Ourweekly columnStaff Pickstakes you back to a time when video stores reigned supreme andthe "Staff Picks" section was the placetofind outwhat films were worthy of one's time.Of course, our version ofStaff Pickshas a decidedly skintillating angle, as we suss out the films from a particular subgenre are the best to find great nudity. This week, we delve into the world of Hyperlink Cinema, the domain of sprawling ensemble pieces where everyone is connected and many lessons are learned! Also, discard for a moment the notion of the word "hyperlink"as it relates tothe internet. This is more in the sense of a great many (hyper) connections (links). Cool?
WriterAlissa Quart may not have been the first to notice the trend incertain filmswhere the lives of many disparate characters end up intersecting in unexpected ways, but she was the first to give it a name that stuck. Writing for Film Comment in 2005 about Don Roos' character-based dramedy Happy Endings, Quart coined the term Hyperlink Cinema to describe the phenomenon. Usually it's applied in the micro sense in that it often applies to one film and one group of characters, but in the macro sense, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Hyperlink Cinema on the grandest scale imaginable. We're not going that macro, this isn't the place for that sort of thing.
The trend really blossomed in the late 60s and into the 70s, as directors began acquiring an increasingly sprawling stable of actors. Robert Altman is one of the pioneers in the genre as we know it, but itsroots canbe traced all the way back to Jean Renoir's 1939 upstairs/downstairs masterpiece Rules of the Game—a subgenre Altman himself dabbled in with Gosford Park. Fellini's Amarcord and Buñuel's Phantom of Libertykick started the 70s Hyperlink renaissance, with Altman really bringing it to the States and giving it a distinctly American flavor. Many Altman disciples like P.T. Anderson and Quentin Tarantino brought the genre into the 90s, along with guys like Stephen Soderbergh and Richard Linklater, who morphed it into the hangout movie.
Directors who continue to operate in the genreinclude Alejandro González Iñárritu and Paul Haggis, the latter of whom won his Oscars for working in the genre with Crash, while the former finally won his Oscars for breaking away from the genre. Iñárritu had an impressive run of films in the genre from 2000's Amores Perros up to 2010's Biutiful, attracting huge international stars like Sean Penn and Naomi Watts for 21 Grams and Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett for Babel. He seemed to be the new poster boy for the new way of doing it, with an eye toward social commentary. However, it's hard to deny the success he's had away from the genre, so maybe someone else will pick up the torch.
Runners up also worth checking out that maybe have no skin or less skin than these five Hyperlink flicks includeTarantino's Pulp Fiction, P.T. Anderson's Magnolia,Doug Liman'sGo, Linklater's Dazed and Confused, Soderbergh's Traffic, and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. We have to begin, however, with the man who ushered the genre to American shores...
Nashville (1975)
Altman is sort of the godfather of hyperlink cinema and a number of his films could've been on this list from M*A*S*H to The Player to Short Cuts, but for my money, this is his best film in the genre. Altman re-teams with writer Joan Tewkesbury for thissprawling character-based drama withno noticeable form or structure, just a circular story that's so carefully constructed, all of its seams are invisible to the eye. It feels—upon first viewing at least—like spending a whirlwind couple of days in Nashville and getting to know and care about multiple people all at once.
While sex is in constant play in the film, there's not as much nudity as one might expect. Lily Tomlin earned an Oscar nomination for her role as a singer and married mother to two deaf childrennamed Linnea, who catches the eye of lothario musician Tom, played by Keith Carradine. When he begins to pursue her, she finds herself in a position she hasn't been in for quite some time, and ends up sleeping with him. Tomlin manages to be mom sexy in this flick, despite the many more scantily clad women around her...
Shelley Duvallalso shows up in a see-through pair of panties and a mostly see-through top...
It'sGwen Wellesthat steals the show, however, as Sueleen Gay, a waitress doggedly trying to make it in the music business despite having very little talent. Taking a gig at an all-male fundraiser for the unseen presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker, poor Sueleen is booed off the stage for her bad singing—and the fact that she didn't take off her clothes. She acquiesces and returns to the stage, giving the guys what they want and simultaneously realizing how good it feels to hold an audience in the palm of your hand, by whatever means necessary...
Sueleen features heavily in the film's tragic climax where everyone gathers for a concert at the Parthenon, and she finds herself suddenly thrust into the spotlight to keep everyone calm after a shooting. It's tragic in a number of senses, least of all because it proves that old adage that the show must go on, and it will keep going on with or without you.
Available on DVD Blu-ray via The Criterion Collection
Welcome to L.A. (1976)
Had Altman made a hyperlink film in his hometown in the mid-70s rather than in Nashville, this is probably what it would've looked and felt like. Altman's role as producer on director Alan Rudolph's third feature directorial effort helps further cement this connection. Hell, Keith Carradine is basically playing the exact same character he played in Altman's ode to the home of country music. It'sessentially Nashville's hipper west coast cousin with a slightly more tidy, less tragic resolution.
It's substantially less sprawling than Altman's film, running nearly a full hour shorter than his effort from the prior year. Rudolph's narrative is focused on a smaller group of characters over a longer period of time, spanning nearly a full year as Carradine and pals Harvey Keitel and John Considine swap lovers between a murderers row of gorgeous 70s beauties, many of whom wereon loanfrom the Altman stable: Geraldine Chaplin, Sissy Spacek, Sally Kellerman, and Lauren Hutton!
Like Altman's film, there's a healthy obsession with sex, but here it dominates the narrative. That also pays off well in the nudity department, with Charlie's daughter Geraldine stripping completely nude and Sissy and Lauren both going topless...
Available on Blu-ray via Kino Lorber
Exotica (1994)
A good number of Hyperlink films are set in and around a strip club, but none before of since Exotica had a marketing campaign and title so geared to make you think the whole movie was going to take in a strip club.Woe to the man who sees the film under such pretenses. Yes, there's a substantial portion of the first and third act that take place in a strip club, but there's an hour in between of various adults coming to terms with tragedy and numbing the painin various unhealthy ways. Likea great many of Canadian director Atom Egoyan's films—The Sweet Hereafter, Where the Truth Lies, Chloe—the film deals in characters treating their pain and past tragedy through sex, in all its various forms.
A bearded Bruce Greenwood plays a mild-mannered tax auditor who deals with his past personal tragedy by channeling his obsession into exotic dancer Christina (Mia Kirshner), who toils away at the titular club under the close eye of the always dubious Elias Koteas. Anyone lured in by the film's opening and marketing campaign will discover that the film's interests lie outside the doors of the club, which will be a disappointment should you hope to only enjoy the film for its nudity. I'll help by getting that out of the way for you right now, so you can see the film—good luck finding it—and appreciate its twisty Hyperlink narrative...
Happy Endings (2005)
It feels like it wouldn't be fair to have a list of films in this genre without the one that inspired the term in the first place. Fifteen years on, Quart's dream of Hyperlink Cinema being "the new Hollywood we've been dreaming of" hasn't really come to fruition. The genre had stagnated in the aughts and nowhere was that more apparent than in Don Roos' third feature—his first following the disastrous big budget romcom Bounce with Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck—and his second in the Hyperlink genre after 1998's The Opposite of Sex.
Unlike that flick, which was more interested in how a young firecracker like Christina Ricci could disrupt the lives of people who thought they had it together, this film deals with thirty and forty-somethings searching for the titular fulfillment. Often its divorced of its sexual meaning, but Lisa Kudrow does visit a massage parlor at one point, though she utilized body double Anna Shemeikka for the brief flash of breast...
Maggie Gyllenhaal and Tamara Davies are there to save the day, however, going topless without the aid of any doubles...
Roos' career hasn't slowed down, he's just grown beyond Hyperlink Cinema for now and moved over to Hyperlink Television as a writer on This is Us. That's fitting place for him to land as that is the future of Hyperlink Cinema Quart seemed to envision, it just moved over to television where the serialized nature allows more time for people to become emotionally involved and invested in the characters.
Available to stream via Amazon Prime
Cloud Atlas (2012)
The most recent hyperlink film on our list—though certainly not the most recent example that's been made—is this huge, sprawling, epic film that absolutely should not work as a film. On paper, everything about Cloud Atlas seems like a terrible idea, and certainly some people will tell you that even on film it's still a terrible idea. As we discussed earlier this week with F for Fake, this is just one of those movies that needs to be seen more than once to be fully appreciated because it's throwing A LOT at the viewer.
Based on the book of the same name by David Mitchell, the film spans several hundred years with six different time periods explored in detail. The Wachowskis teamed up with Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) to split the narrative up, each directing three sections of the story.Together, they took the notion of Hyperlink Cinema to its extreme by casting the same actors to play different characters throughout the timeline. This drives home the book's notion that what we do in our lives will have a ripple effect into the future. Therefore, we first meet Tom Hanks as a villainous thief posing as a doctor in the mid-19th century, and watch as he finally becomes a decent man in the final section, set four hundred years in the future.
Some characters start bad and remain bad, like those played by Hugh Grant and Hugo Weaving. Some, like Halle Berry, Doona Bae, and Jim Sturgess, are mostly good throughout the six stories. And others, like Hanks and Jim Broadbent have a progression from evil to good. The film's production design from high-tech cities to stone-age like civilizations, is impeccable as well, taking the audience across the centuries in a hair under three hours. The film's nudity comes courtesy of Doona Bae, whose biggest role comes as the title character Sonmi~451 in the film's fifth storyline chronologically, "An Orison of Sonmi~451." As she progresses from unthinking automaton to face of a resistance, she discovers sex along the way, getting busy with Jim Sturgess in a steamy sex scene...
It's an interesting concept, with several bold experiments playing out at once, and the sheer ambition of the project can't help but be admired even by the film's detractors. It really is the closest anyone has come to adapting an "unfilmable" concept like this in the Hyperlink Cinema world. Nothing in the genre comes close to Cloud Atlas in terms of ambition. You may not love it, but god damn it, you have to admire it.
Available to rent or own digitally via Amazon Instant Video
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