The House Next Door

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."]

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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."]

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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."]

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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."]

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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."]

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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.

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By Matt Zoller SeitzIn 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?

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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."]

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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."]

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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?"]

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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."]

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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.'"]

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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.

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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?]

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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...

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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?
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To read Part 1 of Lee's entry on Our Trip to Africa, click here. To read Part 2, click here.

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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."]

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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."]

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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."]

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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. "]

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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."]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."]

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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.'"]

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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."]

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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
Behind a blind of potted palms
And finds a lady in a Paris dress
With runs in her nylons

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."]

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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."]

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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.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz
“This is the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood.”

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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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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."]

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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."]

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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."]

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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!'"]

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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"]

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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.

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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.

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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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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. "]

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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."]

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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."]

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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."]

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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."]

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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.

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By Steven Boone

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.

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