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| Staying Alive; USA 1983 | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: May 30 2015, 03:44 AM (289 Views) | |
| wba | May 30 2015, 03:44 AM Post #1 |
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The Merciless
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![]() When I was young, I was pissed that there seemed to be a seemingly obnoxious crowd of nerdy people giving out yearly awards for the worst (mostly US) films of the year. What an immature and laughable thing to do, I thought. Now that I'm older, I'm truly grateful to the people behind the Golden Rasberry Awards for assembling one of the most valuable lists on some of the greatest Hollywood films of the 80s. They may have become (temporarily?) boring and uninteresting in the 21st century (hey, the Oscars have gone the same route...), but during the 80s, their nominated films included masterpieces like Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill, Stanley Donen's Saturn 3, Franco Zefirelli's Endless Love, John Derek's Tarzan, the Ape Man, Michael Mann's Thief, John Milius' Conan, the Barbarian, Brian De Palma's Scarface, Walter Hill's Streets of Fire, Giorgio Moroder's Metropolis, James Bridges' Perfect, George Pan Cosmatos' Cobra, James Foley's Who's That Girl, Zalman King's Two Moon Junction, Rowdy Herrington's Road House, as well as other great stuff like William Friedkin's Cruising, Clint Eastwood's Bronco Billy, Hal Needham's Megaforce, John Carpenter's The Thing, Bob Clark's Rhinestone, Jeannot Szwarc's Supergirl, George Pan Cosmatos' Rambo: First Blood Part II, John Glen's A View to a Kill, Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, Blake Edwards' Sunset and Eddie Murphy's Harlem Nights. And I haven't even seen more than 25% of all nominated films of that decade yet! It's truly a heaven-sent gold mine. Of course this whole thing once again reflects the sorry state of affairs in the US during the 80s, as it hints at the fact that even supposed film lovers didn't recognize a great film when it hit them on the head. But contrary to most accounts of US (and especially world) cinema of that decade, which appear to focus more or less on a few dozen blockbusters and not many more (at the time) well-received crowd (or critic)pleasers, the 80s remain one of the richest and most exciting decades for cinema. And believe it or not, there was also quite a number of great Hollywood films being made at that time. So naturally, when one day I discovered that Sylvester Stallone's follow-up to one of the most successful films of the past decade, John Badham's Saturday Night Fever (1977), had been nominated for a bunch of razzies, my interest was piqued. Before that, I hadn't given this entry in Stallone's filmography much thought, believing that it was probably just a simple work-for-hire thing, which at best delivered the 'required goods', but not much else. But now I knew that I had to see it, sooner rather than later - I mean how much more reliable can an awards show's track record get? Already in its first year their nominations for worst director included such luminaries as Stanley Kubrick, Richard Fleischer, Sidney J. Fury, William Friedkin and Brian De Palma. What a line-up!!! And boy was I right! Staying Alive exceeded my high expectations with seemingly effortless ease. If Stallone had continued directing such films frequently throughout his career, he might have become the legitimate successor to filmmakers like Hawks, Walsh and Ford and would probably get mentioned today in the same breath with other great actors-turned-directors like Clint Eastwood. But I guess the best I can do to describe this film at the moment is to borrow Karl's words from his write-up on Naruse's The Girl in the Rumour (1935), where he talks about the economy of direction and how the film does what it does with seeming ease and is just perfect in the way it's constructed. I guess my feelings about Stallone in this instance mirror Karl's feelings on Naruse. There's really no useless line of dialogue and no glance wasted, every frame and every scene (even the songs of the soundtrack acting like a greek chorus) do exactly what they are supposed to do. And everything is quick and to the point, taking the time it simply takes to get things done the right way. Imagine classical Hollywood cinema around 1940 in its most lean and efficient form. All muscles, no fat. But that doesn't mean Stallone wasn't going to experiment on the formal side. It's not only that most of his montage-sequences (this film is at least as much Rocky as it is Showgirls) are some of the most impressive you'll see in any 80s production, but that they point at the same time backwards (Abel Gance, the Soviets) and forwards (Michael Bay et al), influencing what was to come as much as getting their cues from established forms of framing and cutting from the past. Using the best of all worlds so to speak, the final dance sequence displays a vision of light and color that not only easily bests Darren Aronofsky's much-lauded finale of Black Swan some 30 years later, but also offers a unique vision of its protagonists psyches as well as a surrealist world of its own: the world of art, and how it bursts through the bodies and minds of its practitioners when it gets created. And the final scene of Staying Alive must truly be one of the most simple and amazing end-sequences of any movie in film history! What a moment! And what a way to end a picture! And the camerawork (gritty and glossy at the same time, with special emphasis on particular star-shaped light reflections during the dance scenes – mirrored in the final freeze-frame of the picture), and the acting (Travolta has never sounded nor moved like this in any of his films – he's copying a number of Stallone's ticks, most evidently in the manner he walks and carries himself), to the autobiographically inspired screenplay (read up on Stallone's youth and you'll see why his screenwriting credit tells it all) with its precise dialogue which is mostly still only there to get things going, to mask and obscure but at the same time showopenly what is actually going on with the characters under the surface. The amount of subtle glances and body movements, the whole body language-thing in this film is amazing. Stallone proves that he can be terrific with actors, and the whole film's really an example of how to work in the system while nevertheless doing exactly what you want to do with a film, expressing what you want to express. A sequel that at the same time pays hommage to the original and its fans, actually works as a sequel/continuation of the 'story as a whole' and stands completely on its own feet, not by merely putting a scene or moment of this kind here and another one there, but by organically building a structure which is able to carry many seemingly divergent needs and desires at the same time and resonate on different levels. And it's also a deeply personal film, a 'small' film as people like to say, an inherently modest creation by any facet of this word. And the characters! There's almost no character development, no mystery (again like with the Naruse, which I'm obviously thinking a lot about during the last few days) everything is laid bare, put into the open,it's plain to see. The characters are what they are and they do what they do. Travolta plays a naive and arrogant everyman who loves to dance, and the people he deals with are what they appear to be and what they tell him (as well as what the picture tells us). No hint of deceit, no false bottoms or safety nets, no nothing. If Travolta wants to perceive them differently, it's by his choice alone. And the number of meaningful one-on-one encounters which have either little or much dialogue but again convey their meaning primarily through body language and mise-en-scene: Travolta meeting his mother (a friend of mine said this reminded him of Gallo's The Brown Bunny, while I had been unconsciously thinking of Buffalo '66), his talks with his female friend and his two or three intimate meetings with his primary love interest, even the obligatory one on one talk with the show's choreographer. And the close-ups of faces! I don't know where to begin and where to end. The dancing itself is great, and I love it that the important love scenes are all played out as dance routines. That's the way it mostly used to be in musicals and dance-pictures, but again Stallone makes these moments obvious without pointing them out. They exist in their own sphere while also clearly advancing the plot and being a dance routine. They are what they are. But Stallone also makes a special work of art of them. His art. When the end credits started to roll, I was simply dumbfounded by the eloquence and precision of the movie, its subdued grace and gravity as well as its brashness and let's-just-do-it-attitude, the way it's aesthetically and thematically at the same time down to earth and over the top, honest and hilarious, proudly wearing its accomplishments like a badge of honor. But only if you know how to look. And if you blink, you're probably gonna miss some. When I was young, I was surprised to learn about Leos Carax having written a glowing review of Sylvester Stallone's debut as a director, Paradise Alley from 1978, and considered this a strange and idiosyncratic choice and point of view (and also admired Carax for seeing something of value in "such a film" and then having the guts to write about it in a "serious" magazine like Cahiers du cinema). Now that I'm older, I understand that he was basically responding to a film he watched which he considered great. Nothing special really and a pretty obvious thing to do. It's simply cinema, after all. Edited by wba, May 30 2015, 02:28 PM.
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To please the majority is the requirement of the Planet Cinema. As far as I'm concerned, I don't make a concession to viewers, these victims of life, who think that a film is made only for their enjoyment, and who know nothing about their own existence. letterboxd * tumblr * website | |
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| bure420 | May 30 2015, 07:48 AM Post #2 |
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deadpan darling
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in general people who make fun of "bad movies" are garbage folks. but the fact that the shining was ever on one of these clowns' list surely must make them pure fucking putrid sludge |
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| wba | May 30 2015, 09:01 PM Post #3 |
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The Merciless
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Kubrick was nominated for "worst" director for The Shining... I guess he really must have sucked that year.
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To please the majority is the requirement of the Planet Cinema. As far as I'm concerned, I don't make a concession to viewers, these victims of life, who think that a film is made only for their enjoyment, and who know nothing about their own existence. letterboxd * tumblr * website | |
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