![\"l_04cc8fa5400ad4dc573b11ccac91abf4\"](\"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/l_04cc8fa5400ad4dc573b11ccac91abf4.jpg\")
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\nRob Fortucci, one of my best friends, commissioned this review.\u00a0 I met him in tenth grade\u2014in film class, no less.\u00a0 First hour at Dwight D. Eisenhower High School, in affluent\/middle class Shelby Township, Michigan.<\/p>\n
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\nRob Fortucci, one of my best friends, commissioned this review.\u00a0 I met him in tenth grade\u2014in film class, no less.\u00a0 First hour at Dwight D. Eisenhower High School, in affluent\/middle class Shelby Township, Michigan.<\/p>\n
By the time we met we had each already cultivated our respective cinephile statuses. \u00a0Mine was completely traditional\u2014my parents and grandparents are movie buffs and introduced me to all the kid-friendly classics, everything from Spielberg to Chaplin.\u00a0 At around 12, I started venturing out on my own into more \u2018subversive\u2019 territory, as one does.\u00a0 By the time I met Rob at 14, I was already a Kubrick, Scorsese, and Allen fanatic, and a true student of the 70\u2019s and \u2018golden age cinema\u2019. We instantly became movie buddies, and showed each other our favorites.\u00a0 He introduced me to the kinds of movies that wouldn’t be on the AFI 100 list, and I showed him the great ones that are. \u00a0It was a perfect give and take.<\/p>\n After high school, I moved to New York City for film school, and Rob stayed home in Detroit.\u00a0 My cinephilia expanded exponentially.\u00a0 By the time I was twenty, I had already been through France and their New Wave, skipped around the rest of Europe, tried some Asian, and delved head first into documentaries (slightly before they were cool I guess).<\/p>\n Rob was no slouch either, and basically did the same.\u00a0 However, at a certain point our tastes polarized.\u00a0 I think the main thing you learn after watching movies from the French New Wave is that those movies suck.\u00a0 And I think you can safely apply that outlook to any genre, movement, or period because movies (or art) made solely ‘in spirit’ misses the point.\u00a0 Art’s not about pushing boundaries or abstraction as a fuck you, it’s about making a good thing<\/i>.\u00a0 Making a good thing is often encumbered by era, technology, censorship, or pretension.\u00a0 This is why Signs<\/a>, Back to the Future, and Raising Arizona<\/a> epitomize the best cinema has to offer.\u00a0 They are made free from all those yellow barrels holding them back.\u00a0 (That’s a reference to Jaws<\/a>!)<\/p>\n Rob, however, had not really realized this yet.\u00a0 He has now\u2014but he still likes some<\/i> junk, which is why he’s commissioned me to write a Cassavetes review.<\/p>\n Rob doesn’t know that Cassavetes is a household name in the art world.\u00a0 He really knows nothing of pretension.\u00a0 Shelby TWP, Michigan isn\u2019t exactly a hotbed of art galleries and hipster chic.\u00a0 Rob discovered Cassavetes on TV or something, probably late night on TCM (the channel that PT Anderson ”soaked in” before regurgitating out The Master<\/a>).\u00a0 Rob likes Cassavetes simply because he can relate to the themes.\u00a0 Rob likes alcoholism, problems, marriage, divorce, families, and put-upon husbands.<\/p>\n Rob knows I don’t like Husbands<\/a>.\u00a0 In fact, I’d already seen much of it before he asked me to review it, or at least enough to know I don’t care to see any more.\u00a0 (I have a tendency to turn movies off pretty quickly.\u00a0 There will be an essay about that in the future.)\u00a0 But I promised Rob I\u2019d watch the whole thing, so I did.<\/p>\n I was introduced to Husbands and Cassavetes a long while back by an exuberant teacher in film school named Sal Interlandi.\u00a0 I liked Sal a lot, so I wanted to like the movie (and care about Wong Kar-Wai, whom he also loved).\u00a0 Unfortunately I guess, for Rob and Sal, here’s what I think about Husbands.<\/p>\n Husbands<\/b> Husbands asks you to turn it off in the first five minutes because its opening is so dreadfully boring.\u00a0 It’s very 70’s.\u00a0 Very \u2018stylistic\u2019.\u00a0 It’s a bunch of still photographs of a few \u2018husbands\u2019, I guess.<\/p>\n What follows is some melodramatic slop perpetrated by a filmmaker who, on his first foray, warned us, the audience, that he doesn’t know how to make movies, and that we should bear with him.\u00a0 (This disclaimer literally scrolls up the screen during the opening of Shadows<\/a>.)<\/p>\n I really do think he made up Husbands as he went along, as it’s the only explanation.\u00a0 In fact, he’s probably proud of that as an idea.\u00a0 He would probably say something about improvisation and freedom and how great they are. Look, I like a good improv as much as the next guy.\u00a0 We all think it’s neat when we hear about one of our favorite lines being made up on the spot by a quick-witted actor, and the gracious wherewithal of a maverick director to trust him and leave it in.\u00a0 But there’s a fucking scene in Husbands where the characters sit in an oddly lit black room and sing, for like 30 minutes, for no fucking reason.\u00a0 (I didn’t actually look, but my guess is the scene is actually about twelve minutes.\u00a0 But it feels like thirty or more.)\u00a0 And I like long scenes.\u00a0 I have nothing wrong with them.\u00a0 The longest scene in Boogie Nights is the best one.\u00a0 And the newly famous bar scene in Inglourious Basterds<\/a> is literally over 30 minutes long and it’s fucking awesome.\u00a0 But again, Husbands is really just a bunch of mushed together slop.\u00a0 \u2018Hey, I like basketball, okay, lets have a scene where we play basketball for no reason\u2019.\u00a0 As a person trying to review this movie, it’s extremely difficult, because there’s nothing to dissect.\u00a0 It’s just things happening.<\/p>\n A common reaction to my negative reviews here is to say that \u201cI don’t get it\u201d.\u00a0 The real problem with movies like Husbands is that I do<\/i> get it\u2014I get what they actually<\/i> are, <\/i>as opposed to what they are represented <\/i>to be by a sect of the culture desperate to bolster nothingness in a foolish pursuit to create icons and look smart. Any explanation you could possibly give me as to the point of the goddamn basketball scene, or the singing scene, is made up.\u00a0 It’s made up because in real movies, every scene has a purpose in relation to the others.\u00a0 So even in something inherently experimental like Baraka<\/a> or Man with a Movie Camera<\/a>, you can garner an explanation for any one scene because, although it\u2019s experimental, it adds to an overall theme that is clear and resounding.\u00a0 In Husbands, and movies like it, this is not the case.\u00a0 At most it’s a movie about three people walking around talking.\u00a0 They’re middled aged and they drink and are friends.\u00a0 It really hurts my brain struggling to come up with something intelligible to say about it.<\/p>\n Like any film geek, I like how low rent film stock shot in mostly natural light looks from the 70s.\u00a0 I could wax on\/wax off about how the grain makes it seem grittier, and more real, and blah blah blah.\u00a0 However, the \u2018look\u2019 of the film is wholly accidental and just the throw-up of people who aren’t very technically proficient\u2014either because they weren’t paid enough, didn’t care enough, or didn’t know enough.\u00a0 From what I know about Cassavetes, I think the answer is all three.<\/p>\n The best thing Cassavetes ever did was help Scorsese by being his friend.\u00a0 For that, we owe him for indirectly contributing to some great movies made by a guy who truly knows how to use a camera.\u00a0 In the annals of cinema history, Cassavetes and the like are stains that champion mindlessness. Melodramatic pontificators, abstract-for-the-sake-of-being-abstract ‘artists’ that hinder the art form from exploring new, more advanced possibilities. (”That was way harsh, Ty.” – Cher, Clueless<\/i>)\u00a0 When movies like Husbands are liked by cinephiles, you don\u2019t end up with the next great classic.\u00a0 You end up with movements like \u2018mumblecore\u2019.\u00a0 So thanks a lot.<\/i><\/p>\n Sorry, Rob.\u00a0 I love you.<\/p>\n – Greg<\/p>\n 0 out of 1 stars.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rob Fortucci, one of my best friends, commissioned this review.\u00a0 I met him in tenth grade\u2014in film class, no less.\u00a0 First hour at Dwight D. Eisenhower High School, in affluent\/middle class Shelby Township, Michigan.<\/p>\n By the time we met we had each already cultivated our respective cinephile statuses. \u00a0Mine was completely traditional\u2014my parents and grandparents are movie buffs and introduced me to all the kid-friendly classics, everything from Spielberg to Chaplin.\u00a0 At around 12, I started venturing out on my own into more \u2018subversive\u2019 territory, as one does.\u00a0 By the time I met Rob at 14, I was already a Kubrick, Scorsese, and Allen fanatic, and a true student of the 70\u2019s and \u2018golden age cinema\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,17,15],"tags":[37,479,484,483,485,481,482,480,45,104,185],"class_list":["post-887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-gregsessays","category-gregsreviews","tag-greg-deliso","tag-husbands","tag-husbands-1970","tag-husbands-film","tag-husbands-film-review","tag-husbands-movie","tag-husbands-movie-review","tag-john-cassavetes","tag-review","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=887"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":966,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887\/revisions\/966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRob grew up in a wildly dysfunctional Italian\/Polish home with three rambunctious brothers.\u00a0 Scorsese wasn’t a name, but rather ‘that guy who made Goodfellas<\/a> and Casino<\/a>‘, Woody Allen was a creep their parents had\u00a0 sort of heard of, and Kubrick didn’t exist.\u00a0 Yet, their movie collection was staggering\u2014an entire wall shelf of sticky VHS tapes, all sans boxes, representing a greater portion of Hollywood’s output from about 1980 to 2000.\u00a0 Rob’s favorites were Back to the Future<\/a>, Problem Child<\/a>, Go<\/a>, Three O’Clock High<\/a>, and Boogie Nights<\/a>.\u00a0 Like any cinephile, he deconstructed them endlessly.<\/p>\n![\"husbands2\"](\"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/husbands2.png\")
<\/p>\n
\nWritten & Directed by John Cassavetes
\n142 min. (DVD version)<\/i><\/p>\n<\/p>\n