Links for the Day (December 31, 2006)

1. "2 killed in Bangkok blasts; New Year's events canceled."

[BANGKOK, Thailand (CNN) -- Thai authorities have canceled all major New Year's celebrations in Bangkok after at least seven explosions ripped through several areas of the capital, killing two people, police and hospital officials say. At least 12 other people were wounded in Sunday's attacks, which appeared to have been coordinated, and took place hours before New Year's Eve celebrations at midnight (noon ET). Major events in Thailand's second largest city, Chiang Mai, have also been canceled. Chief government spokesman Yongyud Maiyalab warned people to be cautious but not to panic.]

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2. "Hussein buried in same cemetery as sons."

[TIKRIT, Iraq (CNN) -- About 100 mourners gathered at the flag-draped grave of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein who was buried Sunday in Awja, near Tikrit. About 100 people, including the governor of Salaheddin, clerics, tribal leaders and relatives attended the event, which took place at 4 a.m. (0100 GMT). Saddam Hussein's relatives, including sons Uday and Qusay, are buried in the same cemetery. His sons were killed in a firefight with U.S. forces in 2003.]

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3. "Hundreds die as ferry sinks."

["Survivors of an Indonesian ferry disaster told last night how they had fought each other for life jackets as the vessel broke apart and sank, drowning up to 500 passengers. The Senopati ran into trouble off Mandalika island, about 300km north east of the capital, Jakarta, amid heavy storms. Huge waves crashed over the bows as the ship was travelling across the Java Sea from Borneo to the port of Semarang, central Java. In the last radio contact, the captain said that the ferry was damaged and capsizing."]

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4. "Chappy and Joel's New Year's resolutions."

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5. Kid Rock pledges to "give up something" in 2007.
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Afro fantasia: Bill Condon's Dreamgirls

By Steven BooneRemember that scene in The Blues Brothers where Jake Blues catches the Holy Ghost while watching James Brown lead a leaping, flying congregation of black folks in a gospel blowout? That’s the spirit -- the soul -- of Dreamgirls, Bill Condon's film adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical. Writer-director Condon adores the most spectacular, super heroic aspects of what used to be called The Black Experience as surely as Blues Brothers director John Landis loves JB’s permed pompadour. It’s all flying negroes and flying hair. As embarrassed as some white critics (and one White critic) have been about Dreamgirls’ lumpy mix of flamboyant negritude with bland, cruise ship arrangements of faux Motown pop, black audiences have mostly returned the love. Here, the music’s quality matters less than its thematic resonance; the characters’ thinness and broadness are less important than their vibrancy and familiarity. Dreamgirls is a white moviemaker’s sorta wrongheaded but sincerely besotted Afro fantasia, destined to go in the Ebony subscriber’s collection alongside Carmen Jones, Wattstax, Sparkle, The Color Purple and Coming to America. Love is what keeps this parade float of a movie aloft -- until a failure of nerve and insight built into the Broadway original sends it floating far away from emotional reality on the helium of hope.

Dreamgirls is the saga of girl R&B group The Dreamettes (later called The Dreams) rise and Supremes-style dissolution across the 1960’s and 70’s. Despite denials surely demanded by various entertainment lawyers over the years, Dreamgirls is clearly the story of Berry Gordy’s Motown, his love affair with Supreme Diana Ross and the rude way he ejected singer Florence Ballard from the trio. Gordy saw beautiful Miss Ross as having more crossover appeal than the more talented but average-looking Ballard, so he made Ross the lead. It’s a classic tragedy of 20th Century American music: The black artist-entrepreneur who can’t rise without selling his soul or somehow destroying his musical kin. August Wilson’s stage masterpiece Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the great drama on this subject; Dreamgirls has always carried the potential to be the great musical of same. That potential evaporates during the Hollywood ending, in which the Dreams reunite with their downtrodden Ballard, Effie White (Jennifer Hudson) and Gordy figure Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx) realizes he’s the father of Effie’s daughter. The moment is pure Spielberg Color Purple redemption. The group’s Ross, Deena Jones (Beyonce Knowles) hugs it out with Effie onstage, smoothing over a decade of betrayal, humiliation and outright theft of Effie’s music.

Bullshit.

Florence Ballard died poor and unheralded at 32 while Diana Ross collected Oscar nominations and Grammys. Dreamgirls is set up for just such a tragic conclusion, but Tom Eyen, who wrote the Broadway show’s book, chose to let Effie live. The trouble isn’t that Effie survives but that the powerhouse singer returns to the stage a compromised, chastened also-ran who’s just happy to join in on the show's blandest song. If you’re going to dream a happy ending for Effie, why not one in which she truly wins? Let Taylor’s Rainbow Records crumble behind its payola schemes and overspending while the American pop audience turns against pretty, empty Deena, embracing Effie’s kind of earthy, unruly Soul.

But an ending which doesn’t treat the Dreams reunion as the travesty it is just doesn’t ring true. Effie’s failure and death would have jolted the complacent, historically ignorant, musically incurious viewer into the reality that pop isn’t an American Idol meritocracy -- that there’s a lot of musical treasure out there beyond the charts and the official story. Dreamgirls doesn't indict the racist, Faustian American recording industry, merely the ruthless ambition of Gordy types. In the end, Curtis senses the error of his ways and lowers his head penitently before all the folks he’s wronged over the years. Yes, he’s a musical Mister from The Color Purple! (To compound the deja vu, the real Mister, Danny Glover, as an industry sycophant turned benefactor, beams from the audience at the reunion he helped orchestrate.)

But, as with The Color Purple, none of these weaknesses will stop black moviegoers from loving Dreamgirls to pieces. The last time I saw a predominantly black audience get so excited about a flick was at a screening of Robert Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats (the male Dreamgirls) in 1991. Dreamgirls looks like a more lavish, stylized fraternal twin of Townsend’s film. Both have a storybook sense of the ‘60s and are at something of a loss at how to encapsulate the 70s.

But Condon’s visual flair out-dazzles Townsend’s televisual storytelling. Every grand entrance, turnabout and epiphany gets a dizzying Die Hard room-to-room whip pan, swooning crane shot, or spine-tingling slow fade out. This director has some Stanley Donen, some Bollywood, in his blood. He uses these chops to keep a fearsome momentum but also to underscore the spirit of the age Dreamgirls depicts. In the montage that traces Rainbow’s rise from car dealership to fledgling record label, Condon captures the blushing bride excitement of young black folks bursting out of the Civil Rights era with a crazy dream, money cobbled together from myriad hustles and the bravery that comes from having absolutely nothing to lose. Right on. This is the romance of wage slavery emancipation most of Dreamgirls’ working stiff target audience pursues in real life, with their side hustles and off-the-books home businesses. (In one scene which confirmed that the audience I was sitting in was falling madly in love with the movie, Taylor conscripts a young typist from a crowd of applicants outside the Rainbow office, but when he notices her overlong manicured fingernails, he starts to turn her away. She instantly snaps off the fake nails and bounces on into the office. The applause and laughter that erupted from the audience at that moment was pure, grateful recognition. We all been there, sister.)

Condon realizes that the performances are his best hope of drawing out such resonance and overcoming (or even slightly subverting) the stage musical’s tidy resolution. It hardly matters that the central characters are so wildly inconsistent in motivation, they seem to have split personalities. (Curtis goes from slick, transparent manager-pimp to ingenious grassroots visionary to Ike/Suge/Papa Joe oppressor; Eddie Murphy’s Jackie Wilson-styled James “Thunder” Early similarly oscillates between cartoon ladies man in curly conk and glitter vests and supersensitive cokehead Marvin Gaye in soul brother denim jacket.) Whatever emotion or position the characters happen to be pushing at a given moment, Condon makes them hurl it out from the diaphragm and the heart. So even though Curtis ultimately comes off as a manipulative, womanizing hustler, somewhere in there we get a just as convincing glimpse of his human, even heroic, side -- his ambition to conquer markets and pop culture terrain outside the chitlin’ circuit; his obsessive love of Deena as a regal personification of “Black is Beautiful.” Likewise, although generally there isn’t much chemistry between any two characters in the film, the communal love overflowing in the ensemble number “Family” is convincing enough to induce a crying jag. It helps that Condon tops it off with the loveliest, least saccharine group hug in cinema history.

Of course, most folks are rushing to Dreamgirls for two reasons: To find out if Jennifer Hudson’s rendition of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” really stacks up to Jennifer Holliday’s iconic version; and to see just how quickly her presence and singing voice blow Beyonce off the screen. Well, those expecting a weak performance from Beyonce will be delighted/confounded to find that she has become a decent actress. After a few robotic performances in a forgettable MTV “Hip Hopera” and an Austin Powers flick, she actually showed growth and promise in 2003’s The Fighting Temptations. In Dreamgirls, she plays, well, basically herself -- a young Diva whose beauty and ties to management give her a power she’s not too comfortable with. And, yes, playing basically yourself in a context that invites self-consciousness does qualify as a bitch of an acting challenge.

As for Hudson, you’ve heard it all by now. She’s miraculous, touched by the same force that sent Jake Blues somersaulting to the pulpit. In middle age, she will make a legendary, inevitable Ma Rainey. In the meantime, we’ll probably have to endure years of a Ho’wood shuffle, with Hudson trading maid uniforms for gray wigs for jail suits. Time will tell if, unlike the recording industry depicted in Dreamgirls, Ho’wood has learned anything from a performance by a plump black woman that makes you want to climb into the screen and make passionate love to her. Um, maybe I should speak for myself -- but at the screening of Dreamgirls I caught, Effie’s cry, “And you’re gonna love meeee” was answered by a live chorus of ordinary Joes: “We do, ma! We do!”
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Steven Boone is a New York-basic critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of the pop culture blog Big Media Vandalism.

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Links for the Day (December 30, 2006)

1. "Saddam Hussein executed." Photo by Iraqi TV/AP.

["Saddam Hussein was executed at dawn today following his conviction by an Iraqi court for crimes against humanity. The death sentence was carried out at a former military intelligence headquarters in a Shia district of Baghdad at 6am local time (3am GMT). One of those who witnessed the hanging, Sami al-Askari, an adviser to the Iraqi prime minister, said Saddam struggled when he was taken from his cell in a US military prison but was composed in his last moments. He expressed no remorse."]

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2. "Another jump in ick meter." LA Times writer Geoff Boucher on the disquieting poster for Hostel Part II.

["Take your kids to the theater next week to see the barnyard fable Charlotte's Web and you might find yourself confronted in the lobby by a jolting new poster that is pure slaughterhouse — and the latest example of pop culture looking more and more like an autopsy photo."]

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3. "Moments out of time." At MSN News, film critics Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy revive their popular yearly feature, which they used to publish at Film Comment.

["A Prairie Home Companion: As Robert Altman's last set is dismantled around him, Guy Noir (Kevin Kline) noodles on a grand piano adorned by F. Scott Fitzgerald's fedora'd bust: "Gather thee rosebuds while you may..."]

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4. "Random bullet-point firing." Green Cine Daily editor David Hudson on what he considers the more significant developments in movies and criticism during 2006.

["I'll stray from the meta in a bit, but 2006 was a year in which critics - professed, self-professed or neither - did a lot of fretting about the state of film criticism. In the mainstream media, the story crested twice: in May, when anyone who could tap a keyboard demolished The Da Vinci Code and yet the unwashed masses flooded theaters to see it anyway; and again a month later, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. What's more, the masses rubbed salt in the wounds by making both DVDs mega-sellers. They wanted to see it again! And again! And they still don't care what you think about that, either. The wounds were hurting. Papers were letting name critics go. There was an ugly shake-up at the Voice. Overall, and taking into account all the obvious exceptions, the printed press, undergoing a long hard squeeze, has tended towards streamlining arts coverage budgets by running essentially outsourced consumer reports rather than actual criticism written from a local point of view for a local readership. The alarms went off this year when it finally sank in that this downsizing would inevitably take some of the stalwarts of what used to be the alternative press down as well. But all in all, I'm not as worried as others seem to be. As I've argued here before, good writers and good readers will find each other, and if there's some sort of perceivable value going on where they do, economics will catch up. Yes, it'll be rough going for a while, maybe even a long while. But I remain optimistic that it'll be easier to find good writing and to get good writing read than it was before the advent of the new media that have put this long hard squeeze on the old."

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5. "Centennial Tributses: Carol Reed." Edward Copeland celebrates what would have been the 100th birthday of the director of The Third Man, The Fallen Idol, Odd Man Out, Oliver! and many other features.

["In the [Peter] Bogdanovich intro on the Criterion DVD of The Third Man he repeats the oft-told Orson Welles line that no great film performance was ever given in color. While I disagree with that statement, I can't help but wonder if it applies specifically to Reed as a filmmaker. Though I haven't seen all of his films -- and his filmography is surprisingly slim when compared with someone such as Otto Preminger -- it certainly is true that no film he made in color comes close to matching the greatest of his black-and-white efforts."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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The Banality of Good and Evil: Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth

By Travis Mackenzie HooverPan’s Labyrinth is a thoroughly mediocre movie -- not egregiously bad, but dull and unremarkable and easy to dismiss. At least, it would be easy to dismiss, were it not for the insane across-the-board critical acclaim that it's managed to garner. It’s not enough for these people to say "go see a sweet little fantasy flick, it’s good;” they must instead find deep and redemptive significance in what is at best a fairy tale retread with fascist gunfight appendices. But the fact that the film is a repetition of the fairy tale structure is exactly what people find so profound: Roger Ebert led the charge with his predictable declaration of “A fairy tale for grown-ups!” that was mirrored by other critics, as if dressing up a bedtime story with Franco references and bloodshed were doing anything other than gilding a wilted lily.

The film itself does little to engage the mind. We are introduced to 12-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) as she drives with an official escort into a forest compound somewhere in Spain; it’s the waning days of WWII, and her new stepfather -- the bloodthirsty fascist Vidal (Sergi López) -- has designs on her pregnant mother’s child, which he expects to be the son to carry on his name. In true fairy-tale fashion, the film sets up the Wicked Step-parent as an oppressive ogre so as to give the put-upon child a reason to fantasize -- and perhaps subconsciously call those fantasies to life. Sure enough, she’s soon visited by a fairy who leads her into an abandoned forest labyrinth to find a wacky-looking faun (Doug Jones) at the center. Turns out Ofelia’s the reincarnation of a long-lost princess from a fantasy world (whatever it’s called; I blacked out during the exposition), and that she has to perform some tasks in order to restore her position.

To give an idea of how pedantic the film is in repeating the fairy-tale milieu, I must mention one particular scene. Ofelia is sent to retrieve an item from a room occupied by the Pale Man (Jones again), a blind monster with its eyes in its hands and an enormous table of food set in front of him; the faun informs her beforehand not to eat the food for any reason. Not "Don't eat the food or the monster will eat you," because that would state the reason for not eating, and thus not trigger the chase that will ensue; just a vague reference on which any intelligent being would have surely elaborated. Further, the room is full of Goya-esque frescoes of the Pale Man eating his victims, giving a fairly vivid account of what happens when you raise his ire. To me, this suggests you not stay in his general proximity any longer than you have to. But what does our girl do? She eats some grapes, awakening the Pale Man and ensuring the deaths of a couple of helpful fairies. Had anyone put two and two together, they could have easily avoided disaster, but then there would be no scene.

Of course, the film's profundity supposedly lies not in its fairytaleness but in its being, in Ebert's words, "a fairy tale for grown-ups" -- a crossing of the childish genre with the real adult world. But this is only true if your frame of reference is extremely limited. Vidal, far from being a complex representative of adult reality, is the same monster villain familiar from a thousand bedtime stories. He's the man who makes life miserable for the surrounding peasantry, including the partisans who live in the woods and assorted rabbit hunters who impinge on his territory. Shooting and torturing are high on his list of fun pastimes, and of course he has nothing but disdain for the girl-child, so we have no choice but to loathe him absolutely. Had Vidal been kind to Ofelia and given her and her mother a safe home, the film might have actually had some complexity -- forcing our girl to choose between domestic bliss inside the family unit and the external suffering on which it is predicated. But Ofelia never really has to make a hard choice: she's thoughtfully provided a preordained path on which she can feel safe (and, ultimately, royally pampered), while all of the evil people in the "real" world are easily identified and offer her no comfort. Fascism isn't defined politically, it's rather selfishly defined as whatever gives the heroine a raw deal.

Instead of a reality and a fantasy that intertwine and comment on each other, we have two fantasies that are like ships that pass in the night. Of course the "real" fascist can't acknowledge the existence of the fantasy world (a denial exemplified by his destruction of a folk mixture designed to ease the pain of mother's pregnancy); the fascist is himself a monster designed to get his just desserts in the final reel. Any intermingling of the "real" and the "fantastic" would immediately show that both of them are drawn from the same, feeble archetypal cloth, for the fascist lacks any human qualities that might make his rise to power logical and understandable. So the fantasy/fantasy world can't ever encroach on fantasy/reality territory, because Del Toro's movie requires that the two worlds be hermetically sealed. Save for one deus ex machina bit close to the end, the faun and his fellow-travelers never actually impinge on the real world when anybody's watching, making Ofelia's position that of Big Bird proclaiming belief in the Snuffelupagus. This isn't just a lame piece of scripting, it keeps the film from having anything to say about either of its two sides; each remains intact and unchanged by the encounter.

You wouldn’t know this from the praise being bandied about, which not only overstates the case but fails to connect with anything theoretically useful. Ben Walters in Time Out claims "few directors are so adept at conveying both the uncanny in the real and the recognizable in the fantastic," which is a nice way of saying that both aspects are so broadly drawn as to be indistinguishable from each other. "Not only one of the great fantasy pictures but one of the great end-of-childhood elegies," says Stephanie Zacharek in Salon, despite the fact that Ofelia runs around serving surrogate parent figures blindly while attempting to get back to her “real” family in the magical realm. And the intellectuals at Total Film make sure that we don’t miss that it’s "steeped in the kind of myth familiar from Joseph Campbell’s landmark book," the default position of anyone attempting to justify limp fantasy. But it’s Paolo Cabrelli in Stylus who guilelessly hits the raw nerve, declaring "it does not propose the existence of magic. It confirms it." This bit of slack-jawed awe probably epitomizes the appeal of the movie. It’s for adults who no longer have faith in childhood fantasy, but are disillusioned with the business of being adult: people who are doubly cynical, and thus doubly looking for something to believe. Pan’s Labyrinth offers a bridge between the two worlds, a both-sides-now palliative that assures us that magic is still available in a "real” world gone mad. This is what is meant by “a fairy tale for grown-ups”: a film that encapsulates weariness in adult life and spices it up with nuggets from a world of make-believe that allows you to chuck your life for the magic kingdom beneath the earth.

In reality, grown-up fairy tales look more like Blue Velvet, with its human monsters and its hero's ambivalent stance toward same; Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey is sucked into the sensual depravity of damaged people and is changed by the experience. The fissure between reality and fantasy is better established by Celine and Julie Go Boating, with its analysis of (and intervention in) the fictions that teach us who we are. But these films both are invested in the magical infinitude of human behavior rather than the comforting abstractions of fantasy constructs; they also have an ambiguous stance over how far one can go in representing “reality” on film. Pan’s Labyrinth offers only simplistic disengagement, which makes its elevation to near-masterpiece status a little unnerving.
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Travis Mackenzie Hoover is a freelance writer based in Toronto.

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Links for the Day (December 29, 2006)

1. A CNN poll names President Bush both the hero and the villain of the year. No mention of who won Best Sidekick.

["Bush won the villain sweepstakes by a landslide, with one in four respondents putting him at the top of that bad-guy list. When people were asked to name the candidate for villain that first came to mind, Bush far outdistanced even Osama bin Laden, the terrorist leader in hiding; and former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who is scheduled for execution. The president was picked as hero of the year by a much smaller margin. In the poll, 13 percent named him as their favorite while 6 percent cited the troops in Iraq."]

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2. The results of The LA Weekly Film Poll (formerly at the Village Voice, which also spawned a version at Indiewire -- if this keeps up, awards junkies will need a flowchart). LA Weekly's chief critic Scott Foundas pens an introduction.

["Of the more than 500 new feature-length motion pictures released in Los Angeles (and reviewed in these pages) over the past 12 months, among the very best of them — at least according to this paper’s two house critics and the results of the L.A. Weekly’s First Annual Film Poll — were a 37-year-old French wartime drama (Army of Shadows) never before distributed in the U.S. and a three-hour-long Romanian gallows comedy (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) that grossed all of $80,000 during its North American theatrical run. Such statistics will, I fear, do little to disabuse people of the idea that movie critics are elitist scum fatally out of touch with the concerns of the general moviegoing public. But remember that these same critics have rallied en masse behind Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and a little comedy called Borat — both of which rank among the most commercially successful studio releases of the year."]

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3. At The Nerve Film Lounge, Bilge Ebiri on The Good Shepherd.

["Many of us have been waiting for an American spy movie that does for the genre what John Le Carre and Graham Greene's novels did for British espionage narratives: bring a refreshing dose of realism and somehow convey the mundane, often dysfunctional lives of international spies, shadowy individuals who have to subsume their identities for what they believe (often halfheartedly) is a greater cause. Despite the advance billing, and some admirable intentions, Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd is not that movie."]

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4. The Chicago Film Critics announce their 2006 picks. Best picture: The Departed.

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5. The Toronto Film Critics' picks are summarized here. Best Picture: The Queen.
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Links for the Day (December 28, 2006)

1.: "Luke and the Jedi of the Round Table." Lance Mannion on Star Wars' "Expanded Universe," and the essence of Lucas' movies, which he compares to the Arthurian legends.

["Lucas' obsession with creating the perfect special effects got the better of him in the recently completed prequels/sequels, and he needlessly complicated, and confused, his own story by caring about the politics behind the rise of the Empire and cluttered up the screen with too many epic battle scenes, but the simple knights' tales are still there. In The Phantom Menace, Qui-gon Jinn searches for the Chosen One. In Attack of the Clones, Obi-wan sets out to solve the mystery of who is trying to murder Padme, which reminds me that I promised Jaquandor that I would write a post about Obi-wan's career as the Jedi's top private detective. And in Revenge of the Sith, Anakin faces and succumbs to temptation. I can and, given time, probably will write posts about the mistakes I think Lucas made in the tellings of each of these simple knights tales, but for now I'd rather note that Lucas tried to stay true to his original conception all the way through all six movies. The Star Wars movies are not about war. They are about individuals facing moral and spiritual challenges that come mainly from within themselves."]

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2. Girish Shambu on his "Ten Favorite New Films."

["If you'd like, please feel free to share, link to or comment on any of your favorite new films this year."]

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3. "An Appetite for Artifice," by David Bordwell.

["The rise of science fiction, mystery, fantasy, horror, and comic-book movies probably encouraged clever juggling with story order, point of view, and states of knowledge. So did the rise of indie cinema, which needs narrative innovation to set itself apart from the mainstream...We need to think more about where this impulse toward innovation comes from and how it shows itself, but it seems likely that the flourishing trade in self-conscious storytelling will be with us for some time yet. Hollywood cinema has long been self-consciously, almost fussily formal, and it has a vast appetite for artifice."]

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4. Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope on "The State of the Horror Film."

["There has been a trend in recent horror films to put a twist on their formulas due to the fact that audiences seem to be expecting something beyond gore. For instance, “Joy Ride” did so by infusing dark comedy and humor while “The Descent” turned conventions on their ear in a rather baroque fashion by being hyper-conscious of its placement within the genre. Moreover, there has been a drive to infuse a strong (in terms of Hollywood productions) political edge to the horror film."]

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5. Self-Styled Siren on Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in ""Remember the Night."

["Stanwyck, as usual, is marvelous. In the courtroom scene, see her watch a hambone lawyer (Willard Robertson) spin an absurd theory of how self-hypnosis lured her into unintentional theft. Stanwyck's reaction shots start out demure, but none too optimistic. As the jury starts to buy all that lawyerly hokum, her posture improves, her eyes start to sparkle. She tries to maintain a look of contrition, while she eases her gorgeous legs a little more into the jury's sightlines.?"]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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A humble radiance: Charlotte's Web

By Matt Zoller SeitzTo say that the new film version of Charlotte's Web doesn't dishonor its source sounds like a backhanded compliment, but it's actually the highest praise. E.B. White's novel has survived not just because of its charming premise, cleanly-drawn characters and hints of allegory, but because it's a perfect book. Every paragraph, sentence and word pulls its weight. Like the title object, it's a functional work of art. So is Gary Winick's film version, which casts Dakota Fanning as Fern, the precocious farm girl who assumes responsibility for a doomed runt pig (voiced by Dominic Scott Kay), then watches in astonishment as the pig becomes a curiosity, a celebrity and then an object of quasi-worship, thanks to the selfless devotion of Charlotte the word-embroidering spider. Like the book, Winick's movie is as solid and cleanly rendered as a Greek sculpture. It doesn't advance the art of cinema, nor does it mean to, but it does something just as rare: it stands up for true classicism. It's not a subversive/self-aware quote-mark-enclosed film school homage to prewar Hollywood; it's a 21st century movie so economical yet satisfying that it seems to have been ghost-directed by William Wyler or Walt Disney in about 1939.

The script, credited to Karey Kirkpatrick and Erin Brokovich writer Susannah Grant, doesn't just cherry-pick White's most memorable lines, it leans very heavily on his narration, read here by Sam Shepard -- a gutsy move, considering how many of White's passages are etched in our collective memory. ("It is not often someone comes along that's a true friend and good writer. Charlotte was both.") Winick -- whose borderline-inept Tadpole and serviceable but slight 13 Going on 30 gave no inkling of his potential -- rises to the screenplay's challenge and then some. In its own probably incidental way, Charlotte's Web has more to say about the sources of old movie magic than any number of blockbuster remakes and art-house rethinks. (It's an independent film, by the way, funded by Walden Media -- the family entertaiment production house that backed The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe -- and then picked up by Paramount.) It's not a straight-up computer-animated movie, nor does it foreground animatronic puppetry (as the Babe films did). Instead, it's a live action picture that uses special effects sparingly and tactically (to make real animals' mouths sync up with their dialogue, for instance, or to match a real animal with a digital double for some stuntwork). The effects never call attention to themselves as effects; aside from the obvious unreality of talking mammals and birds, the creatures move more or less as real creatures would -- an approach that gives the whole enterprise a matter-of-fact magic. The movie's compositions, cuts, hues and textures are similarly in tune with old movie values. Seamus McGarvey's cinematography makes the colors pop in the manner of a mid-50s Technicolor drama (bright but not garish, rich but not showily lush), and there's no visible grain, not even in dark shots. Winick and McGarvey's visual grammar favors locked-down closeups, crane shots and dolly shots, eschewing zooms, handheld camerawork and other visual signatures that came into vogue in the second half of the 20th century. Susan Littenburg and Sabrina Plisco's editing holds individual shots held just long enough to clarify a point or fix a reaction, never lingering or prematurely jumping away -- the cutter's equivalent of writing with a minimum of adjectives. These factors subconsciously convey solidity and permanence -- qualities that also describe White's prose.

The performances are conceived in the same spirit. Winick's absurdly overqualified voice-over cast -- Julia Roberts as Charlotte, John Cleese as Samuel the Sheep, Cedric the Entertainer and Oprah Winfrey as Gussy and Golly Goose, Kathy Bates as Bitsy the Cow, Robert Redford as Ike the Horse, and so on -- functions as a laid-back democratic ensemble, serving the scene and the story rather than upstaging them. When a performer shines, it's through precise character work. Roberts, for instance, has never had a role that makes better use of her to-the-manor-born confidence and opacity. What seems like icy vagueness in other roles -- Closer, for example, or Ocean's 11 and 12 -- plays here as craftiness, parental warmth and centered, depthless spirituality; these traits are just right for Charlotte, a mix of ubermom, movie star, Christ figure and eight-legged PR agent. Steve Buscemi's Templeton the Rat is miles away from Paul Lynde's rendition in the 1973 Hanna-Barbera cartoon musical (an OK movie, but one that'll vanish from your memory as soon as you see this version). Buscemi deadpans the rodent's scalawag self-interest in a manner that recalls his underrated star turn in his self-directed Trees Lounge. Buscemi's devotion to psychological plausibility pays off late in the film when Templeton realizes he's developing a conscience, and is startled, appalled, intrigued and finally excited. This sequence of feelings would be tough to sell if Buscemi were playing a human; yet here, with his voice issuing from a CGI-tricked-out rodent, it's not just convincing, it's moving. ("You're very kind," Charlotte tells him. "Don't go spreading it around," he replies.) The human stars acquit themselves just as honorably; first among equals is Fanning, whose beyond-her-years gravity and eerie focus read as righteous fervor. Moreso than in the 1973 film, you get the sense that Fern isn't just a kid taking pity on a pig, but a potential adult who's taking a stand based on an innate moral code (centered on empathy for the condemned, maligned and exploited) that will be perfected over time. This film about barnyard animals is the most humanistic blockbuster of 2006. It's humble and radiant.

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Links for the Day (December 27th, 2006)

1. "Former President Ford dies at 93": From CNN.

["Former President Gerald Ford, who became president in 1974 after the resignation of Richard Nixon, died Tuesday at age 93. Ford, the oldest surviving former U.S. president, died peacefully at 6:45 p.m. PT (9:45 p.m. ET) Tuesday at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, according to a statement from his office. The cause of death was not given."]

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2. "Forgotten Films: Shockproof": Bilge Ebiri on a little-known collaboration (of sorts) between Douglas Sirk and Samuel Fuller.

["No, compared to the florid, sublime expressiveness of Sirk and Fuller’s later work, Shockproof is a relatively subdued film. But it’s also an object of genuine wonder – in which Fuller’s characteristically uncompromising, extreme plotting is given shape and conviction by Sirk’s sophisticated mise-en-scene. The film begins with a pair of women’s legs, clad in ratty black stockings and shoes, walking amongst the clean, dapper shoes of a mid-day crowd on Hollywood Blvd. A brunette walks into a hair salon and gets her hair dyed blonde. We quickly learn that we’re watching Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight), a beautiful, recent parolee who has just done time for murder. Her parole officer, the tough-as-nails Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde, embodying a typical Fuller character with a typical Fuller name), tells her, in a classic hard-boiled exchange, that she has to change her ways: ”You gotta change your brand of men.” “Who picks them for me, you?” “You won’t have any problem making friends. Just make sure they’re friends this time.”]

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3. "Giant kangaroo likely killed off by humans": From MSNBC.

[" Australia's giant prehistoric animals, including three-meter (10-foot) -tall kangaroos, were likely wiped out by aboriginal settlers, not climate change, a researcher said Tuesday. The question of what killed Australia's so-called megafauna — including giant kangaroos and wombat-like creatures as big as a rhinoceros — during the last Ice Age divides paleontologists. The most popular theories are that climate change drove the giants to extinction more than 40,000 years ago or that Aborigines, who arrived in Australia as far back as 60,000 years ago, were responsible because of over hunting or burning the vegetation upon which the creatures fed."]

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4. "Uncommon Scents": Reverse Shot's James Crawford interviews Perfume director Tom Tykwer.

["The problems of adapting literature to the screen are legion, but few novels are as resistant to cinematic translation as Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Patrick Süskind’s macabre, serious, sometimes self-consciously ridiculous picaresque about a man born with an extraordinary sense of smell and an absent moral compass. Following the fictional Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from pauper to master perfumer to serial killer, Süskind’s prose is obstinately unfilmable, being intoxicated with the sensory minutiae of 18th -century France—especially its olfactory squalor and splendor. My first question to Tom Tykwer, director of Perfume’s film version—perhaps the holiday season’s least digestible entry as it so faithfully hews to the novel’s heady mix of solemnity, irony, comedy, and corporeal horror—therefore had to do with issues of adaptation."]

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5. "Like a Ribbon of Dreams" and "Based on a True Story": Martha P. Nochimson's two-part article for Film-Philosophy on New York Film Festival 2006.

["Founded in November 1996, Film-Philosophy is a 'salon-journal': an international para-academic 24-hour live-event version of specialised academic publishing, dedicated to philosophically reviewing film studies, philosophical aesthetics, and world cinema -- with an online readership of over 5000 individual visitors every month, as well as more than 1400 permanent worldwide members of the email discussion salon (join here). Journal texts are published through the email salon, as well as on the website, so that they can be discussed and contested and continued by salon members."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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The tail wags the dog: Children of Men

By Matt Zoller SeitzAbout a third of the way through the science fiction thriller Children of Men -- set in a fascist, childless future England wherein radical activists led by Clive Owen and Julianne Moore try to safeguard the world's only known living pregnant woman -- there's an action sequence so stunning that it slapped the professional detachment right out of me. When it began, I dropped my notebook and pen and bolted upright in my seat, and as it kept unreeling for several minutes without a cut, piling incident upon incident, moving from tight closeups to wide shots revealing a small army of foes chasing our beleaguered heroes, I began to lean forward, as if believing, on some level, that the extra centimeters gained by the change in posture would help me get closer to the movie, even enter the movie, like Alice stepping through the looking-glass. The sense of spiraling panic is multiplied by director Alfonso Cuaron and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's decision to shoot the entire setpiece in one take -- an all-or-nothing approach that meant that if one or two details hadn't come off as planned, the whole sequence would have been unusuable. This choice makes the setpiece's inherent dramatic power insperable from its status as a directorial and photographic performance.

The problem with Children of Men is that it's too much of a performance and not enough of a movie. It's filled with emphatic yet fleeting references to a century's worth of miseries and atrocities, from the U.S. war in Vietnam and concurrent domestic unrest to Bosnia-Herzegovina, 9/11, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. And Owen's character, Theo -- an ex-radical turned civil servant who's asked by his ex-lover, the guerilla leader Julian (Moore), to secure letters of transit for the pregnant Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) -- could be seen as emblematic of contemporary western political malaise, if you squnt really, really hard. Unfortunately, although these touches and Cuaron's meticulous direction indicate otherwise, the film lacks a coherent vision. It's a compelling pastiche, and that's not nothing, but I wanted it to be great rather than just proficient and gripping; it never quite gets there, and it suffers in comparison to earlier classics in the same vein. Unlike, say, Brazil, which wove every scene, performance, line and design detail into an analysis of the mechanics of fascism and its bludgeoning effect on hope and imagination, or Blade Runner, whose jam-packed yet anonymous futureworld visualized life in an era where only machines with limited lifespans appreciated what it meant to be human, Children of Men's references feel at once calculated and perfunctory -- bits of faux-political plumage affixed to what is, in essence, a post-apocalyptic cousin of Casablanca, with Owen in the Bogart role and Moore playing a combination of Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid.

The movie felt less passionate and personal to me than Mad Max, Blade Runner, Brazil, Spielberg's War of the Worlds or the sleazy but fascinating 1975 midnight movie A Boy and His Dog -- movies that are mainly interested in building and sustaining a dreamlike/mythic free-associative aura that's not "real" in any quantifiable sense. Children of Men has a few poetic or allegorical touches: for instance, Kee reveals her pregnancy to Theo by stripping off all her clothes while standing in a cow pen (she looks like she's posing for Annie Leibowitz). Later, Theo loses his shoes and replaces them with flip-flops, in essence becoming Joseph to Kee's Mary, who's often seen in a hooded sackcloth-looking robe. But the film's not inclined to commit to this line of presentation, perhaps for fear of being described as corny, so the touches play like little jokes. For the most part, Children of Men aspires to a kind of off-center realism. It's not so much an allegory as a depressive leftist projection. Its vision of a brutal, paranoid, jackboot-policed, immigrant-abusing-and-deporting England is built on very specific contemporary and recent historical references, and the film certifies its "serious" credentials by embracing a grungy naturalistic vibe. Because of these choices, the film's vagueness begins to seem not allusive, but evasive. It's very, very tastefully pushing your buttons, writing sociological and political checks it has no intention of cashing. (At screenings, you can hear people whispering to their seatmates, "Guatanamo Bay.")

Which isn't to say it's a bad film. It's superbly crafted and compelling throughout, and filled with note-perfect performances -- particularly by Moore; by Michael Caine as the hero's elderly, pot-growing, ex-hippie mentor, and by Owen, whose characteristically coiled, sour performance hints at wellsprings of emotion the character doesn't dare reveal. (After enduring a particularly hideous onslaught of violence, he retreats from his compatriots and collapses behind a tree, sobbing; then he steels himself and heads back into action.) Some of the political and historical nods evoke a fleeting chill. The film is set in 2027, when an unexplained fertility crisis has rendered women sterile; that in turn means that the most conspicuous and constant source of solace -- the presence of younger generations who will someday succeed their elders -- is evaporating like water on hot pavement. Owen's wary, numbed performance suggests the sense of helpless emptiness that this entire society must feel (moreso than the film itself, which often seems merely disinterested). The story begins with a TV news story announcing the death of the only citizen successfully carried to term in three decades, assassinated at age 18 by an autograph-seeking fan. The conspicuous, public displays of grief -- open weeping in workplaces and Princess Di-style flower piles honoring the victim -- suggest that the entire society has become so numbed by daily existence that these media-fueled cathartic outbursts are a collective source of relief, a chance for much of the nation to feel something, if only for one day. But for the most part, the film's ripped-from-recent-headlines touches seem like opportunistic attempts to add depth to what is, in its curiously hard heart, the most elaborate cinematographer's reel in recent memory.

The first time Cuaron and Lubeski mount a one-take action showstopper (there are other one-take scenes prior to this one, but none so extravagantly chaotic), I was shaken, even awed, and rightly so. The sequence's power comes not just from how it's directed, but its events, their impact on the characters' lives and emotions, and their blunt confirmation of the terrifying (yet faceless, and therefore chillingly banal) force brought to bear on our scrambling underdog heroes. But as the film ploughs onward, Cuaron and Lubeski stage another such sequence, and another, and another, always jacking up the scale, accelerating the pace and cramming in more details. Eventually the other facets are subsumed into just one, showmanship, and urgent questions like "What does this futuristic fantasy have to tell us about life today?" and "How will the hero get out of this pickle?" are displaced by more mundane thoughts, like, "Is this take longer than the last one?" and "How the hell did they do that?" and "What time is it?"

Initially, Cuaron and Lubezki seem as though they're going to change up the film's tone as the story unreels and as Theo becomes more politically involved and emotionally invested in Kee's plight. The film's first third employs a striking bit of camerawork that visualizes Theo's detachment: a behind-the-shoulder tracking shot that follows Theo through an environment charged with emotion (for instance, his office on the day that the baby's death is reported) and then peels away from him to focus on other, far more demonstrative people. It's as if the camera equals Theo's conscience, and we get to see the exact moments when he sloughs it off. Curiously, though, as Theo becomes involved and activated again and has the detachment figuratively and literally beaten out of him, Children of Men retains its aloof, even cold tone. It makes you wonder if the filmmakers really care for the substance of what they're showing you, or if they're just keen to get to the next eye-popping one-take setpiece. (In retrospect, the first big action setpiece is reminscient of the highway driving sequence in War of the Worlds, but without the CGI.) Cuaron and Lubezki stage scene after scene with the same can-you-top this brio, guiding Owen through increasingly huge and chaotic tableaus which, as my colleague Keith Uhlich has remarked, feel uncomfortably like first-person shooter videogames. Panicked heroes drive failing old compact cars along muddy back roads while enemies race along on foot behind them, gaining ground whenever the vehicle stalls; Owen sneaks through a guerilla camp at night, staging a sneaky rescue/escape, while Lubezki's medium-distance compositions let us see that he's always mere inches away from being spotted; ragtag armies shoot at each other in a war-torn city that resembles the grimy English backlot version of Hue in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. Over time, the film's rhapsodically reviewed long takes start less an outgrowth of the film's story and themes than a cannily-presented stunt -- a marked contrast to the more justified long take aesthetics of Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark, Gasper Noe's Irreversible, Theo Angelopoulos' The Weeping Meadow, Gus Van Sant's Elephant and even the time-travel sequences in Cuaron's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Children of Men has a gloomy majesty, but in time, it stops being about what it purports to be about and becomes a paean to its own proficiency. The tail wags the dog.

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Links for the Day (December 26th, 2006)

1. "Garbage Day!": Wherein the greatness of 80s cinema is irrevocably proven.

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2. ""UUUuuuuuhhhh.. Miss Uggams x3": Wherein Miss Leslie Uggams forgets the words... thrice.

["Because it's June! June, June, June. Just because it's June! June! JUUUUUUUUNNNNEEE!!!"]

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3. ""I Can Die Now": Arkin Celebrated at Lincoln Center": Wherein Mister Alan Arkin purports to explain the existence of Little Miss Sunshine.

["The Film Society of Lincoln Center paid tribute to Alan Arkin Tuesday nightwith a special screening of Little Miss Sunshine. The film isn't the actor's most recent (I guess they wouldn't show The Santa Clause 3) nor is it his best (or second- or even third-best when you consider The Russians are Coming The Russians Are Coming, Glengarry Glen Ross or 13 Conversations About One Thing), but it is no doubt anchored by Arkin's wonderful performance in the role of the heroin-snorting Grandpa."

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4. "30 Great Westerns": Wherein we ride roughshod and bareback through film history.

["Welcome to our survey of "30 Great Westerns." These are the Westerns that any fan of the genre should know. These are some of the most influential and important Westerns ever made. We don't necessarily claim these are the 30 "best" Westerns. The Covered Wagon (1923), for example, hasn't aged very well, but it helped change attitudes toward Westerns and allowed for serious, feature-length Westerns to follow in its wake."]

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5. "S. Korea says avoid a prostitute, win a prize": Wherein the libido is bribed, to no avail.

["The South Korean government is handing out gifts for office workers who promise not to visit brothels this holiday season. “If you promise yourself to make it a healthy night out at the end of the year, and if you recommend this to others, we are giving lots of prizes,” the Ministry of Gender Equality said in an Internet posting. The ministry is offering to pay companies whose employees pledge not to buy sex after what are typically alcohol-soaked, year-end parties."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Links for the Day (December 25th, 2006)

1. From the House staff to all our readers: Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

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2. "James Brown Dies": From complications incurred while filming Rocky IV.

["James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, whose rasping vocals and revolutionary rhythms led to rap, funk and disco, has died aged 73. He was taken to hospital in Atlanta with acute pneumonia but the cause of death has not been established, his agent, Frank Copsidas, said. Along with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and a handful of others, Brown was one of the major musical influences of the past 50 years. At least one generation idolised him and sometimes openly copied him."]

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3. "Further Fodder": Film Comment readers respond to Paul Schrader's "Film Canon" article.

["But Mr. Schrader should fret less about the impossibility of setting a canon that will remain canonical. Canons always change to reflect evolving tastes. Vermeer was neglected for centuries and moved into the art historical canon less than a hundred years ago. Winckelmann’s epitome of the classical aesthetic was the Apollo Belvedere, now viewed as a Hellenistic pastiche for Roman patrons. And Roman architecture, once viewed as an undifferentiated extension of Greek architecture, came to be admired for its raw expression of structure in the early 20th century, when modern architects were pursuing similar goals, while today we acknowledge that the plaster and painted decorations conveniently ignored for so long really made these buildings more like Beaux Arts painted ladies than anyone previously cared to admit."]

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4. "Canonical Loose Ends": And Schrader's response to his readers.

["The omission of Rossellini was a major boo-boo. I’d sent a copy of the manuscript to Michel Ciment of Positif who objected to my inclusion of The Battle of Algiers at the expense of Salvatore Guiliano. Rosi’s film, Ciment implored, was not only the father of both Battle of Algiers and Z but better than either of them. I realized how right he was and asked Film Comment to replace Algiers with Salvatore, but through some mix-up it replaced Voyage in Italy instead. Rossellini is essential to any Canon, especially mine."]

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5. "Ignorance or Arrogance: What Hollywood Has to Learn from the Extinction of the Incan Empire": From the BRAINTRUSTdv website.

["In 1993, a Northeastern University undergraduate student with an affinity for the band Phish wrote a software application which allowed an online network of friends to share MP3 files. The student, Shawn Fanning, wrote the shareware application he called Napster for his friends who shared similar musical interests. The application spread across the web like wildfire. Unknowingly, Fanning and his small group of friends had launched a revolution against an empire: the recording industry."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Links for the Day (December 24th, 2006)

1. "Calif. Gov. Schwarzenegger breaks leg skiing": At least it's not a tumor.

[" California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger broke his leg on Saturday while skiing with his family in Sun Valley, Idaho, the governor's office said. The 59-year-old former movie star broke the femur bone in his right leg and was taken to a local hospital for X-rays and later discharged, Adam Mendelsohn, the governor's deputy chief of staff for communications, said in a statement. "When the governor returns to Los Angeles from his scheduled Christmas trip, he will have surgery to repair his femur. No one else was involved in the skiing accident," Mendelsohn's statement said."]

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2. "FBI releases last 10 pages of Lennon files": From CNN.

["The FBI has released its final surveillance documents on John Lennon to a university historian who has waged a 25-year legal battle to obtain the secret files. The 10 pages contain new details about Lennon's ties to leftist and anti-war groups in London in the early 1970s, but nothing indicating government officials considered the former Beatle a serious threat, historian Jon Wiener told the Los Angeles Times in Wednesday's editions."]

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3. "Japan researchers film live giant squid": We're havin' sushi tonight, boys! (And tomorrow, and the next day, and...)

["A Japanese research team has succeeded in filming a giant squid live — possibly marking a first — and says the elusive creatures may be more plentiful than previously believed, a researcher said Friday. The research team, led by Tsunemi Kubodera, videotaped the giant squid at the surface as they captured it off the Ogasawara Islands south of Tokyo earlier this month. The squid, which measured about 24 feet long (7 meters), died while it was being caught."]

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4. "Letters from Iwo Jima": Stephanie Zacharek on Clint Eastwood's latest.

["Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima" springs from an admirable impulse: This companion piece to Eastwood's flawed yet complex "Flags of Our Fathers" sets out to tell the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima from the viewpoint of the Japanese soldiers who fought and died there. Eastwood, working from a script by Iris Yamashita (the story is by Yamashita and Paul Haggis), hopes to humanize these soldiers, showing them as inexperienced young men who loved their families, who were under orders from their superiors to fight viciously, and who were victims of a culture in which dying honorably was considered far more important than preserving life. The impulse is commendable; the movie isn't."]

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5. "Home at the End of the World": Elbert Ventura on Children of Men.

["Doomed to disappear before it even sees the light of day, Children of Men seems the exact opposite of what the public wants to see during the holidays. Never mind that Alfonso Cuarón’s searing tour de force is actually a nativity story infused with spiritual fervor (not to mention a riveting action flick with the best set pieces of the year). This orphaned movie emanates such unrelenting bleakness that only a Christmas miracle could rescue it from its ineluctable future as a cult item. And rescuing it deserves."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Links for the Day (December 23rd, 2006)

1. "Essentially Woody: Intro/Annie Hall": A beautiful introduction by Reverse Shot's robbiefreeling to Film Forum's three-week Woody Allen retrospective.

["Odds are that most cinephiles of my generation, and most Reverse Shot writers, were watching Woody Allen movies before they ever saw anything by Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini; before they ever read anything by Dostoevsky or Ibsen; before they were aware of the sizable disparity in aesthetics between American and European cinema; before they were brushing up on their Nietzsche or read Rilke; before they knew the radical cultural differences his films evinced, and that cinema and, furthermore, pop culture itself had completely consumed and regurgitated his philosophical style and outlook. Often either regaled or demeaned as being merely a conduit to the “higher arts” mentioned above, Woody Allen is actually one of the most essential American artists of the past century, subsuming and reappropriating the textures of the modern European arts for the American cosmopolitan sensibility, funneling those tropes into a New York tenor, and thus single-handedly creating a new form of Jewish humor, which tightened the Borscht belt around the ever-inflating girth of the gentile elitism he (and we) both despises and covets. Each Woody Allen film is tricky to navigate; while he seems to put himself out there, in firing range, bearing his neuroses for all to heckle, he also always is shielding himself from some greater truth, whether by hiding behind Upper West Side extravagance or Euro art-house nostalgia."]

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2. "Some Points Before Vacation": From Zach Campbell at Elusive Lucidity.

["I'm not a boxing fan exactly, but I found this article interesting (I found it at some political blog I was surfing very recently, but I'm too lazy to double check which one at the moment). The media treatment of Mike Tyson finds itself echoed strongly by the underappreciated Walter Hill-directed Snipes/Rhames vehicle Undisputed ('02). Armond White wrote up the film in a positive review here. It's hard for me to deal with White's reviews these days--his weird permutation of rightist authoritarian populism is now too demoralizing--but for a while he seemed to be one of the few name reviewers engaging with ideas when he wrote on films, and at the time (2001-2002: he also seemed more aligned with the social left then, tho' I could be wrong) I was really inspired by his work. And anyway the article and the film offer another occasion to recommend Mandingo, Richard Fleischer's 1976 film maudit which is sensationalist, and far from a masterpiece, but still quite an important film. David Ehrenstein (for the record--gay and black like Mr. White, but in his case a figure on the left) has called it the "most honest film about American racism ever made."]

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3. "Gus Van Sant Popped for DUI": Those Fuzzy Navels are to die for.

["Gus Van Sant has directed himself right into the hands of the law. The Oscar-nominated Good Will Hunting auteur was picked up early Thursday morning on a drunk driving charge in Portland, Oregon."]

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4. "Zhang's Defiant Beauty, Smith's Maudlin Happyness": Fernando F. Croce's latest column from Cinepassion.

["Curse of the Golden Flower is incredibly beautiful, but beauty, easily abused and easily misread, has a curse of its own: reviewers seeking the frugality of seriousness were already leery of splendor in the days of Von Sternberg and Ophüls and Minnelli, and knee-jerk distrust of sumptuous surfaces has hardly waned in the years since (vide the uncomprehending scorn heaped onto Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette). The opulence of Zhang Yimou's new film is mystical, everything is ceremonial and everything is ritualized, from the dressing of the palace servants to the preparation of tea to the polishing of a throne; the Empress (Gong Li) strides through the corridors as if inseparably a part of the gold-and-blue chambers, yet a ground-level shot early on, looking up at the suddenly shuddering regent, locates the first crack in the grandeur. The year is 928 A.D., in the midst of China's later Tang dynasty: Chow Yun Fat, his prole rascality hidden under a graying beard and chilling regal armor, is the Emperor, returning from the front for the Chong Yang Festival, as well as for a bit of ruthless house-cleaning. Strands of intrigue proliferate -- three sons (Jay Chou, Qin Junjie, Liu Ye) vie for the crown; Prince Wan (Liu) has an illicit affair with the Empress, his stepmother, but much prefers the pretty daughter (Li Man) of the imperial doctor, who has his own secrets. The Empress pretends not to notice that her medicine's been spiked with mind-destroying toxins, for, as the Emperor reminds her, their family "has to set an example for the entire country."]

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5. "Mike Evans, original Lionel Jefferson, dead": From CNN.

["Actor Mike Evans, best known as Lionel Jefferson in the TV sitcoms "All in the Family" and "The Jeffersons," has died. He was 57. Evans died of throat cancer December 14 at his mother's home in Twentynine Palms, said his niece, Chrystal Evans."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Doctor Who, Season Two, Eps. 12 & 13: "Army of Ghosts" & "Doomsday"

By Ross RuedigerDoctor Who Season Two (or Season 28, depending on your anal-retentiveness) has been a string of entertaining highs and lows, in terms of both quality and intensity. It’s been a season of returns, renewals and reinventions. We’ve met Cybermen, a werewolf, clockwork robots, Queen Victoria, Madame du Pompadour, and at the edge of the universe, maybe even Satan himself. We visited a current parallel Earth and also a New Earth in the year 5,000,000,23. There were trips to 1953, 1879, 2012, and the 51st century -- a time that led to a tour of 18th century France. Sarah Jane Smith came back to us and Mickey Smith said goodbye. K-9 was blown up and put back together. Jackie Tyler died, but Pete Tyler lived. Throughout the adventures, there were only three constants: the Doctor, his TARDIS and Rose Tyler – at the end of the two-parter “Army of Ghosts” & “Doomsday”, we bid a gut-wrenching farewell to one of them.

Rose Tyler: “Planet Earth. This is where I was born. And this is where I died. For the first nineteen years of my life nothing happened. Nothing at all. Not ever. And then I met a man called The Doctor. A man who could change his face. And he took me away from home in his magical machine. He showed me the whole of time and space. I thought it would never end. That's what I thought. But then came the Army of Ghosts, then came Torchwood and the war. And that's when it all ended. This is the story of how I died.”

The two-part finale had an awful lot to live up to, especially after Season One’s “Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways” big finish, which was nothing short of resolution perfection, and for better or worse, my initial basis for comparison. The Bad Wolf story was embedded into Season One with a nearly flawless weave. Season Two attempted something similar with Torchwood, but the ongoing references dropped into each storyline managed to draw attention to themselves more than create any kind of mystery (then again, I don’t suppose they were intended to.)

This season’s finale is, from a writing standpoint, the reverse of the first season. “Bad Wolf” was a mildly goofy setup for the ideal “Parting of the Ways”. Here, “Army of Ghosts” offers up a fairly intense 45 minutes of intrigue and a cliffhanger to put all others to shame. “Doomsday”, however, delves into an awful lot of fanboy silliness on the part of “the war” aspect (more on that later). That said, the dramatic, soulful parts of “Doomsday” work splendidly and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched the Doctor and Rose say goodbye to one another on that overcast beach – the name of which translates to Bad Wolf Bay.

“Army of Ghosts” begins with Rose’s voiceover monologue above - portents of a bitter end it is, too – set against almost nostalgic imagery. They’ve even got the smarts to throw in an Eccleston clip! Credits…and then the Doctor and Rose arrive at the Powell Estate for a typical check-in with Jackie. But things aren’t typical, and only the time travelers seem to notice. The planet’s gone ghost crazy, and as Russell Davies did with “Bad Wolf”, we’re presented with more of a statement than a reality - but it’s a statement worth going for. If such a seemingly harmless phenomena occurred, I’d imagine this is how it might go down. Yeah, the premise is absurd, and Torchwood oughtta have its license to experiment revoked -- but once you get past that, the notion of humans basking in a conveniently affirmed afterlife isn’t terribly hard to swallow. The Doctor deflating the wind in Jackie’s sails is just sooo Doctor Who. No time for fairy tales and romance – shit is going down and he’s gotta get to the bottom of it.

And so the Doctor is finally introduced to the ubiquitous Torchwood, and all logic flies out the window. What’s funny is that it happens so fast, there really isn’t time to think about stuff like the immense amount of alien tech available to these people, and how the government fails to monitor any of it. Yeah, I know I said it was an intense 45 minutes—and it is. This story makes no attempts to play by any rules other than its own. Hop onboard the rollercoaster or admit you’re less than 4 feet tall. The Doctor is our main character, and he’s gotta be the one to point out how rotten things are in Denmark.

That the ghosts turn out to be Cybermen is probably not a shock; Mickey Smith’s (Noel Clarke) sudden reappearance and the cliffhanger Dalek manifestation probably are. I’ll never again experience the initial orgasm of the moment the Daleks descended from the void ship, and yet I’ll always remember the realization: Daleks vs. Cybermen -- every Whovian’s wet dream. If an old-school Doctor Who fan tries to tell you otherwise, they are lying. And so, Russell T. Davies, now that you’ve gotten us here, what do you intend to do with it?

With “Doomsday”, Davies does what really is the only sensible thing to do with the oft-imagined Dalek vs. Cybermen scenario: He has fun with it -- anything else would be masturbation. And he goes for the only other logical bit of drama: Daleks whooping Cybermen ass. This isn’t King Kong vs. Godzilla; there’s only one way to play it. Those of you who said the Cybermen were merely second rate Daleks were sorta correct, and “Doomsday” confirms the verdict.

But enough of that. An engaging piece on ‘bots battling ‘bots isn’t in the cards, as it would eventually lead to bagging on the fact that for some inexplicable reason only Daleks are seen being sucked into the void – there’s nary a Cyberman in sight. Or perhaps I’d hit on the Deus Ex Machina to end all DEMs – two levers which conveniently fix this most dire of situations? Or how about Pete Tyler appearing in the right place at the right time, so Rose doesn't get sucked into the void? If it seems like I’m on the fence with this 90 minutes of fanwank, that’s simply not the case. No matter what happened throughout the story -- the low point being Cyber-Yvonne Hartman’s oily teardrop -- I forgive it: The reunion of Pete and Jackie Tyler and Rose’s exit make it all worthwhile. The former was an unexpected bonus; the latter a painful necessity.

The idea that Rose’s travels with the Doctor in some bizarre way brought her family back together is potent stuff. The initial scene between Pete and Jackie in the corridor makes my heart swell – and that shortly thereafter they manage to slip back into bickering mode is priceless. Maybe only Doctor Who can do this, and if it asks too much of you to submit to such romance, you might be watching the wrong show.

Rose risks everything and all to be with the Doctor. Maybe life has no meaning without him? Her speech at the beginning of the story has a dual interpretation. Yes, “Rose Tyler” is dead on Earth at the tale’s conclusion -- but is that the singular truth of “This is the story of how I died”? Rose’s future seems sound, and she’s a strong enough individual that it likely will be…but her feelings for the Doctor are of such intensity that she’ll always have a hole in the center of her being. Rose may be “the defender of the universe”, but a longing will accompany her until her last breath. Nothing she experiences will equal or even come close to what she had with the Doctor. Echoes of such feelings were seen through Sarah Jane in “School Reunion”; now we get the real deal.

I don’t know when or where, but Rose Tyler -- like Sarah Jane before her -- must encounter the Doctor again. Rose is as much a part of the new Doctor Who as the Doctor himself, and it’d be dramatically irresponsible to not come back to her at some point – cruel even. I look forward to Freema Agyeman’s Martha Jones and the change her character will bring to the dynamic, but Rose Tyler can’t and shouldn’t be replicated. Billie Piper may be headed for other projects, but I (perhaps foolishly) believe she will return to the role that put her on the map.

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THIS WEEK: The Sci Fi Channel broadcasts "The Christmas Invasion", David Tennant's first story, on Christmas Day at 3PM (EST).

Doctor Who DVD Recommendation: Got a sneak peek of the Doctor Who: The Complete Second Series DVD box set and it does not disappoint: All 14 uncut episodes spread across five discs; commentary tracks for every episode -- five of ‘em are “InVision” commentaries, where a box appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen allowing viewers to see the participants ramble; video diaries from both David Tennant and Billie Piper; over 15 minutes of deleted scenes (unsweetened, but still great fun); an amusing outtake reel several notches above the current standard for that sort of thing (for instance, see a Cyberman take K-9 for a walk in the park!); the 7 minute Children in Need special set in the TARDIS immediately after the 9th Doctor’s regeneration and before “The Christmas Invasion”; lastly, a sixth disc is devoted to cutdown episodes of the documentary series Doctor Who Confidential. The box streets on Jan. 16th.
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Ross Ruediger is a San Antonio-based critic and columnist, a contributor to The House Next Door, and publisher of The Rued Morgue.

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Links for the Day (December 22nd, 2006)

1. "indieWIRE Critics Poll 2006": The Dennis Lim-run end-of-the-year movie poll moves from the Village Voice to indieWIRE. House contributors who voted, with links to their ballots: Ed Gonzalez, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Keith Uhlich.

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2. "Road to Morocco (minus Hope & Crosby)": From Edward Copeland on Film, Josh R on a little film called Babel.

["There’s a little film called Babel winding its way through our nation’s movie theaters that is so completely illogical in every respect that it strains credulity well past the breaking point. Now, Babel isn’t a fantasy-based film like Harry Potter, nor science fiction, nor the kind of broad comedy where you accept the ridiculousness as in keeping with the spirit of the thing – it purports to be a realistic drama. But the implausibility factor has been ratcheted up so high that somewhere, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are watching this thing and mumbling to themselves, “You’ve gotta be f***in' kidding me.” Copeland, I know you had issues with Training Day. I'll bet it's starting to look pretty damn reasonable right about now."]

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3. "Rowling tells 'Harry Potter 7' title": Hope Hannah's as excited as I am.

["British author J.K. Rowling revealed on Thursday that the long-awaited seventh and final book in her wizard saga will be called "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," sparking the next phase of Pottermania."]

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4. "The Cinephiliac Moment": From Rob Humanick's blog The Projection Booth.

["Perhaps because I lack the gift of hindsight for now, pinpointing 2006's defining moments has been a bit of a chore. Some have been evident purely for their balls-out extremity (the prolonged, nude wrestling match in Borat), others for their simmering intensity (Miami Vice features one of the most intense police raids in movie history), but a moment of small profundity that only resurfaced in my memory recently took place in Robert Altman's swan song A Prairie Home Companion (forgive me if I screw up any details, as this is from memory, and I haven't the DVD at my disposal for confirmation purposes) has emerged as a pivotal centerpeice of a year that has, for me, largely focused on death and the hereafter. With Virginia Madsen's Angel of Death hovering about the proceedings, mostly unseen, the "lunch lady" (the heartwarming Marylouise Burke) discovers her lover and the long-time show employee Chuck Akers' (L.Q. Jones - I think) lifeless body backstage, having given up the ghost but minutes ago. Overcome with confusion and emotion, she is soothed by the invisible presence of Madsen, who reassures her, "There is no tragedy in the death of an old man. Forgive him his shortcomings, and thank him for all his love and care."]

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5. "Yowsah, et al": Welcome back Eric Henderson. We missed you.

["Insomnia kept me up writing about what I hate. But a few paragraphs in and I'm not sure it sends the proper holiday spirit. The downright sick strains of Newsong's "The Christmas Shoes" aside, I am not prone to Grinching away this time of year. (Hell, I'd probably blog about that song if I could work up the enthusiasm to download it and confirm my suspicions that those lyrics, those sentiments, those off-key children's voices weren't just made up on the spot by my mom's car's radio. Suffice it to say, it's the sort of song that Kenny Rogers might pen after catching Children Of Heaven while tanked up on Jack Daniels eggnog."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Stallone's ring cycle: Rocky Balboa

By Matt Zoller Seitz"Do not let those numbers drive you crazy," fiftysomething ex-boxer Rocky Balboa tells his yuppie accountant son in the film that bears both their names. "Use an eraser. Get rid of 'em all."

I never thought I'd use the phrase "metatexual comment" in a review of a Rocky movie, but a thing is what it is. The line occurs in a sweetly awkward scene between a broken-down, working class dad (Sylvester Stallone) and his slick white-collar son (Milo Ventimiglia) in the lobby of a glass-and-steel office building. But while it's presented as a tossed-off bit of character development, it plays like an unsubtle plea to the viewer: "Forget the other four sequels and give yourself over to this one, because it's not another unnecessary, money-grubbing, button-pushing, factory-tooled product. It's a back-to-basics melodrama about a shambling old boxer re-entering the ring for a no-stakes bout with a young, powerful champ, not because he thinks he can beat the kid, but to prove he's still got heart. Honest to god, we're not yanking your chain this time. Look, ma, no Roman numeral!" That's a nice try at encouraging collective amnesia, but after a three-decade career built on commercial, political and sometimes racial opportunism, Stallone's latest comeback attempt is a dictionary-ready example of too little, too late.

Which isn't to say Rocky Balboa is unlikable. It's a nice little movie -- clumsy, sometimes inept, but nice -- and it shows signs of long-delayed social and artistic evolution on the part of its writer-director-star. The rest of the series trafficked in not-too-coded appeals to white working class racial paranoia (Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang) and even Reagan-era comic book jingoism (Russian hulk Ivan Drago), then lamely tried to cover its tracks with PC switcheroos (revealing that the champ's stereotypically Irish trainer, Mickey, was actually Jewish, and replacing him with Apollo, who played Good Negro opposite Clubber's growling, mohawked savage, then got beaten to death by Drago, giving Rocky another martyr to avenge) and it treated its real South Philly locations as a kind of nostalgic white ethnic backlot. This new movie gives Rocky a mixed-race teen to mentor and accepts changes in urban life with a no-big-deal shrug, and even acknowledges Philly's influx of Mexican-American immigrants; they dominate the staff of Rocky's vanity restaurant, despite brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young) warning that they'll steal the silver. Stallone and cinematographer J. Clark Mathis even color-codes the hero's old stomping ground (warm browns and oranges) and Rocky, Jr.'s impersonal world of vertical ice cube trays and gentrified row house neighborhoods (operating-room white, steel blue). Rocky himself remains Stallone's finest creation -- a big-hearted pug whose Popeye the Sailor malapropisms and sub-kindergarten observations rarely fail to earn a grin. (Rocky describing an animal shelter: "This is where they keep, like, a wide variety of dogs.") And considering how long we've lived with this character, Stallone's decision to build Rocky's physical decline into the story gives the film an unexpected cornball heft. Ditto Stallone's decision to make Rocky a widower who's reluctant to pursue a potential new flame, a divorced fortysomething bartender named Marie (Geraldine Hughes), because he's still madly in love with Adrian (Talia Shire, seen briefly in flashback footage). Hughes, like Shire before her, isn't given much of a character to play -- and her supposedly troubled relationship with her son, Steps (James Francis Kelly III), the aforementioned teen that Rocky semi-adopts, seems to have gotten chewed up in the editing room. But Hughes looks and sounds like a real person, not a Hollywood glamour-puss, and she deserves a medal of valor for getting through the series' single most cliched inspirational speech without cracking up onscreen. (The capper is, "They say the last thing to actually age on someone is their heart." That's plainly untrue: Rocky's most durable features are his hairpiece and his Joan-Crawford-in-Trog eyebows.)

Unfortunately, these earnest touches don't add up to much because, like Rockys II-V, this one's cut from a template so basic that if you showed any one of the movies to a chimp, he could probably type out a shootable new script (though he might need help coming up with a new challenge for the training montage, and when he was through, you'd have to delete all the references to bananas). In Rocky Balboa, our hero's once again fallen on hard times (this time his distress is mainly emotional; he's a grieving husband who keeps a folding chair in a tree near his wife's tombstone and wanders South Philly on palooka Proust tour of meaningful locales); he's once again given an excuse to get back into the ring, courtesy of an ESPN fantasy boxing game that names him the victor in a matchup against the chump-battering title-holder Mason "The Line" Dixon (Antonio Tarver); he's warned that if he fights again, he'll get his ass beat and probably suffer grievous injury, whereupon he mutters some gnomic wisdom and and resumes punching meat, guzzling eggs and jogging up the steps of the Philly Art Museum. Even hardened heartstrings may stir when Stallone cues Bill Conti's "Gonna Fly Now," with its pie-eyed inspirational chorus and variety show orchestra bunka-bunka bassline, and there's an extra-cinematic thrill in seeing the 60-year old, probably steroid-degraded Stallone deadlift weights, do pull-ups and work his combinations. (His form still stinks, but here, as in the rest of the series, he covers himself by reminding us that Rocky's a puncher, not a boxer.) The low-stakes matchup is a nice change of pace for the series; so is the bad guy, who's not really bad, just immature and surrounded by corrupt advisors. There are couple of nice directorial touches; my favorites are the "I am Spartacus"-style closing credits montage, and a lovely early image of Rocky gazing at a vacant lot that once contained an ice rink where he skated with Adrian. (He stands a few yards in front of Paulie's car, his beefy outline haloed by the headlights -- a ghost yearning for a ghost.) But 30 years and upteen reactionary trash-heap blockbusters later, there's just too damned much to forgive.

Rocky Balboa traffics in humility, vulnerability and smallness, virtues that have been AWOL from pretty much everything Stallone's made since the original First Blood (a raw, character-driven action film, temperamentally unlike its sequels). Befitting its stand-alone, weirdly naked title, it's a stripped-down production; like the original, it was shot fast and cheap, this time on High-Definition video instead of 35mm (a format Stallone unfortunately tricks up in the final fight sequence with flash cuts and Natural Born Killers-style color experiments). It's reliant on ancient tropes and hampered by amateurish continuity problems (characters are sometimes stunned to learn things you thought they already knew), and in an age where most sports films zip along like Fox Sports highlight reels, this one's paced like an old-timer's stroll from the Retirement Inn to the Souper Salad. It's not quite like any other blockbuster on screens right now; for that matter, it's not like anything Stallone's been associated with recently. But after a long, lucrative career built mainly on cynically manufactured, artistically worthless programmers like Rocky III-V, the Rambo sequels, Cobra, Lock-Up, The Specialist and their ilk, Stallone's reached the point where sincerity seems like just another career move.

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Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Weeks 7 & 8

By Keith Uhlich

The closing two weeks of the Museum of the Moving Image's (MOMI) Complete Jacques Rivette retrospective feature screenings of two films covered in a previous article (Divertimento and The Gang of Four), as well as three other works of recent vintage (Secret défense, Va savoir, and The Story of Marie and Julien), the first of which is an essential masterpiece.

Secret défense feels in many ways like a culmination -- Rivette's ideologies and obsessions distilled to a perfect essence. Sandrine Bonnaire stars as Sylvie, a medical scientist who discovers that her father's death five years prior might not have been accidental. Reduced to the level of genre, the film could be characterized as a revenge thriller, with Sylvie murderously seeking out her father's former business partner Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) after her brother Paul (Grégoire Colin) produces a supposedly damning photograph that implicates this Mabuse-esque entrepreneur as his killer. Yet the photo retains an unhealthy ambiguity; like a similarly "damning" line of dialogue in Coppola's The Conversation, its meaning differs from person to person. At heart, it proves nothing concrete, but its implications are poisonous nonetheless. Rivette doesn't merely flip his characters' switches -- he allows time to pass, lets the virus settle in. We observe Sylvie's routine and, in the process, we get a sense of her world, a Paris subsumed by distorting and dissociative technological advances (even voices on the other end of a telephone possess an eerie and unnerving clarity).

No mistake that, in these early scenes, Sylvie is shown searching for a cure to an unspecified cancerous ailment; little does she realize that she herself has been infected with an age-old disease: quite simply, the desire for absolute knowledge. Rivette and his collaborators (Pascal Bonitzer and Emmanuelle Cuau) reportedly based Secret défense on the tragedy of Electra, and the film (at nearly three hours) does have the arc and insight of a great Greek myth. Indeed, the film's final images -- which first shatter and then reclaim a quite literal proscenium -- suggest that this is both theater and cinema simultaneously, so how fortunate to have a performer as capable as Bonnaire at the center of it all. Equally adept whether in close-up or long shot, Bonnaire navigates Rivette's mise en scène with a near-imperceptible dexterity. Among her many bravura moments, perhaps the finest ones occur during the extended train set piece (locomotives second only to cats on Rivette's list of outward preoccupations) where Sylvie travels to the countryside to kill Walser.

It's as distressing a rail journey as the one that closes out Mikio Naruse's Yearning, with Bonnaire (a Gallic complement to Hideko Takamine) expertly delineating Sylvie's attempts to distract herself from the task at hand. She sits silently, orders a drink, rebuffs a fellow passenger's stares, and nervously paces just to the edge of courting suspicion. Action (or its lack) defines Sylvie's turbulent state of mind -- when the gun she conceals finally goes off (killing an unintended target) it is less a release than a self-inflicted wound that ushers her interior confusion to the pale and pallid surface. Poisoned by an ambiguous image, she forces her amorphous desire for revenge into a reality that cannot contain it. Actions have consequences (as some diseases cannot be cured): Sylvie's decision not only strips away her protective sheen of complacency, revealing the sickly layerings of guilt underneath, it also points the way -- totally, terribly, tragically -- to her inevitable demise.

I consider The Story of Marie and Julien a lesser Rivette offering -- a watchable, ultimately unfulfilling ghost story that the director had originally intended to make in the 70s as part of his unfinished Scenes from a Parallel Life series, with Leslie Caron and Albert Finney in the title roles. In this incarnation (which stars Emmanuelle Béart and Jerzy Radziwilowicz), the film's most interesting character is a cat named Nevermore, a moniker that none-too-subtly references Rivette and his co-scenarists' indebtedness to Poe. For this and Va savoir (which I have yet to see) I turn to others for comment. From Michael J. Anderson's Senses of Cinema essay on Marie and Julien:

"In the septuagenarian director and former critic's latest work, Histoire de Marie et Julien (Story of Marie and Julien) (2003), the ubiquitous presence of fiction moves beyond mere formal matrix, however, to become the actual subject of the art. The film surely represents a dissection of the process of fiction which is particular to cinematic art. Indeed, Rivette's narrative is shaped by a consideration of the three discrete stages of filmic creation: the conception of the idea (pre-production), its actualisation (production) and its final molding through the process of editing (post-production). Thus, Histoire de Marie et Julien is a film about filmmaking, which one is tempted to read nevertheless in terms broader than pure didacticism, which is to say a film that teaches its viewer about the nature of the art form. To be sure, Rivette's is a work that cues its audience to consider not only the creative layers of the process of narration, but also the creator's place within this construction, which naturally implies Rivette's function in the creation of this specific film. Hence, it would not be unreasonable to attach the tag of “personal” to Histoire de Marie et Julien given both the narrative's recourse to referencing the creator in the process of creation, and also the director's biography."

A second take from Acquarello of Strictly Film School:

"Jacques Rivette creates another refined and sublimely enrapturing composition in The Story of Marie and Julien, a film that ostensibly chronicles the relationship between a brooding, reclusive restorer of antique clocks and occasional blackmailer named Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) and the elusive object of his affection, a beautiful and enigmatic woman named Marie (Emmanuelle Béart) whom he had once known at a time when both were emotionally unavailable. As the film opens, a pensive Julien sits on a park bench and begins to experience an unsettling, prescient dream involving his passing acquaintance, Marie, and in the process, betrays a sense of regret and missed opportunity at their seemingly star-crossed romantic fate. Now, a year later, his haunted, unrequited melancholy now seems entirely reconcilable when he runs into a hurried Marie once again while she rushes to catch a bus at a busy intersection and he, to an appointment with the subject of his blackmail: a woman called Madame X (Anne Brochet) who had perhaps murdered her sister. Illustrating familiar Rivette imagery of interweaving parallel realities, manifestation of the subconscious, and elliptical mystery, the film evolves into a gorgeously hypnotic, slow simmering, and smoldering tone piece on chance, connection, and destiny."

Rivette scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum's dismissive capsule review of Va savoir from The Chicago Reader:

"Having won more mainstream accolades than most of his other work combined, this enjoyable romantic comedy by 73-year-old Jacques Rivette may be his first real hit (1991's La belle noiseuse is the only other contender). I can't begrudge this fine director a rare commercial success, but aside from Hurlevent (1985) this is the only one of his 20 features that I have no desire to see again. After showing much distinction as a modernist (1960-'76) and a postmodernist (1978-'98) Rivette has made his first premodernist film: it's fluffy, sometimes funny, and likably acted by Jeanne Balibar, Sergio Castellitto, Marianne Basler, Jacques Bonnaffe, Helene de Fougerolles, and Bruno Todeschini (call it Rivette Lite or, because it involves an Italian production of As You Desire Me being staged in Paris, call it "Six Characters in Search of Billy Wilder"). But it lacks the scariness, the mystery, and even much of the curiosity of Rivette's better work; if you can't stand something like Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), there's a good chance that you'll love this one."

And a more positive take from The Village Voice's J. Hoberman:

"A leisurely comedy with high slapstick interludes, Va Savoir starts onstage, with Ugo rehearsing Camille in their current production. His company is staging Pirandello's As You Desire Me with a blond-bewigged Camille as the amnesiac heroine played by Greta Garbo in the 1932 Hollywood version. The plays unfolds throughout in bits and pieces, usually before a disastrously empty house. Meanwhile, as Camille wanders around the city hoping to encounter Pierre, Ugo rummages through various libraries in search of a lost text by Goldoni—and is picked up instead by the enigmatic Do. The ensemble is brilliant, but the movie belongs largely to Balibar. With her bemused perpetual smirk, this actress (who has appeared in films by Olivier Assayas and Raul Ruiz) can be hard to cast. Rivette takes her harlequin face as an element to accentuate and, half the time, has her posed like one of Picasso's sad clowns—her thin body subtly contorted as she clutches her shoulder blade or waist. (At one point, she even wears a diamond-patterned dress.) Va Savoir has its own unhurried pace and unpredictable humor. This is the sort of comedy Robert Altman could only dream about. The various alliances shift; the dialogue goes in and out of Italian. There are more dramatic complications than connections, and a reversal in nearly every scene. Serene and witty, it's a cerebral farce in which doors are forever opening and closing, sometimes on another world."

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And with this, the last of the House's Rivette retrospective articles, we also close a door. A few thanks are in order: To David Schwartz and Tomoko Kawamoto of MOMI who provided access to screenings and screeners, not to mention information about the smallest technical detail. To the Out 1 crew -- Aaron Hillis, Glenn Kenny, Charles Taylor, Stephanie Zacharek, A.O. Scott -- for making the two-day press screening experience just that much more enjoyable (and regrets to Reverse Shot writers, and Rivette spelunkers, Michael Joshua Rowin and James Crawford for not introducing my bleary-eyed self in person). To Matt, of course, for sanctioning this series of articles, with extra thanks for letting me do simultaneous (and still ongoing) coverage for Slant. And to the man himself, Jacques Rivette, for a goodly amount of inspiration and perspiration, happily more of the former than the latter. Final word, then, to Charlie Taylor, who sums it up best:

"The critic James Harvey once wrote that the relaxed performances in "Rio Bravo" achieved the status of "pure behaving," in other words, behavior that was completely natural and relaxed in front of the camera. The length of a movie like "Rio Bravo" can't be justified by its simple plot any more than the epic lengths of Rivette movies can be justified by their plots. (At two and a half hours, "Va Savoir" is relatively short; "Celine and Julie" runs three hours and 20 minutes, "La Belle Noiseuse" four hours, "Haut/bas/fragile" two hours and 50 minutes, the uncut "Out One" 12 hours and 40 minutes.) But Rivette's elastic, expansive sense of time allows us to enter into his movies, to savor them. His great gift to moviegoers has been to allow us to live in the cinematic moment of his films as we are watching them and to send us back out into the world with a heightened awareness of the lyricism that can exist in seemingly quotidian moments: what it feels like to walk in a park taking in the surroundings, to stop into a bar for a drink, to sink back into the comfort of your apartment at the end of a work day. Rivette makes life seem like a gift."

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"Divertimento" screens Friday, December 22nd at 7:30pm. "Secret défense" screens Saturday, December 23rd at 2:00pm. "The Story of Marie and Julien" screens Saturday, December 23rd at 6:00pm and Friday, December 29th at 7:30pm. "The Gang of Four" screens Sunday, December 24th at 2:00pm. "Va Savoir" screens Saturday, December 30th at 6:00pm and Sunday, December 31st at 5:00pm. The Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) is located at 35th Avenue at 36th Street in Astoria, Queens County, New York. Click here for travel directions and here for the full Jacques Rivette retrospective screening schedule.

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Links for the Day (December 21st, 2006)

1. "Drop everything, read this now": From Jim Emerson's blog Scanners.

["As David Kilcullen, an Australian lieutenant colonel and political anthropologist currently "on loan" to the State Depatment, explains: "After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate.... [I]t's not about theology. There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’" Packer reports: "In a lecture that Kilcullen teaches on counterterrorism at Johns Hopkins, his students watch “Fight Club,” the 1999 satire about anti-capitalist terrorists, to see a radical ideology without an Islamic face." That, I submit, is revelatory. I wonder if those who can't see what's going on in "Fight Club" -- the feelings of impotence and alienation and personal violation that fuel the rage and the desire to belong to a force larger than the individual, even if it's just a form of nihilistic fascism that lacks the religious, racial or nationalistic aspirations of Naziism, Soviet Communism or "Bin Laden-ism" (for lack of a better term) -- can even begin to comprehend contemporary jihadism and what we now call "the insurgency" (as if there were just one)."]

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2. "Twin Peaks: Season 2": Hot damn, that coffee's good!

["We're still waiting on the official announcement for the second season of Twin Peaks, but Paramount has already announced it for Region 2, and they're releasing it in two volumes. We checked with some retail friends, and we were told Region 1 will receive the entire season on 6 discs."]

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3. "Eyes of a Stranger": Reverse Shot's Michael Koresky on Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima.

["What’s most impressive, even devastating, is that the clarity of vision is nearly crystalline as it shines through the dangerous, crisscrossed layers of representation and historical preconceptions. Like The Thin Red Line, it’s a war film that views the rupture of violence from a godly remove—Eastwood accomplishes this not through omniscient narration or traditional distancing effects, but rather through a finely modulated outsider’s point of view. Though completely spoken in Japanese (with English subtitles), and even if the Allied troops are rarely shown as more than a shadowy blur or a dark blot on the horizon, Letters from Iwo Jima is inescapably, fascinatingly, first and foremost, an American film."]

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4. "Checking It Twice: The SLIFR Christmas List": A wonderful holiday list from Dennis Cozzalio; with thanks for the mention.

["The following will probably feel more like a year-end taking stock of one’s blessings than a simple list of links to blogs and articles I’m currently interested in, and if it does, well, all’s the better for it. Because every time I click these links, I feel blessed in some way. In reality, all most of these guys (and gal) is likely to get from me is a Christmas card (and for those of you who want one and haven’t sent me your post office box addresses, there’s about as big a hint as I’m willing to drop). But in the spirit of holiday fantasy, after each link I’ve decided to imagine what I’d send each of them for Christmas if I had the world’s resources at my fingertips and decided to do something with them other than rule the planet with an iron fist. All gifts are returnable; just save those receipts!"]

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5. "Matt Damon": Just 'cause...

["Alec Baldwin: Film Actors Guild"]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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From the Short Stack: Almodovar on continuity

I've been working on reviews of a number of new releases, but since I'm not finished yet -- and the holidays are eating me alive, schedule-wise -- I'm going to cut and run today, and offer an excerpt from my short stack of movie and TV books. This one's from Laurent Tirard's excellent volume Moviemakers' Master Class: Private Lessons from the World's Foremost Directors, an anthology of interviews with the likes of Woody Allen, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Boorman, Jean-Luc Godard, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Wong Kar-Wai and others. It's a must-read for anyone who's interested in making movies or simply learning how movies are made, and it's especially good at revealing how the best movies reflect the personalities of their creators.

The following is from Tirard's interview with Pedro Almodovar:

"Once or twice, I have met with students, mostly in American universities, to answer questions about my films. What struck me was that my cinema didn't clearly resemble what their teachers had taught them. I could tell that they were lost and confused, not because of the complexity of my answers, but because of their simplicity. They had imagined that I would reveal all kinds of precisely and carefully thought-out rules. But the truth is, their are either too many rules or too few. And I know hundreds of examples proving that one can make a good film by breaking all the rules. I remember that when I shot my first film, I had major problems that forced me to take several shots (for use in) the same scene over a whole year. Consequently, at the start of the scene, the actress has short hair; in the next shot, her hair is medium long; and, in the third shot, very long. On noticing this while cutting the film, I thought the audience would howl, because this went against the most basic rule of all, that of the match cut. But no one noticed a thing. And that was a great lesson for me. It proved that in the end, no one gives a damn about technical errors as long as the film tells an interesting story with a genuine point of view. That is why my advice to anyone who wants to make films is to make them, even if they don't know how. They'll learn by doing it, in the most vibrant and organic way possible."

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Links for the Day (December 20th, 2006)

1. "Little Sam's Little Children Promo": Isn't this child abuse?

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2. "Film Forum's Allen Retrospective Gets City Talking": The Reeler staff surveys Woody Allen's career.

["Far more than they should, superlatives reign as our culture's primary means of defining legends -- a sports figure is "the greatest" this, a rock band is "the biggest" that, so on, so forth, etc. But that only gets you so far in New York, where little speaks louder and more influentially than results. And how do we gauge results? As far as New York film goes, you'd be hard-pressed to beat a 71-year-old Brooklynite named Allen Konigsberg. Never heard of him? You can call him Woody."]

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3. "Perez Hilton's gay witch hunt": Japhy Grant's excellent Salon article on the other Hilton sister.

["He doesn't call it "Hollywood's Most-Hated Web Site" for nothing. As celebrity blogger Perez Hilton -- real name: Mario Lavandeira -- walked down the red carpet of VH1's Big in '06 Awards earlier this month, the paparazzi pointed their lenses to the ground, refusing to shoot his photo. In Hollywoodland, where looks might kill but not being seen is fatal, it was as if the eye of God had turned from Perez. After two years of Hilton appropriating -- OK, stealing -- online paparazzi photos, scrawling words like "whoreanus" (a, um, "pun" on the word heinous) across them using Microsoft Paint and posting them on his site, the photographers and their agencies have finally turned on the world's most popular gossip blogger, who they claim is cutting into their bottom line."]

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4. "2006 - The Year in Posters": A different kind of year-end list from Rob Humanick at The Projection Booth.

["The final weeks of any given year being populated by countless competing best-of lists (many of which are of ranging quality themselves), it seemed appropriate to indulge, albeit temporarily, into something a little more lighthearted. My own best-of list will be debuting here in a little more than a week (after squeezing in as many crucial screenings and Netflix rentals as possible), so until then, I've decided to present a collection of my favorite (and least favorite) movie posters of the year. Not all of these are for films I liked (some I outright disliked), while some are for films I've yet to see, if I wish to at all. Compiling this was fun, but it also brings to light the relationship between the film as a work of art and the film as a product to be marketed, and the many benefits and many more downfalls that arise because of that. Lists are presented in reverse order, so as to maintain suspense."]

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5. "As Pataki Prepares to Step Down, Two Columns Rise at Ground Zero": From The New York Times.

["He once hoped that a whole steel superstructure would soar skyward from ground zero on his watch. In the end — and today’s choreographed construction ceremony was probably just that, his last official visit to the World Trade Center site — Gov. George E. Pataki settled for two columns well below street level. To be sure, they were important columns, set by a giant crane to form the south perimeter of the Freedom Tower. They were big (31 feet 2 1/2 inches and 34 feet 2 1/2 inches). Brawny (49,579 pounds and 53,342 pounds). And symbolically resonant, autographed with messages of hope, remembrance and blessing. But they defined a far different landscape than Mr. Pataki envisioned in April 2003, when he promised that this would be the year that "New Yorkers reclaim their skyline."]
______________________________________________________
"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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A deflating zeppelin: The Good German

By Matt Zoller Seitz
When everyone tells you you're drunk, you'd better lie down.

That phrase echoed in my mind as I watched Steven Soderbergh's The Good German, starring George Clooney as a journalist drawn into a Byzantine noir-ish mystery in postwar Berlin. The reviews have been so uniformly negative that I hoped it had simply been misunderstood -- that there was something there worth defending; but it turns out to be a rare case where a restless auteur doesn't confound unimaginative critics (which I think Brian De Palma did this year with The Black Dahlia) but instead reinforces their worst-case suspicions about his weaknesses. It's not actively awful, but it's so ambitious, and so misguided and ill-thought-out, that its floundering is somehow more painful. The phrase "filmmaking exercise" is an accurate description. The Good German was conceived as a tribute to, and subversion of, 1940s Hollywood tropes and tics -- or so I was led to believe by advance press trumpeting Soderbergh's devotion to classical Hollywood framing, lighting, transitions and camera moves. Unfortunately, that same phrase explains why the film's so shallow, aloof, disorganized and (most surprisingly) technically sloppy. It is mostly definitely an exercise -- not a movie, but a notion of a movie. The notion seems half-baked, but it's hard to say for sure. How do you parse a morass?

Adapted by Paul Attanasio from a novel by Joseph Kanon, The Good German is set in 1945 on the eve of the Pottsdam conference. George Clooney stars as Jake Geismer, an American war correspondent returning to his old stomping grounds, where he was stationed during the height of European combat; he's supposedly in Berlin to cover the conference, but he's really there to locate his ex-lover Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett). Soon enough Jake gets drawn into a murder investigation centering on a now-deceased rocket scientist who used to date Lena, and Lena's current lover Tully (Tobey Maguire), an shifty, amoral American G.I. who happens to be Jake's driver and who's tangled up with the Russians.

As the movie unfolds, Soderbergh cooks up a kind of Old Movie Stew -- a hybrid of The Third Man, Casablanca, Judgment at Nuremberg and Open City, a mix of Neorealist social drama, film noir and message picture, spiced with deliberately jarring contemporary touches, including profanity, post-Joseph Heller world-weariness, nasty violence and frank sex. (Tully's narrated segment about postwar Berlin as scumbag heaven includes a slow tracking shot of an ecstatic, leering Tully jackrabbiting a prostitute from behind; to quote Manohla Dargis' definitive takedown, "Here's looking at you, kid, flung over the bed and on your knees.") Berlin circa 1945 is depicted as a decadent ruin where conquering armies and their private patrons exploit chaos for influence and profit. Everybody's running a scam, shading their past or outright pretending to be something they're not -- all pro forma elements of the aformentioned genres, none of which Soderbergh quite manages to personalize and possess. With its glancing interest in individual vs. collective guilt and its contrast of faux-Old Hollywood gloss and '70s movie degradation, The Good German seems to want to say, "The language of old Hollywood movies was an outgrowth of bourgeois American morality and the profit motive -- ergo, old movie style conceals mundane and unpleasant human truths while protecting the powerful and reproducing their ideology." But what comes out is more like, "Old Hollywood movies are full of shit. Now watch this crane shot!"

Granted, this is all somewhat more promising than the Oscar season norm. And it's more than you usually get from a film school thesis paper blockbuster -- a subcategory of critics' darling that's proliferated like toadstools in the past decade or so, comprised of movies that foreground their influences. The short list includes Boogie Nights, the Psycho remake, Velvet Goldmine, Far from Heaven, Road to Perdition, Roman Coppola's superb and rarely-seen CQ, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Schindler's List and pretty much any Soderbergh film that's either set in the past (Kafka) or derived from an older film or films (The Underneath, Ocean's 11 and 12, Solaris). If you're up on the director's references, these sorts of films tend to be superficially interesting even if they fail to engage your emotions (or don't try to). But through the years I've gotten to the point where it's no longer enough for a movie to amuse me with its academic density and self-awareness; I also want to be moved, or at least enthralled, and the likelihood of that happening decreases in proportion to a director's tendency to quote other films rather than fully transform them (as Spielberg unquestionably did in Schindler's List). Boogie Nights and Far From Heaven, for instance, strike me as obsessively fussed-over anthologies of homage elements rather than movies that satisfy on their own sweet terms. If not for certain engaging performances (Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore in Nights, Dennis Quaid in Heaven) they'd have put me to sleep; rather that sit through them again, I'd rather re-read Robert F. Kolker's A Cinema of Loneliness, which is smarter than any one of these movies, and funnier, too. (My favorite of this list is the widely maligned Road to Perdition; it's more openly sentimental than any of its subgenre compatriots, but much more visually and rhythmically imaginative; its Night of the Hunter-inspired, black-and-white-in-color photography and its thematically complex Jude Law subplot likening photography to spiritual murder are more striking than any of Paul Thomas Anderson's bumper-cars Steadicam shots.) Unfortunately, German is the weakest entry yet in this burgeoning category. It fumbles and stumbles without finding an attitude, much less a sense of purpose, and it isn't cheeky, surprising or disturbing enough to repackage its deficiencies as conscious provocations (which would have made it into a punkish anti-movie -- the sort of film Alex Cox did so brilliantly in the 1980s). Over the course of its mercifully brief running time, The Good German fragments itself into thirds, each one told from the point-of-view of Jake, Lena and Tully. This sounds intriguing, but because the movie never coalesces into a clear vision -- or even a smart riff on modern filmmaking's debt to, or repudiation of, old techniques -- the result is tedious and depressing, like watching a zeppelin deflate.

Plus, visually it's a bust -- surprisingly so, given its advance press. Exhibit A is the film's monochrome photography. It might seem impressive in a no-budget indie (like every Soderbergh film since Traffic, this one was shot by Soderbergh himself under the pseudonym Peter Andrews), but it doesn't get anywhere near the look of a '40s studio picture; it looks more like a contemporary riff on the idea of "old movies," as executed by film school students with more brass than money or experience. There's no subtlety in the gray scale, and the blacks and whites aren't sharply etched enough for Soderbergh to claim that he was aping German Expressionism or American film noir. What's onscreen just looks poorly executed; the blacks are often crushed, killing detail within shadows, and in scenes juxtaposing foregrounded interiors against daylight exteriors glimpsed through windows and doors, the sunlit areas are blown out, in the manner of a TV series shot on Super 16mm (for example, FX's Rescue Me) or a microbudget Mini-DV drama. These tells are acceptable as long as they jibe with the intent of the piece, but here, they just don't. (Perhaps the approach was too obvious to start with. The gold standard for this sort of movie is Chinatown, a film whose style pushed against its period story -- a slow-paced, down-and-dirty, overtly political noir, shot in color and anamorphic widescreen.)

Considering Soderbergh's supposed fidelity to a particular filmmaking school, I'm disappointed that more critics haven't called him out for anachronisms and conceptual sloppiness. (Dargis, who has a good eye, is the highest-profile exception.) Despite the film's rear projections, its Orson Welles/Carol Reed mouse-eye-view shots, Thomas Newman's intentionally overbearing score (like Max Steiner drunk on cough syrup) and other conspicuous elements, German looks and feels more early '60s than mid '40s. That pretty much queers the idea of setting the film's visuals in direct opposition to the characters' language and behavior. Imagine a thinly imagined, R-rated tribute to The Pawnbroker or Carol Reed's The Key, with jagged, slightly off-rhythm edits and truncated sequences that are meant to mimic the classic Hollywood, get-in-and-get-out approach, but which instead seem to have been impulsively aborted in mid-thought. (An early driving-and-talking scene between Tully and Jake ends with a combination of a bad line, a lame double-take and a clumsily timed wipe that just about the most amateurish thing I've seen in a Hollywood movie this year.) Even the performances are a shade dull. Clooney is less reminiscent of Bogart or Clark Gable (who he sent up in O Brother, Where Art Thou?) than Rock Hudson or Victor Mature. Blanchett so overdoes the brooding husky siren thing that at times she seems to have been secretly replaced by a female impersonator imitating Cate Blanchett imitating Marlene Dietrich. The only memorable performance comes from Tobey Maguire, who's been getting the worst reviews of the three stars. Aptly described by Lena as "a boy, not a man," his Tully is twerpy and obnoxious, a nerd who gets off on being bad, and Maguire uses his reedy voice and glassy-eyed stare for unnerving effects. (He's like an elf gone to seed.) It's an in-your-face, heavily intellectualized character turn, but even if you hate it, you have to give Maguire credit: at least he has a vivid idea that he's pointedly trying to execute. That's more than you can say for his director.

What happened? It's a puzzling fiasco. Due to the obviously exhaustive research and planning that must have gone into it, The Good German could not possibly have been as tossed-off as Soderbergh's Schizopolis, Full Frontal, Oceans 12 or the HBO series K Street and Unscripted. Soderbergh's I'm-just-winging-it projects announced their improvisational nature up front, which meant they had to be graded on a curve, like gesture sketches or free-form jazz improvs. There can't be a curve this time. German is modeled on rigorously formal 1940s Hollywood movies, but with a cynical 21st century spirit. Because it fails in the first department and smugly overcompensates in the second, it's worse than a letdown; it verges on an insult.

Whatever Soderbergh's stated purpose in making The Good German, it's hard to shake the suspicion that it came about for the same specious reasons as most of his post-Erin Brockovich/The Limey work -- because he likes jumping from style to style like Julia Roberts trying on hats. Granted, this isn't a news flash; from Kafka onward, Soderbergh's filmography has been mainly interested in subverting, exploring and commenting upon film history, technology and language, mostly at the expense of conventional moviemaking satisfactions. Soderbergh's most confident when he's being playful, but except for The Limey -- his career best film, and one of the greatest American features of the '90s -- he rarely makes movies that are both fun and deep. Maybe Soderbergh realizes this, and it's why, post-Oscar, he's gravitated toward unabashed formal noodling.

But if The Good German is the latest example of Soderbergh at play, he needs to get out more. I no longer sense much urgency or wit in his filmmaking. His hero Jean-Luc Godard has become a sour old professor, but there's still a fire there, a pugnacious soothsayer quality; it's hard to tell what drives Soderbergh beyond sheer restlessness, and it's become harder to discern his opinion toward any subject he's tackled since Traffic. He's in love with making movies, so he makes movies that tell you how much he loves making movies. Onanism is fun, but it's not a spectator sport.

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Links for the Day (December 19th, 2006)

1. "Yogi Bear's co-creator dies at 95": Off to that great pick-uh-nick basket in the sky.

["Joe Barbera, half of the Hanna-Barbera animation team that produced such beloved cartoon characters as Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear and the Flintstones, died Monday, a Warner Bros. spokesman said. He was 95. Barbera died of natural causes at his home with his wife, Sheila, at his side, Warner Bros. spokesman Gary Miereanu said. With his longtime partner, Bill Hanna, Barbera first found success creating the highly successful Tom and Jerry cartoons."]

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2. "Dreamgirls": The Reeler's Aaron Hillis on the movie of the moment.

["The buzz is officially hurting my ears, or maybe that ringing is a result of hearing the disco chorus to "One Night Only" every time I turn on the television. Either way, I'm bound to take some abuse for being a real holiday Scrooge and saying I don't think Dreamgirls is particularly good. I like musicals, and yes, I hoped and even expected to be as giddy as the critical mass, who have proclaimed it to be this season's sacred cowbell. A predominantly African-American cast, jittery jazz hands near-constantly waving, show-stopping solos that tell a story infamously modeled after the troubled rise of The Supremes... Dreamgirls sounds toe-tappingly fresh on paper, and yet I was so bored and unaffected that I barely remember watching it."]

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3. "Gibson says controversial tirade was ‘a gift’": The 'gift' that keeps on giving... except at the box office.

["Some in Hollywood thought that Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic tirade would be a career-killer, but the controversial “Apocalyto” director says it was “a gift.” The experience was “a gift to me because it’s made me really sort of scratch my head and focus on a couple of things that I needed to,” Gibson told DarkHorizons.com. “It’s working out real positive, and hopefully in other lives that I’ll touch.”]

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4. "O.J. Simpson publisher may have been fired over ‘Jewish cabal’ remark": To Judith, with love, from Mel.

["In an explosive telephone argument that led to her firing, publisher Judith Regan allegedly complained of a “Jewish cabal” against her in the book industry and stated that Jews “should know about ganging up, finding common enemies and telling the big lie.” A spokesman for Regan’s former employer, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., told The Associated Press on Monday that the remarks were made during a conversation between Regan and HarperCollins attorney Mark Jackson, who took notes. At the time, the two were discussing the future of a controversial new novel about baseball star Mickey Mantle."]

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5. "Harlan Ellison: The 3 Most Important Things in Life": To Judith, with love, from Keith.

["I had been fired after working for the Disney empire for a total of four hours, including lunch. The lessons here cannot be avoided. Big business is humorless. And . . . At Disney, nobody fucks with The Mouse."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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5 for the Day: Countering Christmas Cheer

By Odienator

My English teacher once told us that Dickens got paid by the word, and in A Christmas Carol, it shows: Dickens spends a ridiculous amount of time telling us Jacob Marley is dead. "You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail," writes Dickens. Two paragraphs later: "There is no doubt that Marley was dead." A page later: "Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years." We get it, Chuck! Dickens may have rambled on and on, but he also blessed us with the character whose name conjures up images of rebellion against the syrupy sentimentality of Christmas. That's right, Dickens invented Billy Bob Thornton.

Wait! I mean Ebenezer Scrooge! In all his appearances (Alastair Sim, Albert Finney, Michael Caine, Scrooge McDuck, and my personal favorite, Mr. Magoo), Scrooge had nothing but humbugs for those who tried to impose their cheery holiday will. Today's Five for the Day honors Mr. Scrooge's tradition; it is the antidote to all that Christmas cheer: the gloppy Hallmark Channel specials, the radio stations that play 24 hours of Christmas music, and the store ads that sweet talk you into thinking that, if you buy that diamond, your woman might give your candy cane a licking worth $2,500. Here are five items that use icons of the Christmas season to satisfy the Grinch in all of us.

1. Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984): What happens when you get the writer of Gentle Ben and In Search of Historic Jesus to pen a movie about De Lawd's nemesis, Santa Claus? If it's the height of the 80's slasher movie craze, you get Silent Night, Deadly Night. Writer-director Charles E. Sellier, Jr. went from Grizzly Adams to Grisly Axes with this film, which features Santa putting Craftsman tools in the stockings (and necks and heads and backs) of the naughty. One unfortunate victim (scream queen Linnea Quigley) gets impaled on deer antlers. The movie is notable only for its commercial, which played on TV during the family friendly 8 PM hour. The first shot showed Santa Claus chopping down a door with an ax before going after a plethora of victims with Christmas lights, axes and knives. Parents' groups freaked out, and the commercial was pulled, but not before my mother found another tool in her arsenal for getting my younger siblings to behave. "That's what Santa brings you if you're naughty!" she told my sister.

2. Phoebe Cates' "how I found out there's no Santa Claus" monologue from Gremlins: Most of my generation remembers Mrs. Kevin Kline from that scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Some may also remember her as the beneficiary of the best thing Chris Columbus ever did. Late in Gremlins, Cates gives a long speech about the night Santa Claus came to town. He didn't have an ax, but he also didn't have coordination: he broke his neck sliding down the chimney. The speech on paper is morbid beyond repair, but Cates' delivery makes it a hilarious "where the fuck did that come from?" moment.

3. The Mad TV parody of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, "directed by Martin Scorsese": Mad TV gives us the alleged first animated movie from Marty, a Rankin-Bass style orgy of graphic violence where Hermy the Misfit Elf finds an Olivier-approved use for his dental skills and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer takes over Santa's toy-making syndicate via decapitation. Filled with (bleeped) F-words, blood and quick editing, just like The Departed, and hilarious as hell. Extra points to Mad for scaring the shit out of me with their Summer of Sam parody featuring Christian cartoon staples Davey and Goliath. "Gee, Dayyyyy-vee" indeed.

4. South Park's The Spirit of Christmas: There are two versions of this, but the one I reference is Santa vs. Jesus. (Told you they were nemeses!) The two get into a fight over the rightful owner of Christmas, while the soon-to-be-famous four little scamps from South Park get confused over whom they want to win. Jesus does Street Fighter video game ha-do-ken moves and Santa has a mouth like Andrew Dice Clay. At the end, Stan sums up the real meaning of Christmas: "Presents!"

5. Sloshed Santas: In my favorite Christmas movie, 1947's Miracle on 34th Street, Edmund Gwenn takes over for the shitfaced Macy's Santa that Maureen O'Hara hired for the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Since then, Santa has appeared in more drunken incarnations than Tara Reid, which explains his constant jolliness. With apologies to you-know-who, my favorite sloshed Santa takes the guise of Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places. Aykroyd's Santa crashes a Christmas party, steals food, eats part of his filthy beard, pulls a gun, drinks like a fish, plants drugs, gets caught in the rain, pissed on by a dog, and attempts suicide twice, all in the space of 12 minutes. I felt sorry for Dan, and it was said that the Odienator's heart grew three sizes that day.

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Links for the Day (December 18th, 2006)

1. "Questioned Apocalypto; Leo in the Sierra with Diamond": Fernando F. Croce on Apocalypto, Blood Diamond, and The Holiday.

["Apocalypto, now. Mel Gibson has issues, agreed, but let us stick to film -- the undigested psycho-baggage on display in Malibu and interviews is best left between him and his anger-management counselor, though on the screen he's managed to wrestle those knotted totems into a very personal directorial style. The Passion of the Christ is never less than disgusting in its insistent conflation of Christian martyrdom and jazzed-up masochism/sadism, yet all emotions are unmistakably Gibson's, palpitating with the insane intensity of a story that just had to be told by its tormented director. Does art soothe the beast? Not if Gibson's latest is any indication: further refining the superstar's deeply held belief that the body can only reach grace when it is being sliced open, Apocalypto offers an expanded dictionary of corporal punishment. Showman that he is, however, Gibson delays the carnage and lulls the audience before setting the right, blood-lusting mood; the narrative, set during the last gasps of the Mayan civilization, locates the first omen as the hero, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), spots a ravaged tribe making its way through the jungle, stricken with fear and looking for a new beginning. An old man regales the soulful villagers with a parable about Man's insatiable void, the morning brings horrors in the shape of raping 'n' pillaging brutes, who come from some Mayan metropolis seeking human sacrifices; the place is torched and the evil savages march the noble savages to their Sodom, though not before Jaguar Paw has stashed his pregnant wife (Dalia Hernandez) and son at the bottom of a rocky pit."]

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2. "Love in the Time of Cholera": Filmbrain delves into the Naomi Watts/Edward Norton-starring adaptation of Maugham's The Painted Veil.

["The Good German isn't the only film this holiday season steeped in the golden age of Hollywood. Though not a technical exercise like Soderbergh's latest experiment, John Curran's The Painted Veil, starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, simply feels like a late-40s studio picture. Everything from the lighting, performances, to the particular way the narrative unfolds – it's as if the ghost of Jack Warner was presiding over the production."]

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3. "Bone fragment likely not Joan of Arc": It's just the messenger.

["A rib bone and a piece of cloth supposedly recovered after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake are probably not hers, according to experts trying to unravel one of the mysteries surrounding the 15th century French heroine. Eighteen experts began a series of tests six months ago on the fragments reportedly recovered from the pyre where the 19-year-old was burned for heresy."]

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4. "Video of the Day 2: Wong Kar-wai Commercials": From Bilge Ebiri at The Screengrab.

["Not sure how to describe this. It's a series of commercials directed by Wong Kar-wai and starring Takeo Kikuchi, that was also, at one point, a short film, which itself exists in two different versions. Or so I'm told. The short film, called "wkwtk1996@7'55'hk", is supposed to be 7 minutes 55 seconds long, so this isn't that, exactly. Instead it appears to be some of the commercials, edited together. Either way, it's cool."]

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5. "Miami Vice (2006)": Rob Humanick on the theatrical and unrated editions of Michael Mann's latest.

["The most significant alterations between the original and unrated cuts of Miami Vice occur in three chunks: a completely different opening, one additional expository scene, and a soundtrack alteration during the third act shootout. Other minor bits and pieces have been reworked: lines of dialogue have been nipped, scenes tucked, etc. Some will surely prefer this version, it being more streamlined and working a bit harder to appeal to the majority. While the unrated cut is still a good film, this saddens me; it feels like poor reviews caused Mann to question his own artistic instincts, the result being a work that is noticeable below its full potential."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

Read more!

Links for the Day (December 17th, 2006)

1. "Medium rare...an aristocrat!" Andy Horbal analyzes the cooking scenes in Scorsese's gangster classic.

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2. "Stranger than Fact." Edward Copeland on "Bobby."

["I keep coming back to the idea of how much better Bobby would have been if it had been an actual documentary. A cursory Internet search seems to indicate that many of the people who were really at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968 are still alive, and their stories certainly have to be more compelling than the silly ones Estevez has concocted...Because the fictional footage proves so boring, watching this movie ends up playing like it's Waiting for Sirhan." ]

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3. "The Present Pernicious--or--Why I hate the History Channel (in which we find inbred cats)." Liverputty contributor Escutcheon Blot on the History Channel, and a particular storytelling technique that he loathes.

["While I have always condemned this particular story-telling gimmick (at least since I first consciously encountered it in the the mid-nineties on the History Channel), its unacceptable recent contamination of light fiction has aroused my fighting blood."]

***
4. "Serial killer elephant shot dead in India": Insert G.O.P. joke here.

["An elephant named “Osama bin Laden” that has killed 27 people in northeast India, has been shot dead, triggering protests by conservationists who say forestry officials had probably shot the wrong animal. The 10-feet tall male elephant had been terrorizing villagers in Assam state for the past two years, destroying hundreds of homes and trampling scores of people -- prompting locals to name him after the elusive al-Qaida leader. The animal was accused of killing 14 people in the past month."]

***
5. "The Lost Leader." From the January issue of Sight and Sound, Colin McCabe on Derek Jarman.

["The first thing you have to say about Derek is that he was queer. The second thing to say - and hard on the heels of the first - is that he was English. I'm not sure that I've ever met anyone who better understood what it is to be English, despite, or perhaps because of, a New Zealand father and a half-Jewish mother. I certainly never met anyone who understood more clearly what was at stake as Margaret Thatcher incubated the Blairites in the blood of the Falklands war and the boom of City deregulation. Derek's anger at what was being done to his country was compounded by his anger at what was being done to his lovers and friends as the scourge of AIDS allowed homophobia to clothe itself in respectability."]

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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Links for the Day (December 16th, 2006)

1. "2006: Year in Film": Slant Magazine's Ed Gonzalez and Nick Schager on their favorite movies of the year.

["Iraq ruled not only the news but movie screens as well in 2006, as George W. Bush's war was analyzed and attacked from myriad angles by documentarians intent on delivering "embedded" on-the-ground reports free from Rummy spin. The War Tapes, Iraq in Fragments, and The Ground Truth (among others) provided bracingly immediate perspectives that blew away the sterility of cable news coverage, their raw, blistering tactics getting intimately inside the complex conflict. Interiority was also the hallmark of two of the year's preeminent fictional efforts, as Michel Gondry's dream-drenched The Science of Sleep and David Lynch's magnum opus Inland Empire both burrowed so deeply into their characters' fractured psyches that they became fanciful, terrifying, hallucinatory portraits of the mind's tangled subconscious. Gondry and Lynch's playful and/or rigorous experimentalism weren't isolated examples, with Michael Mann (Miami Vice), Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette), and Darren Aronofsky (The Fountain) similarly revisiting favorite thematic fixations while pushing the boundaries of their particular aesthetic methods to new, idiosyncratic heights."]

***
2. "2006: Year in Music": Also from Slant -- Sal Cinquemani and Jonathan Keefe pick their favorite albums of the year.

["Call it a year without an angle, and blame Aaron Sorkin's use of "cold open" in one of the last episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip that anyone watched for a reminder that it's better to open any kind of show with a statement that articulates a clear point of view and sets the tone for what's to follow. But what "tone" did the music of 2006 set? The commercialization of independent music such that "indie" joined the laundry list of niche genres to enjoy fleeting popularity (ska, swing, Latin, bluegrass, nü-metal, and emo have all come and gone), the number of both indie and mainstream artists who tackled forms of country music to prove their authenticity, the shocking sudden dearth of commercial hip-hop and R&B worth a damn, the growth industries that both MySpace and Youtube represent as marketing tools, the Internet's ongoing impact on the way people listen to and buy music making it a stronger year for singles than for albums; these were all important stories in 2006, but no one story dominated the year or fully accounts for the utter lack of critical consensus."]

***
3. "The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten": Larry Ceplair's book review for Cineaste.

["For those readers new to the subject of the Hollywood blacklist, the name of John Howard Lawson may not spark any interest. But from the nineteen-twenties through the nineteen–forties he cast a longer shadow on Broadway and in Hollywood than many now-better-remembered playwrights and screenwriters. Lawson was one of the founders of the left-wing theater movement (he co-founded New Playwrights and wrote eight plays for it and other left-wing theater groups), a highly successful screen writer (with twenty-one credits before he was blacklisted, including Blockade, Sahara, and Action in the North Atlantic), an intellectual and theorist (who wrote several books on play writing, script writing, and film), and, until he went to prison, in 1950, the dominant (indeed, many of his comrades thought, the domineering and overbearing) figure in the Hollywood branches of the Communist Party. He was also the most thoroughly blacklisted person in the industry. (He received only one credit after 1947, and that one posthumously, for Cry, the Beloved Country.)"]

***
4. "Passengers fly into a panic over stowaway mice": I have had it with these motherfu... oh to hell with it...

["The screams were louder than the roar of the engines when more than 100 passengers on board a Saudi plane fought off an invasion by 80 stowaways: mice. Al-Hayat newspaper reported on Friday that the mice escaped from the bag of a traveler on the internal Saudi Arabian Airlines flight and started falling on the heads and scurrying between the feet of panic-stricken passengers. "An hour after it took off from Riyadh, the aircraft was at an altitude of 28,000 feet when passengers were surprised by the mice..." the paper quoted Omar al-Jarrah, an airline official as saying."]

***
5. "'American Pie' actress turns herself in at court": How else do you lie down with dogs, indeed...

["Actress Natasha Lyonne, a star of "American Pie" who was accused of threatening to sexually molest a dog, turned herself in at a New York court Friday. A bench warrant was issued for her arrest in January after Lyonne, who has also appeared in "Blade," and "Scary Movie 2," missed four court hearings. The 27-year-old faced a number of charges including criminal mischief, harassment and trespassing after accusations she threatened to sexually molest her former neighbor's dog and ripped a mirror off the wall during a 2004 argument."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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BSG Saturdays: Season 3, Ep. 11, "The Eye of Jupiter"

By Todd VanDerWerff
Those who’ve been complaining that Battlestar Galactica has sacrificed forward momentum for seeing how deeply it could sink its characters into the mire got a bit of a gift in the show’s final 2006 episode, “The Eye of Jupiter.” Scripted by Mark Verheiden and directed by Michael Rymer, the episode picked up a huge handful of dangling plot threads and began the process of weaving them together. While a bit uneven (resurrecting long dormant storylines made for a lot of clumsy exposition), the episode was mostly dizzying and action-packed, culminating in a final act that cross-cut rapidly between four storylines. And that was after the show had put Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) in the firing line and had Adama (Edward James Olmos) confirm to Sharon (Grace Park) and Helo (Tahmoh Penikett) that their human-Cylon hybrid baby was still alive on a basestar somewhere.

Galactica has always shown a surprising willingness to just jump into situations in medias res when it suits the story; this episode advanced us all the way from the bloody clinch between Lee (Jamie Bamber) and Starbuck that closed “Unfinished Business” two weeks ago to a passionate and full-blown affair between the two characters that we hadn’t seen develop in the episode between that one and this. Furthermore, the Cylons had managed to find their way to the planet where the humans were harvesting algae to turn into protein bars. While they discussed their plans to find a temple there in a few throwaway lines in last week’s episode, a lesser show would have dragged this out over the better part of a season. This, as well as the sweaty, frazzled state of the people harvesting the algae, had a discombobulating effect that set the episode on edge immediately. The look of the algae planet, while not as desaturated as Cylon-oppressed New Caprica, was similarly bleached out, also making things seem off.

The episode's habit of picking up long-dangling storylines didn’t stop there. This season has seen the show embracing its propensity for mysticism with renewed vigor. The proudly monotheistic Cylons have seen at least one of their number (D’Anna, played by Lucy Lawless) wander through the afterlife in her quest to find the final answers of her people (she even visited a seer). Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) has always skewed toward the prophetic, of course, and even in this episode, we see that Starbuck's religion keeps her from leaving her husband (adultery, apparently, is just “bending the rules,” though divorce is ruled out). The episode’s main thrust (the finding of an as-yet-undefined temple housing that both the Cylons and humans covet) found the show’s reliable everyman, Chief Tyrol (Aaron Douglas) following a gut instinct and going on an ersatz vision quest, which led him to the temple, (Its interior looks like an observatory with a huge telescope.) Mysticism has always been a weapon in the Galactica arsenal, but it’s always been used sparingly. This episode suggests, through subtle structural details, and outright in a couple of speeches, that some sort of god or gods or super-Cylon is directing everyone’s actions.

Religion has always been treated matter-of-factly on Galactica. The Cylons’ religion has something in it that compels them to forcibly convert (as Dean Stockwell's murderous Brother Cavil has said). The prophetic reveries of Roslin have led to useful information but have also made her seem a bit nuts -- especially to Adama, who seems to be a secular humanist. Many scenes in this episode brazenly shifted the focus to that issue; the emphasis hasn’t been this blatant since Roslin was leading missions to find Kobol. While the scene where Chief discussed his repressive religious upbringing with his wife worked despite itself, the idea that he would dance around naked in the holy of holies is a bit much. But his attitude of longing for his old faith rang true, the scene immediately following (in which Alessandro Juliani's Gaeta expressed to Adama and Roslin that the fact that the Cylons and humans arrived at the same place at the same time spoke to the influence of some sort of creator) was also too much.

Still, if you didn’t enjoy one aspect of the episode, there was something else coming along every minute or so to try to grab your attention. The pell-mell pacing was uncharacteristic, but it gave some of this season’s more underutilized characters (specifically Roslin) things to do. It also resulted in a lot of great individual scenes, even if they rocketed by. The series had nursed along enough storylines that it was able to build all of them to a head in this episode, and the conflict between characters, most of it long-brewing, was something that had been hinted at all season long.

The episode, of course, had a cliffhanger, which leads into a scheduling break of slightly more than a month; unfortunately it was the show’s weakest so far, leading the audience to ask, “I wonder how they’ll get out of this one,” rather than “I wonder how this will change things,” which is what the show’s better cliffhangers (the shooting of Adama at the end of season one, the arrival of the Cylons at the end of season two) managed to accomplish. Indeed, the SciFi Channel's promo people seemed to realize that the question of whether several series regulars would be killed off is essentially moot, and definitively answered who would live and die in the teaser for the back half of the season that aired after the episode's conclusion. The main source of suspense lies in the knowledge Helo and Sharon now have that their child is alive (Adama also learned of this, altering his working relationship with Roslin). There were few hints as to what they might do about that, but one assumes this thread will be foregrounded in the season's remaining episodes.

It’s actually difficult to discuss “The Eye of Jupiter” without making the discussion a plot summary. So much stuff happened in the episode (I haven’t even touched upon a lot of things in my notes) that it’s tempting to just do a straight recap. But the episode also was strong from a technical standpoint. Rymer, who established the show’s distinctive space verite look, did typically strong work, and the closing act cross-cutting was a new highpoint for the show’s editing team. The effects work and the score, previously praised in this column, continue to rank among TV's best.

If anything, “The Eye of Jupiter” clarified the first half of the season. Show mastermind Ron Moore admitted in a recent interview (mild spoilers at that link) that the season has a lot of interconnected story between episodes that won’t become immediately clear until the season is completely wrapped. (Who, for instance, would have thought that last week’s episode, which felt like a one-off, was, in essence, part one of this episode?) This, of course, makes writing about the show’s themes problematic, as the rug could be pulled out from under the audience at any moment. But for now, it seems, Galactica is doing a season about belief and how fragile our hopes and faith in that belief can be. Starbuck holds firm to her beliefs when convenient but bends the rules when she wants to. Adama has questioned his own belief in his worthiness as a commander and a person. And the whole Cylon civilization subplot is an elaborate attempt to get the audience to question its own beliefs about the series at a fundamental level. While not all of these storylines have been executed with the necessary grace (and there are dozens of other examples of characters questioning, probing or clinging to their beliefs in this season), the show appears to be laying a solid thematic foundation for whatever’s ahead of us.
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In case you didn’t notice from the dozens of promos SciFi ran during the episode, when the show returns Jan. 21, it will move to Sundays at 10 p.m., apparently in a bid to capture HBO's audience, which will be between The Wire and The Sopranos (perhaps SciFi thinks Rome fans will enjoy Galactica). Consequently, the reviews here at The House Next Door will move to Mondays for the season’s final nine episodes. In the meantime, check out that interview linked to above, in which Moore indicates that the show will delve more into civilian life in the fleet (the spoilers are fairly mild). Also, be sure to check out the podcasts, which now feature a roundtable and a writers’ meeting in addition to Moore’s commentary.
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark. To read Time Out New York TV critic Andrew Johnston's article on the politics of Battlestar Galactica, click here.

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Doctor Who, Season Two, Ep. 11: "Fear Her"

By Ross RuedigerA suburban neighborhood. A different time. A major televised event. Missing residents. An abusive father. Alien abduction. “The Idiot’s Lantern”? Nope. But Doctor Who’s latest, “Fear Her”, has so many elements in common with that episode, it’s impossible not to draw a comparison.

Now I bagged on “The Idiot’s Lantern” something hardcore, and “Fear Her” has probably just as many flaws...yet there’s something about its itch that I don’t quite know how to scratch. While it’s hardly a season high point, its charms have slowly grown on me over time and multiple viewings.

Maybe it’s got something to do with Chloe Webber’s (Abisola Agbaje) pencil drawings. There’s an innocence to her madness that works a bizarre kind of Who magic. I recall doing these sorts of drawings when I was Chloe’s age (though I was a terrible artist), and watching her obsess takes me back to that time when sitting down with colors and paper was the most freeing, special feeling in the world. A kid can get lost in that world, and the idea that children here literally get lost in Chloe’s drawings lends to its sinister draw (ahem…). If there’s a reason “Fear Her” disappointed me the first time around, it’s because as the story moved forward, I was full well expecting a massive shift into the world inside the drawings. What reality did the children (and later the Doctor) experience when they were taken out of time and space and placed inside Chloe’s artwork? Perhaps it was expecting too much from Doctor Who’s limited budget for the episode to actually turn into a full-scale animated child’s drawing at some point (something akin to what Farscape did with its Chuck Jones tribute in “Revenging Angel”).

Abisola Agbaje seems too inexperienced to portray this child possessed by the otherworldly Isolis. She’s no Linda Blair, and her “whisper” seems the calculated flip-side to Blair’s infamous growling (or perhaps just to Toby’s possession a couple episodes back). Much of the tension derived from the scenario relies on Nina Sosanya’s reactions. Sosanya’s a great actress (see the BBC’s recent spin on Much Ado About Nothing, also with Billie Piper or Russell T Davies’ Casanova, also with David Tennant), but seems a tad off here and I’m not even sure she totally believes in Agbaje’s performance. Since we never get to see the mother/daughter relationship prior to Chloe’s possession, we don’t have a reference point of their love for each other -- at least not until the very end when the love blossoms against the threat of the sudden reappearance of the abusive father (an element that already felt tacked on and underserved). Since this occurs after the Isolis threat has been disposed of, it all seems very secondary. And the shots of Isolis leaping into and out of Chloe’s mouth are some of the goofiest ass images I’ve seen on Doctor Who in a good long while (they make Noel Clarke’s attack by the dustbin in “Rose” seem pretty cool in comparison). Yet despite all the criticisms, I still don’t dislike the episode.

Perhaps my affection for “Fear Her” has something to do with the suburban setting. I said The Wire (the villain of “The Idiot’s Lantern”) reminded me of “something from the Sylvester McCoy era”, which wasn’t a compliment. McCoy’s era introduced themes and methods of storytelling that Russell Davies has since perfected -- but it never went far enough, and fell short in too many other areas. All that said, there are a few enjoyable tales from that time, and one of them is the final story of the classic series, “Survival”, which takes place in a suburban area that’s very reminiscent of the setting here. I’ve got some fond memories of “Survival”. One is seeing it for the first time on a crappy PAL to NTSC converted VHS tape with a roomful of other fans at a Who convention in Dallas. (At the time, none of us knew the show would get the axe in the coming months.) If “The Idiot’s Lantern” feels like bad McCoy, maybe “Fear Her” feels like good McCoy (which is still a few steps down from even bad Tom Baker).

The script, written by Matthew Graham (Life on Mars), was something of a last minute addition to the season lineup, after an idea by Stephen Fry was deemed too expensive to produce (Fry's story was pushed to Season Three, but I believe has now, unfortunately, been scrapped altogether). I wonder how much time Graham had to get it together or if its parallels to “Lantern” were intentional? There are so many, it’s difficult to imagine it was a total accident. Graham’s greatest achievement here is his grasp on the Doctor and Rose and their relationship to each other. I’d be interested in seeing him attempt something bigger for the series further down the road; given his Life on Mars pedigree, he’s certainly got unique ideas about time travel.

Mostly though I’ve learned to enjoy “Fear Her” because it’s the last story before the two-part season finale where the shit hits the fan(s). It’s the last story where the Doctor and Rose enjoy saving the world and doing good deeds. There’s lots of grinning and jesting and having a good time and they very much feel like the team they are.

From the moment the TARDIS materializes between the two dumpsters there’s a vibe that “Fear Her” only wants to spin a sweet, playful yarn, which when it comes down to it is the sum total of its agenda. Even the Isolis alien is only a child who’s lost its way, doing nothing more devious than what’s in its nature. Another “Lantern” parallel: The disappearance of half the team for the final act -- only here it’s the Doctor, leaving Rose to effortlessly save the day.

Rose: “They keep on trying to split us up, but they never ever will.”

The Doctor: “Never say ‘never ever’.”

Rose: “But we’ll always be OK, you and me. (pause) Don’t you reckon, Doctor?”

The Doctor: (looking up into the night sky) “Something in the air. Something coming. (pause) A storm’s approaching”.

“Fear Her” truly is the calm before the storm.

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NEXT WEEK: The Sci Fi Channel broadcasts the two part story -- back-to-back -- which comprises the Season Two finale: "Army of Ghosts" & "Doomsday". (Sorry...no links - they'll spoil you!) Tune in to the epic that begins with Rose Tyler proclaiming, "This is the story of how I died".

Classic Who DVD Recommendation of the Week: Well crap - since I've never recommended a McCoy story, and since I just said that some of them are watchable, I'll go ahead and give it up to "Remembrance of the Daleks", the first story that made us believe a Dalek could fly. ("Survival" is scheduled for DVD release sometime next year.)
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Ross Ruediger is a San Antonio-based critic and columnist, a contributor to The House Next Door, and publisher of The Rued Morgue.

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Wrong is Right: The political jiu-jitsu of Battlestar Galactica

By Andrew JohnstonThe first episodes of Battlestar Galactica’s third season revised the text displayed during the opening credits, thereby distilling the series’ premise down to its absolute basics: “The Human Race--Far from Home--Fighting for Survival.” In other words, these folks live thousands of lightyears away yet inexplicably worship the Greco-Roman pantheon and are at war with a genocidally-inclined artificial species of their own creation...but they’re us.

Of course, in saying that, executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick and their creative team are equating the human species in general with the United States, the better to traffic in allegories about post-9/11 America, BSG's stock-in-trade ever since the 2003 pilot miniseries. From both a creative and commercial standpoint, that's a dicey proposition. Given how polarized the U.S. and the world have become since 9/11, any series that tackles the detention and torture of enemy combatants or the suppression of civil rights in a time of national crisis is going to either alienate half its audience or else cling to a milquetoast middleground and come off as either wishy-washy or opportunistic. But Moore and Eick devised an ingenious third option: on BSG, they’ve mastered a form of political jiu-jitsu, coming up with plots that, within the context of the story, at least -- put liberal viewers in a position where they’re forced to agree with the Fox News crowd and, alternately, make Dittoheads see things through the eyes of DailyKos readers.

Full disclosure: My personal politics are half Socialist and half Libertarian; by default, given the either/or nature of the American system, I’m what most people would call an extremely liberal Democrat. As such, I can only guess how effective BSG is at making right-wingers see the world through liberal eyes. I’m in awe of how Moore and Eick persuaded me to agree, for example, that there are circumstances under which abortion should be banned (via “The Captain’s Hand”), but the episodes that seem constructed to make conservatives understand an opposing viewpoint strike me as politically facile (from my perspective, they’re preaching to the converted). For that reason, I wonder if episodes like “Hand” seem as thuddingly obvious to those on the right.

With that caveat in mind, let's go back in time to the first appearance of Moore and Eick's jiu-jitsu: the series’ third episode, “Bastille Day," which introduced Tom Zarek (Richard Hatch), the radical Saggitron native who has become the show’s most useful political figure—his radical politics allow the writers to use him as a hero or villan depending on plot requirements, in addition to articulating arguments that don’t quite fit in the mouths of any of the principal characters. In his first appearance, Zarek -- then locked up on the same prison ship upon which was being transported when the Cylons first attacked -- was presented as a combination of Simón Bólivar, Nelson Mandela and Timothy McVeigh. We learned that the ever-rebellious Apollo (Jamie Bamber) was a big Zarek fan back in his college days. The revelation that Zarek’s book was flat-out censored by the authorities provided a intriguing hint that humankind's governing document, the Articles of Colonization, might not resemble the U.S. Constitution as closely as we thought.

Zarek's not in prison for his words, however, but for his actions: though we don't learn the details, it's suggested that Zarek killed an unspecified number of people in an Oklahoma City-type attack. Throughout the episode, Apollo acts like a conservative stereotype of simpering liberals who would rather protect abstract notions of fairness than defend peaceful citizens against terrorists. He travels to Zarek’s galley hoping to recruit him and other convicts for a work gang—but his offer to reduce sentences in exchange for hard labor is rebuffed, a mass uprising ensues, and he ends up being imprisoned himself. Zarek holds Lee and other Galactica crewmembers as hostages, saying he’ll only release them after the resignation of Laura Roslin, who he sees as an illegitimate leader (even though she was elevated to the presidency according to rules laid out in the Articles). Secretly, though, Zarek wants to use the standoff to engineer a bloody showdown between prisoners and the Galactica’s marines in the hope of bringing down Roslin and getting publicity that will help him reestablish a power base; so what if a few dozen innocents die in the process? Conservative viewers are given a classic opportunity to say “I told you so!”, while liberals are faced with the implication that the Dick Cheney/Alberto Gonzalez wiretapping, rendition-approving, it's-abuse-not-torture crowd might have a point.

But the situation reverses itself again when Apollo quashes Zarek’s rebellion by offering to use his clout with Commander Adama (Edward James Olmos) and President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) to force them to stick to a constitutionally-mandated election timetable and succession procedure. For a liberal idealist, this seems a happy ending in which diplomacy and respect for the letter of the Constitution carries the day. For those on the other side, the ending probably just seemed like a setup for the return of a really juicy villain. This could be construed as an argument in favor of negotiating with terrorists, but the desperate situation -- the prisoners were needed to help harvest ice needed to replenish the fleet’s rapidly-dwindling water supply -- allows the writers to avoid taking a firm stance on either side of the issue.

If Zarek is often BSG’s ultimate conservative bogeyman, his flipside would have to be Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan), who has come to symbolize authoritarian force. This aspect of the character was most prominent at the start of Season Two, in the story arc where Adama was sidelined after an assassination and Tigh took command of the fleet and declared martial law. Notwithstanding his raging alcoholism, Tigh has always been BSG’s poster boy for law-and-order conservatism. His initial response to the attempt on Adama’s life -- a dramatic increase in military discipline -- may seem logical, but his tenure as fleet commander soon turns into a fiasco thanks to his impulsiveness and drinking. After he officially declares martial law, a poorly-trained solder kills several civilians while trying to suppress a riot; when Adama awakes from his coma, the fleet is on the verge of chaos. To those who agree with Tigh’s iron-fisted approach to crisis management, his failure may have played as a legitimate tragedy. But to those who think Tigh’s methodology has had toxic effects on American life when applied by the Cheney gang, the sense of sadness comes not from Tigh’s personal collapse, but from the inevitability of chaos ensuing from his crackdown on liberty (it’s tempting for those on the left to gloat when such tactics backfire, but the body count makes it difficult).

Fixing the political position of any arc, episode or individual character is not easy, because on BSG , no element is ever static. By the start of Season Three, for example, Zarek -- who had become Vice President of the Twelve Colonies -- had morphed into somebody conservatives could admire as an exemplar of principled patriotism, for his unilateral refusal to collaborate with the Cylons. Tigh, on the other hand, seemed to skew leftward as Season Two progressed, perhaps in response to the Galactica's first encounter with the Battlestar Pegasus (in “Pegasus” and “Resurrection Ship Part 1 & 2"), commanded by the ultra-authoritarian Admiral Caine (Michelle Forbes), who dehumanized her troops.

Liberals and conservatives alike root for the human fleet, and in so doing, root for America's best interests, whatever they consider those to be. But the series goes out of its way to complicate one's sympathies. For instance, in the season two finale when Tigh attempted to steal the presidential election to ensure the re-election of Laura Roslin over her rival Baltar (James Callis), a secret Cylon mole and collaborator, he was unknowingly acting on behalf of humankind's best interests. The inarguable rightness of Tigh's Chicago-style electioneering put liberal viewers in an awkward position. The Supreme Court-decided outcome of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election recommitted Democrats to the sanctity of the one-man, one-vote paradigm, and reinforced their perception of the Republican Party as unrepentant dirty tricksters who would go the extra mile to suppress or disqualify ballots in the name of victory. Yet in identifying with the humans -- who in some sense represent American citizens -- liberal viewers found themselves cheering for Baltar to get screwed in much the same way they believe Al Gore got screwed by Team Bush. At the same time, G.O.P. voters who believed the 2000 election was a case of the end justifying the means might have found themselves thinking that this episode did a better job of justifying their side through allegory than Team Bush ever did in news reports.

The theft of the election was shot down by Adama and Felix Gaeta (Alessandro Juliani), two of the series’ most sympathetic characters, who briefly became “bad guys” for putting an end to the scheme and unknowingly signing the death warrants of thousands of colonists who would perish at Cylon hands on New Caprica a year later (rough cuts of “Collaborators” sent to the press listed the number of survivors after the evacuation of New Caprica as 36,592, which was bumped up to 41,435 when the episode aired). On New Caprica, Tigh became the leader of the resistance against the Cylon occupiers and their human proxies; this led him to embrace tactics favored by groups like the PLO and Hamas and Iraqi insurgents in our world -- including suicide bombing. Tigh's innate appeal to conservatives forced them to view events through the eyes of political movements they're inclined to demonize. (That said, this particular trope was irksome from a common sense standpoint: when your race has less than 20,000 women of child-bearing age left alive, suicide bombing, like abortion, is not a good idea.)

Of the humans who made it off New Caprica alive, no one suffered more than Tigh, who lost an eye (unlike Odin, he hasn’t received wisdom in exchange—not yet, anyway) and killed his own wife as punishment for her collaboration with the Cylons. But he soon lost the sympathy of liberal viewers by leading a “star chamber” court that tried perceived collaborators on the basis of flimsy evidence and gave the accused little opportunity to defend themselves. The parallels to the Bush administration’s limits on the ability of accused terrorists to have their day in court were clear -- perhaps transparent. It seems clear that the writers wanted to show conservative viewers the folly of a democratic society restricting legal rights of those held and charged as enemies of the state. If any were led to reconsider their opinions of the Abu Ghraib scandal and the conditions at Guantanamo Bay, I can hardly complain. As an opponent of the Bush administration’s interpretation of the Constitution, though, the episode seemed groaningly obvious—especially it was revealed that the nearly-executed Gaeta, formerly Baltar's aide, was the mole who saved humanity by leaking the Cylon plans. (The script treated this as a big surprise, but there were no other logical candidates, and the preceding episodes were loaded with broad hints.) This time, it was liberals who were left smacking their foreheads at the obviousness of the message, although the progressives and radicals among the characters were hardly let off the hook -- the executions and trials (some as brief as Admiral Caine's famous two-second courts-martial) were ordered by Zarek, who briefly succeeded Baltar as president, and Everyman deck chief Galen Tyrol (whose activist bona fides were proven when Moore and Eick had him deliver a speech cribbed from 1960s UC Berkeley campus activist Mario Savio in the Season Two finale) sat alongside Tigh on the bench at the kangaroo court.

In season three, BSG’s focus has shifted more to religion and philosophy, but political allegory remains a core component of of the series’ DNA. Production leadtimes and Sci Fi’s scheduling policies prevent the series from literally ripping stories from the headlines as the Law & Order shows do, but that’s undoubtedly for the best; if the goal is to make people rethink their fundamental assumptions, broad hypothetical scenarios are better than specific questions. Besides, neither a diminished Cylon threat (courtesy of the virus that’s floating around out there) or even the discovery of Earth is going to get all of the colonists to agree on the right way to solve any given problem, because they’re us.
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House Next Door contributor Andrew Johnston is a TV columnist for Time Out New York.

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Navel Gazing with Burns and Dignan: Apocalypto, Blood Diamond and The Holiday

By Sean Burns and Andrew DignanAndrew Dignan: Pardon the interruption Sean, but I take back what I said a few weeks ago about The Fountain being the weirdest, most hallucinatory film of the holidays. I knew I never should have counted out Mel Gibson (aka “Crazy Christian”) who two years after making The Passion of the Christ, the rare film that could appeal equally to Evangelicals and the Fangoria set, returns with Apocalypto -- another viscera-dripping exercise in onscreen violence, without any pesky ideology or Jew-baiting to get in the way of all the fun.

I, like most people I know, have spent the better part of the past year making jokes at poor Mel’s expense as his adventures in Malibu appeared to be several chickens finally coming home to roost, all in one glorious/horrifying public breakdown the likes of which I never thought I’d see again (until Michael Richards proved me completely wrong). As Mel’s spent the past three years as fodder for late night talk show monologues, it’s becoming distressingly easy to forget what a provocative and unique filmmaker he’s become, with a keen eye for visual, near-silent storytelling that sets him apart from nearly every other actor turned director in Hollywood. You might be repulsed by what he’s saying with his films, but my God, does he say it with aplomb. Of course your level of revulsion with Apocalypto will likely depend on your tolerance for watching someone other than the Son of God be brutalized for two hours. Playing like The Last of the Mohicans with way more human sacrifice, Apocalypto is a surprisingly conventional action movie, complete with all of the familiar beats one would come to expect from any given mid-'80s Stallone or Schwarzenegger film, the only difference here is it’s a bunch of guys running around in loincloths speaking a dead language (the film strangely reminded me of the Rae Dawn Chong camp-extravaganza Quest for Fire).

Making room for mother-in-law jokes, Jackass-style gross-out gags and fraternal back-slapping, Apocalypto finds Gibson working in the same nyuk-nyuk vein that’s sustained him for over 25 years, proving that, if nothing else, the guy still has retained his sense of humor (juvenile as it may be). This is merely the calm before the storm, however -- establishing the simple, peaceful natives who are conquered by their war-mongering neighbors for the purposes of being dragged through the jungle to be sold off in an open-air market (if they’re lucky) or, more likely, to be torn to pieces as a gift to the Gods. It just wouldn’t be a Gibson film unless someone gets drawn and quartered, would it?

Much ink has been spilt trying to get to the bottom of Mel’s bizarre predisposition towards torture and desecration of the flesh (although I like to think the South Park boys have done the best job of dressing down Gibson as a barking loon), but Apocalytpo takes this idea to near-comical extremes, culminating in a second-act sequence set high atop a pyramid where many a heads is lopped off and sent hurtling to the ground like a soccer ball kicked down cellar steps. As in The Passion, the violence is inseparably linked to acts of faith; here the opulent (and Gibson would likely argue, diseased) Mayans slaughter the indigenous surrounding tribes as a testament to their society and deities being the only true ones. This, coupled with a third act that finds a larger, stronger, and better-armed platoon slowly decimated by booby-traps and scrappy insurgent ingenuity, can’t help but feel like a sly tweak of the very administration whose base made Gibson’s last film one of the biggest hits in history. One must hand it to the man for remaining, as always, unpredictable.

Of course what really counts here is whether the film quickens the pulse, and by and large the film does. Working against the ticking clock of an impending rainstorm that threatens to drown his pregnant wife and a young son who are safely tucked away at the bottom of a well, the last third of Apocalypto finds our hero Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) outrunning spears, bow and arrow and dudes in creepy headgear, in one prolonged breakneck-run through the jungle. This section is largely derivative of everything from First Blood to Predator, and I couldn’t help but wish cinematographer Dean Semler were shooting on 35mm instead of HD (those pixels were the size of grapefruits during some of the POV shots). Yet the film’s later segments take on a primal urgency which transcends period, language and large dollops of blue body paint. Watching large jungle cats tear off the faces of pierced Mayan warriors may not be all the fundamentally different from watching the son of a carpenter get his ribs kicked in circa 33 AD, but because it's framed within a genre instead of a sermon, it certainly seems to go down easier. Sean, I’m convinced you took up chain smoking just to be more like Mel, so please tell me you had as good a time with this one as I did.

Sean Burns: Um, that would be both Mel and Bruce Willis, thank you very much. (I can never quite decide if it was Martin Riggs or John McClane who made smoking look so fucking cool.) But yes, Apocalypto was indeed an enormous hoot. I’ve been going around describing it to everybody as Werner Herzog’s Rambo IV. Can you imagine what kind of nightmares this Gibson fellow has? He might be a seriously disturbed lunatic, but such a fascinating filmmaker. There’s a real primal terror and forcefulness to the way he juxtaposes images, at once strange, familiar, and horrifying -- this guy’s movies come straight from the gut.

What’s heartening to me, at least with regard to Apocalypto’s reception, is that critics are finally focusing on the awesome brutishness of Gibson’s filmmaking skills, instead of merely writing “I Hate The Red States” dissertations, as was temporarily in vogue after The Passion of the Christ’s release. Our host was one of the few I recall who really fixated on the power of Gibson’s technique, and I have to admit that in this respect, the dismissively (far too) gentle reviews for The Nativity Story made me chuckle to no end. All the same folks who a couple years ago seemed so outraged that a tale narrowly focused on Jesus’ death didn’t highlight more of his life and teachings now seem largely nonplussed that similar subjects weren’t addressed in a similarly narrowly focused story of His birth. (Of course, the fact that Catherine Hardwicke couldn’t direct her way out of a paper bag with both hands and a map probably helps.)

But I must admit, the first forty minutes or so of Apocalypto left me sorta cold. The Malick-y strangeness of the mileu was, to me, compromised by Gibson’s Three Stooges humor. (I’d never imagined so many bad “mother-in-law jokes” in a fifteenth century dead-language epic.) It wasn’t until all the hallucinatory depravity in the Mayan temples kicked in that suddenly I wanted to hide under my chair – and what’s scarier than the little grace note of the fat, spoiled child, cheering on the beheadings? This man seriously knows how to horrify.

I tread lightly here, because I don’t wish to rekindle our Passion Of The Christ argument, as it’s frankly a fight I’m sick of having with people. (That movie has become like arguing with somebody about abortion or Iraq, you’re eight drinks in and everybody’s screaming and there’s just never going to be any common ground.) But these films are so fundamentally similar, and yet the reception has been so drastically different, I would argue that Apocalypto becomes a much simpler, easily digestible experience after it turns into a Rambo movie. What made The Passion such an overwhelmingly powerful film experience for me is that it used almost identical blunt-force action movie techniques, but instead of the simple retribution of Apocalypto, The Passion applied the same macho swagger to Jesus’ endless capacity for forgiveness. He stood up at that whipping post and turned the other cheek with the same rousing fanfare we get when Jaguar Paw rises from the water and gets all cocky after the waterfall stunt. Jim Caviezel was granted the same heroic camera treatment as Rudy Youngblood, but always in the context of kindness -- watch him re-attach the centurion’s ear, or speak kindly to The Good Thief on the cross in the midst of some unspeakable torture! Apocalypto is a much easier, lesser movie because Jaguar Paw fights back. The Passion was a tale told in the vernacular of the action picture, but one that frustrated and confounded that vernacular. If you’re wondering why this one goes down easier, I think that might be the key.

AD: Considering how offensive I found the violence in The Passion (and I’m pretty far from squeamish) I was amazed at how similar depictions here were like water off a duck’s back. In its rhythms (family man is wronged, gets revenge on those who hurt him) the film’s not all that different from Death Wish or any of the hundreds of films that have included the line “This time it’s personal” on the poster. Whether that undercuts the film’s own worth, by more or less “devolving” into just an action film, is a question Matt addressed in his own review, although I think the boldness of the filmmaking supersedes any clichés or the film may tread in. Frankly I feel a little guilty about the amount of enjoyment I derived from the film; I now wonder if the film is destined to be seen as a Hostel for the subtitles crowd.
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AD: Anyway, how’s your Liberal Guilt treating you these days? More importantly, when was the last time you thought about where the diamonds you bought come from? I mean really thought about them? Because should you ever somehow get your hands on something that precious, you better make damn sure that no one lost their hands for it.

The most misguided socially-conscious film of the year, Blood Diamond finds director Ed Zwick (The Last Samurai) spending an ungodly amount of money to chronicle exploited minorities, exotic cultures and under-represented global strife, while explaining how all of these things serve to enrich the lives and deepen the souls of photogenic white people. Here we have Leonardo DiCaprio, rocking K-Fed facial hair and a Dutch accent, as he lies, steals, cheats, kills and routinely threatens to skin Djimon Honsou en route to learning what’s important in life. This all would be especially odious if DiCaprio (who between this and The Departed is having a banner year, giving performances better than the film they’re featured in) wasn’t so damn irresistible playing a snake. Using his boyish good looks to gloss over a lot of appalling personality traits, Leo’s Danny Archer spends much the film charming people who clearly despise him, playing upon the knowledge that no matter how much he’s fucking them over, they can feel confident that someone else is getting it worse. It’s a total Bogart performance, a trait that seems to be in demand this month.

Of course, the over-stuffed and overlong Blood Diamond has more important matters to tackle than Leo the war profiteer, taking swipes at everything from western indifference, to hoarding by diamond companies to raise demand to the horrific practice of warlords recruiting young children into militias. When contemplating alternate titles for the film, one imagines simply Africa was tossed around. It’s the sort of film where waves of faceless poor blacks are mowed down by jeep-mounted machine gun without much of a second thought, and we’re supposed to be wrapped up in the plight of rascally Leo’s search for a pink diamond the size of an acorn and the equally lily-white Jennifer Connelly’s desire to tell the important story of Africa. Left with barely any material with which to construct a human face to all of this death and destruction is Honsou (in a bafflingly overpraised performance) who rages demonstratively at the injustices levied at him and his family, but ultimately fails to exist beyond enabling his white companion. Sean, I know I’m not doing this patronizingly dull film justice. Take the ball and run with it.

SB: Dude, you already know better than anybody that the only girl who ever stamped her feet and demanded diamonds from me was also so mercenary that she wouldn’t mind if there was an entire village’s worth of chopped-off African baby arms included the equation, just so long as they didn’t compromise the view from her Box Seats at Fenway Park. However, none of this changes the fact that Edward Zwick is a truly horrible filmmaker. Seriously bro, who else could make a boring samurai movie?

The problem with Blood Diamond is that it’s a great idea for a 105 minute Walter Hill potboiler, and the underlying plot is straight outta Sergio Leone, but Zwick turns it into a bloated, Oscar-grubbing term paper. As such, he employs all the expected genre tropes, while at the same time the guy wants us to feel so guilty that he denies us any of the genre satisfactions. Blood Diamond is even more annoying because, as you’ve noted, DiCaprio is such a great Han Solo. What I feel the Scorsese collaborations have missed (yes, even my dear Departed) is that conspiratorial wink and hustle this kid is capable of when he’s acting like an amoral shitbag. He’s such a smoothie that his presence elicits the first-ever interesting performance from Jennifer Connelly. She’s usually a blank, weepy porcelain goddess, and yet Leo seems to kick her into a new flirty, frisky arena I’ve never seen before from this actress.

But has there ever been a “chase movie” wherein everybody gets to camp down for the night so bloody often? There’s an overwhelming abundance of pace-killing sunrises and sunsets in this flick. Everything that should take one scene requires no less than three… and usually a couple more days, thanks to Zwick’s stumblebum direction. The only way to play this material is breathlessly, and Blood Diamond is full of pregnant, production-designed pauses, ones that do nothing but foreground the background, strangle the pace and call attention to how much money everybody spent. I feel like there’s some sort of essay to be written comparing DiCaprio’s exits from The Departed and Blood Diamond -- one extolling the virtues of efficiency, and how much more can be accomplished with fewer over-emotive Oscar clips.

As for why Stephen Collins and Michael Sheen dominate the third act of an ostensible jungle adventure in their Senate hearings, I have no explanation, other than the ugly truth that Zwick wants to give us an easily vanquished white-guy villain, thereby shortchanging the serious issues he wasted a lot of our time trying to address in the first place. Blood Diamond lacks the honesty to be an action picture and the guts to be a social drama. Like most of Zwick’s work it is stuck merely in-between, infuriating to everybody.
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AD: Switching tracks completely from the dismemberment fun of the last two films is The Holiday, the latest exercise in real estate porn from Nancy Meyers who inexplicably has emerged as the most commercially successful female director in history after 2000’s Mel Gibson telepathy-film What Women Want and 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give, which is founded on the even more improbable scenario of Diane Keaton being lusted after by both Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves. I give Meyers credit for tapping into a zeitgeist and creating a formula that's a proven earner: of petulant, career-oriented women who stomp around their palatial McMansions working themselves into screaming fits over the immature men in their lives that’s a proven earner.

The film is, of course, quite awful even by the lax standards of the “commercial chick flick” genre wherein seemingly intelligent, cultured and affluent individuals debase themselves through a series of pratfalls and forced whimsy in their quest to get that elusive groove back (apparently this is a set-up which is no longer mono-gender exclusive, as Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott more or less made half this film earlier in 2006 as A Good Year). What’s ultimately so frustrating about The Holiday though is how close-minded the film is about the treatment of its two female leads.

Cameron Diaz’s Amanda, who with her pinched, cruel-face and Barbie-doll physique has grown to embody everything I hate about my adopted home, flies off to storybook England for several rounds of earth-shaking sex with Jude Law’s soulful widower. Meanwhile, Kate Winslet, whose beauty is both undeniably physical but also seems to just emanate from deep inside of her, is stuck babysitting the old codger next door (Eli Wallach, stealing most of his best lines from Billy Wilder’s memoirs) and collecting woo from a cherubic-looking Jack Black (dialed down, but still nowhere near as charming as both he and the film seem to think he is). While the “Hollywood beauty” spends two hours shagging by the fire and moping about how on earth she, a self-made millionaire, can sustain a long-distance relationship (my god, what chance to the rest of us have?), Kate spends the film watching DVDs and pining for Rufus Sewell (of all the indignities…) who remains emotionally unavailable across the pond. I was going to say that I finally want to see a film that lets Kate get some action while the dull, statuesque beauty goes wanting, but I realized Little Children already filled that void.

The Holiday also has this nasty little habit of underlining its own prefab nature. Diaz’s character is the owner of a trailer company, allowing the film to give us frequent surrealist asides to illustrate whatever saccharine Nora Ephron-esque film predicament the character has gotten herself into, complete with baritone voice-over accompaniment (“Amanda had it all… the perfect job, a great guy, until…”), which is cute until you realize that’s how this very film is being marketed. It was also unwise to set one of the film’s key emotional arcs against the evolution of one of those noxious, ivory-tickling underscores; I spent the second half of the film mentally checking-out every time Hans Zimmer’s orchestral kicked in, unable to shake how boldfaced manipulative whenever it introduced the heroines’ themes.

Clearly you and I are not the target for this film, nor are we likely susceptible to its “charms.” But a thought did occur to me as I watched the film that at least allowed me to temporarily appreciate it. With its emphasis on slick cars, art décor, designer clothes, expensive baubles and career-oriented protagonists who aren’t emotionally suited to relationships, isn’t it fair to see these films as basically Michael Mann movies made for women? I know this place is absolutely filled with people tripping over one another to conjure up academic defenses of Miami Vice, but is there really a huge difference between Mann fetishizing a couple of go-fast boats and a jet plane swooping across the skyline and Kate Winslet running around her new home as the camera lingers on work-out equipment, home entertainment centers and swimming pools? Is the film’s series of “you go girl” moments really that different from Tubbs and Crockett smoldering in slow motion or, for that matter, your favorite medulla oblongata joke of the year? I know I’m courting blasphemy here, but at least the next time I get a dead-eyed stare from a woman after telling her how much I like Heat I’ll be able to empathize. A little.

SB: It’s an interesting notion, but you seem to be conveniently forgetting that Mann’s characters, for all their awesome hardware, in film after film, come off as fundamentally empty and miserable people, searching in vain for a deeper connection that often dooms them. Meyers, in the other hand, seems to genuinely believe in this “better living through rad architecture” philosophy, and I even found myself at a party the other night with a young lady who was asserting adamantly – though she conceded openly that Myers has no idea how to write recognizable human beings – that she still goes to all her movies on opening weekend, just to gawk at the pretty houses.

Like you, I find no point of entry here. Maybe this is just another case of a movie landing outside our wheelhouse, but I found it excruciating and endless. Whatever did happen to Cameron Diaz? Once such a bright spot -- such a goofy and endearing gangly-limbed comedienne-- she’s so antic and overwrought here, laboring so obviously in the service of such simple physical sight-gags, this simply cannot be the same woman from There’s Something About Mary. Years in Hollywood take their toll, I guess. What an awful, plasticine monster!

And no, despite your baiting I refuse to indulge in my typical Kate Winslet drooling, other than to admit that her grounded, glowing presence is the only thing that kept me from committing suicide during this egregiously overlong (131 minutes!) flick. It is only in the cruel crucible of Hollywood that a wowza sex goddess like Winslet would get stuck in a chaste romance with the eye-rolling, scenery-chewing Jack Black – an emotionally stunted improv comic incapable of even feigning the slightest bit of sincerity. (Really Jack, why don’t you bulge your eyeballs out really wide and say something retarded in a high-pitched sing-song voice for like the eight-hundredth time, because sooner or later it might someday become amusing.)

Finally, I do take issue with your notion that it would be remotely outlandish for Diane Keaton to be lusted after by both Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves. Maybe it’s just because I grew up on Annie Hall and Looking For Mr. Goodbar, but buddy, I think everybody should be lusting after Diane Keaton.

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Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 6

By Keith Uhlich
Now over the Out 1 hump (though the legendary serial will have an encore presentation next March), the Museum of the Moving Image's (MOMI) Complete Jacques Rivette retrospective enters its sixth week with four screenings, one of which is absolutely essential viewing. The Gang of Four (1988) features Bulle Ogier as the delightfully monikered Constance Dumas, an acting teacher who is quickly revealed as something of a quiet tyrant, one who inundates her all-girls performing troupe with a damaging "art-is-life" philosophy. Anna (Fejria Deliba), Claude (Laurence Côte), Joyce (Bernadette Giraud), and Lucia (Inês de Medeiros) are the titular group of young women who travel, day-in/day-out, between their suburban co-operative and Constance's Paris-based acting school (its blood red walls always-and-often seething with barely contained threat). Rivette emphasizes the cloistered nature of a performer's life through several interstitial sequences, filmed inside constantly moving trains to nowhere (they might be pendulums futilely swinging back and forth between the same two points). In stark contrast to the liberating outdoor photography of Rivette's Le Pont du Nord (1981), The Gang of Four is a work composed primarily of near-suffocating, hollowed-out interiors that might almost reflect the characters' psychological states of mind if there were, indeed, any psychology to reflect.

Outwardly these women are full of life, as curious and given over to exploration as Rivette's most famed female duo, Céline and Julie. Their camaraderie is infectious, but it turns out to be an unwitting pose, for Constance has so blurred the girls' ability to distinguish pretense from actuality that they react to each and every real-world situation with a performer's myopic mindset. Due to the transgressions of their classmate Cécile (Nathalie Richard), the womens' circle is infiltrated by a cop of many faces (Benoît Régent); at first, he's as much of a performer as they are, spinning elaborate tales of deceit and deception (including one about a future Rivette subject: the fictional artist Frenhoffer and his painting La Belle noiseuse) as a means of ingratiation. But when his numerous masks fall away and his true intentions are revealed, the girls are unable to deal with him in any realistic context. They react to this interloper as if he is nothing more than a fictional construct and so dispose of him according to Constance's precepts (in a sequence rife and resonant with some of Rivette's most disturbing implications about the line separating life and art).

It's easy for men (at least for those of us who adhere to Andrew Sarris' cherchez la femme philosophy of cinema) to raise women up as ideals, proffering a macho form of feminist ideology that we blindly believe to be progressive (a future dissertation title for those interested in the subject's pursuit: "Do Women Need to kick ass to KICK ASS?"), and I think it is exactly this mindset that Rivette is examining in The Gang of Four. Working from the outside in, Rivette and his actresses transform these vacant shells of people into tragically flesh-and-blood human beings. If we respond to their contrived camaraderie (as any cinemagoer is wont to do), our reactions are nonetheless tempered and kept in check by the very fact of the characters' humanity, which is revealed slowly and disturbingly, layer by layer. No mistake that Constance's theater suggests a sort of womb -- these girls are nurtured over the course of The Gang of Four, finally birthed, at its climax, into a world of absolute uncertainty, into a place where all things familiar are tossed to the wind and they must fend for themselves. The ultimate effect is a frightening one, akin to loosing several of H.R. Giger's aliens into the general populace, though perhaps more disturbing (and simultaneously elating) is Rivette's implication that, beneath their varied facades, this quartet possesses an ever-mutating sense of rhyme and reason, a collective conscience of sorts that, in Constance's absence, might not be so easily molded to murderous consequence.

The Gang of Four was the only film I was able to preview, so I leave thoughts and analyses of the rest of the weekend's screenings to others. The little-seen Merry-Go-Round features Joe Dallesandro and Maria Schneider in what the Museum capsule describes as "an elaborate mystery, [in which] a New Yorker [is] summoned to Paris to search for a missing woman." Part of an account from JoeDallesandro.com:

"As Joe points out, Merry-Go-Round was heading for the same running time stratosphere. And this on top of the tensions that were running high on the set because no one knew what direction the haphazard project was going. There were also off-camera personal crises complicating the lives of stars Dallesandro (drugs), Maria Schneider (suicidal ideation), and the director himself (on the verge of a nervous breakdown). It was only when Joe fell off a motorcycle and injured his coccyx that fate happily intervened on the frustrating shoot. "I didn’t want to, but it was the doctor’s advice that I stop,” Joe recalls. "I’m the kind of actor that if there’s a limb hanging off me, I’m still going to work. The only way any of us could have left the film and got a breather from it, though, was for me to be accidentally injured like that, where the insurance then came in and paid everybody. That’s what happened. Everyone got paid while I was healing. Rivette was going nutty, and Maria was attempting suicide, and so my crack-up gave us a week to calm down and get it together. Rivette was trying to make this movie last forever--we shot a ton of footage--and it was turning out to be one of those 24 hour movies.""

The last two films are shorter versions of longer Rivette works that the director himself helped to create (Rivette considers them both separate entities, removed from their extended counterparts and to be judged accordingly). Divertimento is a two-hour version of Rivette's four-hour Cannes Grand Prize winner La Belle noiseuse, created only from alternate takes and unused footage, while Out 1: Spectre is a four-hour abridgement of the thirteen-hour Out 1. From Vincent Canby's New York Times review of Divertimento:

""Divertimento," opening today at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, is a straight-faced bit of tomfoolery sent out under the name of Jacques Rivette. He is the French director of "La Belle Noiseuse," the hypnotically beautiful, numbing four-hour film, released here in 1991, about the angst of a great, if severely blocked, painter. ... Unfortunately, the artist's personal problems are the creakiest part of "La Belle Noiseuse." "Divertimento" is now a sort of classy soap opera, with more soap than opera. Michel Piccoli is still very fine as the aging painter and Emmanuelle Béart a vision as his model. The re-editing has not helped Jane Birkin's performance as the artist's aging waif of a wife. The eliminated material gave the audience some sense of what she was up against: living with a self-centered artist who put his art ahead of everything. In this new cut, she appears to be the kind of drudge who asks to be stepped on so she can be noble by not complaining. She would drive Lassie to drink."

And Jonathan Rosenbaum, slightly more forgiving:

"For all its limitations as a depiction of the way artists work, the longer version owes much of its power to its sense of duration, which ultimately brings one closer to the characters; this snappier, slicker version, more fluid as storytelling, has plenty of virtues of its own, but it's less likely to linger as long in the mind. Both versions can be read as a sort of apologia on Rivette's part explaining why he's backed away from the obsessive intensity of his 60s and 70s work. But he's still a master, and even this relatively minor effort shows why."

Zach Campbell offers an excellent read of Out 1: Spectre. From his write-up on Elusive Lucidity:

"One of the most interesting things I came away with from the film was triggered by a comment that Dan [Sallitt] made between reel changes about how Rivette and Rohmer both make a lot of films about characters trying to figure out some big truth. The major difference as I see it, however, is that Rohmer's characters are searching for what we might simplistically call a 'center,' a stable something that might dictate moral or ethical behavior. Rivette is interested in esoteric knowledge and its presence on the fringes of everyday life: he's both gnostic and skeptic (we might say he's skeptical by virtue first of his fascination with performance & improvisation, and his relative disinterest in "naturalism" or psychology) whereas Rohmer's approach speaks of his much more historically old-fashioned (i.e., conservative) ideas about society & truth. Where we go from there, testing and challenging and unpacking this observation/supposition, well, I'm not sure ... but I thought I'd throw it out there."

And Rosenbaum again, to close things out:

"Complicating the textual status of Out 1 still further is the 255-minute Out 1: Spectre (1972), which Rivette spent the better part of a year editing out of the original material--not so much a digest of the longer film as a different work with a substantially different structure and tone. Part of the fascinating difference between the two films can be seen in the ways that identical footage can often carry disparate meanings and perform radically different dramatic and narrative functions according to its separate placement in each film. (The opening shot of Spectre, for instance, occurs almost three hours into the serial. One of the more striking differences in the long version is that Michel Lonsdale, the director of one of the film's two theater groups, emerges as the central character--not only because of his role in guiding his group's improvisations and psychic self-explorations, but also because his ambiguous role as a rather infantile patriarch becomes pivotal to the overall movement of the plot.)"
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"Merry-Go-Round" screens Saturday, December 16th at 3:00pm. "Divertimento" screens Saturday, December 16th at 6:00pm. "Out 1: Spectre" screens Sunday, December 17th at 2:00pm. "The Gang of Four" screens Sunday, December 17th at 7:00pm. The Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) is located at 35th Avenue at 36th Street in Astoria, Queens County, New York. Click here for travel directions and here for the full Jacques Rivette retrospective screening schedule.

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Links for the Day (December 15th, 2006)

1."List of Golden Globe nominees": Because in the real world, the Golden Globes matter.

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2. "Shadows Stretch a Little Longer": From The Reeler -- an essential film gets a return engagement at Film Forum

["Word just in from Film Forum notes that Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 French Resistance tale Army of Shadows -- which waited 37 years for its first American theatrical engagement last summer -- is making a two-week encore starting Dec. 29."]

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3. "The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser": Chris Wisniewski on Brooklyn Academy of Music's one-week engagement of Werner Herzog's New German Cinema classic.

["One of the undisputed masterworks of the New German Cinema, Werner Herzog’s The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (its German title translates as “Everyone for himself, and God against all”), which screens this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, begins with a series of pastoral scenes of the German countryside. The swelling music and windswept fields evoke the romantic spirit of the early nineteenth century, but the subtitle—an unattributed paraphrase of a line from Georg Buchner’s Lenz—asks, "But can you not hear the dreadful screaming all around that people usually call silence?" The ironies, tensions, and contradictions expressed so potently in these opening moments hardly require explication, and would probably sound hopelessly banal if I tried to offer one, but it should suffice to say that with Kaspar Hauser, Herzog intends on both demystifying and remystifying human experience, to look at the world through the eyes of a man with the mind of a child and to respond with a gasp of wonder and an existential howl."]

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4. "Stone Stuns Comedy Audience with Serial Killer Joke": When even Borat doesn't laugh...

["Hollywood director Oliver Stone shocked the audience at last night's British Comedy Awards in London by joking about the recent murders of five prostitutes. The Suffolk killings, thought to be the work of a serial killer, have dominated British headlines this week and Platoon movie-maker Stone's bad-taste gag was met with horror by the celebrity audience including Sacha Baron Cohen and Charlotte Church."]

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5. "Hermaphroditic deer with seven legs ‘tasty’": I mean, c'mon, how could I pass up a headline like this?

["Rick Lisko hunts deer with a bow but got his most unusual one driving his truck down his mile-long driveway. The young buck had nub antlers — and seven legs. Lisko said it also had both male and female reproductive organs. "It was definitely a freak of nature," Lisko said. "I guess it's a real rarity.” ... John Hoffman of Eden Meat Market skinned the deer for Lisko, who wasn't going to waste the venison from the animal. "And by the way, I did eat it," Lisko said. "It was tasty."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Girl Talk and Quiet Desperation: Christopher Guest's Women

By Dan Callahan

For Your Consideration, the fourth film from Christopher Guest's floating improv comedy ensemble, has received poor, rather weary reviews. It's been ten years since their first real effort, Waiting for Guffman (not counting the much earlier This Is Spinal Tap, which has some of the same players). At the time, Guffman felt like something new, a character-based comedy with an underlying sense of the real anxiety behind delusional behavior (it seemed close to the best novels of Dawn Powell). Best in Show, their second movie and probably their funniest from a sheer laugh-measuring point of view, sacrificed some of this gravitas for easier forms of humor: it's no mistake that it was dominated by Fred Willard's jovial, inane announcer. In For Your Consideration, Willard tries to graft the same persona onto an Entertainment Tonight-style TV host, and it doesn't ring true, to put it mildly.

These four Guest films are based almost exclusively on what the actors involved can come up with, and the successes and failures in the series are unusually tied to performance, which is why the actor portraits in Consideration are finally so touching, in spite of the film's inexact satire and some clumsy work by the company (mainly the men). It is almost always the actresses in Guest's films who make the biggest impression. When the male characters are memorable, they are usually stereotypically feminine to some degree, like Guest's archetypal small town theater queen in Guffman, or Michael Hitchcock's hysterical yuppie in Best in Show. Gender is quite fluid in this series. The gay couple in Best in Show is a sort of nightmare version of the "everything is a double entendre" queer writing on Will and Grace, yet they do seem like a loving, healthy match-up. Similarly, in the same film, Jane Lynch and Jennifer Coolidge are a lesbian pair who transcend Killing of Sister George-discomfort to seem like a perfect couple, with Lynch's masculine, sharp assurance in ideal contrast with Coolidge's pillowy, out-of-it vulnerability. (It might be germane to note that Guest and his wife Jamie Lee Curtis are a famously gender-reversed butch-femme couple).

These non-traditional alliances make a telling contrast to the marriage of the "Lunts of Blaine," Ron and Sheila Albertson in Guffman, one of the more harrowing depictions of an awful, but inescapable relationship outside of Ingmar Bergman films. The depth of this study is due almost entirely to the work of Catherine O'Hara, who makes Sheila Albertson into a woman caught in a trap throwing out desperate signals for release, most memorably in a classic drunk routine where her wild woman's eyes go bleary and she says a lot of things she shouldn't. Maybe because he has O'Hara to play against, Willard makes Ron Albertson into a scarier version of his usual fool—we might even say Ron is capable of bully-like cruelty far removed from the cartoon vengeance of Willard's host towards the end of For Your Consideration.

As a performer, Guest has been completely adrift since Guffman, trying out a lot of voices and disguises that never coalesce into a person, or even a caricature. Harry Shearer has a similar problem, as if he was under a time limit to come up with something funny and can't fix on either character or schtick. Bob Balaban had a triumph as the silently contemptuous music master in Guffman, but his opportunities have been limited since. And Eugene Levy has struggled on in a much broader style than that of the other performers—this was especially apparent when he was asked to do a more serious portrait of a damaged singer in A Mighty Wind, perhaps the weakest film of the series, a movie about folk music that skewered Peter, Paul and Mary without touching on the glories of Phil Ochs, early Dylan and Judy Collins. But in the same film, Catherine O'Hara built on the terror of her Sheila Albertson. Sheila was a provincial woman of no talent who had odd ideas about what acting and a show business career might mean. O'Hara's Mickey in A Mighty Wind is a talented singer so damaged by a blow-up with her former lover and partner (Levy) that she has retreated into a clearly unsatisfactory marriage. But when she is called back to perform, we can see her performer's hauteur and expressiveness gradually return, only to be jettisoned again when she retreats back into anonymity.

For Your Consideration's lackluster reception should not let us miss the fact that O'Hara has taken themes she has worked on all through the series and refined them into a kind of touchy, dangerous apotheosis of loserdom (thankfully, the National Board of Review recently gave her their Best Supporting Actress prize). This is very much O'Hara's movie, even to the extent of it being book ended with scenes she carries entirely alone. It's as if Guest finally realized that what O'Hara has been doing is so fundamentally different from the sketch comedy hit-or-miss efforts of his other performers that he'd damn well better let her dictate where the film should be going.

O'Hara's Marilyn Hack (her name a seemingly easy joke that begins to seem sadder as the film goes on) is an actress who has been in the business for thirty-two years. She has long blonde hippie-style hair and an age-ripened face; in the first scene, she watches Bette Davis on TV in Jezebel and mouths some of the dialogue with her. Interestingly, the Davis scene is a passionate but restrained bit of acting—surely a more hysterical Davis clip could have been chosen to get an easy laugh. O'Hara's Hack is deadly serious as she tries to match her idol word for word. Then her face drops, and she seems to remember her failure to really make a name for herself. The screen fades to black for the credit sequence.

This scene, which isn't funny at all and is actually pretty uncomfortable, heralds the fact O'Hara is in charge here, and she really delivers, on several levels. On the set of Home For Purim, the film she's shooting, as Marilyn acts out some sentimental moments, we can see that she's working from an idea in her head of what acting should be (old school black-and-white Bette Davis). Her performance has a "grand manner," imitative quality, and this slight amateurishness might be one of the reason's why she's never quite made it in her profession (though she caused a stir in 1989 as a blind prostitute... perhaps it was a companion piece to Pretty Woman). It's Hack's showy self-consciousness, ironically, that probably accounts for the reason Oscar buzz starts up about her performance.

O'Hara masterfully delineates the stages of Marilyn's excitement over the buzz: in a car coming home from work, we see an older woman who's suffered plenty of hard knocks, and this life experience tells her that the Oscar talk can't possibly be for real. Briefly, she thinks that it's really the work that counts. Then, horribly, moment by moment and scene by scene, she starts to believe the hype. When she goes on a talk show (for the first time ever?) she's so nervous she can barely speak, and her younger co-star in Purim, Parker Posey, looks on sympathetically, saying that Marilyn shouldn't be doing this publicity, that she's too "sensitive" for it.

This complicity between the women extends even further out into the film, with Jane Lynch's formidable Mary Hart-like hostess taking a few sharp pot shots at her co-anchor Willard's nasty insensitivity. Lynch and Jennifer Coolidge work in a different vein than O'Hara and the problematic Posey: they're on screen to get laughs. Lynch gets most of her laughs with her body language, especially when she strides "powerfully" towards the camera at the start of her show. Coolidge gets all of her laughs with her voice and her certifiably crazy verbal inventiveness. In these last three Guest movies, Coolidge scores laughs from the audience on almost everything she says: as a re-inventor of the dumb blonde type, she has no peer. There hasn't been a comedienne who worked so well in this vein since Judy Holliday, and Coolidge is wilder than the more technical Holliday—you never know where she's going to take you, and you always feel the vague panic behind her non-sequiturs, which is part of what makes them so hilarious.

Posey was quite funny in Guffman (though she did get a little broad with the blank-faced monologues at Dairy Queen), and frenetically high-strung in Best in Show. She's not a natural comic like Lynch or Coolidge, and not quite a real actress like O'Hara—she needs careful handling and usually doesn't get it. But she does beautiful work in For Your Consideration's most touching scene, when she encounters a changed Marilyn Hack at a glitzy party. Marilyn has transformed herself into a sadly recognizable female show biz freak: her lips are filled with collagen, her hair teased and highlighted, her breasts siloconized and pushed up high, and her face pulled back so tight that she can barely talk.

O'Hara is truly inspired in these later scenes because she does purely comic things with this changed appearance (the "always surprised" expression these ladies have), without ever losing the woman who is trapped inside this travesty. At the party, Posey doesn't seem to even recognize Marilyn for a long time. Then, as she realizes who she's talking to, Posey's face reflects a gentle sadness and disappointment. It mirrors the similar disappointment for audience members when they see an actress they love on screen who has gone under the knife and ruined their face. (I got upset when I saw what Jessica Lange had done to her delicate face in Wim Wenders' Don't Come Knocking. When she exploded with emotion, as only she can do, the emotion could not break free of the plasticized mask she was wearing).

For Your Consideration is easy to knock, and the criticisms leveled at it are fairly unanswerable, especially regarding how out of touch it is with the new Hollywood. The film-within-a-film, Home for Purim, is a schmaltzy Jewish melodrama that's supposed to get chuckles with every "Oy vey!"—it's such an old-timey conception that it wouldn't have passed muster for Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. But Consideration is also filled with genuine laughs based on believable characters who are as out of touch with reality as the film itself, and the rumbling discontent of Guest's women has come to a head with Catherine O'Hara's Marilyn Hack. As she listens to the Oscar nominations read out and doesn't hear her name, her panicked eyes scream out of her rigid, destroyed face. Posey, who also expected a nomination, bursts into tears (very different from her stagier tears earlier in the movie). Guest then cuts back to O'Hara, her own tears struggling out of her eyes, as she repeats her own name. "Marilyn Hack...it's so easy to say...just say it," she keeps repeating.

This is the breakdown that seemed inevitable for her Sheila Albertson and her Mickey in A Mighty Wind, and it works as a kind of relief after all the blows that have been landed on Guest's delusional characters. It's as if he was always working towards this burst of tragic emotion, and of course it's O'Hara who finally brought him past the brink of comic cluelessness and into unadulterated pain. From this peak, O'Hara mixes in some dead-on low comedy when confronted by Willard's camera: her hair a mess, clad in a bathrobe, she's roaring drunk, angry and incoherent, ending her tirade against the nominees with an amiable, "Come on in, I've got all this food!" Such moments are a reminder of how accurately O'Hara plays drunkenness (like her ultra-confidential, "Shhh! Girl talk!" as she leans away from her husband to ask an embarrassing wifely question in Guffman). In the last scene, Marilyn is teaching an acting class, the last refuge for failures of her magnitude. She acts out the scene from Jezebel, then spouts some New Age mumbo-jumbo, her pain and her personality obliterated as her blue eyes glint with madness from behind her plastic mask.

For Your Consideration might indeed be a bridge too far for the Guest troupe, but seeing it makes you want to liberate his inventive women for other projects. Lynch and Coolidge could clean up together in a comedy of their own (just turn the cameras on and let them talk). As for O'Hara, I'd say she's ready for Mary Tyrone, perhaps with added scenes upstairs where she can do some comic bits with the morphine needles.
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Dan Callahan is a contributor to The House Next Door. His writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal, and Senses of Cinema among other publications.

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Links for the Day (December 14th, 2006)

1. "The Trash Princess": Kay S. Hymowitz on our love affair with all things Paris.

["Maybe 500 channels and an epidemic of bloggerhea mean that Americans have less of a common culture, but we all still share . . . Paris Hilton. The naughty blond heiress is, like, wallpapering our brains. Even if you don’t read the tabloids, you can’t escape her. There’s a (topless) Vanity Fair cover, a Barbara Walters interview, a best-selling single, a CD, a jewelry line, a best-selling book, a nightclub chain. Madame Tussaud has immortalized her in its wax museum. She can command $100,000 just to show up at a restaurant or club opening for an hour. She is among the top Googled people in the United States. And don’t think you can just get on a plane, go to (say) Auckland, and live Paris-free. In 2005, she was among the most popular search topics in New Zealand—not to mention Germany, Japan, and Australia. She is also a huge lure in Mexico, Turkey, France, and Sweden (so much for the enlightened sexuality of the Scandinavians). Who could top her in the fame department? Liberal commentators have dubbed estate-tax repeal “the Paris Hilton tax cut,” and the term has stuck. Madonna never had a piece of federal legislation named after her."]

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2. "Peter Boyle (1935-2006)": Edward Copeland's appreciation of the late, lamented performer.

["While he never managed to win an Emmy for his role on "Raymond," he did get one for his great guest appearance on one of the very best episodes of "The X-Files," "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," about a psychic with bad luck. Still, Young Frankenstein will tower above all else for me, from his great comic scene with the blind man (Gene Hackman) to his rendition of "Puttin' on the Ritz." RIP Peter Boyle."]

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3. "Senator undergoes brain surgery, sources say": From CNN's Politics page.

["Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota underwent brain surgery early Thursday at George Washington University Hospital after suffering stroke-like symptoms, two Democratic sources familiar with his condition told CNN. Johnson, 59, was taken to the hospital Wednesday after he appeared to suffer the stroke-like symptoms, although a spokeswoman for the senator said subsequent evaluation showed he did not suffer a stroke or a heart attack. There was no word early Thursday on the nature of Johnson's surgery or his condition. ... Should Johnson not be able to complete his term, which ends in 2008, South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds, a Republican, could appoint his replacement, which could shift the balance of power in the Senate. South Dakota Secretary of State Chris Nelson said the appointment would fill the vacancy until a general election could be held in November 2008. There are no restrictions on who the governor can appoint, beyond meeting the legal requirements for Senate membership, he said.]

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4. "Monster House": Carlos Rojas of The Naked Gaze blog on Monster House.

["The house’s sexual connotations are reinforced even more clearly when the trio, in attempting to extinguish the house’s heart, inadvertently discover its soul—the cement-encased corpse of Nebbercracker’s wife, Constance, who had accidentally fallen to her death 45 years earlier. They had met at a circus, where she was the proverbial “fat lady,” and he fell in love with her. He therefore took her away from the circus, married her, and began to build a dream house for the two of them. At one point while they were at the construction site, however, Constance found herself bullied by some neighborhood kids, and then lost her balance and fell right down to the cellar, where she was immediately covered by wet cement."]

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5. "Stallone says ‘guys like me’ don’t need to retire": Coming up: Pongo's review of Rocky Five... THOUSAND!!! Pongo...

["At 60, Sylvester Stallone thinks it’s time to show people that the careers of “guys like me,” can last long after most people retire, and he sets out to prove it in his new movie, “Rocky Balboa.” “This is uncharted waters. People are living longer. They are healthier. They have more ambition, more energy, yet society is telling them to move aside,” Stallone told Reuters. ”It’s different now, and I thought, ‘Boy, if I could just come up with a dramatic premise to use as a platform.”’"]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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5 for the Day: When Titles Collide

By Keith Uhlich

Mismatched plots, mixed motivations, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! This is what happens when movie titles that share some of the same words come crashing together.

1. Aguirre: The Wrath of Khan: When the crew of the Starship Enterprise answer a distress signal originating in Machu Picchu, little do they realize that it is a trap set for them by Kirk’s (William Shatner) old nemesis Khan (Klaus Kinski), now a despotic conquistador with delusions of grandeur. As Khan leads his captives deeper and deeper into the Amazonian jungle, they all become slave to his lunatic quest, save for Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) who – with the aid of a pack of wild howler monkeys – makes the ultimate, tear-jerking sacrifice.

2. Bridget Jones's Diary of a Country Priest: Culture-clash comedy ensues when everyone’s favorite wanton sex goddess (Renée Zellweger) renounces her hedonistic ways for the priesthood. Assigned a small parish in the French countryside, Bridget finds herself less than welcome by the stone-faced locals, who nearly drive the Brit diarist to an early, cancer-stricken grave. Things take a turn for the worse when her old flames Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) come to visit, a situation that begets much rom-com hilarity and some unexpected spiritual introspection. From writer/director Robert Bresson, adapted from the New York Times bestselling novel by Helen Fielding.

3. Crash Crash: James Ballard (James Spader), a racist Canadian yuppie with a horned-up car crash fixation, visits Los Angeles when prejudices are at their peak. He’s quickly indoctrinated into a liberal guilt "crash" cult – led by the heavily scarred, former TV writer Vaughn (Paul Haggis) – who plan on orchestrating a massive freeway pileup to show Los Angeleans the error of their intolerant ways. With Rosanna Arquette as Shaniqua.

4. Lost in Transamerica: Bobbie Harris (Bill Murray), an aging transsexual movie star, travels to Tokyo with her neurotic businessman brother (Albert Brooks) and sister-in-law (Julie Hagerty) to make peace with Charlie (Scarlett Johansson), the exchange student son she never knew. When Bobbie is offered a high-paying Suntory commercial, the foursome rent a Winnebago and drive along Japan's scenic coastal byways to the studios in Kyoto. Along the way, Brit-pop songs are sung, life lessons are learned, and Bobbie begins to suspect that her feelings for Charlie are more than parental.

5. The Last House on My Left Foot: Paralyzed Irish author Christy Brown (Daniel Day-Lewis) unwittingly harbors the two killer-rapists (Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon) of his teenage daughters (Neve Campbell and Lindsay Lohan), wining and dining them until they drunkenly confess their misdeeds. Christy then proceeds to enact a bloody revenge, using sharp-bladed household appliances, lead-tipped writing implements, and the only body part he knows how.

What are your title collisions and their hodgepodge plots? A few suggestions to get things started: The Last American Virgin Suicides; Porky's II: The Next Day After Tomorrow; Midnight Ran; Jaws the Revenge of the Sith; Oldboy in the Plastic Bubble. And an example in motion.
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Keith Uhlich is managing editor of The House of Flying Daggers Next Door, a staff critic for Slant Magazine, and a contributor to a variety of print and online publications.

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Links for the Day (December 13th, 2006)

1. "Jules and Jim, Resilience, and Memories of My Nervous Illness": House writer and Slant Magazine editor Ed Gonzalez's inaugural reviews in his more frequent role as a Village Voice film section contributor.

["A woman is a woman to Godard, but Truffaut saw deeper. Catherine is autonomous, using her sex as leverage to claim a man's sense of freedom. Truffaut doesn't typecast Catherine as a feminist or a repudiation of one. She is wild, passionate, maybe even a little mad, but always straight—which is to say, she is more real than anyone in the film's carnival of souls. But she is above all a romantic, and like another famous Catherine familiar to fans of Emily Bront and Kate Bush, her love is potentially metaphysical. Daring us to understand her, Catherine shatters traditional views of women, just as Jules and Jim's visual panache destroyed conventional opinions of film art."]

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2. "Green Lantern creator dead at 91": From CNN.com.

["Martin Nodell, the creator of Green Lantern, the comic book superhero who uses his magical ring to help him fight crime, has died. He was 91. Nodell died at a nursing home in Muskego, Wisconsin, on Saturday of natural causes, his son Spencer Nodell told The Associated Press on Tuesday. He previously lived in West Palm Beach. Nodell was looking for a new idea for a comic book in 1940 when he was waiting for a New York subway and saw a train operator waving a lantern displaying a green light, said Maggie Thompson, senior editor of Comics Buyer's Guide."]

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3. "The year women broke": From the Quiet Bubble blog.

["What’s important about 2006 is that it’s the year that women cartoonists reached critical mass, both in the marketplace and in the press. In terms of critical attention, and mostly fawning at that, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen, Miriam Katin’s We Are On Our Own, and Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken with Plums were clearly the hits of the year. (Bechdel was interviewed and profiled so often that ¡Journalista! started linking to pieces on her as “yet another Alison Bechdel interview.”) It’s telling that, as with nonfiction prose in the country, it’s the memoir comics that get the most attention. In Fun Home, Bechdel intertwines the story of her closeted father with her own coming-out during college. Marchetto’s comic portrays her (successful) struggle with breast cancer in 2004. Katin’s memoir (the best of the bunch in this paragraph) tells the story of her Jewish mother’s fleeing of Budapest during WWII, one step ahead of the Nazis, and with the Russians looming ahead. Satrapi’s work, although a fiction, takes her uncle’s death as its starting point."]

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4. "Critics say Christian game glorifies violence": Left Behind THE FLAMETHROWER!!! The kids love this one.

["Targeted largely at conservative Christians, it’s a violent video game with a difference: Combatants on one side pause for prayer, and their favored interjection is “Praise the Lord.” Critics say “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” glorifies religious violence against non-Christians. Some liberal groups have been urging a boycott, and on Tuesday they urged Wal-Mart to withdraw the game from its shelves. However, Troy Lyndon, CEO of Left Behind Games Inc., defended the game as “inspirational entertainment” and said its critics were exaggerating. He expressed greater concern about poor reviews from some video-game aficionados, saying the company would offer a free technical upgrade by Dec. 24."]

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5. "Unwelcome Guest: For Your Condescension": Fernando F. Croce on For Your Consideration, Bobby, Happy Feet, and The Nativity Story.

["Sooner or later, every satirical wag gets lazy and bitch-slaps Hollywood. For Christopher Guest, it was sooner: His 1989 directorial debut, The Big Picture, had a film-school naïf being taught to whore himself in Tinseltown while feigning integrity, and now consider For Your Consideration the result of a lesson well-learned. Ghosts from the past kick things off, a glimpse of Bette Davis flooding a TV screen in Jezebel while a has-been actress (Catherine O'Hara) forlornly mimics the words to herself; O'Hara then drives to the studio, only for a gate guard to clinch her Norma Desmondian role by mistaking her for somebody else, probably a more successful thesp. Human self-delusion in the face of aging and mediocrity has been Guest's theme -- the rock 'n' rollers in This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner directed, Guest provided the authorial voice), the wee community-theatre folks in Waiting for Guffman, and the dog-owners in Best in Show are clueless to their own absurdities, with the ensuing mockery cloaked as oddball-celebration. Guest's previous picture, A Mighty Wind, deepened, expanded this concept by adding heft not just to the characters' achievements (their songs were actually pretty good), but also to their dreams, so that caricature might suddenly give way to reveal flesh and blood. But For Your Consideration is back to snark with a vengeance, a condescending (and not funny) crotch-punch that pretends to deride Hollywood's hype-juggernaut and Oscar hunger while in reality only punishing the schmucks who dare to hope and dream."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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The Sexy, Surreal Slice & Dice of Nip/Tuck

By Ross Ruediger

Tonight at 10, FX delivers the Season Four finale of its highest rated series, Nip/Tuck. Based on the 14 episodes presented thus far, this season's subtitle should be “The Apology”, because after the disaster that was Season Three, that’s what was owed to long-term fans -- and it’s largely what producer/writer Ryan Murphy and his band of twisted lunatics delivered.

Nip/Tuck’s charter mission -- a commentary about the evils (and occasional benefits) of cosmetic surgery -- has been all but abandoned at this point. There’s still at least one patient/surgery per episode, but most of them are played for laughs or shock value (and sometimes both) and rarely leave lasting impressions. After three seasons of exploring themes that were tidily summed up by the oft-repeated catchphrase of the Carver (“Beauty is a curse on the world”), maybe there isn’t much left to say? The show has often been accused of promoting sexist themes, which is a tad shortsighted, as it primarily holds up a mirror to what’s beneath the surface, that which cannot be fixed through botox injections and boob jobs: Nip/Tuck is really about people making atrocious life decisions (surgery being only the tip of that iceberg). On the rare occasion someone on Nip/Tuck makes a good decision, you can bet the positive fallout won’t last long, as they’ll soon enough make another bad one, dragging the character back to their moral drawing board. It’s impossible for anyone on this series to be content for any length of time, and the day someone finds true happiness, it’ll be time to close up shop.

To wit: Dr. Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) has spent the bulk of the series running to and from his wife Julia (Joely Richardson). Sometimes they’re divorced, sometimes not; sometimes they’re together, sometimes not; sometimes they love each other, sometimes they just wanna claw each other’s eyes out. At the close of Season Three, the divorced couple, who'd let their mutual hatred lapse for one night, found out Julia was pregnant. And so they came together once again, and near the start of this season, Julia gave birth to a deformed son, and things momentarily ambled along as nicely as they could in the twisted universe of Nip/Tuck, until…Sean fucked the nubile young babysitter, Monica (Jennifer Hall). In a later episode, he ate one of Monica’s hash brownies, inexplicably obtaining an instantaneous LSD-like high resulting in whacked-out hallucinations, and realized how wrong it was to fuck the babysitter. Further down the road, after Monica started going off the rails and making weird threats, she was decapitated by a moving bus -- right in front of Sean. Lest you think Julia was a mere victim throughout all of this, she was busy cultivating feelings for and a relationship with the other babysitter, a dwarf named Marlowe (Peter Dinklage)…whom she eventually fucked.

If you have never watched Nip/Tuck, you are probably thinking one of two things right about now: “I had no idea what I was missing!” or “The further degradation of television and humanity has just been nicely summed up in one paragraph.” Those on the first train of thought should go out and rent or buy the Season One DVD box set now. You’ll thank me. Those on the second train? This show is not for you, and if you still think it might be, then envision Melissa Gilbert gettin’ jiggy with her dog. Even though it wasn’t graphically depicted, I challenge anyone to view Episode 4.4, “Shari Noble”, and come away from it with the ability to get that image out of your head.

The farmyard antics of Laura Ingalls were only a minor diversion in Season Four. Unlike the previous two seasons, the current has differed by returning to its Season One roots in that there’s been no setup for a major revelation of a mystery in the season finale. There’s been a surplus of criminal activity, but viewers have been in on it the entire time. We know what’s going on, even when Drs. Troy and McNamara do not.

Further, the criminal element has largely been the deviously masterminded plan of Escobar Gallardo (Robert LaSardo), a Miami drug lord who plagued the two doctors back in Season One. The pair eventually one-upped him via their surgical skills, and provided a clever means for his capture by the fuzz. Escobar stewed in prison for the past two and half years, biding his time and plotting his revenge, which he’s meticulously unveiled throughout the season. If the finale features a revelation, it will be the cumshot at the end of Escobar’s plan –- and how Sean and Christian will outwit him again…that’s assuming that they do, as I wouldn’t put it past Ryan Murphy to leave us hanging. The title of the episode is “Gala Gallardo”, apparently named after Escobar’s previously unseen wife. It’s difficult to tell if the Escobar reintroduction was part of some sort of Murphy Master Plan, however a major part of the Season Four storyline -- involving organ trafficking -- was quietly seeded in the Murphy-scripted Season One finale.

The season divided neatly into two halves. The first featured mostly standalone stories, wrapped around the purchase of McNamara/Troy by billionaire Burt Landau (Larry Hagman) and his wife Michelle (Sanaa Lathan). Presumably this was done to appeal to new viewers unfamiliar with the longer-term aspects of the ongoing story. Nearly every episode unleashed some bizarre take on an actor whom we’d almost forgotten about: A barely recognizable Kathleen Turner as a phone sex operator in need of vocal chord reconstruction; Richard Chamberlain playing a loathsome queen bent on having his boy-toy lover’s face reconstructed so he’d appear as a younger version of Chamberlain; Rosie O’Donnell’s over-hyped two part arc as trailer trash who wins the lottery but loses everything else. Did I mention what they did with Melissa Gilbert? Just as I was beginning to tire of the formula, something happened…

The halfway point, Episode 8, “Conor McNamara”, saw the return of Ruth Williamson’s plastic surgery-addicted socialite Mrs. Grubman -- who featured in several episodes of the first two seasons -- now dying of cancer. Her final request? For Dr. Troy to operate on her corpse so that it would look ideal for her funeral (which, quite sadly, only Christian attended). In what was unquestionably a season highlight, Troy performed the surgery as a dream-like vision of Grubman sat on a nearby piano serenading Christian with “This Girl’s in Love With You” -- all while Burt Bacharach tickled the ivories in cameo behind her. From this episode forward, the series reveled in nostalgia, finding unique ways of bringing back bits and pieces of Nip/Tuck’s past, but never gratuitously so and always serving the bigger picture. It became an expert weave on the part of the production team, and justified the season’s first half in the process.

I spent much time this season pondering the inspiration provided by the antics of Tom Cruise. Three major issues of everyone's favorite couch jumper were addressed: Scientology, psychiatry and postpartum depression. So I pondered whether or not Cruise had time to watch the show –- after all, his on-again off-again friend Brooke Shields had a recurring role as a psycho therapist (literally). Shields’ Faith Wolper went so far as to have the words “Property of Christian Troy” tattooed on her ass, but this was only after she’d convinced Hagman’s Burt that the only proper way to deal with a spouse cheating with an employee is to blackmail the pair (Christian and Michelle) into having sex in front of him. Score One for Cruise’s feelings on therapy! Resident Nip/Tuck flake and former porn queen Kimber Henry (played by the always lovely Kelly Carlson) delved deeply into the Church of Scientology, dragging Christian, Sean & Julia’s son Matt (John Hensley) (no time to explain that one; see Season Two premiere for more details) along for the ride. I read Murphy say he wanted to portray the Church fairly, and given what little non-Scientologists know about the Church, I believe it was; how can the Church be portrayed as anything but a fringe lunatic cult when its inner workings are largely a secret? The apex of the storyline occurred last week when the Church’s godlike deity Xenu appeared to Kimber in a hallucination. Minus One, Tom –- do not pass Go! and do not collect $200. The postpartum issue was given far more sensitive treatment. It was clear that Julia was suffering from it, however she resisted medication –- and I’ve no idea what Tom would make of that. If nothing else, I hope he was entertained by it all. I refuse to believe the exploration of these themes was mere coincidence. As the season progressed, Nicole Kidman made it publicly known that she wanted to guest on the show; perhaps she wanted to get his attention.

Special mention must be made of Peter Dinklage’s Marlowe Sawyer, who was a true standout this season. I do not know if the role was written for him, but I cannot imagine any other actor of his stature playing the part. Dinklage achieved what many would consider a dramatic challenge: he made it not only OK for “normal” sized people to have sexual and romantic relations with a dwarf, but he (with plenty of help from Joely Richardson) also made it sexy and real (as opposed to his character in Threshold, which just made it obnoxious). When the pair feel for each other, we were right there with them, and when it didn’t work out, it was heartbreaking.

Despite all this window dressing, the dynamic duo of doctors remains the meat of the series. For all the attention paid to Julian McMahon’s bad-boy Christian Troy, for my guilty viewing pleasure, Walsh’s Sean McNamara stands as the show’s darkest, most satisfying portrayal. Christian is drawn in strict shades of black and white –- when he’s bad, he’s very, very bad, but when he is good, he’s positively angelic. Sean, however, is shown in deep shades of gray and possesses a conscience that continually wreaks havoc on a tortured soul. We were given a major revelation this season -- again, in the episode “Conor McNamara” -- that Sean was born with a facial deformity that led to the breakup of his parents and presumably to his career in plastic surgery. Most devastating to the character is that Julia has finally left not only him, but Miami altogether (the couple admitted to each other the affairs detailed above). She headed to New York with kids Annie and Conor in tow, and it’s anyone’s guess when they’ll be back. Some may think the temporary loss of Richardson will hurt the series, but really this is a breath of fresh air. As great as Richardson is, the ongoing McNamara push-me/pull-you has taken its toll on this fan. How refreshing it would be to see a fifth season sans Julia altogether, forcing Sean to find a life outside of any possible reconciliation.

I suspect things will get worse for Sean before they get better. Episode 4.11, “Conor McNamara 2026”, set in both the present and the titular year, was both reminiscence and reunion, and it showed Sean alone 20 years from now; he hadn’t even spoken to Julia since Conor was five. If the events seen in that episode are true -– and there was no indication they weren’t -– a certain tension has been excised from the series. No matter how much we might hope for the McNamaras to reconcile, we have seen that ultimately they do not. In the future, it's feasible that this development has freed up both characters for greater and different dramatic possibilities.

But will there even be a Season Five? Season Four has provided an almost circular feel to the series, and in a recent interview, Ryan Murphy seemed unsure as to the possibility of the series continuing (although he may simply have been playing with the interviewer, as he frequently seems to do). Given the strength of the latter half of this season, if Nip/Tuck were to end here, they’d likely be going out on a high note. Yet it’s difficult to imagine FX letting go of its biggest cash and ratings cow, despite rumors that Murphy’s contract has expired and speculation that, given his blossoming movie career, he might not be inclined to return.

Can the series survive without Murphy? It’s impossible to say, and yet nearly each member of writing team has proven they’re a worthy candidate for showrunner -– and the series must have a writer calling the shots, as it’s a writer’s show. Were I in charge, and if Murphy were leaving, I’d seriously consider courting writer/co-producer Jennifer Salt (you know -- Eunice from Soap…Grace from Sisters…Diana from Gargoyles???) to take hold of the creative reins. She’s been with the show since Season One and her work has consistently proven her firm grasp on what makes Nip/Tuck tick. Episodes like “Joy Kringle” and “Shari Noble” showcase her ability to provoke and titillate while “Rhea Reynolds” and “Conor McNamara” demonstrate her understanding of the emotion necessary for the show’s survival. Perhaps of equal importance would be the value of having a female at the show’s helm and what might come of that.

A show as edgy and out there as Nip/Tuck seems destined to have a finite shelf life. Both Christian and Sean’s aging has been addressed on numerous occasions from a variety of angles, and yet they’ve both thus far avoided any major cosmetic enhancement. They’re getting older and resisting what’s provided their bread and butter -- and it probably goes without saying the actors won’t be game for face-lifts and hair plugs in order to keep the drama going. Beyond that, I'd best avoid making predictions. For all I know, I’ll be coming to this talkback later tonight and proclaiming, “Ignore those last few paragraphs. The fat lady just sang and the doors of McNamara/Troy are closed for business.” Whenever the series ends, I like the idea of having to scrape my jaw up off the floor and make an appointment for some reconstructive surgery.
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Ross Ruediger is a San Antonio-based critic and columnist, a contributor to The House Next Door, and publisher of The Rued Morgue.

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T.V. on TV: How I Met Your Mother

By Todd VanDerWerffAt the moment, there are more good comedies on the air than during any given year in the last decade, but for the most part, these shows are filmed single-camera style -- meaning one camera captures each take, in the manner of a movie or a TV drama. This breaks with TV comedy tradition in a number of ways. There have been popular single-camera comedies in the past (The Andy Griffith Show and M*A*S*H, for two), but most sitcoms were essentially filmed plays. The actors performed in front of a live studio audience, and their performances were captured on three or more cameras. The format was invented for I Love Lucy, and it didn't change much over the decades; if Desi Arnaz were to drop in on a taping of According to Jim, he’d have no trouble following along.

CBS is the last real hold-out on the multi-camera front. All five of its sitcoms are filmed at least partially with multiple cameras, but the one that stands out is How I Met your Mother (Mondays, 8 p.m. ET), which blends both single-camera elements (a lot of the show’s cutaways and flashbacks are filmed in this manner, and the production schedule also mirrors a single-camera sitcom, allowing more time for more scenes and complicated camera set-ups) with multi-camera elements (the scenes that take place on the show’s standing sets). Tapes of the completed episodes are shown to an audience, and their reactions are recorded for the show's laugh track. It’s surprising that the hybrid approach hasn't become more pervasive; it combines the versatility of a single-camera show plus the safety net of a traditional sitcom.

How I Met Your Mother (or HIMYM) is a sterling example of the hybrid sitcom. It's nothing revolutionary, but it has a nearly perfect ensemble cast; indeed, in the show’s first season, the actors elevated weak material just by playing the hell out of it. All five of the show’s lead actors (Josh Radnor, Cobie Smulders, Jason Segal, Alyson Hannigan and Neil Patrick Harris) are precisely cast to fit the their incredibly specific roles within the ensemble. In that way, the show earns comparisons to Friends, another sitcom about young single New Yorkers. Also like Friends, HIMYM traffics in soapy plotlines, and its characters have evolved in increasingly eccentric but believable directions. For instance, just as Joey started out as a sort of dumb guy stereotype and then graduated to a very specific kind of overly sensitive himbo on Friends, thanks largely to Matt LaBlanc’s portrayal, Jason Segal has taken a fairly stereotypical sitcom role (the best friend in a committed relationship) and turned it into a marvel of specificity. His Marshall is the kind of guy who spent much of high school reading back issues of Fortean Times and being lonely, only to find himself out in the real world and capable of landing both a pretty girl and a dream job.

Segal's colleagues have likewise filled out some pretty basic parts. Smulders is the Jennifer Aniston of the group – pretty, but able to play funny when needed (even more so in Season Two, which hasn’t required her to dance through the show’s soapy contrivances as much). Hannigan, who has one of the most expressive faces on TV, finds the right combination of alluring and slightly nerdy. Harris’ Barney, the lovable freewheeling cad of the group, invests every line with casual glee. Radnor’s Ted, the center of the show, was seen as the weakest link by many in the first season (including myself). His performance was good, and his joke delivery improved as the season went on, but his character had a propensity toward stalker-like behavior. What’s more, Radnor just seemed a little bland. In the second season, though, Ted has entered into a relationship with Smulders’ character, Robin; his brand of romanticism plays better within the confines of a relationship than it did when he was single. Now that Ted's not required to continually drive the show's central plot device (the question is in the show’s title, and, in an interesting bit of sitcom fatalism, we know Ted doesn’t marry Robin), Ted is free to play straight man, something Radnor’s better at than being a joke machine. And somehow, Radnor and the writers have made "bland" a persona. Ted’s a precise type of bland, the kind that can get away with lying to a girlfriend or wronging a friend just by being vaguely affable.

The more effective use of Ted isn't the only Season Two improvement. The writers have also buckled down and figured out a way to make the comedy work, driving it from their characters rather than generic punchlines (in the first season, the jokes would occasionally sound like jokes and look like jokes without quite landing). Now a lot of the laughs come from the show’s cutaways, which have always worked; but the writing has also expanded character quirks (like Marshall’s fear of Bigfoot -- or Sasquatch, as he insists on calling the creature) and added elaborate running gags (like Barney being mis-named Swarley at a coffee shop, only to find the nickname catching on).

The series also has a more confident voice. HIMYM is a long, rambling story told to Ted’s future children (Bob Saget narrates) and there are digressions and bits and pieces that loop back on themselves. The break with conventional format sometimes borders on gimmicky, but mostly it works, and in a genre that too often feels hidebound by structure, it sets this sitcom apart. The best episode to date is still season one’s "Drum Roll, Please,” a love story told through a series of interconnecting flashbacks that segue via an identity mystery and a fantastic cake. But Season Two has employed structural variety in nearly every episode.

HIMYM is the sort of thing that NBC would have turned into a massive, massive hit 15 years ago, but for all its charm, it's not indispensible TV. That may be why, despite its likeability, it manages to attract fewer than 10 million viewers every week. It doesn’t help that CBS is probably the wrong venue. Many of show’s references seem pitched to those born between 1975 and 1985; not a lot of people in that demographic watch the older-skewing CBS. And in the first season, the show probably suffered from not delivering the sitcom revolution viewers might have thought they wanted. But in its second season, it's worth catching week in and week out; it’s a perfect example of its (rapidly dying) genre, and it’s at the top of its game. Even a weak episode is worth watching just to see the ensemble members ping-pong off each other.
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.

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Links for the Day (December 12th, 2006)

1. "Forgotten Films: The Dion Brothers (aka The Gravy Train) (dir. Jack Starrett, 1974)": Bilge Ebiri writes on a forgotten film co-written by Terrence Malick.

["Jack Starrett’s loser crime comedy The Dion Brothers (aka The Gravy Train) has built up enough of a cult following that it’s a slight misnomer to call it a “forgotten” film. After all, it’s been featured as part of the infamous Austin geek-out QT Fest, the Ain’t It Cool News-approved, Quentin Tarantino-programmed festival of cult flicks, and Starrett himself, an actor-cum-director who put his name to a number of cult flicks, including 1973’s Cleopatra Jones, has gained something of a reputation over the years. (Sadly, though, it’s been a posthumous one – he died in 1989 at the age of 52.) The Dion Brothers also holds added value for the average film buff, because its screenplay was co-written by Terrence Malick, who was reportedly also the original director of this film. (I can only assume he got the job after the critical success of Badlands.) Starrett replaced Malick, presumably sometime before production, and Malick’s credit now reads “David Whitney,” a pseudonym the reclusive writer-director has occasionally used."]

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2. "A Woman in Trouble is Rescued and Loved": House contributor Dan Callahan writes on INLAND EMPIRE for Bright Lights After Dark.

["Inland Empire was shot on consumer grade DV, and the surprise is how sumptuous it looks, with its dreamy dissolves, the red of Dern's lips bleeding into a huge ketchup stain on a white shirt, the blue of a desperate sex scene transforming Theroux's wasted face into a sort of Picasso painting on impotence. Lynch perches his camera right on people's faces for numerous close-ups, and the effect should be Ken Russell-grotesque, but it never is. Why? Difficult to say, except that the people seem to be shot with love and gentle concentration, as if the director was trying to find new ways to look at the human face, until the faces open up like flowers. Grace Zabriskie begins the film in dragon-lady mode, with a heavy accent (she's very funny), so that it has a huge impact when, hours later, we see her face again, and it suddenly seems disarmingly pretty, as if a mask has dropped away. And always there is Dern's face, that long landscape of nose and chin, like a giant high school prom queen just beginning to melt."]

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3. "Arctic Ice Retreat May Speed Up, Leaving Ice-Free Ocean by 2040": From Bloomberg.com

["Arctic sea-ice retreat is likely to accelerate so rapidly that the Arctic Ocean will be nearly ice- free by the summer by 2040, atmospheric scientists said. Further increases in the atmosphere of so-called greenhouse gases may lead to global warming that causes the already- retreating ice to begin melting four times faster in about 20 years' time, a team led by U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist Marika Holland says today in research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters."]

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4. "Oldest woman dies at age 116": From CNN.

["Elizabeth "Lizzie" Bolden, recognized as the world's oldest person, died early Monday, the administrator of the nursing home where she lived said Monday. She was 116. Bolden was born August 15, 1890, according to the Gerontology Research Group, a Los Angeles-based organization that tracks the ages of the world's oldest people. Guinness World Records recognized Bolden as the oldest person in August after the death of Maria Ester de Capovilla of Ecuador, who previously was listed as the oldest."]

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5. "Bringing new meaning to ‘firing blind’": Yes, well...

["The blind would be able to go hunting if a Texas bill becomes law. The bill would allow legally blind hunters to use a laser sight, or lighted pointing instrument, which is forbidden for sighted hunters, according to State Rep. Edmund Kuempel, who introduced it. "This opens up the fun of hunting to additional people, and I think that's great," Kuempel said."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Savage art: Mel Gibson's Apocalypto

By Matt Zoller SeitzMel Gibson’s Mayan fable Apocalypto is one of the most viscerally powerful and intensely upsetting movies of the year. But it’s not the shots of severed heads, vivisected torsos and pierced flesh that disturb; it’s the closeups of those who witness or perpetrate violence. The latter are the cinematic version of what gamblers call “tells” – incidental gestures that reveal the filmmaker’s intent. The greatness of the movie’s brutal, tragic first half -- which charts a Mayan tribe’s enslavement by a nation-state of militant, human-sacrificing cultists – can be found in close-ups of human faces while suffering is inflicted or endured. Men are strangled in their marriage beds by unseen assailants; women are threatened with rape and sexual servitude while their hogtied husbands look on, weeping with rage; an enemy soldier picks up a screaming child and hurls him like a medicine ball, just to see what happens.

This horrific sadism is not an abstraction, much less a thug’s provocation. Nor is it, as some ungenerous and unobservant critics have claimed, “fetishistic.” John Woo’s violence could be described as fetishistic, because it’s all about light and shadow, rhythm and color; the people are abstracted in death, like dancers, or figures in a mural. But in the first half of Apocalypto, Gibson is moved by simple human routines, and appalled by viciousness that disrupts of destroys those routines. He brings a John Fordian cornball sense to the knockabout first-act slapstick (the hero’s warrior dad gives a rub-on aphrodisiac to a fellow warrior who can’t get it up – and we discover it was a vicious prank when the warrior stumbles out of his tent fanning his burning genitals, followed by his wife, who needs a drink of water right now). He photographs the hero, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), doting on his pregnant wife, Seven (Dalia Hernandez), with an intimate comfort that only a father could summon; Gibson even shows the subcutaneous bulge caused by the infant’s kicking against the wall of mom’s womb, and photographs it with real tenderness, as if he’s never gotten over what a miracle it is. And when the thugs invade and dismantle Jaguar Paw’s village, forcing him to hide his wife and son in a pit that’s like a deep well, Gibson plainly demonstrates the absence of morality that's the hallmark of bullies, from Roman Centurions, Inquisitors and Gestapo through soccer hooligans and street-corner gangstas. He makes the depiction of brutality as frankly upsetting -- and hyper-realistically protracted -- as possible, to jolt you out of your moviegoer’s jadedness and make you feel sadness, nausea, righteous anger, something. Any reaction will do, as long as it’s not indifference.

Indeed, Gibson makes a case for indifference to suffering as the greatest of human crimes -- the one from which all others spring. The most chilling images in the movie are the reaction shots of those who look upon sadistic cruelty either with glee or with no particular opinion. In the human sacrifice sequence, for instance, Gibson repeatedly cuts between close-ups of the high priest (Fernando Hernandez) presiding over the heart removals, decapitations and mass chantings, and the nearby king (Rafael Velez), who’s so anesthetized by drugs or by exposure to mass murder (perhaps both) that he barely seems to have a pulse. You can’t even say he’s lost in thought, because his dead face and slack body (it seems to be merging with the throne) suggest that he has no thoughts to get lost in. Equally shocking – maybe more so, because it’s funny – is the reaction of the queen (Diana Botello) when the high priest finishes sacrificing his first victim in the sequence and moves on to the second. The latter’s suffering is depicted partly from the victim’s own point-of-view – a surprising, formally risky touch that compels identification – but midway through, Gibson cuts to the queen, who rolls her eyes as if to say, “Please, not this again.”

Gibson’s right-on attitude toward cruelty and suffering is schizophrenically juxtaposed with one that’s more familiar, less deep, and in this context, a lot more problematic: a R-rated action star’s very '80s impulse toward pulp cartoonishness and gross-out showboating. Both qualities lope to the fore during Apocalypto’s second hour. At the film’s halfway mark -- after Jaguar Paw escapes his tormentors and races home through the jungle to reunite with his young son and pregnant wife, who are still trapped in a pit where he hid them -- the soulful, penetrating close-ups that typify the movie’s first half are supplanted by more stylized, even cliched action close-ups: Zen pulp brooding and badass pre-fight stares reminiscent of anime, videogames and martial arts pictures. The replacement of one type of close-up with another coincides with the movie’s transformation from a primal fable about individual lives shattered by oppression (like the slave ship scenes in Amistad or the Kristillnacht sequence in Schindler’s List by way of Edgar Rice Burroughs) to a more conventional, revenge-driven, fight-and-flight action picture, hugely indebted to Cornel Wilde’s The Naked Prey, the Rambo and Mad Max trilogy, Martin Campbell’s underappreciated No Escape, and Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans, from which Gibson borrows not just situations and setpieces, but certain iconic shots. (Gibson’s cinematographer is the great Dean Semler, who shot The Road Warrior, Dances with Wolves and The Alamo; his trademark combination of flamboyant high-speed crane moves and hair-trigger rack focuses gives the action an omniscient wondrousness -- we’re everywhere at once.)

This is the kind of movie where the hero sustains an arrow wound to his torso that should lay him up for weeks, yet keeps racing homeward at Jesse Owens velocity, leaping off thousand-foot-high waterfalls (a Mohicans setpiece so often pilfered that it should be retired for a while), climbing tall trees to elude his foes, outrunning a hungry jaguar and improvising a blowgun from a hollow reed, a handful of thorns and a poison tree frog. You don’t question it because by the time Apocalypto shifts into run-through-the-jungle mode, Gibson has already established (via a curse laid on the bad guys by a plague-stricken orphan girl) that Jaguar Paw is a prophesied savoir who’s preordained to escape his tormentors and inflict payback (a warrior favored by his god), and because tall-tale absurdity is catnip to the imagination no matter what century you’re living in. One could argue, persuasively, that Apocalypto is not more subject to plausibility gripes than the mayhem described in The Iliad: “"He brought him down with a glinting jagged rock/Massive, top of the heap behind the rampart's edge/No easy lift for a fighter even in prime strength/Working with both hands, weak as men are now/Giant Ajax hoisted it high and hurled it down/crushed the rim of the fighter's four-horned helmet/and cracked his skull to splinters, bloody pulp.”

But the plausibility of action and the depiction of its kinetic particulars are different things; when we consider them, we circle back to the matter of “tells” – and in the second half of Apocalypto, the tells are not flattering to Gibson. The violence in the second half is far less serious and disturbing than Homer’s violence – and for that matter, Peckinpah’s violence in The Wild Bunch, Scorsese’s in Taxi Driver and Goodfellas and (since Gibson dares direct comparison) Mann’s violence in the more elegant, politically and morally subtle Mohicans. The first hour is hyper-real while maintaining a grip on reality (it’s the emotions that are strategically exaggerated, not the brutality itself); the second is more abstracted and shallow -- a series of Olympic-velocity foot chases and t-shirt-ready iconic poses (including an image of Jaguar Paw rising from a quicksand pit that’s Apocalypse Now by way of Predator).

It’s impossible to say whether Gibson is straining after the mythic and settling for the cartoonish or if his filmmaking sensibility is so conditioned by his long stint as an R-rated action superstar that he just can’t help reverting. In any event, the second half seems intended less to confirm eternal facts about the human species than to make Friday night crowds recoil and then laugh at the director’s class clown audacity. (Maybe this is another eternal fact: people don't mind being challenged if you pander, too.) An animal attacking a man’s face gets multiple, super-tight closeups, the better to show you the skin and muscle coming off; near the end of the movie, a warrior falls to his knees after a coup-de-grace and stares blankly into space while a thin jet of blood sprays from his opened skull, Holy Grail-style. It’s kewl, no doubt. But in artistic seriousness, it’s not far removed from the scene in Commando where Arnold exits the toolshed and shears off the top of an enemy’s head by backhanding a circular saw blade, Frisbee-style.

None of this should suggest that the second half of Apocalypto is unworthy of attention. On the contrary, it’s one of the most relentless and thrilling pulp action movies ever. I wrote in a March 10, 2004 NYPress column about The Passion of the Christ that “Gibson is the most visually gifted movie star to pick up a camera since Charles Laughton made The Night of the Hunter back in 1955"; from its frantic lateral tracking shots (seen through a high-def video image, the reflected sunlight on wet leaves blurs into quivering tracer streaks) to its god’s-eye view of Seven and her son in the pit, to the cutaway to the wind-buffeted trees when Jaguar Paw’s father dies (like he’s watching his own soul escape), Apocalypto makes me glad I went out on that limb. That horrific yet empathetic first half is so Passion of the Christ-like –richly imagined but emotionally direct, and unusually attuned to suffering – that it resonates throughout the he-man action of the second half, and gives it a serious aura that it only partly deserves. It all comes back to emotional heft. Gibson establishes this story’s stakes at the outset, and they’re resolutely human-scaled. This is Mayan history told not by a professor, but by a pop mythmaker who’s grown richer than most studio bosses, yet retains a working Joe's sensibility – a fondness for the lowball gag, the sentimental moment, the flamboyant exaggeration. In retrospect, the opening portentous quote from Will Durant (“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within”) feels like a bait-and-switch. Gibson runs away from specific political analogy, from politics generally, while holding onto a muscular spiritualism. Apocalypto is historically and politically resonant in the way that Stagecoach is, which is to say, not very. It's deliberately mythopoetic and ahistorical; it's Fanfare for the Common Warrior, driving home the fact that when great upheavals occur, non-elite citizens are less interested in arguing the fine points of philosophy, spirituality or patriotism than in getting themselves and their loved ones the hell out of Dodge. Like Odysseus, Jaguar Paw labors under expectations of leadership, but ultimately his frenzied quest is about his own survival and his family’s (his progeny’s). He just wants to reunite with his wife and son and watch his new child being born. But it's not easy, because from ground level, history is just one damned thing after another -- a point that's etched in bronze with the film's final image, arguably the greatest action movie punchline since Chuck Heston found lady liberty face-down in the sand.

So any sense of letdown is relative: Apocalypto goes from being transcendently great to being merely beautiful and thrilling – from being unlike anything you seen to being a version of something you’ve seen many times, with some idiosyncratic, sometimes stunningly unique touches. That qualifier “merely” judges the movie only in relation to itself; Apocalypto’s feverish intensity is music for the eyes.

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Links for the Day (December 11th, 2006)

1. "Prince picked to perform at halftime of Super Bowl": Can you my darling, can you picture this?

["For the third year in a row, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame act will headline the Super Bowl halftime entertainment. Prince, winner of six Grammy Awards and nominated for five more this year, will perform at the game in Miami on Feb. 4. The Super Bowl is annually television's highest rated show in the U.S. An estimated 141 million Americans watched last season's game between Pittsburgh and Seattle. The Rolling Stones headlined the halftime show for that Super Bowl, and the year before it was Paul McCartney."]

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2. "Another flag planted for Iwo Jima": Edward Copeland reports on several critic groups' awards.

["When was the last time that NBR and the Los Angeles Film Critics agreed on best picture, best actor and best actress? Let's see what New York says tomorrow. Boston and NY Online critics concur on Whitaker and Mirren -- is a clean sweep in the offing?"]

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3. "The Other Great Trilogy": Travis Mackenzie Hoover writes on the Porky's films for Film Freak Central.

["Of course, nobody was seeing these movies for their social realism. I can remember having a lab partner in high school who would ooze rotten enthusiasm for the T&A comedies of our youth while seeming oblivious to their finer points (and creeping me out in the process). Praising the politics of a Porky's entry may be a cul-de-sac along the lines of praising Russ Meyer for middle-class black roles that are obviously secondary to his fetish for enormous breasts--and try as I might, I just can't transform the horndog antics of Clark's films (at least the first one) into anything faintly resembling a feminist critique. Indeed, the verisimilitude of these pictures unfortunately extends to a male imperative that most would sooner forget. It's impossible for me to write off the series completely, though, as their tortuous ethics are a rather interesting case history in the annals of pop."]

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4. "Sneak Preview: Letters from Iwo Jima": Reverse Shot's robbiefreeling on Clint Eastwood's latest.

["It's a precarious picture...an American director, fascinated by the notion of Japanese "honor" and patriotism, delves into history, trying to excavate a buried world for the edification of himself and his viewers...a lesser filmmaker, one who doesn't understand the importance of silence, the weight of violence, and the tenderness bred in isolation, would have exoticized these characters (played outstandingly by all, especially, Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, and Tsuyoshi Ihara). Miraculously, Eastwood falls into none of the traps. Those moments that seem indelibly "Japanese" (most involving the honor of suicide in wartime) register with tremendous emotional weight...to such an extent that the plight of the American soldiers in Flags seem as trivialities in comparison. Eastwood seems to have put his heart and soul into the crafting of this film, and his passion, empathy, and respect for his subject matter registers in nearly every frame. It's the American film of the year."]

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5. "Nicolas Cage Takes Time Out From Acting": Insert snarky comment here.

["Hollywood actor, Nicolas Cage intends to take a break from acting and work on other activities and most important to contribute at the independent film-making development. "I'm thinking about taking more time in between movies," Cage said. The 42-year-old actor believes he has done enough movies given his age and plans to help develop independent cinema and maybe even use his new home in the Bahamas to do so."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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The Wire Mondays: Season 4, Ep. 13, “Final Grades”

By Barry Maupin

"I feel old. I been out there since I was 13. I ain't never fucked up a count, never stole off a package, never did some shit that I wasn't told to do. I been straight up. But what come back?"
—Bodie Broadus—
Bodie (JD Williams) fills the silence as he sits with Officer Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) in a plant sanctuary so peaceful he wonders if they're still in Baltimore. His lament sounds like that of a third-generation factory worker abandoned by the town's only industry, or any other middle class foot soldier forced to confront the American Dream. Bodie agrees to flip on his boss, drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector), to protest the business policy that it's better to kill a corner grunt than chance a disruption in the trade. When Marlo's minions surround Bodie's post that night, he grabs a gun and starts blasting, shouting, "I'm right here!" as his crew scatters. Bodie knows it's the end, but he’s going to meet it standing on the corner he built.

McNulty stops by the staging area for the just-discovered corpses of Marlo's victims and flashes his old self in a rash of procedural nitpicking. "You know, if I was police," his ex-partner from homicide, Det. Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce), teases, "I don't think I could lean back on it. You?" Det. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) piles on: "Not if I was real police." McNulty is content to work the beat, but when he arrives for his shift the next day and hears of Bodie's death, he rushes to the scene, where he finds Poot (Tray Chaney) back at work less than 24 hours after witnessing the gruesome murder of his best friend. He puts Poot against the wall and pretends to frisk him while he discreetly asks who dropped Bodie. "Y'all did," Poot reckons. "They took him out 'cause he was talkin' to y'all…so cuff me or kick my ass off this corner before you do me the same." McNulty shuffles off in silence, stricken by the notion that he flipped Bodie in part to stroke his own ego.

The Wire's landscape is thick with men almost desperate to reach back and snatch some kid from the vortex, attempting personally what they can't achieve professionally. They mostly fail, but like McNulty—whose misfire with Bodie catalyzes his return to Major Crimes and the pursuit of Marlo—Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom) at least wrings promise from loss. Bunny, a former cop turned "sort of" teacher, takes his compulsive truth telling to Wee-Bey (Hassan Johnson), the imprisoned father of Namond (Julito McCullum), one of the corner kids he's accused of leaving behind with a trial academic program gone bust. The men recognize each other immediately—as opponents at work but kin in spirit—and Bunny never pretends for a moment that they're not equals, peppering his pitch with "you and me" and "our kind." Fatalism guides Wee-Bey's reaction to the suggestion that Namond is headed his direction or worse. "Maybe, maybe not," he shrugs. "That's the game." Bunny wants to bring Namond into his home so presses on. "He ain't made for them corners, man. I mean, not like we were…I gotta believe that you see it." As Bunny speaks, Wee-Bey lets go of his tight posture, his body heaving off the only idea of his son he's ever had.

Cutty (Chad L. Coleman), a former jail mate of Wee-Bey's, sets up their meeting from his hospital bed, where he's recovering after getting shot in the leg trying in his own way to pull Michael (Tristan Wilds) off the corner. His nurse (Marvina Vinique) reads his history of violent admissions and presumes the worst. "All you gangsters," she sounds off without bothering to look his way. "Wash up in our ER like it's your due. You can stand out there slingin' drugs till you get shot, or cut, have us put you back together free of charge, so you can do it again." She rethinks her stance after Bunny tells her who Cutty is now, but he'll contend with those expectations forever.

Michael bolts Cutty's stable to take up arms with Chris (Gbenga Akinnagbe), Marlo's chief enforcer. Chris spares Michael the Bodie assignment and the indignity of making his first kill a former boss. With Bodie gone by another's hand, Marlo and his muscle pay an early morning call on Michael at the apartment they've furnished him, with the charge to form a team to take over Bodie's shop. "Then we got this other thing," Marlo hints, pausing. Michael meets his stare with wide-eyed composure.

The following night, Michael skulks toward a corner, head down and hood up. He walks up to a dealer, waits for his attention and shoots him in the face. Michael climbs into the back of Chris's SUV and pulls off his hood. "You can look him in the eye now," Chris counsels through the rearview mirror as he drives. "No matter who he is or what he done, you look him right in the eye." The advice could double as a means of owning what they’ve done as well. Michael closes his eyes and dreams of helping his little brother, Bug (Keenon Brice), with his homework until Chris jars him from the reverie to retrieve the murder weapon. It's official—one way or the other—once Michael makes his first appearance on Lester's Big Board, listed as "Unknown" under a snapshot of him with his new family.

Dukie (Jermaine Crawford) rides Michael's coattails through the tough times. On his way to his makeshift digs at Michael's, he stops off at the burnt out shell of Randy's house, the pile of debris reminiscent of his own family's recent eviction scene. At Michael's, he hesitates outside then climbs the stairs, where he comes upon Michael with a girl before slumping off to Bug's room and the bottom bunk. He slows on the approach to Douglas High for his first day after a late-semester social promotion, already inclined to turn back when mocking laughter finds him without the mantle of his Fayette Street foursome and sends him weaving through incoming traffic. Later in the week, he waits in front of Tilghman Middle for Prez (Jim True-Frost), his math teacher and all-around benefactor. Prez asks if he's on his way to Douglas, but knows he isn't when Dukie boots the excuse for his missing book bag. Dukie gives Prez a fancy pen set ("For all you did"); the gift comes off like a consolation prize and serves as the goodbye he doesn't know how to say. Next time Prez sees Dukie, he's on the corner, working for Michael.

Randy (Maestro Harrell) goes back on the list after arsonists put his foster mom in the burn unit, and Sgt. Carver (Seth Gilliam)—who kick-starts a chain of sloppy police work that leads to the boy's outing as a snitch—scrambles to salvage the protection Randy's testimony deserved from the outset. He pleads to keep Randy out of a group home, but his guilt is of no concern to social services; Carver's ultimate offer to take him in doesn't tally with the system's screening process. Randy prepares for whatever comes, tucking his candy savings into the binding of a book.

Carver escorts Randy to the assigned group home; on their way in, Randy confers stone-faced absolution: "You tried. You don’t need to feel bad." The gesture resembles Dukie's—a pat on the head for the effort, however inconsequential. Carver follows him in, but when he sees the arrangement, he rushes out, seals himself off in his car, and rains blows on the wheel and dash. Back on the street, Carver chases off a group of pre-teen vandals, pausing to read an oath of eternal unity scrawled on the wall by four boys—Namond, Michael, Dukie, and Randy—losing their grip on that friendship by the day.

Bubbles (Andre Royo), like Cutty, seeks redemption for a misspent life in passing down his own skills. When Sherrod, his wisdom's young recipient, dies after sneaking a sniff of tainted heroin meant for Bubs' tormentor, Bubs turns himself in as a murderer. Partway through his confession, he sprays the detectives with vomit—a sick mix of withdrawal and self-loathing—and sends them out to freshen up. They return to find him hanging by his belt from the ceiling. They cut him down in time, and when the paramedics clear out after confirming Bubs' vitality, Sgt. Jay Landsman (Delaney Williams) drops his derisive bearing and asks, "What is in your head, fella?" Bubs tries to articulate what compelled him to take in the homeless boy, but trails off when he can't make sense of it. "Like I ain't even who I am, right?" Bubs chokes at the audacity of a lifelong junkie who hopes to be something more. Landsman says nothing—his bearing now wholly stripped of its usual smart-assed cynicism—and wanders into the office. "Let's throw this one back," he tells the primary, Det. Norris (Ed Norris). "Sad ass motherfucker's carrying more weight than we'll ever put on him."

Omar (Michael K. Williams) wonders how to shed the weight after robbing a wholesale drug shipment on its way to Proposition Joe (Robert F. Chew). "I'll spend the rest of my life trying to put that out on the street," Omar admits to his mentor, the blind bartender Butch (S. Robert Morgan). "I ain't no drug dealer, Butch, you feel me?" Butch jokes that Omar should offer to sell it back to Joe for 20 cents on the dollar and they share a sweet laugh at the crazy notion. Omar stops laughing and licks his lips. "This some shameless shit," Joe's nephew, Cheese (Method Man), denounces when Omar stops by Joe's electronics shop and proposes the buyback for real. "Ain't no shame in my game, dog," Omar states calmly. "I'm here about the business. Ain't that right, Joe?" Omar pulls out a claim check for the broken clock he left before the robbery. Joe reaches under his desk and hands over the clock, repaired.

Joe doesn't share the same trust with his co-op associates, who decide in a pre-meeting that Joe should eat the Omar loss alone. "When that good raw shit come straight off the boat, it's gonna be mine only, seeing as how y'all can't find the heart to stand with me now," Joe announces, hurt that the co-op's core principle ("share and share alike") can't withstand the trauma. "You wanna quorum up again, think it over a little?" A bunch of gangsters stare at their shoes and calculate the stand's long-range costs. Marlo buttonholes Joe after the gathering, expecting a more comprehensive crosscheck. Joe lets him sit with Vondas (Paul Ben-Victor), the boat connect. "I'm only here right now for Joe, who I trust, who I respect, who I work with for many years," Vondas clarifies. "You, I do not know. And I don't need to know." Joe tweaks Marlo for his suspicion, relaying Omar's offer as 30 on the dollar.

Mayor Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) envisions the electoral stigma of a solution to the school budget crisis with his top aides. "So, uh, I take the governor's money, and then two years from now, when I shake the hand of any voter in the D.C. suburbs, they say, 'Oh, right, you're the guy needed my tax dollars to bail out your school system.'" At home with his wife, he mounts a hollow-eyed defense of his inclination. "I'll help the schools, help the city a lot more if I'm, uh, governor two years from now. I'm thinking, that way, it wouldn't just be about me if I don't take the money." Carcetti returns from Annapolis after leaving the money on the table and sits at his desk amidst the trappings of the office, looking tiny in his chair.

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Links for the Day (December 10th, 2006)

1. "For Your Consideration: Hijacking the Oscar Season": Over at Slant, Ed Gonzalez blogs about the Academy Awards' many fallacies and falsities.

["Oscar history tells us that an actress like Sandra Huller, who gives the best female performance of the year in the film Requiem, cannot score an Oscar nomination against heavyweights like Dench and Helen Mirren whose prospects are bankrolled by big studios. This is the sad reality of the Oscars, which doesn't reward the biggest talent so much as the biggest campaign—a reality that has become especially apparent ever since the Weinstein brothers stopped making films that mattered and started making films only to win awards. (This is not unlike our political system, which does not have room for a poor third-party candidate.) But Oscar pundits could change things around by turning the system against itself, only pushing films that have opened, bringing great performances to the attention of the public even if they don't stand a realistic chance of getting an Oscar nomination, thus restoring a sense of legitimacy to our ever-crumbling popular film culture."]

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2. "Iraq Study Group Report is No. 2 in sales": From the Seattle Times.

["It isn't just politicians who want to read "The Iraq Study Group Report." After the report's release in book form Wednesday, it had soared up the charts on Amazon.com and was at No. 2 on Thursday, after being at No. 4,101 Tuesday. Anne Messitte of Vintage Books said the study was already in a second printing, although she declined to give any exact numbers. "We are continuing to receive orders all the time and will work to keep up with demand," said Messitte, executive vice president and publisher of Vintage, a paperback imprint of Random House."]

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3. Rivette Out 1 Vol. 1 & Vol. 2: James Crawford and Michael Joshua Rowin discuss Jacques Rivette's 13-hour serial for Reverse Shot.

["Having just recently read James Monaco’s take on Out 1 in his now ancient 1976 edition of The New Wave, I was struck by how much time he accorded to discussing the actual plot, if one can call it that, of Rivette’s epic, even if he explains, going along with Rivette’s suggestion, that its mysteries are ultimately unimportant. I was struck by this because the same day I read Monaco’s book I also saw Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord (1981), during which I finally worked up the courage to say the hell with according any sort of seriousness to narrative mechanics in Rivette. It’s clear by now at this stage of my still nascent climb up the Rivette Matterhorn that trying to unknot the tangled conspiracies and narrative puzzles of his work is like trying to figure out or even care about what’s really going on in Casino Royale—as in the new Bond, the why, not the how, is what truly counts. Not that the details of Out 1 don’t matter, but in actually watching it one must catch the cogent metaphors and meaningful syntheses from thirteen hours of movie and work up to the guiding principles Rivette used to make sense and plot out of the final product. Otherwise, and I could see this happening to some cinephiliac Quixote one day, you’ll get as lost and maddened as Out 1’s characters."]

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4. "Record bought at flea market fetches $155,401": From CNN's Entertainment Report.

["Forty years after it was made, The Velvet Underground's first recording has become a financial hit -- in cyberspace. Bought for 75 cents four years ago at a Manhattan flea market, the rare recording of music that ended up on the influential New York band's first album, "The Velvet Underground & Nico," sold on eBay for a closing bid of $155,401. The buyer is a mystery, only identified by the eBay screen name: "mechadaddy." But a greater mystery endures: How did the 12-inch, acetate LP end up buried in a box of records at a flea market?"]

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5. "Alternate Versions for Miami Vice": Further to the comments discussion on a previous "Links for the Day", here's the imdb page that lists most of the changes made for Michael Mann's "Director's Edition" DVD.

["The unrated director's cut adds 7 minutes of unseen footage:"]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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BSG Saturdays: Season 3, Ep. 10, "The Passage"

By Todd VanDerWerff

“The Passage,” the penultimate episode of Battlestar Galactica's 2006 run, was both a throwback to the series’ more action-packed first season and an attempt at rehabilitating a character who was mostly invented to be a thorn in the side of the regulars. It succeeded at the former and almost succeeded at the latter, though it took a strong final monologue from Edward James Olmos's Admiral Adama to rescue that plot point. All in all, a solid stand-alone, inching the show's mythology forward a bit while returning to the feeling of imminent doom that was Season One's stock-in-trade.

The plot finds the fleet running perilously low on food. To get to the algae neeeded to compress into precious protein bars, the ships must pass through a highly irradiated star cluster. The military pilots, already weak from hunger, are told to pump themselves up on stimulants and chaperone the civilian fleet through five trips to and from the planet on the other edge of the star cluster. (They are able to jump in to the danger area, then jump out later, but they can’t go on their own and leave the civilians unprotected). The episode revolved around this exhausting mission, and the cast's ragged performances were a nice reminder of just how raw things can get for the denizens of the fleet (since Season One, there have only been a few episodes where the characters struggled to acquire the materials for fuel and life-sustaining essentials, probably because there were only so many ways to retell that story without seeming repetitious).

The end of all things has always hovered over Galactica; indeed, the series is often at its best when we’re reminded of just how necessary every life is to the continuation of the human race. (I often miss President Laura Roslin’s whiteboard that tracked the population of the fleet, even as it always seemed to trend downward.) As the show has gone on, though, the nuclear apocalypse that kicked it off has necessarily receded further into the background. Characters started having children (bumping that whiteboard count up ever-so-slightly), the portrayal of the Cylon civilization deepened, and the writers grew more interested in pursuing the series’ underlying mythology. It was nice, then, to see an episode that focused on one of those essential survival questions again (though it seems unlikely that Adama or Roslin would let the food situation get that dire before seeking a new algae source), especially as it called back some of the most vivid Season One elements -- the exhausted pilots holding themselves together with drugs and minimal sleep, the interest in the role rank plays within the pilots' dynamics, and the reapppearance of the wall of photos honoring those who died in the Cylons' opening attack.

If "The Passage" seemed to view now-familiar elements with fresh eyes, that might be due to the fact that it was written by a non-staffer -- longtime TV writer Jane Espenson, whose career spans everything from Dinosaurs to Jake in Progress (though she is best known for her five season stint on Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Like many freelance episodes, it felt like an attempt by someone not in the inner circle of writers to capture what they liked about the show while steering clear of outright fan fiction. For the most part, Espenson and director Michael Nankin succeeded.

Working against all this was the fact that "The Passage" was, of all things, Kat-centric. Luciana Carro was strong in the role, but Kat has always been underwritten, conceived as a younger, better foil for Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck in the Season Two episode “Scar.” (Kat appeared several times prior to that, but her storyline in “Scar” -- also directed by Nankin -- is easily the most remarkable thing about the character so far.) Kat was brash, cocky and gratutiously challenging to Starbuck, her superior; the audience knew nothing about her and plenty about Starbuck, so it was only natural that we would side with Starbuck in the end. Kat made more appearances after that, but, for the most part, she was a one-episode wonder (if an irritating one).

"The Passage" unexpectedly turned into a Kat story roughly halfway through its first act. (Though, perhaps, we should have seen it coming; Espenson's blog urges fledgling TV spec-writers to pin the plots of spec scripts to under-utilized recurring characters.) Over the course of the episode, we learned that Kat used to be a drug runner; overhauling a minor character's background isn't a big deal (it's riskier when it’s done to a major character, as it was with Apollo in "Black Market"), but giving Kat a dark past is just this side of being a completely unbearable groaner. Much of "The Passage" felt like those episodes of Lost where we learn plenty about the past life of a character we hadn't spent much quality time with before, only see them killed by the episode’s end. Sure enough, Kat died, purposefully taking on more radiation than she could handle in an attempt to keep pushing ahead, burn away her past as another woman and save a civilian ship. She lied about her radiation level by swapping out the badge showing she had absorbed too much with another badge that indicated she hadn't, thus ending a career that started in one lie with another. (As Starbuck said, “You lied your way into the company of good people.”)

The Kat storyline felt somewhat forced, but it was redeemed by two final scenes -- Adama sitting at Kat’s bedside and talking about how he always wanted a daughter (advancing the idea that he has hyper-personalized those who serve beneath him, despite attempts to distance himself in the last few episodes) and Starbuck pinning Kat’s photo to the wall of the dead and missing. It felt wrong to have Starbuck come around completely on Kat, but Sackhoff played the scene well. "The Passage" suggested that a whole life, even one rife with wrongdoing, can be redeemed by an in-the-moment good deed. While this is sketchy from an ethical point of view (if a mass murderer saves a life, does that absolve him of former crimes?), it’s an interestingly democratic idea that advances Galactica’s expanded focus this season; it implies that any character can be the hero, and every character’s story is worth telling.

The Cylons returned this week after being mostly AWOL from the past two installments. The scenes on board the basestar continue to be technically intriguing; the dissolves and that haunting piano score redeem some clunky dialogue. And the show’s mythology took another step forward with a well-acted scene in which Baltar (James Callis) and D’Anna (Lucy Lawless) visited the hybrid who powers the Basestar (Tiffany Lyndall-Knight). D’Anna’s chasing of the identity of the final five Cylon models (by endlessly killing herself) is a nifty metaphor for addiction (and not one you’ve seen a million times already), and her drawings of what she remembers from the land between life and death are devolving into obscure darkness, like schizophrenic artist Louis Wain’s famous cats.

Finally, a word on the special effects. The visual effects team on Galactica, thrice nominated for Emmys now, never calls attention to itself, but the scenes set inside the star cluster must have been tough to compose on a television timeframe, and they all looked completely convincing within the show’s universe. The team has yet to win an Emmy (losing last year to, of all things, Rome), which executive producer David Eick attributes to the effects not being horribly obtrusive. Here’s hoping that this episode, filled as it was with stunning vistas and starships jetting through them, will land them that elusive prize.
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.

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Links for the Day (December 9th, 2006)

1. "Out 1 in a Million": Aaron Hillis writes on Jacques Rivette's magnum opus for The Reeler.

["It's difficult enough convincing Manhattanites to venture to an outer borough, let alone to see the narrative-defying and often very lengthy films of one of the French New Wave's most underappreciated auteurs. But those art-film lovers who have been making the Astoria, Queens, commute since Nov. 10 have been plenty rewarded, as the Museum of the Moving Image's The Complete Jacques Rivette retrospective continues to tender the ultra-rarest of treasures (L'Amour Fou, The Nun, Céline and Julie Go Boating and 19 others) from Rivette's vital oeuvre through Dec. 31. This weekend's schedule in particular marks the mother of all mythic movies: Rivette's 1971 magnum-with-a-capital-M opus, Out 1 -- a 743-minute (yes, that's 12-and-a-half hours) behemoth that has never been seen in its entirety in the United States."]

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2. "Black Friday: Ponsoldt's Debut Opens at Last": Also from The Reeler: Off the Black's long, hard road to release. Be sure and read Steven Boone's review of the film here.

["I caught up with filmmaker James Ponsoldt last weekend in New York, mere days before before his feature debut Off the Black was scheduled to hit theaters. (It opens today at the Regal Union Square and AMC Empire.) I had stayed in touch with the Columbia Film School grad since just before Sundance, where Black premiered to generally favorable reviews and a particularly warm reception for Nick Nolte. The actor's blown-out performance as over-the-hill high school baseball umpire Ray Cook is easily one of his best, in part because it's exactly the right role at exactly the right time, not to mention the closely considered dynamics it evokes among his co-stars Trevor Morgan, Sally Kirkland and Timothy Hutton."]

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3. "An Interview with David Lynch": Michael Joshua Rowin interviews the director for Reverse Shot.

[" It’s the ideas that tell you everything. In the beginning the ideas were one theme, then two themes, then three themes. Then I’m thinking of those themes and bringing in more ideas that started uniting those themes, those first themes and holding them together in a story. Once the story started unfolding, then much, much script work was done and we started shooting in a more traditional manner. So it’s the ideas that are talking and the ideas that you try to stay completely true to."]

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4. "'Dear Santa' letters flood North Pole, Alaska": Bet they set The Santa Clause 4 here.

["It's a name that needs no address. Everyone knows Santa Claus lives at the North Pole. So letters sent to the roly-poly icon find their way to the small town of North Pole deep in Alaska's interior, including those simply addressed to Santa. Last year, 120,000 letters arrived from 26 countries, not counting the thousands with no return address. Those that do have return addresses usually get a reply and a North Pole postmark in a holiday effort that has delighted children all over the world for decades."]

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5. "Singer Carey battles porn star Carey over name": She had a hamster named Mary and grew up on Carey Court.

["Grammy-winning pop singer Mariah Carey is trying to block porn star-turned politician Mary Carey from trademarking her similar-sounding stage name, saying that fans could get the two performers confused. But the adult film actress, whose real name is Mary Cook, said Friday that she would not be intimidated by the international superstar and will press forward with her trademark application. "I'm ready to battle Mariah over this because I've been Mary Carey for a long time," Mary Carey told Reuters. "It's kind of funny because I'm a porn star and I've been being myself for a long time. I think she's being silly." The star of films such as "Double Air Bags 11" and "Boobsville Sorority Girls," she started using the stage name Mary Carey in 2002 and ran for California governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger. She filed the trademark papers earlier this year."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Doctor Who, Season Two, Ep. 10: "Love & Monsters"

By Ross RuedigerDear Russell T. Davies,

What the hell do you think you're doing to Doctor Who?

With “Love & Monsters” you've written a story where the Doctor and Rose are on-screen for all of ten minutes. Our primary character is a disconnected, internet-surfing social misfit and the people around him appear to have even less of a grasp on reality. The soundtrack overdoses on the nerdiest, niche pop band of all time. The villain is a third-rate huckster framed by a cheap suit and a wispy beard. Oh, and perhaps most mind-boggling, you give Camille Coduri's Jackie Tyler ample amounts of screen time!? Golly gee whiz Davies, you even have the balls to begin with a Scooby-Doo chase scene and end with a Stephen King quote and a thinly veiled blowjob gag.

Russell, Russell, Russell...I love you for "Love & Monsters." For every poignant, wisecracking & emotion-drenched minute of it.

Mister Blue Sky, please tell us why
You had to hide away for so long
Where did we go wrong?

I've read the criticisms, sure, and while I disagree with them, I can see where they're coming from. Some people just don't like their Doctor Who served this rare. With “Love & Monsters” you've brought the series kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Should every episode be like this? Of course not, and you know that. But you also know there's no reason the series can't do something this quirky and beautiful when an inspired mind conjures up such a scenario.

Some have claimed that through “Love & Monsters” you are taking a swipe at fandom. I don't see it that way. Isn't it your celebration of and tribute to genre fans of all types? Marc Warren’s Elton Pope is a bruised introvert. Life has led him to sequester himself from other people. Even though he’d like for us to believe otherwise, Elton’s clearly a computer geek obsessed with the Doctor--I can relate to that. The way you write Elton, it's obvious you don't pity him, but care for him. An assessment of Elton as pathetic would say more about the viewer than the character. When we watch Doctor Who, it's natural to want to be the Doctor or Rose; to believe that the power of good will win out. But the reality is that most of us are far more Elton than we are the Doctor. We live the so-called lives of quiet desperation and the search for good is a frustrating chore. We look for answers and don’t usually find them, and on the rare occasions we do, it's not generally what we wanted to hear.

Hey there Mister Blue
We're so pleased to be with you
Look around see what you do
Ev'rybody smiles at you

There are very real truths in your depiction of the value of meeting people through the Internet. While a certain topic may be the common ground, people will eventually trade deeper and more important thoughts and ideas. They will grow and learn and experience through trust. Such relationships may remain confined to cyberspace, but they may also eventually come together in the "real" world. While the Internet has frequently been depicted as a breeding ground for stalkers, child molesters, identity thieves and other ne’er-do-wells, you show a larger reality: It's also a place where the lonely can make vital life connections.

And Peter Kay's Victor Kennedy? He represents the worst type of troll. The guy who bitches and attempts to moderate those veering away from a group's charter issue(s). He shouts "Off Topic!" at the expression of individuality, controlling cyber forums by preying on feelings of insecurity. He's the sort of dude who takes all the fun out of it by trying to absorb everyone into his way of doing things. Unfortunately, these types frequently