1. "Bald eagle soars off endangered list": America, fuck yeah!
["The bald eagle, America's national symbol, is flying high after spending three decades in recovery. On Thursday, the government took the eagle off the Endangered Species Act's "threatened" list."]
2. "Massachusetts Begins Universal Health Care": Christopher Lee (no, not that Christopher Lee) reports.
["There is a lot of talk about overhauling health care in the United States, but Massachusetts is actually trying to do it -- again. Today, the home of some of the nation's most prestigious hospitals and medical schools becomes the first state to require its residents to have health insurance or face financial penalties. Making insurance mandatory -- and more affordable -- for Massachusetts's 6.5 million residents is the centerpiece of a law approved by the legislature last year that civic and business leaders hope will dramatically reduce the ranks of the state's 400,000 uninsured and the number of people who seek costly "uncompensated" care in hospital emergency rooms."]
3. "Good luck schmuck": Glenn Kenny on the poster art for Dane Cook's sure-to-be-masterful Good Luck Chuck.
["I like to think I'm pretty sceptical when it comes to putatively sacrosanct pop iconography, which is why I was taken a bit aback by the rather violent offense I took to this poster for the early-fall comedy release Good Luck Chuck when I saw it the other night at a Manhattan multiplex. The image is a parody—a crudely constructed, unconvincing parody—of a photo by Annie Leibovitz of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The photo was taken on the last day of Lennon's life, in December of 1980, and was published on the cover of the January 22nd issue of Rolling Stone."]
4. "Surely, You Kid": Michael Koresky on George Ratliff's horror(ible) opus, Joshua.
["I’ve read in interviews with Ratliff that he’s embracing his audiences’ “nervous laughter”…well, he better, because there’s bound to be a lot of titters; indeed, it’s hard to keep a straight face during Joshua, so poorly does Ratliff establish space or tone. Ultimately, Ratliff hasn’t done much more than add a particularly stupid entry to the “little boys in suits are scary” subgenre, and this one comes with a thoroughly uninvestigated stench of homophobia. I’m not convinced it was Ratliff’s intention to demonize its main character for his burgeoning differences (he prefers Bartok to baseball . . . horrors!), but then why, in its final scene, does little Joshua turn to his gay uncle, as they sit together doing a piano duet, after mommy and daddy are out of the picture, and say, “This feels right”? Okay, George, you finally creeped me out."]
5. "Man turns 700-pound block of cheddar into Mount Rushmore replica": Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., you clean that cheese out of your ear!
["It’s George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln — carved out of a giant block of cheese. Troy Landwehr used his carving tools to turn a 700-pound block of Land O’ Lakes cheddar into a replica of Mount Rushmore. The cheese carver and winemaker was commissioned by Cheez-It snack crackers to make the monumental carving."]
Clip of the Day: Pulp Muppets (who knew Beaker was such a badass?)
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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.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Links for the Day (July 1st, 2007)
Everyman as Superman: Live Free or Die Hard
By Matt Zoller Seitz
In the original 1988 Die Hard, Alan Rickman's bad guy, Hans Gruber, taunts stalwart hero John McClane by asking him if he's "another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he's John Wayne...Rambo...Marshal Dillon..." McClane jokes that he was always partial to Roy Rogers because "I really liked those sequined shirts," then ends the conversation with the now-iconic kiss-off, "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker." 
The repetition of that phrase in three Die Hard sequels helps explain why I never really warmed to them. They're lively smash-and-burn adventures that leaven their brutality with self-deprecating wit and something vaguely resembling a human touch; each boasts wittily choreographed action sequences, and even the worst of the lot, the sadistic and borderline-retarded Die Hard 2, pulls you in. But whatever their merits, each sequel -- including Live Free or Die Hard, which opened this week -- does more to undercut what made the original, and its hero, seem special. That's a sin that no amount of boisterious ingenuity can erase. "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" wasn't just funny because it was a blue-collar, East coast, wise-ass response to a James Bond baddie's effete condescension. It was funny because it sounded like something a real person might say if he got caught in a situation that ludicrous. McClane's comeback was a tonic, a contrast to all the other badass one-liners we'd heard up to then: James Bond's icy British witticisms; Arnold Schwarzenegger's lame, mechanical approximation of same; Sylvester Stallone's dead-eyed homicidal pledges ("I'm comin ta get yew").
But when McClane says his signature line over and over in four movies spanning nearly 20 years, and when he somehow keeps wandering into the middle of sinister situations (except for Ripley in the Alien movies, no franchise lead has worse luck) and when he magically manages to absorb ever-more punishment the older he gets (in Live Free, he survives impacts that would flatten the Terminator) he comes to embody the image that Hans mockingly ascribed to him. The delight of Die Hard was that we'd never seen an action hero like McClane: physically capable but reluctant; impulsive and petty and emotionally transparent. When the same character shows up in Live Free or Die Hard to save America from cyberterrorists -- after saving Nakatomi Plaza, Dulles Airport and New York City -- he's become John Wayne plus Rambo minus hair. Yes, I know; it had to be this way. When a movie becomes a hit -- especially a dark horse like Die Hard, which had a trashy trailer and a leading man who was famous mainly for bantering with Cybill Shepherd on Moonlighting -- there will be as many follow-ups as the market can bear. Nevertheless, as much as I enjoyed the sequels, I wish they hadn't been made. They make the extraordinary seem ordinary. 
And that's too bad, because the premise of Live Free is chilling -- so keyed into real-world fears that I wish the screenplay (credited to Mark Bomback and David Marconi) had done more than use it as a springboard for another Die Hard sequel. When high-tech hijinks wreak havoc with the nation's cyberstructure, the director of the FBI's cyberterror unit (Cliff Curtis) issues an all-points bulletin ordering local law enforcement to round up America's most gifted and notorious hackers and bring them to the capital for questioning. When McClane gets the call, he's in New Brunswick, New Jersey, creepily stalking his estranged daughter, Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and interrupting her in-car make-out session by yanking her would-be boyfriend out the vehicle and threatening to beat him to death. (If I were her, I wouldn't return Dad's phone calls either.) While picking up his assigned hacker, Camden troublemaker Matt Farrell (Justin Long), he survives an assault by a squad of machinegun wielding goons; ever the bulldog, he resolves to get the kid to Washington anyway, and arrives in time for the bad guy, Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) to unveil phase two of his diabolical plan: using his control over America's computer networks to turn life into a videogame. (In the film's most unnerving sequence, Gabriel orders his own squad of hackers to mess with traffic signals throughout D.C., turning what should have been a typical rush hour into an outtake from The Blues Brothers.) Matt explains to the FBI dunderheads -- and to McClane, a Luddite who still listens to '60s rock on his car radio -- that this is part of a three-step master plan to destroy modern life as we know it. It's called a "Fire Sale" scenario: Everything must go. 
Of course, the fact that this is a Die Hard movie means that the Fire Sale plot will be exposed as a mammoth diversion, orchestrated to let Gabriel and his henchpeople (including his gorgeous, kung fu-kicking wife, Mai Lihn, played by martial arts star Maggie Q) steal an obscene amount of money. This is a cop out, and a disappointing one; while Olyphant's Gabriel is probably the least scary of the series' villains, he's the most complex, because he's motivated by professional grievance and ideology. Originally hired after 9/11 to assess flaws in America's cyberstructure, he warned that the whole thing was vulnerable, and rather than accept the bad news (and the price tag required to fix it), Gabriel's bosses fired him and dragged his name through the mud. Until the screenplay's other shoe inevitably drops to expose him as a common thief (as McClane's wife Holly labeled Hans in Die Hard 1), Gabriel seems bears less resemblance to Hans and Simon than to Gary Oldman's Egor Korshunov in Air Force One, who is motivated by more than filthy lucre, and whose viciousness doesn't negate the fact that he often speaks the truth. (Called out as a villain by the Chief Executive, Korshunov replies that he won't be lectured by the leader of a nation that killed 100,000 Iraqis to save a nickel on a gallon of gas.) Gabriel seems to enjoy pushing America to embrace its worst caricature. He makes Wall Street soil its collective britches by driving stock prices down, and terrifies the general public by broadcasting fake atrocity footage and a bewildering montage in which U.S. Presidents appear to deliver pieces of the same incoherent monologue. He's like a lethal performance artist, destroying the invisible mechanisms that govern modern life to conjure the horror he foretold and expose the thin line between civilization and chaos. Kevin Smith's cameo appearance as a hacker named Warlock -- Matt's rival and sort-of guru -- includes a throwaway line about zombies that inadvertently suggests the richer film that might have been, if the filmmakers had followed Live Free's ideas to their logical end, and told a story about ordinary people struggling to do right while society crumbled. But a summer action picture wouldn't dare go there, so Live Free repeats the same Die Hard tropes once more for old times's sake. (Besides the thief-posing-as-terrorist bit, the movie has a recurring gag about Lucy changing her last name, and an Ayn Randian spark between Gabriel and Mai Linh that evokes the Jeremy Irons-Sam Phillips relationship in Die Hard with a Vengeance.) 
There's a strong conservative undertow throughout. Matt starts out a free radical -- a far-leftist verging on anarchist, like many outlaw hackers. He dismisses the federal government as a bunch of corrupt incompetents ("It took FEMA five days to get water to the Superdome!") and blows off mainstream news reports as fearmongering corporate media hype -- so of course he ends up a grateful surrogate son of McClane and a reborn patriot who regrets the destruction his hacking helped cause. McClane jump-starts Matt's change when he rebuts his political screed by snapping, "It's not a system, it's a country." That line exposes the script's conservative mindset. McClane forces a disengaged, bratty young dissenter to shut up, grow balls and do something constructive. The picture's such a daddy-to-the-rescue fantasy that it could be called Die Hard 4: Get With the Program. The attitude doesn't really rankle because it's consistent with Hollywood action pictures dating back to John Wayne's autumnal westerns; this is an inherently conservative genre, and McClane's Joe Sixpack sentiments are fundamentally decent. It might have been fun to see the Democracy Now!/Fox News Channel dynamic played out more pointedly, as a Socratic dialogue with bullets and explosions instead of words. But the film's political consciousness is as half-baked as Gabriel's Dark-Prince-of-Chaos routine. It's ideological shadowplay that's ultimately a cover for making money.
Director Len Wiseman (the Underworld movies) delivers the expected ratio of close-quarters gunfights, hand-to-hand ass-kicking and vehicular insanity. The film boasts two chase sequences that rank with the best I've seen -- McClane and Matt fleeing a chopper full of Gabriel's hitmen and a climactic duel between an F-35 jet and an 18-wheeled truck in and around a collapsing interstate mix-master. But these setpieces paradoxically diminish Live Free or Die Hard by reminding us that it's yet another overscaled summer action movie; they're nowhere near as heartstopping as the bit in the first film where McClane accidentally falls into an elevator shaft, bounces downward a couple of floors and barely catches himself. In Live Free, McClane fights Mai Lihn inside a vehicle that's hanging upside-down in an elevator shaft, and 50 body blows, two dead bad guys and one fireball later, emerges victorious, crowing like a barfly that just whipped his drinking buddy at pinball. When did Everyman become Superman?
Links for the Day (June 30th, 2007)
1. "FIRST PERSON: John Pierson: An Open Letter to Michael Moore." At IndieWire, the producer of Moore's breakthrough, Roger & Me, blasts Moore as an egotist who thinks he's infallible, and endorses the anti-Moore documentary Manufacturing Dissent, which claims Moore did land an interview with GM's then-chairman for Roger & Me, but omitted it to preserve the film's catchy concept.
["Did I know you had interviewed Roger Smith when Roger & Me caught lightning in a bottle back in 1989? No. Do I have any first-hand knowledge now that you covered it up? No. But do I fully and completely believe the testimony of people who were there with you in Flint and have absolutely nothing to gain by lying - eyewitnesses like Nader organizer James Musselman or even Roger Smith himself? Yes I do. And of all the answers you tried to give to explain this away - after starting with an all too typical ad hominem Fox News-style attack - I loved this one the most: 'If I'd gotten an interview with him, why wouldn't I put it in the film?' Jeez Mike, I don't know; maybe because it would utterly destroy the structural essence of your one-man Don Quixote quest to get to GM's Chairman."]
2. "Michael Moore's Sicko: His most revolutionary, and best, film to date." By Godfrey Cheshire of The Independent Weekly.
["It's clear that all of Michael Moore's films have the same subject: American democracy, its promise and the many powerful forces that keep that promise from being realized. Not just a populist, he may in fact be the Last Jeffersonian Idealist, the kid in civics class who really believed that if Americans were given the facts and a clear choice, they would make the wisest, most enlightened decisions. Our problem right now, of course, is that American democracy is largely a joke. The people aren't in charge; money is."]
3. CinemaScope 31. The film magazine's new issue includes two pieces by Andrew Tracy (on Cornel Wilde and Killer of Sheep), plus Tom Charity on the John Wayne centennial, Dennis Lim on Abel Ferrara's Go-Go Tales, Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Global Discoveries on DVD" and Jessica Winter on Knocked Up.
["As funny and endearing as Judd Apatow’s proudly vulgar new comedy can be, it may give the viewer nostalgia for the sequence in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) when Jennifer Jason Leigh falls pregnant by a guy she shouldn’t be with, promptly gets an abortion, and rides back from the clinic with her brother, who takes her out for a cheeseburger. And that’s it: no apparent self-torment, no post-facto breakdown, no further discussion. Twenty-five years later—plus a nationwide swing to the right, the founding of Operation Rescue, and that deathless Ben Folds Five song—Knocked Up presents us with a similarly unpromising scenario: smart twentysomething who just got a big career break has inadvertently fruitful one-night stand with unemployed shlub. Yet in this case, abortion is only briefly suggested by third parties and dismissed out of hand. That’s not to say that the outcome is unrealistic: When Allison (Katherine Heigl) bursts into tears at the sight of the heartbeat on the sonogram, it’s obvious that ending the pregnancy simply isn’t an option for her—just as bearing a child simply isn’t an option for Leigh’s teenage character in Fast Times. Still, when the closest a movie like Knocked Up comes to even saying the word is “rhymes with shmashmortion,” it’s clear that we’re considering less a depiction of life as actual people live it but rather a pop-culture product that embodies the squeamish contradictions of the mainstream moment a little too accurately. This is a movie, after all, in which Allison always has sex with her bra on but we get an extreme close-up of the baby’s head inching through Mom’s conspicuously bald vagina. Who knew the miracle of childbirth could be liberated from the dark shame of pubic hair?"]
4. Hip-Hop Gangsters on an Isle of Chaos." In The New York Times, A.O. Scott on Ghosts of Cité Soleil.
["Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cité Soleil offers a tour of a notorious, hellish slum in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. There, in 2004, when this documentary was shot, gang leaders known as Chimères (the ghosts of the title) fought with one another, and also with opponents of Haiti’s president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, for control of the streets. Mr. Aristide’s decade-long decline from hero of democracy to belligerent strongman provides a backdrop for Mr. Leth’s focus on two Chimère leaders as they struggle for dominance and survival amid chaos and squalor. The glimpse afforded into their world is impressive in its intimacy; the filmmaker and his camera operators were given remarkable access, and were brave enough to venture into one of the most lawless, desperate and dangerous neighborhoods in the world."]
5. "NY movie critic Joel Siegel dead at 63." From The Associated Press.
["NEW YORK - Joel Siegel, a longtime movie critic for WABC-TV and "Good Morning America' who racked up five New York Emmy Awards for his insightful work, died Friday, the television station said. He was 63. The station said Siegel, who was famous for his weekly reviews, had been battling colon cancer. 'Joel was an important part of ABC News and we will miss him," ABC News President David Westin said in a release. 'He was a brilliant reviewer and a great reporter. But much more, he was our dear friend and colleague. Our thoughts and prayers are with Joel's family.'"]
Clip of the Day: Joel Siegel's review of Carrie: The Musical.
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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.
928. Unsere Afrikareise / Our Trip to Africa (1966, Peter Kubelka)
By Kevin B. Lee
[Editor's Note: This is the 928th entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]
Screen-of-consciousness notes of a 12-minute film played twice::
Opening sounds of cheering - man stalking game
tourists on boat: sound of a gunshot as a man’s hat gets blown of by a gust of wind
shots of spectators on boat intercuts with wounded animal in its death throes in the water = distance/ detachment emphasized across cuts
zebras blood on its black and white stripes - cut to a black woman’s face - emphasis on skin textures, surfaces
sensual
talking of tourists - mystery science theater commentary imposed on the footage
similarly, nightclub music imposed on footage
agitated cobra - cut to: woman’s naked torso
white man offering an African man a smoke - collusion?
two white men eating
shot of animal’s flesh being stripped from its carcass
trapped giraffe - shot of giraffe’s buttocks
woman’s bare breast
man emerging from hut - insinuation of sex
nightclub music
man with a gun - cuts to shot of the prow of a boat = phalluses
cut to: gaping cavity of animal carcass
cut to: woman pounding stick into a mill
cut to: woman’s naked breast
cut to: men eating - consumption...
Sex is not mentioned at all in any of the pre-reading I did, but I was definitely seeing connections. What’s fascinating about these connections is that they could be used to point to my own preoccupations as much as Kubelka’s. But never mind me - let’s ponder Kubelka for a minute. For one thing, his camera is repeatedly trained on women’s bare breasts and veiled shadowy nether-regions, a man’s penis, and the bare buttocks of… a giraffe! Moreover, out of the 14 hours of footage he reputedly shot, it is these conspicuous fragments that made the final cut. So who’s got the fixation here - Kubelka, or me for pointing out that he’s practically shoving it in my face?
To read Part 1 of Lee's entry on Our Trip to Africa, click here. To read Part 2, click here. Read more!
Friday, June 29, 2007
Links for the Day (June 29th, 2007)
1. "The Unknown Soldier." At The Reeler, Lewis Beale says Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn is yet another racist Vietnam war movie.
["For the most part, Vietnam War movies are all about us -- the Stars and Stripes -- and the ways the war messed with our heads. Thanks to our immersion into the heart of Southeast Asian darkness, we learned the Nature of True Evil, which compelled and even required us to kill everything that moved. Take for example the justly famous Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter, based on absolutely nothing that occurred in real life yet inserted into the film to show how our small-town heroes are turned into quivering neurotic messes thanks to those degenerate Orientals and their inhuman savagery. Or let's discuss Apocalypse Now a supposedly revisionist version of the war (Vietnam is all but lost, and Americans are crazed and paranoid throughout), which still treats the Vietnamese as a collective body of victims without any sense of individuality. In one famous scene, our boys are so disconnected from the locals they can't distinguish between a boat full of terrorists and one of innocent merchants, so they preemptively massacre the latter. The U.S. Air Force napalms a village in order to 'save' it from those dastardly Viet Cong. And that symbolic climax where Kurtz's disciples sacrifice a caribou while their leader is sacrificed nearby, affirming even more primitive impulses than our own? We're not supposed to think they're having a barbecue, are we? If there's a humanized Vietnamese character in either of these films, and not just a gaggle of Yellow Peril cannon fodder, I didn't see it."]
2. "Noting TV's Need for Good Editors." Variety columnist Brian Lowry thinks TV's most powerful writer-producers could use a bit more interference.
["Network notes have gotten a bad rap, but as several recent programs attest -- including David Milch's bizarre John From Cincinnati, Aaron Sorkin's self-indulgent Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and, yes, David Chase's much-debated blackout -- left to their own devices, even the finest writers can produce material that leave audiences cold and occasionally slack jawed."]
3. At The Evening Class, Michael Guillen and Michael Frawley cover the hell out of Frameline31. Selections include a wrap-up, coverage of the awards, and interviews with Alan Cumming, Mink Stole, Etyan Fox, Michael Winterbottom and Mike Jones, the personal trainer who outed his former lover, New Life Church founder Ted Haggard.
[Mike Jones: Well, most gay men have issues. We all have baggage. There's no doubt about it. But for a lot of gay men, they've never come to grips because—as gay men a lot of times—we do put up with a lot of crap. We have to [jump] hurdles to be who we are. I think sometimes since we haven't resolved a lot of the issues within ourselves, we're not quite sure how to react to certain situations. I think that has kind of happened with me. Are people happy that I exposed [Ted Haggard]? Yes. Are they happy that it was me who did it? I think a lot of them feel not. What's happened, even with HRC, is they're looking too hard at me as a person than what I did as a person to expose this man. They're looking too much at the escorting part and not at what I accomplished."]
4. Girish Shambu on the criticism of James Naremore, author of Acting in the Cinema, The Magic World of Orson Welles and More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts.
["Truth be told, when I come upon writings on film by an English Lit prof, occasionally a slight prejudice kicks in. Perhaps I’ve seen too many such writings foreground the ‘literary’ elements of film (plot and dialogue, a novelistic approach to ‘rich’ character development) at the expense of taking hold, with both hands, of the full audiovisual complex of cinema, treating, as V. F. Perkins put it, 'film as film.' When I first encountered it, Naremore’s writing gave me a bracing corrective to this stereotype. "]
5. "End of Story." In which Mark Ravenhill of The Guardian advocates gathering up copies of Robert McKee's screenwriting bible Story and burning them.
["It's a sinister conspiracy no one's talking about...It's spreading through movies, television drama, fiction writing for adults and children. It's beginning to creep into the theatre. It's a cult with thousands of glassy-eyed members. It's poisoning more and more of our culture. It's called Story. And I want you to help me put an end to it."]
Clip of the Day: "Go ahead, Stevie! Go ahead!"
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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.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Finale Interruptus: Deadwood: The Complete Third Season
By Keith Uhlich
If one experiences a slightly hollow feeling upon the completion of Deadwood's stellar third season, it's due, in part, to the fact that it wasn't meant to end this way.
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To read the rest of the review, click here.
Farscape: A Frellin' Retrospective
By Ross Ruediger
My first impression of Farscape is forever burned into the ol’ gray matter. I was at a friend’s abode and the Sci-Fi Channel was on in the background. Dominar Rygel the XVI -- a mainstay of the series, as well as a creation of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop -- filled the screen. Within seconds a judgment was made: “This looks fuckin’ stupid.”
Good thing I gave the show another chance a couple years later. And Rygel? Farscape without the Dominar would be like The Empire Strikes Back without Yoda. Actors may come and go, but Henson’s proven time and again you can’t keep a good Muppet down.
The ‘90s weren’t a hayride for a sci-fi fan of my breed. The various Star Treks felt sterile and stiff. The X-Files became a crowd-pleasing ratings whore. Babylon 5 was…well, I still don’t know what it was, but try as I might it just never grabbed me (although Londo and G’Kar always made it worth the effort). By the time Sci-Fi unveiled Farscape, hopes of enjoyable space opera had long since faded.My name is John Crichton - I'm lost. An astronaut shot through a wormhole in some distant part of the Universe. I'm trying to stay alive aboard this ship - this living ship - of escaped prisoners - my friends. If you can hear me - beware. If I make it back, will they follow? If I open the door, are you ready? Earth is unprepared – helpless - for the nightmares I've seen. Or should I stay, protect my home? Not show them you exist. But then you’ll never know…the wonders I've seen. – Crichton’s Opening Credits Voiceover from Season Three
It’s tempting to hail Farscape as a sci-fi TV breakthrough, but what really made the show work (aside from great scripts, direction, effects, puppetry and acting) was its uniquely derivative feel. Pulling from places other series didn’t acknowledge, Farscape’s beauty came from its originality being so damn unoriginal. It smacked of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century…had Buck spent his nights in Mos Eisley’s creature cantina. It had major Blake’s 7 mojo working overtime. It owed the curse word “frell” to Galactica’s “frak”, yet shamelessly kept the time unit “microt” intact. Farscape grokked Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land by turning it upside down and inside out. The show often felt like Dallas in space: A ship full of greedy, opportunistic folk who didn’t always do the right thing. They made bad decisions. Fucked and cheated on each other. Got drunk and did drugs. Quoted Monty Python.
But it was love, respect and mutual admiration that kept the day-to-day bullshit from tearing Farscape’s characters apart. Over four 22-episode seasons and a miniseries wrap-up, they learned from each other and formed a dysfunctional family willing to risk everything and die for one another. It was so cool that in the end even the bad guys weren’t all that bad. See, falling for Farscape was easy, because Farscape was me.
Season One was largely a collection of standalone tales introducing us -- through the eyes of displaced Earth astronaut John Crichton (Ben Browder) -- to this bizarre, unpredictable alien world. Central to his conflict were the Sebaceans, a race who appeared human – at least enough so that the astronaut reluctantly fell for one of them: Peacekeeper Officer Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black). Of course Aeryn really wasn’t having any of it. The key to Farscape’s eventual formula? The guy was the girl and the girl was the guy; he the hopeless romantic thinker and she the stainless steel soldier. The season’s close saw the introduction of John’s other “love”: Scorpius (Wayne Pygram), a militant Sebacean half-breed adept at playing every side of the fence, and ruthlessly intent on uncovering precious wormhole knowledge buried somewhere inside Crichton’s subconscious.
Matt Seitz quoted a friend in a recent Sopranos talkback: "…During its first season, a great show is about what it's about, and during subsequent seasons, it's about itself, and how great it is." This struck me as possibly applicable to Farscape, yet it’s hard to reconcile the notion with the feeling that regardless of how groundbreaking Season One often felt, the frequently self-indulgent material that came afterward cemented the concept as something gloriously epic. Sometimes a show is so damn out there it needs to be told how great it is so it can go even further -- to the places others fear to tread.
Season Two expanded on the themes set up in the first while at the same time taking even bigger risks. Two such offerings -- “Crackers Don’t Matter” (2.4) and “The Way We Weren’t” (2.5) -- couldn’t have been less alike. The former was a brilliant mixture of wit and slapstick set entirely onboard the living ship, Moya. The latter was an intense, personal drama exploring previously unknown histories of both Aeryn and Pilot (the peculiar, gentle creature who serves as Moya’s, um, pilot) and their unusual connection to each other. These two episodes demonstrated flexibility -- Farscape could wander in wildly different directions and still work. The season also introduced the Scarrans, the reptilian race with whom the Sebacean Peacekeepers are continually at odds. Earlier I referred to Scorpius as a Sebacean half-breed – his other half is Scarran.
The entirety of Season Three was arguably Farscape’s crowning achievement (and the point has been argued to death). It’s a rollercoaster of a book told in 22 chapters, with a distinct beginning (Eps. 3.1-3.6), absorbing middle (3.7-3.16) and epic end (3.17-3.22).
3.1 was titled “Season of Death”; it was the shape of things to come and Farscape’s third season lived up to it from start to finish. The “Self-Inflicted Wounds” two-parter (3.3 & 3.4) delved deeper into the mysteries of wormholes as well as showcased the tearful sacrifice of a series regular. “Eat Me” (3.6), a sci-fi spin on Night of the Living Dead, featured a villain capable of “twinning” people for his own nasty purposes. It ended with two John Crichtons returning to Moya – problem being the “twin” element. This wasn’t a case of cloning – the two Johns were equal and the same and the situation wasn’t resolved within the hour. Indeed, each John grabbed a half of the cast and the two parties split up for the season’s middle section, with every other episode focusing on one of the two groups. Now it didn’t take a genius to figure out sooner or later that one of the Johns would meet his maker, and any fan who’d been paying attention to the way Farscape did things knew which one it would end up being: The one whose passing could be milked for the maximum dramatic effect. If one were judging from every angle, “Into the Lion’s Den Part II: Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” (3.21) may well have been Farscape’s apex. I’m still able to put those 45 minutes on and wallow in every frame. If I could recommend one season of Farscape for someone to view, it’d be the third -- yet that’s a double-edged recommendation because, without the primer of the first two, much of Season Three’s drama is lessened considerably and there’s a good chance none of it would make much sense.
With Season Four, the show morphed into a near operatic (though uneven) blend of tried & true and risky & daring. Some of it sailed and some of it sunk – yet the 16x9 visuals peaked and were slicker than whale shit in an ice flow. Unfortunately, Farscape also lost some narrative focus at this point (The “Season 4 Curse” -- see also Six Feet Under & The Sopranos)…and then it was abruptly canceled. An insanely well-organized and thought-out fan campaign led to the eventual production of a wrap-up miniseries, “The Peacekeeper Wars”. Tautly directed by Brian Henson, it satisfactorily tied up most of the loose ends, delivered a hellaciously relentess story along the way, and sent the concept sailing off into the uncharted territories of near-obscurity. The sole mission of “The Peacekeeper Wars” was to make sure the series got the ending it deserved. It was a beautifully executed love letter to the fans, as well as to those who'd worked so hard on it for so long. Yet for all John Crichton and Co. meant to so many people just a few years ago, these days it often feels as if they never even existed. Well, maybe that’s not entirely the case.
Before even a frame was shot, a noteworthy initial guideline from the creative head honchos – David Kemper and Rockne S. O’Bannon – was simplistic and daring: “If Star Trek already does it, then it’s off limits”. The aim was to create the anti-Trek. (Interesting to note that Kemper penned two eps of Next Generation and one of Voyager; numerous other Farscape scribes can be traced back to Trek as well.)
Farscape’s influence was felt after the fact – far more so than when it was actually on the air. Probably its biggest contribution to TV sci-fi was its approach to sexuality – people on the show got it on, which at the time was nearly non-existent in the genre, yet today is rampant. When Enterprise was unveiled, it seemed to have taken a few notes from the Farscape book in regard to sexuality. Suddenly the franchise that had been frigid since the late 80s featured a hot and sometimes even horny Vulcan…and when Star Trek encourages viewers to lust over Vulcans, you know the times they are a changin’.
Second on the influential roster would be its wicked sense of humor – Farscape could be as funny as it was dramatic. Again, B.S. (Before ‘Scape) so much space opera was dictated by the dry Trek template – clearly somewhere between Kirk stepping down and Picard taking over, humanity lost the ability to have a good laugh. Babylon 5 even seemed to present its characters as mostly humorless. Then again, Farscape was set in the present rather than the future (well, the present on the other side of the universe) and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with humorless sci-fi, but people on spaceships who’ll dance for me are far more entertaining. (Oh yeah -- Farscape had some bitchin’ dance scenes, too.) A lot of this probably stemmed from Farscape’s lack of emphasis on the military, which was yet another deviation from the sci-fi norm. Moya was a ship full of criminals on the run; the stodgy, militaristic Peacekeepers were basically around to chase them every five or six episodes. One of the great Farscape experiments was the episode "Revenging Angel" (3.16), which literally shifted into an animated Warner Bros. cartoon for about half the story. The bold, ballsy and weird material explored the relationship of Crichton and fellow crewmember D’Argo (Anthony Simcoe) through making the former the Roadrunner and the latter Wile E. Coyote. In the end, the entire thing ended up being a dramatic, poignant test of what exactly their friendship was about.
The series also helped pave the way, like Babylon 5 before it, for arc-driven sci-fi. These days it seems almost untenable for a sci-fi show to lack an arcing storyline of some kind. Farscape’s arc became so out there and convoluted by the end that you had to tip your hat at its audacity to be its own dog. Back when ‘Scape was doing this, it was immensely counter-productive to building an audience: You were either onboard Moya or you were adrift in space. The show was rarely designed for the uninitiated. In this day and age of TV on DVD, these issues don’t plague television as doggedly, but it’s easy to forget that the TV-on-DVD revolution is really something which viewers have become acclimated to over the past few years. Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Doctor Who and maybe even Lost and Heroes all owe some of their vision to the groundwork Farscape laid. (Hell, Stargate went so far as to hire not one, but both of its lead actors.)
Yet there’s one area where Farscape excelled that hasn’t been duplicated: Its presentation of creatures and aliens. Doctor Who scratches the surface from time to time, but it’s still in junior high compared to the accomplishments of Henson’s Creature Shop. I remain stunned that the BBC hasn't hired them at least once for the new Doctor Who, and it’s somewhat baffling the Shop seems virtually unemployed these days. Yet in saying that, I’m forced to consider my initial negative reaction to seeing Rygel. Shit, George Lucas eventually took Yoda into the CGI realm despite the success of the puppet incarnation (indeed, even Rygel briefly went digital in the opening moments of “The Peacekeeper Wars”). Without getting into a rant about the pitfalls of CGI, it’s unfortunate the common consensus these days is that computer animation somehow looks more “real” than a three-dimensional puppet. CGI technology has evolved to the point where anything can be accomplished with the right amount of time and money. Puppetry is a fascinating wizardry that seems to be on the way out, if it's not already extinct (a CGI Kermit is probably right around the corner). I think it was Ben Browder who once said that he loved Rygel because he could physically grab, smack and beat the shit out of him when the character deserved it (which was often). Wait a minute – maybe there are still some areas where CGI isn’t the only solution.
Probably the most offensive thing you can say to a Farscape fan is “Isn’t that the show with all the Muppets?” Frellin' pisses me off!! I’ve come a long way through those uncharted territories, haven’t I? Star Wars was brought up a couple times here, and I'd like to specifically recommend Farscape to any Star Wars fans who were less than enthused by the new trilogy. If there's one thing that I specifically missed in Episodes I-III, it was the lack of swashbuckling that Episodes IV-VI displayed. Farscape will buckle your swash.
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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.
Links for the Day (June 28th, 2007)
1. "Kanye West's 'Stronger' Video." By Brandon Soderberg of No Trivia.
["The Kanye video is primarily a homage to a sequence where Tetsuo is subjected to a series of tests by the government, then locked in a hospital, and busts out, destroying an entire line of armed guards...It all works conceptually, invoking Akira...The character of Tetsuo is apt because it suggests Kanye's mix of blind, righteous indignation and unblinking self-awareness. Tetsuo is the antagonist of Akira, slowly overtaken by his powers and the hubris newfound power entails, but he is also undeniably the main attraction, in part, because of his out-of-control-ness; he's the most complex and engaging character. I think Kanye understands these kinds of contradictions in himself."]
2. "Know Thyself." At Exploding Kinetoscope, Chris Stangl compares the blockbuster Scream and the indie horror film There's Nothing Out There, which some say is Wes Craven's unacknowledged inspiration.
["'Horror,' Stephen King used to be fond of telling interviewers, 'Is as conservative as a three-piece suit.'"]
3. "Pick Your Poison: Fists or Fireballs." Manohla Dargis on Live Free or Die Hard.
["Life or age or something has mellowed Mr. Willis. He no longer enters a movie like God's gift, as he did almost two decades ago in the first Die Hard, lips pursed as if he alone were in on the joke — which, given the fat salary he was earning, perhaps he was. In Live Free or Die Hard he enters swinging, fist smashing through hard glass and sinking into soft flesh. He's making a point and so is the movie, namely that McClane (and Mr. Willis) is ready to earn our love again by performing the same lovably violent, meathead tricks as before. And look, he's not laughing, not exactly, even if the film ends up a goof."]
4. "The films of Joni Mitchell: A brief retrospective." At Scanners, Jim Emerson analyzes the singer-songwriter's cinematic lyrics.
["How about the camerawork in this shot from 'The Boho Dance' (from 'The Hissing of Summer Lawns'):A camera pans the cocktail hour
I see this as a horizontal dolly shot more than a 'pan.' And not too much zeroing in on the legs. Maybe a tilt down as the lady drops an hors d'oeuvre, just so you have a chance to notice. Or maybe somebody seated in the foreground spots the flawed stockings from across the room and there's a bit of rack focus to the lady's gams. Maybe we just see her in a full shot, with her back to us, standing in a cluster of other people who can't see the runs that are turned toward the camera. Or, if she's seated, perhaps she crosses or uncrosses her stems briefly, allowing us a glimpse of the telltale hosiery. There are lots of ways to shoot it, but Mitchell tells you what the shot needs to convey so you can come up with the specific compositions yourself."]
Behind a blind of potted palms
And finds a lady in a Paris dress
With runs in her nylons
5. "Hollywood Scrambles as Strike Looms." Michael Cieply of The New York Times on the industry's union-driven rush hour.
[" Though it’s unclear whether the forthcoming contract expirations of the entertainment industry’s writers, actors and directors will lead to a work stoppage over the next year, Hollywood is nonetheless frantically hedging its bets. Producers, executives, agents and filmmakers are aware that even a hard-working star can most likely squeeze in no more than two movies before June 30 of next year, when the last of the deals end. After that date no studio wants to be caught with filming on its schedule, especially under expensive “pay or play” deals. (Such arrangements require companies to pay actors or others even if the movie isn’t made.) And that has turned moviedom’s midsummer months into an unusually tense season."]
Clip of the Day: "That that that that that don't kill me/Can only make me stronger."
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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.
“La Jetée”/Sans Soleil: Chris Marker's Unique Vision Yields an Essential DVD
By Matt Zoller Seitz
“This is the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood.”
To read the article, click here. Read more!
Stage and Screen: Pacino: An Actor's Vision
By Matt Zoller Seitz
Though far from perfect, the films are revealing, because they suggest that Pacino, who started out on the New York stage, is still a theater artist at heart-—a fact apparent not just in his choice of material (and in his often grandiose acting), but in his direction, which manages to be at once cinematic and stagy; all three movies boast odd images, edits and effects that catch the viewer off guard.
To read the article, click here. Read more!
Groovy: This is Tom Jones
By Matt Zoller Seitz
In his autumn years, swivel-hipped belter Tom Jones has become a huggable icon of ’60s kitsch. One of the many pleasures of this three-disc compilation of material from his 1969–71 variety show is its confirmation that Jones’s talent was no joke.
To read the article, click here. Read more!
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Jack McGee Without Pity: Rescue Me's Fire Chief Burns Bridges
By Matt Zoller Seitz
McGee says that Rescue Me star and executive producer Denis Leary demands deference from costars, ostracizes those who don't grant it, and avoids taking responsibility for unpleasant creative decisions, preferring to subcontract the delivery of bad news to his fellow executive producers, Peter Tolan and Jim Serpico. "He's a bully, is what he is," McGee says. "Bullies most of the time don't have the guts to do things themselves."
To read the article, click here. Read more!
Keep Your Head Down, Balls: The Sergio Leone Anthology
By Keith Uhlich
The films of Sergio Leone are cobbled together from disparate parts and influences. As Sir Christopher Frayling notes in his audio commentary for A Fistful of Dollars (the first of four films included in the recently released DVD box set, "The Sergio Leone Anthology"), the opening credits—with their galloping, target-practice-ready silhouettes—are meant to mimic the James Bond series, then tremendously popular in Leone's home country of Italy. But to label this and Leone's subsequent productions as quintessentially Italian is to neglect the films' cosmopolitan realities: financial backers from Germany, Spain, and America; primary location shooting in Franco-controlled Spain; stars of all stripes, among them Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach, Gian Maria Volontè, Marianne Koch, and Klaus Kinski; and vocal post-dubbing tailored to the country of exhibition. Leone presides over these celluloid mish-mashes like a master chef; he isn't the only purveyor of these so-called spaghetti westerns, but he is the one whose worldwide reputation is most secure.
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To read the rest of the review, click here.
Links for the Day (June 27th, 2007)
1. Wells on Spielberg. By Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere.
["In a press release about the forthcoming TCM documentary Spielberg on Spielberg (airing July 9th at 8 pm), George Lucas is quoted as follows: "Steven is the consummate filmmaker. He has an extraordinary ability to make brilliant movies -- brilliantly artistic, brilliantly entertaining, and brilliantly successful. Steven's genius is that he knows, innately, how to communicate through film. He is one of the few directors I know who can actually edit in his head while he is filming." Here's Hollywood Elsewhere's compassionate revision of this statement, which I've sent along to TCM publicists: "Before he compromised and then totally muddied up his once-hallowed reputation with forehead slappers like 1941, The Color Purple, Always, Empire of the Sun, Hook, Amistad, A.I., Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal and Munich, Steven Spielberg was once (i.e., from 1975 to 1982) regarded as a consummate filmmaker. He seemed to have an extraordinary ability to make brilliant movies -- stylistically vivid (although not very artistic), often entertaining, and, of course, financially successful. The money part is what finally counts for industry mainstreamers who derive satisfaction from showing obeisance before power and kowtowing to the heavyweights."]
2. "Slate's Summer Movies Issue." Articles include Eric Lichtenfeld's "Yippee-ki-yay...The Greatest One-Liner in Movie History"; Marisa Meltzer's "Leisure and Innocence: The Eternal Appeal of the Stoner Movie"; "Revolutionary Road: The Movie"; and "The State of the Ninja," by Grady Hendrix. Related: The debut of Slate V, an online video spin-off of the magazine.
["The Israeli affinity for ninjas makes sense when you consider that ninjas are basically supercool Jews. Both practice esoteric traditions that must be kept pure or they'll lose their power, both wear black outfits, and both can destroy much larger and more numerous opponents. The main difference is that while observant Jews spend a lot of time praying, observant ninjas spend a lot of time hiding and killing people."]
3. "The Return and Debut of Renowned Screen Capture Quiz." In which House contributor Dan Jardine revives a game from the dearly departed Cinemarati.
["If you are able to correctly guess the identities of BOTH films first, you will win a GRAND PRIZE. I promise to dust it off before sending it your way."]
4. "A Spurned Parody of Die Hard Returns to YouTube, Approved." By Maria Aspan of The New York Times.
["The song’s refrain says, 'We’re gonna die, die, die as hard as we can!'"]
5. "This Is Exactly Why I So Love Hollywood." By Nikki Finke of LA Weekly.
["Tom: Please give me a call about a spec script Elia Infascelli-Smith has gone out with called $40,000 Man. As you know, along with Universal, we control the rights to The Six Million Dollar Man. My understanding is this spec includes characters we own. Best, Richard"]
Clip of the Day:
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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.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Big Love Tuesdays: Season 2, Ep. 3, "Reunion"
By Todd VanDerWerff
Midway through Monday night’s episode of Big Love, “Reunion,” Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) sits in front of a video gambling machine and pokes at the screen, paging through the various games offered. Bill has made a point to the leader of the Juniper Creek compound, Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), of how immoral he finds gambling, but Roman claims that this is the way to go. By using the machines to profit from others’ sins, the United Effort Brotherhood can pour money into its own way of life. Bill sits before the machine, glasses perched on his nose, and imitates the little beeping noises it makes (Paxton’s performance is probably the weakest among the leads, but he and the writers understand the earnestly dorky and law-abiding way the character engages with the world, and show it in little moments like this). Bill, in his own way in this moment, confronts one of the central conflicts of the whole series.
The central question facing most members of fundamentalist religious groups or sects is how deeply they want to engage with the world. To what degree are they going to follow that old commandment from the Gospel of John to be “in the world but not of the world”? In some ways, the whole of Big Love is about how anyone who professes to believe in a creed or code that goes above and beyond themselves can function at all in mainstream American society, which is built on a long-standing series of compromises designed to guarantee everyone certain rights and freedoms. At one extreme lies the Juniper Creek compound, where those who practice polygamy live in relative seclusion from the rest of the world and carry on in a strange amalgam of 19th century rural life and 21st century intrigue. At the other “extreme” lies what those of us who are not fundamentalists would think of as the normal world -- one where The Newlywed Game coyly hints at sex and one where premarital sex is all but expected of teenagers. The Henricksons espouse the values of the Juniper Creek bunch, but live in the world of the suburbs, all sharply contrasting colors and bright, green backyards. Look past the polygamy and the plight of the Henricksons is the plight of any modern mega-church goer; you can’t serve both God and mammon, but don’t you really want to? That the series plays all of these ideas so unironically is one of the factors that seems to keep some from embracing it fully.
Big Love is about the conflict between two worlds, between the life you were leading and the life you are leading, or between the life you are leading and the life you wish you were leading. In many ways, the scenes with Roman are the least interesting simply because Roman is the least bothered by the disparity between his status and his way of life (though this may change as the law sweeps in at the end of the episode to arrest Roman). All of the other characters face conflicts like this, be it between a life they didn’t want to choose and their choice to live it, or between their relatively young age and their status as a wife and mother at that young age. Hell, there’s even a deeply repressed homosexual (Matt Ross’ Alby Grant, a character conceived of and played a bit too broadly, but one who struggles with the tension between self and cause just like everyone else on the series). Teenagers long to tamp down sexual urges and fail. Children raised to be brides for much older men escape into a suburban wonderland of temptation. The first of Bill’s three wives, Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), tries to make peace with her disapproving family and can’t even speak to them.
“Reunion” is probably the best episode of the second season so far, largely because it ditches the increasingly irritating shenanigans at Henrickson Home Plus (Bill’s co-worker is consigned to a small scene where he talks with Bill on the phone) and more smoothly integrates the Juniper Creek characters into the main Henrickson storyline (Bill and his second wife, Nicki (Chloë Sevigny) travel to Juniper Creek for the titular event where Bill also meets with the UEB board about the video gambling issue). Juniper Creek isn’t an inherently awful idea for subplots for the series, but it often feels shoehorned in and occasionally didactic, as if HBO and the series’ creators suffered a failure of nerve and decided to show us how the majority of polygamists really live. Stanton’s performance is occasionally worth all of this -- he’s simultaneously stately and terrifying -- but the setting is never as compelling as Bill’s own compound of three homes in Sandy, Utah.
Continuing with the season’s trend of focusing on one Henrickson wife per episode, much of the action back in Sandy focuses on Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), the youngest of Bill’s wives and the one who seems to have no prior connection to polygamy before her marriage to Bill. Tripplehorn, Paxton and Sevigny have reaped most of the praise from critics for their performances, but Goodwin is just as good and largely unheralded because what she does is rarely as dramatic as what the others get to play. Margie is sweet and a little naive, though she inevitably stumbles along toward the right thing to do. A scene like the one where Margie tries to smooth things over between Barb and her sister with an ill-timed phone call could feel like just another scene from any old family soap, but Goodwin plays everything so guilelessly that none of this feels particularly forced. The episode’s climactic scene, where she confronts Barb about her queasily pseudo-sexual relationship with Barb’s son (she’s only five years his senior), was perfectly underplayed by both Goodwin and Tripplehorn, and the sort of scene only this series can do in how it examines the challenges of this alternative family unit and the strengths provided by having more people around.
Speaking of alternative family units, the episode for the first time makes textual the series’ allusions to gay marriage (Roman writes a letter protesting the anti-gay marriage amendment -- only because it defined marriage as between ONE man and ONE woman instead of one MAN and one WOMAN). Barb also speaks with two fellow polygamist wives about how all of the normal polygamist families have to stay “closeted.” Fortunately, the episode doesn't focus too heavily on this, as these sorts of things work better buried into the fabric of the show. One of the foremost arguments against legalizing gay marriage is that if you legalized that, you’d have to legalize things like polygamy shortly thereafter. Big Love’s creators, Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, are a gay couple, and the series (at least in its first season) occasionally felt like the duo's attempts to say, “C’mon. Could the polygamists be THAT bad?” Couching the whole thing in characters who were unapologetic religious fundamentalists felt like even more of a masterstroke. But this only works at a subtextual level. Once the subtext becomes text, the metaphor stretches too thin, simply because any same-sex relationship between two people is fundamentally different from a polygamous but heterosexual marriage between four.
No mind though. The rest of the episode so skillfully sets up the conflicts between the world of Juniper Creek and the world of the Henricksons, or the world of the Henricksons and the world of the suburbs, that minor bobbles can be forgiven. Nicki confronts her father, Roman, over his outing of Nicki’s family in last season’s governor’s mansion ceremony, tearfully making the break with Juniper Creek, and finally siding with her husband and sister-wives. In the last two episodes, the series has done more for the character of Nicki than it did in the whole first season. In some ways she’s almost as childlike as Margene, especially when dealing with her emotions and passions. Her almost frightened glances up at Bill as he strips himself and then her while the two stand surrounded by sheets hung out to dry (yet another instance of the series using the fundamentalist Mormon idea of the family passing through “veils” in the afterlife to find each other as a literal touchstone -- you can see it reflected in the opening credits too) feel more appropriate to a shy girl than to the shrieking harridan the character could be in the first season. And while Barb struggles to make peace with her family, her son Ben (Douglas Smith) tries to get back on the straight and narrow by dallying with the group Straight Edge (he got himself beat up in the process), while also attempting to heed his friend’s and his sister’s advice to break off his sexual relationship with his girlfriend.
At some point, every fundamentalist must confront the idea of whether they’ll choose their self or their creed. Most of the characters on Big Love have made this choice already and are dealing with the emotional fallout in one way or another. The teenagers, though, are all being forced to make this choice anew (even Amanda Seyfried’s Sarah, who’s joined a post-Mormon support group as a way to break with her parents’ life, chastises her sexually active brother, reminding him of when they were taught that it was better to die than give up virginity before marriage), and as the episode ends with Rhonda (Daveigh Chase) having snuck away from Juniper Creek to the Henrickson home (seemingly because of her growing realization that she’s just not attracted to Roman, her promised husband), we’re reminded that Big Love may be just as much about who future generations choose to be as what their parents chose to do now.
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.
Ordinary Bad: Evening
By N.P. Thompson
I have such fond memories of hating The Hours, and Evening, on the surface, appears to offer a similar round of literary pretentiousness, even some of the same cast members. Imagine my disappointment, then, on finding a perfectly ordinary bad movie, with nothing peculiarly distinguished about its badness. Evening opens with the gentle sound of ocean waves under austere white-on-black credits. Digitized fireflies flicker against charcoal clouds in the night sky, before the camera alights upon unnaturally blue water with sunrise on the horizon. A motionless sailboat, in which Claire Danes lies outstretched, rests in the bay. Vanessa Redgrave stands nearby on the craggy shore, wearing falsely blond hair and a formal gown of black lace. Redgrave and Danes are playing the same character, and there the old Ann Lord perches, beaming at her younger self, the former Ann Grant, prostrate in the boat. That’s about as close to The Hours’s mannered ghoulishness as we get.
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To read the rest of the review, click here.
Links for the Day (June 26th, 2007)
1. "Altruism Among Chimps": I love every ape I see, from Chimpan-A to Chimpanzee.
["On the ever-shrinking list of behaviors unique to humans, one stands out: selfless altruism. Or so scientists thought. "]
2. "Sneak Preview: Mister Lonely": Clarence Carter bitch-slaps Harmony Korine. Click here for clips from the film.
["Michael’s narrative only occupies something like two-thirds of Mister Lonely; the rest is taken up with the tale of crazed priest Werner Herzog and his troupe of miraculous flying nuns in South America featuring what may well be the best exxxtreme sports footage ever witnessed in an “art” film. What these two strands have to do with one another is anyone’s guess, and while I’m sure the mastermind behind these poignant juxtapositions probably has a boilerplate dealing with questions of self-actualization, fame, and faith all ready to go, it’s only so much bunk. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of bunk that weak-willed scenesters lap up in spades, so look out for appalling rhapsodizing should this thing ever find its way to our shores. So twee and precious it makes Belle and Sebastian seem like Slayer, and incoherent to the point of madness, “Mister Lonely” is a special animal. Thank goodness its only been loosed upon the rarified festival circuit thus far…should it get out into the world, the consequences could be disastrous."]
3. "'Evan' struggles to find right audience": If only he'd worn a red clown nose.
["Did Universal's pricey comedy "Evan Almighty" suffer an identity crisis heading into its opening weekend? Sequel is far more family friendly than the adult-themed "Bruce Almighty," but not all parents may have gotten the message. Same for the Christian crowd."]
4. "Ratner Will Direct Hefner Biopic": Oh, sweet Jesus.
["Brett Ratner has been tapped to helm Playboy, about the colorful life of the magazine's founder, for Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment."]
5. "Masculine, Animal Logic": Walter Chaw on the third season of Rescue Me.
["As much a product of our post-apocalypse as "Deadwood", "Rescue Me", like that David Milch masterpiece, is about the flattening of society and the reconstruction of it according to masculine, animal logic. Indeed, it's a good argument that society has never been constructed any other way."]
Clip of the Day: Luke, these are your numbers.
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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.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Winding through McWorld: Michael Moore's Sicko
By Steven Boone
--Tony Benn, Former Member of British Parliament, in Sicko--
Mr. Benn's wise words get to the Tootsie Roll center of Michael Moore's searching, hilarious, heartbroken American anthem, Sicko. Moore is out to reduce fear, restore morale and advocate for Americans to keep more of what little money they have in their pockets. If this were the 1960's, he'd have to die or be humiliated into hiding. Hoover's FBI would have found some way to make him disappear from the national scene -- maybe step out of the way of some wacko assassin or send an underage hooker up to Moore's hotel room. In 2007 McWorld, all it takes to neutralize Moore's message is to remind everybody that he's fat and disheveled. Or so it would seem after rocket attacks like Roger and Me, Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 failed to inspire widespread rebellion in the land.
Sicko is different. This polemic about the corrupt nexus of health insurance companies, government and the pharmaceutical industry doesn't just expose the powerful as wanting us out of the way; it shows that they also want most of us dead. Moore portrays workaday Americans collectively like the dutiful wife who has a faint suspicion about her abusive husband, but no idea that he's planning to have her killed for the life insurance money. Marriage is trust. For an American working stiff like me, watching Sicko is like discovering the hitman's instructions in a desk drawer. The film gives us that insert shot of the note and the lingering reaction shot of the wife coming to grips. Hurts like hell.Moore surveys a cross-section of sick Americans whose HMO's denied them treatment options that could have restored their health simply because said treatment wasn't covered under their policy. Sicko provides documentation and testimony to prove many of these companies manipulate the client approval/denial process to skew toward denial. Various people tell their horror stories of being turned away from emergency rooms, refused cancer treatment, charged outrageous prices for life-saving medicine. On a 1971 White House tape, we hear John Ehrlichman telling Richard Nixon that industrialist Henry J. Kaiser plans to offer newfangled "private enterprise" medical coverage in which "all the incentives are toward less medical care, because the less care they give them, the more money they make." Nixon blithely responds, "Not bad." Like a lot of other, more famous Nixon tapes, it's a slap-in-the-face sample of how the elite really feel about us. Moore and his research team dig out from under many such muddy rocks.
For the first half of the film, Moore forgoes his old trespass-and-ambush interviews with powerful assholes and simply narrates the stories of everyday people struggling with the HMO's. Cool, but that's not what makes this his best film yet. The genius move here is that, when he does enter the picture, Moore ambushes the heroes and the innocents of his story, not the villains. He harasses medical workers and patients in Canada, England and France, all countries with free national health care. Fully in character as the schlubby Midwestern bumbler, he demands that these people come clean about how terrible their health care systems are. The joke is in the wind-up: Before this fact-finding world tour, the film shares American propaganda films and TV news segments demonizing "socialized medicine" as the spectre of communism. These deliriously cinematic stretches of found footage, pop culture references and movie soundtracks (including one Willy Wonka ditty that I haven't yet stopped laughing over) show Moore keeping pace with the brilliant BBC documentarian Adam Curtis (The Power of Nightmares, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom?).So Moore is portraying only an average American whose mind might be clouded with all that disinformation. The doctors, nurses, pharmacists, American expatriates and natives in those foreign countries happily play along with him. When he learns how efficient and equitable these systems are, he has a fit. Pocket change for AIDS and Cancer medication? Free hospital stays? "It was enough to make me want to put down my Freedom Fries." His astonishment and culture shock may be rehearsed, but it comes from a sincere place, I'd say. It's as if Moore is re-enacting the disillusionment he suffered the first time he learned these facts.
Each of Moore's films has an ambitious agenda, but Sicko's mission is larger than even Fahrenheit 9/11's intention to derail the bogus War on Terror. If Moore gets enough Americans to get serious about a free universal health care program, this idiocracy might get back on the road to becoming the "educated, healthy and confident" citizenry Mr. Benn mourns. His elegant filmmaking here gives him a better shot than ever. Moore's new strategy suggests a lot of regrouping and reflection after Fahrenhieit 9/11 had more success at the box office than in reversing government policy. I sense that he's been groping for a way to really get people riled up, in a manner that no amount of government spin could undo. He seems to realize that making an ass out of a C.E.O. on camera may be fun, but it doesn't draft converts. Sicko is all about talking to the people, getting their stories out there, and connecting them with others, across all borders. The film's narrative line winds like an Indian trail because it follows Mike to the homes and workplaces of folks who wrote to him with HMO horror stories or national health care praise songs.Moore conducts one last ambush stunt for old time's sake, taking ailing 9/11 rescue workers to Guantanamo Bay prison for the same thorough, government-administered health care that Al-Qaeda detainees are getting. The gag goes nowhere, but when Moore and the "9/11 heroes" move on to Cuba, Sicko gives us arguably the loveliest passage in any of his films. At a Cuban state hospital, the 9/11 workers get free medical tests that would have been too expensive in the U.S. You might have questions about the value of this episode as a Castro publicity stunt, but the gratitude of a woman who had to sell her house to make a dent in her medical bills is hard to shake. Later, when the 9/11 workers bond and exchange hugs with respectful Cuban firefighters, Moore makes his most beautiful and dangerous visual statement: Imagine there's no countries.
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Steven Boone is a New York-based critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of the pop culture blog Big Media Vandalism. Read more!
John From Cincinnati Mondays: Season 1, Ep. 3, "His Visit: Day Two Continued"
By Keith Uhlich
The fences go up in the aftermath of the miracle that closed the second episode of John From Cincinnati. In “His Visit: Day 2 Continued”, young Shaun Yost (Greyson Fletcher) is now fully, and inexplicably, recovered from his fatal neck injury. His family and friends spirit him away from the hospital on the roundabout recommendation of the kindly and curious Dr. Michael Smith (Garret Dillahunt), but instead of basking in the joy of the occurrence, this head-on encounter with the unexplained allows all involved to open up past wounds and kindle new fears and prejudices. Creator David Milch and episode scripter Ted Mann’s meaning is clear: old habits die hard.
The ever-paranoid (and Debby Boone-fearing) Barry Cunningham’s allusion to Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” provides the episode its primary theme: in the presence of the unknown, retreat to what is familiar. Milch, Mann, and director Mark Tinker illustrate this often involuntary foible of human nature in various ways, many of them memorably comical. Drug dealer Steady Freddy Lopez (Dayton Callie), consigned to sitting vigil in the hospital parking lot, gets the Milch soliloquy of the week, expounding on the pleasures of the Sarah Brightman-Andrea Bocelli cover of “Con Te Partirò” before recoiling when Bocelli doesn’t come in where expected. “What’s this? Different version?” he asks of the ether.Perhaps so, in the sense that even a favored song can attune itself to the needs of a particular moment in time, revealing, in the process, untold and illuminating layers of meaning. Yet the discovery is still unnerving, especially for those of us caught, so irrevocably, in the confines of routine. The best thing to do, as Freddy discovers, is to go with the flow, first fracturing the hand of his subordinate Palaka (Paul Ben Victor) in an ultimately unnecessary attempt at pretense, then helping to distract the reporters when the Yost family (blood relatives and surrogates alike) exits a hospital side-door with Shaun in tow. Brightman’s populist soprano stylings swell to the occasion (one more example in John From Cincinnati of a collective working in unwitting harmony), and the effect is lyrical, soul-stirring, profound.
Indeed, my favorite scenes of John From Cincinnati’s third installment are those underscored with song and, to this end, the episode’s key sequence must be counted as the one between otherworldly John Monad (Austin Nichols) and surf-store employee Kai (Keala Kennelly). A propulsive Delta Blues ditty as background accompaniment, John exhorts Kai to “See God,” whereupon she falls into a trance and witnesses several Imperial Beach denizens – drug-addict surfer Butchie Yost (Brian Van Holt), motel employee Ramon Gaviota (Luis Guzman), and illegal alien shuttle-man Vietnam Joe (Jim Beaver) – succumb to a intense burning sensation. It's another moment of unconscious connection, and Kai isn’t having any of it. “Don’t do that to me again, John,” she says upon waking.Some may dismiss Kai’s seemingly instinctive evasion of the miraculous as a writer’s conceit, but it meshes with the surf-culture mentality that Milch and company are exploring. A clear dividing-line exists, for many a surfer, between land and sea. Only on the ocean are they fully themselves, attuned to the rhythms of the world in ways that, for the most part, can only be reconstituted in landlock via illicit and/or solitary means (and then only as pale imitation). Off the waters of Imperial Beach, these characters fall prey to their weaknesses, a point quite literally illustrated when elder surf statesman Mitch Yost (Bruce Greenwood) catches his leg on a nail while jumping a backyard fence. “You’re hanging there like a side of beef,” says Butchie when he comes upon his dad’s predicament. The two connect for a brief moment of father/son simpatico, but once the physical hurdle is cleared, Mitch goes on his selfishly separate way, ostensibly to rendezvous with imposter filmmaker Cass (Emily Rose), who is in the clandestine employ of surf promoter Linc Stark (Luke Perry). (Most everyone on John From Cincinnati is wearing a mask of one kind or another.)
About the only person who openly engages with the day’s events is Dr. Smith, who comes unannounced to the Yost household and requests an audience with Shaun. “Watching a stranger tie himself in knots is probably not your idea of fun just now,” he stammers to Shaun’s grandmother Cissy (Rebecca De Mornay), who nonetheless admits the physician with little resistance. Dr. Smith finds Shaun in perfect health, and also somewhat annoyed at the adults’ treatment of him as a fragile vessel. “This sucks,” he offers while Dr. Smith runs him through a series of physical tests. All this miraculous brouhaha and he just wants to go skateboarding. For all the criticism (undeserved, in my opinion) of Fletcher’s flat-affect performance, he makes for a wonderfully reactive and observant screen presence. An earlier scene in which Cissy and Mitch have a heated argument is punctuated by a cut-away shot of Shaun lying on his bed, fully aware of the events transpiring just outside his door. The youngest Yost has not yet built up his protective emotional barriers – everything makes an impression, for better and for worse.“I am so happy,” says Dr. Smith in the episode’s climactic moments, though it’s clear that he doesn’t quite know where his elation is coming from. It is merely organic to the moment, and Shaun, with Cissy’s hard-won permission, acts as the feeling’s conduit. As a crowd gathers outside the Yost household, Shaun takes to the backyard half-pipe, wowing the gathered reporters, neighbors, friends, and strangers as Lazarus might have the multitudes at Bethany. Kai and John come upon the throng. He looks forward knowingly, while she looks on in awe. “See God, Kai,” he says to his companion. And as Shaun effortlessly crests the half-pipe’s apex – bridging the gap, breaching the wall – she, and we, do just that.
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Keith Uhlich is managing editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications. John From Cincinnati recaps run every Monday for the duration of the series. Read more!
Links for the Day (June 25th, 2007)
1. "Rate Your Blog." The blog sensation that's sweeping the nation is just a silly gimmick designed to get people to visit the dating site Mingle.com. And wouldn't ya know -- it's working. Thanks to The Shamus for the initial tip-off. The graphic above is Mingle.com's rating for The House Next Door, based on the following criteria: "Death 15x; kill 6x; hell 5x; gay 4x; pain 3x; steal 2x; porn 1x." If you want to bump your rating from a lame-ass "PG," try using "cocksucker" and "motherfucker" as pronouns.
2. "Israel to Transfer Millions to Abbas to Bolster Him." By Isabel Kershner of The New York Times. Related: "Bomb Kills 6 UN Soldiers in S. Lebanon,"; "Video shows kidnapped BBC man wearing explosives belt"; "Brown vows to learn from 'divisive' Iraq war"; and "Middle East Conflict Intensifies as Blah, Blah, Blah Etc. Etc.."
["The U.N. has issued a strongly worded whatever denouncing someone or something presumably having to do with the vicious explosive things that raged across this, or shattered the predawn calm of that, or ripped suddenly through the other, killing umpteen innocent civilians in a Jerusalem bus or Beirut discotheque or Fallujah mosque or whatever it was this time."]
3. "Woman Warrior." House contributor Sean Burns reviews Michael Winterbottom's latest for Philadelphia Weekly.
["The movie stands back in horror, looking away from the videotape we all know is coming."]
4. "Time (2006)." By Oggs Cruz of Oggs' Movie Thoughts.
["The face is literally mangled, punctured, and mashed; fat flows from the tubes that pass through the inanimate body."]
5. "Addressing this AFI Bullshit." From House contributor Andrew Dignan's blog Punitive Superego.
["Titanic makes the list but L.A. Confidential doesn’t, proving once and for all nothing makes a film a classic like bilking millions of teenage girls out of their allowance."]
Clip of the Day: "Well, what do you expect? They're Canadian."
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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!
R.I.P.: Daniel Robert Epstein and Andy Jones
By Matt Zoller Seitz
The House Next Door extends its condolences to the families of Andy Jones and Daniel Robert Epstein. I read their work online and enjoyed it; I regret never having met these men who were, by all accounts, well worth knowing.
Anderson Jones II, a.k.a. Andy, was a critic, reporter, junketeer and natural-born eccentric. He was a contributor to E! Online, a commentator in the cable network's True Hollywood Story insta-documentaries, and an editor at the now-defunct roughcut.com, where he encouraged future blogger extraordinaire David Poland to start his first online-only movie column back in 1997. As an online writer and TV gadfly, Jones created a sort of Hollywood EveryFan persona, showcased in colums for FilmStew.com that read like outtakes from a Kathy Griffin routine. Among other misadventures, he recounted getting hit by a car outside of a Pioneer Chicken ("The good news? The guy who hit me stopped") and how Jennifer Love Hewitt ended up paying for his meal at Taco Bell ("My friends are saying, "Maybe she thought you were homeless"). Jones suffered a heart attack June 22 at Los Angeles' Arclight theater during a screening of A Mighty Heart (don't even think about it) and died en route to the hospital.
Poland remembers Jones as a man who "...always led with his sexuality, his race, and his ambitions. I became his co-worker, his friend, and eventually, his boss, which kind of killed the friend part. But no matter how rough he could get while angry, there was always a sweetness and vulnerability that made me (and many others) want to do whatever we could for him. No one who heard it will ever forget that laugh that somehow combined a squeal and a giggle. No one who encountered it will ever forget his rage at all the things he considered injustices. Or the questions that only Andy could come up with or would dare to ask." For more about Jones, see MediaBistro.com, Variety, Movie City Indie, L.A. Observed, FilmStew.com and at CHUD.com, where Mark Wheaton ends his remembrance with the following anecdote: "Before we parted ways, he gave me his business card. It’s simple – black type on a white background – with 'Anderson Jones II' written imperiously over his address on Normandie. In the lower right corner is his phone number and e-mail address. In the lower left, the words: “Open 24 Hours” and under it: 'For Hire.' No hint of occupation, press affiliation, etc. But the thing that catches your eye is actually what is written – in tiny letters and, actually, within quotation marks above his name as he is quoting himself. It reads: 'I am legendary. You are not.'"
Condolences can be sent to Jones' sister-in-law and brother, Anna and Arnold L. Jones, at 1471 E. Fairifield Ct., Ontario, CA 91761.
Epstein, who was found dead in his Astoria, Queens apartment by his wife June 13, and whose cause of death has still not been determined, was a superb interviewer and a wordsmith whose sheer productivity defied Newton's laws. (He published over 800 interviews at SuicideGirls alone.) He had a knack for cajoling subjects into dropping their guard long enough to say something spontaneous and revealing -- or at the very least, honest. His pieces didn't seem so much written as overheard, probably in a bar. Ellen Burstyn told him, "I don’t think there’s an actor alive who doesn’t want an Oscar. And once they have one, they want another one." David Koepp, writer of the fourth Indiana Jones movie, told Epstein, "The first thing is that you realize this is a beloved character, probably one of the most in film history, and a lot of people are going to be angry no matter what I do....I’m going to get my *ss handed to me on some level, even by my fellow filmmakers or the audience." He gave Bootsy Collins a forum to wax eloquent about record industry ego-tripping and his latest, greatest self-designed equipment (including the Traben Bootzilla bass). He got Hercules star Kevin Sorbo to unload on Sam Raimi. And he let filmmaker Eric Schaeffer, long notorious for dining on his own foot, keep going until he reached the knee.
Obituaries and testimonials can be found at Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, CHUD, ComingSoon.net, Suicide Girls, Newsarama, FilmStew.com, Blackfilm.com, Dark Horizons and Cinematical, among other sites.
Edward Copeland's Top 100
By Edward Copeland
Even though the new AFI list of the 100 greatest American films of all time was an improvement on their first try, I couldn't help but be inspired to do my own Top 100 list.
To read it, click here. Read more!
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Links for the Day (June 24th, 2007)
1. "First "Indy 4" Image of Harrison Ford Released": Sans walker and eyepatch...
["The first snapshot in 18 years, taken by Steven Spielberg, of Harrison Ford decked out in fedora and khakis."]
2. "The Hamster Dance": A blast from my Internet past.
["Dee dah dee dah dee dah doh doh!"]
3. "Michael Winterbottom, the unscripted undirector": A description both complimentary and insulting?
["Michael Winterbottom, the British director, doesn't stick to a signature subject or style, as Martin Scorsese and Tim Burton do. He doesn't exert control over every frame, as Stanley Kubrick did. And his subjects are all over the map."]
4. "Spice Girls to reveal ‘future plans’ on June 28": Tell me what I want, what I really don't want.
["Talk of a Spice Girls reunion has swirled for weeks — boosted by Sporty Spice herself — and on Friday the vivacious five said they would make “an announcement to the world” next week."]
5. "100-foot deep Andes lake disappears": It was all because of this guy. (Thanks Ed...)
["A five-acre glacial lake in Chile's southern Andes has disappeared -- and scientists want to know why."]
Clip of the Day: "How to escape a fart." Some highbrow Sunday humor.
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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.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Links for the Day (June 23rd, 2007)
1. "The cruelest T-Shirt imaginable": Practically sold out, and probably for good reason.
["'Spoilt' by Oliver Moss"]
2. "An overlooked movie master": Roger Ebert's first "Movie Answer Man" column in a year. Thanks to Jim Emerson for pointing it out.
["I devoured the McCarthy canon after hearing my sportswriter friend Bill Nack read aloud from All the Pretty Horses. Nack is one of the greatest reader-alouders alive, and as an impresario, I have "presented" him in two "concerts in words." In my opinion, McCarthy's best book is Suttree."]
3. "Uncoupling": Michael Joshua Rowin reviews Pascale Ferran's adaptation of Lady Chatterley.
["The seas of literary adaptation are wrought with peril, but there’s something particularly resistant to cinematic translation in the work of D.H. Lawrence. A novel like The Rainbow doesn’t seem possible to successfully convert into visual terms—its intensity of emotion and psychological insight is wholly dependent on verbal precision; it’s a monument of language built according to its characters’ awareness of body, mind, and soul, an inner monologue of their changing relationship to the entire universe as they grow from furious malcontents to enlightened iconoclasts. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence’s most infamous novel and the source of scandal and censorship upon its publication in 1928 for its frank depiction of adulterous sex and unabashed swearing, presents a contrary set of problems. Unlike The Rainbow or Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterley is superficially ripe for the screen: its prose is digestible, its story arc simple, and its action extremely camera-friendly even as it takes up its predecessors’ themes. Yet the book’s notorious erotic journey is, in ways, a distraction. There’s a lot more going on in Lady Chatterley beyond some cathartic banging that a movie cut expressly to that tune might overlook."]
4. ""This town... Is a Losin' Town": Petulance as Cool in Ocean's Thirteen": Fernando F. Croce on Ocean's 13, Hostel: Part II, and Paprika.
["Steven Soderbergh used to remake Rat Pack flicks, now he remakes the Dean Martin celebrity roasts."]
5. "The Only Thing Less Watchable Than the Films Are the Judges": Brendan Bouzard continues his martyr's crusade watching On the Lot. The accompanying picture just kills me.
["At some point in the Babylon that was Hollywood in the 1970s, Carrie Fisher got hopped up on angel dust and repeatedly slammed her head against a brick wall until a chunk of her skull broke itself off and jammed itself into whatever part of the brain manages one’s artistic sensibility. It’s the only explanation I’ve got for her taste, her behavior, her unrelenting idiocy as judge on On the Lot. This goes way beyond the Paula/Randy brand of good natured dumb and into a world that’s scarily revealing of just how delusional the syntactical structures of Hollywood’s collective hivebrain is."]
Clip of the Day: "Blowing up a Snowman w/ Too Many Explosives": Frosty gets his, and then some...
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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.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Ambassador of Love: Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn
By Steven Boone
It's all about love.
I went to a screening of Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn fighting off one of those desperately lonely, uncertain states we all find ourselves in at times. Two hours later, I came out of the theater flying, simply too in love with life to fret over some ground-level personal nonsense. Herzog's film about torture and starvation is the feel-good movie of the summer.
Rescue Dawn, which opens July 4, draws from the true story of Dieter Dengler, the German-American fighter pilot shot down and captured in Laos in 1966. Dengler eventually got his fellow prisoners to assist in an escape that at first seemed impossible and pointless. In 1966, it was still possible to believe that an end to the Vietnam War was in sight--better to sit out the war in a prison camp until the anticipated American victory ensured their release. Dieter seemed to know better.
But Rescue Dawn doesn't care much for politics. It's really a love story in disguise, and the object of its protagonist's ardor is... what, exactly? Flight? Military service? The United States of America? Yes, yes, yes. And also: dogs that can walk on two legs, Laotian thugs with bad teeth, midgets, snails, home cooking, incontinence, Jeremy Davies's weirdness, nicknames, smiles, leeches... This is Herzog in the madly embracing spirit of his other great "American" film, Stroszek. (Anyone who watches Rescue Dawn and has also seen the maternity ward and "chicken dance" scenes in Stroszek should dig where I'm coming from.) Rescue Dawn is about a man whose soul has no room for fear because it is too full of l-o-v- e.
Captured German-American pilot Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), also the subject of Herzog's 1997 documentary Little Deiter Needs to Fly, doesn't flinch when his Viet Cong interrogator prods him to sign a statement denouncing the U.S., to facilitate his release: "No way. I can't sign this. America gave me wings." The romance of this moment made my heart skip the same beat it did when the lovers in Brief Encounter finally cut the small talk and looked each other square in the misty eye. As explained in Little Dieter, Dengler's dream since childhood was to become a pilot. America became his adopted homeland at 18 after a youth in Germany marked by WWII traumas, and her Navy endowed him with those "wings." His apparent bravery before the V.C. is nothing more than gratitude--not the jingoistic kind you might expect here, but the emboldening gratefulness a lonely man feels when fortune graces him with a family. Think of all the men who have said to their lovers, wives or children, "I'd take a bullet for you." That isn't valor; that's a valentine.
As usual, Herzog's valentine comes in two rich, complementary layers. One one level, he dramatizes how Dengler feeds his fearlessness and optimism with camaraderie. Daydreaming, joking and bullshitting with prisoners and guards alike pull him through seasons of torture and starvation in a Laos prison camp. Even as he wastes away to a skeletal frame, his people skills never wane. It's no less disorienting a spectacle than Klaus Kinski babbling to monkeys on a raft. Meanwhile, Herzog's storytelling expresses infatuated communion with his madman/muse, and awe at the world that shaped him. The filmmaker who tends to see "chaos, hostility and murder" virtually everywhere (but especially in nature) puts his pessimism in rewarding context here: The world is insane with predatory evil, but it is just as on fire with truth and beauty. It's gonna be a photo finish.
Herzog's screen megalomaniacs all want to build something or reach some height. Yet, while those indelible Kinski loons (Don Lope de Aguirre, Brian "Fitzcarrldo" Fitzgerald, Cobra Verde) may have had grand visions, they were ultimately sick with cruelty and dominance. Herzog has matured (though some of his disappointed fanboys-n-girls would say "softened") beyond the Kinski fireworks show, embracing heroes who are more like him-- self-immolating artist-daredevils like Walter Steiner (his first flying "Dieter") and quixotic, child-like protectors like Bruno S. and Timothy Treadwell. Bale's Dieter Dengler may be tough enough to endure torture, but he isn't vengeful or sadistic enough to dish it out. He designs an escape plan for minimal violence that gives all of his fellow captives a real shot at making it out alive. After escape, when his injured buddy (Steve Zahn) slows him down, he tends to him with the delicacy of a parent.
If the above plot details sound like spoilers, not to worry. Rescue Dawn is delectable not because of the seemingly generic war movie suspense that antsy critics are already lining up to decry. The treasures here are in the human and animal performances Herzog corrals and the dance that cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger's camera does around them. Don't let this film's inept, Chuck Norrissy trailer fool you; Herzog and Zeitlinger drink deep. The 1.85:1 frame swoons and pulsates with intense regard for people, dogs, sun-dappled leaves, mud, a ball of rice. Zeitlinger does Ophuls swirls around the soldiers, prisoners and peasants fighting for their lives--a true danse macabre, but also a deranged celebration of life. There is terror and adoration in those nearly fisheye tracking shots through the prison camp/village and jungle thickets. Zeitlinger is forever withholding, opening out, unveiling with a grace that probably has Roman Polanski and Steven Spielberg hounding their agents. The sequence after Dengler escapes from his downed fighter jet delineates his subsequent capture like a silent movie. Without music or fashionable action flick stylistics (desaturated colors, strobing shutter, etc.), the camera compels attention merely through patient subjectivity as Dengler explores the utterly alien jungle. When he gets captured going for a drink of water in a pond, Herzog and Zeitlinger don't give us menacing cutaways of approaching Pathet Lao guerillas accompanied by a subwoofer thrum. Instead, we become aware of the soldiers only when Dieter does, and the revelation occurs in a simple, steady, stomach-knotting pan.
Sounds rudimentary, but how many contemporary Ho'wood films on this scale trust the camera to do this kind of work when sound mixers, lab colorists and CGI geeks are chomping at the bit? (For more on this kind of restraint, see the lovely documentary In the Edges: The Grizzly Man Sessions, which shows Herzog supervising a handful of musicians scoring Grizzly Man. He warns them not to get carried away during improvised passages, like jazz musicians whose solo riffs do little more than "show off their brilliance." The director may indulge hypnotic central performances, but his maxim for technicians and artisans seems to be, "serve the symphony.")
Herzog also maintains an even hand on the actors. Though nearly upstaged by the unknowns who play prison guards Crazy Horse, Little Hitler and Walkie Talkie, Zahn and the great Jeremy Davies (as Dengler's feuding fellow Americans) create two vibrant eccentrics for Bale to swap crazy with. The prisoners' hunger and desperation have rendered them child-like in some respects; Herzog finds something beautiful in this: In a scene where the prisoners reminisce about delicious hot meals, Bale, Zahn and Davies quibble over the details like boys debating who would win a fight between Spiderman and The Thing. Another moment lets Bale deliver a monologue about the violent childhood origins of his flight obsession that resonates sharply with both Little Dieter Needs to Fly and preadolescent Bale's euphoric/psychotic "Cadillac of the sky" scene in Empire of the Sun. When Bale caps the story with, "Ever since then, Little Dieter needed to fly," Zahn's wide grin tells it: Deiter's functional madness is infectious. Davies, meanwhile, as Dengler's emaciated leadership rival, also competes with Bale for Top Loon. Whereas Bale's absurd All-American sturdiness is like a pristine American flag planted on a bomb crater, Davies' mumbling, whispering, sidewinding performance is the colorful carnage. (It's always been a mystery to me why this kid wasn't cast in the Psycho remake for a letter perfect Norman Bates.) Again, though, it must be stressed to Herzog fans--the kind who'd wear Kinski's face on a T-shirt Che Guevara-style--that the mania on display here is not for ironic hipster delectation. (Well, none of Herzog's films are, really, but that's another story.) Cineastes who simply want Aguirre: Reloaded--brain candy to offset a weed high--might find Rescue Dawn pretty low-voltage and a little square.
The film's third act draws out such lazy viewers like tear gas:
Dengler's escape, rescue, recovery and final celebration play to an often exultant, triumphalist accompaniment. The music suddenly plays the film cheap. (Otherwise, Klaus Badelt's score is often quite subtle, eloquent and inseparable from the image, crucial to many sequences' structure and impact.) Even so, Herzog's larger vision bursts through: Dengler, still a virtual skeleton in his hospital bed, reunites with his Navy buddies and lets them "kidnap" him before CIA officers can take him off to a debriefing. They smuggle him out of the hospital and over to his true home, an aircraft carrier packed with cheering servicemen. Barely standing but beatific, he babbles a bit of philosophy (something like, "...empty what is full... fill what is empty...") that sails over his comrades' heads, but doesn't dampen their excitement one bit. They hoist him on their shoulders like World Series victors as an officer-emcee screams into a microphone, "They love you!" Somewhere in there, Dieter also cries, "I love you guys!" If this moment weren't smothered in Ho'wood/Hans Zimmerish muzak, it would be easier to appreciate as an expression of military fraternity boiling over into mad love. Bale's wraith-like appearance says it all; it did something to me that no war film I've ever seen had managed: Suddenly, I understood the religious devotion some have to military service. Herzog understands people through their religion, be it ski jumps, bears, grand opera, El Dorado or, as in this scene, a band of brothers.
I want to say that the critics who choose to read this insanely happy ending as generic, jingoistic pandering to the U.S. of A are just taking it at face value. But the full value of this moment is right up front, not hidden in any ironic subtext. Herzog is not lurking in the shadows, whispering about how Dieter's triumph is a sham or the Vietnam War is a crime. He is simply attempting to be true to a moment, to describe the lunacy of extreme joy as piercingly as he does rage, terror and anomie. That's so cool. Steven Spielberg may be gunning for cinema Popehood; Wim Wenders may be a continent-bridging screen angel, but right about now Herzog's effort to adopt experiences, find common ground and convey his findings in the most intimate yet accessible voice makes him an unlikely Ambassador of Love.
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Steven Boone is a New York-based critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of the pop culture blog Big Media Vandalism.
The Eccentrics: Burn Notice, Meadowlands, Flight of the Conchords and Big Love
By Todd VanDerWerff
The Sopranos is dead. The big network dramas and comedies are on vacation until the cool months (or longer, in some cases). What’s worth watching? Not much. Summer used to be the time when broadcast networks aired frothy fare (Fox’s short-lived, fondly remembered Keen Eddie) or series that were initially deemed too odd to become hits in the spring or fall (like CBS’s Survivor and Big Brother, both of which launched in bathing-suit weather). This summer, the network landscape looks barren, save such showbiz-themed competition series as Fox’s On the Lot and So You Think You Can Dance.
Cable is a desert too, but at least it’s got a wheezy carnival parked on it. There’s a histrionic legal thriller (TNT’s The Closer); a self-pitying, macho soap (FX’s Rescue Me); a feel-good doctor show about organ donation (TNT’s Heartland) and confident but uninspired sci-fi thrillers (USA’s The Dead Zone and The 4400; Sci-Fi’s Stargate Atlantis and its departing SG-1). But there are also four series -- three new, one returning -- that are just fresh enough to stand out from the pack and be worth having an opinion on.
To read the article, click here. Read more!
Climbing Out on a Limb and Then Crawling Back: Broken English
By Matt Zoller Seitz
The low-key comedy “Broken English,” about a romance-scarred professional woman named Nora Wilder (Parker Posey) who invigorates her life with help from a handsome, sensitive, fedora-clad Frenchman (Melvil Poupaud), is a textbook example of an Indiewood film: a Hollywood fantasy wrapped in plain brown paper.
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To read the rest of the review, click here.
Links for the Day (June 22nd, 2007)
1. "of Comedy and Disability": By Stephen Kuusisto for Planet of the Blind.
["When I was 17 a friend's mother asked me if I had any heroes. I named Groucho Marx. My friend's mother was indignant and said that real heroes are people who make a difference like "Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr." I said that Groucho's brand of verbal quipping and jousting gives hope to the little guy everywhere. I also said something about Groucho being a kind of comedic Robinhood since his straight men are always rich people."]
2. "13 Years & Counting": Ed Gonzalez reviews Michael Moore's Sicko.
["Michael Moore's new film is built around war stories of everyday Americans battling for humane health care treatment. After a pointless dig at George W. Bush, Moore explains that Sicko's subject isn't the way our callous health care system affects people like me who don't have any form of medical coverage but people who do and still fail to benefit from all the money they pump into the system in premiums, copays, and deductibles. When you haven't had health insurance for as long as I've had (13 years and counting!), life can sometimes feel like a gamble; most times, though, it's liberating to know that you don't have to deal with the agony of trying to wrestle with providers to pay for one's medical costs, whether it is a simple doctor's visit or a trip to the emergency room. Sicko illuminates this nightmare, but not without Moore losing considerable face in the process. "]
3. "Schwarzenberger. Berlin Alexanderplatz.": From GreenCine Daily.
["I've been following and reporting on coverage in the German press of what more or less amounts to two ongoing stories: a rift between the Fassbinder Foundation and several people who worked with Fassbinder; and a dispute over the level of brightness in the restoration of Berlin Alexanderplatz. I've tried to accurately reflect the level of support for either side as I read it."]
4. "Ghettoizing Nuance": Walter Chaw tears into Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer & Evan Almighty.
["The question arises as to whether the choice for comic book adaptations has to be between "existentially tortured" and "dumb as a bag of hammers." It's a given on which extreme Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (hereafter FF2), already lauded for being blissfully free of gravitas and subtext, resides; what's troubling is the underlying inference of this philosophy: that people deserve and want entertainment that's beneath them. It's easier by far to condemn the audience as morons, forking over their cash like roughneck flyovers voting for Big Business, but I prefer to look at the situation as a tragedy--a by-product of a generation of fervent anti-intellectualism that's made smart people afraid to question their own judgment."]
5. "Fading to Black with Johnny Sack: Vincent Curatola on his latest role. See it here.
["When Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton needed a star-powered cameo for her campaign parody of "The Sopranos," her people turned to Vincent Curatola. He's better known as Johnny Sack, the late New York boss from "The Sopranos.""]
Clip of the Day: Captain Spaulding has a strange interlude.
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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.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Links for the Day (June 21st, 2007)
1. "100 Years, 100 Movies." The American Film Institute, which first ranked American films in 1997, did it again last night on CBS, with Voice-of-God Morgan Freeman handling countdown duties. Citizen Kane held onto the top spot, followed by The Godfather (formerly #3) and Casablanca (formerly #2). Related: "100 Reasons for Another TV List Special," in which Edward Copeland compares the old and new lists, in an easy-to-read format that shows you which titles have risen, sunk, or vanished.
["I have to admit: the new list is a vast improvement over the first version. "]
2. "The 25 Greatest Action Films Ever!" Thus spake Entertainment Weekly. Related: EW's online-only list of the 26th through 50th greatest action movies. Number 50: Battleship Potemkin. Number 49: Point Break.
["Happiness is a warm pair of guns...especially when Chow Yun-Fat is holding them."]
3. "The Greatest Foreign Films of All Time," according to the May 11 issue of The Guardian.
["#1. Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy/France, 1988
Our verdict: O Guardian readers, I love you and perhaps sometimes (as a Guardian reader for 50 years) I come close to understanding you. But Cinema Paradiso as the best foreign language film of all time? Better than M, The Rules of the Game, Ugetsu Monogatari or ... Maybe I'm a snob, and I know we're playing a game, not voting for president. But can't you see that this is the kind of movie lousy presidents remember when they want to be kind to cinema and show their humanity? The film is clever and touching, and in its way it's an ad for cinema. But ... there is work to be done.--David Thomson"]
4. "The Hottest Sopranos Mistresses," according to Maxim.
["#4. Jim “Johnny Cakes” (John Costelloe)
Pros: He's an excellent, forthright communicator, and holds down jobs as a short-order cook at the local diner and a volunteer firefighter. He also enjoys a friendly game of cards and a few beers with the fellas.
Cons: He has a penis. His majestic handlebar mustache makes him look just a little bit like Lemmy from Motörhead. And has a great show ever wasted more time on such a tonally off-kilter subplot?"]
5. "Point-Counterpoint," from a 1997 issue of The Onion: "Reservoir Dogs is the Best Movie Ever" vs. "Reservoir Dogs is Fucking Awesome!"
["My favorite part is when Michael Madsen, Mr. Blond, is torturing that cop and cutting him up and throwing gasoline in his face. The first time I saw that part, I was like, holy shit. The best thing about that scene is the fact that, although it's really violent, it also really makes you think."]
Clip of the Day: "Little Green Bag."
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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.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Video Essay: Dario Argento's Inferno
By Kevin B. Lee
The House Next Door is committed to recognizing the best of online film culture in as many exciting and innovative manifestations as we can find. One of our contributors, Kevin Lee aka alsolikelife, has recently begun producing a unique series of video essays, an extension of his efforts to watch every film on the list of "The 1000 Greatest Films" as compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?. His progress can be followed on his blog, Shooting Down Pictures. The House is pleased to showcase Kevin's video essays as he nears completion of his project. His latest video, on Dario Argento's Inferno (#926 on his list) can be viewed after the break. Click here to read Kevin's text entry on Inferno.
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Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker based in New York City. He has written for Cinema-Scope, The Chicago Reader, Senses of Cinema and Slant. His website is www.alsolikelife.com.
Links for the Day (June 20th, 2007)
1. "Bloomberg quits Republican party": From The Guardian.
["The New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is dropping his affiliation with the Republican party, sparking widespread speculation that he intends to run for president. The billionaire businessman, 65, declared his decision on a campaign-style sweep through California, during which he criticised both parties in Washington for being too timid. The former Democrat, who switched to the Republicans for his first mayoral run, said that becoming an independent would allow him greater flexibility in decision-making."]
2. "New Criterions": N.P. Thompson reviews two new Criterion Collection discs: WR: Mysteries of the Organism & Cría Cuervos.
["The years haven’t been as forgiving to Cría Cuervos (due in August from Criterion) This 1976 Spanish drama, written and directed by Carlos Saura, features Ana Torrent as an orphaned 8-year-old who observes ghostly arguments between her dead parents, reliving their strife in her head. The death-obsessed girl (also named Ana) talks about wanting to die, tells her cold yet not unattractive young aunt that she wishes she would die, and thoughtfully offers to assist her mute, disabled grandmother on to her final resting place. When Ana’s pet rabbit soon croaks in this atmosphere of doom, the child buries it, then smears the mud from the grave on her cheeks. I, for one, cannot swallow the conventional wisdom that it’s all an allegory for the last days of Franco’s dictatorship. But what else could it be? Nowhere in this is there a sense of tragedy or loss, or even of nostalgia or fear or humor – Saura’s torpid make-believe feels like Buñuel played straight."]
3. "The Other Side of Hip: Clearwater Festival 2007": By Paul Schrodt for The Stranger Song.
["The musky smell of unwashed bodies comes and goes as one passes through the Clearwater Festival, like a watchful spirit casting off anyone too faint-of-heart for the event’s environmentalist mission. It’s all a part of the scenery: Birkenstock, unkempt beards, and women’s tanned, sagging breasts everywhere you look, unrestrained by that most oppressive of human constructions—the brassiere. At lunch, one liberated young woman was kind enough to show a group of us her weeks-old leg infection which—still untreated by a doctor—had turned black with lint caught under its scabby surface. “Oh, I pick at it.” Everyone kept eating their tofu."]
4. "New James Bond director announced": Coffee, black; chocolate ice cream, shaken, not stirred.
["The director of the next James Bond film has been announced as Marc Forster, the man behind Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland."]
5. "Rosie wants ‘Price Is Right’ hosting job": From MSNBC.
["“The Price Is Right” needs a host, and Rosie O’Donnell is interested. Very interested. The 45-year-old said on her blog recently that she was meeting with the “Price” people this week and that she “sure would” accept the job if they offer. “I LOVE THE PRICE IS RIGHT,” she wrote, the capitalization underscoring her feelings."]
Clip of the Day: Businessman has a meltdown in a hotel lobby - probably staged, but I laughed my ass off.
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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.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Big Love Tuesdays: Season 2, Ep. 2, "The Writing on the Wall"
By Todd VanDerWerff
Near the end of Big Love’s latest episode, “The Writing on the Wall,” Bill Henrickson’s second wife, Nikki, (Chloë Sevigny) delivers a long monologue to first wife, Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), about how she doesn’t trust love as a foundation for a marriage, perhaps, especially, a plural one. This comes after Barb tells her that she still wasn’t sure if she believed in the principle the family bases its life on (the show tosses off American quasi-religious terms like “the principle” and “testimony” without really bothering to explain them). Nikki, raised on the polygamous Juniper Creek compound, is largely flummoxed by the world she found herself a part of when she left the compound to marry Bill (Bill Paxton) and move to the suburbs. If the season premiere, “Damage Control,” focused on all that Barb left behind when she allowed Bill to take a second wife, “Writing on the Wall” turned its gaze on Nikki, a character who could be a bit too unbelievably manipulative and shrill in the first season. While the main plotlines all focus on Bill (who finds himself thrust into compound politics again and trying to fend off a vandal marking up billboards for his Home Plus stores), writers and creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer use the hoary old device of a husband forgetting he and his wife’s anniversary to illuminate the least-developed Henrickson.
In the first season, Nikki was a bit of an enigma. Sevigny portrayed the character well, but it sometimes seemed like she was a cardboard cutout villain, driving the Henricksons into debt or needlessly antagonizing Barb or unnecessarily involving her family at the compound with her suburban family. The audience never got a sense of Nikki as anything other than a character who seemed resentful of Barb’s status of first wife. But in this episode, just as the last episode gave us a sense of what Barb gave up to enter this relationship, we get a sense of what Nikki gave up. Nikki, in many ways, comes from the opposite direction of Barb. While Barb has had a taste of something like independence, the sheer freedom of not living on the compound often seems terrifying to Nikki. She overspends and, in this episode, she seems put off by the simple act of going to the bank to put money in an account for Barb. She even swindles a little bit of extra cash from Margie (Ginnifer Goodwin) when trying to make the deposit for Barb. Nikki has one advantage over the other two wives, though: She believes wholeheartedly in the principle, and she’s going to do her best to see that no one else in the family gives up on it.
In the comments section on my "T.V. on TV" post on the show, site publisher Matt Zoller Seitz has said that by having three women of differing ages playing the wives, the creators could effectively examine a marriage at three different stages -- the stage when you’ve learned to put up with someone’s faults, the stage when you’re wondering who, exactly, you married, and the initial stage when the sheer euphoria of always being close to someone you love is enough to carry you along. Nikki may come at the question of whether love is enough to sustain a marriage from a different perspective than most people facing a seven year itch, but her question is one every married couple must confront. Nikki doesn’t trust love (perhaps because she saw very little of it in the twisted dealings at the compound), but she does believe in the idea of plural marriage, even when Bill and Barb forget her anniversary.
The “Oops! I forgot your anniversary!” plotline is one of the oldest and most overused in television, but Big Love’s central conceit means that the show has to come at the plotline from a fundamentally different point-of-view. We’re reminded of this when Margie picks up a photo of Bill and Nikki’s wedding while visiting the compound (Nikki is there trying to rescue Wanda (Melora Walters) and Joey (Shawn Doyle) from the men who would punish them for poisoning Alby (Matt Ross) in what is probably still the show’s most irritating subplot). Bill and Nikki stand, smiling happily at the camera, but Barb stands off to the side, a more taciturn smile on her face. The show has always suggested that Barb’s attitude toward Nikki was just as responsible for the rift between the two as Nikki’s attitude toward Barb, but it’s never been as blatant about it as it was in this episode, with Barb pointing out how she grew to love Nikki and the family.
Nikki takes Margie to the compound (Margie’s never been there), and Margie’s childish delight at all of the weirdness at Juniper Creek (from beekeepers to a mother and children disappearing into a hole in the ground) prompts something of an embarrassed smile from Nikki, who reminds Margie she doesn’t make fun of where Margie comes from. Maybe it’s just that I’ve seen additional episodes where Nikki reveals more of herself, but I feel as though I understand her as a person much better than I did in the first season. She’s divided between two worlds -- the anarchic and strange world of the compound, which she probably believes in more than her current life, and the suburban world, where she feels completely alien. But she loves Bill (“She went after him like a spider,” says Bill’s mother), and she believes in what she’s doing.
The idea of living in two worlds is reflected in the storylines centered on the two teens in the Henrickson household -- Ben (Douglas Smith) and Sarah (Amanda Seyfried). Ben is trying to slowly warm his girlfriend up to the idea of him coming from a polygamous family (and trying to disguise that the two have given in to their sexual urges), while Sarah is slowly getting to know Scott, the boy she met at the post-Mormon support group, better, even though she lies to him about her age, leading him to believe she’s in college instead of high school. Sarah’s friend Heather (Tina Majorino), one of the few outside characters who knows about the Henricksons, returned in this episode as well. As the teens grow older and make more and more friends outside of the family, it becomes harder and harder for Barb to justify what she’s done, especially as an example for her daughter. The growing friction here seems bound to reach some sort of breaking point.
The storyline with Bill trying to figure out who outed his family and who defaced his sign was better than last week’s Bill plot, but Paxton’s strength in the series seems to be playing off of his wives, and he didn’t get enough of that this week. While the idea of outing frightening the Henricksons and Bill’s scrambling to put things right (especially with the billboards) is promising and rife with the subtextual allusions to gay marriage that wandered throughout the first season (and will return in the weeks to come, when I’ll speak about them more fully), it also lets the show indulge in its worst tendencies. In particular, a character tonight met with Bill and Don about fixing the vandalized Home Plus billboard and launched into an extensive monologue about Lady Bird Johnson’s hatred of billboards. While I have no doubt this was based on a real person or researched within an inch of its life, it feels quirky for the sake of being quirky here. The same with much of the weirdness at the compound, where Rhonda (Daveigh Chase) was cutting an album tonight. These plotlines are always well-acted, but when compared to the genuine intrigue in the Henrickson households, they seem dropped in from a much-lesser series.
The episode ended, as mentioned, with the Henricksons gathering together to celebrate Nikki’s anniversary (and Barb once again choosing the family over herself by skipping her first statistics class at the university). We saw another dinner with just Bill and his three wives (the series is always careful to compose these shots so Bill sits at the head of the table with the wives off to either side of him -- suggesting, always subtly, that this arrangement is perhaps unstable and doomed to fail). Nikki, who just earlier was asking Margie how Wanda and Joey could survive with only each other to count on (Margie answered with that dumb little grin she wears every time she feels in over her head), shared her beliefs with Barb, and then went into the house, where Bill gave her a brand new drill for the anniversary. It was fitting that Nikki received a tool of construction. As she tried it out, we got a sense that she wasn’t trying to rip the family apart (as she often seemed to be in season one); she’s trying, as hard as she can, to hold it together.
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.>
"I'm making a lasagna... for one": Flight of the Conchords
By Keith Uhlich
The jury is still out on whether the new HBO series Flight of the Conchords will be any kind of consistent comedy gold, but I had to share this musical interlude ("I'm Not Crying") from the premiere episode, "Sally", which is definitely one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Dig the Conrad Hall-circa-In Cold Blood lighting and bask in lyrics like "I'm not upset because you left me this way/My eyes are just a little sweaty today". The bruised male ego henceforth has its anthem. Join me and comment after the break.
Links for the Day (June 19th, 2007)
1. "The figure skater, the actress and the ex": Kristy Swanson rediscovers her inner Buffy.
["It began with an unlikely love match: Canadian figure skater Lloyd Eisler and a B-list actress best known as the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But the story of the couple's romance is lurching toward a non-Hollywood ending, after police laid an assault charge this weekend against actress Kristy Swanson for allegedly punching her lover's ex-wife, a teacher from Kingston. Now, the city of Kingston has been drawn into the bitter feud after Ms. Swanson's publicist yesterday alleged a cover-up by the local police force. Meantime, the force was under siege, fielding calls from media outlets from the National Enquirer to The New York Times."]
2. "Blockbuster makes Blu move": Format Wars: Episode V.
["Blockbuster is down with Blu-ray. An exclusive deal with the movie rental giant helped Blu-ray win a battle against HD DVD in a format war reminiscent of the Beta vs. VHS days of the early 1980s. Blu-ray and HD DVD are rival technologies for high definition DVD viewing. Discs made in one format can generally only be used in machines made for them. Blockbuster said 1,450 of its stores will carry only Blu-ray high-definition movies. Although most consumers still opt for standard definition movies, the competing high-definition technologies are staking out their territory for the future."]
3. "East German Cinema Guide": By Robert Horton for GreenCine.
["Put them together, and the terms "East Germany" and "cinema" conjure up bleak associations: a gray Berlin, barbed wire, and the soul-frying bitterness of a Hollywood Cold War picture along the lines of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or a post-reunification lookback such as The Lives of Others. But for "East German cinema" itself? There's a fair amount of barbed wire and bitterness in the films of the German Democratic Republic, but there's much more: the subject is ripe for re-discovery, a process helped along in the US by a 2005 Museum of Modern Art series and a steady stream of DVD releases from First Run Features. In preparing a lecture on Cold War cinema for the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, I had the chance to delve into the world of GDR film and found it arresting in many ways - an island unto itself, yet connected to the greater flow of movie history in unexpected flashes. Here's a bit of background, followed by a collection of films from this strange era."]
4. "Take Another Swing": Morgan Freeman (yes, that Morgan Freeman) on the pleasures and necessities of golf.
["I celebrated my 70th birthday this month. When I think about getting older, the main thing I often wonder is "How much older can I get?" But you can't worry too much about that. You just have to take in every little moment, and do all you can to ensure a healthy future."]
5. "Private Abraham Lincoln collection goes public": With his most prized possession - Miss January, 1865.
["A battered old hat, a pair of stained gloves, a child’s silly rhyme — hardly the stuff of history. Except that this hat is a stovepipe hat, the gloves are stained with a president’s blood and the rhyme was written by a young Abraham Lincoln."]
Clip of the Day: The trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
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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.
Monday, June 18, 2007
John From Cincinnati Mondays: Season 1, Eps. 1 & 2, "His Visit: Day One" & "His Visit: Day Two"
By Keith Uhlich
Credit is due to David Milch: It took balls to commence his new series, John From Cincinnati, with a weathered and wizened Luke Perry (as surf promoter Linc Stark) stepping from an SUV into the early morning quietude of a California beach. For those many souls reeling from the now-infamous final moments of The Sopranos, the transition between James Gandolfini’s quizzical mug and the age-hollowed stare of a former beach bum teen idol was an associative burden I suspect they’d rather not bear. “The end is near,” says John Monad (Austin Nichols), who emerges from both the sand dune boonies (teeming with illegal aliens crossing clandestinely into the border town of Imperial Beach) and from the literal shadow of the man who was Dylan McKay. Both prophetic Adonis and idiot man-child, John is given to statements of holy writ portent, though he’s less a messiah from on high (Jesus Fucking Christ) than an absolving creature of the sea, a sponge who soaks up the pain of others and reconstitutes it as fully-lived experience.
He is the monad, the one, the being who maintains the equilibrium of an unbalanced world. It’s tempting to label him the Stromboli to the series’ many Pinocchios, though he is himself something of a puppet, a divine instrument given to mimicry of the simplest human behaviors, which, befitting a Creator who effectively made “cocksucker” a household term, tend towards the profane and the scatological. If Deadwood, Milch’s previous series, was about a civilization on the rise, then John From Cincinnati observes a civilization in decline. The societal mechanisms are already established and practiced, and decay has set in, though this is not to say that the community lacks for spirit, merely that said spirit is most often subsumed by the addictions and temptations of everyday life. Per “Johnny Appleseed”, the series’ Joe Strummer-penned theme song: “We think there is a soul/We don’t know/That soul is hard to find.”
If there is a master narrative plan for John From Cincinnati it is the excavation and unearthing of that ineffable essence that makes us human, a tall order for what has been described, necessarily, though still reductively, as a “surf-noir.” Two episodes in, I have my doubts that Milch will be entirely able to pull it off, but there’s a consistency to his vision that helps carry us over the rough patches. It’s telling that it feels like neither a stretch nor a ham-fisted metaphor to set a crucial scene between John and drug-addled Butchie Yost (Brian Van Holt) before a wall-painting of a crucified Christ on Calvary surrounded by surfboard-bearing apostles. It’s strangely on point, a perfect encapsulation of a sport that its practitioners consider a religion unto itself. Indeed, whenever John From Cincinnati leaves land behind, it takes effortless flight. Despite Imperial Beach’s real-world cred as a so-so surfing locale, its fictional waters are healing, baptizing, renewing. Miracles don’t just happen in the surf – they are part and parcel to it.
But as the premiere episode (“His Visit: Day 1”) sets out, to see the sea is not to possess unshakeable faith. And so when fallen angel of the sport Mitch Yost (Bruce Greenwood) suddenly levitates after a lonely morning surf session, he puts his trust in paranoid self-diagnosis. “And I got fuckin’ cancer” he tells his wife Cissy (Rebecca De Mornay) as punchline to a heated argument about their grandson Shaun (Greyson Fletcher). Having lost Butchie – his son and Shaun’s father – to the lure of addiction, Mitch rules over the youngest Yost’s desires with an iron fist. As shown in a terrific sequence with shell-shocked former detective, and surrogate father, Bill Jacks (Ed O’Neill), Shaun’s talents are innate and raw – they demand the recognition and sponsorship of adults who, for the most part, can’t get out of their damn fool heads. A brilliant surfer (Fletcher – a welcome non-professional performer in a cast of pros – is, in actuality, a champion boarder on both land and sea), he also possesses the seeming ability to raise the dead.
He stumbles upon this gift quite by chance while Bill mourns the death of his pet bird Zippy. “When you’re older you’ll understand,” he says repeatedly to Shaun, who takes in the scene with an observant gaze that is innocent yet somehow wise beyond the years. He tenderly strokes the bird and it springs back to life. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” screams Bill, invoking (with more than a tinge of blasphemy) a trinity that he will call upon again at the close of episode two (“His Visit: Day 2”) when Shaun’s unwittingly selfless action comes full circle. Milch and his writing staff (which include novelist Kem Nunn and pro-surfer Steve Hawk) complicate the interpretation of the show’s miracles by making them seem almost tangential to their apparent instigators. Far from a simplistic Christ figure, John is, so far, something of an inactive presence, yet the characters congregate around him as if sensing his necessity to the communal body. He's the beating heart that keeps them alive, however tenuously.
There are clear biblical parallels and stand-ins – I like to think the motel-bound trio of Ramon Gaviota (Luis Guzman), Meyer Dickstein (Willie Garson), and Barry Cunningham (Matt Winston) are as much the Three Wise Men as the Three Stooges – but there’s more than a hint of false prophecy in the air. When the lottery-rich Cunningham – whom Winston plays, quite bravely, as a verbose collection of obsessive-compulsive tics – speaks of the visions that accompany his frequent seizures, it comes off, at first glance, as the yammering of a madman. But there is real pain underlying his manic-depressive behavior (the result, so Cunningham feels, of a childhood run-in with Butchie), not to mention a sense of thus far unrealized, yet rapidly simmering threat. Consider his second episode riff on The Sopranos’s call to arms: “I woke up this morning happy. I mistook that freedom for power.” Shades of Deadwood’s George Hearst, cast in the mold of a present day passive-aggressive.
Whether John From Cincinnati reaches its portended apocalypse (over two episodes we've seen a motel standoff, an earthquake, the paralyzing of a major character, and a knowing gaze by John at a half-built, Devil’s Tower-like circular structure) is of little concern to me so long as Milch maintains his rock-solid sense of milieu. When all the prophecies are said and done, I know I’ll return to John From Cincinnati for its ellipses, for those moments when the narrative momentum slows to a crawl so that the day-to-day human drama takes precedence. When Cissy halts an argument with Mitch by teasing about “the healing powers of sex” (with this role, the striking, sun-baked De Mornay achieves a revelatory resurgence akin to Jeanne Tripplehorn on Big Love); when Shaun silently prepares for a surfing competition while countless mini-dramas unfold around him; when Bill ambles nervously down a hospital hallway, his hand gently patting his jacket pocket while Dr. Michael Smith (Garret Dillahunt) looks at him suspiciously, I feel prepared to jump the gun and call John From Cincinnati one for the ages. In a more tempered state, perhaps brought on by a sucker punch from Imperial Beach’s resident drug dealer Steady Freddy Lopez (Dayton Callie), I offer more qualified, though no less passionate praise. Wherever we go from here (my own suspicion: a perhaps intentional absence of the big picture closure so demanded, yet rarely ever attained, by the barbarians at the gate), David Milch has once again given us something worth discussing and cherishing.
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Keith Uhlich is managing editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications. John From Cincinnati recaps run every Monday for the duration of the series.
Capital letters: The Closer
By Todd VanDerWerff
TNT’s legal thriller The Closer, which starts its third season tonight, is a series best described in capital letters. Kyra Sedgwick plays Brenda Leigh Johnson, a detective who CARES TOO MUCH. At home, she and her boyfriend SQUABBLE, while at work, her boss, J.K. Simmons’s William Pope, GROWLS AT THE CAMERA.
To read the review, click here. Read more!
5 for the Day: Hell on wheels
Readers, rev your engines.
The chase sequence has been a staple of cinema from the days of D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett. That’s because the chase is inherently cinematic. No other medium can produce it as effectively. Imagine a painting, sculpture, or song depicting a car chase; it’s difficult. Prose fares better but still can’t compete. Movies, with their ability to flash a rapid succession of multiple viewpoints, to crosscut between pursuer and pursuee and innocent double-taking bystanders, and to convey a headlong rush of speed, are the ideal medium. Nowadays, when a movie flags or gets boring, the director adds a car chase. Moviemaking and the automotive industry grew up together. I think most directors harbor a secret desire to make a chase sequence. Even Robert Altman filmed a car chase in Brewster McCloud, and not a bad one either. The Bond films excelled at chases of all kinds.
My five is heavy on car chases, but anything on wheels may qualify, as long as someone is being chased or doing the chasing. The variety of wacky vehicles chasing W.C. Fields in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break qualifies for inclusion, as does Steve McQueen’s attempted motorcycle getaway in The Great Escape. But competitive sequences in films like Grand Prix and Ben-Hur don't qualify, because there's no clear-cut pursuer and quarry. If any questions arise, I will wave a checkered flag and adjudicate.
1. The French Connection
Ever since Bullitt inaugurated the modern era of the dramatic car chase in 1968, filmmakers have scrambled to top it. The heyday of these efforts was the 1970’s. Death Proof’s recent liturgical recitation of Two Lane Blacktop, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, and Vanishing Point named but a few titles; many more could be added. Greatest of all is 1971’s The French Connection. This chase still sets the bar for all others. Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle chases an assassin who gets away on an elevated train in Brooklyn. Flashing his badge, Popeye commandeers a brown Pontiac Le Mans from its owner. It’s the first scene I can think of showing what would later become an epidemic in filmdom: carjacking by cop. Doyle speeds off, and after that it is train vs. Pontiac, traffic vs. Pontiac, anything-that-gets-in-its-way vs. Pontiac, lady and a baby carriage vs. Pontiac. This chase doesn’t exhilarate, it grates under your skin. Theodore Soderberg and Christopher Newman’s sound design is a nerve jangling cacophony of blaring horns, squealing tires, and rattling train wheels. Through it all is Gene Hackman’s silent but vigorous cursing. It comes through loud and clear from behind the windshield even though we can’t hear it. Jerry Greenberg’s Oscar winning editing cuts between two levels of action: Hackman hell bent on street level, and the hijacked train and hostage situation on the level above. These two set pieces hurtle along relentlessly, their vectors verging ominously, until they reach a smashing climax. It’s simply great. And the denouement is so classic they made a poster out of it. Director William Friedkin almost never lived this chase down. He tried to follow it up in To Live and Die in L.A. and Jade. Producer Philip D’Antoni tried to repeat the success in The Seven-Ups with another great chase that features Bill Hickman, the same driver who did most of the stunt work in Bullitt.
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark
The truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark is a direct descendant of Buster Keaton’s The General. You take a vehicle, a locomotive in Keaton’s case, a truck in Raiders’, and then you exploit said vehicle every which way you can. In Raiders, you can almost hear Spielberg and Company ask the question “What can we do with a German truck?” Well, let me count the ways, for their answers are ingenious, and like some tribe of Plains Indians, they leave nothing to waste. First of all, the truck is transporting the Hebrew Ark of the Covenant. Guarding the precious cargo in back are seven Nazi soldiers. A Gestapo car precedes the truck, and a German version jeep with mounted machine gun follows close behind. A motorcycle with sidecar brings up the rear. Indiana Jones gives chase on an Arabian horse. John Williams’ brilliant music gallops heroically for a moment, and then proceeds to mirror perfectly all the action that comes next. Indy rides alongside the truck, takes out the rider and driver, and gains control behind the wheel. The Gestapo car tries to stop him. The jeep opens fire. The motorcycle and sidecar provide comedy relief. What can you do with a truck? Well, you can use it to run the jeep off an impossibly precarious cliff. You can have the Nazis get out and crawl around the sides and over the top. You can shoot Indy, punch him around, and hurl him through the windshield to be trapped straddling the speeding front tire. In a stunt that is a direct descendant of Yakima Canutt’s great work in Stagecoach, you can have Indy escape certain death by pulling himself underneath the truck, then hook his whip into the truck's undercarriage, drag behind it and climb back aboard.
For the record, that’s the front, back, sides, top, and bottom of the truck. Michael Kahn’s editing weaves all this action together seamlessly. Spielberg repeated this “exploit the vehicle” formula successfully in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom “What can we do with a mine car?” and unsuccessfully in Indiana Jones and the last Crusade “What can we do with a tank?” …Well, you can hold a guy’s head next to its treads, you can climb all over it, you can have Sallah deliver the awful line “He’s inside the belly of that steel beast.” Geez, the Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark would know what a fucking tank was.
3. What’s Up, Doc?
It is said that all true comedies end in marriage. They also like to end with chases. Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? is a fine example. A delightfully madcap ode to the screwball comedies of yesteryear, What’s Up, Doc? hits all the requisite notes and then some. Nerdy Howard Bannister and zany catalyst Judy Maxwell begin things when they stash four plaid-clad cases of mixed-up MacGuffins into a grocery delivery trike. Then they pedal their escape through the streets of San Francisco, chased by an assortment of oddball characters in a taxi, an old Cadillac and a new Cadillac. San Francisco, with its steep hills and picturesque trolley cars, has always been a favorite location for car chases, and Bogdanovich makes full use of it. Our pair race down dangerous hills and try to pedal uphill only to speed back down in reverse. They zoom between the A-frame of a ladder and narrowly miss crossing trolley cars, leaving various car crashes in their wake. They avoid two men carrying a large pane of glass. They coast through a parade in Chinatown, zipping through and tearing away a Chinese dragon while the band behind plays “La Cucharacha” Chinese style. They crash through a costume shop and come out wearing costumes. They steal a Volkswagen Beetle decorated for some newlyweds and continue on with the tin cans dragging behind them. They knock over trash cans and ruin the work of a laborer smoothing a patch of cement. They get chased down Lombard Street. They make a wrong turn and bounce down the steps of Alta Plaza Park, the 3 cars chasing them doing some permanent damage that can still be seen to this day. The only thing missing is a fruit cart. The end of the line has the blue Beetle jumping off the end of a pier and three pursuing cars splashing down. Luckily for Howard and Judy, Beetles float.
What’s up, Doc? manages to stand on equal footing with the films it emulates. It was the first film to list stuntmen in the credits, and the first that made the city of San Francisco require advance permits for any future car chases. And last but not least, it’s the only movie where I find Ryan O’Neal appealing and Barbra Streisand sexy.
4. Short Time
Here’s one you may have forgotten. The car chase in Short Time (1990) asks the crucial question “How much abuse can a car take?” The answer is quite a bit. The great Dabney Coleman plays Burt Simpson, a Seattle cop who’s two weeks away from retirement. He takes every precaution when he leaves the station house. After he is misdiagnosed with a rare blood disorder, he thinks he has only a few days to live. If he dies in the line of duty, his family will collect $320,000 in insurance. He spends the rest of the movie not giving a flip about self-preservation. When Burt tears off after the bad guys, the ensuing chase becomes a perfect balance of excitement and humor. “This is for you, Dougie. You’re going to college little guy” he says as he guns the engine and weaves in and out of the dozen or so police cars to lead the pack in hot pursuit. When the baddies open fire with an automatic weapon, he shoots them back “the finger” with both hands. He rolls his car down an embankment, realizes that he’s still alive, and then throws off his seatbelt in frustration. He grows more disgusted with every near miss; dodging death again and again. The bad guys are dismayed at his tenacity: “What is he trying to do, kill himself?!?” The two cars stick to each other like superglue as they plow through the tropes and conceits you’ve seen in a million chase scenes. How much abuse can a car take? Short Time answers that question. By the end of the chase, Burt’s car has practically disintegrated -- and that’s before one hell of a final collision.
5. The Blues Brothers
Elwood: “It’s got a cop motor, a 440 cubic inch plant, it’s got cop tires, cop suspensions, cop shocks. It’s a model made before catalytic converters so it’ll run good on regular gas. What do you say, is it the new Bluesmobile or what?”
Jake: “Fix the cigarette lighter.”
The Bluesmobile, a 1974 Dodge Monaco sedan, is indeed a piece of work. It has properties that are almost magical. And it should: it’s on a mission from God.
Elwood: “It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.”
Jake: “Hit it.”
And so begins one of the greatest car chases in all of cinema. The Blues Brothers is car chase as hilarious overkill. Jake and Elwood have everyone chasing them. That means 300 plus state troopers (a world record, more than The Sugarland Express) S.W.A.T. teams, the National Guard, a contingent of Illinois Nazis “I hate Illinois Nazis” and a country music RV. The only thing not chasing them is a kitchen sink. Director John Landis begins the pace almost casually, at dawn. We witness cop cars running off the freeway and crashing like lemmings in pyramid-high pile ups, while a bluesy bass riff plays lazily on the soundtrack. The tempo picks up as Jake and Elwood enter the city. The patrol cars keep piling up, yet no one gets hurt. A red Pinto full of Nazis led by Henry Gibson goes off a bridge to nowhere and then falls for what seems like miles, its impact creating a car-swallowing hole in the middle of the street. Elwood steps on the gas just in time to jump over it. Finally, the Bluesmobile guns through the streets of Chicago at 120 m.p.h., racing towards Daley Center. When Jake and Elwood get out, the car completely falls apart, as if God himself was holding it together. It’s a fitting end to a comic chase of staggering proportions.
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House contributor Wagstaff also writes for Liverputty and Edward Copeland on Film.
Links for the Day (June 18th, 2007)
1. "The Sopranos Finale: Three Alternate Endings." From I'm Just Sayin'." Related: a shot-by-shot breakdown of the last scene at A Lesson a Day.
2. "Body Shop: One Last Look at Hostel, Part II." From Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Related: "SLIFR Forum: The Future of Horror?" See also: Chris Stangl of The Exploding Kinetoscope on "Critical Disconnect: 120 Days of Hostel, Part II."
["Hostel, Part II is no more a purposeful or reflective consideration of the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Darfur, or a finger on the pulse of post-9/11 anxiety, than was Part I. Again, the notion that a movie takes advantage of a premise involving an especially bloody and aggressive outgrowth of capitalism, spearheaded by characters that look like they could have come from deep inside the beltway of George W. Bush’s America, doesn’t mean that the movie profoundly engages with that premise on a political or sociological level. And hearing Roth pontificate in interviews about how he drew inspiration for the movie after pondering the aftermath of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina really is opportunism at its most shameless-- post-production rationalization designed to distract the mainstream press from the ghoulish play he’s really up to. No, Hostel Part II departs from its predecessor into the realm of a truly effective giallo-influenced thriller through sheer craft and skillfully achieved empathy for those pitiful specimens who find themselves in the death chair."]
3. "Frankenheimer's Last Film." The Shamus on Path to War.
["It’s impossible to watch Path of War and not think of the path we have taken to Iraq. In Vietnam, we simply were ignorant of that country’s history and suffered from a hubris about our own superiority and military might. You’d think we’d have have learned a lesson that would resonate for longer, but history does tend to repeat itself and we are once again in a quagmire. In both wars, there seems to be a sense of pride in powerful men that won’t let them honorably back away when they know they should."]
4. "Review of Man from Earth." Michael Guillen praises a new film adaptation of a short story by science fiction master Jerome Bixby, and posts an interview with the director, Richard Shenkman. Cross-published at The Evening Class.
["Schenkman: I was disappointed when we were shopping the film around to some of the different distributors—including one major cable channel that's well-known for playing a lot of science fiction material—and were told that it's not science fiction because there's no rocket ships or ray guns or aliens or anything like that. That's nonsense! Some of the greatest science fiction of the last 100 years—and I'm equally referring to books and short stories—is science fiction of the mind. It's a reality that's just a few degrees away from the reality that we live in and its skewed view of humanity. I'm thinking here obviously of Kurt Vonnegut as much as I'm thinking of Isaac Asimov and a variety of the other greats."]
5. "Ford at Fox: 21 Disc Collection for December." Dave Kehr on a projected DVD mega-collection of John Ford movies.
["Rumors that 20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment was planning a John Ford set have been rumbling through the community for months. I’ve just received confirmation from a Fox publicist that the rumors are not only true, but the project sounds bigger and better than I’d dared to hope."]
Clip of the Day:
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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.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Links for the Day (June 17th, 2007)
1. "Fred Thompson: Not so Conservative?": Newsweek ponders.
["Fred Thompson has a gift for knowing just what to say to anyone, in any situation. In 1998, when Thompson was a Republican senator and a single man about town, New York socialite Georgette Mosbacher invited him to accompany her on an overseas trip. Thompson couldn't go, and summoned the full measure of his Tennessee charm in letting her down. "I am sitting here with a long face and broken heart as I contemplate sunsets on the Mediterranean, which I will not see," he wrote to Mosbacher on his official Senate stationery. "We must remember the unspoken vow that all United States senators take upon entering the Senate: I shall have no money, and I shall have no fun. I, of course regarding myself as an unconquerable soul, am still determined to break the second part of that vow.""]
2. "Girl, 5, stumbles from woods to delight rescuers": This headline and opener are really, um, interesting.
["A 5-year-old girl who was feared drowned with her grandfather on a boating trip startled searchers Friday when she emerged from the woods -- naked, scratched and holding raspberries."]
3. "Ford at Fox: 21 Disc Collection for December": Dave Kehr reports some terrific news.
["Rumors that 20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment was planning a John Ford set have been rumbling through the community for months. I’ve just received confirmation from a Fox publicist that the rumors are not only true, but the project sounds bigger and better than I’d dared to hope. Now set for release for December, 2007, the collection, to be titled “Ford at Fox,” will consists of 25 features that Ford made for Fox, including five silents, 18 of which will be new to DVD."]
4. "Movies I've Borrowed for an Unreasonably Long Time Blog-a-thon": Rob Humanick calls the latest one.
["Therefore, in the name of we procrastinators, I declare the week of July 15-21 the official "Movies I've Borrowed for an Unreasonably Long Time" Blog-a-Thon. This date will give anyone interested in participating a full month to get around to those dust-collecting DVDs and tapes - extra props to anyone who can beat my own personal record of a whopping four years (that's right - I borrowed my friend's copy of WarGames at the end of my senior year in high school, and now I'm applying for graduate school)."]
5. "Beetroot Risotto"; "Chicken Fricassee with Tomato, Rosemary and Olives"; and "Ugly Chocolate Sponge Cake": A three-course meal, courtesy the Esoteric Rabbit.
["Serve with wet polenta."]
Clip of the Day: Out of context: the final scene of Pasolini's Salò. ("A film which, all accounts settled, can and must be seen only once, for the last time, when one still has virginal eyes." - Alberto Pezzotta in Senses of Cinema.)
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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.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Links for the Day (June 16th, 2007)
1. "Iranian porn stars? (Updated)" & "Friday Acid Flashback Blogging, or, I'm the worst Glenn": A bit of a row between Glenn Kenny and Ann Althouse, with special appearance by... MOM?!!
["Yes, I am guilty—I was tweaking Ann Althouse in the original version of that post and hence I should have been extra careful in its composition. By misquoting her I was not attempting to "smear" her. And while I truly regret the mistake, I respectfully disagree that my riff loses any of its sense if the correct word "actors" is substituted for the incorrect word "stars." It was an honest, and yes, dumb mistake that I'm sorry happened. But I can't pretend that it's not amusing to see Althouse refer to me as "infernal" (my mom will particularly enjoy that one). "]
2. "In Solidarity": Jeff Reichert interviews Volker Schlöndorff.
["Somewhat underrated in discussion of the major filmmakers of the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff created one of its most emblematic and resonant early works in Young Törless, and one of the most widely admired imports of the late Seventies—The Tin Drum won both the Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Still, his career, which is based on an unusually high percentage of literary adaptations, seems somehow harder to get a handle on than that of Wenders, Herzog, or even Fassbinder, whose output almost takes on a kind of uniformity (of pushed boundaries) in comparison. His detour into the business side of the film world—which found him rebuilding classic German studio UFA from 1990-1997 and making no films during the period—probably hasn’t helped his notoriety with this current generation of viewers. But in the last six years, he’s turned out three films, all dealing directly with that most unfashionable of topics: politics. His latest, opening today, June 15, in New York is Strike, a sort-of biopic about the life of Agnieszka Wolynicza (a terrific, bug-eyed Katharina Thalba), who played an important, if largely unknown, role in the Polish Solidarity movement."]
3. "Ten Films Still Not on DVD": What are your ten? Discuss below...
["New viewing technology allows audiences to see a film with astounding visual clarity and a pitch perfect soundtrack. The problem, however, with HD-DVD’s, BluRay’s and DVD’s in general, is that it's hard to go back and "update" the millions of films that have been released in the past one hundred years. This list is incredibly small and in no way represents the "best" films not available on DVD. But here are ten films that are important entries in cinematic history and deserve restoration for a new generation of viewers."]
4. "Viral Video": From MSNBC.
["Michael Moore's new documentary about America's health-care system and pharmaceutical industry may be called “Sicko,” but chances are he's the one feeling a little queasy today. Although it's not due to hit theaters until June 29, “Sicko” is already playing on thousands of screens across the country—the result of a leak that has it playing for free on numerous peer-to-peer networks online, including BitTorrent, Pirate Bay and others."]
5. "Ten Years, Ten-Lists #5 (Bill Chambers)": The grand poobah of Film Freak Central lists ten watershed moments in the history of the site.
["You may resent me for not giving you ten more rental ideas, but since I realized that FILM FREAK CENTRAL's tenth anniversary obliged me to recap the site's "origin story," anyway, I just decided to dedicate my list to landmarks in our turbulent history. (Like I warned, "self-indulgent.") Th..Th..That's all, folks!"]
Clip of the Day: Mashing up Winnie the Pooh with Apocalypse Now. Pointed out by Alan Vanneman at Bright Lights After Dark.
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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.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Farce Majeure: Robot Chicken gobbles up Star Wars
By Andrew Johnston
Not long ago, you would have been laughed off Tatooine for predicting that a sitcom as mainstream as 30 Rock would expect its viewers to recognize the name of a Star Wars character as obscure as Captain Needa. “More and more, the geeks are inheriting the earth,” says Seth Green, who ought to know: Robot Chicken, the action-figure sketch-comedy program that the 32-year-old actor cocreated for the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim lineup, is arguably the geekiest thing on TV. But Chicken isn’t a mere litany of esoteric references to Reagan-era cartoons and sci-fi movies. The show consistently strikes comic gold by placing fanciful characters in real-world situations (in the 2004 debut episode, Transformers’ Optimus Prime was diagnosed with prostate cancer). And no property offers a richer trove of material-—or a cooler array of action figures—than the Star Wars saga, which turned 30 on May 25. A Robot Chicken special celebrating the anniversary (debuting Sunday, June 17) is therefore a combination as natural and inspired as fried chicken and waffles.
House contributor Andrew Johnston edits "TimeIn," the TV, DVD and videogame section of Time Out New York. To read the rest of the article, click here.
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To Live is To Learn: Kenji Mizoguchi on screen, on DVD
An e-conversation between Ryland Walker Knight and Steven Boone
So I bought the Criterion disc of Sansho the Bailiff blind and told Keith Uhlich I would write it up. After watching the film two times now, about a week apart, I still have no idea what to write. To be honest: I know it's a marvel of a film but it still doesn't touch me the way I've read people describe it as having affected them. My mood is changed, and I am wholly devastated, but I do not know why there is a value in that any more. I've long thought that when a movie provokes such a depressed response it should be to show you the world is alive, and substantive, despite the sour times, but both Ugestu and Sansho, the two Kenji Mizoguchi films that I've seen, only appear a series of denials. Freedom is only ever achieved at a price, the price of a loved one's death, in both films. Perhaps this is realism? It certainly is crushing.
Let me be clear: I am fascinated by these films, and this director. All the visual rhymes and storytelling patterns — the overall structure — are glorious, and perhaps genius. Sansho opens with the mother telling her son to be careful in the world, to remember his father and his father's teachings, after which the film then travels back in time to show you those precise, compassionate moral teachings. Sansho closes in a minor beach community, ravaged by a tidal wave, attempting to secure itself anew. Here, the covenant between mother and son is reconstituted thanks to the son's faithful devotion to his father's moral teachings, proving their worth and resonance. Mizoguchi's ability to synthesize his morals into the structure of the film and its varied, complex and shifting storylines inspires awe. Yet, I am not moved as much by this ending as I am by the final shot of, say, Ugetsu; or, really, the whole of, say, Rear Window, another film from 1954; or, say, the finale of Breathless, an often hilarious downer film made by one of Mizoguchi's famed trumpeters, Godard; or, possibly most damning, another Japanese milestone from 1954, Seven Samurai, by Mizoguchi's celebrated former assistant, Akira Kurosawa, who has clearly eclipsed him in terms of Western fame since then.
To further unveil myself: I bought Ugetsu blind, too, when it came out from Criterion Collection in late 2005, and while I was blown away by its images and structure, I found it hard to figure out what I liked about it beyond its visual flair and formal precision. Indeed, I am still having trouble understanding why I own the films. I really do not want to watch them again (that often? ever?) no matter how great they may be. And while their packaging is delovely, and the essays insightful (Lopate's essay accompanying Ugestu is better than the one Le Fanu wrote for the Sansho disc), and the supplements worthy of the cost, I'm still nagged by how difficult it is to actually watch these films. Perhaps it's a similar thing to your Antonioni problem: on a small screen, the majestic images and structural genius are not as imposing, or evident, or something. I imagine watching these films in a theatre is an entirely different experience. It's funny, too, that I have this problem as I keep missing the retrospectives that have been popping up around the country in the last year. While I prepared to leave New York (for the West Coast) last summer, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley was running "Seven Classic Mizoguchi". After I was back in Berkeley, the Film Forum in New York played a series of Mizoguchi classics. And then, after I left Seattle last winter, the series traveled to the Northwest Film Forum. It seems I'm fated to watch the films on DVD, like most of the rest of the Region-1 world, which is a shame.
I know you attended the New York Film Forum retrospective last year and I was curious what your take on both of these films, and any others, might be. Have you seen these Criterion discs? Are there other films of Mizoguchi's you like more? you think work better? you find more joy within? Why do you think, perhaps, Kurosawa is more famous? Simply because his films are more immediately satisfying and less austere? I am wary of all of this. But I trust you.
later, ryland.
Ry,
Like the nerd I am, I still have the tickets for all the Film Forum Mizoguchi screenings I saw last summer: Story of Late Chrysanthemums, Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, Life of Oharu and Street of Shame. I love them all, but have no desire to own or view a DVD of any of them. These are pure theatrical experiences. I can't imagine sitting through Chrysanthemum's epic, super long, room-to-room master shots while eating grilled cheese in my apartment. In the theater, the last pan-and-crane shot of Ugetsu gathered up the audience and lifted us into the sky. It was pure religion. Mizoguchi is one of the all-time masters at designing shot sequences, not just for the big screen, but for public consumption. Like those dag-blasted superhero flicks y'all mysteriously champion, Mizoguchi's working with national myths and parables; they don't really resound so well unless you're watching with a packed house of neighbors and strangers. (Imagine watching an immortal performance of a great stage play in an empty playhouse. The audience electricity is a crucial ingredient.) When the father in Sansho, a politician banished for doing the right thing, gives his son a lesson in compassion and mercy before being taken away, I was moved to leave these comments on a film geek forum:
"In just the first five minutes of Sansho the Bailiff, Mizoguchi hands you a treasure you wouldn't trade for a trillion yen: An official in feudal Japan has gotten into hot water by defying his superiors on behalf of aggrieved peasants. He's about to be jailed or exiled for doing the right fucking thing, so he takes his last few moments at home to impart some wisdom to his son, who it's clear he will never see again.
"The advice he gives his boy stands in sharp contrast to every father-son talking-to in Western cinema. Take, um, Conan the Barbarian. Conan's dad tells him to trust no one or nothing but his sword. Trust nothing but an instrument of death. Thanks, dad. By the end of the flick, Conan has survived by trusting only his sword, killing hundreds, and has worked up the balls to defy even God (Crom): "Don't like it? To hell with you."
"The father in Sansho delivers to his son a clear, stirring set of virtues comparable to Jesus' sermon on the mount. But shorter. Mizoguchi is drawing from tenets of Buddhism and elements of Japanese myth, but I don't see any western filmmaker from that time engaging so directly and intimately with the meaning of, say, the Gospels. Over here it's greeting cards.
"John Wayne and Mel Gibson and all the other soldiers of Christ trust their swords first. Alls I'm saying is, I would trade all the Westerns and DeMille epics and morality plays gaudying up Ho'wood's history for just those three minutes of the father-son lesson in Sansho. If we had more stuff like that in our culture, who knows what we'd be?"
This trans-Pacific cultural communication I perceived wouldn't be so forceful if just me and maybe a homeboy/girl or two were sitting at home staring at the flick on the 50" plasma.
Speaking of plays, I'm starting to question the whole notion of a good film as something you can revisit frequently and see something new in each time — the return-to-the-well theory. Those five Mizoguchi films live in my mind the way a performance of the play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom still marks my soul. I know I can be a drama queen with the hyperbole, but I mean it here: I can recall those hauntings as vividly as the time I got stuck up on 241st Street. No need for a refresher.
Ry, if you had been there for the Mizoguchi fest, I think you would know why you own those discs. You'd have them for the same reason that those ticket stubs are in my wallet: to trigger powerful memories, to go over the crime scene occasionally, to figure out how the whole thing was brought off. At this point, DVD is my ongoing film school. I might put on a disc of Ugetsu if I'm planning to shoot something and want to see how the director handled a particular sequence. Even though the world doesn't know it, films on DVD and all their supplemental material are really for filmmakers, scholars and critics. Film buffs and fanboys might get something out of hearing a director's commentary, but the ideal presentation format for most films is theatrical. In the last few years, despite all the valuable schooling, I've fallen out of love with DVD as a way of experiencing flicks for the first time. I do my best to get my ass to the theater if something rare comes to town. (Easy for me to say, right? So many great venues in NYC.) The 50" plasma still can't cut it.
Kurosawa? A few months ago, a complete stranger who liked my online writing heard I was too broke to catch a screening of Ran at MOMA, so she comp'd me a ticket. She said I haven't seen it if I'd only seen it on tape or DVD. I'd attempted to sit through Ran many times on cable and home video over the years; glanced at and been impressed by the famous battle sequence. But watching the whole thing hovering above me, 20 feet tall, I finally saw the film as the epic poem that it was (and, ultimately, Kurosawa's perfect valediction). Toru Takemitsu's score riding across the cutaways to the sky during the battle scene moved me more than any Ozu pillow shot I've yet seen.
And, yes, I do suspect my problems with Godard, Antonioni, The Life Aquatic and that goddamned Superman flick have much to do with the fact that I've tried engaging them on DVD first. I have to make more time for priceless theatrical screenings in this town, despite tickets that now cost more than my shoes. Also, whoever that nice lady who treated me to Ran is, I'm gonna find out if she's single.
Steve
My friend,
A day after my first missive, I am renewed. Your response helped me locate not just my own thoughts on the films, but myself in relation to the films; I even re-watched pieces of both. Those final shots of uplift are wondrous, in particular the finale of Ugetsu: it is the formal echo of the film's opener, opening the film back up to the world, offering the viewer the world. The final shot of Sansho, while still magical, is more subtle a move. First, the camera is not as choreographed as in Ugetsu; it is simply a crane and pan, without any tracking, and without worrying about capturing movement through the frame (by a child actor). Second, in lieu of the protagonist's child as the preserving, sustaining humanistic life force Mizoguchi invests us in, it is seaweed scattered on the beach: gathered from the ocean, associated with death and patience and separation throughout the film, it is, here in the end, what will provide sustenance for this wrecked hamlet — and this renewed family. That, I think, was where I found Sansho so devastating: its humanism is less overt than that of Ugetsu. At first glance, the beach is empty and the frame is dominated by that island smack in the middle of the frame. Yet, if you follow the contours of the image, from the mound in the middle down along the beach to the seaweed-gatherer and his odd flock of leaves, you find yourself at once drawn into the metaphor of renewal (invested in an item gathered from a previously devilish entity) and shown the world outside the film. As I said in my earlier email, Mizoguchi's ability to tie theme to structure and form is dazzling, and complex. And yet, still, the films are rather dour to watch alone. In a way, after reading your response, I felt, for a minute, that I had hardly — that is, actually — seen the films.
Another peek behind the curtain: both initial viewings of both films saw me briefly nod off. "What?!" you may be thinking. To answer, I must first say this is outright not a bad thing. As Keith Uhlich has relayed to me, Abbas Kiarostami once said, "I love a film that affords me a nap." That's a delicious bit of endorsement. I have fallen asleep in many of my so-called favorite films, from time to time, including the first time. Perhaps I'm just a nut, but perhaps it's something else — perhaps the naps force me to question why I slid a little lower and pay better attention. Perhaps a nap is worthwhile. And yet, perhaps a nap is an outright sin on a first viewing. I'm still not sure about that; it warrants more investigation. If it means I am drawn back into the film, or the film has somehow seeped into my pores as a result — an odd, spectral osmosis — then, okay, I'm sold. If it means I'm just lazy, I am sorry. I am apt to think the films I return to after a nap are the ones I usually enjoy more, and further, in time. Some films appear designed to facilitate a nap.
Last weekend I indulged in Jacques Rivette's near-13 hour Out 1 at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive over Saturday and Sunday. I napped for a bit of, I think, one episode on each day. It is one of my favorite movie-going experiences ever. Last December I saw Sátántangó at Seattle's Northwest Film Forum and after an early nap about two hours into the seven-and-a-half hour picture I was wide awake the rest of the way. It was a defining experience. (However, given the opportunity, I would much rather revisit Rivette's film than Tarr's film any day, or pair of days, as the case may be.) There's a magic to the theatrical experience, it is true. In fact, after reading Walter Chaw's recent blog post "Ten Films That Changed The Way I Look At Film" I made a list, for myself alone, of "Ten Defining Movie-Going Experiences". Both the marathon films are on the list, but neither can top seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70 mm at The Castro in San Francisco in the summer of 2005. I remember walking out of that screening practically yelling that it was the best film ever made and I refused to watch it on DVD ever again. So I thank you for clarifying the Mizoguchi run(s) as those kinds of defining cinematic experiences. I know I'm missing something here at home on my laptop. (Yes, I do not have a television anymore; I watch films on a 13" laptop monitor with headphones when not attending the theatre. Yet, this does not diminish a great film, in general; instead, intimacy works better for some films rather than others, as watching Kiarostami's Taste Of Cherry last week — my first encounter with his films — alone in my room was as close to a religious film experience as I've encountered with a computer-viewing. On the flip side, I have only watched The New World once on DVD.)
To bring it back to Mizoguchi, and the two of his films we are discussing, I should also like to say, in addition to reading over your response, I received two other emails about my conundrum I would like to share, in parts:
"I was to see a triple feature of Mizoguchi once. Started with The Life of Oharu and was so devastated that I couldn't bear to watch the others. It's funny: Naruse I couldn't get enough of. But Mizoguchi, for me at least, needs to be taken in slowly, with space in between." — Keith Uhlich
"Watching Mizoguchi films in those [undergraduate] days, I was struck by the combination of formal and thematic beauty. It caught my own sense of the world, or of the world as I wanted it to be, not sad and painful (I took that for granted), but powerful and profound in its sadness and pain. I continue to admire Mizoguchi's films tremendously. I know a lot more about film as an art form now, and I admire his films' formal properties more and more articulately than I did back then. I have to admit, however, that I'd rather watch Kung Fu Hustle." — low proFile
I think this insistence on letting Mizoguchi's films sit, to allow them to work on one's mind over time, is crucial, for me. His films (or at least these two I've seen) rigorously foreground temporal space, and actions through time, as when he shoots scenes without edits, like the hillside ambush of Miyagi, the potter's wife, in Ugetsu. As it happens, after reading D K Holm's appreciation of the man last week, I checked out Robin Wood's Personal Views from the UC Berkeley library (further distracting me from many projects) and immediately skipped to the final essay (in this early edition) titled, "The Ghost Princess and the Seaweed-Gatherer: Ugetsu Monogatari and Sansho Dayu". It was a pleasant entry into Wood's work. He has a keen, discerning eye and offers insightful reads. (Perhaps an additional element of my resistance to write anything is that Mizoguchi already has so much good written about him, and that it is, in general, written so well.) This passage from Wood's essay, describing the sequence of Miyagi's ambush in Ugetsu that I mentioned above, seems the most relevant to our discussion:
"Miyagi, trying to return home with her child, is attacked on a mountain path by three starving outcasts (perhaps deserters) who steal the rice-cakes she has been given. When she protests, one of them drives a spear into her. Her little boy still on her back, she staggers on, supporting herself on a stick. Here, there is no cutting: the scene is a classic example of what the French call the plan-séquence, the 'sequence' organized within a single shot. But the preservation of spatial reality within the image, and the preservation of the spectator's distance from the action, are again crucial to the total effect.
"...Mizoguchi's long take hold the spectator at a distance throughout, preserves the unity and continuity of the action, and preserves the sense of environment — of the action situated in a real world governed by the realities of time and space. We are not asked to respond simply and directly to the physical horror of a spear entering a woman's belly, but to an event existing in a context. The detachment with which the camera compels us to watch the action makes the emotion it evokes much less immediate and overwhelming, but also much finer and deeper: we are free to contemplate the scene's wider implications, to reflect on the events that have preceded it and its likely consequences.
"The organization of the complex action over a large area within a singe take is remarkable: one would call it virtuoso did not the word carry connotations of display, the technique here being self-effacing in the extreme. The staging has many of the features one thinks of as characteristically Mizoguchian. The camera position is slightly above the action, in the interests of clarity: from it, we can see not only the path and the hut, but down into the valley below."
Wood's synthesis of how Mizoguchi’s long-takes work (in tandem with his deft compositional eye) can help us understand why it may take more time for one to deal with his films, especially in the home setting. It's that phrase, "we are free to contemplate the scene's wider implications, to reflect on the events that have preceded it and its likely consequences." However, I would argue, we are not simply free to contemplate, we are forced to contemplate, and pay attention, to the action on screen with the aid of the long take. I know that’s why I’m so enamored with Tarkovsky’s films. What I don’t know is how those films feel closer to me than these. I want to refuse the notion that it is simply because of skin-tone and ethnicity but that may be the root, no matter how much I tell my (other) friends, “I just watch movies; foreign movies don’t feel foreign to me as much as intriguing. I feel more at home watching Mirror than I do watching Manhattan — but I love both films.” That said, I also like Pirates and Superman Returns and EPIII so who knows what my problem is with calculating and articulating my somewhat tempered response to Mizoguchi, an artist I prize and admire. Perhaps it’s that temporal element.
Which is not to say initial reactions are useless. Or that one must return to films to understand them. My point is more about being open to changing one's mind; or to recognize that one's mind has changed over time. I think to allow that is a part of being human, and part of valuable criticism: the ability to refine and focus one's attention to an object as well as to life. So it's not that I feel too optimistic to appreciate the Mizoguchi films, or his world view — I believe in Zushio's father's teachings, too — it's more that I feel I need some time, like Zushio. An education is never finite. I am, regrettably, a latecomer to this criticism practice, as I was to the values of a college education. And, as I've said before, I am willing to risk making mistakes: I think to live is to learn. And I love learning. Especially at the movies, over time.
word up,
ry.
Ry,
I will go out on that limb with you regarding dozing off at flicks you love. My initial reaction to your theory was hell naw, that you wouldn't accept such a rationalization regarding a lapdance or a milkshake. After a little thought, however, I realize that you're only acknowledging your specific personal response in flux. Maybe a film that you can love and drift away from/with and allow to seep into your dreams (it happened to me watching The Lady from Shanghai once — "Michael, do you think the wooorld is coming to an end?") is like a lover you're comfortable with, comfortable enough to curl up beside, unguarded. Maybe the charm/attraction of some films is their calm and patience.
Wait, no "maybe": I just saw such a film tonight, Rolf de Heer's aborigine epic Ten Canoes. Oh, Ry, you have to see this one when it hits your town. The film is all about stories that are so ancient and embedded in the fabric of daily life that pauses, jokes, asides and detours do nothing but add to their already tensile strength. The narrator calls his stories trees. He openly teases us for our presumed impatience and coaxes us to stay with him, advising us that there is something useful even in the apparently random ethnographic scenes of tribesmen on an egg hunt or constructing canoes. Ah, man, I can't wait to hear your take on this, the most charismatic film I've seen in a while.
Getting back to Mizoguchi's trees: You were right to correct Robin Wood's statements about what that killing scene in Ugetsu was doing to us. Wood: "The detachment with which the camera compels us to watch the action makes the emotion it evokes much less immediate and overwhelming..." Hogwash. Ry: "However, I would argue, we are not simply free to contemplate, we are forced to contemplate, and pay attention, to the action on screen with the aid of the long take." Right on. The key to all the Mizoguchi masterpieces I saw last summer is that his restrained camera gets us ever more desperately invested in the fate of his characters. Seen on the big screen, these films are as intimate as a sonogram.
your friend,
Steve
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Ryland Walker Knight and Steven Boone first met under aliases on one such film geek board. Ry said, "You got style, and smarts," and Steve said, "You got smarts, and style." Since then they have collaborated off and on, here and there: both on Vinyl Is Heavy and Big Media Vandalism and, of course, here, at The House Next Door.
Links for the Day (June 15th, 2007)
1. "Kurt Waldheim, Former U.N. Chief, Is Dead at 88": From The New York Times.
["Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary general and president of Austria whose hidden ties to Nazi organizations and war crimes were exposed late in his career, died yesterday at his home in Vienna. He was 88."]
2. "No Gay Marriage Ballot Item for Mass.": From Guardian Unlimited.
["Massachusetts lawmakers threw out a proposed constitutional amendment Thursday that would have let voters decide whether to ban gay marriage in the only state that allows it. The vote - which came amid heavy pressure to kill the measure from Gov. Deval Patrick and legislative leaders - was a devastating blow to efforts to reverse a historic 2003 court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. ``Today's vote is not just a victory for marriage equality. It was a victory for equality itself,'' said Patrick, who had lobbied lawmakers up until the final hours to kill the measure. As the tally was announced, the halls of the Statehouse erupted in applause. "]
3. "Horror Story": S.T. VanAirsdale on the Museum of the Moving Image's "Horror Films" series.
["Almost 30 years ago, in the acrid fog of post-Vietnam disillusionment, an American cinema bowing under a flurry of jabs like Coming Home, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now took a body blow from John Carpenter. The 30-year-old director followed his overlooked grindhouse picture Assault on Precinct 13 with another low-budget indie, this time a slasher film called Halloween. Already enjoying a reappraisal in Europe, where both audiences and critics greeted Precinct 13 with acclaim, Carpenter was warming up in the States. Something was happening -- not much, but something."]
4. "Notes on The Chelsea Girls": Andrew Chan on Andy Warhol's magnum opus.
["I came to one of MoMA's recent screenings of Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls as a novice to both avant-garde film and the wild underground characters who populate this notorious 1966 classic. In other significant ways, though, I was well prepared for the alleged impenetrability of its three-hour, double-projected, unedited vision of drug-induced debauchery. I had heard the film euphemistically referred to as "challenging but rewarding" and more bluntly described as "agony." To introduce it that Friday, a Warhol expert informed the audience that a couple nights ago half the viewers walked out, as if he were daring us to stay put in our seats. But why at MoMA, of all places, would an audience be made to feel as if difficulty, quirkiness, and provocation were qualities unusual in a work of modern art? Why talk about this movie as if it doubled as both torture device and badge of honor?"]
5. "Nancy Drew": Walter Chaw delves into the mystery.
["Far from too much to ladle on what is easily the worst film of the year, Nancy Drew can in fact be appreciated as the working metaphor for the Republican party in the middle of 2007 as the most unpopular President in history leads it to ignominy. It's a train wreck and an ideological morass of ill-fitting parts and contradictory feints and bobbles, held together by some flickering ideal of innocence and good old American self-sufficiency in the body of a prim housewife shoehorned into the vessel of a sixteen-year-old girl in parochial schoolgirl duds. Not burdened by too much religiosity, at least, Nancy Drew nevertheless paints the divide in this country as clearly as if it were. Should this picture persist as a cultural artifact--and there's no reason on this sweet green earth for that--it'll persist hand-in-hand with discussions of this neo-Reaganism, the death of Jerry Falwell, the rising tide of discontent surrounding the Iraq War, and our atmosphere of punditry and intolerance. It's a movie about a little girl from the fifties teaching little girls from the '00s about virtue by solving the love-child sex-murder of an icon from the Golden Age of Hollywood. It's also, in case you were wondering, bumbling, inept, annoying, obtuse, ugly-looking, badly-cut (by the editor of Glitter), and, on the whole, generally unwatchable."]
Clip of the Day: Cheetah poops into a Jeep while people sitting inside. (Imagine what John Waters could do with this...)
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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.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Links for the Day (June 14th, 2007)
1. "Artist unveils $98M diamond skull": Lucy in the eye with diamonds.
["Damien Hirst, former BritArt bad boy whose works infuriate and inspire in equal measure, did it again on Friday with a diamond-encrusted platinum cast of a human skull priced at a cool $98 million. The skull, cast from a 35-year-old 18th-century European male, is coated with 8,601 diamonds, including a large pink diamond worth more than $8 million in the center of its forehead. "It shows we are not going to live for ever. But it also has a feeling of victory over death," Hirst said as the sparkling skull was unveiled to the public for the first time amid tight security at central London's White Cube gallery."]
2. "John from Cincinnati": Ed Gonzalez reviews the new HBO series.
["HBO has promoted John from Cincinnati as "a new series from the producers of Deadwood," but are these words of enticement or warning? The western show's life support may have been pulled by the cable network, but its essence lives on—its unique rhythms and cadences of language reincarnated in this new surfing drama in ways that struggle for sense, or have yet to make any. Indeed, given the impressive turnaround other shows like Dexter have made in the past, there's some hope that John from Cincinnati may find a way to justify its singularly flabbergasting, almost inscrutable eccentricity. Right now, creator David Milch isn't being kind to anyone, especially himself, by playing it so aloofishly cool—showing off as if he were running on empty."]
3. "The ancient origins of cell phone technology": From Lance Mannion.
["My sister, the former Lucy Manhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifnion, has been having an anxious week. My brother-in-law and my teenage nephew are on a white water adventure on the Colorado River and they've been unreachable by cell phone since they descended into the Grand Canyon. It's been three days since Lucy's heard from them and it's making her a little crazy. When I heard about this, I reacted with my usual compassion. "Gee, too bad, you have to live like it's the 1980s for a week.""]
4. "Kenyon Review": Zach Campbell on Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon, and the audiences who react.
["As a general rule (there are exceptions) I loathe going to see melodramas or noirs in public. My experience just never jibes with the vocal majority, who chuckle and guffaw throughout any number of lines they perceive as too "quaint," or which they perceive as howlers. I can even sympathize (though not empathize so much) with this kind of behavior when we're looking at a given film as a relic of the slightly older or outmoded idiocies of the past (even as these same audiences might be loathe to laugh at contemporary idiocies)--such as a film that insists on its women characters being housewives and mothers to be happy, or some such nonsense. (But this does not describe Daisy Kenyon, a film with a very strong female character based on a novel by a feminist writer and agitator that explicitly problematizes and dramatizes the attempts of its three-dimensional male characters to pigeonhole and control its three-dimensional female protagonist.)"]
5. "Don Herbert, ‘Mr. Wizard’ to Science Buffs, Dies at 89": Bow our heads... and see our Clip of the Day
["Don Herbert, who unlocked the wonders of science for youngsters of the 1950s and ’60s as television’s Mr. Wizard, died yesterday at his home in the Bell Canyon section of Los Angeles. He was 89."]
Clip of the Day: Letterman vs. Wizard
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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.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Links for the Day (June 13th, 2007)
1. "Katherine Heigl: the new Barbarella?": Peet Gelderblom thinks there's a kinda cockle shell about you.
["There’s just one big question: How on Earth are they going to find an actress as INSANELY HOT as Jane Fonda in her prime? It’s impossible, right? Well… almost impossible. I present you: Katherine Heigl."]
2. "The heads they are a-rollin’": Paul Schrodt on the latest from Herr Roth.
["What has Quentin Tarantino done to Eli Roth? Hostel: Part II is the smuggest shit to stink up the aisles of American pop culture since Mr. Brown and Mr. Blue debated the subtext of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” in Reservoir Dogs. “The whole song is a metaphor for big dicks.” No, it’s not, but just as sure as Tarantino fetishizes the minutiae of pop culture, you can bet Roth’s latest gives him a hard-on. He rushes through the mechanics of foreplay—a playful if uninspired opening—and basks in the orgasmic glory of his torture sequences, as if they were the whole point. And maybe they are. In a culture that emphasizes the visceral release of gore, we’d prefer to forget what makes these scenes so powerful and cathartic in the first place. Better question: What has Eli Roth done to American horror cinema?"]
3. "Whacking the Critics": From The New York Sun.
["As HBO defines the future of the medium by mounting serial dramas and comedies — like " The Sopranos" and " Sex and the City" and even, in some ways, "Curb Your Enthusiasm" — it will be the bloggers and insta-critics following closely behind that make it exciting, interpreting and Monday-morning-quarterbacking in ways that have changed the face of criticism. Mr. Chase wasn't whacking the audience; he was whacking the old-school critical establishment for creating lofty literary expectations he had no desire to fulfill."]
4. "A view from a chair": By Scott Schuldt for The Oklahoman.
["When you've seen the world from a height of 6 foot 3 for most of your adult life, things certainly look different once your eye line drops more than a foot lower once you can't use your legs any longer. Two years ago, I was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis, one of the rarest types, and as the disease has progressed, I've been forced to use a wheelchair most of the time."]
5. "Gus Van Sant tumbles down the Champs-Élysées": N.P. Thompson has no l'amour for Paris Je T'aime.
["In "Le Marais," Gus Van Sant chimes in with a contribution on his all-time favorite subject: lissome gay dudes making eyes and acting like moo-cows at each other. Portland's own Elias McConnell looks mighty fine sporting a blond buzz-cut and dangling a hand-rolled cigarette in the corner of his mouth, but the boy can't act. While McConnell was perfectly natural in Elephant, here he's rigorously posed (like a Bruce Weber model), and Van Sant's fetishizing feels like something Humbert Humbert would do. Opposite McConnell, the longhaired Gaspard Ulliel has most of the lines, including this gem: "You like jazz? Charlie Parker, yeah, and Kurt Cobain, too?""]
Clip of the Day: Generalissimo Stalin visits Berlin. From the YouTube description: "From Mikheil Chiaureli's Padeniye Berlina / Fall of Berlin (1949). Part of the Stalin Film genre, The Fall of Berlin is regarded as the ultimate glorification of the Soviet dictator on celluloid, pretty much deifying him as a benevolent peacemaker who likes to tend to his little garden, and glad-handing the country's award-winning workers when not single-handedly rescuing the nation from whatever trauma pops up on the horizon."
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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.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Big Love Tuesdays: Season 2, Ep. 1, "Damage Control"
By Todd VanDerWerff
In some ways, “Damage Control,” the season premiere of Big Love’s second season, is all about the aftermath. In many ways, the whole series is all about the aftermath. The foremost expression of this is in the series’ central question: How much of yourself do you have to give up to be married to a person? Or, if you’re a polygamist, how much of yourself do you have to give up to be married to three people (or share a husband with two others)? “Damage Control” is probably the weakest of the season’s first five episodes, but it does most of the heavy lifting required to get the plot away from the revelation of the Henrickson family’s polygamous lifestyle at the governor’s mansion in last season’s finale (the revelation sunk Barb -- Jeanne Tripplehorn -- in her chance to win the mother of the year award) and on to other business. This mildly irritating plot won’t go away completely, but this week’s episode deals with it the most fully.
The reason this whole mildly soapy storyline works is because of Tripplehorn, who reasserts her character as the show’s center in the premiere. Sure, Bill (the do-gooding Bill Paxton) is first-billed and at the center of most of the show’s storylines, but the series often feels like Barb’s story -- the story of how she became the closest thing there is to an independent woman in a strict religious setting, then lost it all because of her commitment to her beliefs above self. Tripplehorn tells this entire story in throwaway lines and telltale sighs since the show takes place several years after all of these events happened (the show has done nothing so gauche as a flashback episode -- yet). “Damage Control” was the most overt acknowledgment yet of all that Barb gave up and just how much Bill depends on the maturity of his relationship with her to get through his day-to-day life.
We first spot Barb frantically churning through the waters of the backyard pool, ostensibly trying to forget all that happened to her at the governor’s mansion. Barb returns to the pool again later in the episode after she loses an argument with Bill (who wants her to attend a dinner with the neighbors to begin to piece together who leaked the family secrets), unable and ultimately unwilling to stand up to him and demand her rights. As Barb churns through the water, we watch her move toward the camera from the bottom of the pool, like underwater voyeurs. And, indeed, she seems to reach some moment of painful emotional catharsis while swimming.
Barb leaves Bill and the other wives to go and stay with family friends. In a witty and perfectly constructed scene, she calls to let her youngest daughter know she isn’t coming home tonight (while the family watches a movie about a moral, upstanding cowboy in a white hat -- surely the sort of man Bill thinks he is), only to find herself trapped in a conversation where Nikki (Chloë Sevigny, showing new, more caring sides of her character in this episode) gives her a purported moral upbraiding and Margie (Ginnifer Goodwin, who gets more mileage out of looking hurt than almost anyone on television) clumsily and childishly tries to manipulate her into returning (by giving the phone to one of the smaller children). One of Big Love’s greatest strengths is the way it understands how these three women relate to each other, and how Nikki tries to gain the upper hand over Barb while Margie tries to befriend her, and neither ever quite succeeds, simply because Barb still seems mildly shell-shocked to see them around the house.
The episode ultimately turns on the aftermath of a decision we never get to see Barb make -- the decision to step aside and let her husband take multiple wives. Bill is nothing so simple as a villain, but he is often emotionally callous, unaware of how his actions hurt his family members, especially his first wife, who has trouble reconciling who she was before Nikki became the second wife with who she is now. At one point, she lectures her daughter Sarah (Amanda Seyfried), asking her to not make the same mistakes Barb did, perhaps to not turn over her own freedom so completely to another individual. Sarah asks her if Bill would join Barb if Barb left, and Barb is forced to admit she has no idea.
It’s fitting that Barb has this discussion with Sarah, who is going through her own crisis of faith. Sarah has finally realized that she doesn’t believe in polygamy, and she’s not sure where else to turn. She joins (of all things) an ex-Mormon group at a Baptist church where she discusses her feelings on how she was raised. It’s a remarkable scene, especially for Seyfried, who perfectly captures the terror of realizing both that you no longer believe what you always said you did and that everyone thinks you’re an idiot for ever believing that in the first place. Sarah vacillates between teary gulps of gratitude at having a place to express herself freely and trying to defend her lifestyle with explanations and snide jokes. She’s taking the first steps toward the life her mother would want for her, no matter how tentative those steps may be (and the boy she meets at the support group becomes important in episodes to come).
There were other storylines in "Damage Control", most having to do with the Juniper Creek compound and a crisis of the group’s confidence in Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton, who’s great but a shade too obviously evil). Federal agents are closing in around Roman, and Bill feels the noose tightening around his neck too (though he gets a promise from the state attorney general’s office that as long as he stays clean otherwise, he’s OK). In addition, Bill and his co-workers at Home Plus are trying to figure out if his secretary ratted him out. For the most part, all of these storylines feel like padding, though watching Stanton is always interesting. Still, the scene where the secretary races from a dark Hummer and crashes her car, complete with the strains of David Byrne’s slightly-too-twee score was a low point for the episode.
But the stuff back at the Henrickson home was so good that it really didn’t matter. Barb finally forced herself to join her husband and the neighbors at the Hawaiian-themed dinner (where the neighbor husband banally discusses how the Mormons of Utah could rise up and become independent from the U.S. again if they really wanted to, as if it were just another topic of conversation). Caught in a lie, Barb is forced to lie again to make peace with both the neighbors and Bill. She quells her emotions to make Bill happy and to keep her family safe (as any spouse or parent must do at some time), and the look on Bill’s face is one of sweet relief -- he can’t do this without her.
The final scene, where Bill talks Barb into returning, giving up all of her almost independence with only minor concessions, must frustrate those who watch the show and wish the women would be more assertive. But that would be unrealistic and not in keeping with the characters or their milieu. Bill holds the priesthood for Barb -- the only way she knows to see him are as moral center and emotional compass. To question him would be to reorder her cosmos (indeed, many who leave fundamentalist religions and rebuke them are often profoundly depressed for this very reason), and Barb is not to that point yet. For now, we just have to live with the taste we get of her as her own person -- Barb, not Barb Henrickson -- and wonder, just as much as she does, how she got to this point.
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.>
Links for the Day (June 12th, 2007)
1. "The Gorey Factor": C. Jerry Kutner on the legacy and influence of Edward Gorey.
["Some still dispute whether Edward Gorey (1925-2000) was fundamentally an artist who wrote, or a writer who drew. Gorey was, in fact, both an accomplished writer and an accomplished artist who - like many of the greatest filmmakers - combined word and image to create a recognizable world of his own."]
2. "Book 2 film": Pat Graham blogs on adaptations.
["In the current "Fiction Into Film" issue at Bookforum.com (as linked through GreenCine Daily), writer-director Alexander Payne makes this startling admission: "My screenwriting professor at UCLA used to ask us, 'When adapting a piece of literature, what do you owe the original writer?' We were trained to call out in unison, 'Nothing!'" Except maybe it's not so startling, since it pretty well describes my attitude too."]
3. "The Sopranos: Good Times": Reverse Shot's final recap of the HBO staple.
["I’m feeling inclined to cheat and offer this blog post as my contribution to the upcoming Reverse Shot symposium – you know, the one about the power of a single cut to shape and define an entire film. “Made in America” ended The Sopranos in media res with a hard (dare I say Dardenne-ish?) cut to black. Seated at a table in a cozy neighborhood restaurant with Carmela and AJ, Tony looked up to see Meadow coming through the door to complete the family dinner. Or was it to see a gun being pointed in his direction by the two-shifty looking African-American kids who’d come in moments before? Or maybe to anxiously note the return of the leather-jacketed guy who’d walked in just ahead of AJ a few minutes before that and stared at Tony’s table before making a pointed beeline for the men’s room: a location fraught with symbolic peril in this season of Godfather riffs. Yes, it would make sense that the show would come unplugged in the exact split-second that Tony got plugged; like Bobby, with whom he’d previously discussed death’s never-see-it-coming factor, he just never saw it coming. Or maybe our man was just about to order more onion rings."]
4. "Sextuplets in Arizona and Minnesota": The seventh sign! Just as Satan planned!
["Two sets of sextuplets were born in different states less than a day apart, a rare occurrence but one that fertility experts say could become increasingly common as more couples seek artificial methods of conceiving babies."]
5. "Maupin revisits ‘Tales of the City’ hippies": From MSNBC.
["Stretched out on a sofa next to his Australian shepherd, Sophie, Armistead Maupin says he never intended to write another installment of his popular “Tales of the City” series. But thankfully for fans worldwide, Maupin’s newest book, “Michael Tolliver Lives,” revisits many of the same larger-than-life characters that propelled “Tales” from a weekly San Francisco Chronicle column to six books and a Showtime mini-soap opera. The book debuts Tuesday, when Maupin kicks off a tour and Mayor Gavin Newsom declares “Michael Tolliver Day” in San Francisco."]
Clip of the Day: Human Tetris, anyone?
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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.
Monday, June 11, 2007
The Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 21, "Made in America"
By Matt Zoller Seitz
"It's my nature."
That's the punchline of the the fable "The Scorpion and the Frog," a fable repeated in numerous pop culture works, including The Sopranos, which referenced it in Season Two. About 10 minutes into "Made in America," the final episode of the final season of David Chase's drama, that phrase wriggled into my head and stayed there. It's key to appreciating the final episode, and key to understanding Chase's attitude toward people; they are what they are, they rarely change, and when they do, they stay changed for as long as it takes to realize that they were more comfortable with their old selves, at which point they revert; and once they're taken out of the picture, by illness or incarceration or death, the world keeps turning without them.
Which is a roundabout way of saying, what the hell did people expect from David Chase? Closure? Satisfaction? Answers? A moral?
It was the perfect ending. No ending at all. Write your own goddamn ending.
Tony goes to a restaurant to meet his family for dinner, after an episode showing you that after all the bloody machinations of the past six episodes, life had begun to return to something like "normal," whatever that means for this sordid bunch of self-deluded materialistic suburbanites with blood on their hands; he sits down in a booth and flips through the jukebox trying to pick a song (a great self-referential joke for a show that prides itself on picking exactly the right song for a scene). He chooses Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" (the refrain "Don't stop" expressing the feelings of Sopranos fans so perfectly that I fear it'll be the go-to headline for stories about the finale); when Steve Perry sings, "Just a small town girl," the little bell on the restaurant's front door rings and Carmela enters and sits with Tony. They exchange chitchat -- most of the episode, which was both written and directed by Chase, is chit-chat heavy, with some halfhearted exposition sandwiched in. "What looks good tonight?" Carmela asks. "I don't know," Tony replies. He tells her Carlo flipped, that he's going to testify; Carmela's grave expression indicates that this could be the beginning of the end for their family as well as Da Family.
The bell rings again, Tony looks up, and a middle-aged white guy in a Members Only Jacket (so named in the final credits, and another nice extra-textual gag) enters the restaurant and peels off screen right toward the bar, revealing AJ coming in right behind him. AJ sits with them. More chit-chat. Tony makes eye contact with the Members Only guy, who seems to be staring at him a bit too intently; is he an assassin, sent to kill Tony and maybe his family as well, or is he just someone who recognized Tony from TV and newspaper stories? We don't know; the guy eventually gets up from his stool and goes into the bathroom. Is he pulling a Michael Corleone? Is there a gun taped to the back of a toilet tank? We don't know. Moments later, two young black males enter the restaurant. Tony was almost killed by a couple of young black men in Season One; are they assassins, or just a couple of friends going out for dinner? We don't know.
Meadow is the last Soprano family member to arrive at the restaurant. The scene cuts between Tony, Carmela and AJ inside and Meadow outside, desperately trying to parallel park. The final episodes of the final episode of The Sopranos, and David Chase is spending a solid minute on Meadow's poor parking skills. Who does he think he is? Doesn't he know we want to know that everyone died or that everyone was all right, or that Tony eventually flipped or didn't, or that the Sopranos went into witness protection or didn't, or that Tony ripped the skin off his face, exposing circuitry, and proceeded to reveal to his family that all this time, he was a cyborg sent from the future to save humanity from extinction? And yet the tension is unbearable. So often on The Sopranos, when a character or characters spend a lot of screen time shooting the breeze or fixating on some mundane bit of business, the non-drama is followed by a beat-down or a bullet in the brain; your attention starts to wander and then WHAM. We expect the same dynamic this time; but Meadow successfully parks the car. She walks across the street. We think she might get hit by a car; she does not. Cut to the inside of the restaurant; Tony looks up at the sound of the bell ringing; cut to black.
The sound cuts out, too.
The credits roll.
There is no music.
What happens next? We don't know. We'll never know.
"What the hell?"
The above sentence is the opening of a brief conversation I had with my sister-in-law. She called at 10:15 eastern time. She and my brother had just finished watching the final episode of The Sopranos. They wanted to talk about it. I hadn't watched it yet. I cut her off. "Don't tell me anything," I said. "I want to watch it myself." I'd wanted to watch it in real time, but my three-year-old son refused to go to bed by nine. I hung up and headed upstairs and pulled up the episode on my digital video recorder. Keith Uhlich, my managing editor, called, and even though I tried to cut him off instantly, he still managed to squeeze out, "I think David Chase just pissed off millions of people."
If so, they were millions of people who weren't watching The Sopranos, but another show that they hoped would turn into what they wanted The Sopranos to be. They kept hoping that this time, the scorpion won't sting them. He always did.
Here, yet again, Chase did exactly what I expect him to do: the unexpected. No gangster story has ever ended like this. The lack of resolution -- the absolute and deliberate failure, or more accurately, refusal, to end this thing -- was exactly right. It felt more violent, more disturbing, more unfair than even the most savage murders Chase has depicted over the course of six seasons, because the victim was us. He ended the series by whacking the viewer.
This ending was so consistent with everything that came before -- consistent with the show's themes, its style, its cruel sense of humor, its belief in the utter finality of death as the only real ending, the sense that life goes on anyway, even without the incredibly important person known as You -- that it was the greatest Sopranos ending ever. As I've said over and over in these posts and in Star-Ledger coverage of Seasons One through Three, Chase would rather frustrate, baffle or disappoint than deliver what audiences expect. This finale was the ultimate example of that principle. It was the film breaking five minutes before the end of a gripping movie, or having a novel ripped ripped from your hands before you were done with the last chapter.
Phil Leotardo was shot in the head at that gas station in mid-sentence; he didn't even live long enough to see the wheel of his daughter's SUV roll over his skull. Life went on without him.
Good luck naming a season of The Sopranos that ended with the simultaneous rising of action to a delirious peak and the tying up of loose ends. Season One probably came the closest to attaining that kind of classical narrative shape, and that season doubtless ended as it did because Chase figured he was doing a one-off that wouldn't get picked up for another go-round. Left to his own devices -- as he was from Season Two onward -- he established that he'd rather insinuate, tease and then frustrate. Starting with Season Two, every season has packed a lot of plot (and a fair amount of violence) into the second-to-last episode, left the final episode as a denouement -- a protracted down-shifting -- and left a lot of subplots, many of them seemingly major, unresolved. We never found out what happened to the Russian from "Pine Barrens." Tracee's murder at the hands of Ralphie Cifaretto was apparently never discovered by law enforcement, and justice was done obliquely, by Tony, months later, in a different context, and it's doubtful that it occurred to him that he was avenging Tracee.
This is considered bad drama because it's like life.
"Made in America" was the ultimate season ender; if you thought previous season enders were unsatisfying, well, you hadn't seen anything yet.
We were always frogs offering a scorpion a ride across the river. And this scorpion never promised not to sting us.
The Sopranos eschews tidy resolutions, and seems (or perhaps I should say "seemed") to delight in providing closure on small matters while denying it in big ones. In "Made in America," Meadow's wedding was discussed, but only in the abstract. We heard that Carlo flipped but we never saw it and never got any indication of why, or whether any evidence he might provide would prove damning enough to bring down the family. We heard twice that subpoenas were being handed out, but despite Tony's depressed reactions, we never learned if they would lead anywhere; there were indications that the gun charge might finally bring Tony down, but there was no closure on that, either. Tony visited Sil in the hospital, but we never learned if he lived or died. We heard Meadow had to go to the doctor to change her birth control pills. Did she have a pregnancy scare? Did she switch medicine to be extra-certain that she didn't have a child by the son of a known gangster, thus perpetuating the family legacy? Unlikely, since she told her dad she went into law after seeing his treatment at the hands of cops and FBI agents -- but we don't know. Tony's boys brought a cat from the safehouse back to the Bing; it kept staring at a picture of the murdered Christopher for hours on end. When the picture was moved, the cat moved with it, and kept staring. What does this mean? We don't know.
Tony's lawyer sat there whacking that bottle of ketchup over and over until Tony grabbed it out of his hands and tried to do it himself, and the ketchup still didn't come out.
The pilot episode started with Tony telling Dr. Melfi that he feared he'd come into the business (and by implication, America) at the end; that the best was over. The creeping sense of numbness and despair, the sense that the best (whatever that means) is over, and the concurrent sense that nothing that happens to us is as important as important to history, or even to our friends and relatives, as we'd like think, that when we're gone we'll probably be forgotten like 99.99999% of the human race, is encoded in every line and scene of this finale. Almost nobody gives a damn about your life but you, and according to Chase, there's a good chance you don't give as much of a damn as you think, because if did, you would have already changed yourself to match your idealized image. Uncle Junior doesn't remember anything about his long, colorful, nasty life, including the shooting of his own nephew; he might not even recognize his nephew. The widowed Janice seeks refuge in a house that used to belong to Johnny Sacrimoni. It's surrounded by McHomes; Tony informs her that when Johnny built the house, the area was all cornfields. We learn that the key to finding Phil is locating a gas station with a pay phone in front of it; a gas station attendant explains that few gas stations have pay phones anymore. One of the Little Italy scenes begins with a shot of a double-decker tour bus zipping through the neighborhood, and we hear an announcer telling the tourists that Little Italy used to be a huge, thriving neighborhood, but now it's been reduced to a handful of restaurants and stores; the scene ends with a shot of the street teeming with Asians. "Fuckin' A, I'm disappointed," Phil exclaims at one point. To quote another episode title, "Join the Club."
Tony looks up at the sound of the door opening. Cut to black. Roll credits. The story continues. You're not around to see it.
Throughout its run, The Sopranos has insisted, in dialogue and imagery, that there is a life beyond what we can see, a world beyond the familiar. Chase could never show us that world outright because no artist has that power. But for eight years, he did the next best thing, which was show us a fiction that wasn't quite like any of the fictions that influenced it -- a fiction that prompted contemplation of our own world, however small or large it might be. And in the final moments of the final hour of the final season, he gave us an ending we did not anticipate -- an ending unlike any he's ever staged, but not the least bit out-of-character for The Sopranos.
Appreciate it.
Sopranos recaps run every Monday at The House Next Door. For more articles about the series, see The Sopranos in the sidebar at right.
Ousmane Sembene: Jan. 1, 1923 - June 10, 2007
Some obituaries, articles, and websites on the late African maestro:
Links for the Day (June 11th, 2007)
1. Some Sopranos wrap-ups:
- Edward Copeland: "We'll always have Jersey"
- Alan Sepinwall: "Sopranos Rewind: Made in America"
- Jim Emerson: "The Sopranos: Eighty-Sixed"
- Matthew Gilbert: "To the end, 'Sopranos' has its way with viewers' psyches"
- Tom Shales: "A Bang-Up Finale For 'The Sopranos'"
- Frazier Moore: "No Easy Ending for 'The Sopranos'"
- Television Without Pity: "The 'Made in America' Thread"
["It may have been the greatest double-take -- by the audience -- in the history of American television."]
2. "Fassbinder's legacy @ 25": From GreenCine Daily.
[""Why are you journalists always claiming Rainer was gay? He was never gay, and I would know." It doesn't matter whether Juliane Lorenz, head of the Fassbinder Foundation meant, when she blurted this utterance to critic and documentarian Hans Günther Pflaum in 1992, that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was not gay in the strictest sense or that behind all that famously polysexual activity lurked some closeted heterosexual. The comment, quoted in Christiane Peitz's longish piece on the battle over RWF's legacy for Tuesday's Tagesspiegel, suggests either a skewed sense of reality, a reluctance to face that reality or a full-blown attempt to replace it with a self-serving myth; it's, plain and simple, a nutty remark. Pflaum himself asserts that Lorenz was trying to eradicate a good chunk of RWF's identity. Producer Michael Fengler recalls that Lorenz upped the ante at a gathering marking the 10th anniversary of RWF's death that same year. Not only was he not gay, she insisted, he rarely dabbled in drugs. And yet it was Lorenz herself who found Fassbinder dead on a bed littered with notes for his next film 25 years ago today. The combination of a hefty dose of sleeping pills and cocaine would have been too much for the most robust of hearts."]
3. "Powell urges US to close Guantanamo": From Al Jazeera.
["Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state, has called for the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba to be shut down immediately, saying it has become a liability."]
4. "‘Spring Awakening’ and ‘Coast of Utopia’ Rack Up Tony Awards": From The New York Times.
["The 61st annual Tony Awards last night were dominated by two shows drawn from the 19th century: “Spring Awakening,” about sexually frustrated German teenagers in that era, won best musical and most of the other musical awards, while “The Coast of Utopia,” Tom Stoppard’s epic period trilogy about Russian intellectuals, set a record for the most awards won by a play in Tony history."]
5. "Daisy Kenyon (1947, Otto Preminger)": Mike D'Angelo discovers one for the ages.
["First of all, since somebody asked: Yes, this is the highest rating I've given since I switched to the 100-point scale in the summer of 2002. Which is not to say that Daisy Kenyon is now my favorite film of all time or anything—Only Angels Have Wings, The Lady Eve, Brief Encounter, A Star Is Born ('54), The Night of the Hunter, North by Northwest, Yojimbo, Woman in the Dunes, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Manhattan, Exotica, and (yes) Memento will all likely get the magic 100 if/when I watch them again. But it's been a long, long while since I've encountered a "new" (that is, previously unseen by me) old-Hollywood masterpiece. Give those zany auteurists credit for carrying the banner on this one. I'm sorry I doubted you, guys."]
Clip of the Day: We are all Christopher Moltisanti
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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!
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Macro-Meditating: Manufactured Landscapes
By Keith Uhlich
The lengthy tracking shot that opens Jennifer Baichwal's documentary Manufactured Landscapes is a thing of beauty.
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To read the rest of the review, click here.
Links for the Day (June 10th, 2007)
1. "A Farewell (But Not Really)": Bilge Ebiri says goodbye, kinda-sorta. Best of luck.
["A quick note to say that today marks the last day that I will be editing Screengrab. I’ll continue to write for the blog, but as of next week, Peter Smith will be taking over editing duties."]
2. "Rudderless Socialists Face Wipe-Out in French Election": From Deutsche Welle.
["Reeling from Segolene Royal's presidential defeat, France's Socialist Party faces a humiliating wipe-out in Sunday's first round of legislative elections, set to deliver a huge majority for President Sarkozy."]
3. "See You In (Vaccine) Court": From The Huffington Post.
["On Monday, one of the most important legal proceedings in American medical history will get underway at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington. There, a special panel of three judges will begin hearing evidence to support -- and refute -- the hypothesis that mercury in vaccines and/or the live-virus measles-mumps-rubella shot caused autism or autism-like symptoms in some American children."]
4. "News Flash: Bill O'Reilly Caught Telling Lies!": Jim Emerson calls him out.
["Now he's professing to be shocked, shocked about a panel last April at Boulder High School that was part of the Conference on World Affairs. (YouTube clip here.) I was on a CWA panel at Boulder High (about "Borat") that same week, and I can only imagine what O'McCarthy could have edited from it to make me or any of my co-panelists sound like we were saying something other than what we actually said. Say we quoted something from Borat in the movie. Out of context, O'Reilly could make it appear as if we were saying it ourselves. This one-man sitcom (oh, wait, that's his term for John Edwards) stoops that low, and lower, all the time, and oops he's doing it again. Of course, O'Reilly deals only in clips and sound bites. He has no patience for complete thoughts. Perhaps he simply doesn't have the time or the inclination to read or listen to what actually occurred during the 90-minute panel discussion, but for the record I'm going to re-print his claims alongside the actual transcript of the panel. We compare, you decide. And then perhaps you'll see why Boulder High students are demanding an apology from Fox and its loudest, most irresponsible (and that's saying a lot!) Spinmeister. O'Reilly's yellow-journalism depends on distortion and misrepresentation. The easiest way to counter it is to let the facts speak for themselves."]
5. "Okeley-Dokeley, Bruno: Suffering Through Flanders": Fernando F. Croce on Bruno Dumont's latest, and others.
["Flanders proves how "Bressonian" is even more of a red flag than "Tarantinoesque." Diary of a Country Priest and Pickpocket can't be reduced to slowed-down rhythms and glaring nonprofessionals -- there's a mystery to Bresson that can never be reproduced, a curiosity about the world that escapes Dumont's fastidiously intellectualized view of life and film, which remains trapped in a stasis of grief."]
Clip of the Day: Get your reading on a free 800 number, baby!
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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.
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Celebrity Culture Tunnel-Vision: Ocean's Thirteen
By Keith Uhlich
For the most part the film is all setup, a series of disconnected riffs and vignettes that might as well be scored to a continuous loop of Barrett Strong's "Money (That's What I Want)."
To read the Slant review, click here. Read more!
Links for the Day (June 9th, 2007)
1. "The Sopranos: Greatest Hits." For The Star-Ledger, Alan Sepinwall picks the series' ten best episodes. The results -- as local TV news teasers always say -- may surprise you. To chide Alan for not picking episode blahbedy-blah, click here and leave a comment. Plus: "Great Moments in Ledger/Sopranos History."
["Just missed the cut: 'Pine Barrens,' 'Long-Term Parking,' 'Isabella,' 'Funhouse,' 'The Weight,' 'Members Only,' 'The Knight in White Satin Armor,' 'University,' 'Soprano Home Movies' and the rest of this current season."]
2. "Michael Tucker: 'There Has to be a Reckoning.'" For Green Cine's main page, David D'Arcy interviews the director of the Iraq war documentary Gunner Palace, and its follow-up, The Prisoner: Or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, which details the surreal fate of an Iraqi journalist arrested in the former film.
["The Prisoner follows up on a raid conducted by the same unit in Gunner Palace. Three brothers are taken from their Baghdad home. One of them, squatting in handcuffs, insists that he is a journalist and keeps repeating "shut up, shut up" when the troops tell him to shut his mouth. In Gunner Palace, you don't see this man again once he is taken away. Michael Tucker doesn't see the man until two years later, when he learns that Yunis Khatayer Abbas was indeed a journalist, cameraman and photographer, professional distinctions which didn't keep him from being confined for nine months. A long stay at Abu Ghraib was included in the package. Yunis was also lodged, courtesy of the American taxpayer, in a tent-prison, which put thousands of detainees and their American jailers in the path of insurgent mortar attacks. "]
3. "Grey's Fires Isaiah Washington." From the Ausiello report at TVGuide.com.
["Multiple sources are telling me that Isaiah Washington will not be returning to Grey's Anatomy next season. An ABC Studios spokesperson confirms that the actor's contract option has not been picked up, but declined further comment.
One insider, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation, speculated that the decision was likely due only in part to the T.R. Knight homophobic-slur scandal and the subsequent fallout. "There was a pattern of problematic behavior going back before he used the F-word," says my spy. "I imagine [his dismissal] was the result of all of that.""]
4. "White House Waives New Passport Rules." From Aeronews.net.
["Talk about a governmental logjam. Because of a new passport rule that took effect in January, the State Department has issued more than 4.5 million passports this year, a 60 percent increase from last year, and millions more are waiting to be processed. The wait time for a passport application to be processed has doubled over last year. The new rule requires those traveling to and from Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean and Bermuda to present a passport to enter or re-enter the United States, just in time for the peak travel season. The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative took effect January 23 and was mandated by Congress in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 to strengthen border security and facilitate entry into the United States for citizens and legitimate international visitors, said the State Department."]
5. "Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen." Jerry Stahl reviews Allen's latest collection of short fiction and humorous one-offs for The Los Angeles Times.
["As fictioneer, Allen has the ear of a comedian and the erudition of a Carnegie Deli waiter with a PhD in European literature. An accusation, incidentally, no one ever laid at the feet of Henry James."]
Clip of the Day: The opening credits.
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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.
Friday, June 08, 2007
Links for the Day (June 8th, 2007)
1. "Civil War note from Lincoln discovered": From The Denver Post.
["It was July 7, 1863, the middle of the Civil War, and after a series of crushing defeats, things were finally starting to look up for the Union. Days earlier, its troops had defeated the Confederates at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Buoyed by the twin victories, President Abraham Lincoln dashed off a note in his own hand, optimistically predicting that if Union Gen. George Meade could defeat Robert E. Lee's retreating Confederate army before it recrossed the Potomac River into Virginia, the war would be over. "]
2. "So Long, Farewell, Auf Weidersein, Adieu and You and You and You": Cinemarati is closing its doors. The staff offers its farewells and remembrances.
["Friends, Readers, Fellow Travellers, lend me your ears. Unlike Marc Antony, I come not to bury Cinemarati, nor simply to praise it. Actually, I’m gonna do a little bit of both."]
3. "List of films by gory death scene": Now here's an int'resting Wikipedia entry. Anyone care to add Hostel: Part II?
["This is a list of films with gory death scenes, i.e. a list of films in which characters die graphically violent and/or gory deaths, often depicted using special effects. While standards for gore differ, films on this list depict on-screen human deaths with graphic detail, rather than off-screen and implied, depicting loss of blood and body parts (flesh, limbs, internal organs) in large quantity and other types of sadistic deaths."]
4. Two writers on the Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en rose: Chris Wisniewski and Dan Callahan.
["Edith Piaf's tidal emotional vulgarity and brutish commitment to the most sentimental chansons is captured accurately and even irresistibly in La Vie En Rose, an epic, intuitive exploration of her hard life and times. In recent years, audiences have endured a deadening heap of biopics that have either betrayed or exploited their subjects. The rare good biopic, like Alan Rudolph's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, generally tried to give us a sense of lives as they might have been lived. La Vie En Rose goes in the opposite direction, treating Piaf's life and art as a heartfelt, theatrical spectacle. Director Olivier Dahan has said he wanted to make a "tragic, romantic blockbuster," and he has done so: this is bravura popular filmmaking, marked by both precision and gusto. The use of Piaf's music is so impressionistic throughout that it almost has a Terence Davies flavor to it; song is treated as memory."]
5. "Hostel Takeover in Times Square": S.T. VanAirsdale ain't kind to Eli Roth and company.
["Indignation will only get you so far when it comes to discussing the films of Eli Roth. Now officially a canon with the one-two punch of his Thanksgiving trailer during Grindhouse and this week's release of Hostel: Part II, Roth's work is cruel, vicious, exploitive, shallow, unimaginative and, occasionally, amusing in a dog-walking-into-the-screen-door kind of way that runs warm with the afterburn of pity. As entries in the horror genre, his films boast influence without reverence; dropped names and visual cues flow almost as freely as the viscera onscreen. They're half-witted and maybe a quarter scary. Roth wields the kind of muscular cynicism that purports to push envelopes, but only once he's emptied them."]
Clip of the Day: Henry Fonda, graveside, in Young Mr. Lincoln
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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.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
T.V. on TV: Big Love, The 4400 and The Shield
By Todd VanDerWerff
I’ll talk about Big Love in more detail starting June 11, when the House debuts a new recap series, "Big Love Tuesdays." For now I'll just say that in the first five episodes of the HBO drama's second season, it has evolved from a damn good show to a nearly great one. In its first season, Big Love seemed reluctant to tell the story of a polygamous family without leaning on expository crutches; to make certain episodes happen, it occasionally lapsed into plot contrivance or needless melodrama. But in its sophomore outing, Big Love moves with the confidence of a series that has figured out what it wants to be and how to get there. As the House recap title indicates, HBO, in its infinite wisdom, has stranded the show on Monday, a night where even Six Feet Under couldn’t do much, ratings-wise, so I’ll sound the alarm now: Don’t miss it.
Big Love parses relationships between people in a family setup that few Americans have experienced, and makes it comprehensible and believable. Even if you've never had to deal with a third mother or a sister wife, the series illustrates the difficulty of navigating these relationships with subtle writing and even better acting (especially from Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloe Sevigny and Ginnifer Goodwin as the wives of Bill Paxton's ambitious retailer, Bill Henrickson). It still rankles when the two younger wives call Tripplehorn’s Barb "boss lady"; but no other series could concieve a scene as original as the one where Goodwin’s Margie tells Barb that she understands her limits in her uneasily flirtatious relationship with Barb and Bill's teenage son. Just as striking is the fact that Big Love really understands the sheer passion of fundamentalism -- of giving in to something larger than yourself and dedicating yourself to that abstract dream. While the characters' polygamous lifestyle puts them out-of-step with mainstream America, they speak unironically of following God’s calling and having visions and abstaining from alcohol or sex before marriage. Unlikely as it may sound, given the multiple spouses and the subtextual arguments in favor of gay marriage, America’s fundamentalist Christians have no better friend than Big Love, which argues that the passion they feel for God is as valid as any other emotion. At the same time, though, the series is not afraid to depict polygamy and fundamentalism's discontents, represented most notably in its teenage characters, portrayed by Douglas Smith, Amanda Seyfried and Daveigh Chase. All cope with losing their faith in the culture that raised them, and fighting against a secular world that enfolds them every time they leave the house.
Big Love still leans too easily on quirkiness when it doesn't know what else to do; its marginal characters are sketched too broadly, and the storylines originating in the old-time polygamist compound at Juniper Creek often seem shoehorned in to emphasize how damaging unchecked polygamy can be to women. But by and large, Big Love is a unique family soap that has found its second gear. If you bailed in the series’ early going because it seemed unsure of itself, now’s the time to come back. 
The 4400, beginning its fourth season (or maybe its third season -- the first season was a six-episode miniseries) June 17 at 9 p.m. on USA, is a great idea for a pulp SF TV series. Over the course of about 60 years, a bunch of people disappeared into the ether; then they unexpectedly returned all at once, with superpowers, and the government tried its best to keep tabs on all of them. The end of the first season (or miniseries, if you must) revealed that the returnees had been taken into the future by the last remnants of humanity and given superpowers to avert an impending, unspecified disaster that would send humanity to its ruin. Since most series of this type follow that initial setup with “AND THERE WERE ALIENS!”, the very fact that The 4400 seemed to be chasing some sort of larger narrative was exciting in and of itself.
And for a little while, that was enough. One of the most ingenious things about that initial mini-season was that all of the characters’ new abilities radiated out of them unpredictably, spreading goodness and light. It was goofy, feel-good science fiction, and the basic format -- in which two government agents wandered the country, investigating the returnees and seeing how their powers manifested and affected the world -- was a good one. The acting has always been spotty; Billy Campbell and Peter Coyote (who has since left the show) are the only regulars who seem to know how goofy the whole thing is); but one-off nature of the episodes is conducive to hiring solid guest stars to play the various returnees. In the early stretch, The 4400 wasn't great, but it was diverting summer TV. Unfortunately, the show almost immediately added layers of ever-duller mythology (the people in the future were subdivided into various sects and splinter cells) and often focused on its least appealing aspects (a bunch of angst-y teenagers have gotten way too much screen time).
Now, in the series’ fourth season debut, the characters are scattered to the various corners of the Earth (leading man Joel Gretsch is still searching for a woman he loved whom he originally met in an alternate reality) and working through stories that are less gooey and much darker than we've seen up to now (the premiere focuses on a kid who manages to take over the city of Seattle, thanks to a power manifested through sheer force of personality). What’s more, the series has introduced a drug called Promicin that lets people gamble on acquiring 4400-style powers (though 50% who take the drug die -- gotta love those odds). This development allows the writers to develop obvious drug addiction metaphors, but it also robs the returnees of their specialness. I’m sure I’ll stick with The 4400 to the end (I’m a sucker for this sort of thing), but sci-fi mystery has been done so much better on Battlestar Galactica, Lost and Heroes that it’s really not worth picking up this series now. 
The last six episodes of The Shield’s sixth season were a study in ever-ratcheting tension. Strike team leader Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) tried find out who had killed former strike team member Lem (Kenny Johnson, whom the show missed ever-so-slightly), only to learn that the culprit was his right-hand man, Shane (an electrifying Walton Goggins, turning in a weekly Emmy reel). Their long-delayed confrontation, which occurred in the denouement of the last episode, wasn't just one of the best scenes in the show’s run, it managed to transform The Shield's subtext-less bullheadedness into something approaching real emotional bonding. The two left the scene as something approaching sworn enemies; then the show entered tap-dancing mode, putting off the inevitable Shane-Vic showdown that will surely drive Season Seven, which the creators say will be its last.
Much has been written comparing this season of The Shield and the similar season of The Sopranos. To a large degree, that’s because both started at roughly the same time in April and because both shows returned this year with the back halves of seasons that aired in the spring of 2006. But they have other similarities: both feature borderline-sociopath protagonists who cross that border often; both were significant series for the FX and HBO networks, and for basic and pay cable respectively. But where The Sopranos has seemed intent on stripping away any sympathy viewers might have felt for Tony Soprano, insisting on his monstrousness while trying to leave their basic empathy for him intact, The Shield is stuck with Vic for another season, so it has to do the dance it’s done for its entire run. Sure, Vic is bad, the show says, but he’s not as bad as some other guys out there.
What made the first six episodes of the season so note perfect was that they largely abandoned this well-worn trope and replaced it with the idea that Vic had become utterly single-minded, so intent on finding Lem’s killer and exacting revenge that he tortured men brutally and bent every rule he could. But when he found out Shane was behind the murder, the writers couldn’t very well have Vic take down Shane immediately, even if it might have been prudent for Vic to do so. Now, the show is faced with a stretch of episodes where we have a rough idea of what must happen (Shane and Vic take each other down, and the series end with one or both of them dead or in jail). But we're still waiting on the how.
To that end, the final four episodes of Season Six brought in Franka Potente (Run Lola Run) as a woman representing the Armenians the strike team ripped off in Season Two (phew) who became an ally of Shane and sent Vic off looking for any sort of ally he could find. Shane had essentially set up a mutually assured destruction situation: if he went down, he’d use his information on the strike team’s misdeeds to bring down Vic. It seems as though Season Seven will be about both of these players doing what they can to maneuver around this conundrum, but the final four episodes of Season Six seemed dedicated less to meaningfully advancing this storyline than simply setting it up (though the sheer number of callbacks to events throughout the series in seasons five and six has been fairly breathtaking). All of the characters are unsubtly written, and the show shifts them around like chess pieces, but they’re played with such gusto and written with such brute force that you barely notice. The final four hours of season six had some fine action sequences (Vic hanging through a car window to beat on the driver), but it also had too much throat-clearing, and even the strongest moments didn't rise to the level of the season's first half.
But now that the pieces are in place, the final stretch holds promise. Unlike Sopranos creator David Chase, who often seems suspicious of anything not resembling an anticlimax, Shield creator Shawn Ryan is a devotee of the big finish, and Season Six picked up a lot of threads left dangling by previous seasons (including the rape of Benito Martinez's Aceveda, which seemed like a development that would be left unresolved). The Shield isn't great TV, but it delivers spectacular payoffs.
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.>
Links for the Day (June 7th, 2007)
1. "Barker brings the 'Price' on down one more time": His final Showcase Showdown.
["You will see no tears from Bob Barker when CBS airs his 6,586th and final Price Is Right broadcast June 15 (11 a.m. ET/10 a.m. PT and 8 p.m. ET/PT). "What surprises me most is that I got through the whole thing without crying ," Barker, 83, said at a news conference after Wednesday's taping on the CBS Television City game-show stage, where he has hosted the show for 35 years. "This is a very emotional time.""]
2. "Low-key buzz to Starbucks' first music release": From SeattlePi.
["The unprecedented promotion between the giants of coffee and rock accompanied the release of McCartney's 21st solo album -- the first under Starbucks' new Hear Music label. The company has been about more than coffee for a while now, stocking CDs with its lattes and even dabbling in film distribution. The new label and the new promotion is just another step: an experiment in cross-industry marketing and, some experts have said, a pretty neat idea. But if the sounds of change -- if not all-out McCartney overload -- could be heard Tuesday in Seattle's Starbucks stores, few people were really listening."]
3. "Overlord": House contributor Travis Mackenzie Hoover reviews Stuart Cooper's fiction/doc hybrid, now out on Criterion DVD.
["If nothing else, Overlord has the distinction of inventing its own genre. A bold combination of fictional drama and found-footage assembly, it grimly blends the real and the imaginary to the point where you can't help but be a little affected by the actors' proximity to the real devastation of WWII. Long undistributed in North America and roundly-unseen on these shores except by those fortunate few who caught it on the late, lamented Z Channel, Overlord has acquired a cult mystique slightly disproportionate to its merit. Director Stuart Cooper and his co-scenarist Christopher Hudson only hint at the inner life of their hapless deer-in-the-headlights lead and don't quite sell the impending doom for which they so desperately reach. But make no mistake: this is a one-of-a-kind movie that should've opened new avenues for narrative filmmaking instead of dropping into the big black hole that it did."]
4. "Knock Knock": A dissenting view on Knocked Up, from eshman at Reverse Blog.
["Now there are major exceptions, and I don’t want to essentialize, but it’s at least interesting that most of the dissenting voices gathered by the Tomatometer are female. As ever, these are voices easily sidelined by self-congratulatory male critical consensus (as are voices uncharmed by the winking frat-boy homophobia that undergirds much of Knocked Up’s humor). That we’re witnessing another epidemic of overpraise is clear enough, but in the realm of filmic male wish-fulfillment, we, like Knocked Up’s deluded, beer-goggled heroine, have traded down."]
5. "On The Lot Still Sucks": Brendan Bouzard speaks the truth.
["“Hey guys, let’s change the format again.” “Sounds good. No one watches the show anyway.” And so begins another weird week On the Lot, as Adrianna Costa gets another chance to embarrass our educational system with her complete illiteracy. She announces that Michael Bay(!!!!!!) is our guest judge and Bay obliges while Costa gives a full boilerplate promotional schpiel about Transformers."]
Clip of the Day: Bob Barker practically tortured to death.
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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.
Turf and Surf: Deadwood: The Complete Third Season and John from Cincinnati
By Matt Zoller Seitz
On the commentary track for the last episode of the third and final season of Deadwood -- available on DVD Tuesday, June 12 -- creator and executive producer David Milch mourns the 2006 death of the Western drama’s cinematographer, James Glennon. On the Deadwood set, cast and crew talked like dime-novel characters even when they weren’t shooting. In that spirit, Glennon used to embolden Milch by telling him, “Do not weaken, young man. Think of commerce.” While re-watching Deadwood on DVD, around the same time that Milch’s new HBO show, John from Cincinnati, premieres, it is hard to think of anything else.
The More Things Change: Rescue Me, Season Four
By Todd VanDerWerff
Rescue Me has never known what to do with its female characters. Most of them lose all self-control at the mere sight of legendary firefighter and perpetual screwup Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary); the rest break his balls or start fires that nearly kill him.
To read the review, click here. Read more!
Apocalypse Now in drag: The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: Extra Frills Edition
By Matt Zoller Seitz
Director Stephan Elliott was moved to write Priscilla at a gay pride parade, where he saw a feather break off a drag queen’s costume and twirl down the street like a tumbleweed.
To read the review, click here. Read more!