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Hollywood maggots eat dead ideas | page 1, 2
Rare "quality," in a Hollywood context, is limited to whatever fringe didn't get burned off your spangled leotard when you jumped through the thousand flaming hoops. You see a scrap of it every now and then, and you think, "How the fuck did this film even get made? It's so good." And the reason for all the bitching and moaning by writers like me is that a really good movie is still an utterly magical, transforming experience of entertainment. When it's done right, it does become a part of your life. It can "Live with you through all your tomorrows." If you have any love for the infinite possibilities of film at all, you can't stop whining about what the industry has become: a sweaty, banal tool for Evil instead of a mouthpiece for the propaganda of intelligence, soulfulness, higher cultural and human leanings. Cintra Wilson Cintra Wilson's column appears every other Thursday in People + Archives
But there are occasional blasts of hope, and for this we can thank filmmakers like Mike Leigh. "Topsy-Turvy," Leigh's new period piece about the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Mikado," is absolutely great. This new offering does everything a film can do -- there are numerous real human drama parts strung together instead of only one climactic drama part that the whole rest of the movie tediously trudges up to, then ejaculates. The fabric of the uh, "plot" (Mike, he doesn't really do plots) is all of the backstage disasters that precede a theatrical production: the usual ups and downs, the ego wars, the arguments and illnesses and ultimately -- the nuts and bolts of real human sorcery -- the overcoming of obstacles. It's a miracle that any theater production ever wobbles up onto its hind legs at all. Here is life, sayeth Mike Leigh, in a way nearly everyone else has been too mercenarily chickenshit to do since "The Best Years of Our Lives." Without trying to sound melodramatically rhapsodic, I wept when the little pink-powdered geisha girls sang "Three Little Maids From School," because it was such a capsule of true delight, and so fragile in its tiny painted world, so close to never having happened, due to the usual ceaseless bunch of production throwbacks. But the point Leigh makes is that it did happen; "The Mikado" was a big, fat, delirious cherry blossom of a thing, and the joy was hard-earned, like any real joy is or it is meaningless. And that's the way it ought to be, ladies and gentlemen. Fuck this lightweight "Runaway Bride" shit. People ought to feel difficult, excruciating things. What is the point of Life, after all, if it is all so easy? The little haven, the painted eggshell world of the theater has become the enormous Disney superstructure of L.A., and all the innocence has been skull-fucked away by fat, cynical guys. Yet every now and then, a beautiful, bright child will be born among orangutans and learn to speak; a diamond will be retrieved from the ass of the dead dog. It gets harder every day, due to the directional undertow of Peorian paychecks, but Mike Leigh shows that though it has always been difficult, a good thing can still happen, occasionally.
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