Baz Jazz Hands: Christmas cards with Elvis

This is the final in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the films of Baz Luhrmann.

We ordered our Christmas cards late this year, but they arrived early. I think it might be part of a ploy by Snapfish to create the impression of excellent customer service, to tell you your order is expected on Friday and then deliver it on Tuesday.

Having been out all day Wednesday at work followed by Ferrari and Saltburn, though, I couldn't start stuffing them in envelopes until Thursday after work, and because of my younger son's school holiday concert, couldn't actually start until that night. When I wanted to watch a movie.

I figured, what better accompaniment to the task than the last entry of Baz Jazz Hands, Baz Luhrmann being a filmmaker whose strengths (some would say weaknesses) come across through an overall impression of what he's doing, not a minute attention to every detail on screen? Especially if you've already seen the movie once?

If I actually wrote in my Christmas cards, it probably wouldn't have worked, but I gave that up ages ago. The only writing I do is the address and the return address on the envelope, and all I was really doing at this stage was writing my return address and the recipient's name on each envelope, kind of like a machine completing a task in parts. I'd look up their addresses later on when I wasn't watching a movie.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the opening scene of Elvis actually features Christmas cards. Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) is putting away a box of Christmas cards on a high shelf when he suffers the stroke that sent him to a hospital bed from which he would never emerge. I almost did a double take, my own Christmas cards right there in my lap. 

It's not the only Christmas element in this movie. In fact, there's a whole to do that feels like it takes up 20 minutes about whether Elvis will wear his Christmas sweater and sing "Here Comes Santa Claus" on a television broadcast designed specifically for those two purposes. (Spoiler alert: He does not.)

The salient facts about Parker's death seem mostly accurate -- he died on January 20, 1997, so indeed he could have been putting away Christmas cards, though Wikipedia does not say anything about that. He also did not die until the next morning, so in theory, his deathbed narration of this story, by the light of a night in Vegas, could have also occurred. 

That isn't, however, the impression one gets from the Christmas special episode, which bothered me more than it should. But more on that in the moment.

My ranking of Elvis as my #7 film of 2022 was, in part, the thing that inspired me to do this Baz Jazz Hands series. At that time I had seen only two of Luhrmann's six films more than once, and I thought this made a good excuse to revisit the others, to note how Luhrmann's style has developed and solidified over the years. Now that I've done this, I feel I can confidently say he is the only filmmaker -- or for sure, the only filmmaker who has made multiple films -- where I've seen his entire output more than once.

The first 45 minutes of Elvis were an absolute confirmation of the affection I'd felt for it the first time. The colors, the editing, the performance of Austin Butler as the green Elvis, the absolute joy emanating from anything and everything ... it was intoxicating. As Elvis is driving his pink Cadillac, I thought to myself that I had never seen the color pink look quite like that on screen, and I was enthralled by it.

An interesting thing about this film is to watch its color palette become more muted as Elvis sinks deeper into the drug and health problems that would ultimately claim him. You aren't supposed to have as much fun with the second half, or even the final two-thirds, of this film, and that doesn't lessen it as a film -- it just presents the reality of a man's life.

One thing did lessen it, though, and I'd say it probably came about the halfway mark.

I mentioned the whole donnybrook over whether Elvis would meekly accept his commitment of playing a family-friendly Christmas special. In order to draw further thematic resonance from this, Luhrmann chooses to group it together with an event that did not occur, that could not have occurred, at the same time, making it seem as though they were contemporaneous. Two events, actually.

The first in the narrative of these three total events is the assassination of Martin Luther King. We see Elvis receive the news and feel heartbroken. 

Not straight away in the narrative, but within maybe ten more minutes of screen time, we start to get into the Christmas special and whether Elvis will behave. Then as they are preparing the Christmas special and there is excessive discussion of Santa Claus coming or not coming to town, and whether he will be reaching town via the lane that bears his name, Robert Kennedy is shot and killed, creating yet more perspective in Elvis regarding what is and what is not important. 

Here's the thing: King was shot in April of 1968. Kennedy was shot in June of 1968. There was no Christmas season between those events, or especially at the time of either event.

I said in my review of Elvis (which you can read here if you like) that the movie has a strong sense of emotional truth, if not literal truth at every juncture. I was effectively granting Luhrmann license to take liberties with the truth as long as it was furthering the effective portrait of this man.

However, I do take issue with combining events that were so transparently not related to one another, where it is easily verifiable that they weren't. I first came to this by thinking "Wow, I didn't know Bobby Kennedy was assassinated right around Christmastime." Of course, he wasn't. Luhrmann thought that Elvis' commitment to the Christmas show made an effective metaphor for his selling out of his original persona, a slow-moving compromise that had been going on for some time at this point. And that the death of a political leader he admired would demonstrate just how vacuous were the others things he was doing.

If this were the desire -- and if the movie wants to grapple with Presley's uneasy relationship to Black culture and the debts he owes it -- why not have it be King's death he's struggling with at the same time as the Christmas show? Did Luhrmann just figure people would better remember the time of year King was killed than the time of year Kennedy was killed, so it would make his mild subterfuge less noticeable?

I can't say that this really impacted my enjoyment of the film the second time, but it ate away at me for the rest of the movie, so it obviously stuck in my craw. 

Overall, though, this Elvis viewing confirmed the thing I have been steadily realizing all year, or putting into words at least: Luhrmann is a maker of myths. If his characters lack in nuance, it's because he's giving us archetypes, not finely detailed and complicated human beings. If his biopic adheres to the standard components of a biopic, just exploded outward in his unique style, then that's because he wants to make the ultimate biopic, the biopic that might go in the dictionary next to the definition, not something that surprises us by only examining a small part of the subject's life, or examining him by having five different actors play him.

In short, the things Luhrmann does are things I appreciate. The scope of the big screen is strong with this one. He understands that movies are made on a large canvas and that the subject matter should match. 

In thinking about filmmakers with a signature style, I think Luhrmann is one as much as Wes Anderson is one. You know you're watching a Luhrmann movie when you're watching it. He comes back to the same sorts of shots, the same sorts of editing techniques, the same anachronistic use of music. There's one shot in Elvis where the casino owner is writing out the terms of Elvis' contract at the International Hotel -- or more specifically, the benefits Parker will get from this commitment -- and I swear there is another shot just like that, focusing ominously on the letters as they are being written, in another Luhrmann film. At this stage I can't remember which one it was. But the moment marked this as a Luhrmann film as much as anything else.

There are differences between a filmmaker like Luhrmann and one like Anderson, though. These differences don't make one better or worse than the other, but I do think they help explain why Anderson gets so much backlash from his haters while Luhrmann gets relatively little, even though he too has plenty of haters.

For one, Luhrmann has made about half the number of films as Anderson in the same period of time. His style has had less opportunity to grate on us for its repetitious nature, especially when he goes nine years between making films, as he did between The Great Gatsby and Elvis.

But I also think the "same style, different subject matter" approach they share befits the sorts of projects Luhrmann tackles better than the sorts of projects Anderson tackles. Again, no slight on Anderson as I really like two-thirds of his movies. But on the ones I don't like, I smack my forehead about how Anderson seems to be going back to the same well, again and again. 

With Luhrmann -- especially with the scarcity of movies he gives us -- I feel like this well will never run dry.

Thus concludes the series. I will conclude King Darren before the end of the month, which will make Darren Aronofsky the second director whose every film I have seen more than once, and which will bring all three of my 2023 bi-monthly series to a close.

Baz Jazz Hands: Celebrating baseball victory with The Great Gatsby

This is the penultimate viewing in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the six feature films of Baz Luhrmann. 

I won my fantasy baseball league on Monday morning my time.

It's my second win in three years, after I took home the trophy in 2021 as well.

Woo hoo.

I obviously don't talk about it a lot on here -- this is a movie blog, in case you weren't aware -- but fantasy baseball occupies a sizeable percentage of my brain from early March to early October each year. (Early October if I'm lucky and make it all the way to the finals, as I did this year -- otherwise I begin the weaning off process starting as early as mid-September, depending on how quickly I'm eliminated.)

The end of the fantasy baseball season, in fact, usually begins the transition to my obsession with movies (and the NBA) that takes me through to my year-end rankings. At which point -- lo and behold -- it's almost time for baseball again. (Nice to have obsessions that fuel you year-round, I've found -- it means you always have something to look forward to.)

To celebrate my win, I decided to watch The Great Gatsby on Monday night for Baz Jazz Hands.

That might seem like a disconnect, but hear me out.

The scenes I remember most from my first two viewings of The Great Gatsby, which both occurred ten years ago in 2013, are the lavish party sequences taking place at Jay Gatsby's West Egg mansion. Their celebratory atmosphere seemed just the thing to crown my fifth fantasy baseball championship in 30 years of playing fantasy baseball. (Of course, I forgot that a lot of the rest of the story ranges from mildly to very depressing.)

As I was watching these scenes again, it struck me how they are similar in time period and bacchanalian excess to the party scenes depicted in last year's Babylon from director Damien Chazelle. The feeling of the scenes, though, couldn't be more different, and points up the essential underlying optimism that characterizes Baz Luhrmann's work and continues to make him -- I think I can now say it with confidence -- a favorite director.

Those scenes in Babylon feel like Chazelle smearing our faces in the dog shit of the characters' lurid deviance. The Gatsby characters, while probably getting equally drunk and engaging in similar shenanigans, feel like innocents, people having the time of their lives as they are seduced by the grandeur of Gatsby's orbit. 

I prefer the latter -- not always, but certainly given the mean-spiritedness with which Chazelle depicts these scenes, and their comparative lightness in Luhrmann's film. (I should add that my first viewing of Gatsby was in 3D, which just made this stuff all the more delightfully delirious.)

Watching these Luhrmann films back to back has made me even more aware of a Luhrmann Template that I continue to enjoy. Gatsby is just his latest example of a movie told by a writer in recollection of a period of ecstasy in his life, one that is now sadly in the past and out of reach. Its most obvious corollary in his filmography is Moulin Rouge, with the slight difference that Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is more of a third party in this film whereas Christian (Ewan McGregor) is the central figure in the earlier film's featured romance. Luhrmann is big on song and dance as a means of showing his characters at the height of their happiness and glory, though because he's a romantic, we know these films also have to end in tragedy. Romeo + Juliet is certainly another example of that tragic ending. 

Strictly Ballroom and Australia both end happily, but are no less effective for it. Especially since I reacted so positively to Australia this time, I'm starting to think that Luhrmann is effective in any mode, and I have yet to find a film of his where his missteps are any more than minor.

I do have one humorously significant complaint about The Great Gatsby, but it can be chalked up more to an idiosyncratic tic than anything I really want to criticize about the filmmaking.

Namely: Was Leonardo DiCaprio paid by the number of times he used the phrase "old sport"?

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's original novel, "Old Sport" -- probably more appropriately capitalized, because it functions as a nickname -- is what Gatsby calls Carraway whenever he speaks to him. He uses it when speaking to a few other people, but we see him speak to Carraway more than anyone else.

And I say "whenever he speaks to him," I mean "whenever he speaks to him" -- at least in this film, if not the novel. 

If your name was Nick and you had a conversation with someone where they said "You know, Nick, I was thinking about an idea I had. Nick, I thought I would throw a party tonight. It's because I'm celebrating, Nick. You see, Nick, I just won my fantasy baseball league." You'd think that was weird, right? Everyone knows your name is Nick. You don't need to say it every sentence.

It's even weirder when it is a goofy, quaint, awkward nickname like "Old Sport."

Was this Luhrmann's idea? DiCaprio's? Is the frequency of this nickname established in the book and they are just trying to be faithful in their adaptation?

I don't know. But it's annoying as hell. Next time I watch The Great Gatsby -- maybe another ten years from now -- I will make a drinking game out of it. Or at the very least, count the actual number of occurrences.

But as I said, this is a humorous complaint that does not detract from another excellently conceived vision by Luhrmann. It's not just the unparalleled attention to design details, resulting in a luxurious production design. It's not just the wistful feeling that suffuses the film. It's not just the incredible ability of Carey Mulligan and Elizabeth Debicki (who I first discovered in this film) to play flappers. It's not just the hissible villain, this time played by Joel Edgerton. 

It's all of it, which wraps me up in its spell, even though its second half is a downer compared to its first. The complete package leaves The Great Gatsby jockeying for position around the middle of my Luhrmann rankings, with the likes of Strictly Ballroom and my newly appreciated Australia. (As much as I did enjoy Romeo + Juliet on this viewing, I think it may now be looking up from the bottom.)

Where will Elvis fit into all this on my second viewing? We'll find out in December. 

Baz Jazz Hands: Australia

This is the fourth in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the films of Baz Luhrmann.

I was at a disadvantage when I saw Australia in January of 2009. Several, actually:

1) I had not yet lived in Australia.

2) I was not yet a parent.

3) I heard it was bad.

Yes I had a fair number of preconceived notions about the poor quality of Australia when coming in. The film was received with howls in certain critical corners in late 2008 when it was released, and according to the date Letterboxd shows me I saw it, I only just barely crammed it in before my 2008 list closed. I metaphorically had my arms crossed before I even entered the theater, despite loving Luhrmann's previous film, Moulin Rouge. (Which I watched for about the fifth time for this series in June, you will recall.)

Then I liked the movie. Maybe I didn't love it, but I liked it plenty. And considerably more than my wife, an actual Australian, if memory serves. Another hurdle for Australia to overcome in terms of its enduring legacy in my mind.

I checked the retroactive star rating I gave it on Letterboxd, and was pleasantly surprised to see that when I entered all my films in Letterboxd in early 2012, I was feeling generously enough toward Australia to give it 3.5 stars. The Flickchart ranking is also fair, 2145 out of 6353 films ranked, good for 66%.

So you can imagine I was pretty surprised to nearly be in tears at the end of the movie on this viewing.

Yes I am a sap. We know this about me. It's one of the main reasons I (generally) swoon for Luhrmann's work. But I'd thought Australia was an exception.

Instead I watched -- across last Friday night and Saturday morning -- a grand, sweeping, 2-hour-and-45-minute epic in the old school style of big spectacles, with brave heroes and hissable villains, and damsels in distress who, it should be said, get plenty of their own agency in a manner more befitting the 21st century in which the film was made. With a storyline about surrogate parents and their surrogate child that really put a lump in my throat.

I think one of the criticisms Luhrmann receives is that he doesn't draw his characters very finely. There are things they represent, but they don't have the detail or the nuance that we believe -- correctly in most instances -- is the meat and potatoes of good character writing.

One example of this, which caused a lot of guffaws at the time, is that Hugh Jackman's character never receives a name other than "the Drover." (Because he's a cattle drover.) I admit I thought this was funny at the time too.

Now I realize that giving us inordinately complex characters is not one of Luhrmann's interests, and that does not necessarily detract from the quality of his films. I'd argue that we do get some complexity in other Luhrmann characters, often as a result of the performer's individual gifts. Some, for example, think that's what we get in the lead performance in Elvis, though I'd have to think more about that to decide if it deviates from my thesis. 

Which is this: Luhrmann is more interested in exploring archetypes, not specific people.

The Drover is perhaps the prime example, though that doesn't take even a little bit away from Jackman's performance. He's heroic and sexy and has incredible chemistry with Nicole Kidman. Did I say he was sexy? Boy is he sexy. But you can't pull off those things if you are wooden, if you are only fulfilling the needs of an archetype.

Yet even if he were, so what? It's becoming clear to me after four Luhrmann films that his films are in conversation with the very history of narrative, beyond existing as narratives themselves. Few writer-directors conjure more detestable villains. Richard Roxburgh's duke in Moulin Rouge may be at the top of that list, but David Wenham's Fletcher gives him a run for his money here. Luhrmann is exceptional at getting a sneer from an actor.

When you are watching a Luhrmann movie, you need to be going in with the expectation that he's going to paint with broad strokes, on purpose, to bring out what makes certain character types appear over and over in the history of storytelling. Some people may not like that project. I love it.

And did I love Australia on this viewing?

Maybe. Maybe I did.

The epic scope of the outback in the film's opening 90 minutes or so is perhaps something I wouldn't have appreciated as much before I lived here. Not that I've spent a huge amount of time in the outback. But I did actually visit the part of the world in which this is set in 2017. The city of Darwin and the Aboriginal territory of Arnhem Land are both places I visited, though the latter only with the accompaniment of an indigenous guide, and only just inside the boundary. See, only indigenous people are allowed to set foot in Arnhem Land unless specifically approved for a visit. 

I found these scenes glorious in scope and subject matter. In 2008 (early 2009) I also did not have the context of coming to understand the indigenous experience a little better as I have in the ten years I've lived here. I would never pretend that I understand the experience well -- that's not something I have any right to claim -- but I certainly have consumed a fair amount of art about the indigenous experience, each of which improves my overall ability to empathize with their history of suffering. At first I thought Luhrmann's handling of the indigenous themes would read as cringey or appropriative to me, but I actually think he does a pretty good job with it. It's always great to see Australian treasure David Gulpilil, who just passed in the past two years, in the role of King George.

As impressed as I was with the vistas in the film's first 90 minutes, I was equally impressed with Luhrmann's shift to the upper-class social gatherings of Darwin, which is where we see some of his most familiar interests -- romantic scenes of people dressed up in fancy outfits, dancing. We get this in almost every Luhrmann film -- possibly ever one, full stop. The attack by Japanese aircraft is then also done really well. 

I was enthusiastic enough about Australia on this viewing that I could probably continue to list things. But there was only one more funny detail I wanted to mention before I wrap up with thoughts on why the film's possible deepest resonance for me this time around.

That last detail relates to how Luhrmann establishes his villains. One thing is, of course, the sneering. Another is the conniving, murder, etc. But something I found common to both Wenham's Fletcher and a lesser villain, King Carney, played by Bryan Brown -- who ends up having something of a heart -- is that they both swig directly from the bottle when they're drinking at a fancy party. In one character detail it shows both their sense of entitlement, and how uncouth they are -- the latter a real sin in Luhrmann's world of passionate kisses in tuxedos and ball gowns.

My final thought has to do with the third lead beyond Kidman and Jackman, a young Aboriginal boy named Nullah, played by Brandon Walters.

For starters, I was overcome by how radiant a presence this boy is. Let it never be said that Luhrmann doesn't have a knack for casting. I'm not sure where he found Walters -- I could probably look it up on the internet if I could be bothered -- but there are not a lot of characters I have seen on screen in whom I have found it easier to poor my heart. Those eyes! The kid is such a natural that I'm sorry to see he has only appeared in three other projects, and only in the past few years -- unless of course that was his choice. If it was because Australia was received poorly, then I think that's truly a shame.

My reaction to both Walters and the character has something to do with what I mentioned up top, about how I was not a parent in 2009. 

I was really touched by the story of the makeshift family that develops between Drover, Sarah Ashley and Nullah. I suppose today it would read more as a white savior narrative, but just as Luhrmann avoids the most pernicious pitfalls of depicting the Aboriginal experience on screen, he also avoids them in this regard. The conditions at the time -- when so-called "half caste" indigenous children were being taken from their families to become "civilized" in white homes -- makes it inevitable that the two white heroes of this film would have to play this role toward him. However, the understanding of the importance of him going on walkabout with his grandfather, Gulpilil's King George, keeps the optics pretty good on this one.

And dammit if I didn't get emotional when a) this makeshift family is reunited, and b) this makeshift family has to send their adoptive son out into the world, to learn the ways of his ancestors, to discover how to follow the songlines that they have sung out for navigating the great outback. When you are a parent, narratives in which parents are separated from children suddenly strike you more deeply -- and I discovered on this viewing that Australia is a particularly good example of this sort of emotional manipulation, a term I use in its very best sense. 

(Yeah, I never expected to write this many words on Australia either.)

One final, final thought. I watched Australia close to what was the tenth anniversary of me living in this country. August 20, 2013 was the date I left America; August 22nd was the day I arrived in Australia, because you lose that day flying in that direction. I thought about posting about this landmark date here on this blog, but since it isn't directly related to the movies, I never did. However, I thought watching Australia for reasons other than celebrating this anniversary, and rather only because it was the next scheduled movie in this series, was pretty felicitous. 

We're up to Luhrmann's second-most-recent release in October with The Great Gatsby, which will be my third viewing.

Baz Jazz Hands: Moulin Rouge!

This is the third in my 2023 bi-monthly series revisiting the six feature films of Baz Luhrmann.

Moulin Rouge! (question mark optional) has been my uncontested favorite Baz Luhrmann film ever since I first saw it. That may not be saying as much as it seems like it's saying, though, because the only other Luhrmann film I'd see at the time was Romeo + Juliet, and none of the four I've seen since then -- including the one that was released before either of those films -- have been quite good enough to surpass it.

However, on this viewing, which is at least my third but probably my fourth, I am likely to be more critical of it than I have been on any previous occasion.

Does any film you've ever seen go on and on about love as much as this one does?

I have no doubt the intention is 100% earnest on Luhrmann's part -- nothing he does strikes me as cynical, and it's obvious in the way he makes movies that he's a romantic. But my my. A person could make a good drinking game out of every time the word "love" is uttered in Moulin Rouge (no question mark this time) and would be pretty toasted by the end of the 128 minutes.

The fact that it is 128 minutes, and yet I don't feel like very much happens in the plot, is another mild criticism I have of its tendency to go and on. I am never bored in any viewing of Moulin Rouge, but this time I noticed all the ways it could have easily been trimmed down more than I have previously.

It gets to that length because of its heavy reliance on its jukebox musical format, and I must say that I still think this format works extraordinarily well. In fact, this may be the first time I had ever seen a jukebox musical, and though some of the luster has worn off that form, it felt fresh and invigorating that first time.

My favorite moment/scene in the whole film is when you first hear Ewan McGregor break into Elton John's "Your Song," belting the familiar phrase "My gift is my song!" at the heavens and taking us aback. (And watch out, the heavens might answer back, since Placido Domingo plays the moon.) McGregor's variations on this song -- the emphasis he places, the notes that are changed -- left me romantically dumbstruck when I first saw this film, and still does today.

And in many movies, the "Your Song" bit would have been enough. But after a pause, McGregor's Christian follows Nicole Kidman's Satine onto the roof of the elephant she lives in (great set), and they continue romancing each other with popular music. In fact, he's got his little run of familiar lyrics, all of which feature the word "love" -- you know, "all you need is love," "love lift us up where we belong," etc. 

And then, after a while more of this, they do a duet of "Heroes" by David Bowie. The arrangement is great, and there's a delirious sense of the ecstasy of the filmmaking as the camera swirls around them and colors burst behind them, only they don't notice because they're lost in each other's eyes.

Taken individually, it's all good -- maybe I could do without the cutesy run of familiar lyrics by McGregor -- but by the time I got to the end of it, I realized we'd been at this for 15 minutes, when it could have easily been accomplished in five. And to gild the lily even more, "Your Song" enters Christian's narration after the sequence finally ends. When he's back at his typewriter, he gushes "How wonderful life was, now that Satine was in the world." 

Mercy, Baz. Mercy.

Don't get me wrong. The movie still gives me chills and speaks to every little bit of the romantic in me, not to mention the former stage actor in me, not to mention the guy who loves to see somebody really commit, not to mention the cinephile who loves to be bowled over by a spectacle. All this still really works in Moulin Rouge.

But I'm still thinking ... maybe it works better at an hour 40?

I suppose if shaving off 25 minutes would have made us any less invested in the Christian-Satine romance, it wouldn't be worth doing. Perhaps you need that slightly indulgent sequence between their two rooms to really live with the idea of these two falling head over heels for each other. Convincing us that two characters are in love is no small task for a film to try to accomplish, and Moulin Rouge does it better than most. So I guess I wouldn't trade it under any circumstances ... but I won't lie and tell you it didn't bother me just a little bit this time through.

Maybe I'm not the romantic I was in 2001. I've seen Moulin Rouge in approximately ten-year intervals, at obviously different stages in my life. (I also think there was a repeat viewing between 2001 and when I started keeping track of repeat watches in 2006, and even think it was at my friend Justin's house on a visit to Maine. But because I have no written record of it I cannot be entirely sure.)

The first time I saw it, I was heartsick after a relationship I was very hopeful about had ended. (It was a short relationship, but that didn't mean I wasn't hopeful about it.) So I think although I found it beautiful that first time, I also found it a little hard to take -- a little too painful at that time. If I did see it a few years later, by then I think I was in a more promising, longer-term happy relationship, so maybe by then I could finally fully embrace it.

In 2011, it was the first year of my older son's life, so my heart was very full at that time. And the movie found quite a nice home there.

In 2023, I am happy and content, but perhaps being on the verge of turning 50 means that some of the emotions of my youth have dulled a bit. Enough, maybe, to roll my eyes a bit at the number of times the word "love" is used in a film, without a hint of irony.

But again, I say all this still feeling a rush of splendor over the sense of place Luhrmann establishes in that Paris of 1899, in that bohemian quarter of Montmartre where artists pursued earnest ideals and yes, love could blossom under the intoxication of it all. The movie is a master class on production design and setting the scene. If I had to choose a theme for a casino in Las Vegas, I might just choose Moulin Rouge. I don't say that, of course, to undermine or belittle it. If you haven't been to Vegas, I'll just say that you can dream yourself away into a casino that has been designed according to a great theme with all the details gotten just right. The snapshot of this Paris that Luhrmann gave us has that sort of potential. 

Okay, in August I will move on to Australia, which I have not seen since I moved to Australia. We'll see if I think more or less of the movie as a result.

Baz Jazz Hands: William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet

This is the second in a bi-monthly 2023 series revisiting the six films of director Baz Luhrmann, on the heels of Elvis finishing in my top ten last year.

As soon as I started watching William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, I was struck by the fact that it was a forerunner, in some ways, for two other films I love -- in fact, two future #1s. 

Which means maybe I just wasn't ready for it yet in 1996.

Oh, I didn't dislike Baz Luhrmann's second feature film, the first I had seen at that time. But I do remember feeling a bit irritated by its style, and by some of the histrionic displays of emotion by Leonardo DiCaprio. In fact, as I was watching last night, I asked myself the following chicken-or-the-egg question: "Do I think of Romeo & Juliet as one of Shakespeare's lesser tragedies because of DiCaprio's histrionics, or do I find DiCaprio histrionic because I think of Romeo & Juliet as one of Shakespeare's lesser tragedies?"

I think there's evidence of this being a lesser tragedy, at least from the plot side. Romeo & Juliet is not a play I've seen over and over again like I have with Hamlet (my favorite) or Macbeth (the one that seems to have been remade the most recently, plus I've also seen two older versions within the last five years). So each new exposure to Romeo & Juliet is a reminder of the plot, or lack thereof. 

I didn't mind that I'd chosen this viewing for the night before a four-day weekend, when my brain was dead from two really busy weeks at work. (I should say, it's a four-day weekend for most people -- for me, the weekend lasts until a week from Tuesday, as I am going to Vietnam for a resort holiday. I should probably tell you more about that, but not today.) I didn't mind the timing of the viewing because a) I already knew the basic story, so little failures to parse the dialogue would not make a difference, and b) it doesn't seem that there really is much of a story.

Unlike, as a point of comparison, all the minute twists and turns in the outlook of characters in Hamlet, as well as some really interesting plot mechanics, Romeo & Juliet seems like it can be primarily broken down as such: Boy and girl meet and fall in love. Their families hate each other. Girl arranged to marry dopey guy she hates, so pretends to kill herself to escape. Boy thinks she's really killed herself so then kills himself. Girl sees he's killed himself so really kills herself.

Unless I missed them, there don't seem to be a lot of interesting digressions from this. The characters on each side of the feud exist merely to dramatize the intensity of the feud. A couple characters (Mercutio and Tybalt) are killed near the mid-point of the story, but the only effect of that is really to yet further intensify the feud.

Am I oversimplifying Romeo & Juliet, which, to its credit, does contain some of Shakespeare's most widely quoted text? Perhaps. But last night's viewing did nothing to improve that general impression of the material.

It did make me realize, though, how much of a debt my #1 film of 2000 owed to it -- and how it had some probably more coincidental echoes in my #1 film of 1997.

Michael Almereyda's 2000 version of Hamlet, the one where Ethan Hawke gives the "To be or not to be" speech in a Blockbuster video, was a huge success for me, as I went on to name it my best of that year. And to be certain, I had already seen William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet at that time.

What the passage of four years apparently made me forget was that this movie has exactly the same framing device as Hamlet, which is a television newscaster reading the opening and closing lines of the play, functioning as sort of a Greek chorus -- though it's dialogue that would belong to an actual character in each play (I'm just not going to look that up right now to tell you who). 

When I saw this transpiring in Romeo + Juliet, I was shocked at the directness of how Almereyda ripped off what Luhrmann was doing here. I mean, any modern adaptation of Shakespeare, which both of these are, might be inclined to use a television newscaster as part of the proceedings. But the fact that both films begin and end with it as well? Perhaps critics raked Almereyda over the coals for this at the time, but if so, I didn't hear it. (Granted, it wasn't as easy in 2000 to read all the reviews you could possibly want to read about a movie you loved. I believe this was before the invention of Rotten Tomatoes.)

That's the most obvious way Hamlet is indebted to Romeo + Juliet, but what about a less obvious way, that you'd call a coincidence if both of the films were being produced simultaneously. Actress Diane Venora appears in both films, here as Juliet's mother Gloria, there as Hamlet's mother Gertrude. I almost feel like Luhrmann might have cast her just to be cheeky, since her last name is Venora and the play takes place "in fair Verona." Maybe Luhrmann is a fan of word jumbles. Almereyda seems almost certainly to have cast her in order to evoke Luhrmann's film -- or at least because that film gave him evidence she could do this sort of material.

The second point of comparison that I couldn't help notice was with Titanic, though this likely falls more into the category of coincidental.

It made me realize, possibly for the first time, that there is a real Romeo & Juliet quality to Jack and Rose's relationship in Titanic. Sure the similarity became obvious to me because DiCaprio played both Romeo and Jack, but there are other elements that solidify that similarity. For one, Rose being rich and Jack being poor is a similar sort of "opposites attract" scenario that informs their Montague-Capulet style pairing. But then there are also similarities with the way their romance develops, including scenes of going hand in hand to run around corners and evade the pursuit of the people who would stop them. Even the element of suicide is common between them, as you recall that Rose is considering jumping off the back of the ship at the time Jack meets her.

One other similarity I could not ignore. Although Paul Rudd technically plays the role of Romeo's romantic rival, Paris (Dave Paris, ha ha), Paris is a bit of a drip and doesn't much factor in to the story. (And what a babyface version of Rudd!) Romeo's real antagonist, whom he eventually kills, is Tybalt, played by John Leguizamo. I couldn't help notice a physical similarity between Leguizamo and Jack's rival in Titanic, played by Billy Zane. Imagine them in your mind and you'll see what I mean. (By the way, as many times as I've seen Titanic -- I want to say it's about six -- I had to look up his character's name just now. Caledon Hockley? That doesn't sound right.)

Of course, the real similarities are between this and Luhrmann's future work. Naturally it's easy to see similarities to his very next film, Moulin Rouge!, which also includes an illicit tragic romance where the central pair are trying to evade a romantic rival. Some of the most "in your face" aspects of Romeo + Juliet from a style perspective are just getting warmed up for Moulin Rouge! Then the film is also a reminder of the future The Great Gatsby, as there are big parties here that resemble the big parties there -- plus of course both films star DiCaprio. (I caught myself wondering what Luhrmann might have done as the director of last year's Babylon, instead of Damien Chazelle. Would certainly have had a lot more heart.)

To be clear, the style elements that maybe didn't work for me in 1996 do in fact work for me now. In fact, I think they are an essential part of what I've come to call this series: Baz Jazz Hands. If I didn't like the choices Luhrmann made with his camera, with his editing, with his anachronisms, etc., I likely wouldn't be doing a series like this at all.

I have to come back to DiCaprio's histrionics before I close things out for today.

I may be overstating this a little bit. DiCaprio has always been a good actor, even back then, and I suspect any tendency to turn things up to 11 was the result of a direct request from his director. His screaming of "I am fortune's fool!" is something I always think of as a telling moment from this film, and I think I thought it was all a bit too much back then. Which, as suggested earlier, may just be my notion that the whole play is a bit overwrought. 

There are really only a few moments like this, and I do think DiCaprio does a better job than Claire Danes as Juliet. She's not bad, but I did think she seemed a little uncomfortable with some of the dialogue. I do remember really swooning for her at this age, probably because she reminds me a little bit of a former girlfriend, just around the face. (As opposed to, you know, her elbows.) But I also noticed a moment when she does this sort of choking cry that seems a bit off -- and I noticed it in particular because Danes has this really over-the-top crying seen in Fleishman is in Trouble. It's not that her crying strikes me as artificial, but maybe just that few actresses are willing to "cry ugly" the way Danes is willing to "cry ugly."

So as not to leave you with a negative impression of what I thought about these two, I do find their scenes together to be incredibly romantic -- a function of both their chemistry, and Luhrmann's expert ability to conjure romance on screen. 

Okay I clearly had a lot more to say about this movie than maybe I thought I would going in.

In June I'll be back with what has historically been my favorite Luhrmann film, Moulin Rouge! We'll see if it still holds that crown after my first viewing since 2011.

Baz Jazz Hands: Strictly Ballroom

This is the first in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the six films of director Baz Luhrmann.

Twenty-twenty three is starting to seem, quite early on, like the year where I'm regurgitating a lot of previous output. Last month's first entry in my monthly series, Audient Classics, involved revisiting Sherlock Jr. -- which I had seen and written about as part of my 2016 silent movie series, No Audio Audient. It was the second movie in that series.

Now, it's the third movie of 2014's Australian Audient that I'm revisiting. Strictly Ballroom came up as part of that series, and I wrote my thoughts on it then. And even though that's nearly nine years ago, I feel like my takeaways this time will be very similar. As we did with Sherlock Jr., I'll write it up first and see what I said back then after the fact.

I'm worried I'm going too heavy in that regard in 2023 and I'm going to regret it. Of the 30 films I expect to watch in 2023 as part of four recurring series -- that would be 12 for one monthly series, and six each for three bi-monthly series -- only six of those films will be new to me, those being the three each from Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion in Campion Champion and Bigelow Pro. Well, I do tend to rewatch a lot of movies each year -- 26 former #1s in 2022, as you know. I guess my rewatches will be just a little more curated than usual this year, though I may find myself growing weary of it sooner than I thought -- especially if I wrote about those movies on here the first time.

Well, let's dive into Strictly Ballroom and see how we go. I don't expect there to be a lot of Baz Jazz Hands overlap after this, since I don't recall writing about Baz Luhrmann's other films, though I've certainly mentioned my love for Moulin Rouge! at least in passing.

In addition to seeming like a blueprint for a number of future Luhrmann movies -- Rouge! and The Great Gatsby in particular come to mind -- one thing that really registered to me this time was how Australian this movie is. That's something I would have noted the first time but also would have appreciated more today, after being in the country for nearly ten years, as opposed to the six months I'd been here at the time I first saw it. Certain templates of an Australian male that I've come to know quite well are firmly on display here, certain ways of saying things that strike me as so uniquely Australian. There's a scene where the lead, Scott Hastings -- played by a man, Paul Mercurio, who is today a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly -- asks another dancer, who is also Scott's best friend, what he thought of Scott's new dance steps. The friend, played by the wonderfully named actor Pip Mushin, thrice states "I don't know," in this particular way where each one-syllable word has at least three syllables, yet it all comes out with a sort of dismissive rapidity that just made me crack up.

You might argue that this is a template for another Luhrmann movie, Australia, since these are his only two films set in his native country. But this is a look at a "real" sort of Australia, even as it is drenched in fantasy, whereas Australia represents a very cinematic sort of Australia, the type an outsider might make. I'll probably have more thoughts on that in August, when that movie comes up on the schedule.

How real? In the opening scene we see Scott and his soon-to-be former partner competing in the Waratah Championships, which just sounds so parochial. Waratah means a number of different things in Australia -- it's the name of a plant, and there's a place called Waratah Bay here in Victoria -- but the name is meant to indicate a little backwater competition, even though the dancers here are considered candidates to take home the coveted top prize at the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix Dancing Championship. Which in its way could not seem further away from Waratah.

Even though it shows Luhrmann's more modest origins, before he became "Baz Jazz Hands," the movie does reflect a certain ambition in terms of its soundtrack. It uses Strauss' "Blue Danube Waltz" at the beginning, then later scores a key sequence of romantic escalation between Scott and his dance partner/love interest Fran (Tara Morice) to a cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time." (Sung by Morice, I am now learning.) The movie also features as its theme song "Love is in the Air" by Australian disco star John Paul Young, which I think I always thought was a Burt Bacharach song.

The movie also really showcases Luhrmann's tendency to view the world through a sort of warped, fish eye lens. Some extreme closeups of characters reminded me of things we might see from Terry Gilliam, specifically the scene involving Jim Broadbent in Time Bandits. (That may be no coincidence, as Broadbent would go on to appear in Moulin Rouge!) Things like this would have registered Luhrmann as a filmmaker with a particular aesthetic specificity, the kind that might win him a Shakespeare adaptation starring major Hollywood actors his next time out.

Though of course, the swoony romance itself would have been a bigger factor in making him the logical interpreter of Romeo & Juliet. As I tend to be in most Luhrmann films, I was really taken with the sweetness and earnestness he brings us in the development of the feelings between Scott and Fran. It's obvious they're going to get there because that's the sort of movie this is, but Luhrmann was even back then capable of framing iconic moments to enrich that journey. 

One last random observation. The lead, Paul Mercurio, is almost a dead ringer for fellow Australian Guy Pearce. Although I don't see a lot of mentions of their similarity on the internet -- just one query about whether Pearce was in Strictly Ballroom -- don't tell me you don't see it:

I've always thought Australian men have a tendency to look a certain way that signals they are Australian, which I can't really define, but which I know when I see. This could be an extreme example of that ... or just a coincidence.

Okay, let's see what I said the last time I wrote about Strictly Ballroom.

Some similar sentiments, though maybe not as many as I thought. I remembered writing about the technique where Luhrmann pans from a lower to a higher floor of a building (or vice versa), a technique with echoes in later films, so I specifically didn't mention it this time, though I did still enjoy that quite a bit. This paragraph stuck out to me in particular for repeating some of the sentiments I've just written, but is also notable for its failure of fact-checking:

"It's interesting to see how much of the Luhrmann flourishes already exist here. One is what we will call the "frenetic close-up," where Luhrmann swoops his camera in at the unnaturally frenzied face of a character, making them appear almost grotesque. Think Jim Broadbent dancing in Moulin Rouge! Another is his earnest repurposing of pop music, as (cover versions of) both "Love is in the Air" and Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors" are used prominently and to emotionally cathartic effect."

As it turns out, the Cyndi Lauper cover was not "True Colors" but rather "Time After Time," which came out around the same time and was also a ballad, so it was easy to confuse them. And the "Love is in the Air" that appears here is not a cover, but actually the original.

Okay, in April I'll catch William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet for the first time in 27 years. I certainly won't have any old thoughts to compare that one to, though I am currently watching Claire Danes in the TV show Fleishman is in Trouble, so that might make an interesting point of comparison. 

King Darren & Baz Jazz Hands

Busy January, busy February.

And busy April, June, August, October and December.

In 2022, I cut down to just one bi-monthly series so as not to have too many movies that were a recurring obligation. That worked out well in a year in which I also rewatched all 26 of my previous #1s.

Apparently I've got space on my schedule in 2023, because I'm not only going back to two bi-monthly series -- I'm going up to three. 

Three bi-monthly series, Vance? What do you think there are, 18 months in a calendar year?

Nope I don't. I'll just have to do two of them in the same six months.

When I saw Elvis last June, and enjoyed it as much as I did (ultimately naming it my #7 of the year), it occurred to me -- not for the first time -- that I just plain like Baz Luhrmann. None of his films are failures to me, even Australia. I owned it with pride: I'm a Baz Luhrmann fan.

And because he doesn't make movies all that often, it also occurred to me that he has exactly six features to his name.

Then and there I decided that in 2023, I would rewatch Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!, Australia, The Great Gatsby and Elvis, having seen only Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby more than once.

Since it's been more than 20 years since I saw Romeo + Juliet, which I didn't love at the time, that one in particular is one I'm interested in revisiting through the prism of being a confirmed Luhrmann fan, to see my potentially differing perspective on it now. 

That would have been all done and dusted -- to use the appropriately Australian term in a discussion of Baz Luhrmann -- until Darren Aronofsky came along.

When Aronofsky became the first director to ever direct two films I named #1, I knew I had to appreciate him in some way the following year.

Now, Aronofsky does not have exactly six feature films. He has eight. 

But two of those are movies I've seen quite recently. I of course rewatched The Wrestler last June for the project of revisiting all my #1s -- only five days before Elvis, in fact. And The Fountain wasn't long before that in February of 2021.

So I'll skip those two and watch Pi, Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, Noah, mother! and The Whale -- the latter of which finally opens in Australian cinemas today (you can read my review, at long last, here). 

There's a similarity with Luhrmann in that only two of the six I'm watching are films I've seen more than once, those being Requiem and mother! But I am pretty familiar with those, having seen mother! three times and Requiem at least three, probably four. 

My third mother! viewing was in late 2019, so after this series I will have seen all eight of Aronofsky's films in the 2020s, and will have a good up-to-the-moment grasp of his full filmography, to better assess just how much his work means to me. If two of his films have climbed all the way up the charts, it may be that there are things in the movies of his I appreciated less that I should be appreciating more. (Though given my love for the two #1s and the two I've seen at least three times, there's already a lot of love for Darren Aronofsky going around.)

I considered combining these two series into one monthly post, but I think I'll handle them separately, so I won't be forced to watch them in close proximity to give you my freshest possible thoughts. I'll call one series "King Darren," because Aronofsky has now proven himself through the stats, and I'll call the other series "Baz Jazz Hands," because there's no better metaphor for Luhrmann's filmmaking style than jazz hands.

Though of course there are things the men have in common, other than me liking their work. They're both men who make big choices that could be considered confrontational, whether that's on the aggressive side (rubbing your nose in the harrowing effects of drug addition) or the playful side (injecting modern pop songs into 1899 Paris). Neither is content to play it safe. 

Meanwhile, I will of course still be watching the films I haven't seen of Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow in my other bi-monthly series, Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro, which will be running as normally scheduled in January, March, May, July, September and November. 

So if you need anything from me in February, April, June, August, October and December, and I snap at you, just remember: I've got a lot of movies to watch. 

Starting with Pi and Strictly Ballroom this month.