And One Sword To Rule Them All: "Excalibur" (1981)

directed by John Boorman
Starring Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren, Nigel Terry, Liam Neeson, Corin Redgrave, Cheri Lunghim with newcomers Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne, Neil Jordan and Ciaran Hinds

Excalibur, the Sword Of Power.

I watched Excalibur last night. I've seen it a handful of times since it was first released and it's one of those flicks where if it's on, I gotta watch it to the end. So involving and detailed is its whole mise-en-scene that I get swept into that world and have a hard time coming back out. It's a weird movie with its own distinct mood. Still, I'm never ready for it to be over.

I'd been fascinated by the King Arthur myth since I was a kid, beginning with Disney’s The Sword In The Stone, in which the kid Wart is tended to by a daffy Wizard and a talking owl (the same Disney universe of woods where, apparently, Aurora is being seen to by three daffy fairies before meeting her spinning wheel fate the next glen over, and beyond the next clutch of trees Snow White is tending to her dwarfs). In the animated fable, Wart falls into a river and is transformed by Merlin into a fish in order to learn a few life lessons before resuming his human form.

I loved that sequence as a kid; the idea that a poor anybody could experience magic and then be transformed into a king was transfixing for a fantasy-minded kid from the Bronx. The boy-as-fish scene -- in fact the entire Disney movie and title -- is taken directly from the first book of T.H. White’s opus The Once and Future King, a thoroughly detailed and deeply researched rendering of the King Arthur tale that I read in high school. The book gave me a deeper understanding of all the players in the Arthurian legend, their motivations, and the ultimate tragedy that befell them all.

Excalibur pulls from that source but more directly from the 15th century Thomas Malory classic Le Morte D'Arthur, which I have never read. In my estimation, Excalibur is one of the best contemporary screen adaptations of that story. It retains both the folksiness and the grandeur of the legend, but also the abiding sadness of a world lost through the folly of man himself. All of that is due to the off-kilter but brilliant world view of director John Boorman. But while I live for this kind of artsy approach, the critics panned Excalibur when it arrived in theaters.

I saw Excalibur soon after its April 1981 release in Boston with a Cape Verdean guy I had just begun seeing. We were crazy about each other. We were young and there was a desperate, star-crossed lovers aspect to our relationship since I was graduating from college within the month and returning to New York, while he had no plans to go to college or ever leave Roxbury. Every moment we spent together had a dramatic urgency and perhaps this lent to the initial romantic impact of the film on my senses.

The spellbinding Excalibur is a cinematic dirge, mourning the loss of a world that was both more magical and more noble than ours. There is a pageantry about the film, a surreal, distant quality to it that is the embodiment of myth. Each shot is gorgeously composed in exquisite, painterly detail to serve as an eternal tableau. The film has its excesses, to be sure: the lighting of the titular sword and the outre musings of Merlin can be over the top. But the story is not to be imagined as taking place in the natural world as we know it. History has already shown us that things will not end well; Arthur will be betrayed and outwitted even as he establishes the roots of a democratic thought system that remains the bedrock of the British and American judiciary today. Excalibur is impressionistic art. It's high opera captured on film.

Excalibur also features a number of British stars we will come to know well later in their careers – Helen Mirren, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Ciaran Hinds – but for the most part, they are all unknown to us and are treated as an ensemble. Even the actor who portrays Arthur (Nigel Terry) is an unknown quantity to Americans, so this adds to the sense that the viewer is being plunged into a strange history in which there are no star turns (none of that “with Sir Laurence Olivier as Uther Pendragon!” crap). The plunge is also enhanced by the fact that Boorman uses “Siegfried’s Funeral March” by Richard Wagner in the opening and throughout the film, to give the whole a distinctly operatic atmosphere, and by the fact that Excalibur has no opening credits other than title and a few lines about the setting. The audience is dropped front and center into a medieval land-rights battle between the armies of King Uther Pendragon and the Lord of Cornwall, mud and spittle flying, armor clanking, broadswords hefted, grunts and curses and horse whinnies fogging the night air.

Merlin: "I wish I didn't already know what's going to happen here (sigh)."


Merlin the magician is adviser to Uther. He is the fulcrum from which the storyline swings, as he knows all that will happen before it does and can summon otherworldly powers to his and Uther’s aid. Uther forms a truce with Cornwall after hours of bloody night clashes, and Cornwall invites him and his men to his castle for a celebration where Cornwall’s wife Igraine is bidden to dance for the throng. Mistake. Within hours of forging the truce, Uther is rudely salivating over Igraine and announcing his lustful intentions toward her, which gets him and his men thrown out of Cornwall castle. As Cornwall plans to take his battalion into the forest to dispatch Uther et al once and for all, Uther prevails on Merlin to aid him in his quest to screw Cornwall’s wife. Merlin does so against his better judgment, magically transforming Uther into the image of Cornwall so he can slip into the palace unchallenged and bed Igraine. As Uther sates his lust, the real Cornwall meets his death in battle with Uther’s men. (“He came, and he went,” said my witty date.)

Thus is the story set in motion, for Uther takes the now widowed Igraine to wife as her young daughter, the necromantically gifted Morgana, watches. Igraine gives birth to a son, but Merlin shows up to collect the child as part of the bargain he struck with Uther to bring him to Igraine in the first place. Baby Arthur is secreted away and give to Sir Ector to raise alongside his son Kay.

We next see the teenaged Arthur at the jousting tournament where the misplacement of Kay's sword leads to the pulling of the Sword In The Stone. Lines among the local knights are quickly drawn between those who believe that with the sword Excalibur in hand, Arthur is the rightful king of England, and those who think its hooey, and new battles are fought. Tutored by Merlin in wisdom and the natural magic that is dying out with him, Arthur proves to be an apt pupil and a harmonizing force among the different factions. But as soon as Arthur claps eyes on Guenevere (Lunghi) he's a bumbling goner, and though Merlin tries to get him to cool his jets the two are eventually married.

The story is well known by now. The only notes left to add are that Lancelot is here played by hot stuff Nicholas Clay, and it would be tough for any Arthurian chick to ignore him. Lance's armor is highly polished so as to appear blindingly white on the screen, thus telegraphing the goodness of his soul. He appears truly tortured over his love of Jen.

Boorman's own son Charley plays Arthur's wicked son Mordred, spawned when Arthur was tricked into laying with his own evil sister Morgana (Mirren). The film takes a truly icky turn when Mordred shows up, and also when poor Percival is tortured by Morgana on his quest for the Holy Grail.

Excalibur is not a perfect movie. But its images, musical moments, and ideas about justice, peace, faith, and the destiny of Man will haunt you afterwards. It goes to show why the story of King Arthur and the ideal of the Round Table has endured for generations.

"Begin Again" (2014) or, A Music Industry Fairy Tale

directed by John Carney
with Keira Knightley, Mark Ruffalo, Adam Levin, Yasiin Bey, Hailee Steinfeld





Finally made it down to Ye Olde Cineplex to take a gander at Begin Again, the new film by director John Carney, who helmed 2006's Once -- a film I haven't seen all of and which is apparently so charming that a Tony-winning Broadway musical of it was mounted.

My principle reasons for wanting to see it were 1) Its storyline has something to do with today's music industry, 2) Mark Ruffalo, 3) Mark Ruffalo, and 4) Mark Ruffalo.

Ruffalo had been acting for a decade by the time I really noticed him, in 2000's You Can Count On Me, where he played the sexy, rumpled, rebel ne'er do well brother to Laura Linney's uptight big sister. The role fits him well. He did a version of the sexy interloper in The Kid's All Right, and here he reprises that kind of character as Dan, the hard-drinking down-on-his-luck record label exec reeling from the break up of his marriage to Catherine Keener and being fired from the label he co-founded after a streak of bad signings.

Drunken Dan stumbles into an East Village open-mike night event -- where A&R men do occasionally discover great talent -- and hears the reluctant singer-songwriter stylings of Gretta, played by Keira Knightley. Gretta herself is mourning betrayal by her songwriting partner and longtime love Dave, a budding pop star (Maroon 5's Adam Levine in a smarmy turn) with whom she had traveled to New York on his label's dime to start ramping up his career. Morose Gretta is importuned by a busking friend to come to this show, so her half-hearted performance is a skidmark along her tucked-tail retreat home to London. While the audience at this NYC hip-pit is lukewarm to Gretta's skills, Dan has A Beautiful Mind-like power to hear all the fully-produced potential in Gretta's music and accosts her with the idea that they can make beautiful music together. The sequence of how he hears her music more fully produced is magical -- but also doesn't quite fit with the rest of the film's tone. Up to now Gretta has been a behind-the-scenes-kinda chick in Dave's universe, so she's is reluctant to alter her music or step out front, and certainly not with Dave, whose glory days as a Grammy-winning producer are significantly behind him. He admits that his clout to get anyone signed is severely diminished if not nonexistent.

Ruffalo's grizzled boy-charm comes into play and Gretta finds herself convinced to do something outrageous -- record an album of her songs live at various outdoor locales in New York City. It's an intriguing idea, though thoroughly impractical. The fun of the film is seeing how this improbability comes to life with a motley crew of musicians, a rigged traveling recording studio, an influx of cash from a Dan-friendly artist (Cee-Lo Green, in a picture-stealing cameo), some risky locations, and even a guest turn on guitar by Dan's precocious teenage daughter (Hailee Steinfeld of True Grit fame showing an unprecedented amount of thigh). The songs are pleasant and mildly thought-provoking, but not earth-shaking.

Knightley, dressed down here to represent your average bohemian girl singer, doesn't embarrass herself at the microphone but has little real star power as a performer in this role. (I was astonished to notice in the closeups how jacked up Knightley's teeth remain this far into her full-fledged movie-star trip -- but perhaps the small physical flaw is part of her appeal? She's so easy on the eyes I guess it doesn't matter that her teeth are triple-rowed up in there.) Knightley's Gretta stands up for the craft of music, just making songs for their own sake and not wanting to sell out for pop stardom. Cute, noble, even, but from my current window seat in the music biz, this looks exactly like that time-honored recipe for starvation that bedevils many a brilliant music creator.

Begin Again gets the finer details of the music industry wrong. For instance, one of the founding partners of a label -- here played by Mos Def (officially credited as Yasiin Bey) -- can't just "fire" his co-founding partner. And while the music industry of yore (1940s through the 1990s) is rife with music execs who boozed, drank, screwed, smoked, popped pills, flouted the rules and barely functioned in their jobs, today's trouble-beset industry has no room and no tolerance for money-sucks and fuck-ups like Dan. There is too much still at stake. And if you're going to go around the city recording live music in open-air venues -- already a nightmare for background and ambient noise -- make sure that the tech holding the microphone isn't simultaneously jumping up and down, stomping his feet, and screaming "Great!" before the track is over (as Dan does a few times).

What it gets right is the power of music itself to transform, to heal, to bond, and to uplift. The real golden threads of Begin Again, at least for me, begin with the recognition that for many creative folks, music is the lingua franca not only of artistic expression but of human communication. One's musical tastes do tell a lot about one. Trading lyrics and song titles is a form of language that many of my friends indulge in. Bonding over appreciation for certain artists or tracks can be an indelible connection. By listening to each other's iPods, Dan and Gretta draw even closer and forge a deeper understanding of the other's musicality. This is probably a spoiler: Some moviegoers may find it jarring or unrealistic that when Dave plays Gretta a new song he has written on his own during a solo trip to LA, she knows instantaneously that something is amiss in their relationship. I thought it was a great detail about their music and their communication style.

The movie also demonstrates the many ways in which music brings together people who might never have met or worked together in any other capacity. Looking at the performers that Dan and Gretta gather for her project is a perfect example. Another detail I like is that the film may take place in New York City, a classic setting for thousands of films and my home town. The director doesn't give us the glossy, high finance, fantasy corporate center New York, and neither do we get the gritty, dark, crime-ridden mysterious New York either. It's just everyday life here, the weird mix of funk, grunge, utility, surprise, art, retail, and workaday monotony that undergirds the soul of the city. It's brownstones and bodegas, cobblestones and fire escapes, fire hydrants and chain link fences, plate glass and cement. And of course people of all shapes and sizes who flock there to make music.

For about five minutes in the latter part of the film, we think that we're going to get a pat, Hollywood ending tied up with a Valentine red ribbon. That it doesn't happen feels far more real and true. The two main characters do begin again, and that new beginning could not have happened without their meeting. But their beginnings are facilitated by their connection, not the goal of it.

Like most fairy tales, Begin Again is a sweet film (despite all of Dan's cussing). If you're a music person like me it will restore or reaffirm your belief in music as a tonic to the soul.

Backward Glance: "Three Days of the Condor" (1975)

Directed by Sidney Pollack
Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, Max von Sydow

I caught this classic of '70s angst for the first time in 2010. Hearing the title, I would mix it up in my mind with similarly titled flicks, including Night of the Iguana, a Tennessee Williams drama with Richard Burton and Ava Gardner; Day of the Jackal, a thriller about Fench military hero and prime minister Charles de Gaulle that I’ve never seen; and Day of the Locust, an insane flick about 1930s Hollywood that still haunts me.

Director Sydney Pollack's political thriller is about an everyman caught in a nightmarish and hard-to-follow government plot that is scarily prescient. Robert Redford is Joe Turner -- can you get a more Everyman name than that? -- a CIA reader/researcher who is a little too good at his gig. When he discovers what he shouldn't, the running begins in earnest. Using a grainy color film stock that looks almost like newsreel, Pollack paints a portrait of sheer paranoia that fits perfectly with the Vietnam era of covert government operations and suppressed public information.

PLOT SUMMARY:
At a small CIA outpost inside a fashionable upper East Side Manhattan townhouse, Joe Turner works with a close-knit team. He's great at what he does. No sooner has he called his superiors in Washington to report evidence of a covert CIA operation set to invade the Middle East than a crew of government assassins is dispatched to hush it up. As fate and the gods of storytelling would have it, Joe slips out the back to fetch lunch and returns to find everyone in the office murdered, including his co-worker girlfriend.

Marked for death, Joe – code name Condor -- contacts his New York home office via pay phone for help and comes up with one Higgins (Cliff Robertson with an outsized 70s comb-over), a CIA deputy chief whom he’s never met. Higgins says he'll help and tells Joe to meet agents in an alley at the back of the Ansonia Hotel on 72nd Street. When Joe balks, Higgins tells him to bring a friend. Unsurprisingly, when Joe and his bestie arrive in the alley, a shootout ensues that leaves the friend and the two agents sent to meet them dead. Desperate to elude the killers as well as the police, who are converging on the crime scene, Joe stumbles into a clothing store and kidnaps a customer, Kathy Hale (played by an atypically vulnerable-looking Faye Dunaway) and has her drive him to her apartment in Brooklyn. She is justifiably terrified, doesn’t believe his tale, and struggles to get free of him.

Joe is not an agent, but a reader. He must rely on his wits and everything he has ever read about political intrigue, spying, hit men, even gun play to unravel the mystery of what has happened. Realizing that another friend is in imminent danger, he ties Kathy to the toilet and drives her car to the friend’s highrise apartment, convincing his wife to leave immediately. On the way out he unknowingly crosses paths with killing machine-for-hire Joubert, played by Max von Sydow. The two share a long and suspenseful elevator ride to the lobby in which Joe realizes who the guy is. He allows Joubert to leave the building, but knowing that he could be killed the minute he walks out the door, Joe engages a group of black people in the lobby to walk him to his car, promising them $5 apiece. Joe escapes, and Joubert, hiding in some bushes with Joe in his sights, must accede defeat for the moment. But not before noting the license plate of the car.

Joe returns to Kathy’s apartment and ungags her, and here’s where things get even more complicated. Her live-in boyfriend, who has gone to Vermont to ski and is expecting her to join him, calls up but Joe threatens her not to let on she's in trouble. She blows the man off with a tale of a car breakdown, and actually sounds none too sorry about it. Meanwhile, Joe is checking out her place, studying the black n white photos of spare, haunting autumnscapes she has posted and surmises that she is a lonely woman with secrets. Joe is no criminal, but he is hella observant. He tells Kathy that he needs time to figure things out, but he also needs at least one night to forget before he'll go away and leave her be. “You like men who go away,” he tells her, adding, “Why haven’t you asked me to untie your hands yet?” The handsome stranger has just looked deep into her hidden truth. And after all, it's Robert freakin' Redford. So of course she lays back and lets it happen. Cue the jazzy Fender Rhodes Dave Grusin score as Joe and Kathy get busy.

Their idyll is interrupted the next morning when a postman knocking with a package turns out to be one of the uniformed hitmen who helped take out all Joe's co-workers. The scene erupts into a full on fight with furniture flying and a struggle for the gun. Joe ends up shooting the assailant as Kathy screams. Joe calms her and the two leave the apartment. Love on the run.

This is the point at which the Hunted becomes the Hunter. Putting two and two together, Joe decides to turn the tables and now tracks the CIA chief who's rubber-stamping all the mayhem, while being dogged at every step by Joubert. The path leads to the home of an agency official in suburban Washington, D.C., where Joubert breaks in, grabs the gun and surprisingly offs the man Joe’s been trying to squeeze. Seems the hitman switched sides for a bigger paycheck. Joubert explains that he takes no sides, he’s just the hired help. No hard feelings. He lets Joe go.

Back in NYC, Joe uses Kathy as bait to locate and identify Higgins, whom they kidnap from a lower Manhattan lunch spot so he can get answers. Check the irony in this prescient exchange, when Joe asks, Would the US really secretly invade the Middle East over oil? Higgins says Yes. Joe thinks that the American people should be given the choice to vote on it, that government operations should be transparent. Says Higgins: “Today it’s oil, but what if it’s water, or food? When people run out, they won’t want to be asked, they’ll just want us to GET it for them.” Righteous Joe tells Higgins that he has leaked the information about the secret "CIA within the CIA" to the New York Times, as they stand in front of the paper's headquarters.

“You have no idea how much damage you’ve just done,” says Higgins.

“I hope so,” says Turner, who then melts into the crowd.




NOTES:
You know I love my New York, especially Dirty Old 1970s New York. In this film Times Square is still the delightfully sleazy neon cesspool it used to be, the buses are still forest green with sliver panels, Broadway looks like Broadway, the old apartment buildings still have the same old chain fences and cheesy lobbies, the Ansonia Hotel is in all its architectural glory on 72nd Street, and the World Trade Center towers still stand tall. That was the New York I grew up in, went to school in, spent my early career in.

Director Sidney Pollack makes a few nods to the city's diversity, with one of Turner’s murdered CIA co-workers was a lovely Asian woman. And of course there is the crowd of African Americans in the lobby, though when you get right down to it, Joe uses these innocent black folk as human shields. I was convinced that any of them would be gunned down in the scene, much as we've been conditioned to see the token black character be the first to catch a bullet in most mainstream flicks. This doesn’t happen, I was relieved to note, but neither does Joe Turner cough up the $5 he’d promised to dole out, to the crowd’s jeering disappointment. Also, several of the sisters and brothers are wielding tambourines, because of course any gathering of colored people in New York City would naturally include percussion instruments.

On first viewing I’m intrigued by the Redford-Dunaway relationship. I'm not a complete prude, but it always astounds me how quickly strangers fall into bed together in movies, particularly in the films of the ‘70s. Dunaway plays a truly complicated woman where still waters run deep, and when she finally believes him it’s a beautiful moment. She confesses, “You’re a really sweet man to be with.”

My favorite character is the nonpartisan Joubert, whose European coolness as the hitman (smarty-pants Joe IDs his accent as being from Alsace-Lorraine in France) actually makes him the most interesting person in the flick. Actor Von Sydow has one scene in a hotel room, passing the time between hits by painting a miniature soldier. He's a killer, but he has an inner life. It's a detail coopted by director John Frankenheimer in his ‘90s thriller Ronin, where the Jean Reno character's safe house contact lives in Alsace Lorraine and paints miniature ronin figures before removing a bullet from American operative Bob DeNiro.

Three Days of the Condor is a classic of the genre, where the Everyman knowingly or unknowingly comes in possession of The Thing That Will Change the World, and must run from those who violently want it stopped or violently want to take it for themselves.

FAVORITE LINE
Turner: Have I raped you yet? Have I even tried?
Hale: The night is young.