Mad Men: Is this it?

I shouldn’t be too hard on it. After spending the last three weeks watching the astounding Deadwood, I immediately jumped in. No break. No breather. Just a whole set of new characters to grow attached to, and an old set to forget.

That said, judging by the first episode…

The problem lies with the crassness of the writing. It’s like a smart show for stupid people. A camp guy can’t speak without it being given an ironic reference to his hidden sexuality (HE’S GAY!). Someone else makes a sarcastic jibe about inventing a machine that can copy paper (THEY ARE REFERRING TO PHOTOCOPIERS!). And, my favourite, the Lucky Strike CEO coughs whilst claiming he’s smoked his harmless cigarettes all his life (THEY ACTUALLY ARE NOT HARMLESS!).

Aside from the bizarre – and needless – references to contemporary technology, it’s all justified somehow by claiming that People-Back-Then didn’t know better.

This is, quite frankly, a crock of shit. It rings completely hollow in Man Men, making the writers seem false as smug.

Certainly people were less prone to come out as gay, for example, but a camp man who has never had a girlfriend would certainly raise questions. And if anyone received medical advice against smoking,  then witnessed a tobacco boss hawk up in a meeting, I’d guess they would at least think about quitting.

And yes, it does revel in its misogyny. The office workers are stepford wives, submitting to their ad men masters with glee. They might work to improve their lot within the system, but not one complains about it. Even behind closed doors, far away from the ears of men, they don’t make one complaint. Instead, they aspire – and encourage each other – to move the countryside and never work again.

It’s akin to making a TV show set in the Deep South, that focuses on black slaves being abused, whilst they tell their children that keeping their heads down and being nice to the white-folk is what’s best for them in the long run.

I end with a quote The Guardian:

“…Or is Mad Men’s success down to something more sinister? Does it tap into a nostalgia for a time when it was acceptable to be sexist, racist and the rest?”

I can’t think of one reason why that’s not true.

First draft completed

Back again. Been a trying couple of weeks.

In truth though, 30 films in 30 days stalled a while back. In part due to momentum, commitment and an increasing despondence with the questions. I can’t think of a movie I used to love but now hate, for example. I should have read the questions before commiting to it.

I’ve also been working on a personal project. I’m happy to note that I’ve finished the first draft. Or at least I will have when I merge together the 12,061 words spread over four documents. It’s bloated, rough and didn’t quite hit the mark, but it feels good to complete something.

And what is it? I’m not quite ready to say, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. I may start posting bits when I’ve done another pass on it.

A character who you can relate to the most

30 Movies In 30 Days. Day 15 – Curt Henderson

Note: I’m not writing these overweekends (Fri-Sun) because I need a break. I acknowledge I missed yesterday too. I need more free time.

Now this is a bit too personal. And restrictive. The very idea is insidious; by naming someone you reduce yourself to characterture. A duller, fatter, less charismatic version of a paper cutout. My self-esteem is higher than that.

But in the interests of this increasingly flawed exercise (this is the third time I’ve disagreed with the very principle of the question, in case you haven’t been counting) I name a character – Curt Henderson.

Arguably the central character in American Graffiti’s ensemble cast, Curt is hardly a notable character. He’s barely developed and broadly drawn, really only given sparkle by energetic performance from Richard Dreyfuss.

But what he does have is a dilemma. To stay in his hometown, or leave for college.

In terms of Joseph Campbell, it’s the Call To Adventure. Do you reject or refuse it?

I left my small suburban hometown three times before I finally broke away. It took me so long that it’s now become my favourite theme to see in story. I’m somewhat obsessive over it.

It’s also caused me no end of trouble. I now always worry that I’m stagnant. I barely go a day without thinking about what I’ll do next. In fact, next month I pass a record for staying put in the same flat. The record is a year.

So I understand Curt’s dilemma. I’ve left behind friends, lives and family, all in the pursuit of doing something different. Like Curt too, I’ve had doubts. Where the known, safer and easier path is alluring.

I’ve always overcome that. In large part, no doubt, because of the end of American Graffiti. For whilst Curt finally decides to leave, his friend Steve Bolander promises his high-school sweetheart in a moment of emotion that he won’t go away with Curt.

The credits shortly roll. Curt becomes a writer and lives in Canada. Steve sells insurance in their hometown.

I’ll never sell insurance.

A movie that no one would expect you to love

30 Movies In 30 Days. Day 14 – Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs

True story: I wrote my Batchelor’s degree dissertation about Disney’s influence on fairy tales because I was bored. After submitting half-a-dozen flawless essays on Lynch, Scorsese, Ford and Hitchcock, I arrogantly decided that I’d pick a random subject I had no interest in for my final assignment. Just to prove how good I was. What a dick.

I spent six months immersed in everything Walt had ever had a hand in and beyond. And slowly, I became a convert.

Snow White has a purity to it that hasn’t been seen in American movies for years. It’s not loaded with action scenes for teens or filled with knowing jokes for parents or overblown with wacky characters for toddlers.

What it does instead is play. Snow White was produced when Disney animators loved the medium itself. Disney first saw cartoons as the successor to vaudeville, and so his first feature is loaded with playful moments where the characters essentially put on a show. Gags are crammed in where-ever they can – not jokes, but gags; imaginative moments that make you smile with joy, but not necessarily laugh.

It’s not cynical, cover-all-bases, gotta’ catch-them-all scriptwriting that Pixar are only now moving away from. It’s just entertainment, founded on the idea that everyone finds it funny when a man dries his beard out using a mangler, or a tortoise ‘plays’ his shell as if it were an instrument.

A movie that is a guilty pleasure

30 Movies In 30 Days. Day 13 – Fail again.

Like the ‘favourite classic movie’ day, this question displeases me.

I’m not ashamed of anything I watch. Even if that thing is The Emperor’s New Groove, 10 Things I Hate About You or The Phantom Menace.

It’s one of the reasons I despise independent cinema chains. Sure, Odeon cinemas are full of wankers, but I’d take them any day over the stuck-up bastards who tut through anything that isn’t shot in 1920s Russia.

Like anyone who got the mixed bag of film studies at University, I spent a large amount of my early twenties ploughing through ‘international cinema’. Hunting down obscure Japanese thrillers, collecting the filmography of Goddard and knowing why Chinese kitchen-sink drama was The Next Big Thing.

I watched the A-team on Sunday. It stands up against anything I watched during my degree.

If I’m going to waste two-hours of my life on watching something that I’ve already seen, it’s going to worth enough for me to be proud about it.

A movie that you hate

30 Movies In 30 Days. Day 12 – Forrest Gump

I don’t think I’d be wrong in saying that Forrest Gump shares similarities with Triumph Of The Will.

Harsh words. True though. Both are technically accomplished films. Both were made by directors at the peak of their careers. And both combine half-truths and bias in order to subvert reality and propagate a politically skewered version of reality.

But rather than re-write my university essay on the subject, here’ s the bullets on what this beloved, brilliant and beautiful classic has to say:

• That even a subservient, stupid, docile imbecile can prosper in America, providing he follows the establishment and the status quo.
• That questioning the order of things, campaigning against the administration and leading a life different to the norm will get you killed you by aids.
• That the Black Panthers were mean, nasty black people who beat women and needed to be taught a lesson by moronic white men.
• That the only reason women joined the counter-culture in sixties America was because they were sexually abused and victims of incest.
• That finding God solves inner anger, turmoil, and turns drunks into stand-up citizens.
• That only when women renounce their past life and go and live with a man can they truly be forgiven for their choices.

No question, Forrest Gump is pure Republican trash. And it’s because of this that its enduring popularity makes me sad. A large degree of people I talk to know only of Vietnam, Watergate and Kennedy through the eyes of Gump.

And given how brilliantly put-together the movie is, I see that degree only growing larger.

A movie that changed your opinion about something

30 Movies In 30 Days. Day 11 – Fight Club

Put it in context. I was eighteen when it was released. I’d gone to University not two months before, hoping to expand my horizons. Naturally, I was hooked.

Fight Club was a rare moment of stunning realization. Like hearing Bill Hicks or reading Neuromancer for the first time, as I watched it I could felt my brain being rewired.

Most of which has long since faded. Like Taxi Driver, Fight Club is for young angry men. I’m neither. But the residuals still linger. Fight Club is about action, self-responsibility, self-determination. Trimming fat, cutting distractions and dismissing excuses. I still believe in all of it.

In fact, my favourite scene of the movie is about precisely that. A college dropout, working at a convenience store, is forced by Tyler to suck the butt of a pistol. Whimpering, the kid reveals he wanted to be a vet, but the college courses weres too expensive. Too much effort. Too hard.

“Would you rather die, out here, in the back of a convenience store?” Tyler asks. The clerk shakes his head. Tyler removes the gun and tells him that if he’s not on his way to being a veterinarian in six weeks, he will be dead.

I would bet he lived.

Tyler is a brutual creation, but gloriously motivating. As the narrator comments: “No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”

Interlude

Brief interlude this weekend in 30 Movies in 30 Days, on account of people’s birthdays and trips to Wales and strange West Country rituals. I didn’t specify which days the 30 days would be, did I?

In the meantime, here’s a picture of a bear:

Favourite classic movie

30 Movies In 30 Days. Day 10 – Fail.

Questions like this are for people who stay stuff like:  “I don’t usually like black and white movies, but…” Y’know, morons.

At stretch, I’m taking it to mean the Golden Age of Hollywood (1920s – 1950s).  That’s over three decades of movies though, in which some of the best directors of all-time (Hitchcock, Hawks, Capra, Ford) filmed their best work.

So I’m dismissing the question today, because it displeases me. Thus, what follows is my favourite classic movies from the best classic directors.

Hitchcock – Vertigo. Filled with his standard tropes (wit, mystery, blondes, Jimmy) but the forced transformation of Judy into Madeleine feels disturbingly confessional for Hitch. The Herrmann score is hypnotic, too.

Hawks – Rio Bravo. John Wayne and Angie Dickinson light up the screen, and the mundane problems of a handful of flawed fellows become captivating, thanks to highly influential pressure cooker scenario.

Capra – It’s A Wonderful Life. Clearly. For the idyllic school dance, the heart-breaking decision to save the buildings and loans company with savings, and the message in Clarence’s card at the end.

Ford – The Searchers. Primarily because the scope of the thing. Ethan and Martin travels across The Old West span years. Finding her is an obsession borne out of Ethan’s racism, and so the revelation about her fate – although obvious from the start – is highly evocative.

A movie with the best soundtrack

30 Movies In 30 Days. Day 9 – American Graffiti

Slightly late. I was tired.

Which came first, Mean Streets or American Graffiti? Both were released in 1973, both were highly personal, and both redefined how movies used music. As people Lucas and Scorsese are worlds apart, but their breakthrough flicks are like East and West Coast reflections of each other.

Out of the two, for me the soundtrack to Lucas’ movie is better. Just. For the most part it’s classic American fifties rock ‘n’ roll. Hits dripping with innocence and carefree attitudes. Simple, wonderful pop tunes written in the boom of post-war America.

Yet, thanks to producer Gary Kurtz, Lucas managed to get the rights to a few Beach Boys tracks too. These, combined with some other early sixties classics, give the movie its subtext.

Cruising, Surfing and The Beach Boys defined California in ‘61/62. But those hits were the last of their kind. As hotrod racer John Miller says in the movie: “Rock ‘n’ Roll has been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died”.

After ’62 came The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Brian Wilson moved from pure pop to Pet Sounds. Vietnam caused a divide between young and old. Civil rights movements and mind-altering drugs spread across America.

So when Miller says that, it’s prophetic of larger things than pop music.

As a collection of songs, the soundtrack to American Graffiti is full of classics. But it’s far more interesting to me for what it represents – it’s a summary of the twilight of an era.