GOOD & BRAD

RIP to Davy Jones of The Monkees—& arguably The Wife’s first love—passed on too young at 66.

One more quick Oscar note: Sunday evening’s show featured talking heads of famous people discussing their earliest movie memories. Brad Pitt recalled being taken to see a movie featuring “a good Gargantua and a bad Gargantua,” & that the good Gargantua had to sacrifice himself at the end. He’s thinking, of course, of the 1966 Japanese kaiju film War of the Gargantuas (Furankenshutain no Kaiju: Sanda tai Gaira; released in the US in 1970), a vague sequel to 1965’s Frankenstein Conquers the World.

So, for inspiring Mr. Pitt with his selflessness…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the honor to Sanda…

…the brownish, mountain-dwelling “Good Gargantua,” who does battle for humanity's sake with his greenish, sea-dwelling, people-gobbling brother Gaira…

…in that movie. I was taken to it by my long-suffering Mom, for all I know on the same day as Pitt (he’s only about a year younger than I am, which is probably why I’m often mistaken for him), & I remember it spooked me slightly more than the Japanese monster pictures usually did. Accidental byproducts of Frankenstein-ian experiments in the earlier film, these shaggy anthropoids with their ugly ogre-ish faces & their Cain & Abel dynamic, plus the goriness of Gaira’s eating habits, combined to make this one grimmer & nastier than the typical Godzilla fare.

Also, there’s the matter of this horrible song, which has been occupying space in my cranium for four decades…

OSCARS, THE GROUCHES

A couple of Oscar notes: The verdict online appears to be that last night’s show sucked, sucked, sucked, or at best that it was boring. This is the usual verdict any more, & I don’t think it has much to do with the quality of the show (except for last year’s, which got particularly venomous notices).

Over the last twenty years, the hosting duties have been given to a variety of comedic geniuses—Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, David Letterman, Whoopi Goldberg, Ellen DeGeneres, Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin—most of whom have been declared failures. I liked them all (I thought Martin was especially funny). All of them have been found wanting by comparison to Billy Crystal, who hosted the show for the 9th time last night. But when he’s hosted, he too has usually been found wanting by plenty of viewers.

I think that the petulant response that so many contemporary fans have to most Oscar telecasts in recent years has more to do with the show failing to give them the sense of giddy excitement that it did when they were kids. Last night’s show did kind of suck, & it was kind of boring, but my suspicion is that Oscar shows always have been—they’ve always represented the lamest of a species of self-consciously old-fashioned variety show, & that’s what we want. We want to hate the Oscars, & we’d hate them even more if they were somehow made “modern.” We’d probably hate them most of all in the unlikely event that they ever were a couple of tightly-paced hours of really first-rate entertainment.

I thought that Crystal, maybe the last of the comedians who sees doing a song-&-dance number as a routine part of his job rather than something for which he should get extra credit, managed his duties last night excellently, more relaxed & confident than he’s been in some past years. The Cirque de Soleil number was impressive, & I also loved this short sketch with Bob Balaban, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Fred Willard, Christopher Guest & Jennifer Coolidge about a focus group for The Wizard of Oz, although I understand that it was poorly received...

When Crystal said “Weren’t they hilarious?” afterwards, many (likely similar) people online were quick to reply “No.”

The only remotely surprising win of the night, I thought, was Meryl Streep’s for The Iron Lady. It was a pleasant surprise—the movie was thin & weak apart from her, but that performance was sensational.

My gripe this year, as so often, was with the necrology. It was cool that George Kuchar was included, but here’s a list, compiled with the help of some friends, of those omitted: Harry Morgan, Charles Napier, Jeff Conaway, Sid Melton, Yvette Vickers, Tura Satana, Zina Bethune & Zalman King, among others.

You could quibble about some of these, maybe, but…no Harry Morgan? Really?

GOOD MOON ON THE RISE

Happy Oscar weekend everybody!

As an aesthetic or meritocratic measure, the Oscars are a travesty of course, & always have been. Probably all contests based on subjective judgment of artistic work are travesties. Probably back at the City Dionysia in 442 BC, somebody was muttering “Look, Antigone was good, I just don’t think it was the play of the year. I think they just figure they owe Sophocles after he got hosed on Oedipus Rex.”

Travesty or not, the Oscars are usually good for a laugh or two, & they do often honor good movies. Last week a friend of mine mentioned on facebook that she & her husband were watching one of their favorite movies: “I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride!”

Ah, Moonstruck.

The Wife & I count this movie, which turns 25 this year, as one of our favorites as well. Oscar liked it, too: It won for Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, & Best Screenplay.

In Moonstruck’s main plot, woman falls in love with her fiancé’s estranged brother. In the subplot, an aging, successful businessman cheats on his wife. To someone who’d never seen the film, that description might sound more like the basis for a sordid, Arhur Miller-ish melodrama with a violent, tragic ending than a warm, eccentric romantic comedy.

Part of Moonstruck’s achievement is that it manages to be both romantic & fiercely honest about love. The fickleness, the brevity, the irrationality, & the wide streak of selfishness that characterize even the grandest amores are fully acknowledged, & cheerfully mocked, & yet somehow the movie convinces us of love’s transcendence. Plus, it’s one of the funniest films of the ‘80s.

The story centers on a Loretta Castorini (Cher), an Italian-American widow pushing 40. An accountant, she lives in a palatial house in Brooklyn, exquisitely shot by cinematographer David Watkin, with her gloomy father Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia), an affluent plumber, & her gloomier mother Rose (Olympia Dukakis). Gloomiest of all is her grandfather (Feodor Chalaipin), who moves around in a wake of small dogs—the only time joy registers on his face is when he gets them to howl at the moon.

Loretta agrees to marry her dull, pleasant boyfriend Johnny (Danny Aiello), who by her own admission she likes but doesn’t love, before he leaves for Italy & the deathbed of his vociferous, energetic mother. While he’s away, Loretta goes to invite his brother Ronnie (Nicolas Cage) to the wedding, & the two fall immediately in love. Meanwhile, Rose struggles with the awareness that Cosmo is cheating on her.

That’s the plot, but it does no justice to the richness of the movie, which works on a surprisingly broad canvas, with minor characters ranging from Loretta’s customers to Cosmo’s, Ronnie’s coworkers, the waiters at the restaurants, or random passersby like the vitriolic old crone with whom Loretta has an odd exchange at the airport. In formal terms, the resolution of the plot is a bit of an anticlimax, really, but while you’re watching the movie it’s comedic bliss, & utterly satisfying.

Indeed, this is one of those rare & precious movies where everything somehow went improbably right. Cher did her best work as an actress in Moonstruck, & Cage probably had his finest hour here, too. But the supporting actors & bit players are sublime without exception—in particular Louis Guss & Julie Bovasso as Loretta’s Aunt & Uncle, & John Mahoney as a coed-loving college professor who happens into dinner with Rose & wistfully discovers the pleasure of a mature woman’s company.

The director, Norman Jewison, did fine work before & after this film, but nowhere else showed this flawless a touch. John Patrick Shanley, who wrote the Oscar-winning, highly quotable script, has never topped it—most of his subsequent work has been brilliant in flashes but badly uneven. But Moonstruck’s dialogue, for all its idiosyncratic poetry, still sounds blunt & natural in the mouths of these actors. The happy irony is that this celebration of love’s glorious imperfection is, in itself, pretty much a perfect movie.