Two on Roger Ailes & Fox News

 The Loudest Voice (2019)

Based on a book by Gabriel Sherman
TV mini-series on Showtime with multiple writers and directors

Bombshell (2019)
Directed by Jay Roach
Written by Charles Randolph


These are thoughts reflecting on seeing Bombshell last night and The Loudest Voice some months ago.

Given, it’s length, depth and more outside point of view, The Loudest Voice is the greater of these two projects in showing what Fox News is. There is a natural focus on Roger Ailes. Fox News is a corporate broadcasting projection of his personality, politically and beyond.

The Loudest Voice has a dynamic and convincingly terrific central performance by Russell Crowe as Ailes. We see him before Fox News was created. We see how he pulled it all off and the series goes into more depth about his right wing political allies, from Richard Nixon through to Donald Trump.
The Loudest Voice takes us through the selecting of the on-screen talent such as the casting of radio shock talk entity Sean Hannity, which elevated him to a national political pundit that people take seriously and listen to, even President Trump. We see the building of the network that becomes the highest rated in the cable news business and dominant in the political dialog of the USA. There is no doubt that Ailes knew how to appeal to the lowest in the country, the fears and greed, and channel the power of Rupert Murdoch’s international information business empire into the awesome force of right-wing propaganda that it became. Roger Ailes was a talented man in a nasty game.
The series takes us through to the eventual downfall of Ailes and shows us rather explicitly the nature of the sexual acts he coerced out of women ambitious for bigtime TV careers. He liked them to suck him off.

The series takes us through 20 years of the career of Roger Ailes. It is a detailed story of the horribly business information entity that Fox News became and sadly remains even after Ailes is gone. 
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Bombshell being just a theatrical movie and not a long one coming in at 109 minutes has a much shorter focal length. It’s all about the final year of Ailes. The story is told from the perspective of the Fox News women and the attempt led by Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidmen in this, Naomi Watts in The Loudest Voice)  to expose the sexual harassment by Roger Ailes.
Unlike The Loudest Voice, it is not an indictment of Fox News itself. We are asked to have sympathy for Gretchen Carlson who was happy to work to comply or deflect the harassment by Roger Ailes for many years and not call him on it, sue him, until she is eventually canned from the network. We could leave the movie with the impression that Fox News is not a bad entity, and not a bad place to work except for Ailes.

It depicts this, sort of, intramural battle between the right wing boss and these right wing hack women, who were ambitious and ruthless enough to go along with slimeball Roger Ailes, his needs and his broadcast tone demands up to a point. That point being, for some the main stars, no longer of use to the network and out of a job.
Ailes himself in John Lithgow’s characterisation of Roger Ailes, as a rather pathetic old man in his final year of power, might bring him more sympathy than is appropriate given his history.

It might be hard for some viewers to have total sympathy for these women even as their treatment was criminal and despicable.
You want to play in the sewer you might get shit on. 

     

Gonzo (2008)

 Gonzo (2008)

Written and Directed by Alex Gibney

This well crafted documentary portrait of the legendary writer is also a recap of the times of Hunter S. Thompson’s short career. Short, because it only really lasted from the early 1960s until the mid-1970s.

The movie could have been set into sub-chapters,
“The Gonzo Years: 1965 - 1975”
And
“The So-Gone Years: Portrait of  Middle-aged Alcoholic. 1975-2005”

The movie is a lucid journey through the promising and ultimately disturbing times of the Gonzo years in sad dying America.

“The Gonzo Years: 1965 - 1975”
It all starts for Thompson with his penetrating work with the phallus-choppered manboy-cult of the sick assed all-American Hell’s Angels with their homoerotic Brando Wild One cosplay routine that includes gang rape. They were tough-guys when the gang was there to engage in group beatings of rivals. Shame on Ken Keasy, the Merry Pranksters, The Rolling Stones, etc for falling for these thugs and their militant romantic outlaw 1% cowboy image of themselves. But they surely did fall for them and invited them to party and even, insanely, music festival security. Eventually Thompson was alienated and turned on them when witnessing a gangbang at a Prankster party and then their attack on anti-Vietnam war protesters. Good ole patriotic all American boys.
Thompson was treated to one of their gang boy stompings, beat up badly. A good book came out of all that.

On to the Aspen Co sheriff campaign which is kind of interesting.

Then this documentary really gets rolling with the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas segment. This is Thompson’s most famous work and has sustained partly because of the 1998 film adaptation by Terry Gilliam with handsome young actor Johnny Depp as Thompson. Clips from the movie are used extensively, maybe too much, in this segment of the film. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a good read and a rather popular book in it’s day. It was probably the most successful in sales of any of his work and is a surreal picture of the glitzy shiny neon underbelly of the USA, the mobster-created gambling paradise in the desert. (See Bugsy for further fictionalised information. With Warren Beaty as the charismatic loony cold-blooded killer, mobster-entrepreneur, and sucker for woman.)
Actors seem to like to play the cigarette holder chomping, gun loving macho writer. We also see a clip from Where the Buffalo Roam with Bill Murry in the role. In the clip he deals ruthlessly with oppressive authority when he opens fire and murders his fax machine. How dare “The Man'' trouble an artist with a deadline?

The really heartbreaking part of Gonzo is not the decline and eventual suicide, he was basically a drunk, burnt out, jerk celebrity by then. The hard part was the recap of the 1972 presidential campaign which Thompson covered for Rolling Stone and out of which came another successful and artfully crafted new journalism book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972.
This part of Gonzo makes the whole movie worthwhile, not so much for Thompson’s part in it but the way the movie covers the coverage of the hopeful, but tragically doomed, campaign of eventual Democratic candidate Sen. George McGovern running against slime-ball Richard Nixon. Viewers of age are reminded what a good man McGovern was, how he promised to end the war in Vietnam and REDUCE THE BLOATED MILITARY BUDGET. Was this the only time a democratic presidential candidate threatened the military-industrial complex? Don’t expect Joe Biden to do that even as we all go down the tubes economically, that old hack will give us serious austerity before touching the holy war machine that is America's most important product. George McGovern is interviewed in the movie. He was a sadly missed opportunity and a great individual. This part of the movie brings back what a discouraging disappointment that was. Tricky Dick won and then resigned after the Watergate breakin, etc.
(1972 was the first time this writer was eligible to vote. It was cast for McGovern.) 

“The So-GoneYears: Portrait of  Middle-aged Alcoholic. 1975-2005”

Gonzo kind of winds down after that and the last quarter of it covers Thompson’s later and final years. Basically broken hearted by the USA political atmosphere, he became yet another bloated victim of that most American of all the drugs; alcohol. He became a heavy booze hound and pain in the ass to his intimates while riding in the remnants of his fame to the great prize in the winning circle of  American success; “Empty Hedonism”. That’s sad, but it's a horrible sad little “culture” we have here. With the body count steadily on the rise. Thompson was maybe too American for his own good. His final statement before suicide at age 67 morned the end of pro-football season, another old dog pissing around the goal post of the great American brute pastime.

Yet  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 are enormous and unique in their illumination and critique of USA culture. They are written by an outsider embedding himself within and participating fulling. Pushed forward by the stimulating substances at hand they are purely American products. It is not surprising that they destroyed their maker in the process of their production and success. There is no shame that a mere human couldn’t keep it up and repeat the same trick again and again for our amusement. He contributed a great deal and owned us nothing to begin with.

A movie star sponsored tower cannon firing of the ashes of his remains is a sad infantile sent off for another man-boy lost in the mind-fuck that is  America. I would have been much more impressive had he committed suicide by shooting himself out of a cannon into the canyon cliff wall, Ringling-Knievel style. But that would have been redundant. He did that before, sort of, with propelling himself with coke, speed, acid and a lot of booze into the impenetrable wall of the Mad American Death Machine while sending notes back from this righteous suicide mission in the hopeless cause of saving America from itself.

Gonzo is a great documentary.  

 

Everybody Rides the Carousel (1975)

 

Directed by John Hubley

Written by John and Faith Hubley

This short (72 minute) animated feature takes viewers through the “8 Stages of Life” using the metaphor of an animated carousel ride.
The 8 Stages concept comes from the work of Erik Erikson.

There are no surprises in this presentation and not a lot of feeling. The animation from 1975 might have already felt old fashioned, with more a 1950s feel about it. It’s as if the visual explosion, psychedelia, of the 1960s never happened.

There are no surprises or interesting life conflicts giving a new perspective. It is a routine middle class life.
The feeling this leaves is of a very dull and predetermined carousel ride that there is no point in getting on in the first place.
The movie fails in drawing us in or inspiring us with the joy and wonderment of life that is there somewhere in the cracks of the routine presented.

There is too much audio chatter animated, a lot of it with an improvised feel to it, where just silent animated images might have been better.
This is particularly evident during the childhood segments, the “Second Stage”. Here the Hubleys revert to a technique pioneered in their 1959 film Moonbird. In Moonbird they had recorded candid audio of their two sons at play and animated that. This film does something similar in the “Second Stage”.
(Perhaps it is unfair to be able to see these two films together rather than 15 years apart. This is a burden on filmmakers in general during the digital streaming age. For instance TCM can take a day to show all of Chaplin’s films. A filmmaker could get away with recycling a gag filmed 10 years ago when the public had no possibility of accessing all the films at one time. Now we can see the self-reference an hour later in a different film.)

The Seventh Stage has a definite prejudice in the breeding life choice.
Have children or a life of “Stagnation”. Childless creative people might find this offensive. 

The overall effect of Everybody Rides the Carousel was just kind of dreary. “Stop the world. I want to get off!”     
 

The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem

 

This novel from 2018 is set in the post Trump elected USA.

The novel is written in the first person voice of Phoebe a New Yorker. Phoebe, a journalist, had a nice NYC life as a Op Ed editor at the Times but just before the events in the novel decided to quit.
She has a good friend, Roslyn, who works at NPR. She is also friends, or thinks she is, with Roslyn’s college age daughter Arabella. Arabella has taken off from Reed College in Portland and has broken off contact with her mother, and Phoebe, causing the expected parental distress.

Newly footloose, jobless, and looking for SOMETHING anyway, Phoebe sets off for the wild west in search for Arabella. She follows a hunch that Arabella might have gone to Mount Baldy in California where there is a zen monastery where Leonard Cohen hung out for years (while his business manager ripped him off for millions). Phoebe has a NYCer’s disgust at the election of Trump who city people were all too familiar with for decades while unable to grok why people in the sticks, in the good old USA, love and worship him so. It is noted in the novel that Leonard Cohen died on election day 2016.  

In seeking professional local help in the search for Arabelle, Phoebe hooks up with Charles Heist, The Feral Detective, and a wild adventure commences.

The novel can be looked upon as a contemplation of the politically and culturally binary nature of Trump’s USA. There are opposing cult and survivalist elements that make for an exciting and suspenseful adventure saga. Since the novel’s voice is a first person sophisticated NYC woman we share with her the wonderment, and sometimes threatening horror, of what and who she discovers out there in the California desert as well as how it all could be oddly appealing in a primal way.  
Since Phoebe is a-seen-it-all New Yorker nothing is looked upon as all that ghastly through her descriptions, even though some of the events surely would be quite horrifying to witness first hand.

It’s all a wild ride though the still wild west and a welcome off the road and grid ride. Lethem’s not a Johnny One Note. His novels are all inventively different. This fact might upset some readers who will say, “This wasn’t like Fortress, Motherless, Chronic, Dissident, or Blot.”,  but this reader delighted in it and traveling with one of our finest contemporary novels in a look at yet another viewing angle in the crazy world that is the USA.

A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (1923)

Written and Directed by Charles Chaplin

This is an unusual item in the Chaplin film list for a few reasons. It is an early feature running a brisk 1 hour and 22 minutes. All his work before had been shorts with the exceptions of The Kid at 1 hr 8 minutes and The Pilgrim at 47 minutes. (Tillie’s Punctured Romance, the Mack Sennett movie from 1914 runs 1 hr 22 minutes and is a very early feature comedy film, but not a Chaplin controlled film.)

A Woman of Paris then represents Chaplin exploring the feature length form as well as a bold attempt to take on a serious drama. He certainly was dealing with serious subjects in his Tramp films before this but always presented in a comedy package. The Kid has some deeply moving serious moments that he handles perfectly.
In this one he also does not appear at all. There is a title card at the beginning of the presentation stating that he wants it understood that he is not acting in this movie.

A Woman of Paris has some light party moments but nothing that could really be classified as even comedy relief.
It can be seen not only as an experiment for Charles Chaplin as a serious  filmmaker but as a starring vehicle for his long time leading lady Edna Purviance.
Edna Purviance is someone Chaplin recruited into the film business. The story goes that he wanted someone raw that he could direct into acting exactly as he felt he needed. He employed her in 30 some of the short movies that developed him into a global superstar and one of the early true geniuses of the early days of film art.

A Woman of Paris is a very romantic, but quite sophisticated, love story. A small town man and woman are in love. They intend to go off to Paris together to marry and make a life. But the older generation, mainly the stern fathers of both of them, present obstacles that cause a misunderstanding and separation. Marie (Edna Purviance), takes the midnight train to Paris on her own.

From here it takes a sudden jump into some future, months or a year later. Marie is living a life of material wealth with everything she could possibly want as a kept lover of Pierre Revel (Adolphe Menjou). He is soon to be married to another woman. Pierre is a billionaire or whatever was filthy rich at that time. He is seen in his “office” , his luxury bed, at “work” looking at ticker tape coming out of one of those bell jar type stock price machines.

The conflict of the situation comes in when she has a chance meeting with her old townie boyfriend who still loves her. He has transplanted to Paris himself with his mother and is a struggling artist, in a lifestyle far from the opulent luxury of Marie.

But Marie wants real love and maybe children. Revel gives every appearance of adoring her and wanting her, he is not really presented as a horrible rich cad, yet he is marrying another and she must choose between that life and being the only woman in love and poverty with the artist.
The drama continues from there in a way that is not being revealed, spoiled, here.

As stated before it is a brisk well staged and constructed tragic romantic story. Recommended for anyone interested in silent dramatic movies and of course anyone interested in the work and development of the movie great Charles Chaplin. 

   

 Ban the Sadist Videos! (2005)

Written and Directed by David Gregory

This British documentary has to do with a movement to ban certain video content in the 1980s.

This issue emerged through the media technology breakthrough of home video. VHS videotape technology became widespread toward the end of the 20th Century. This meant that people, for the first time ever, could watch movies of their own choice at home, bypassing the gate keeping of theatrical cinema and broadcast TV. These videotapes were mostly rather expensive to buy in the early days of this boom, so a number of stores opened up to serve the market with video rental.   
This presented a new wild world of unregulated content availability.

The British Board of Film Censors, later “Classification” (BBFC) was established in 1912 by the film industry as a way of regulating itself and avoiding government censors stepping in. Anyone familiar with older British movies is familiar with the slide of approval “This is to Certify that (Movie name) Has Been Passed for Universal Exhibition.”
In the early days of home video BBFC had no jurisdiction over this content. 

An uproar arose among people concerned with the effect of hardcore violent content on the general population and children in particular. This also played out in the sensationalist British press which got to play both sides of the game in that they could draw readers in with descriptions of the horrid content at the same time as calling for something to be done about it all.
This documentary is about this campaign to ban or regulate. It is slanted to unlimited freedom discounting the claims of harmful effects on children and the community in general of hardcore violent video content.
It tells us how the BBFC in 1984 got jurisdiction over censoring home video as well.

It’s an interesting documentary and it brings up the issue of what effect video has on people. Do we really know? Is there any way of knowing and measuring such things? If one takes the approach that video has no impact at all then why have corporations spent billions or trillions on TV advertising content in the past 70 years or so since the dawn of the ubiquitous broadcast video age? 

If home video has no effect then apparently it was some other magic that elevated a failed real estate developer into the highest office in the USA directly after being featured as a wise business leader in a very successful prime time TV reality show for 14 years on one of the three major networks.

Is the effect of video content on our reality settled?

Wonderwall (1968)

Directed by Joe Massot
Story by Gérard Brach
Screenplay by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

The set up of this nearly silent movie is rather simple. There is a typical absent minded Prof. Oscar Collins, played by Jack MacGowran. He spends his days at the lab looking at microbes through a microscope. Apparently he is consumed by this, by the tiny life forms that are his work. He is shown right away to be unaware of much else. When the work day ends at 6pm his co-workers head out the door. He doesn’t look up as they depart, he says goodbye to the woman by the man’s name and vice versa. He consults post-it notes in his pocket to remind him how to leave the lab, to shut things off, to feed the lab mice, and at home to remove his socks before soaking his feet. He fails to do the last.

His dark apartment is cluttered with stacks of old newspapers. He sits there and again looks through a microscope. This is his world, clearly the only one he cares about.
This world is intruded upon by noise from the apartment through the wall behind him. He bangs on the wall and it stops. But then another musical piece begins. (The music for the movie is effective and unobtrusively done by George Harrison in his first adventure into movie soundtracks.)
The scene culminates with a slick idea of a projection on the professor’s wall of what is in the next room. He sees a circular light on his wall with an upside down image of a woman’s body. He is fascinated by this and says, “Camera obscura.”  The hole in his wall and his darkened room have produced the ancient magic of a camera obscura.

This is a movie about voyeurism. The professor becomes obsessed with watching through the wall. Peeping through the wall is the new peeping through the microscope. Jane Birkin plays the model living next door. She is on the surface the object of the peeping. This could have been a simple girlie show soft sex movie, but it is not. It is much better than that and viewers coming to it for that would be likely disappointed.

We don’t particularly see that the old professor is getting a sexual kick out of the looking. We can assume that is what he is after presumably if that is what we are looking for. There is a glimpse of nudity, but the room next door more seems to represent the movement of life and youth. One moment he looks through the hole and sees a young man in a skiing scene. This is for a photo shoot. Penny’s (Jane Birkin) apartment is being used for photoshoots for glossy fashion magazines. What goes on in there is staged artifice. And Penny is a very unhappy object apparently not feeling loved for herself.  

The movie can do to the viewer exactly what it does to the professor character. Though the wall of our screen we are lured in to be voyeurs  with the notion of the girlie show in a psychedelic wonderland. That world beyond the wall is colorful and inviting on the surface, but it is actually fake, commercial, and the characters, hired to act as the joyful young, feel exploited, unseen, and unloved as themselves.

Little wonder that the film is so little known and was not widely distributed and seen 50 some years ago.

It is a subtle artful contemplation of media in our lives and not something with much appealy to the popular audience trained to expect sex, violence, and plotty conflict.
This is a really good little movie.    

 

Belushi (2020)

 Belushi (2020)

Written and Directed by R.J. Cutler

I suppose many will disagree with this one.

Watched this last night. It had an odd effect. Maybe it was because I had just watched Way Out West, one of the better Laurel and Hardy features, but I came away from Belushi thinking he was way less the skilled, funny, performer that I have previously assumed.

None of the stuff from Saturday Night held up much, The Bee, the racist samurai bit, the reclusive Joe Cocker impersonation, “cheeseburger, cheeseburger”, none if these had any appeal or were in the least funny.

It doesn’t appear that he had the depth, interest, or attention span required to craft anything beyond the hollowest of TV sketch comedy. His work is nothing compared to the SCTV crew, like Harold Ramis who he worked with in the Lampoon Radio show, or any of the others on that classic program, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, yet he had some lowest-common-denominator appeal that elevated him to features.

The features and not great either. Animal House has some yahoo drunk male audience appeal. “Whoo Hoo! Party!” But what else?

And The Blues Brothers act is another white man minstrel show that could afford the hire the best sessions musicians of that genre to help sell it pull is off.

As I said I had looked at this stuff after the comedy genius and crafted performance timing of Laurel and Hardy already 20 years into their amazing film career. Belushi is nothing in comparison.

Near the closing of the doc Tony Hendra says something about the American Success story that Belushi was ultimately a victim of. There is nothing behind that success.

Dead at 33. Belushi is just a kind of pathetic mass media character.

Interesting documentary in unintentionally putting all this on display but not burying the truth in empty praise.

King Cohen (2017)

Written & Directed by Steve Mitchell

This is a nicely done, cheerful, documentary about legendary TV/movie writer/director/producer Larry Cohen.

It is cheerful because it tends to focus on the joy, the fun, of filmmaking on the hardscrabble indie edge in the 1970s and early 1980s.
It is also NYC centric. Cohen, classic 1970s movies are set in the city.

We are told and shown examples of Cohen’s knack for stealing location shots in the city. This is when a stripped down, fast moving, production crew just shoots stuff on the streets without establishing permission through the city authorities, such as today’s Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, or informing bystanders and pedestrians who happen to be there.  Cohen also did not put a lot of planning into stunt coordinating. Fred Williamson, star of Cohen’s 1973 Black Caesar, tells some interesting fun stories about this mode of working with Cohen. He contradicts Cohen’s claim of performing a stunt of jumping from a moving cab before his star agreed to do it. “He’s lying.” says Williamson, smoking a big cigar. It’s very amusing.

Those familiar with Cohen classic 1970s-80s indie feature work, such as It’s Alive (1974) and it’s sequels and Q (1982) might be interested in learning through this documentary that Larry Cohen did a lot of TV writing of popular shows in the 1960’s when very young, in his 20s. These include The Fugitive, The Defenders, and being the creator of Branded (“Scorned as the one who ran, What do you do when you’re branded and you know you’re a man?”), and The Invaders. 

Larry Cohen is interviewed in the movie. He is an interesting personality that only NYC could have produced, likes to talk, is proud of his work. He likes to focus on the positive end of a very difficult business that he managed to succeed in way beyond most others who attempt it.

This is a very entertaining fast paced documentary filled with enthusiasm and joyfulness in the creative process.  
It could serve as an inspiration for young moving image storytellers.