“Hugo,” Scorsese’s first attempt at three-dimensional movie-making, may just change the way we think about 3D films. If only the story being told wasn’t such a snooze. Film critics will forgive the “Raging Bull” director when he abandons his pre-teen leads and dwells on the dawn of motion pictures. Bread and butter movie goers will simply roll their eyes and wait for the next bit of 3D eye candy to leap off the screen.

“Hugo,” based on the children’s book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by Brian Selznick, feels like a movie that’s been buried under a pile of heavy pillows. The attempts at whimsy stumble, the sense of wonder squandered by its somber tone. Even Borat himself, the great Sacha Baron Cohen, can’t inject enough humor to make “Hugo” anything but a visually striking snooze factory.

Young, wide-eyed Asa Butterfield stars as Hugo, an orphan who lives betwixt the walls of a Parisian train station. He’s a whiz with gadgetry like his late father (Jude Law), but his knack for nicking gears catches the attention of a surly toy shop owner (Ben Kingsley). Hugo has better luck with the man’s goddaughter (Chloe Moretz of “Kick-Ass” fame), a charmer who always finds a way to throw a $20 word into her conversations.

Hugo and the girl embark on a series of kiddie adventures like evading the clutches of the station’s inspector (Cohen) and trying to complete an automaton started by Hugo’s father. Their playful romps may soon come to an end.  The stubborn inspector wants to haul Hugo to the nearest orphanage, and the toy shop owner had his only cruel plan in mind for the lad.

Scorsese invites us into Hugo’s world with a series of sweeping camera movements that take eye-popping advantage of that third dimension. This isn’t gimmickry on parade but a filmmaker genuinely curious as to how 3D can enhance the movie going experience. Those vistas still draw our attention to the technology in unwelcome ways, but at least we’re seeing 3D put to rigorous, artful use.

The narrative isn’t nearly so inviting, especially when the story shifts to focus on Kingsley’s character. Gone is the magical sense of children making the most of a dangerous playground, replaced by Scorsese reclaiming his role as the nation’s film professor.

Scorsese saves what he imagines is best for last, a loving tribute to cinema’s earliest days as seen through the eyes of a film pioneer. The director’s technical prowess remains without equal, but including snippets from classic silent films only reminds us how stilted and unnatural “Hugo” is on even a cursory examination. And do we really need a cinematic lecture on film preservation?

“Hugo” may have some of the trappings of a children’s film, but young ones will be bored out of their Thomas the Tank Engine T-shirts long before the final act. Scorsese is an odd choice to helm a story aimed at younger audiences, though at least no one gets graphically whacked at any point in the proceedings. And even a beguiling performer like Moretz can’t make “Hugo” more than a grown-up film masquerading as fun for all age groups.

Cohen’s manic energy is kept tightly under wrap, a shrewd move without a logical payoff. You wait … and wait … for Cohen to uncork a slice of slapstick glee, and you leave the theater empty handed. The film prefers to saddle him with a flimsy romantic subplot that adds nothing but minutes to a film already powering past the two-hour mark.

“Hugo” might just give the 3D movement a second wind, but Scorsese’s affection for the new movie format could have been put to far better use.

But we haven’t yet had a certifiable auteur take a crack at the format – until now.

Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo,” opening wide tomorrow, finds the Oscar-winning director turning his attention to the third dimension. The early reviews are glowing – a gaggle of comments essentially saying it’s the best use of 3D technology yet. Will that be enough to convince audiences that paying a surcharge – and wearing those clumsy glasses – are worth the effort?

Scorsese has his work cut out for him, and he can blame an industry which abused 3D nearly every step of the way.

Director James Cameron’s “Avatar” wasn’t the first 3D film of this generation, but it was the first that took advantage of the format in ways we hadn’t seen before. Nearly every subsequent 3D feature has been either mildly diverting or an utter fraud, with too many falling into the latter category. Most were “up-converted” from 2D, meaning they were shot in traditional fashion and then retro-fitted to 3D.

The results were a far cry from Cameron’s magical realm of Pandora.

Audiences quickly caught on, and box office numbers for 3D films sank. “Drive Angry,” “Step-Up 3D,” “Fright Night” and “The Three Musketeers” all flopped, while other 3D films simply underwhelmed (like this month’s “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas”).

We’ve been hoodwinked (another 3D flop) and we’re not in the mood to keep paying extra for the chance to see a movie’s title float off the big screen.

That’s where Scorsese comes in. If “Hugo” stuns audiences, perhaps they’ll give 3D filmmaking a second chance. If not, we might as well stow away those black-framed glasses until the next generation of filmmakers decides it’s time to try 3D all over again.

“The Departed” may have won Martin Scorsese a long overdue Oscar, the film doesn’t quite stack up to the source material, “Infernal Affairs.”   Originating from Hong Kong and directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, “Infernal Affairs” has roughly the same basic plot as “The Departed,” in that it follows two moles on opposite ends of the law being driven to the edge of madness as the number of people they can trust dwindles as the body count rises.

“The Departed” is certainly more relatable to western audiences, given Scorsese’s flair for stylish, swear-laden dialogue, however “Infernal Affairs” is not only a tighter picture narratively, it also is a stronger piece of work thematically. Andy Lau and Tony Leung inhabit the roles later filled by Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, respectively. Lau has a golden-boy sheen about him that can turn sinister and threatening, while Leung has a world-weary demeanor that trumps DiCaprio’s overcooked performance.

DiCaprio is an actor I’ve never been sold on in the masculine roles he insists on playing. He’s an actor with a boyish look that serves him well in films like “Catch Me If You Can,” but he feels like a counterfeit male doing a tough-guy act whenever he works with directors like Scorsese. A friend of mine described bad acting as “when you can see the gears turning” in the actor’s head. If you look at DiCaprio’s latest, “J. Edgar,” and not only can you see the gears turning, you can hear them clack as loud as the cogs inside Big Ben just from looking at the stills.

In “The Departed,” he plays a character who is worried the criminals he’s embedded with will discover he’s a cop, but it almost feels like DiCaprio’s real fear is that the audience will see his phony streetwise Bah-stonian facade for what it really is.

While “The Departed” flirts with religious metaphor and ultimately ignores it, “Infernal Affairs” spins a compelling crime yarn that serves as symbolism for the Buddhist idea of Hell on Earth, the idea of “continuous suffering.” The film’s two protagonists find themselves living a existence of perpetual suffering, slowly losing their identities in the high tech war on crime. While Leung’s undercover cop is a character who yearns for release from his personal Hell posing as a criminal, Andy Lau’s gangster mole seeks to immerse himself in his role as a police officer, destroying those who know his true identity, ultimately looking to erase the man he was.

To say where the two films differ in the final act would be to spoil the movie, but let’s just say that “The Departed” opts for an ending that only serves to satisfy audience bloodlust, while “Infernal Affairs” has an ending you can’t shake. The film’s final shot makes the ending ambiguous and haunting. The final shot in “The Departed” is a bad joke.

“The Departed” is a film that runs at 151 minutes and says less than “Infernal Affairs” does in 101 minutes. That’s not to say that Scorsese’s film isn’t ultimately a solid one, but like most remakes it’s an inferior piece of work compared to the movie that spawned it. If you enjoy “The Departed,” give “Infernal Affairs” a whirl. It’s ultimately a tighter, more successful film than its little brother.

Available on Blu-ray

Other Noteworthy Releases

West Side Story: In case you missed it, check out fellow Parcbencher Greg Victor’s coverage of this much-heralded Blu-ray release of this classic musical.

Available on Blu-ray or in a deluxe box set

My Fair Lady: Another beloved musical coming to Blu-ray this week, this one being George Cukor’s adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” starring the lovely Audrey Hepburn and the charismatic Rex Harrison.

Available on Blu-ray

Three Colors – Blue, White, Red: Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski’s final three films, which serve as a trilogy in which each film vaguely symbolizes one of each of the words in the motto of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. Kieślowski explores his protagonists with a graceful hand that reveals the soul of each character in a way few directors are capable of doing. The way he shoots stunningly beautiful actresses like Irene Jacob (“Red,” “The Double Life of Véronique“) is absolutely hypnotic, you can’t take your eyes off his films, even when it seems like nothing is happening.

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

The Rules of the Game: One of the great classics of French cinema, Criterion is updating their edition of this 1939 Jean Renior film to include it on Blu-ray.

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

Evil Dead 2: Sam Raimi’s comedic redux of his classic debut gets another release on Blu-ray.  It seems like each of the “Evil Dead” movies got dipped each year on DVD, and given this is already the second release on Blu-ray, it seems we’re in for the same ol’ song and dance on this format. I’ve got the Book of the Dead edition on DVD, so they won’t get me again.

Available on Blu-ray

Larry Crowne: A Nia Vardalos-scripted nothingburger directed by Tom Hanks.  Hanks rolling around on a scooter in the trailer, along with the added presence of Julia Roberts, made me perfectly okay with never, ever seeing this movie.

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis: Kino has done a fantastic job restoring the full cut of Fritz Lang’s silent science fiction masterpiece. However this week they’re bringing us a restored edition of the long out-of-print version of “Metropolis” Giorgio Moroder put together that was released in 1984. Moroder’s version made some audacious choices, including replacing the title cards with subtitles, using a score of contemporary pop music and even adding color. Though it’s doubtful that it was intended to replace the original, it’s interesting that someone had the stones to do this to such a film classic.

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

Tom Cruise Blu-ray Collection: Includes “Collateral,” “Top Gun,” “War of the Worlds,” “Minority Report” and “Days of Thunder”.

Available on Blu-ray

This post originally appeared over at Parcbench

Jonathan grew up in a Queens housing project where he earned the nickname “Milk” for being the only white kid surrounded by minorities. He was stuck living there with his impoverished grandmother because his cop father was killed in the line of duty. Surrounded by broken lives and with a black child named Vinny as his only true friend, Jonathan dreamed of getting out fast – particularly because a crack addict named Hanky is constantly terrorizing the kids in the building.

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Milk and Vinny find a gun and never really intend to use it other than to scare Hanky away, but in a moment of panic Milk shoots and kills the junkie. When he and Vinny move the body to cover up the killing, another drug dealer finds out and, in an ensuing tussle, the dealer tumbles down a flight of stairs to his death.

Detective Charles Stanford (Al Pacino), the former partner of Milk’s father, figures out these were innocent accidents that took out the worst human trash in the projects so Milk is never charged. The deaths are left officially unsolved.

Sixteen years later, amid NYC’s rabid love for its police after the heroics of 9/11, Milk (now played by Channing Tatum) becomes a rookie cop himself. And just as his precinct chief, Captain Marion Mathers (Ray Liotta) is imploring his officers to keep their noses clean for the public love affair to continue, Milk starts getting mysterious notes threatening to expose his secret killings. Making matters worse for Milk is a neighborhood newspaper editor (Juliette Binoche) printing notes calling for justice in the killings.

As the threats escalate and his past closes in on him, even Milk’s wife (Katie Holmes) starts to wonder what’s going on. The young cop must race against time to figure out who knows about his past and figure out how to stop them from destroying his life.

As written and directed by Dito Montiel, who came out of literally nowhere at age 38 in 2003 to win the best picture prize at Sundance with his debut film “A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints,” “Son” stands in the proudly gritty tradition of Sidney Lumet’s and Martin Scorsese’s best New York City films. Its story is harsh and uncompromising, but it provides a meaty series of ethical dilemmas that rarely are seen in the dumbed-down movies of our times.

Montiel provides a terrific script to build upon but also draws great performances from his deeply talented cast. While Tatum does solid work as Milk, there are three particularly strong and surprising turns. Katie Holmes does her best acting to date while Pacino actually manages to be subtle and affecting. The biggest surprise is comic Tracy Morgan, expertly playing the adult Vinny, a man who has been pushed so far by a hard life that he may never come back to normal.

With a profuse amount of profanity (that nonetheless feels true to the setting and characters) and some intense moments of danger involving children, “A Son of No One” might be difficult viewing for the easily offended. But for those who are longing for the kind of gritty cop drama that is all too rare these days,  it more than fills the bill and in my mind stands as one of the very best films of the year.

In William Strauss and Neil Howe’s Generations, the babies born 1925-1942 are classified as members of the “Silent Generation.” These were the kids who grew up during the crises of the Great Depression and World War II, entered young adulthood at the postwar high of the 1950s, and hit middle age during the cultural chaos of the late 1960s and ’70s. This life sequence puts them in Howe and Strauss’ “Adaptive” archetype, a recessive generation less populous in numbers than the ones before (the GI Generation) and after (the Baby Boomers.)

When this generation started making movies they transformed Hollywood. Peter Biskind’s 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock ‘N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood lays out the popular narrative. The tail of the Silent Generation and the beginning of the Boomers (filmmakers born 1939-1946) put out major dramatic work that challenged the more bland conventions of mid ‘60s Hollywood cinema. The 1970s were the R-rated decade. Francis Ford Coppola made “The Godfather.” Martin Scorsese released “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver.” New serious actors like Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Jon Voight, and Robert De Niro delivered legendary performances. This was a film generation inspired by the French New Wave to treat movies as serious art.

Oscar Nominated-screenwriter, award-winning mystery novelist, and now Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon was a member of this clique. Born in 1943, Simon is like others born at the edges of generations, a blending of both appears in his re-titled memoir Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine, recently released in paperback with new material.

Part 1 of this series established the unique nature of the Hollywood Left with Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda. This West Coast socialist colony of wannabe revolutionaries is superficial and anti-intellectual in its politics. It’s this aspect of Hollywood leftism more than any other that destined Simon to one day escape.

Simon was a serious leftist and Turning Right establishes his credentials. The Civil Rights Movement was his first taste of activism. His second chapter describes a misadventure in 1966 when en route to integrate a segregated bathhouse in Myrtle Beach he encountered a racist Southern cop and severed his finger while changing a tire. Turning Right is filled with these narratives of the strange situations Simon’s leftist politics took him. One chapter recounts his journey through Red China, another his trip to the Soviet Union, another to Cuba. In one chapter Simon describes the KGB’s attempts to recruit him via a crime writers’ association front group. (Simon was the creator of the Moses Wine series of mystery novels, a hippie detective conceived long before the Coens dreamed of The Dude.)

This is a far deeper political experience than Simon’s Hollywood peers and in the hands of an award-winning novelist it makes for an infectious page-turner.

Simon did not have a Road-to-Damascus moment that pushed him to the Right. It was a slow surrender over the course of decades. He notes that by 1987 he was no longer a Marxist but still a man of the Left. During the 1990s the O.J. Simpson trial’s racial politics were another nudge. However, it was not until 9/11 that the Left’s disgraceful reaction pushed Simon to the edge and eventually overboard.

But did he emerge as a conservative?

I have often said that I’m uncomfortable being called a conservative—it’s so square—but these days I almost always find myself getting along more with conservatives on political issues—except for social ones, as you can tell.

On religion Simon identifies as an agnostic. His conservatism takes a similar open-minded, anti-ideological path:

What I am left with is a collection of ideas with which I have dabbled throughout my life, never fully discarding any of them, even though some are completely contradictory of others. I regard Marxism, Freudianism, libertarianism, laissez-faire capitalism, Zen Buddhism, Quaker pacifism, neoconservatism, neoliberalism, that whole galaxy of isms, as arrows in a quiver to be drawn at will, depending on the adversary or the necessities of the situation. That may sound dangerously close to yet another ism—cultural relativism—but I assure you it is not. I do think there is almost always a good and evil, a right and wrong—although often you have to look closely—and the relativist view of the world is at best lazy and at worst a stalking horse for fascism. Those arrows in my quiver are no more than an arsenal for helping me find that elusive truth. And perhaps for taking action. Sometimes one is not enough. Sometimes I don’t need or want any of them.

Such is the endowment that the Silent Generation of Hollywood Apostates: skepticism toward easy ideology and a celebration of serious thinking across the disciplines.

This is a different message than that of a solid Baby Boomer like the 1957-born David Mamet. In Part 3 of the Hollywood Revolt we’ll consider the lessons of Mamet’s exciting essay collection The Secret Knowledge.

Check out the new Chris Weitz-directed “A Better Life,” based on a screenplay written by Simon 20 years ago.

The nominees:

Dances With Wolves: I love it, but then my Indian name is Struggles with White Guilt.

Ghost: I distinctly remember thinking, really? Ghost? Really?! I don’t dislike it, but it wasn’t exactly Oscar bait. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Awakenings: Mmmmmm, L Dopa. Yummy, delicious L Dopa.

Goodfellas: Scorsese’s career seemed to build to this and plateau with this. I love some early Scorsese, and I love some later Scorsese. But this is the centerpiece of his career, in my opinion.

The Godfather Part III: Okay. Really? Really?!!! There were about a hundred gangster movies released in 1990, so it was practically unavoidable that two of them would wind up Best Picture Nominees, but seriously?

WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOMINATED

Dances With Wolves: Probably my dad’s favorite movie. He dragged me to it, I didn’t want to see it. And while I don’t think it should have won, it’s not the blow-out that some people make it out to be. It’s a legitimately great movie, as noted by Nolte.

Total Recall: Get. Your ass. To Mars.

Miller’s Crossing: Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling.

Goodfellas: From the first line (“The f*%k is that?”), Scorsese’s masterpiece sucks you in and never lets go. Scorsese tells the story of Three Decades of Life in the Mafia through the eyes of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), an Irish-Sicilian kid who longs to be a part of the Lucchese crime family. His Sicilian blood allows him access to the family and he becomes an earner, but his Irish heritage prevents him from ever advancing to any sort of official leadership in the organization. As such, he provides a perspective on the mafia that we didn’t get in “The Godfather” saga. He’s a blue collar guy, working for the man, whereas Michael Corleone was the man.

Surrounding Henry are thugs and assassins, many of whom we get to know on an intimate basis. You just knew watching this movie that no one involved would probably ever be this good again. Lorraine Bracco. Ray Liotta. Frank Vincent. But Joe Pesci’s performance is an example of the perfect actor finding the perfect role. His Tommy is menacing and hilarious, his dialogue endlessly quotable. Of course there are exchanges and lines that became instantly famous, like, “Whaddaya mean I’m funny?” and “No more shines, Billy,” but the movie is also jam-packed with throwaway, inconsequential lines that add authenticity and never fail to make me laugh.

• “Maybe I should let him drive.”
• “Trying to make me think what the fu*% I did here.”
• “Can you believe that? A Jew broad, prejudiced against Italians.”
• “No, you ain’t alright, Spider, you got a lot of f*%in’ problems.”

As a rule, I try not to get too pretentious, but this is exquisite filmmaking. Scorsese invented neither the freeze frame, nor the extended tracking shot, nor the use of pop songs in place of a score, but he uses all of these tools and techniques to the greatest effect possible.

The violence is always brutal, often horrifying, and more-than-occasionally funny. Most of all, it’s casual. It just happens. Guys are smiling one minute and getting whacked the next. Sometimes without cause. Notice, though, that Henry is rarely in on the violence. He’s often at least mildly horrified by it. He pistol whips a guy for attempting to put the moves on his wife, but this act of violence is portrayed as darkly chivalrous: he was protecting someone. During  a jaunt to Florida, Henry and Jimmy (Robert De Niro) hassle a guy who owes the mob money. Henry definitely participates, but it’s an act of violence that’s on the record — Henry serves time for it. But the rest of the time, he’s an observer. At the end of the movie, we learn that his narration has been courtroom testimony — Henry has wisely painted himself as less involved than those who are on trial. The revelation gives new meaning to earlier narration, for example, his description of Jimmy:

He liked to steal. He actually liked it. He was the kind of guy who rooted for bad guys in the movies.

For all we know, Henry also liked to steal and also rooted for bad guys in the movies, but the circumstances of his narration dictate a need to make everyone else out to be the bad guy.

The key scene in the movie, for me, is the one where Tommy, Jimmy, and Henry go to Tommy’s mom’s house in the middle of the night to borrow a shovel so they can bury a nearly dead gangster wrapped in tablecloths in the trunk of Henry’s car. Over a sumptuous meal, the boys engage in a casual, friendly conversation with Tommy’s mom. They discuss her paintings (noting that one of her subjects looks like the guy in the trunk), Tommy asks to borrow a knife (“Well. Bring it back,” his mom responds), and the mom notices that Henry isn’t very talkative.

“I’m…just listening,” he stammers.

The mom goes on to relate a story about a quiet guy who never talks. When asked why, the guy responds, “What am I going to say? That my wife two-times me?” To which his wife responds, “Shut up, you’re always talking.” Tommy reveals that in Italian, it sounds better, and that the guy’s true nature is lost in the translation, explaining, “He’s content to be a jerk.”

This perfectly describes Henry, as he’s seen on the stand at the end of the movie, casually identifying Jimmy and Paulie (Paul Sorvino) for the prosecution.

It’s my favorite movie. It never fails to entertain or suck me in. Others in my personal top five or ten change places depending on my mood. But “Goodfellas” leapt to the top of the list around 1991, and has stayed there. So it goes without saying that I believe it should have beaten “Dances With Wolves.”

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2. Lame Celebrity Tweet of the Day: Seth MacFarlane:

I wonder if anyone called him “Andrew Breitfart” in high school.

MacFarlane, radio host actress Amy Holmes, and Breitbart will meet this Friday night at the roundtable on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher.”

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3. Fugitive child rapist attracts A-list cast

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4. “International human rights and climate change advocate” Bianca Jagger wants Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell to stop an execution. I’d listen to her. She is a international human rights and climate change advocate.

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5. The most rewatchable movie ever “Goodfellas” is 20 years old today and might become a television series. GQ takes a look back with the cast and crew, including director Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro and Ray Liotta:

“Do I Amuse You?” and Other Happy Accidents

Schoonmaker: [editor] Scorsese wanted to show that as [Joe] Pesci gets angrier and angrier, the men around him and Ray [Liotta] stop laughing, and you see the look of dread come on their faces. The key moment was how long we waited before Ray says, “Get the fuck outta here, Tommy,” in an attempt to break it. We kept screening it over and over again to get just the right beat for that one incredible moment where Ray knows if he doesn’t make this work, he’s going to get shot. [laughs]

Liotta: It was supposed to end when I say, “Get the fuck outta here, Tommy.” But you let it breathe, just to see what happens. And for some reason I said, “You really are a funny guy!” and he gets the gun. We made that up in the moment, literally.

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6. More details on the ’Matrix’ Filmmakers’ Gay Iraq War romance complete with assassination plot targeting George W. Bush:

The heroes are indeed a gay American soldier named (with little irony) “Butch” and an Iraqi soldier turned militant. Butch is endearing, young, and a ravishingly handsome Marine. Our spies tell us that he “just wants to fuck and kill everything” in Iraq — until, that is, he falls in love with the Iraqi. …

[T]ragedy radicalizes the pair and they become convinced that the only way to rid the world of evil is to kill the architect of the invasion, the then-president of the United States, George W. Bush. And so, during one of the president’s secret sorties to Iraq, they attempt to assassinate him.

Set in the future and told partly in flashback, the $20 million production is called “Cobalt Neural 9.” Both Arianna Huffington and Jesse Ventura will appear in the film. No one knows if it will really get made but the Wachowskis certainly have the cash to do it on their own.

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7. The new “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I” trailer:

“Harry Potter 7″ hits theatres November 19th.

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8. Interview with Tom Selleck about his new television series “Blue Bloods”:

“When I first saw the script, written by these terrific writers, Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green (“The Sopranos”), I felt New York could be a central character; the streets, the neighborhoods, things we don’t often see in a television series.”

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9. Turner Classic Movies weekend host Ben Mankiewicz counts down his top 25 favorite Bruce Springsteen songs and some bad choices are made due to their shared Bush Derangement Syndrome.

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10. Coming Soon: “Crazy Heart” with a sex change.

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11. Below are the trailers for the films the ”Smart Set” in the critical community have thus far chosen as this year’s top Oscar contenders:

“The King’s Speech” is scheduled for a November 26th release date.

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“The Social Network” hits theatres October 1.

Born in 1904, he was the product of a family of actors, and grew up in San Francisco helping his parents learn lines, doing backstage work, and even acting when the occasion demanded. “I was fascinated by all of it,” Stevens said. “The sounds of the theater and the audience, their rapture when a play took over and moved them and held them quietly. . . When the audience was truly moved, it was absolutely quiet. They were in a communion because they were learning the truth about themselves.”

In 1921 his parents moved the family to Los Angeles to find work in the silent movie industry, and for Stevens it was a wonderful change. He leveraged a job his cousin had at Hal Roach studios to begin visiting the lot.

“I was really a kid at the time,” Stevens said, “and I had been interested in photography as a kid, as a hobby. . . I was on a picture for four or five days, had an opportunity to be on a set, and the assistant cameraman kept showing me things. One day I climbed the fence, knowing they needed an assistant cameraman. A couple of days later I was one. The first day or two it was pretty disastrous, but I knew something about photography, and I caught on quick.”

Soon Stevens quit high school — at sixteen, he was a full-time Hollywood cameraman.

Most of the early films he shot were westerns, and he quickly developed an affinity for the genre and the cowboys who brought it to life on screen. “The old western boys were pretty fine fellows,” he said. “It wasn’t that they didn’t kiss the girl and only kissed their horse and didn’t smoke: they were good men and the tradition was such that they wanted to be rugged, responsible. They had an integrity.”

He dreamed of soon directing a western of his own, putting all of these feelings onto the screen, but it was not to be:

Nothing is more pleasant for me than to be on location in the country that I love, in any of our western land­scapes, being out there with a camp outfit and a film company. I had done some work when I was starting in with photography on westerns, and photographing them was the greatest pleasure I had. If I was ever qualified for anything, it would have had to do with making westerns. But as I started working on pictures with people like Katharine Hepburn, I got further away from the thing I really liked to do.

As he developed his skills and through the 1920s and ’30s, slowly graduating from assistant cameraman to cameraman proper and then to director, he found that the western work of his apprenticeship gave way to another genre immensely popular and ubiquitous at the time: comedies. He worked on Laurel and Hardy pictures, and eventually an assortment of (for the most part) rather lighthearted dramas starring the likes of Fred Astaire, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers.

It was a successful career in terms of fame and box office, but it came at a hidden artistic cost that he would only fathom decades later. “I remember a whole period in my life where everything was a gag,” is how he summed up the essential dilemma later in life. “We found ourselves always wanting to play out everything as a joke — a very dangerous thing to do, because we looked at everything frivolously.” What, he wondered, had happened to that sense of communion he had felt when watching audiences under the spell of the plays put on by his parents?

When America finally found itself dragged into the maelstrom of World War II, Stevens’ long, idyllic Hollywood party was over. “I quit the film business to go into the army,” he explained. “I wanted to be in the war — I really didn’t want to make films at that time. . . My agent Charles Feldman told me, ‘You go in this war, it’ll last seven years, and you’re finished as far as films are concerned, if nothing worse happens to you.’ Well, I went in the latter part of 1942. . . ”

The war would become the defining event of his life, utterly changing the way he looked at his art. He commanded a troupe of cameramen who filmed in color throughout Africa and Europe, culminating in the nightmare world they found upon reaching Dachau at the close of the war.

“Beyond descrip­tion,” he said with a shiver later. “Like wandering around in one of Dante’s infernal visions. . . everybody’s pleading for water and laying there, three guys in a bunk, dying. . . we went to the woodpile outside the crematorium, and the woodpile was people.” The George Stevens who once filmed clever comedies in between behind-the-scenes flings with the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers was no more. “It causes a most profound adjustment in your thinking,” he said. “I don’t suppose I was ever too hilarious again.”

Back in America, the desire to direct again came slowly, and the films became more serious, the work of a auteur surrounded by the ghosts of his past. “I kept feeling I should do a picture about the war — all the other guys had done or were doing pictures about their war experiences, Ford, Huston, Wyler, and so on. And here I was avoiding the subject. Until I found Shane — it was a western, but it was really my war picture. The cattlemen against the ranchers, the gunfighter, the wide-eyed little boy, it was pretty clear to me what it was about.”

Ever since the war, he had become acutely aware of the depiction of violence on screen, and the gaping difference between Hollywood violence and what he had seen at Dachau. “At the time we made this picture there was a great vogue of kids with cowboy hats and cap pistols going bang, bang, bang. . . In the popular movies we saw western guys with guitars, not six-shooters.” Stevens now knew better. “A gunshot. . . is a holocaust. It’s not a gesture of bravado, it’s death.”

So that was the guy who decided to film Shane: a man whose long-standing admiration for America’s popular conception of the mythic west was now haunted by war. It would be his first (and, as it turned out, his only) western as a director, and he was determined to do the job right, infusing the audience with deep emotions reminiscent of those quiet moments of communion achieved long ago in his parents’ theater.

“What I wanted this film to do,” Stevens said, “was catch something of how people looked and lived, their home ways, their manners and ways of doing things, and most importantly the violent character of the six-shooter. . . I wanted to show that a .45, if you pull directly in a man’s direction, you destroy an upright figure. I wanted to make that one point.” How he went about doing all of that — the directorial decisions, the editing, the clever cinematic tricks — would change the way westerns were made forever after.

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Two books about George Stevens. Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film by Marilyn Ann Moss and George Stevens: Interviews edited by Paul Cronin (the same guy who did that great book Herzog on Herzog, which I referenced in our Grizzly Man series) are both worthwhile. Unlike guys like John Ford, Stevens enjoyed articulating the decisions underlying his art, and these books are chock full of his thoughts on his films, Hollywood, and much else.

George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey. This excellent, illuminating documentary was produced, directed and narrated by Stevens’ own son, George Jr. You can Netflix it, or purchase it at the usual places. Well worth your time.

Martin Scorsese on George Stevens. The renowned director of our time explains what he admires about one of the greats of the Golden Age of filmmaking in this article written for TCM.

He came into the world as Wu Yu-Sheng in October, 1946. Originally hailing from Guangzhou (Canton), in the south of China, his family fled to British-controlled Hong Kong in 1950 to escape the newly organized Communist government. Woo and his parents lived in a shantytown slum until a terrible fire destroyed the whole works in 1953, then survived on the streets for a year before finally settling in government housing. “The neighborhood had lots of drug dealers and gangsters,” Woo says, “There was gambling and prostitution. Every day I had to deal with a gang. I used to get beat up by a gang and I used to fight back very hard. I got in lots of fights. But I had great parents who taught me to go straight and to live with dignity and be a decent man.” His father soon contracted tuberculosis, and would die from the disease while Woo was in his teens. “Because we were poor,” Woo says, “I always thought we were living in hell.”

Throughout those grim years, only two things kept Woo’s spirit intact. The first was an event he now sees as miraculous: he became the beneficiary of an anonymous donation from an American family intended to send destitute Chinese kids to school. “I was deeply impressed,” he says, “with the altruism of the American family who paid for my education that my family valued but was simply unable to supply.” Soon Woo was in a Lutheran school and attending church, with the goal of both to “make decent young men and women out of us slum-dwellers. And, I must say, the school achieved its aim.”

When his teachers complained that his Chinese name was too hard for them to pronounce, he chose a solid Christian name, John, as a substitute. Soon, he considered himself “a fervent Christian,” going so far as to flirt with becoming a minister so that he might somehow repay the kindnesses laden on him by the church. He attended a Catholic high school, and made his first money doing work at various churches. “All of these things,” Woo says, “made me learn what dignity is, what honor is, and gave me a lot of hope.” Even after his father died, he remained unbowed and refused to join a gang, do drugs, or succumb to any of the other pitfalls of life in the slums. When asked how he managed to keep on the straight and narrow in such trying circumstances, his response is simple: “I had a great mother, and I was devoted to the church.”

The other thing that transformed Woo’s life in those years was cinema. “My mother was a huge fan of American classics,” Woo says, “so she often took me to the movies. They were free for kids. Because we lived in the slums I loved movies so much for helping me escape from that hell. There was so much beauty in movies.” It got to the point where Woo found himself cutting classes in order to sneak away to see all the latest pictures. By the time he graduated high school his mind was filled with filmic lessons learned from classic American movies, the French New Wave, the gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville, the samurai films of Kurosawa, and much else.

He began making short experimental films of his own in an attempt to mimic the beauty he saw on screen, funding them by working as a ballroom dance instructor at yet another church. “I wasn’t a great dancer,” he admits, “I just knew the moves and taught people. But that made me learn the ability of the body to move, and to see the romance in physical action.” In hindsight, this peripheral education would have the same brilliant effect on his future filmmaking career that military drill training had on the career of legendary Hollywood dance choreographer Busby Berkeley. “As I’m shooting sometimes,” Woo says, “or when I choreograph action, I feel like I’m dancing. When I have my hero diving in the air, or shooting with two guns, it’s pretty much like ballet.”

Film school was not only beyond his reach economically — no such institution existed at all in 1960s Hong Kong. So after high school, he finagled his way into a job as a production assistant at Cathay Studios, and over a period of many years managed to work his way up the food chain, hopping from Shaw Brothers to Golden Harvest to Golden Princess. Eventually he became a director of formula martial arts flicks (one starring a very young Jackie Chan) and goofy comedies, but his heart still lay with those Melville pictures seen as a kid, with action and visuals filtered through a fertile mind’s eye chock-full of Christian imagery and iconography. “I tried to convince the studio to let me make a gangster film,” Woo remembers, “but they didn’t want me to.” As the comedies and martial arts flicks he made began to draw less and less at the box office, his rising star dimmed, and he found himself a has-been at the box-office before he had even the chance to do a single film with full creative control. “I was so very frustrated,” Woo says about the long doldrums of his early directorial career. “Some people even said I should go back to film school or just watch tapes and learn about film, which hurt me. You know, I do have my dignity. I’ve always believed I am a good director.”

Finally, in 1985 he got a break thanks to his friendship with director/producer Tsui Hark. Woo had previously helped Tsui through some particularly rough patches and lean years, so when in the mid-1980s Tsui was getting his own production company off the ground, one dedicated to the improvement and modernization of Hong Kong films, he gave Woo a chance to finally direct the kind of movie he wanted, a “homage to Jean-Pierre Melville, or Martin Scorsese, or Sam Peckinpah.” But this movie wouldn’t just be a copycat production, it would reflect Woo’s own outlook on life. “I wanted to make a film that would emphasize traditional values: loyalty, honesty, passion for justice, commitment to your family. Things I felt were being lost. . . .These are the values that I put in my films. My kind of hero fights for justice, for what is right.”

The result was A Better Tomorrow (1986 — the film’s original Chinese name directly translates to “True Colors of Valor” or “The Essence of Heroes”), a movie filled to the brim with guns, cool Armani clothes fluttering in the wind, male bonding, honor-killing, and Christian-inspired notions of sacrifice and redemption. And did I mention the guns? The movie was a smash hit and a cultural touchstone for a generation of Hong Kong filmgoers.

After fifteen long years, Woo had finally found his métier and become a bonafide auteur. He had also found an actor capable of epitomizing the noble yet conflicted spirit of the heroes populating his brutal, balletic action films: Chow Yun-fat.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, the ascension of Chow Yun-fat from ex-soap-opera star and “box-office poison” to Hong Kong’s answer to Steve McQueen.

Previous posts in the series “John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, and Hard Boiled”

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

John Woo at Netflix. You can rent quite a few Woo items here, but alas, no A Better Tomorrow (1986) or A Better Tomorrow II (1987) quite yet. Still, what’s left on the menu is a rich list. From his early years, you’ve got Hand of Death (1976) and Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979). From his Hong Kong gangster prime there’s his masterpiece The Killer (1989), the gritty Bullet in the Head (1990), the lighthearted and playful Once a Thief (1991), and of course Hard Boiled (1992). Then you’ve got his Hollywood oeuvre: Hard Target (1993), Broken Arrow (1996), Face/Off (1997), Mission: Impossible II (2000), Windtalkers (2002), and Paycheck (2003). Finally, you have his latest triumph, the Chinese historical epic Red Cliff (2008), Woo’s attempt to make a film with the sweep and grandeur of Lawrence of Arabia. Have fun.

A John Woo tribute at YouTube. Courtesy of creator Ernest M. Whiteman III, here is a visual primer on why John Woo is held in such regard by fans as both an action director and as a filmmaker who possesses great emotional and thematic depth:

Crossings: John Woo Documentary. If you can stand the strangely compressed aspect ratio of this video at YouTube, here is a five-part overview of Woo’s life and career.

Roman Polanski’s best films, like all great films, are very moral—in particular Chinatown and The Pianist. They deal with socially repugnant behavior (incest, domestic abuse, prejudice, oppression, war) and the human spirit’s attempt to triumph over ethical transgression and evil-doing. But as a new allegation of sexual assault surfaced against the director last week, the famous filmmaker’s life has been anything but a model of morality. 

So why do some in the entertainment industry have such a hard time separating the two? Why is it so hard for them to judge the art with the yardstick of criticism and the life with the yardstick of justice? Whence the urge to intermingle the two and excuse the opprobrium of the one because of the merit of the other? 

Despite the fact that in 1977 Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful intercourse with a minor (legally equivalent to statutory rape), his apologists typically downplay—or outright forgive—the director’s crime on one of five grounds: (1) the rape occurred over 30 years ago; (2) he’s paid his debt to society; (3) he’s a nice man being persecuted because of his religion and/or celebrity; (4) the victim was somehow complicit; and (5) he’s an accomplished valuable artist. 

Last year 138 film industry workers, including such luminaries as Martin Scorsese and Pedro Almodovar, signed a petition put forth by the French artistic alliance SACD (Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques) protesting Polanski’s arrest and demanding his immediate release. 

Here are a few examples of some of Polanski’s well-known apologists expressing their support for the Polish admitted pedophile following his arrest. Notice how, regardless of the defender, one (or a combination) of the above five rationalizations is always alleged in Polanski’s favor. 

Woody Allen (May 15, to French radio station RTL): “It’s something that happened many years ago… he has suffered…. He has paid his dues, he has had a hard life…He’s an artist, he’s a nice person, he did something wrong and he paid for it.” 

Gore Vidal (in an October 2009 interview with The Atlantic): “I really don’t give a f–k. Look am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s being taken advantage of?… The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel all in white, being raped by this awful Jew… well, the story is totally different now from what it was then … Anti-Semitism got poor Polanski.” 

Whoopi Goldberg (September 2009 on The View): “It wasn’t ‘rape’ rape. I think it was something else, but I don’t believe it was ‘rape’ rape.” [Note: Even in her subsequent clarification Goldberg continued to minimize Polanski’s crime.] 

No matter what line of defense the apologist takes, however, the real motive that seems to underlie this Instinct for clemency, whether explicitly stated or not, is the last—the fact that Polanski is a valued and valuable artist, a brilliant filmmaker with an Academy Award to prove it. This earns him a “talent pass.” 

I come neither to bury Polanski nor to praise him, although I greatly admire his movies, especially the two aforementioned masterpieces. 

I only pose the question: Why are some so willing to issue talent a pass? Why are they so unwilling to accept the fact that a great filmmaker can be a pedophile or a pedophile a great filmmaker? It’s as if the admission of the one will diminish or negate the truth of the other. 

Is the notion even plausible, or at least worth entertaining, that without the vice there wouldn’t be the virtue? Is there some sort of “morality paradox” in play that could drive Polanski to explore the subject of sexual abuse in Chinatown and then enact it in real life only a few years later? Are they merely  manifestations—one artistic, one realistic—of the same obsession? And is the affirmative art—the grand and noble humanity of The Pianist, for example—a kind of conscious or subconscious act of expiation and atonement on the artist’s part for past transgressions? If so, should that affect the way we view the art or mitigate our condemnation of the artist’s sins in his private life? 

For some inexplicable reason we don’t issue the talent pass as readily to transgressors in other fields, especially politics. Politicians (Gary Hart, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, et alii) are held to a much higher standard. Their careers go down in flames instantly for minor, non-criminal sexual peccadilloes (although in the Edwards case campaign fund misappropriation charges may be forthcoming). Clinton would surely not have been reelected had the Lewinsky affair cropped up during his first term. But as someone had to pay the price, poor monogamous Al Gore got stuck with the Monica albatross around his neck and suffered significant undeserved backlash at the ballot box. 

Apparently, when issuing talent passes, we value the makers of law far less than the makers of art. What that says about us as a society bodes well for Hollywood box office receipts and less so for Washington legislators. There’s probably a morality paradox there, too. But the abiding conclusion is that, for many in the entertainment world, a great artist gets leeway that other mere mortals—even Presidents—can never dream of getting.