Which backs get lashed

Having kept my love for A Ghost Story entirely out of print -- though if you had listened to this podcast, you would have heard me rave about it -- I was somewhat taken aback when the first comment to greet my year-end list on Facebook was the following:

"Casey Affleck should BE a ghost. Fade into nothing. Scare people when he pops up so they run away."

As this comment came within five minutes of posting, when I was still in that delirious high of publishing the end result of "my year's work," I immediately felt a pit in my stomach.

Was I wrong to look past the involvement of Casey Affleck in this movie in giving it my highest honor for the year?

I knew this person was not trying to be funny, either, despite her at least somewhat playful use of the extended ghost metaphor. This is a woman I have consistently seen post about #MeToo, who does not consider this a laughing matter. (I mean, I'd hope no one would consider it a laughing matter, but this woman most certainly does not.)

So I had a momentary crisis about whether I had failed in my responsibility to an important social cause in completely disregarding Affleck's participation in the movie as a relevant factor in assessing it. Should I so actively promote something that has a genuine creep on screen for much of its running time, even if he is behind a sheet for most of it?

I've written a number of times in the past about my general philosophy -- I'm sure there are exceptions -- of separating the art from the artist. I mean, I've seen Woody Allen's films every year for five years running now, which is almost certainly my longest such streak in the man's entire career. I believe if a movie has something useful to add to the conversation, or may be doing something interesting, I should see it and grapple with it, even if the person who made it is not a very good person. There are a lot of not very good people making movies.

But I must admit I did not even have this internal debate when it came to Affleck and A Ghost Story. I know Affleck was guilty of some shady things, some awful things, on the set of I'm Still Here. Women are right to be skeeved out by him, and men should be sure he does not go near their daughters. Still, and maybe this is just because I did not pore over the details of the accusations against him, I didn't realize he was quite as worthy of being loathed as the level he is loathed. Especially as more and more names have come out of more and more people doing terrible things -- in many cases, worse things -- the accusations against Affleck have further receded in terms of how shocked I feel I should be by them.

And yet this woman came forward with an implicit scolding of me for supporting an Affleck project, reminding me just how angry people are at Affleck -- at how they have pulled him out of what has increasingly become an indistinguishable noise about sexual harassment, and targeted him specifically for their hatred and scorn.

I guess part of the disconnect for me is that he just won an Oscar last year, and I kind of feel like people already knew these things about him when Manchester by the Sea came out, though perhaps I am off on my chronology there. I feel like last year would have been the time to punish him, yet "we" did not. "We" awarded him with the year's highest acting honor, because he was just so damn good. (A textbook example of separating the art and the artist.)

In fact, I find myself wondering if Affleck will be allowed to hand out the best actress Oscar this year. I'm kind of suspecting no. Though maybe it would actually be a better punishment for him to throw him out there and see what kind of reception he gets than to keep him out of the show entirely.

So it seems especially strange to me that A Ghost Story should now be bearing the brunt of a delayed disgust with Affleck. Is it because people felt like they could dismiss A Ghost Story as a twee exercise, not a serious film, whereas Manchester by the Sea was something they should more obviously reckon with?

But I also know that this is not an unreasonable viewpoint, or one held by only a few people. My wife has so far boycotted A Ghost Story because of Affleck's involvement (though I hold out hope that I'll eventually get to show it to her). Another person said to me, regarding Ghost Story, "I also struggled with Casey Affleck in it in a way I wouldn't have if I'd liked the movie."

So I guess Affleck can set you off on the wrong foot with the movie, or, if you aren't liking it, become "the lightning rod," to quote that friend again.

What I guess I wonder is why we're not hearing people go on rants about Baby Driver because Kevin Spacey was in it or rants about The Disaster Artist because James Franco was in it. Some of that may be out there, but I haven't seen it.

Granted, a lot of that has to do with the timing. Most people saw and formed their opinions of those movies before the person in question was revealed to be a creep, though I can't imagine people didn't have suspicions about Franco. Maybe the backlash for things can't come retroactively, any more than you can say "Ugh, you like American Beauty? How dare you, Kevin Spacey is in that." Though it does seem to be the case that the timing of the accusations against Franco played a role in why he was nominated for a Golden Globe but not an Oscar. (Not that nominations are actually done like this, but I like to imagine the Academy hastily switching in Denzel Washington, for his performance in a movie nobody saw and which is supposed to be bad, in place of Franco.)

Of course, I'm not the only one supporting A Ghost Story, so I have company in my failure to punish the movie for Affleck's transgressions. Two critics I like very much and listen to on podcasts regularly, Michael Phillips and Matt Singer, had it in their top three for the year, and in glancing at one of those websites that compiles best-of lists from around the world, I saw at least one other where it was at the tippy top, like it was for me. I suspect there are more.

Still, I can't imagine I can go into a new ranking year with the same blase attitude about whether the people I'm watching on screen are shitheads or not. #MeToo is too important to not pay it some heed. So maybe I'll just skip Woody Allen's movie this year. I'm sure I won't miss much.

More than anything, I hope this is no long-term blight on David Lowery's beautiful film, in which Rooney Mara is also a blameless participant deserving of much praise. A Ghost Story deserves to be a film for the ages, and I hope that the incidental toxicity Affleck brought to the project does not keep it from being one.

And I also hope one day I can show it to my wife.

The wrong year for Woody

As Time magazine names the Me Too movement it's Person of the Year -- in what functions as a direct rebuke to the guy who says he was their first choice, Donald Trump -- it's certainly the wrong year to be supporting Woody Allen's latest project.

And yet I am going to see Wonder Wheel tonight ... just as I saw Cafe Society last year, Irrational Man the year before that, Magic in the Moonlight the year before that and Blue Jasmine the year before that. (At least I missed two of three movies before that.)

Then again, the only one of those movies I actually paid for was Blue Jasmine. Magic in the Moonlight was on a plane, Irrational Man was with my critics cards and Cafe Society was a press screening. Tonight I will again be using my critics card.

The thing is, I really liked two of those movies (Moonlight and Society), sort of liked one of them (Jasmine) and only hated one of them (Irrational). It's probably Woody's turn to make another movie I hate. We'll see.

What keeps me coming back is not merely, or at least mostly, the possibility of something good. It's that I find Allen's a career that's really easy to write about. This will be his third movie I am reviewing for ReelGood -- a benchmark that's been easy to obtain because he makes one movie per year, and no one else is that keen to review his movies. So I've got my talking points down (getting old, accused of sexual misdeeds, makes one movie per year) and I can just slot this particular movie into wherever he stands within his own personal trajectory.

I am conscious of the fact that I am continuing to give Allen my attention, if not my money. But then, I am always a guy who tries to separate the art from the artist. Or, if I'm punishing the artist's art because I don't like the artist, I'm more likely to punish the artist for tweeting too much about his movie (James Gunn in Guardians 2) than for sleeping with and marrying his stepdaughter.

That's pretty fucked up when you look at it like that.

Anyway.

I probably should have saved this post until after I'd seen the movie, but tomorrow will be time to post about Star Wars: The Last Jedi on this blog -- as I am seeing it tomorrow night at midnight!

The battle for the biggest output

When a director releases two movies in quick succession, you tend to take notice. It usually says something about how prolific he or she is.

Not every director, mind you. Steven Spielberg had two movies come out a week apart in December, but they were his first two movies as director since the disaster known as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008, so in that case it really was just an accident of timing.

With Steven Soderbergh, it's pure volume of cinematic output.

Soderbergh had a movie in September (Contagion, which I just watched last night) and now one in January (Haywire). He's clearly making them as fast as his body will allow. (Without the content itself suffering, apparently.) It's not the first such period of intense activity of his career, either. Remember, this was the guy who got nominated for best director for two different films in the year 2000 (Erin Brockovich and Traffic, the latter of which netted him the Oscar).

Soderbergh's frenzied moviemaking rate made me think of other directors who are constantly going behind the camera, and three other names immediately jumped to mind: Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and Michael Winterbottom. Allen's and Eastwood's movies usually make headlines; Winterbottom's don't necessarily, because they're a bit more out of the mainstream. But these are three guys who are constantly delivering new features, presumably on or ahead of schedule, since that would be the only way for them to keep pace with themselves. True to form, each had a film in 2011 (Midnight in Paris, J. Edgar and The Trip).

So I thought it would be interesting to see who's truly the most prolific of the foursome, and I'd love to hear your suggestions for which others might belong in the conversation. (Current directors only, please -- that eliminates all the hacks who made four or five movies a year back in the studio system days.) I have my suspicions, but as I write this, I really don't know who will take the prize.

In order to do this, we'll need to examine each director's career, starting with the year that the least experienced director in the group released his first feature. We'll look at their filmographies from that moment onward, and may have to make some judgment calls if there are films whose status as a feature is borderline. For our purposes, documentaries are considered features because they run at feature length. Before we even start I know there's an asterisk with Winterbottom's The Trip, which was a TV series edited into a feature. However, you could argue that a TV series might take even longer to film than a feature, so Winterbottom should get credit for it and then some.

It turns out that the newest to the game is in fact Winterbottom, whose first theatrical feature was 1995's Butterfly Kiss. (Or 1995's Go Now -- I'm having a hard time telling which one was released first.) He'd made TV movies before then, but his first feature wasn't until 1995.

So starting with the release year 1995 and onward, here's how it looks for each of our contenders:

Michael Winterbottom

Butterfly Kiss (1995)
Go Now (1995)
Jude (1996)
Welcome to Sarajevo (1997)
I Want You (1998)
Wonderland (1999)
With or Without You (1999)
The Claim (2000)
24 Hour Party People (2002)
In This World (2003)
Code 46 (2003)
9 Songs (2004)
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2006)
The Road to Guantanamo (2006)
A Mighty Heart (2007)
Genova (2007)
The Shock Doctrine (2009)
The Killer Inside Me (2010)
The Trip (2011)

That's 19 titles in 17 years, nine of which I've seen. It appears he has two movies due out in 2012, one of which premiered at last year's Toronto International Film Festival (Trishna), one of which is about scheduled to shoot (Bailout), I guess with the intention of getting released this year. But he loses out due to the timing of this post. (Sorry, I'm not counting the film festival premiere.)

Steven Soderbergh

The Underneath (1995)
Gray's Anatomy (1996)
Schizopolis (1996)
Out of Sight (1998)
The Limey (1999)
Erin Brockovich (2000)
Traffic (2000)
Ocean's Eleven (2001)
Full Frontal (2002)
Solaris (2002)
Ocean's Twelve (2004)
Bubble (2005)
The Good German (2006)
Ocean's Thirteen (2007)
Che Part 1 (2008)
Che Part 2 (2008)
The Girlfriend Experience (2009)
The Informant! (2009)
And Everything is Going Fine (2010)
Contagian (2011)
Haywire (2012)

And Soderbergh takes the lead with 21 films since 1995, 15 of which I've seen. I'm glad he didn't pull ahead of Winterbottom by only one, because I had to make the judgment call to split Che into two films. They were released that way, with separate admissions in most cases, and they contain over four hours of content in radically different styles. If that's not two movies, I don't know what is. (Though since they were filmed at the same time with the same crew, you could just as compellingly make the argument that they should be one film, if in this context you are quantifying a "film" as a distinct project in a distinct location that requires a certain amount of the director's undivided attention. So many ways to interpret the same information.) Incidentally, Soderbergh's Magic Mike is also expected later in 2012, with something called The Side Effects due in 2013.

Clint Eastwood
The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
Absolute Power (1997)
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)
True Crime (1999)
Space Cowboys (2000)
Blood Work (2002)
Mystic River (2003)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Flags of Our Fathers (2006)
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)
Changeling (2008)
Gran Torino (2008)
Invictus (2009)
Hereafter (2010)
J. Edgar (2011)

Well, Eastwood has let me down. I guess he has only been hugely prolific since 2008, releasing five films since the fall of that year. His 15 movies in 17 years -- 11 of which I've seen -- leave him at a pace of less than one a year. Still, not bad for an 81-year-old, especially when many of his films are painted on a huge canvas and seem to require a great deal of logistics. IMDB doesn't list a 2012 movie for him, so either someone charged with updating his page is slacking, or the man is finally giving his weary bones a short rest.

Woody Allen

Mighty Aphrodite (1995)
Everyone Says I Love You (1996)
Deconstructing Harry (1997)
Celebrity (1998)
Sweet and Lowdown (1999)
Small Time Crooks (2000)
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)
Hollywood Ending (2002)
Anything Else (2003)
Melinda and Melinda (2004)
Match Point (2005)
Scoop (2006)
Cassandra's Dream (2007)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
Whatever Works (2009)
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)
Midnight in Paris (2011)

My suspicion was that Woody would be the most prolific. That's why exercises like this are great. Turns out he's only third most prolific, with 17 movies in the 17 years, 13 of which I've seen. But Woody does get a special commendation for being the only one on this list to make at least one movie (exactly one) in every year since 1995. If I were going only by U.S. theatrical release dates, Cassandra's Dream was released in January of 2008, leaving him with two movies in 2008 and none in 2007. But it played a number of places around Europe in 2007 and is generally credited with that release year. And sure enough, Allen's 18th film in the last 18 years (Nero Fiddled) is due out later this year. If you want to know how far back this streak goes, you have to go all the way back to 1981 to find a year in which Allen did not direct a film.

So our champion is: Steven Soderbergh! The guy who inspired the topic in the first place.

Take a vacation, will you, Steven? You're making everyone else look bad.

Drawn to a certain look

My wife and I watched most of the season of Glee this year.

I'll admit it. In part because the way we stopped watching makes a funny story.

It was one of the last couple episodes of the year, and the "dorky kids" in the glee club are trying to become less dorky, or something. So they choreograph some kind of rebellious song-and-dance cover of M.C. Hammer's "U Can't Touch This," which they stage in the school library. At that exact moment, we couldn't take it anymore. We shut off the episode, deleted it from the DVR, deleted the remaining episodes from the DVR, and deleted the series recording. That was that.

But at some point, I was reading up on Glee, and found out that its creator, Ryan Murphy, had also written and directed the big-screen adaptation of Augusten Burroughs' acclaimed memoirs, Running With Scissors. No one thought the movie was so hot, but it was one of those ones I knew I would see, eventually. Last night, "eventually" rolled around, which is why I'm writing this post today. (And for the record, I liked the movie better than the consensus opinion of it.)

At the time I read about Murphy's role in Scissors, I said, "Oh yeah, that makes sense -- the guy who plays the gay kid on Glee also played Augusten Burroughs in Running With Scissors." Ryan Murphy was involved in both, and creative types tend to like to collaborate on multiple projects.

Except that Chris Colfer, who plays Kurt on Glee, was not in Running With Scissors. That was Joseph Cross. Here they are, with Colfer on top, and Cross on the bottom. (And no, that's not a gay joke, even though both actors play gay characters in their respective shows/films. Colfer is actually gay, and I can't tell the status of Cross, though he also played a gay character in Milk.)


Okay, maybe it's not an overwhelming similarity when you look at them side by side. But when we finished watching the movie last night, I told my wife that this was the guy who had created Glee, and she admitted that she'd spent the whole movie thinking that Joseph Cross looked like the kid on Glee. Unprompted from me, mind you.

Murphy is also gay, so it's not a stretch that he sees something about himself in both Augusten Burroughs and Kurt Hummel. No doubt he identifies with Kurt, as he was an openly gay high school student who sang in the choir. And since he also saw a therapist as a younger man, it seems pretty clear he also identifies with the scarred upbringing of Augusten Burroughs, who was legally adopted by his therapist at the promptings of his own mother.

Murphy is certainly not alone in casting similar-type actors over and over, but instead of giving you a thorough compendium of the others who display this tendency, I'll just mention one: Woody Allen. And in his case, it seems to be modeled after his own life, as well.

Everyone knows that Woody Allen became obsessed with Scarlett Johansson in recent years, as she appeared in three of his films between 2005 and 2008 (Match Point, Scoop and Vicky Cristina Barcelona.) It's logical to see his love affair with Soon-Yi Previn mirrored in his obsession with Johansson, though of course Previn and Johannson look nothing alike. However, when it became clear that Allen had to eventually cast another actress in order not to seem fixated on ScarJo to the exclusion of all others, he did cast another young blonde: Evan Rachel Wood, in Whatever Works.

Whatever Works is a useful film to examine in this discussion for other reasons: Woody also cast the next best thing to himself as the star of the film, Larry David. Clearly, David's character is a role Allen would have ordinarily played, and it's not like David is such a spring chicken relative to Allen -- he's only 11 years younger. But maybe Allen was trying to deflect accusations that it was just another wish fulfillment fantasy of a really old man bedding a very young girl -- which is what happens in Whatever Works -- by using David instead of himself.