Great word, no?
A little Hollywood history. In 1949, Ingrid Bergman was one of the biggest Hollywood stars and one of the world's most acclaimed actresses. She had seen two of Italian director Roberto Rossellini's films (including Open City) and was a huge fan. She wrote him a letter, expressing interest in coming to Italy and making a movie with him. Rossellini accepted and cast the actress (who had had multiple affairs before and a close friendship with Hemingway) in 1950's Stromboli, about a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage on a volcanic Sicilian island. Almost immediately, the two began an affair. Bergman wanted out of her marriage, out of Hollywood. Bergman left her husband and 10-year old daughter, married Rossellini, gave birth to a son, and then twin daughters (including Isabella). She moved to Italy to live with Roberto until 1956, making five movies with him. Eventually, she returned to Hollywood, winning an Oscar for 1956's Anastasia. Moralists in America were furious, unforgiving towards Bergman. She was denounced on the floor of the Senate. Longtime fans accused her of immorality. The below photo of her was done by Life photographer Gordon Parks.
Ingrid Bergman at Stromboli, 1949
Parks was a talented guy. Parks was an African-American, born in Kansas in 1912. Through the 1960s, he worked as a photographer, often depicting rural poverty, crime. He was hired by the Farm Security Administration in the early 1940s to document conditions of rural poverty to help drum up support for FDR's New Deal programs. Among the most well-known of these was his 1942 American Gothic, a take on the iconic Grant Wood work.
The subject of the photo was Ella Watson, a black charwoman (basically, a cleaning woman or maid) whom Parks spent a month with, getting to know. He spent time in her tiny apartment, met her family, went to church with her, and really got to watch how she made do with her low-wage existence.
Parks became an in-demand photographer after that and worked at Life for more than twenty years (about 1948-1972). He photographed celebrities and film stars, a slum in Brazil, people and events associated with the civil rights movement. He also directed films, wrote novels and memoirs and screenplays. I had to read his 1963 novel The Learning Tree in high school English class. It was a sensitive, vivid, moving coming-of-age story about a black youth whose childhood tragedies and obstacles resembled Parks' own. Parks directed the film version of The Learning Tree in 1969, becoming the first African-American to direct a film for a major studio. (On a sidenote: Candace Bushnell, the author of Sex and the City, moved to NYC from Connecticut at the age of eighteen. She arrived in NYC and moved in soon after with Parks, then 60(!),whom she dated for a period; he was her first boyfriend in the city.)
Parks, who was a composer as well, also the film director of the hugely popular Shaft, was also the author of a somewhat controversial article for Life on a family living in a Brazil slum, focusing on son Flavio, suffering from asthma. The photos brought about a huge swelling of support from the magazine's readers, who donated $30,000 to improve the family's living conditions and pay for Flavio's medical treatments.
Parks died in 2006 at the age of 93.
You can't really praise a film's B-movie pleasures anymore. That's probably because there are no real B-movies. How can there be a B-movie when an average budget is, what, 30-50 million? A film either comes to the theater or it goes to DVD; there are no small, junky little films anymore, no smallness. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, unfortunately titled, sure would have filled out a 1960s twin-bill pretty nicely. It has modest pleasures, indifferent acting (James Franco seems freeze-dried and baked, Freida Pinto has little to no presence), and, of course, some truly nifty performance capture photography. This is when an actor records actions and movements, eye flutterings, head rotations, finger movements. This behavior is used that to animate digital character models in computer animation. In the film, Andy Serkis (there are murmurs of Oscar hype in the Best Supporting Actor category) had his behavior and movements electronically tracked and then translated, using CGI, to bring life to the character of Cesar, the ape that leads the revolt. Serkis may be the world's leading artist in performance capture; he was Kong in King Kong, Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films. This film was enjoyably old-fashioned, with rotten villains (Brian Cox & co., who mistreat the apes at a animal facility), chintzy effects (I thought Serkis's performance was kind of precise and broad in equal measures), and absolutely nothing resembling a relationship with the original film.
Taylor Lautner's 15 minutes are probably far from up, but the actor will be little more than a punchline if he keeps giving the kind of vacant, awful performances he does in the silly Abducted. The actor is bad, distractingly bad, as a high school student who realizes that his parents (Jason Isaacs and Maria Bello) aren't, in fact, his real parents. But everyone's bad, really bad: Lily Collins as Lautner's love interest, who races around scenic Pittsburgh with Lautner after the bad guys start chasing the two around because... well, it has something to with a list; Alfred Molina is boring and utterly colorless as the CIA agent in pursuit; Sigourney Weaver keeps a straight face as Lautner's therapist, uttering lines like "I hate balloons" while trying to help Lautner and Collins escape from baddies in an easy-to-get-around hospital; to say Michael Nyqvist is one-dimensional as the Euro-something villain is to give him credit for being richer and more faceted than he is. But, hey, give it up for a fun bad movie. The plot zips along, and if nothing really makes sense, at least my interest didn't flag. Pittsburgh looks nice too, and Lautner has a great body. But it's just sad that director John Singleton (who was the first African American director nominated for an Oscar for Boyz N The Hood seemingly a hundred and ten years ago) has thrown away his career, being as a director-for-hire on terrible scripts like this. But honestly, John Singleton has never really made that good of a movie, although, to come full-circle with this post, he directed the 2000 remake of Gordon Parks's Shaft.
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