After being disappointed by “New York, I Love You,” yet another uneven, inconsistent portmanteau film filled with great talent yet middling results, we got to wondering: what is it about anthology pictures that always manages to almost always deliver inconsistent, uneven and forgettable payoffs. The concept is one that is admittedly fascinating (otherwise we wouldn’t be here) and always attracts us — taking the word’s greatest filmmakers of the time and placing them together with a theme of short vignettes. But the executions are largely haphazard and sometimes embarrassing follies with more misses than hits.
Is it feature-film greats, who no longer have concepts that can exists as shorts? Half-assed ideas that can’t play as 15-minute segments? Off -the-cuff “narratives” that are just a fun, quick palette cleansers, but not serious works? Or is it just sequences without a film and a rudder thanks to the disparate and incongruent voices? There’s never been a classic omnibus ever that we can think of, but we decided to take revisit the “classics” to see what we could find. Here’s Part One. Part two a little bit later this afternoon..
“New York Stories” (1989)
Directors: 3 of them; Woody Allen (“Oedipus Rex”), Martin Scorsese (“Life Lessons”) Francis Ford Coppola (“Life Without Zoe”)
And The Point Was? For three well-known New York directors to take half-baked ideas centering around the Big Apple and fortunately not stretch them past 30 minutes each.
The Best: Martin Scorese’s paean to Procul Harum and the unattainable woman that got away featured a presciently disheveled, pre-meltdown Nick Nolte as a recidivist womanizer/ troubled New York artist who couldn’t really paint unless he was tortured by some aloof muse (a comely Rosanna Arquette in her prime). Again, it might have been just an excuse to play “A Whiter Shade of Pale” about 7 times within 30 minutes, but it was still enjoyable and did retain the Scorsese spark.
The Ok: Allen’s love note to his mam and being a mama’s boy was front and center in “Oedipus Rex,” a lighthearted comedy about a mother disembodied and transported into the ether of New York City after a magic trick goes awry (check the pre-‘Curb’ Larry David-with-hair cameo). She proceeds to be a gigantic apparition over Manhattan announcing embarrassing facts about her son’s personal life that New Yorkers soon become accustomed to; tolerating and then even ignoring her awkward motherly gushing about her son (how cute he was he was as a child and generally airing his dirty laundry). A little bit more high-concept from Woody than we’re used to, but essentially, it was much the same old gag we were used to about neurosis and self-deprecation.
The Worst: Coppola’s ‘Zoe’ about a precocious 12-year-old living in a hotel who slyly manages to convince her separated parents (one being Coppola clan member Talia Shire) to reconcile was not coincidentally made right before “The Godfather: Part III,” i.e., the beginning of the end for his ’90s career (though he’s thankfully resuscitated his artisan affinities of late).
Summary: Nothing these guys really want to put on their highlight reel.
Scorsese’s “Life Lessons”
“Four Rooms” (1995)
The gist: Comprised of four stories, directed by a veritable who’s-who of early 1990’s indie filmmaking all-stars, all linked by a single unlucky bellhop, played by Tim Roth (ill-advisededly channeling Jerry Lewis with one of his sloppiest performances ever). “Gas Food Lodging” helmer Allison Anders directed the enervating Honeymoon Suite segment, “The Missing Ingredient,” about a coven of witches (one of whom is none other than Madonna) that walk around topless and attempt to steal Roth’s man-chum for a wiccan spell. Alexandre Rockwell, director of “In the Soup,” tackled room 404, “The Wrong Man,” which centers around a husband and wife embroiled in some weird-ass roleplaying. Robert Rodriguez delivered a tale about two little kids and a dead body, while his “Grindhouse” partner-in-crime Quentin Tarantino dispatched the self-satisfied Penthouse story.
Best Segment: We’re not sure if this is the best segment, but only one segment still stands out, and it’s Robert Rodriguez’s “The Misbehavers.” In the segment, Antonio Banderas is on his way to a New Year’s Eve party and pays Roth’s hapless bellhop $500 to watch his two little miscreant kids who, fittingly, are also dressed in tuxedos. Banderas warns the kids not to misbehave, but, of course, all hell breaks loose as soon as he leaves — including the discovery of a dead prostitute in the children’s room’s mattress. Rodriguez pulls off the mixture of darkness and wackiness with much more skill than he’d bring to longer projects down the line (“Shorts”). The image of little kids in tuxedos would inspire Rodriguez to create his absurdly successful “Spy Kids” series, with the fourth entry ramping up production soon.
Worst Segment: Tarantino’s plodding and self-indulgent “The Man from Hollywood.” Strike one: Tarantino having a major acting role. Strike two: excessive Bruce Willis mugging. Talky and meandering, even by Tarantino standards, it involves a very serious bet, the loser of said bet having to lose a pinky finger. All critics of Tarantino need to do to shut up a die-hard supporter is remind them of this caustic bit of insider-y nonsense.
Notable: Again, only for it being a class reunion of indie movie darlings. Only two of the four would survive to achieve notable success and accolades, while the other two reside in the “where are they now?” category.
Summary: This movie is a borderline fiasco, a folly of hubris and a mid-1990s Miramax, so drunk on the potential of their young filmmakers that they never stopped to question the stability of the project, or the entertainment value of the stories therein.
Scene: Tim Roth in Tarantino’s “The Man from Hollywood”
“Eros” (2004)
Directors: 3 of them; Michelangelo Antonioni (“The Dangerous Thread of Things”), Steven Soderbergh (“Equilibrium”), Wong Kar-Wai (“The Hand”)
And The Point Was? Three different takes on love (natch).
The Best: Wong Kar-Wai is obviously a master of unrequited love and lust and therefore, “The Hand,” a tale starring Gong-Li as a prostitute who gives such a life-changing handjob it convinces a young man to become a professional seamstress (or something like that) is visually sumptuous (Christopher Doyle again) and rich in atmosphere and balmy mood.
Not Bad: Leave it to cerebral egghead Soderbergh to take a story of lust and convert into a noir-ish 1950s tale about a jittery salesman (Robert Downey Jr.) at his psychoanalyst’s office (Alan Arkin) confessing about an evocative dream about a haunting beautiful red-head (Ele Keats) that strangely morphs and turns on its head by the end.
The Worst: Easily Michelangelo Antonioni’s unbearable segment; another misguided vignette about quarrelling lovers (replete with horribly wooden acting) that only adds to the Europeans-art-fart posit. He’s marginally forgiven because it’s a post-stroke film (and his last) made three years before his death so senility must have set in.
Summary: Curiosity factor is high for Soderbergh and Kar-Wai completists, but not a must-see in the end.
Scene: Soderbergh’s “Equilibrium”
“Spirits Of The Dead” (or it’s French title, “Histoires extraordinaires”) (1968)
Directors: 3 of them; Roger Vadim (“Metzengerstein”), Louis Malle (“William Wilson”), Federico Fellini (“Toby Dammit”)
And The Point Was? Three greats tackling the works of Edgar Allen Poe to deliver what arguably was meant to be a horror triptych. Or in Roger Vadim’s case the point was hiring his wife Jane Fonda again.
The Best: There isn’t one.
Uhh, the OK then? Err, sure. Vadim directs Fonda (and Peter Fonda) in an unintentionally funny and semi-lurid Gothic tale about a woman (Jane) obsessed with a family rival (Peter) that shuns her. Seeking revenge for daring to evince indifference at her advances, she burns down his stable of horses with him in it. His spirit is then evidently reincarnated into a horse which she is further bedeviled with and rides around endlessly. The end.
The excuse to work with French superstar: Malle, Alain Delon and Brigitte Bardot, how can that go possibly wrong? But indeed it does in this aimless, not scary tale of an immoral bastard (Delon) who’s cruel acts are followed and corrected by his righteous doppelganger (Delon). Bardot plays a Baroness he cheats at in poker, winning the right to sadomasochistically strike her back with a whip. Spoiler: His comeuppance is delivered by a madness-inducing suicide (or is it quite that?), by jumping out a church bell tower, which is perhaps notable for just how hilarious the fake rag-doll looks plummeting from the sky.
Notable: Terence Stamp, looking like a ghostly white vampire in a Fellini tale about an actor at the end of his tether is noteworthy for the two icons working together (though Stamp was really just beginning), but it’s choked by the auteurs thick propensity for overwroughtness and narrative wandering (like much of his late work, frankly).
Summary: Perhaps a guilty campy pleasure to some, but generally it’s more corny than shocking or even interesting.
Scene: Roger Vadim’ s”Metzengerstein
“Love & Anger” (1969)
Directors: Marco Bellocchio (with co-director Elda Tattoli on “Discutiamo, discutiamo”), Bernardo Bertolucci (“Agonia”) Jean-Luc Godard (“L’Amore”), Pier Paolo Pasolini (“La sequenza del fiore di carta”), Carlo Lizzani (“L’indifferenza”)
And The Point Was? Watching the world’s greatest directors fumble wildly with hilariously pretentious stories of lust and frustration only to be one-upped by the lesser-regarded Carlo Lizzani.
The Best: Lizzani’s striking and intense take on human apathy charts the rape of woman in an apartment complex under the prying and voyeuristic eyes of its detached denizens. Meanwhile a hit and run inadvertently leads to a shifty-eyed man (who turns out to be wanted by the law) having to help drive a dying woman to a hospital with the heat giving a police escort.
The Worst: A three-way-tie between Godard’s ponderous-going-nowhere “L’Amore,” Bellocchio’s pedantic, political classroom discourse (read, squawking Italians yelling empty rhetoric at top volume) and Bertolluci’s excruciating “Agonia,” which is indeed utter agony and is perhaps the ur-text of arty European affected cinema that created some of the lampooning cliches that still exist to this day abour Euro art films. It’s essentially a bunch of mimes — no really — writhing around a room, moaning and attempting to convey the last breaths of a dying man. We love Bertolluci’s work and even tolerate films like the ill-conceived “Partner,” but Christ, never make us watch that again.
Summary: Watch Lizzani’s visually arresting and immediately engaging short and ditch the rest. If you never see the rest of these in your lifetime you won’t be any worse off. In fact, you’ll never regret that hour-plus you can never get back.
Here’s the Bertolluci segment, watch at your own risk.
— RP and Drew Taylor
