Ballet is inherently dramatic, so it is no wonder the movies have frequently looked to pointed shoes and bun heads for inspiration. The first ballet moves captured on film were likely in the turn-of-the-last-century animated films of Alexander Shiryaev, whose crude but beautiful films used drawings and puppets as an early form of dance notation.
Since then, the movies have been dancing with the stars. Everyone from legendary performers like Mikhail Baryshnikov to gifted amateurs like Natalie Portman, who plays a beautiful but troubled ballerina in this weekend’s dark drama Black Swan, have done a cinematic grand jeté or two.
The most classic ballet movie has to be The Red Shoes, the 1948 classic which interweaves on and off stage action to tell the story of a ballerina pulled between two men—a composer who loves her and an impresario who wants to make her a star. The British Film Institute labeled it one of “the best British films ever” and the movie inspired Kate Bush’s song and album of the same name.
The Red Shoes was nominated for four Oscars and took home a pair, which is two more than our next ballet film, even though it was nominated for eleven. The Turning Point (which ties The Color Purple for most nominations with no wins) starred Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft as lifelong rivals; one who left the ballet to become a wife and mother, the other who stayed and became a star. Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day and Grace Kelly were all offered the lead roles, but turned them down. After seeing the movie, Hepburn regretted her decision. “That was the one film,” she said, “that got away from me.”
There are dozens of Hollywood ballet movies. It’s almost tutu much (you had to know that pun was coming); White Nights, Center Stage (with Avatar’s Zoe Saldana), Billy Elliot, The Company (made with the cooperation of the Joffrey Ballet) and even the South Korean horror film, Wishing Stairs, feature stories about fictional ballet dancers, but there are many interesting ballet documentaries as well.
The history of the Ballet Russe of Monte Carlo is touchingly and lovingly told in Ballets Russes, an intimate documentary focused on the founders of modern ballet and also fascinating is La Danse – Le ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, director Frederick Wiseman’s fly-on-the-wall look at the production of seven ballets by the Paris Opera Ballet.
Usually they sound like one long breathless sentence that seems scarier than the disease the drugs are meant to prevent.
A new film, Love and Other Drugs, starring Jake Gylennhaal and Anne Hathaway as a pharmaceutical salesman and the girl he loves respectively, however, forgoes the disclaimer. In fact, in what almost seems like a 90-minute ad for Viagra, it appears that the drug’s—Vitamin V, Jake calls it—only side effect is that it works too well.
It is the rare movie that uses a real brand name drug as a plot device. Even though the odd movie like Prozac Nation dares to name names, often filmmakers use fictitious drugs to advance their stories (and avoid lawsuits from notoriously litigious Big Pharma), but even in fantasy, side effects abound.
Brain Candy, the 1996 Kids in the Hall comedy, created a cure for depression called GLeeMONEX that “makes you feel like it’s 72°F in your head all the time.” Unfortunately the pill’s patients also turn into comatose zombies.
David Cronenberg devised Ephemerol, a tranquilizer used as a morning sickness remedy for his film Scanners. Side effects? Telekinetic and telepathic abilities. Later, in Naked Lunch, Cronenberg featured the more recreational drug Bug Powder, a yellow dust formally used by exterminators, informally by people looking to find a “literary high.”
In Repo! The Genetic Opera, Paris Hilton’s character Amber Sweet was addicted to a powerful blue, glowing opiate extracted from dead bodies called Zydrate. I’ll do wild things to “your soul for one more hit of that glow,” she sings. An alternative cinematic painkiller is Novril, the pills that kept James Caan sedated in Misery.
Filmmakers don’t just fictionalize pharmaceuticals, however. Plenty of recreational drugs get the Hollywood treatment. Remember Space Coke from Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie? One snort was enough to send both Cheech and Chong literally into outer space.
A Clockwork Orange was chock-a-block with fake drugs; everything from Drencrom to the synthetic mescaline Synthemesc to Vellocet, which produced ultra-violent tendencies and sudden outbursts of Singing in the Rain.
Perhaps the strangest recreational drug from the movies is Alien Nation’s Jabroka. Aliens find it highly addictive and grow to monstrous proportions when they take it, but to humans it tastes like dish soap and has no effect.
Wikipedia defines survival as “the struggle to remain alive and living.” Next to that definition should be a picture of Aron Ralston, the poster boy for survival at any cost.
His name may not ring a bell, but his remarkable story will make you wonder how far you would go to stay alive. You see, Ralston is the American mountain climber who was trapped by a boulder for five days in May 2003 and was only able to free himself by amputating his own arm.
His story is told in unflinching detail in 127 Hours, starring James Franco. The film is so intense some audience members have suffered panic attacks and lightheadedness.
The same can’t be said of Alive, the 1993 film about a Uruguayan rugby team stranded in the Andes, who, once their rations of wine and chocolate ran out, were forced to eat their deceased teammates to stay alive.
Based on real events, the facts of the story are gut-wrenching, but as New Yorker critic Anthony Lane pointed out “most people know the story already; everyone began to titter with anticipation whenever one of the characters said he felt hungry.”
The ghoulish humour some audiences found in the film’s story of survival was echoed in Lane’s review when he wrote that the film, “solemnly wring(s) a message of togetherness from the horror. Come closer to your friends than ever before, the movie says: have them for lunch.”
Less known than Alive’s cannibalistic rugby players but just as compelling is Touching the Void, another true-life endurance drama.
The movie’s lesson?
Never go mountain climbing.
Roger Ebert called the story of Joe Simpson’s slow, painful climb from the bottom of a crevice to rescue “the most harrowing movie about mountain climbing I have seen, or can imagine.”
Most of these movies have happy (or at least happy-ish) endings, but not all stories of survival end in triumph.
The anti-survival movie genre is alive and well, even if the characters usually aren’t by the end of these films.
Into the Wild, the Oscar-nominated story of an idealistic dreamer not up to the challenges of living on his own in the wilderness of Alaska, and Open Water, the tale of a pair of swimmers who become shark bait, don‘t have the inspirational uplift of some of the other movies I’ve mentioned, but can be essays in courage (or stupidity, depending on your viewpoint).
A Saturday matinee screening of last year’s Paranormal Activity was the first and only time I have ever heard anyone actually scream in a theatre. I don’t mean a quiet whimper followed by an embarrassed laugh or a frightened little squeal. No, I mean a full-on, open throated howl of terror.
The release of Paranormal’s prequel last weekend got me thinking about other big screen scream worthy scenes. So just in time for Halloween are some leave-the-lights-on movie moments.
If Alfred Hitchcock had any doubts about the effectiveness of the shower sequence in Psycho they must have been put to bed when he received an angry letter from the father whose daughter stopped bathing after seeing the bathtub murder scene in Les Diaboliques and then, more distressingly, refused to shower after seeing Psycho. Hitch’s response to the concerned dad? “Send her to the dry cleaners.”
The shower scene was terrifying but at least it was allowed to stay in the movie. In 1931, Frankenstein star Boris Karloff demanded the scene in the movie where the monster plays with a little girl, throwing flowers in a pond be cut from the picture. It’s a cute scene until the beast runs out of flowers and tosses the little girl into the water, leaving her to drown. Karloff, and audiences, objected to the violence against the youngster and the scene was shortened, then removed altogether and remained unseen until a special videotape release 48 years later.
More recently, The Exorcist (now beautifully restored on Blu Ray) so traumatized audiences with shots of the possessed Regan MacNeil’s 360-degree head spinning that in the U.K. the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade were on-call at screenings to tend to fainters. Star Linda Blair says she wasn’t traumatized by the film, but admits there has been one long lasting side effect. “You wouldn’t believe how often people ask me to make my head spin around,” she says.
Blair may have been unfazed while shooting her gruesome scenes, but not all actors emerge unscathed. Elisha Cuthbert was so grossed out while shooting the notorious blender scene in the down-and-dirty flick Captivity she says she felt “physically ill twice” and had to have a bucket nearby.
Scary scenes one and all, but recounting them begs the question, why are we drawn to them?
The quick answer comes from Alfred Hitchcock who said, “People like to be scared when they feel safe.”
Clint Eastwood’s latest film, Hereafter, concerns itself with what happens once you have, as John Cleese might say, “shuffled off this mortal coil.”
In the film, a woman has a near death experience, beginning her walk into a bright light surrounded by misty figures making a similar journey into that great goodnight. That’s just the most recent cinematic vision of what happens after death, but there are many more, some played for laughs, sometimes for drama and now and then for comfort.
In Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen goes for the joke, taking the viewer on an elevator ride through hell’s nine floors, each reserved for a different kind of sinner. Best line? “Floor 7: the media. Sorry, that floor is all filled up.”
Tim Burton also had some fun with the afterlife in Beetlejuice. Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis get tips on how to haunt their old house in a book titled Handbook for the Recently Deceased. Best line? “We’re not completely helpless, Barbara,” says Adam (Baldwin). “I’ve been reading that book and there’s a word for people in our situation: ghosts.”
Taking the hereafter a bit more seriously is The Rapture, which sees Mimi Rogers almost reunited with her dearly departed daughter. This version of Heaven is much starker than the usual sweetness and light paradise seen on film; there’s no Pearly Gates or fluffy clouds with angels snacking on Philadelphia Cream Cheese. For that version check out the opening minutes of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. The story of a dead carnival worker who asks for permission to be sent back to earth for one day to make amends for mistakes he made in life starts with a glittering vision of heaven, complete with sparkling stars. Best heavenly quote? “Here there is no time; this is the beginning and the end.”
What Dreams May Come, the 1998 film about a man who leaves heaven to search hell for his wife paints heaven as a place that, as Roger Ebert noted, seems “cheerfully assembled from the storage rooms of images we keep in our minds: Renaissance art, the pre-Raphaelites, greeting cards, angel kitsch.” The heaven in this film is a wonderful place “big enough for everyone to have their own private universe.”
On the flipside is the movie’s vision of hell as a surreal, dark place. Best quote: “Hell is for those who don’t know they’re dead.”
What do Elizabeth Taylor and Diane Lane have in common? Besides earning the title World’s Most Desirable Woman (Lane, officially, in 2004, and Taylor, pretty much all the way through the ’60s and ’70s), they’ve both shared the screen with a 1,600-pound leading man.
No, it wasn’t Marlon Brando, it was a horse, of course. Both have starred in movies featuring four-legged cast mates — Taylor most famously in National Velvet, Lane in this weekend’s Secretariat, the story of racing’s most famous thoroughbred.
Secretariat may be the most storied real-life horse to be portrayed in the movies, but he’s not the only one. Remember Phar Lap? The biopic of his life and career — he was the most famous Australian animal athlete of all time, so well known that his heart, preserved at the National Museum of Australia, is their most requested exhibit — was not a hit in North America despite a 100 per cent Rotten Tomatoes rating, but was popular in Australia and New Zealand where the horse is a national treasure.
Faring better at the box office was the inspirational equine movie Seabiscuit, a Depression-era story about a charger that won races and lifted spirits. Dubbed “Three Men and a Horse” by one writer, the story of a jockey (Tobey Maguire), a businessman (Jeff Bridges) and a wise old cowboy (Chris Cooper) connected with audiences and sold a hefty 5.5 million copies on DVD.
Memorable quote? “The horse is too small, the jockey too big, the trainer too old, and I’m too dumb to know the difference.”
More fleet of foot than the racehorse sports movies is the Disney comedy The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit. Based on the novel The Year of the Horse by Eric Hatch, it mixes Mad Men-style advertising executives, a cute kid and a horse named after a stomach pill with stars Kurt Russell, Dean Jones and Dick Van Dyke Show regular, Morey Amsterdam.
Coming around the homestretch are two horse movies starring Hollywood stud Robert Redford. In The Electric Horseman, he’s a washed-up rodeo star “just walkin’” around to save funeral expenses.” He’s a bit on the decrepit side, but Redford did all of his own riding stunts in the film. Redford is back in the saddle in The Horse Whisperer, playing a horse trainer with a special touch. Memorable quote? “Truth is, I help horses with people problems.”
This weekend the story of a 12-year-old vampire who helps her young neighbour deal with bullies at school hits theatres.
Sound familiar?
It should, the movie is an American remake of a Swedish art house hit from less than twelve months ago. Let Me In, the English language remounting of Låt den rätte komma in, joins a long list of movies to paste an American stamp on its cinematic passport.
Let Me In is earning good reviews for its respectful treatment of the source material but that is not always the case. Critic Tom O’Neil warned, “Chances are, with the remake, Hollywood is just serving up re-fried beans that aren’t very tasty.”
Re-hashes like Weekend at Bernie’s, which was loosely based on the Indian cult classic Jane Bhi Do Yaaron and the Thai film Bangkok Dangerous, which won the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival international critics’ Award only to be retooled as a big budget, small-brained Nic Cage movie, have left a bad taste in viewer’s mouths but not all remakes are unpalatable.
The Departed, the Irish Mafia movie that gave Martin Scorsese his long deserved Best Director Oscar, was based on the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs.
Critics loved Scorsese’s film, giving it a 93 per cent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, although Infernal Affairs star Andy Lau grumbled, “The Departed was too long,” and Andrew Lau, the original’s co-director said, “of course I think the version I made is better but the Hollywood version is pretty good too.”
Also pretty good is Insomnia, Christopher Nolan’s 2002 remake of a 1997 Norwegian film of the same name. Directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg, the original’s story of a disgraced Swedish detective, played by Stellan Skarsgård, who struggles to solve a brutal murder case in northern Norway is a gritty psychological drama which writer Peter Cowie said “represents European cinema at its most challenging.”
The U.S. remake, starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank is a much different film. Roger Ebert said, “unlike most remakes, the Nolan Insomnia is not a pale retread, but a re-examination of the material, like a new production of a good play.”
These U.S. remakes have always been with us, and regardless of how Let Me In fares at the box office, are unlikely to stop. For better or for worse plans are already underway for an English remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starring Daniel Craig.
Twenty three years have passed since the original film won an Academy Award for lead actor Michael Douglas and a Razzie for supporting actress Daryl Hannah which means that many current second year university students weren’t even born when Gordon Gekko made the words “Greed is good” famous.
Twenty-three years is a stretch but it is more common than you think for years, and sometimes even decades to pass between source and sequel.
Return to Oz, based on the second and third Oz books and made forty-six years after the classic MGM film, picks up the story six months after Dorothy returned to Kansas. The film held a Guinness Book of World Records notation as the sequel with the longest gap from its original until it was bumped off by Fantasia/2000, which came a whooping fifty-nine years after Fantasia.
Not record breaking, but still substantial are The Color of Money, which trailed The Hustler by twenty-five years and An American Werewolf in Paris which bounded into theatres sixteen years after An American Werewolf in London.
Sci fi fans also had to wait sixteen years for the follow up to 2001 A Space Odyssey. 2010: The Year We Make Contact featured a whole new cast (save for Douglas Rain who reprised his role as the voice of HAL 9000) but original director Stanley Kubrick was given a cameo of sorts. He can be seen as the Soviet premier on the cover of Time magazine.
Speaking of directors, it’s unusual for the original director to come back and direct a sequel a decade later, but Troy Duffy, stuck to his guns (literally) and ten years after The Boondock Saints came The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day. “To me, the successful sequels in the past have given you everything you’ve loved from the first film, plus a brand-new storyline that you could never have predicted,” said Duffy.
Oliver Stone, who had never made a sequel to any of his films before remounting Wall Street, seems to have followed Duffy’s advice filling his new film with touchstones from the original, but let’s hope he’s joking when he says, “I should go back and do ‘Son of Scarface’ or something!”
Buried director Rodrigo Cortés on his admiration for Ryan Reynolds
“I hope that all Canadians are not like Ryan Reynolds because that embarrasses the world. People like him should be forbidden.”
Woody Allen on aging
“I’ll be 75 in another couple of months and I do see myself as becoming waning and decrepit.”
Jacob Tierney on working with a cat in Good Neighbours:
“He starred in 300. That’s the cat from 300. Do you know how many times the trainer told me that? I was like, ‘Awesome. Shall I talk to his agent?’”
Paul Giamatti on the famous “merlot” line in Sideways:
“The funniest thing about that line is the only reason it is merlot is that we tried all these different wines and that was the only one that was funny… was the word merlot. For some reason that sounded funnier than chardonnay.”
Josh Brolin on Diane Lane:
“If you look at my wife’s boobs you’ll see that she doesn’t need a boob job.”
Ballet is inherently dramatic, so it is no wonder the movies have frequently looked to pointed shoes and bun heads for inspiration. The first ballet moves captured on film were likely in the turn-of-the-last-century animated films of Alexander Shiryaev, whose crude but beautiful films used drawings and puppets as an early form of dance notation.
