Every 70s Movie: milos forman

Showing posts with label milos forman. Show all posts

Friday, February 9, 2018

Visions of Eight (1973)

Rather than providing conventional historical contextualization or even straightforward reportage, this arty documentary project from megaproducer David L. Wolper lets eight internationally acclaimed filmmakers offer cinematic sketches of the Olympics, with the 1972 summer games in Munich as their canvas. The terrorist attacks that left 11 Israeli athletes dead receive only passing mention, not out of disrespect but rather because Wolper’s film was designed to celebrate timeless aspects of the Olympics. As with most anthology pictures, Visions of Eight is a hit-or-miss affair, but even the iffy sequences are imaginative, so as a total viewing experience, Visions of Eight is offbeat, unpredictable, and, just as Woper intended, inspirational. Given a clear shape thanks to well-crafted introductory and closing segments overseen by Mel Stewart (who directed Wolper’s beloved 1971 theatrical feature Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory), the film moves gracefully between quasi-narrative sequences and experimental passages.

Yuri Ozerov’s “The Beginning” is among the merely serviceable vignettes. Mai Zetterling’s weight-lifting sequence “The Strongest” loses focus despite flashy cinematography and editing, because Zetterling drifts into random stats (Olympians ate 1.1 million eggs over the course of the ’72 games) and images of computers processing data. Infusing “The Decathalon” with his characteristically antiauthoritarian humor, Milos Forman juxtaposes pageantry with mundane details such as officials yawning between events, and he tips his hand by narrating, “I got to see the Olympics for free and had the best seats.” Arguably the best sequence is Claude Lelouch’s “The Losers,” which offers a poignant alternative to familiar views of triumphant athletes.

Innovative Hollywood director Arthur Penn gets a bit carried away with “The Highest,” employing artsy audio drops, slow motion, and soft focus to transform high jumps into audiovisual abstractions, though it must be said that parts of “The Highest” are quite beautiful. Michael Pfleghar’s “The Women” underwhelms, and Kon Ichikawa’s “The Fastest” obnoxiously celebrates its own technical complexity via narration that explains how 24 cameras and 20,000 feet of film were used to record a 100-yard-dash in granular detail. The final segment, John Schlesinger’s “The Longest,” lives up to its title, offering a repetitive look at an English marathoner.

Still, Visions of Eight amply rewards the viewer’s attention. The best sequences are terrific, the cumulative abundance of atmosphere and information is impressive, and the license Wolper gave to his collaborators resulted in great stylistic variety. Never lost amid the directorial flourishes is the sincere theme of the piece, which has to do with extolling the values of achievement and community.

Visions of Eight: GROOVY

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Taking Off (1971)

Bittersweet, funny, hip, and insightful, Czechoslovakian filmmaker Milos Forman’s first English-language movie offers a sly look at the Generation Gap in which both groups under investigation—counterculture kids and Establishment parents—are portrayed with dignity. Unlike most pictures of the same type, which opt for oh-the-humanity melodrama or us-vs.-them stridency, Taking Off tells a droll story about people trying to understand the life experiences of others, even as introspective odysseys reveal unexpected complexities. On some levels, the film is quite heady, and this aspect of Taking Off is maximized by Forman’s unique cinematic approach; as he did with such monumental later films as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984), Forman blends realism and stylization as effortlessly as he fuses comedy with drama. Yet on other levels, Taking Off works as a simple fish-out-of-water comedy, especially during scenes when nebbishy leading man Buck Henry illustrates the conundrum of average suburban Americans struggling to grasp the rhythms of the sex-drugs-and-rock-‘n’-roll lifestyle.

Henry plays Larry Tyne, a straight-laced businessman living in an affluent suburb of New York City with his wife, Lynn (Lynn Carlin). When their teenaged daughter, Jeannie (Linnea Heacock), runs away from home, Larry searches the grungier sections of Manhattan, eventually encountering fellow befuddled suburbanite Margot (Georgia Engel), the parent of another teenager who “took off.” Margot introduces Larry and Lynn to a support group for parents in their unique situation, which leads to the film’s most amusing sequence—in the unlikely context of a hotel meeting room, a helpful young stoner (Vincent Schiavelli) provides reefers and coaches dozens of middle-aged straights on how to toke without bogarting.

While the main story of Taking Off is fairly strong, it’s clearly just a framework that Forman and his collaborators use to connect sketches and vignettes. For instance, running through the movie are clips of an audition for a musical, so periodically Forman cuts to some longhaired singer-songwriter playing a number that speaks to a counterculture-friendly theme. (Notables among the auditioners are future pop star Carly Simon and future Oscar-winning actress Kathy Bates, appearing here as “Bobo Bates” and displaying a lovely singing voice.)

Forman cowrote the picture with a team including playwright John Guare, and the script consistently prioritizes nuance over mere plotting. Beyond simply cataloging the impossibilities of hippie-era Utopian dreams, as well as the constricting problems inherent to those stuck on the 9-to-5 rat race, Taking Off communicates the notion that everyone in the story is lost, to some degree or another. In fact, the title has a double meaning because Larry’s quest through the counterculture represents him “taking off” from his normal world, even though he finds liberation frightening.

Taking Off might ultimately be too slight, in terms of narrative, to earn a space in the counterculture-cinema pantheon, especially since the story is told only partially from the viewpoint of the Woodstock Generation. Nonetheless, in addition to marking Forman’s impressive transition from European to American filmmaking, Taking Off captures its time with unusual maturity, sensitivity, and wit.

Taking Off: RIGHT ON

Monday, November 4, 2013

Hair (1979)

Seeing as how this disappointing film’s source material is, arguably, the quintessential counterculture musical, it’s impossible to say that making Hair was a wasted endeavor. After all, preserving the stage show’s energy on film, and spreading the stage show’s provocative messages to audiences who had not seen the musical in its original form, was both inevitable and worthwhile. The problem (or one of them, anyway) is that the translation process took too long. Once Hair hit cinemas, the milieu of the stage show—antiwar protests, hippies dropping acid and experimenting with free love, the Vietnam War claiming a sickening number of human lives—had slipped into history. As a result, Hair was already a museum piece even when it was new. Still, if one ignores the unfortunate nature of the film’s appearance within the public sphere, there’s a lot to enjoy in Hair, even though the film cannot be ranked among the most artistically successful stage-to-screen transpositions. The acting is heartfelt, the singing and dancing are powerful, director Milos Forman’s handling of material is imaginative and thoughtful, and the inherent humanism of the original stage show shines through. Thus, while the elements never cohere, something interesting happens in nearly every scene.

That said, it’s tempting to castigate the filmmakers for making significant changes to the source material, such as altering characterizations and dropping songs (or pieces of songs). The movie’s story feels overly schematic, which, in turn, makes the final scenes come across as overly strident. Moreover, there’s a gigantic plot hole in the middle of the movie’s story, which makes the whole business of tinkering with success seem even more foolhardy in retrospect. In sum, had the filmmakers improved on the show, only purists would gripe, but that’s not the case here, because the movie’s narrative flaws are apparent to all viewers.

In any event, the movie’s story revolves around Claude (John Savage), a straight-arrow Midwesterner who arrives in Manhattan on the way to an Army training camp. Claude meets a group of exuberant hippies, led by the charismatic George (Treat Williams), and Claude also becomes infatuated with a pretty New Yorker from upper-crust society, Sheila (Beverly D’Angelo). As the story progresses, Claude questions the legitimacy of the Vietnam War as he becomes entranced with the ideals and lifestyle of his new longhaired compatriots, but ironic tragedy eventually casts a dark cloud over the peace-and-love revelry. The movie bursts with extraordinary music, including the familiar hits “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” “Easy to be Hard,” and “Hair.” (The less said about “Good Morning Starshine,” the better.) Savage’s brand of twitchy sensitivity works fairly well, since he makes Claude seem uncomfortable in nearly every circumstance, but Williams easily steals the movie with his dark intensity, whether acting in straight dramatic scenes or singing in musical passages. Forman fills the screen with activity and color, employing dynamic choreography by Twyla Tharp, and the cast features such powerhouse singers as Nell Carter and Ellen Foley, so even if the leads sometimes underwhelm in terms of vocals, the overall musicality of the piece is impressive.

Given its arrival in cinemas so long after the underlying subject matter was central in American life, it’s arguable whether Hair would have enjoyed greater impact if the filmmakers had delivered the stage show intact. Nonetheless, since so many of the changes are problematic, it’s important to remember that this movie is, ultimately, an adaptation rather than a direct recording. In other words, this Hair isn’t the Hair that captured the public’s imagination. For that, better to catch one of the stage show’s myriad revivals.

Hair: FUNKY

Friday, January 28, 2011

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

   Despite being one of the seminal dramas of the 1970s and an almost universally praised Oscar winner for Best Picture, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has its detractors, not least of whom was the late Ken Kesey, who wrote the book upon which the film is based. Kesey, a counterculture legend who extrapolated the narrative from his experiences as a participant in LSD experiments at a military hospital, said he never saw the picture because the filmmakers informed him they were taking liberties with his story. Notwithstanding Kesey’s misgivings, Cuckoo’s Nest is an extraordinary piece of work that might not necessarily capture Kesey’s unique voice, but substitutes something of equal interest and power. Jack Nicholson plays R.P. McMurphy, a prison inmate who feigns insanity to dodge a work detail, then gets sent to a mental asylum for his trouble. Once there, he becomes the charismatic leader for a group of lost souls, uniting them against their common enemy: tyrannical Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher).
   Under the audacious and sensitive direction of Milos Forman, a Czech native who lost his parents in the Holocaust and fled Czechoslovakia during a violent communist takeover, Cuckoo’s Nest plays out as a profound metaphor about the hardship and necessity of fighting fascist regimes; McMurphy personifies the rebellious soul of the free populace while Ratched represents the heartless machine of the oppressive overmind. The mid-’70s were just the right moment for this intense counterculture statement, and what makes Cuckoo’s Nest so extraordinary is that it meshes its idealistic themes with raucous entertainment. Whenever McMurphy leads his fellow patients in mischief, he’s like a high-art version of the sort of anarchistic rabble-rousers Bill Murray played in his comedy heyday. This irresistible charm (both McMurphy’s and Nicholson’s) makes the downbeat path the story follows totally absorbing, just like the work of the splendid cast makes ensemble scenes intimate and vivid.
   Fletcher and Nicholson won well-deserved Oscars, and they’re matched by artists working in top form: Actors Brad Dourif and Will Sampson are heartbreaking as two key patients; composer Jack Nitzsche’s score is subtle and surprising; and the loose, documentary-style images by cinematographers Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler are indelible. Incidentally, Cuckoo’s Nest netted Michael Douglas his first Oscar, because he produced the film, and watch out for future Taxi costars Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd as two members of McMurphy’s merry band.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: OUTTA SIGHT