Two takes on Hollywood movie tours

Just a couple more posts about our trip to LA, and then I'll stop. Promise.

We took two guided movie tours while we were there. The first was at the Warner Bros studios; a peppy young guide drove ten of us around in an electric cart and reminded us repeatedly to watch Two and a Half Men, Pretty Little Liars, and Chuck.

But he also showed us the backlots that are dressed up to represent a variety of locations — note New York subway station in foreground and Chicago "L" in background:



And he took us to a prop room that had the (or at least a) Maltese Falcon (which everyone else ignored):



And the coffee shop set from Friends (over which some in our group became visibly verklempt):



It was fun to see what goes on behind the scenes, and how sets are built, but it was also clearly one big ad for Warner's products. I guess I shouldn't have expected otherwise.

And then we did a movie location tour, courtesy of Dearly Departed.

They offer a few different options: you can take the Celebrity Scandal tour (Hugh Grant's embarrassing pick-up! George Michael's restroom!); the Nasty Nellie tour (Nellie Oleson from Little House on the Prairie shares her Hollywood secrets!) and our choice, the Hollywood Movie Tour.

Amazingly, we were the only people booked for this particular day, so we had tour guide Brian to ourselves. He was the antithesis of our by-the-book Warners' guide: irreverent, sardonic, and a wealth of information about Hollywood movie history.

Yeah, we liked him.

The bus had a built-in video screen, and Brian had a DVD of movie clips that put each real-life location in context.

He showed us where scenes from Glen or Glenda, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Ed Wood were shot (and also where Ed Wood worked). He pointed out that Joe Gillis's apartment in Sunset Boulevard looks exactly the same today as it did in the movie.



He drove us past the fabulous John Sowden House, used in The Aviator and possibly where the Black Dahlia's killer lived.



He took us to the last-of-its-kind Gilmore Gasoline service station, which he and a group of Hollywood preservation enthusiasts are trying to save.

And he shared movie star gossip (Mae West! Bette Davis! Angelyne!).

It was great to get a movie tour from someone so passionate about Hollywood, and the realization that so many scenes are shot in real places (I know, duh) has made me more observant of backgrounds and locations when I watch films.

(Is that a real restaurant? Let's check Google Maps. Hey, it is! They're in Venice Beach! Wait, what just happened? I wasn't paying attention ...)

Alloy and the General

The rapid approach of the Oscars reminds me (to my chagrin) that I've seen exactly one nominated film (Little Miss Sunshine). No different to any other year, really, and given that I only saw a half-dozen movies in a theater last year, I'm surprised that any of them got the nod from the little golden guy.

We could have rectified the situation this weekend by going to see The Departed, or The Queen, or Pan's Labyrinth, all of which are still playing in the area. But instead we went to the ICA to see an 80-year-old silent film with a live soundtrack of springs, horseshoes and musical saw.

The film was The General, Buster Keaton's 1927 masterpiece about a train engineer who steams through enemy lines during the Civil War to rescue his beloved engine (oh, and also the girl he loves). It's one of the best films I've ever seen: a tight, carefully constructed story with action, humor and breathtaking stunts that impress not only for their creativity and ingenuity, but also because they were executed way before wirework, stunt doubles or CGI.

In my favorite sequence, which really showcases Keaton's skills, his character, in pursuit of the enemy spies who have stolen his train, has to deal with an unwieldy cannon, a re-appearing boxcar and obstacles on the track--all while the train is moving. Here's a version of the scene, though the print quality isn't great and one of the gags has been edited out. Darn YouTube.

A great silent film needs a great soundtrack, and at the ICA this came courtesy of the Alloy Orchestra. Alloy is percussion-based; two-thirds of the group play drums, cymbals and "junk" (sheets of metal, springs, plus the aforementioned saw) as well as clarinet and accordion, while Mission of Burma vocalist Roger Miller's synth fills in with strings, brass, and everything in between.

I'd never seen a silent film with live music, and it brought a new, vibrant dimension to the experience. Maybe it was the insistent rhythm of the snare providing the clickety-clack voice of the speeding trains and the martial tattoo of the engaging armies, or the floor toms standing in for booming cannons, or the sheet of paper artfully crumpled to bring striking realism to an arson scene.

Or maybe it was watching these musicians as they played, eyes on the screen, moving effortlessly from one instrument to another, occasionally exchanging glances, dramatically flourishing drumsticks, rocking out old-school during exciting sequences.

When the film was over, and the audience had applauded both film and performers, the lights came up and the blackout screens over the floor-to-ceiling windows rose slowly, revealing the harbor and the skyline, and it was one of those moments to forget that Boston wasn't New York, that it was a world-class city with fabulous music and gorgeous architecture and the occasional sense to put the two things together with one of the best films ever made.

Chumscrubber, Flammkueche

Friday night's dinner plans morphed from "Let's go somewhere like 29 Newbury" to "Let's see if Tim and Peter want to come out" to "We're having takeout at Tim and Peter's." Which, frankly, sounded like a much better way to spend Friday night after what had been a very long work week.

So we went over and drank martinis (lavender, using the simple syrup we made this summer, and limoncello) and ate pizza. The bacon and olive was notable for the fact that it was liberally topped with actual slices of bacon. Not fried, diced slivers or crumbled bits, but entire slices, baked on top of the pie. Why don't more people do this? Why isn't there a federal law to say this is the only legitimate method of bacon presentation when pizza is involved?

And we watched The Chumscrubber (2005), starring Jamie Bell (Billy Elliott) and Glenn Close. Best described as "Donnie Darko meets American Beauty." Bell (with no trace of a Billingham accent) plays a disaffected youth in an upper-middle-class California suburb who, between taking meds donated by his psychotherapist dad and dealing with the unexpected suicide of his best friend, has to track down the deceased's stash of prescription drugs before the local rich-kid bully makes good on his promise to kill a boy he has kidnapped.

While it handles the theme of "what's wrong with kids today" without much subtlety (no wonder the offspring are twisted when the parents are medicated, delusional, self-involved or violent--and apparently have glasses of red wine surgically attached to their manicured hands), it also features some sensitive and thoughtful performances from the teen actors.

Best work, though, comes from Glenn Close as the mother of the dead kid. Her character moves from intense fury cloaked with sociable politeness (she calls each of the neighbors in turn to tell them "... in no way do I blame you for my son's death") to silently screaming despair to quiet acceptance with graceful ease. Worth a look.

Saturday we took our fat cat to the vet for her annual checkup (the results are in: she's fat. See?)



In the afternoon we schlepped to the mall to start our War-on-Christmas shopping, and found that everyone else in the entire world had the same idea. We spent a couple of hours punching mouthbreathers and then staggered back home, freshened up and headed out to Sandrine's for dinner. Ah, civilization. Or at least as close as one can get in a roomful of flustered Harvard professors the day Yale clobbers their football team.

Once again we were in close proximity to the yellingest table in the room; two middle-aged couples discussing their parents' senility and their childrens' apathy ("He's not ready to declare a major; he's trying to decide between biology and creative writing"), all tweed jackets and assured opinions.

We discussed which comment, spoken at high volume, would cause the most offence: "I agree with Rush Limbaugh; Michael J. Fox was totally faking it" or "Gee, I really hope Santorum runs in 2008."

Food, as always as Sandrine's, was lovely. I had the simple salad (though noted sadly that the tomatoes no longer had the summer's enormous flavor) and the duck-prosciutto Flammkueche with bleu cheese and apples. The Boy started with a baked Crottin de Chavignol, warm and creamy, and then did the Choucroute, which involves six types of meat from the same maaagical animal: pork chop, bauernwurst, weisswurst, ham hock, wiener, plus a single sweet potato wrapped in bacon, and Riesling-infused sauerkraut. Way too much pig for me, but not for The Boy! Oink!

Binoche in a sack, Super-8, blood subtitles

Watched a lot of movies this week: Little Miss Sunshine (again); Sideways, V for Vendetta (oh, cute bald Natalie Portman!). The three that really stood out, though, were:

Caché, Michael Haneke's mystery about a French couple (Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche) who start to receive videotapes suggesting someone is spying on them. The title translates as "Hidden," and as the movie progresses it becomes clear that it's appropriate on many levels. It's not just a film about a middle-class couple's personal dramas, and the secrets people keep from each other, but also about France's immigrant population, here represented as either ignored and overlooked or eyed with suspicion and malice. On a side note, why do people in French movies look like ... like ... like people? Here Juliette Binoche is in shapeless linen dresses. Characters wear rumpled pants, have craggy faces and cigarette-graveled voices. But unlike in a Hollywood movie, where those things would be used to define the character ("the mom, she sounds like she smokes four packs a day, okay?"), here it's just a reflection of who the actor is. The reality is almost unreal, it's so unusual.

Torremolinos 73, a Spanish-language movie set during Franco's Spain (though the action seems largely unaffected by that fact). Here an encyclopedia salesman, struggling to make ends meet, is offered a choice by his boss: get involved in a new business venture making, um, scientific, educational films (starring your wife) to sell in Scandinavia, or lose your job. As it turns out, he has a knack for wielding a Super-8 camera and she quickly sheds her inhibitions (and various outfits) and soon they're so successful that he's given the chance to write and direct a real film. The plot, which also revolves around the couple's attempts to start a family, could have been melodramatic, overly sleazy, judgemental or plain silly, but it's none of the above. Rather, it's honest, quirky (ooh, I hate that word!), compelling. I saw it on HBO Latino, so no subtitles, but it must be on DVD by now.

Night Watch, apparently, was a huge box-office hit in Russia. And while the plot may seem hackneyed to me (ancient battle between good and evil is revived; the Apocalypse is near; vampires are involved), some of the visuals are creative and clever (the doll that sprouts spindly spider legs; the bird who changes into a woman; the backstory illustrated with a hand-drawn flip-book). Most innovative, though, are the subtitles. Not content to simply flash obediently at the bottom of the screen in yellow Arial, they fit themselves into the action. One of the best examples appears as a boy gets a nosebleed while swimming underwater. The subtitles, dark red, fade in ... and then wash away, dissolving like blood in water. At other times they move with the speaking character, disappearing behind objects and coming out the other side, or fading out slowly on a particularly important statement, allowing just a little longer for the viewer to grasp their significance.

Lest I give the impression of being a foreign-film geek, I should point out that I also saw the last half of Better Off Dead (though by this point it's already etched into the cerebral cortex) and Cheech and Chong's Next Movie (which actually has some beautifully crafted comic moments, and no, I wasn't watching it stoned).