![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inulroThis week the DVD rental company decided the theme was lovingly re-created period pieces that are a bit slow-moving.
Hollywoodland is wonderful in that it is extremely evocative of 50s LA. It's a post-noir number, with many elements of a good hard-boiled PI story, but the 50s don't have the same feeling as the 30s and 40s. LA is growing exponentially - the PI, Simo, keeps ending up at new-build tract housing on the edge of the desert. Television is the Next Big Thing and the old studio system is breaking down.
One strand of the story is the (apparent) suicide of George Reeves, star of the original Superman TV series, played by an almost unrecognisable Ben Affleck. Reeves didn't want to play Superman in the first place and thought it was ridiculous. It's stressed throughout how only children watch it.
For all that adults scoff at Superman and act all superior because they don't watch it, it's adults who ruin Reeves' career. He has to be cut from From Here to Eternity because in a test screening the audience (adults) fell about pointing and laughing "it's superman!". It would probably have been unimaginable to them that today's big TV stars use their hiatus to make movies. Thankfully today's audience is sophisticated enough to separate actors from characters in their minds and careers don't have to end because the actor is too well known as one character. And they say society is dumbing down!
/rant over
Wonderful period/location stuff and points about the state of the entertainment industry in the late 50s aside, the film isn't all that good. It's not bad either, but Chinatown or The Big Sleep it's not.
The Good Shepherd
Technically this is the better film, but I'm glad I didn't see this in the cinema. It's far too long! It spans the period 1939 to 1961. Matt Damon gets different glasses to show that time is passing because, hey, it's not like men's fashions changed much in that period, especially for uptight blue-blood WASP types. I do hope the take-home messages (espionage fucks up your family life, is full or moral grey areas and you can't trust anybody) weren't supposed to come as news to anyone.
It's somewhat better than I've made it sound, and the sheer joylessness of Damon's character has to be seen to be believed.
Hollywoodland is wonderful in that it is extremely evocative of 50s LA. It's a post-noir number, with many elements of a good hard-boiled PI story, but the 50s don't have the same feeling as the 30s and 40s. LA is growing exponentially - the PI, Simo, keeps ending up at new-build tract housing on the edge of the desert. Television is the Next Big Thing and the old studio system is breaking down.
One strand of the story is the (apparent) suicide of George Reeves, star of the original Superman TV series, played by an almost unrecognisable Ben Affleck. Reeves didn't want to play Superman in the first place and thought it was ridiculous. It's stressed throughout how only children watch it.
For all that adults scoff at Superman and act all superior because they don't watch it, it's adults who ruin Reeves' career. He has to be cut from From Here to Eternity because in a test screening the audience (adults) fell about pointing and laughing "it's superman!". It would probably have been unimaginable to them that today's big TV stars use their hiatus to make movies. Thankfully today's audience is sophisticated enough to separate actors from characters in their minds and careers don't have to end because the actor is too well known as one character. And they say society is dumbing down!
/rant over
Wonderful period/location stuff and points about the state of the entertainment industry in the late 50s aside, the film isn't all that good. It's not bad either, but Chinatown or The Big Sleep it's not.
The Good Shepherd
Technically this is the better film, but I'm glad I didn't see this in the cinema. It's far too long! It spans the period 1939 to 1961. Matt Damon gets different glasses to show that time is passing because, hey, it's not like men's fashions changed much in that period, especially for uptight blue-blood WASP types. I do hope the take-home messages (espionage fucks up your family life, is full or moral grey areas and you can't trust anybody) weren't supposed to come as news to anyone.
It's somewhat better than I've made it sound, and the sheer joylessness of Damon's character has to be seen to be believed.
