The House Next Door

By Jeremiah Kipp

Trouble Every Day aches with spiritual dread. Using the iconography of vampire films to illustrate religious fervor, co-writer/director Claire Denis also shows reverence to the medium of film, particularly to the purity of silent movies. There's almost no dialogue, and what little there is feels like it takes place within the half-heard context of a dream. An early scene on an airplane features Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) en route to Paris for his honeymoon, his comfort and security literally in midair. He politely excuses himself to the bathroom, stares blankly into the void, and remembers or envisions a murderess, or maybe a dying girl, covered in blood. There's no sense of shock to the image, but there's an unsettling fascination with the textures of wet skin and dried blood. The context isn't so much violence as repressed indulgence. Josh Hartnett may have gone 40 Days and 40 Nights without twenty-something sex or self-gratification, but Gallo's angst-ridden version of Lent is the perilous and hellish adult version.

Denis' bold poetic stance amid the arid sexual frustrations of Beau Travail and the urban alienation of I Can't Sleep gain further resonance within the loaded, oft-maligned context of the horror film. She uses and comments on the genre with playful decadence, having a blissfully ignorant American couple enacting silly vampire role-playing as they chase each other and embrace among the gargoyle statues of a cathedral tower. That's the Scream response to horror that was rampant throughout the 1990s—a tacky postmodern riff—but Denis harkens back to classic Universal horror titles, and further still to Vampyr and Nosferatu. One has to wonder, though, if her romancing newlyweds are preserving or bastardizing screen history. Maybe both.

The grisly denouement, graphic in its sexual bloodletting, takes a deeper plunge. A leather-clad male intruder achieves release by committing the taboo act of cannibalism, chewing away at human flesh. Though he tries to find a cure for nearly the entire film, the young protagonist of Trouble Every Day discovers his only release will come not through repentance but through sick hedonism. Catholic guilt is cast away, and male sexual hysteria gets unleashed as both rape fantasy and savage carnality. Cannibal lust is equated with giving in to primal impulses, a necessary act for our hungry vampire-marauder to undergo before he can return to his rational life of the marriage, the home, the successful job, and the time-honored American dream that seems to be sweeping over Denis' beloved Parisian culture.

Sporting a neatly trimmed moustache and combed-back hair, Gallo redirects his bad boy persona, externalized so forcefully as Billy Brown in Buffalo 66 and as Bud Clay in The Brown Bunny. Denis domesticates this wild beast of an actor and keeps him docile; Gallo’s thinly veiled maverick energy remains quietly predatory as he and his wife (played by the meek and pretty Tricia Vessey) follow a cute, sallow maid (Florence Loiret-Caille) down a labyrinthine hotel corridor. Gallo's hollow features and striking eyes, so prominent in the actor's fashion advertisements and performance art, are properly entombed within Denis' minimalist framework. She lingers on that face as Shane sits on the edge of a bed or grimly stares himself down in that airplane mirror. Even sitting still, he projects a dangerous allure under his scrubbed surface.

Ostensibly a medical researcher for a leading pharmaceutical company, Shane's honeymoon vacation is an elaborate ruse for him to track down the scientist responsible for his deviant fantasies. The subject of a covert test lab experiment gone wrong, an attempt to increase his sexual drive has transformed Shane into a ghoul hungry for devouring human flesh during intercourse. Needless to say, he's terrified of consummating his marriage. Standing over his nubile wife while she soaks in a bathtub, he whispers, "Are you afraid?" It's a vulnerable moment for him—he's fixated on and frightened by the mysteries of her naked flesh. When he violently masturbates later, his wife pounding on the door behind him, it's pure emasculated terror.

No answers are found with Shane's former colleague Léo Semeneau (Alex Descas), the man who created the drug that aroused his gory, fetishistic dreams. In fact, Léo's own wife Coré (Béatrice Dalle, whose skeleton face and protruding teeth are used to chilling effect) is so far gone she's kept under lock and key in their rickety old house. She's first seen roving among modern society, luring truck drivers to their bloody deaths. If Gallo is Trouble Every Day's de-facto Dracula, the stoic and remote Descas is an impassive Dr. Frankenstein whose experiments have run amok. Like Mary Shelley's fictional creator, Léo is a self-made God without answers. That's not much of a stretch for a deeply religious film that questions religiosity, or rejects it. Shane and Coré, left alone, can only find respite by delving into the forbidden.

Smearing the blood of interlopers on her walls, Coré paces back and forth in front of her fingerpainted designs of tombstones and crosses. When Shane finally arrives at the secret old house at the end of his search, as he must, the first thing Coré does is ritualistically light a match and, in what a lesser film might use as its climactic battle, ignite a fire. Instead of ending with the destruction of the haunted laboratory, Denis builds towards a far more audacious and supremely grotesque finale set in the shadows of a hotel basement. It is grimly foreshadowed by an earlier scene where a foreign doctor attempts to convince Dr. Semeneau that he shouldn't involve himself in the unknown. "It's not kosher," he warns. Munching on the most private feminine spaces, the film makes good on its promise to have Shane eat his way through those fears.

Trouble Every Day is cinematically astonishing in ways that shame most films. It's a reminder of why we call them motion pictures: stories told through vivid, expressionistic images. By transposing her aesthetic to the horror genre, Denis has a built-in framework that may appeal to those who turned a blind eye to the poetic, experimental flourishes of Beau Travail. One would hope, anyway. But at the time of the film's American release, audiences were more interested in flocking to the prolonged music video Queen of the Damned.

Admittedly, it's an art film that will baffle a certain percentage of the horror crowd, and a horror film that will turn off the art crowd. Could be audiences at the film's Cannes premiere, repulsed by what they saw before them, thought it was too much to take in all at once. Yet the idea of what's represented is more disturbing than anything Denis actually shows. She and her longtime collaborator Agnès Godard photograph acts of rapacious bloodlust in ways that inspire contemplation, not revulsion. Those willing to place themselves into Denis' philosophical rhythms will find that what they're watching is representative of something deeper, as metaphors for our primal fears. In her final scene, Denis lingers on a single drop of blood trickling down a translucent shower curtain. The stains of guilt aren't so easily washed away. Neither is the disconcerting resonance of Trouble Every Day.

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Jeremiah Kipp's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Filmmaker, Fangoria and other publications.

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1. "Belated Birthday Wishes P.C.!": How could we neglect Phil the Shill in yesterday's birthday wishes? Maxima mea culpa.

["This is the world we live in. Uh-ohhh-ohhh!"]

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2. "Timber shrine reveals Stonehenge secret": Funny, it doesn't look Druish.

["New excavations near Stonehenge could finally explain its reason for existence: as one half of a much larger temple built to celebrate the living and the dead. A dig less than two miles away has revealed the largest neolithic village in Britain. The similar dates and designs of the sites have convinced archaeologists that they were elements of a single religious complex. Stonehenge was designed as a permanent monument to the dead and constructed of rock to symbolise their enduring presence, the research suggests. The nearby settlement at Durrington Walls was a shrine to the transience of life. Its houses were made of wood, as was a timber circle mirroring the design of Stonehenge."]

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3. "Best-selling author Sidney Sheldon dies at 89": From MSNBC.

["Sidney Sheldon, who won awards in three careers — Broadway theater, movies, television — then at age 50 turned to writing best-selling novels about stalwart women who triumph in a hostile world of ruthless men, has died. He was 89. Sheldon died Tuesday afternoon of complications from pneumonia at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, said Warren Cowan, his publicist of more than 25 years. His wife, Alexandra, and his daughter, author Mary Sheldon, were by his side. "I've lost a longtime and dear friend," Cowan said. "In all my years in this business, I've never heard an unkind word said about him."]

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4. "How an icon became a dial-a-diva": From The Sydney Morning Herald.

["Dietrich spent her last decade mostly bedridden in her apartment on the Avenue Montaigne, appearing rarely in public but becoming a prolific letter writer and telephone caller. According to Lerman, one of her correspondents was a man from the San Fernando Valley in California. "He told her how much he adored her, etc. When she saw, from his letterhead, that he was a doctor, she rang him. This began endless telephone exchanges, during which he became more and more enslaved," writes Lerman. When the doctor offered to fly to Paris to "rescue" her, Dietrich cut off communication for several weeks. When she rang him again, she discovered he was so depressed about losing touch with her that he was seeing a psychiatrist five times a week, at $US90 a session."]

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5. "Women Filmmaking Stats": From Anne Thompson's Risky Biz blog.

["The Philly Inquirer critic Carrie Rickey has come up with some provocative statistics about women in the film business:"]
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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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By Ryland Walker Knight

David Lynch's voice has a diminutive, nasal inflection. You can hear the Pacific Northwest’s gentility and echoes of a woodland youth. In his new book, Catching The Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, this calm is felt in each short, declarative sentence that makes up each short, welcoming chapter.

The book is slim. The 177 pages offer more blank, white spaces than text. Lynch doesn't really explicate his ideas: he distills them into succinct statements. But he's hardly condescending. Rather, the whole book is an invitation. When you open Lynch's book, he, in turn, opens his front door and invites you inside for a cup of coffee. And, perhaps, a twenty-minute meditation session.

"I'm not always good with words," he says. Being a painter first and foremost, this effort to express his abstractions verbally instead of visually bears the over-stitched scars of an artist slightly outside his usual medium. Lynch is swinging for the fences throughout the book, at times promoting (nearly propagandizing) the practice of Transcendental Meditation, while at other junctures explaining his distrust and disappointment with the film industry. Yet his prose is so simple (one cannot help but think throughout of Ordinary Language Philosophers) that the reader can relax with the book. Its main aim, it feels, is to engender peace and good will.

David Lynch has practiced Transcendental Meditation for thirty-three years. He regrets (and regrets to inform the reader) that his first response was flippant dismissal. Yet, once he decided to try, in earnest, he felt "as if [he was] in an elevator and the cable had been cut. Boom! I fell into bliss—pure bliss."

To transcend, he says, is to dive within and explore (or catch) your ideas. Lynch's use of "idea" is vague and fluid, and prevalent throughout. Chiefly, though, he wants to say that "ideas are everything." Water, then, runs through everything:

"Ideas are like fish.
If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper.
Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re beautiful."

He goes on to explain his idea of an idea in a one-page chapter called, "Ideas":

"An idea is a thought. It's a thought that holds more than you think it does when you receive it. But in that first moment there is a spark. In a comic strip, if someone gets an idea, a lightbulb goes on. It happens in an instant, just as in life."

Catching The Big Fish reads just this side of a "How To" book, which is just this side of action: a "How To" book isn't the act of doing, but a helping hand, a match lit—an impetus for the doing. It takes two, babe. As stated before, Catching The Big Fish is an invitation, a plea, not a sermon, and for his part, Lynch never affects a tone of authority. There's a diary-spying element to the prose, but it is never cloying, only sincere.

And because it's brief, you can sit down and read Catching The Big Fish in less time than it takes to watch Lynch's newest film, INLAND EMPIRE: I read comparatively slowly and I finished the whole book in less than 90 minutes; INLAND EMPIRE runs 179 minutes. The book is like a coffee table companion-cum-summation for Lynch's multimedia career. You could have it lying around at a party and guests would be free to pick it up and, at random, choose an aphorism to share. The best one-liner comes a little past midway, in a chapter titled, "The Box and The Key":

"I don't have a clue what those are."

Its rival comes nearer the close in a clever, compact, and beguiling chapter, "Fire". It reads:

"Sitting in front of a fire is mesmerizing. It's magical. I feel the same way about electricity. And smoke. And flickering lights."

In five brief sentences Lynch explains everything he loves about (1) Fire (2) Life (3) Cinema (4) Modernity (5) his original Inland Empire, the Pacific Northwest: his woodland home which he has smote moot–and rendered past tense–with those words, "And smoke."

"Smoke" also recalls the Philadelphia of his art school days, which he chopped up, tossed around and flipped upside down in a fog of grotesquerie with his first film, Eraserhead. Eraserhead is a stark dream of hurt, cloudy & congested with that magical smoke. Lynch says as much in the chapter devoted to it and its genesis: "Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. ...it was a struggle. So I pulled out my Bible and started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. ...And I saw the thing as a whole." This embrace of spirituality is reflected in Lynch's devotion to–and new promotion of–Transcendental Meditation. It seems a natural evolution of his character.

To read this book is to see Lynch as nothing but a peaceful human being with a clear thought process. And for all we know, that could very well be true; this would be quite a charade if false. Plus, why not believe him? Why not take him at his word/s? Why is it so difficult to assume a man can be spiritually at peace in the world yet, in his art, create horrorshow wormholes? Precisely because the art is gussied up in ugly, I suppose. However, isn't art supposed to broaden our worlds? Doesn’t seeing another world illuminated in turn illuminate ours?

To wit:

"Meditation is not a selfish thing. Even though you're diving in and experiencing the Self, you're not closing yourself off from the world. You're strengthening yourself, so that you can be more effective when you go back out into the world."

All David Lynch is asking, at bottom, in the silt of the riverbed, is, Why not give it a shot? It worked for me. "It" being, of course, not only meditation, but peace. The final chapter is titled "Real Peace" and the final word of the text is a simple one-word paragraph that operates as a blessing, an appeal and a farewell.

"Peace."

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House Next Door contributor Ryland Walker Knight is the infrequent publisher of the blog Vinyl Is Heavy.

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1. "Happy Birthday, CB!": House fave Christian Bale turns 33 today. Roll dat boo-shit up!

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2. "What I learned during "An Evening with Kenneth Anger"": From Eric Henderson at When Canses Were Classeled.

["Pauline Kael is an overrated little film critic who wrote (poorly) over-effusive pieces celebrating second-rate talents like ... [And here I held my breath, expecting the next words to come from his mouth to be Brian De Palma.] ... Sam Peckinpah ... [Whew!]"]

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3. "Microsoft Vista: Should you buy now?": Peter Lewis of Fortune magazine test-drives the new Windows OS.

["What does Windows Vista have in common with the just-christened nuclear aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush? Answer: They are both powerful flagships of technology that took five years and billions of dollars to build. Also, while they'll both be in use for years to come, they're almost certainly the last of their respective kinds. The world now moves at Internet speed, and slow, complex behemoths - whether warships or software - are being forced to become smaller, faster and more maneuverable. Vista is anything but. After numerous well-publicized delays - two years of core coding had to be scrapped and rewritten to plug security holes - Vista will be launched on Jan. 30, backed by Microsoft's largest-ever marketing blitz."]

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4. "Bond's late arrival in China": From the BBC.

["After saying no to James Bond for the first 20 films, the Chinese government censor has now decided that the franchise is finally fit to be screened in this country. So, Casino Royale is being released uncut into Chinese cinemas. In the basement of a Beijing shopping centre, the series got its first premiere in this country."]

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5. "Kansai TV now accused of faking info in 1998": Thanks to Jeffrey Hill for the link.

["Kansai Telecasting Corp., already under fire for airing a program earlier this month with fabricated dietary data, used deceptive information in that show's predecessor in 1998, two university professors who appeared on the program said Sunday. Yoichi Nagamura, a professor of health and food studies at Chiba Institute of Science, and Makoto Tajima, a professor of nutrition studies at Jissen Women's University, said a producer of "Hakkutsu! Aruaru Daijiten" used their test data and comments dishonestly in a May 25, 1998, episode on the possible sleep-inducing effects of lettuce."]
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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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By Matt Zoller Seitz
Although I'd hoped to write a comprehensive new essay about Theo Angelopoulos' epic The Weeping Meadow as my entry in the month-long Contemplative Cinema Blog-a-thon -- sponsored by critic Harry Tuttle of Screenville -- various professional obligations, coupled with a nasty week-long bout of strep throat, made it impossible. As an under-the-wire stopgap, here's an expanded, illustrated version of a column that originally appeared in NYPress in 2005. Angelopoulos' film about displaced peasants coping with natural and manmade disaster was one of my Top 10 movies that year, ranked right after The New World, a film with which it would fit nicely on a double-bill. I think it fits Harry's loosely-defined criteria for a contemplative film. Its ideas are not just conveyed mainly through picture and sound, they're specifically elucidated through very, very long takes, often from "a great and detached distance" (the original headline of the review). The resultant sense of quasi-omniscient "real time" sweep is a director's analogy for history's cool scrutiny.

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Movies don't have to get physically close to their characters to draw you into their world; they can achieve a different kind of intimacy by standing back and reminding us of how small we are. Theo Angelopoulos' The Weeping Meadow demonstrates this principle. The first installment in a projected trilogy summing up the 20th Century, it's an epic film of a type that's rarely attempted. Like Barry Lyndon -- and Homer, whom the script and imagery invoke -- it prefers physical distance to closeness, and repeatedly places its main characters, the members of a refugee family, in the larger context of geography and history, following them through poverty, the rise and fall of fascism, and a horrendous series of disasters. It's probably the largest production of Angelopoulos' career, but the movie's relentless formal precision -- it's composed mainly in medium and long shots, with long takes whenever possible -- makes you think not about production values, but about the fragility of individuals caught up in the gears of history. It finds a cool-headed but empathetic visual analogy for the way we tend to envision history: as anecdotes about masses of unknown people moving from place to place, enduring unimaginable suffering, then shaking off the pain, reinventing themselves and moving on.

The movie begins with a longshot of a mass of people crossing a flooded plain -- Greeks escaping the Red Army's invasion of Odessa. They walk toward the camera -- toward us -- as an undifferentiated mass, mere black specks on the horizon. The camera cranes down to their level, gradually looking at them from shoulder-level rather than from above (a harbinger of how the scene will briefly personalize them without quite individualizing them). A narrator tells us of their plight as if describing migrating wildlife. Then an unseen spectator cries out -- from somewhere behind us -- "Hey! Who are you? Where are you from?" The refugees stop and face the camera with a particular family centered in the frame, and then one man effectively takes over narration duties and begins reciting his group's narrative while the entire assembly (like a tribe or congregation) looks right at us, some seemingly apprehensive of what we might think, others indifferent, still others staring in stone-faced defiance, as if daring us to pass judgment.

Then, even more surprisingly, the camera, which had been zooming in slowly -- implicitly promising to end in a closeup picking out a single character with which we can "identify" -- gracefully tilts down, focusing on the family's reflection in the water at their feet, then tilting further, until the people vanish from the frame and only their reflection remains. Then the camera slowly unfocuses so that even the family's reflections become indistinct -- impressionistic color blobs on the water -- before merging with the rippling water and dissolving to the film's opening credits sequence, a montage of historic photos. (For a frame-by-frame breakdown of this opening, scroll to the end of this article.)

Most movies operate under the the implied understanding that the camera represents "us," the viewer. Most commercial narratives adhere to a so-called "invisible" style that averts the film's own gaze from that knowledge. The director of the so-called "invisible" movie (the sort of director a meat-and-potatoes film critic would praise as "a craftsman") knows he's not supposed to break that fourth wall and remind us that we're watching a movie. It's like a gentleman's agreement between the movie and the viewer that a certain distance will be respected. But Angelopolous is no gentleman. Here, in the very first scene of an epic that's about as distanced from sentimentality as a movie can get, he commits a stylistic act of radical intimacy, flouting that implied understanding between viewer and movie. (The narrator says not that someone cried out to the refugees, but that it's "as if" someone cried out to them; it's "as if" the film itself asked them the question.) The director's form-conscious style declares that The Weeping Meadow's truest, deepest subject is not any particular character, or even a specific time and place, but the means by which we perceive history -- the angles and distances from which we see (or fail to see) it, and the inevitable process by which stories blur together to create group histories, then legends, ultimately to be forgotten save for one or two broad brush strokes.

As the tale unfolds, its characters -- orphaned refugee Eleni, or Helen (Alexandra Aidini), her adoptive brother and future husband Alexis (Nikos Poursadinis) and their children -- at first seem as tiny and contrived as figurines in a diorama, and Angelopoulos enforces that notion by composing virtually the entire movie as a series of immense tableaus. The family's house is swallowed by flood water and stays submerged for what feels like an eternity; the drowning house is often framed in extreme longshot, putting it in the context of other houses we never visit; meanwhile, rowboats drift through the frame. The abduction and torture of average citizens at the hands of fascist goons is conveyed in a meticulous, slow crane shot that looks down on police herding prisoners into unseen rooms on a dimly lit street. (It's like the way Roman Polanski filmed the ghetto rebellion in The Pianist, peering down from the hero's apartment window across the street.) A labor activist dies in a field of white sheets drying on laundry lines.

Adapt to Angelopoulos' stately rhythms—no small thing to ask, given the movie's three hour running time—and you'll be amazed by the movie's power, which builds very slowly as we watch these specks move through time, dancing and feasting and playing music, marrying and raising kids, enlisting in the army, scouring the countryside in search of missing loved ones and plotting a desperate, perhaps pointless escape to America.

The Weeping Meadow reminded me of poet and critic Vachel Lindsay's statement that characterization in movies isn't like characterization in novels or plays. We feel for movie characters as children feel for their dolls -- personalizing them by deciding to care, imprinting their featureless surfaces with our feelings and dreams. When they break, it hurts.



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Matt Zoller Seitz is editor-in-chief and publisher of The House Next Door, a contributor to the The New York Times film section, and a former columnist for NYPress and The Star-Ledger.

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1. "2007 Screen Actors Guild Awards: Winners": The Last Little Miss King & Queen of Scotland.

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2. "The 5 Biggest Mismatches in Movie Fight History": With thanks to Patrick Walsh for pointing out the link.

["Action movies have a pretty simple formula when it comes to killing bad guys: you leave the toughest villain for last. It’s why at the end of Die Hard, that dead Russian guy jumps out of a body bag, somehow still armed with an automatic weapon. The filmmakers knew that, despite defying the laws that govern the physical universe, if they had ended the movie killing anyone else, it just wouldn’t have felt right. Leaving the toughest bad guy for last creates a sense of suspense as to whether or not the hero is going to be able to take him. So if the last bad guy is a total pussy, well, the audience is probably going to notice. Below, we count down the five most mismatched climactic fights in action movie history."]

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3. "Modern Martyrs": An interview with Aleksandr Sokurov's frequent screenwriter Yury Arabov.

["Until recently, Yury Arabov was primarily known to the general public as the screenwriter of several notable films by art-house director Alexander Sokurov, and, to a rather smaller audience, as a poet. In the past year, though, he gained visibility when NTV television broadcast two high-profile miniseries for which he wrote the scripts: adaptations of Nikolai Gogol's "Dead Souls" and Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago." Now, Arabov has published a novel, "Flagellants," which is a lament for the death of the Russian intelligentsia -- and, according to the author, a reflection of his own conflicted feelings about being an artist in present-day Russia."]

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4. "New Yorkers Score Big at Sundance": The Reeler wraps up Sundance.

["When you looked at the odds, it all made sense in a way: With upwards of 50 films from New York programmed between the shorts, documentary and dramatic competitions at this year's Sundance Film Festival, nobody really could have been that surprised to see the New York contingent take home a suitcase worth of hardware -- including the Dramatic Audience Award (Grace is Gone) and both the Documentary (Manda Bala) and Dramatic (Padre Nuestro) Grand Jury Prizes -- at Saturday night's awards show. "Numb," said Padre Nuestro director Christopher Zalla, who told The Reeler about his reaction to juror Sarah Polley's announcement at the end of the ceremony."]

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5. "A long time ago...": Edward Copeland announces a Springtime Blog-a-thon.

["30 years ago, May 25 to be exact ... in theaters across the United States a little film called Star Wars opened and changed much of how Hollywood works, for both good and bad."]
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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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By Todd VanDerWerff
When Battlestar Galactica began its run, if you had held a poll to see which character fans most expected to be portrayed as a Christ figure, James Callis’ Gaius Baltar probably would have ranked near the bottom of the list. But in "Taking a Break From All Your Worries," Baltar -- who, with his beard and mustache growth while in Cylon captivity, has been looking superficially Christlike -- died and was resurrected by a trio of Number Sixes (Tricia Helfer) posed like Raphael’s cherubs. Granted, this happened in a hallucination; the real Baltar died and was resurrected in a far more mundane way (via CPR, it would seem), waking up with his arms outstretched as though he had been crucified. From there, Baltar was strapped to a table and sent into a second hallucination in which death always hovered nearby (not unlike the Harrowing of Hell, but with water substituted for fire), then forced to submit to a series of God-like voices and betrayed by a close confidante (or at least that's how Baltar saw it).

It all begs one question: Does Galactica mean us to take these Baltar-as-Christ suggestions at face value (and these are hardly the first the show has dropped), or is the series just having fun at the expense of Baltar's tendency to hold his own interests above everyone else's, even during the End of All Things? Given how little patience the series has shown for Baltar’s sniveling self-regard in the past, the latter seems more likely -- but it’s also possible that Baltar’s utter failure as a leader and long captivity among the Cylons has sent him on some sort of redemption arc.

Last night’s episode blended the question of what to do with the deposed leader Baltar with the show’s ongoing soap opera plot about the failing marriages of lovers Apollo (Jamie Bamber) and Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff). As is often the case with Galactica, some elements didn't work as well as they should have. Nevertheless, this episode, which featured a strong script by Michael Taylor and excellent direction by series star Edward James Olmos, was one of the season’s best. On evidence of "Taking a Break" and the two preceding hours (“The Eye of Jupiter” and ""Rapture"), Galactica seems to have regained its footing after a string of early Season Three episodes that didn’t hit all of their marks.

Galactica has been known to restage famous news photos and works of art to give key shots a layer of subconscious resonance, but even by this show's standards, Olmos’ direction was notably iconic, packed with compositions modeled on religious iconography. Baltar’s hallucination of being drowned slowly in an endless sea was probably conceived as a way to do a dream sequence that reveals hidden secrets on the cheap; these sorts of plot cheats are used so frequently in genre fiction that I actually groaned the first time Olmos’ character, Admiral Adama, said the word “hallucinogens.” But the setup’s simplicity had the benefit of making an old plot device seem vital again: as Baltar treaded water on his back, a bright light (the eye of God?) shone down on him from above, guiding him toward the truth. The other portion of the hallucination -- Baltar coming to in a Cylon resurrection tank surrounded by Cylons done-up in makeup to made them seem ever-so-slightly off -- came as close as this series does to outright horror. Beyond visceral impact, the script used the dream/hallucination images to advance the plot (the other characters have now learned the depths of Baltar’s duplicity, and how he was occasionally an unwitting pawn in the Cylons’ game).

The season, so far, has given some of the show’s less-heralded players some good material to work with (Sackhoff and Bamber have been consistently strong this year), but this has come at the expense of sidelining some of the series’ more potent actors. Mary McDonnell’s President Laura Roslin and Olmos’ Adama have mostly been stranded (with the conspicuous exception of that one great scene in "Unfinished Business" where they toked up and talked about the future); since McDonnell and Olmos are capable of carrying the series’ weaker episodes by themselves, their recent under-employment has been discouraging. Taylor’s script, however, finally gave the duo something to play, with the added benefit of letting them share screen space with the equally-up-to-the-task Callis and Michael Hogan’s snarling Colonel Tigh. An early scene where Roslin interrogated Baltar -- trying to uncover his role was in the series-opening nuclear attacks and threatening to toss him out of an airlock -- might have seemed over-the-top in another drama, but because McDonnell’s portrayal is usually so reserved, it was quite effective. The scene also utilized the oft-recurring visual motif of the wall of photos of those who died in the attacks (recalling the 9/11 "missing" posters) intelligently, almost as a silent jury indicting Baltar. The device might have worked even better if it hadn’t been accompanied by too-obvious Roslin dialogue about the deaths Baltar helped cause.

Earlier this season, in "Collaborators," Galactica asked what a society should do with those who've worked with an occupying force. The episode was bracingly frank in its willingness to engage the issue, but the issue seemed to come out of nowhere; its appearance might have seemed more organic if the series had spent more time setting up the crew’s anger at the collaborators. Now, with Baltar, the series is asking what to do with a leader who sold out to occupying powers; because of our prior familiarity with Baltar, and the series taking its time reuniting him with the main cast, this seems a more effective recasting of the "Collaborators" storyline, coupled with some notably raised stakes. Plus, in suggesting that Baltar knew Gaeta (Alessandro Juliani) was slipping information to the insurgency, the series is both asking how little we trust Baltar and to what extent “good” exists in the politics of war. If Baltar really did know what was going on, by allowing it to continue, did he actually do something moral on behalf of his species? The series, which is supposedly building toward a trial for Baltar in this season's final three episodes, seems willing to pose these questions more bluntly and honestly than it asked what should happen to civilians and rank-and-file soldiers who served the wrong side in a conflict.

The episode featured yet more instances of Starbuck and Apollo almost leaving their respective partners for each other, then choosing to stay put. These scenes are always well-acted, and tonight’s were intriguingly scripted as well, suggesting that Baltar's betrayal of humankind was different in degree, not kind, from a husband's betrayal of his wife (Galactica often seems to believe it's not the magnitude of the sin, but the act of sinning itself). Nevertheless, I hope the series is done with this plotline. The Starbuck/Apollo pairing is better when it’s in the background; for a series that tries so hard to engage the audience in considering both its genre and the political questions inherent in its storyline, Galactica has an unfortunate tendency to satisfy its serial narrative obligations with typical tales of forbidden love.

But these are comparatively small quibbles with an otherwise superb episode -- one that sent Galactica into the homestretch of Season Three operating from a position of strength.
____________________________________________
House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.

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1. "Lord of the Rings by George Lucas": A frightening what-if, Dr. Katz-style. Thanks to Jeffrey Hill for the link.

["I think Frodo is kind of a gritty, suburban nine-year old."]

***
2. "It's freezing, there's no pay -- is that Redford?": Sounds like a day job I once had.

["At 20, Clifford is technically a year younger than the minimum age for a festival volunteer. But, just as the film world is all about connections, so too is this festival; a Sundance board member who also is a member of the board of the Ivy Film Festival, which Clifford runs at Brown, got him the gig standing in 9-degree cold night after night. Believe it or not, that's a coveted slot."]

***
3. "YouTubers to get ad money share": Thanks to orchidthief from 24 Lies a Second for sending the link.

["People who upload their own films to video-sharing website YouTube will soon get a share of the ad revenue. YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would "reward creativity". The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film."]

***
4. "In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real": From The New York Times, with thanks to Alan Vanneman at Bright Lights After Dark for pointing out the link.

["The XXX industry has gotten too graphic, even for its own tastes. Pornography has long helped drive the adoption of new technology, from the printing press to the videocassette. Now pornographic movie studios are staying ahead of the curve by releasing high-definition DVDs. They have discovered that the technology is sometimes not so sexy. The high-definition format is accentuating imperfections in the actors — from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes. Hollywood is dealing with similar problems, but they are more pronounced for pornographers, who rely on close-ups and who, because of their quick adoption of the new format, are facing the issue more immediately than mainstream entertainment companies. Producers are taking steps to hide the imperfections. Some shots are lit differently, while some actors simply are not shot at certain angles, or are getting cosmetic surgery, or seeking expert grooming. “The biggest problem is razor burn,” said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director."

***
5. "Wicker Men": Analyzing the two Wickers, from Metaphilm.

["Neil LaBute’s remake of this cherished cult classic has triggered a great deal of debate; a glimpse at the IMDB forum will reveal desultory outbursts of feeling both for and against, as well as the various shades of indifference, incredulity, and boredom that lie somewhere in-between. For some, its advent marks the limit of Hollywood’s imagination; for others, it undermines what little remains of a British cinematic tradition. Either way, it may be interesting to lay the films side-by-side, stripping away pretension and prejudice—after all, challenging prejudice was itself the originals film’s intention."]
_____________________________________________________
"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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1. " Mega-marsupials once roamed Australia": And all I can think to say is, "Crikey!"

["Marsupial lions, kangaroos as tall as trucks and wombats the size of a rhinoceros roamed Australia's outback before being killed off by fires lit by arriving humans, scientists said on Thursday. The giant animals lived in the arid Nullarbor desert around 400,000 years ago, but died out around 50,000 years ago, relatively shortly after the arrival of human settlers, according to new fossil skeletons found in caves. Fossilized remains were uncovered almost intact in a series of three deep caves in the center of the Nullarbor desert -- east of the west coast city of Perth -- in October 2002."]

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2. "10-year-old filmmaker sues for creative control": Say hello to my little friend.

["Most 10-year-olds are happy with an allowance and some video games. Budding filmmaker Dominic Scott Kay wants creative control, along with a shot at the Sundance Film Festival. And, as often happens in the entertainment business, to get what he wants he's headed to court with one of Hollywood's top litigators in tow. The child actor, whose credits include Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report" and voicing Wilbur the pig in Paramount Pictures' recent "Charlotte's Web," is in a creative battle with Conroy Kanter, the financier of the short film Kay directed. The two met when Kay played with Kanter's son on a soccer team. "She wanted to make all the decisions and stuff," Kay said. "She wanted final cut and everything." Kay alleges in a lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court that Kanter, his Malibu neighbor, is trying to wrestle away control of "Saving Angelo," starring actor Kevin Bacon, which she helped bankroll with $11,000."]

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3. "Hollywood From the Fringes": Jonathan Rosenbaum on INLAND EMPIRE.

["Writing about Wild at Heart in 1990, I suggested that Lynch's career seemed to dispute William Butler Yeats's memorable formulation In dreams begin responsibilities. He seemed to be in determined denial about the implications of the violence he trafficked in, with a child's view of good and evil, a formalist attitude toward images and sounds, a solipsistic desire to remain politically disengaged, and a lack of interest in understanding or addressing how the grown-up world works. "To claim that Lynch is ideologically innocent and naive about his neofascist fun seems fair enough," I wrote. "But to claim that he's ideologically neutral is to succumb to that same innocence and naivete.""]

***
4. "Prince Charles Arrives In Philadelphia": Mothers lock up your daughters...

["Britain's Prince Charles and his wife arrived in Philadelphia on a commercial flight Friday afternoon, accompanied by a staff of 18. Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, were to be in the city until Sunday morning, when they are scheduled to leave on a private train for New York after church, KYW-TV reported. Their itinerary includes a visit to Independence Hall, where American independence from Britain was proclaimed."]

***
5. "Real Life Simpsons intro": Animation shmanimation!

["D'oh!"]
_____________________________________________________
"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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By Matt Zoller Seitz
Lead illustration by Peet Gelderblom

These films are not in production, except in my imagination.

1. Moby Dick. Written and directed by Terrence Malick. Starring Mel Gibson as Ahab, Ben Foster as Ishmael, Rudy Youngblood as Starbuck and Ian Holm as Father Mapple. Cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki. Edited by Anne V. Coates. Score by Eliot Goldenthal.

The reclusive director follows up his long-awaited Fountain of Youth project with the ultimate nautical adventure, and does not disappoint. Herman Melville's supposedly unfilmable novel -- which stymied John Huston, among other would-be adapters -- gets the cosmic, ruminative treatment in this three-hour CinemaScope epic, which alternates quicksilver, free-associative montages with the most surprisingly conventional and exciting action scenes Malick has ever directed. As Ahab -- arguably the role he was born to play -- Mel Gibson gives a surprisingly restrained performance, resisting the natural inclination to play the character as Long John Silver on crack. Gibson instead directs his intensity inward, a decision that lends Ahab a lordly detachment and icy, inscrutable anger reminiscent of mid-period Laurence Olivier; the performance is aided immeasurably by Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography, which often hides Ahab's eyes in Rembrandt pools of torchlit blackness or, in daylight scenes, in the sliver of shadow cast by the brim of his cap. Throughout there are curious but distinctly Malickian changes -- including the casting of Apocalypto star Rudy Youngblood as a Starbuck who's actually a combination of the characters of Starbuck and Queequeg, with Maori tattoos and a habit of meditating on deck at the same time every day, even during storms.

But for the most part, Malick's Moby Dick incorporates more of the novel than anyone expected, with Ishmael's distinctive, first person-yet-omniscient ruminations put to especially good use. Although the film has but one narrator (a contrast to recent Malick films), the tone and style are similar to The Thin Red Line -- meditative, fascinated by rituals and social structures, and attuned to the moment-to-moment beauty of the sea and the infinite variety of creatures dwelling within it. (The movie begins with a woodcut-illustrated prologue about the history of whaling, set to scratchy 1920s-era, 78 rpm recordings of sea chanteys performed by Australian seamen, supposedly drawn from the director's record collection and played on his grandma's Victrola.) The movie's aesthetic high point is one of the largest seaborne action sequences ever filmed: a 20-minute section depicting the pursuit, slaughter and stripping of harpooned whales, a process shown in great detail while Ishamel recites passages from Melville's novel -- including an observation that doubles as the movie's tagline: "There's no savagery of beast that's not infinitely outdone by man."

2. Slaughterhouse Five. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Starring George Clooney as Billy Pilgrim and Scarlett Johansson as Montana Wildhack. Written by Lem Dobbs. Cinematography by Ed Lachman. Edited by Sarah Flack. Music by Cliff Martinez.

Kurt Vonnegut's novel was adapted once before -- in an effective but not quite transcendent 1972 version by George Roy Hill. For anyone considering an adaptation of this book, the sticking point is the question of how much one should literalize the idea that the main character -- optometrist, suburban drone and traumatized World War II conscientious objector Billy Pilgrim -- has "come unstuck in time." Soderbergh's version makes that idea quite metaphorical while maintaining plausible deniability. We're never entirely sure if the tale's intricate flashback/flash-forward structure is the result of Pilgrim's actual dislocation in time and space (indicated by his sojourn on the planet Trafalmador, where he's kept as a zoological specimen by aliens and made to mate -- and live a weirdly awkward facsimile of domestic life -- with Johansson's porn star Montana Wildhack) or if he's suffered brain damage as a result of a plane crash and is roaming through his actual past and fantasy life in sort of a mid-century, sci-fi inflected American version of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Reassembling all of his collaborators from his greatest film, The Limey -- which also had a nonlinear structure and a black comedic yet powerfully emotional feel -- Soderbergh creates a puzzle-box film that plays like a summation of everything he's seen, learned and made during two decades as a filmmaker and moviegoer. It's a model of daring storytelling, a period piece about middle-American malaise during the Vietnam era, a harrowing absurdist war movie (the Dresden bombing scenes rival Apocalypse Now in their epic craziness) and an intensely erotic yet unexpectedly charming sex farce. (The Trafalmador scenes feature extensive full frontal male and female nudity -- which, coupled with footage of burn victims in the Dresden sequence, guarantees Slaughterhouse an NC-17 rating; but Soderbergh, whose movie is already in profit thanks to worldwide presale agreements, gives the MPAA the finger and releases the picture unrated.) Ed Lachman's CinemaScope images are so fluid, varied and mind-bogglingly beautiful that upon the picture's release, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences declares the cinematography category closed that year, and messengers the statuette directly to his house.

3. The Emperor Paul. Directed by Spike Lee. Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Starring Terrence Howard as Paul Robeson. Cinematography by Ernest Dickerson. Edited by Barry Brown.

Lee's movies always seem to be on the verge of bursting into song; with The Emperor Paul, he scratches that itch at feature length for the first time since School Daze, but with a striking difference: the entire movie is sung-through from start to finish, gliding gracefully through different phases of Paul Robeson's life -- football player, opera and musical star, pioneering African-American movie star, temperamental diva, anti-racism activist and Communist pariah. Lee's selection of Sondheim to do the score and lyrics for a biopic of a politically incendiary African-American surprises many, given Lee's own past pronouncements on such matters. But the director's blunt explanation -- "He's the only musical theater figure alive today who's in Robeson's weight class, so it was a no-brainer" -- sets the issue to rest before production has even started. Shot on immense, defiantly "unreal" breakaway sets and lit like a Vincente Minnelli melodrama (by longtime Lee collaborator Ernest Dickerson, going behind the camera for Lee for the first time since Malcolm X) the movie's an unclassifiable, politically and aesthetically divisive work that at times plays like a hybrid of Bob Fosse's Lenny and Jacques Tati's Playtime. But its sheer chutzpah earns respect even from those who find it pretentious, sanctimonious and borderline impenetrable. The film's visual and musical zenith is a seamless three-minute montage that shows Robeson on a whirlwind music tour of North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, singing his way through "All God's Chillun Got Wings" in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Swahili. Star Terrence Howard doesn't look much like Robeson -- but considering that he's credible as an intellectual, a musical genius, a bad boy and a tragic figure, and does all his own singing to boot, what's not to like?

4. Watership Down. Written and directed by Brad Bird. Featuring the voices of Clive Owen (as Hazel), Daniel Radcliffe (as Fiver), Richard E. Grant (as Dandelion), Cate Blanchett (as Clover), Emily Blunt (as Hyzenthlay), Ray Winstone (as General Woundwort) and Sacha Baron Cohen (as Kehaar). Cinematography by Haskell Wexler. Score by Rachel Portman.

The cartoon auteur behind The Iron Giant and The Incredibles pushes his art one step further in an adult direction, turning Richard Adams' 1972 novel into a dark allegorical epic that borrows equally from Spartacus, the New Testament and Picnic at Hanging Rock. Adams' narrative -- about a displaced warren of rabbits following the visionary Fiver to a promised land somewhere in the English countryside -- is played straight, including the often shocking scenes of rabbit-on-rabbit (and dog-on-rabbit) brutality that made both the novel and the previous, 1978 film adaptation such a shock to parents who'd expected a time-waster about cute widdle bunnies. Working for the first time as a director of photography on an animated feature, cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who shot about half of Days of Heaven back in the day, fills Bird's widescreen canvases with an overwhelming variety of natural textures and colors, often employing a faux-deep focus technique that he says is modeled on the Technoscope cinematography in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. The movie is rated PG-13, but brushes with an R because of what the MPAA calls "graphic animal violence and situations so emotionally intense that they make Bambi look like Scooby-Doo."

5. A Looney Tunes Odyssey. Directed by Joe Dante. Screenplay by Dante, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Music and lyrics by Parker, Stone and Marc Shaiman.

The pop culture-savvy director of Gremlins, Matinee and Looney Tunes: Back in Action returns to the Warner Bros. stable and turns out this brisk, 72-minute comic epic based on Homer's The Odyssey, starring Elmer Fudd as the wandering Odysseus, Bugs Bunny (in drag, natch) as his beloved Penelope, and a constellation of costars in plum supporting parts (including the Tasmanian Devil as the Cyclops and Daffy Duck as Penelope's most persistent would-be suitor, Ducchus). South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and their preferred composer, Marc Shaiman contribute 14 original (and uncharacteristically squeaky-clean) tunes in a variety of styles, ranging from 1940s Bing Crosby-style torch song to Gilbert and Sullivan-style libretto that plays during the thrillingly absurd finale, which crosscuts between Odysseus/Elmer returning home and preparing to eliminate the suitors, and Penelope/Bugs preparing for a wedding that'll be aborted as soon as the cleric says, "Speak now or forever hold your piece," prompting Bugs and Daffy's most elaborate bit of absurdist wordplay since the "Shoot him now" exchange in "Rabbit Seasoning." In CinemaScope, of course.
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Matt Zoller Seitz is editor-in-chief and publisher of The House Next Door, a contributor to the The New York Times film section, and a former columnist for NYPress and The Star-Ledger.

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1. "Visionary Outlaw Mavericks on the Dark Edge; or, Indie Guignol": David Bordwell on the dark side of the "Indie."

["In an article originally called “Sundance Movies Are Bad for You!” but now more tamely titled “The Trouble with Sundance,” Richard Corliss complains that indie movies have become so predictable that they form a genre in themselves. They focus on relationships, especially those of a dysfunctional family or a fumbling love affair, and treat their principals with a dutiful mix of pathos and humor. Where, he asks, are the more imaginative narrative and stylistic maneuvers fostered by the Coen brothers, Jarmusch, Tarantino, and the like? That’s only half the story. True, indie films are often pallid comedies and melodramas. But just as often, and sometimes at the same time, they’re desperately sensationalistic. In these the formal conservativism to which Corliss objects is wedded to hot-button content. We call a bland Indie film quirky, but there are others we call dark. They’re Indie Guignol."]

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2. "Rocky III": Sheila O'Malley on the still-potent pleasures of Clubber Lang & co.

["Watched it last night. So fun!!! I mean, come ON. Mr. T. With the feather earrings. And the furious eyeballs. And that BODY. Also the apparently bottomless checkbook - because he apparently can fly about the country (and the world) to sit in the stands at Rocky's various fights and glower menacingly. But still: what a great scowl. A great villain. When he yells up at Adrian, "WOMAN! HEY! Woman!"]

***
3. "Can't We All Not Get Along?": From LA Weekly.

["It dawns on us, as standup queen Sarah Silverman debuts her new “I-play-me” Comedy Central series at this point in her taboo-thrashing career, that, bizarrely, she’s no longer the most transgressive, racism-spotlighting, shit-stirring Jewish comedian in the entertainment world. That would be Sacha Baron Cohen, whose performance-art trek through bigoted America — a Sherman’s march of real-life comedy destruction — has generated massive box office, op-ed pieces and litigation. Meanwhile, Silverman, a raven-haired beauty who enjoys treating stereotypes and personal sexuality as the joke equivalent of Tinkertoys, has remained mostly an indie comedy phenomenon. And where Silverman’s humorous obsession with human genitalia finds its outlet in one-liners, Cohen notoriously shows us in his nude mano-a-mano hotel-room melee from Borat how physically close he’s willing to get to that topic."]

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4. "Woman fights off mountain lion": Kim Bauer at 60.

["A 65-year-old woman fought off a mountain lion attack in Humboldt County on Wednesday -- using a ballpoint pen to stab the animal -- and in the process probably saved the life of her 70-year-old husband. Nell Hamm first saw the lion when it had her husband's head in its jaws. The lion pounced on Jim Hamm at the end of a 10-mile hike in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. He was trailing his wife when the big cat attacked, pinning him face down on the trail. Nell Hamm did all the right things. She approached and screamed at the lion. Then she grabbed a branch and began beating it on its back. "It wouldn't let go, no matter how hard I hit it," she said in an interview at Mad River Community Hospital Thursday, where her husband was in intensive care recovering from surgery. Jim Hamm, who was trying to tear at the face of the cat, told his wife to grab a pen from his pocket and stab the cat in the eyes. She did, but the pen broke."]

***
5. " Overzealous censor edits 'God' out of 'Queen'": Bloody 'ell!

["So much for God and country, at least during some in-flight showings of the Oscar-nominated movie "The Queen." That's because all mentions of God were bleeped out in a version of the film given to some commercial airlines.]
_____________________________________________________
"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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By Todd VanDerWerff

HBO's Rome is good TV. It's not particularly deep, but it's fun to watch, and it's got great production values, cinematic direction and some fine performances. It's diminished, however, simply by virtue of the network it's on. If it appeared on a different channel, any channel, it would surely be considered one of its best shows. But on HBO, it has to compete with Deadwood, The Wire, The Sopranos and even young upstart Big Love. In comparison, Rome seems almost sophomoric -- a high gloss soap opera.

HBO's great series almost always take a worn-out genre and blow it up, following the template of The Sopranos, which hit familiar mob story plot points but did so more slowly and meticulously than other televised attempts at same. From there, HBO tackled Westerns and cop dramas and family soaps. Rome initially promised to be a nasty takeoff on swords-and-sandals epics, a chance to examine the lurid reality of Roman society around the time of Julius Caesar's reign, but the series has settled into a less ambitious groove; it seems content merely to exemplify its genre rather than reinvent it. Cecil B. DeMille movies made Bible stories more palatable by mixing in liberal doses of sex and violence; Rome just ups the ante a bit and shows them full-on. There's a vague and somewhat obligatory-seeming attempt to define the sex and violence as outgrowths of the era's politics (Polly Walker's Atia is constantly sleeping with men who will give her the greatest political boost), but for the most part, these elements serve the same function as in DeMille's films: Look at how much sex there was in ancient Rome! And how much violence!

None of this wantonness resonates as strongly as the filmmakers might wish because it's rooted in characters who are not often sketched beyond a handful of traits: loyal-to-a-fault Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), constantly scheming Atia, burgeoning-man-of-the-people Gaius Octavian (Max Pirkis, as the boy who would be Augustus Caesar). The characters scheme to get ahead and rise in their particular circles (or, in Pullo's case, to get the woman he wants), but we never feel that these motivations come from a distinct place for each character. Contrast this with Deadwood, where all of the characters (or most) are similarly scheming to land themselves the best place in their incipient civilization, but go about this through very different means and operate from very different motivations. Any given episode of Rome eventually devolves into a long series of betrayals and political tricks, briefly punctuated by sex or nicely choreographed mayhem (the gladiatorial combat in season one's penultimate episode juiced the storylines so effectively that it almost singlehandedly justified the entire season). This formula become more obvious in season two, where most of the characters are isolated from each other, aiming to put themselves in the best possible position after the murder of Caesar (Ciarán Hinds).

Caesar, while not the show's lead character by any means, acted as a hub for Rome's huge cast; all of the storylines intersected through him, and Hinds played the part with a benevolent arrogance that made it easy to believe that Caesar was both beloved by the people and an enemy of their freedoms. His murder became a grim necessity, but you were sad to see him go, simply because his scenes were often the most compelling thing in any given episode. Sure enough, Season Two suffers from not having that strong center. The show bounces manically from setting to setting; it's often hard to pin down just what one scene has to do with another. Again, contrast this with Deadwood where the cast was even more populous, but a handful of main locations and characters (particularly Al Swearengen) persisted throughout the series run, and gave viewers some narrative anchors.

Another problem is Rome's preference for compressing events that occured over years into a handful of episodes. Season One took place over seven years, but it felt if the story unfolded over a few weeks (three or four months at the most). There are cues to signify how much time has passed, but the series rarely makes a serious effort to show how the march of time has affected its characters (or simply can't, in the case of Pirkis and the other younger actors). Events are conflated so hilariously that Rome often seems like an afternoon soap with Gladiator-level production values. Cheating spouses! Hidden diseases! Betrayal and murder! There's nothing inherently wrong with this approach except that it makes the series' pretense of realism harder to buy.

Finally, the dialogue is too on-the-nose. There's some nice, poetic writing on occasion, but the characters rarely leave anything to subtext. They're always saying exactly what they think, or offering us exposition on what's happened in the months-long interim between episodes, or pointing out the obvious. (Reprimanding her son Octavian for alienating Mark Antony, Atia says, "Don't you see we're dependent on Antony now? Who will protect us if you drive him away from me?") On Deadwood or The Wire, characters usually say much less than you expect or else much more -- sometimes talking around the subject so as to define it without offending a social superior. Rome's characters feel more like human chess pieces given little speeches to read, then shoved around into place by the writers before the next plot point glides into view.

There's still a lot to like about Rome. It's got a refreshing lack of politically correct anachronism (the slaves are slaves and are treated as such, and the women have no hope of meting out their political will); this helps the series keep its winking asides to the modern day from becoming too overt or self-satisfied. The production design is among the best on television, and the direction (by such varied hands as Michael Apted and Alan Taylor) is vivid, often rising above the TV norm. Another, more recent positive development: the series also appears to be building to the rise of Augustus. If there's a figure in Roman history that could unite the numerous plotlines as effectively as the original Caesar, it's the new Caesar. But in spite of its oft-apparent potential, the series rarely rises above the pretty good. There's a brilliant show to be made about the hubris of a civilization that thinks it cannot fall; Rome isn't it.

***
The Naked Trucker and T-Bones Show on Comedy Central is pretty dumb. As with all shows of this type (loosely connected sketches tied to a central monologue delivered by two characters), it's pretty uneven. But its deliberately low-fi sensibilities (at times it seems like a comic monologue surrounding a series of YouTube videos) make it oddly charming. It's very much a show finding its way, and more jokes miss than hit their marks, but Naked Trucker (Dave Allen) and T-Bones (David Koechner) are disarming enough to make this slyly enjoyable.

The conceit is that Trucker and T-Bones travel the country and tell us stories about their journeys. Hence the episode airing tonight involves a voyage to Vermont that features Andy Richter (in fake mustache and silly hat) as a mayor that gives T-Bones the key to his city (or maybe he's not the mayor after all...). The two also sing songs, recount their adventures with hitchhikers, and show us footage from the truck as they travel around. It's, as mentioned, dumb, and Koechner's whiny character can grate on the nerves if he's employed in anything beyond small doses, but there are enough solid jokes here to justify checking the show out once or twice, if only to see Koechner play the dash of the truck as a drum with paint sticks, all the while singing an impromptu song about "Paint Stickin." It's the sort of show where the live studio audience cheers loudly when pot smoking is mentioned.

***
Alexandra Pelosi (exactly who you think she is) brings her latest documentary, Friends of God, to HBO tonight at 9 p.m. Her last nonfiction feature, Journeys with George, made her a mini-celebrity, and she's spun that into a career of making movies she calls "road trips." In Friends of God, Pelosi spends an hour wandering the U.S. in search of evangelical Christians (the hot minority of the TV season, apparently) and what she finds is supposed to amuse us or scare us or... something. Pelosi is so busy jetting from one place to the next that we never get a sense of the people in her documentary as anything other than stereotypes. The Oscar-nominated documentary Jesus Camp introduced a Christian boogey-man just to have a Christian boogey-man, but at least it followed the same characters throughout, letting us get a sense of how their beliefs affected their dealings with the wider world. Pelosi has just found the easiest targets for her camera in Friends of God -- including megachurch evangelist Ted Haggard, who, sometime during production, was revealed to have patronized a male prostitute, and forced out of his job.

Obviously, Pelosi had no say in Haggard's self-destruction, but he's far from the only camera subject whose presence could be described as grimly comical or off-putting. Without meaning to, the director betrays a condescending attitude toward her topic, inviting us to make fun of evangelicals or be frightened of them or just close our eyes until they leave the screen and are replaced by a fresh set of freaks. Yes, there are Christian wrestlers out there, and drive-through churches and the like, but they don't make up the majority of America's evangelicals. Pelosi seems tickled to meet these rubes, and her attitude can be patronizing. "We wouldn't believe you do this back in New York," she says ever so often, and you can almost picture her back home, telling a story about those crazy Christians at a dinner party. Certainly those of Pelosi's inclinations and politics (and I count myself among that number) would do well to figure out exactly what evangelicals believe and why, rather than bowing to received wisdom, but there's no way that's going to happen when evangelicals are made the butt of easy jokes.

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Sci-Fi's Dresden Files (9 p.m. Sunday), the cable channel's latest original series, isn't up to the level of Battlestar Galactica or even last summer's uneven Northern Exposure/X-Files hybrid Eureka. But it feels like the sort of show that, given enough time, could grow into the sort of cult hit you find yourself watching a marathon of over Labor Day weekend. The premise is brilliant: Harry Dresden's a wizard who solves magical crimes and lives in our very real world (but advertises in the yellow pages). The cast is also quite good (particularly Paul Blackthorne as the title character and Terrence Mann as Bob the office ghost). But the show's attempts to blend scares and snark wander afield far too often. What's more, the show's episodes fall into the common genre trap of being too exposition-heavy; by the time the monster of the week's twists and turns are exposed, we just don't care anymore, no matter how many witty quips Dresden and Bob trade.

But there may be reason to hope for Dresden. After all, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (a similarly high-concept series) didn’t really take off until its second season, and Dresden, a show with a writing staff of people who’ve worked in good genre TV -- including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine -- seems like it might need a similar number of episodes to iron out its many kinks. Check out an episode or two, or wait for the inevitable marathon. It might all be worth it in the end.

***
Like football? Then The NFL Network is making the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl heaven for fans. The channel -- which unfortunately isn't yet available in most cable packages -- is airing old Super Bowls as they originally appeared (halftime shows intact). The broadcasts make interesting cultural artifacts. Ostentatious patriotism perceptibly rises as troops go to war in Vietnam or Iraq, and the halftime shows of the '70s and '80s prove to be every bit as bad as everyone says. More interesting is the NFL Films production America's Game: The Super Bowl Champions, which counts down the top 20 Super Bowl winners. The series has the usual NFL Films problems, chief among which is a tendency to greatly overstate football's importance in American history. (An episode on the 1983 Oakland Raiders has narrator Alec Baldwin comparing the team to the Soviets' "Red army"; one can imagine Baldwin between takes, ranting about the crap he has to read.) But enough time has passed in most of these episodes that the main players behind the teams profiled are willing to open up more about both their personal difficulties and their opinions of each other. It's amusing to see Lawrence Taylor of the Giants reveal that he thought Phil Simms, the quarterback who led the team to a Super Bowl win, was kind of a wimp, and finding out that former Raider Todd Christensen became an acclaimed tenor is the right kind of bizarre factoid for a "where are they now" segment. If you don't like football, you won't find much to entertain you in America's Game, but there's enough good stuff there for fans of the game (or even fair-weather fans who prefer baseball, like myself) that it should be just the thing to get ready for the big game.
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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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