake shore, he'd discover "you've got some really crazy drivers in this city.")

At least half of the city back then seems to have felt very few degrees of separation from the filming. We've all got stories about the film whose 25th anniversary celebration you'll read about today in the Spotlight Section of the News.

It was a singular moment in Buffalo history and I don't think the city of its filming is entirely irrelevant to the stubborn popularity and stature the film enjoys.

By all means, then, feel free to share your memories here.
So where WERE you then, in the summer of 1983 when it was made?
--Jeff Simon