Sunset Boulevard

Year of Release:  1950
Director:  Billy Wilder
Screenplay:  Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D. M. Marshman Jr.
Starring:  William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Fred Clark, Lloyd Gough
Running Time:  110 minutes
Genre:  Drama, thriller, film noir

Joe Gillis (Holden) is a struggling Hollywood screenwriter, who hasn't had work in ages.  In danger of losing his car and his apartment, he hides out at a decaying old Hollywood mansion on Sunset Boulevard which turns out to be owned by faded star of the silent screen, Norma Desmond (Swanson), who lives alone with her enigmatic servant Max (von Stroheim).  Norma is determined to be a star again and has written a long and terrible screenplay of Salome, which she hopes to star in with Cecil B. DeMille directing.  Gillis persuades her to hire him as a script doctor, and soon finds himself drawn into her bizarre and twisted world of faded starlight.

Hollywood has always loved making films about itself, and this is one of the darkest and bitterest takes on the dream factory.  It has one of the greatest opening in film history, as we first meet Joe Gillis as a corpse floating face down in a swimming pool, and flashing back six months to tell the story of how he came to be there, the fact that the film is narrated by a corpse helps set the strange tone for the film, where everything seems slightly off centre.  Former silent star Gloria Swanson gives a memorable performance as the terrifying, pitiful and tragic Norma Desmond.  A great star forgotten and left behind by an industry and a world that has moved on without her, with nothing to sustain her but memories and dreams, she becomes almost heroic in her tragedy.  Joe Gillis, our nominal hero, is really more of an anti-hero, basically using Norma for her money, while mostly holding her in contempt.  The great silent director turned actor Erich von Stroheim appears as the sinister manservant Max.  There are several cameos from well known figures of the silent screen including Buster Keaton and Cecil B. DeMille.  Incidentally this is one of David Lynch's favourite films, and I can definitely see why.  It's a great film.

"I am big!  It was the pictures that got small"
- Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson)

Gloria Swanson readies for her close-up in Sunset Boulevard

Somewhere

Year:  2010
Director:  Sofia Coppola
Screenplay:  Sofia Coppola
Starring:  Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning, Michelle Monaghan, Chris Pontius, Simona Ventura
Running Time:  98 minutes
Genre:  Drama, comedy, Hollywood

This film is a slow moving but engrossing character piece.  Johnny Marco (Dorff) is a Hollywood actor who has recently become famous and now lives at the legendary Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, drinking too much and indulging in random sexual encounters with various women.  He is also getting a series of abusive anonymous text messages.  One morning his estranged, eleven year old daughter, Cleo (Fanning), turns up for an unexpected, extended stay.  With Cleo around, Johnny is forced to rexamine his feckless, empty life.

As with all of Sofia Coppola's previous films, this movie deals with lonely, wealthy people.  However while her previous films (The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Transtlation (2003) and Marie Antoinette (2006)) deal with these subjects from a largely female perspective, this one deals with her usual themes from a male point of view.  Stephen Dorff gives a good perfomance as the outwardly successful but deeply unhappy Marco, and manages to make a potentially unsympathetic character engaging.  Elle Fanning is also striking as the intelligent, grounded daughter.  Sofia Coppola is the daughter of acclaimed director Francis Ford Coppola and she has said that some apsects of the film, notably the sequence where Cleo accompanies Marco to a film festival in Italy and awards ceremonies, were partially inspired by her own childhood, although she has denied that the film is autobiographical.  It's obvious that Sofia Coppola knows the Hollywood lifestyle, and she herself has stayed at the Chateau Marmont, and the film critiques the lifestyle while also understanding it's appeal.  The character of Johnny Marco is treated sympathetically.  Often shot in a way that emphasises his isolation, his unhappiness is obvious on his face.  he knows that his life is empty and that he is in many ways just going through the motions, but he is trapped in a sense.  Cleo understands the pitfalls of her father's lifestyle and while she obviously adores and worships him, she is not blind to his faults and frequently finds herself taking care of him instead of the other way around.  She makes his breakfast and so on.  For his part, as much as he loves her, Marco cannot be the father that Cleo needs and he knows it.  At times the film feels a little bit like a Bret Easton Ellis story, although there is much less sex and violence and much more warmth and heart than you would find in Ellis' work.

A lot of the humour in the film comes from the depiction of the show-biz world.  This is not a behind the scenes drama.  Instead it follows Marco on the publicity trail as he tries to promote his latest movie doing photo-shoots with an actress (Michelle Monaghan) who clearly hates him, answering inane questions at press conferences and interviews and sitting in a make-up chair with his head and face completely plastered in gunk having clearly been forgotten about.

As with Sofia Coppola's other films, some people, particularly these days, may find it kind of difficult to be sympathetic to the self-examination of wealthy people trying to find meaning in a small, enclosed world.  The thing is that she is depicting the world that she knows about and lives in.  She grow up in a family that was practically Hollywood royalty, so the lives she depicts are ones that she knows about, even her one period film, Marie Antoinette, is still very much a Sofia Coppola film.  The thing is that there is a genuine warmth and heart to the film, as there is in all her work.  Ultimately the search for meaning, fulfillment and happiness is a key human concern that we can all relate to.       

      

Elle Fanning and Stephen Dorff in Somewhere

"Tell-All" by Chuck Palahniuk

Year of Publication: 2010
Number of Pages: 179 pages
Genre: Satire, Hollywood, comedy

Summary: The story is narrated by Hazie Coogan who has devoted her life to fulfilling the every whim of her employer, Hollywood star Katherine "Miss Kathie" Kenton who at the height of her glittering career was one of the biggest stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and has subsequently survived numerous failed marriages, countless cosmetic surgeries, career setbacks and comebacks, as well as alcohol and drug addiction, and now lives in the serene retirement of a movie legend.
Until Katherine falls for a young suitor named Webster Carlton Westward III. Hazie immediately pegs him as a would-be writer who wants a few lurid personal detials for a "tell-all" celebrity biography which is just lacking a final chapter before it is sent off to the publisher.
Until it turns out that Westward's book already has a final chapter written, describing the exact circumstances in which Katherine will meet her violent end.
As always it is up to Hazie to protect Katherine, and Katherine's reputation, for posterity.

Opinions: In the course of his ten previous novels and two non-fiction books, Chuck Palahniuk has taken numerous bitterly funny and savagely satirical swipes at the nightmarish world of modern life. In this one he turns his attention to the world of movies and in particular the Hollywood "Golden Age", the period of Hollywood movies which lasted from roughly the end of the Silent Film era at the end of the 1920s to the early 1960s.
As usual with Palahniuk, the book utilises a number of stylistic tricks, for example the novel is written in the style of a screen treatment (the chapter headings are all numbered with "Act" and "Scene" such as "Act One, Scene One" and so on), all names are written in bold type, the narrative flits frequently between past and present and there are numerous lurid fantasy sequences (including frequent extracts from a Lillian Hellman penned screenplay which depict Hellman (in reality a well-known playwright) as a kind of superheroine.
The book is not one of Palahniuk's best and lacks some of the wild inventiveness of his best works and reading it I got the feeling that Palahniuk's heart wasn't really in it. The book will feel like very familiar territory to Palahniuk's fans. However, despite that, it is an entertaining, funny and disturbing work, which reads like a mash-up of the movies All About Eve (1950) and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Fans of old Hollywood movies will enjoy it, with it's repeated references to classic movie stars.