Mark Steyn's year-end wrap-up begins by singing the
Looney Tunes boxed set's praises:
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My favourite screen experience in 2003 was Looney Tunes. No, not Looney Tunes -- Back In Action, this year's big-screen feature in which Warner Brothers demonstrate that they haven't a clue what to do with one of the most glorious franchises in motion pictures other than dilute it by tossing in already forgotten hot names like that gal from "Dharma & Greg" -- or is it "Will & Grace"? No, I'm talking about the 4-DVD set, The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, which came out in October and I've been watching more or less ever since -- hence, the Wile E Coyote references in my review of Brother Bear. For some reason, it's not yet available on British-format DVD, but order the US set and buy a special player. Or wait till George W Bush invades and makes you forcibly convert to NTSC, which always sounds like a sinister Washington national security acronym anyway.
Chuck Jones is rightly hailed as the pre-eminent genius of the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies stable. He directed the great Bugs-meets-Wagner opus "What's Opera, Doc?" and "One Froggy Evening", which Spielberg calls the Citizen Kane of animation and whose "Hello, Ma Baby!" sequence Mel Brooks paid hommage to in Space Balls. (Neither of them are included here, presumably because they're destined for Vol II.) But look at Looney Tunes' under-rated Number Two helmer, Fritz Freling. I don't think there's a funnier six minutes in motion pictures than "High Diving Hare", in which a high-dive act fails to show up and Yosemite Sam demands Bugs Bunny take his place. No matter how often Sam forces Bugs up the ladder and on to the diving board, somehow it's always Sam who ends up plunging off and into the tub of water, or in the general vicinity thereof. I especially enjoy the bit where Bugs forgets to refill the tub and so throws the water over after Sam's halfway down. The sequence where Sam is falling through the air trying to force the liquid to go down faster so he'll have something to land in is a masterpiece of comic ingenuity and timing, even if, in the end, he misses the tub and crashes through the floorboards.
Likewise, Freling's "Canary Row", in which Sylvester the puddy tat, disguised as a hotel bellhop, snaffles Tweety's covered cage down from Granny's room and into the back alley, only to find that it's not Tweety but Granny waiting under the cover to thwack him. The sight of Granny hunched up in the cage with her umbrella drawn is one of the all-time great sight gags.
Something seems terribly wrong when there's more character, narrative and ideas packed into a cheap six-minute cartoon than into the 90-minute mega-budget feature version. A year ago, I mentioned the remarkable fact that the three most valuable Hollywood properties were all drawn from British books -- Bond, Harry Potter, Tolkien -- a strange statistic that indicts almost incidentally the UK film industry but far more profoundly the US one. In his what-if fantasy Making History, Stephen Fry has a cute riff on the differences between novels and movies -- novels are passive and reflective and interior, movies are active and muscular and dynamic, etc. True, as far as it goes. But that's mostly a self-inflicted wound by modern novelists. The reality is that when a writer for the page decides he's going to go for action heroes (Bond), special effects (Potter) or an almighty road movie (Tolkien), he can prove pretty conclusively that, even in what's meant to be Hollywood's main areas of expertise, almost any half-decent wordsmith can do it better. Plus they get the interior stuff in. In that respect, I hesitate to take issue with the editor, who evidently had a ripping time at Master And Commander. But it seemed to me they got the boat, the narrative, the shiver-me-timbering right, but missed everything else going on in the books.
2003 was the year Hollywood's storytelling failure started to look, at least to yours truly, terminal. The most celebrated directors, Spielberg and Tarantino, are masters of allusion, and not much else. For example, I loved Catch Me If You Can, Spielberg's tale of conman Frank Abagnale, who learned to pass for a surgeon by watching "Doctor Kildare" and to pass for a lawyer by watching "Perry Mason". Spielberg wanted to do a glossy Sixties thriller in the style of Stanley Donen, full of period charm beginning with the Saul Bass titles. But here's the thing: when Stanley Donen was doing Charade, he wasn't trying to do anything in the style of anybody; he was just doing it. Like the Broadway musical, film has always been, to some degree, an adaptive form; its finest moments have often been based on books (The Wizard Of Oz) or plays (Casablanca). But, in Hollywood as on Broadway, when the art of adaptation degenerates into the art of allusion, you know your greatest days are past. The sequence in Catch Me when Leonardo Di Caprio gets a tailor to make him a copy of Sean Connery's suit in Goldfinger is delightful but also a reminder of Hollywood's major problem: the burden of its past.
In Kill Bill Vol 1, Quentin Tarantino struggles out from under this dead weight through the clever trick of alluding to stuff 99% of American filmgoers wouldn't recognize -- obscure instrumental LPs, Asian movie legends, etc. He does it so brilliantly that you can't help noticing that he misfires only once, when he tries to do something for real -- kill a woman in cold blood in front of her four-year old daughter -- and you realize he can't do it. Without the allusions -- the kitsch and swagger and style -- the scene feels fake and you're aware only of the director's limitations.
If this problem gets any more widespread, they'll have to teach it in film school.
That said, my favourite picture of the year -- not yet released in Britain -- is also a film about films and film-makers, if only on the surface. In Sofia Coppola's rueful mood piece Lost In Translation, a saggy, sad-faced, past-his-best movie star is holed up in a Japanese hotel to shoot a whiskey commercial and finds a sweet college kid precipitating him into the dangerous stages of mid-life crisis. The picture's a lot funnier than some of the rave reviews would have you believe, mainly because the jokes are so true. It has two great performances: Bill Murray, who should get an Oscar, and Scarlett Johansson, who won't get noticed but gives a lovely note-perfect turn. Bill and Scarlett were the movie couple who redeemed the year for me. If you exclude Bugs and Daffy.
The Spectator, December 27th 2003
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