Big Love Tuesdays: Season 2, Ep. 8, "Kingdom Come"

By Todd VanDerWerff

Growing up fundamentalist is a tricky balancing act, as the fundamentalist teenager constantly dances between new and potent urges (to have sex or to rebel against parents) and the way of life he or she has been taught, since childhood, is the one true way to eternal life. Try though the teen might, the dance can only end in one of the two camps. It’s hard to stand in both. Either you give in to temptation and find yourself realizing there’s more in Heaven and Earth than were dreamt of, or you give in to temptation and find yourself crippled with guilt, racing back to the comfort of what you have known your whole life. In one of this season of Big Love’s longest-simmering plotlines, Ben Henrickson (Douglas Smith, turning in his finest performance yet) is finally forced to choose between his way of life and his sexual relationship with his girlfriend, Brynn (Sarah Jones). This season of Big Love has been particularly skillful at illuminating the conflicts between creed and self (especially in the case of the Henrickson wives and teens), and the season’s eighth episode, “Kingdom Come,” written by Dustin Lance Black and directed by Daniel Attias, turns this overriding theme into a character-specific plotline as Ben struggles to find a way to reconcile both sides of his life.

If Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton, almost scary when angered by his teenagers) has seemed blithely unaware of the way his plural marriage has hurt his first wife Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn, giving her best performance since the season premiere), he’s completely oblivious when it comes to the way this life has affected his teenagers, who are still struggling to find some form of moral purchase in the world. His daughter Sarah (Amanda Seyfried) has already received a lecture from Barb on why she shouldn’t join a life of polygamy and joined a post-Mormon support group. When she and her boyfriend were threatened by Juniper Creek goon Alby Grant (Matt Ross), she didn’t even bother to report it to Bill, perhaps because the whole incident didn’t strike her as incredibly odd. Ben, meanwhile, has tried and tried to find a way to stop sleeping with Brynn, but it just feels too good. When he goes to his old pastor for guidance, the pastor comes to his house and nearly exposes the whole family (simply from Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) being in the wrong place at the wrong time). From there, Barb and Bill grill their son on why, exactly, the pastor felt they should talk with Ben.

Tearfully, Ben confesses to being a “deviant” and explains the whole situation to his father, who tries to respond with love at first, but later finds that drowned out by anger (even lashing out at Sarah, who knew of Ben and Brynn’s coupling, but didn’t tell anyone). He grounds Ben until further notice and stalks off. But when Ben comes to his parents later, it's to tell them that he has asked Brynn to marry him. When Barb expresses her concerns that he doesn’t know that Brynn is the one, Ben expresses that she is the one for right now. And later he would find another one, and she would be the second wife. And so on and so on.

The looks of horror in Bill and Barb’s eyes come from very different places. Bill can’t believe that Ben has gotten a fundamental precept of the religion he belonged to wrong (as we were informed while Bill was courting that diner waitress, the impulse to take another wife must come from the Holy Spirit and not from a lustful place). And Barb can’t believe that her choice to let Bill take a second wife so many years ago has reverberated out through her children, who now see this as the normal way of things, as the way that life has to order itself. The look on Tripplehorn’s face suggests that this is the first time Barb has ever considered this very natural conclusion her children would jump to (despite her success at warning Sarah away from the polygamist life). But it makes perfect sense for Ben to jump to this conclusion. With no organization to the religion he’s a part of and with no religious leaders to turn to outside of the family, Ben tries to find a way to forge ahead and keep the best of both worlds -- to blend the world and God into something more palatable. After all, mightn’t it seem that a long string of marriages for one man was just a case of that man getting tired of one wife and plucking up another?

Indeed, in this episode, it seems as though Bill is growing tired of his wives. He longs to have a night off every week, as work and his home life are taking their toll on him (his attempts to play both sides of the burgeoning war between Juniper Creek and the Hollis Greene clan are exhausting him). His desire to take a night off touches off a sexual power struggle, the likes of which we haven’t seen since season one. Barb simply refuses to agree to the plan, drawing a line as to which husbandly duties Bill can back out on (as well as a line in the sand at three wives -- insisting that he can’t take another in a scene where all four players get to play off each other heatedly). Margie stands firm with Barb at first, but she’s soon seduced by Bill. The two perform oral sex on each other as Nicki (Chloë Sevigny) looks on in shock. Nicki’s insistence that sex is only for procreation and not recreation later surfaces when Bill tries to perform the same act on her and she flails in anger, hitting him on the head and chastising him (she tells him she prefers it face to face and finds him too far away when he’s down there). This all resolves itself when a wounded Bill turns to Barb for forgiveness at the end of the episode (she agrees to two nights off per month, but he has to spend them with the kids), but the episode continues Barb’s evolution as someone who’s rediscovering a spine she seemed to have misplaced. The whole of season two has allowed us to see the hurt of Barb all over again, and Tripplehorn plays every little moment of hurt as a torrent that threatens to sweep her away.

In the midst of all of this domestic drama, the war between the Creek and the Greenes continued. This plot has dragged down the last two episodes, but it was subdued here, to the point where we didn’t get to see anything actually happen in the war, only the aftereffects as one side or the other called Bill to yell at him for misleading them. (This all changed at episode’s end as a tip from Bill sent the feds after the Greenes, though they had two agents out in the world who were able to shoot Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton).) I haven’t enjoyed this plotline very much, but I liked the way it tied in here as almost an afterthought, especially in the scene where Roman and Bill meet at the diner to discuss strategy, and Roman orders two butterscotch sundaes and two 7-Ups -- a somehow perfectly apropos choice for the character. And I must admit that the shooting of Roman has me intrigued -- the Juniper Creek setting is at its best when it threatens to infect the carefully cultivated suburban life that Bill has built. I’ve pooh-poohed commentors throughout the season who have said that the end of the series will be Bill taking the place of Roman, but they seem to be picking up on something I was missing because between Bill’s promise to his son of building a place where people could live the principle in peace and Roman’s sudden absence from UEB meetings, Bill’s certainly going to have to face that temptation.

But as wrapped up as the episode could become in these sorts of politics, it truly concludes with two beautifully executed and intimately shot scenes, one between Barb and Brynn and the other between Bill and Ben. The Barb and Brynn scene opens with a long shot that slowly pulls out and pans to reveal Barb speaking (to someone we don’t know the identity of at first), delivering a monologue about how hard it was to learn to share Bill and to learn to love Nicki too. Tripplehorn (kept slightly off-center in the frame throughout) offers a taste of weary defeat here, but also seems bent on preserving her family (and perhaps protecting Brynn, who quickly leaves Ben) and holding on to what little she remembers of her life before Nicki.

After Brynn leaves Ben, he sits, sobbing, in the basement. Bill finally finds the gentle love needed for the situation and goes to his son, explaining to him his plan for Weber Gaming. Then, in a rare moment when we get to see a bit of the religious ceremony of the principle, Bill ushers Ben in as a priesthood holder (with all of the responsibility that entails), also taking his son in as his confidante on the Weber Gaming matter. Black also wrote the episode where Margie was baptized into the principle (in season one’s tenth episode), and this episode once again combines the mundanity of every day life with that striving for the holy and the significant. Light trickles in to the ho-hum basement, and Bill and Ben both struggle to find something bigger and better than themselves, human failings be damned.
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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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Michelangelo Antonioni: September 29, 1912-July 30th, 2007

By Keith Uhlich

Okay, seriously. What the fuck is going on?

"I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks, which have been laid down by panic in the face of nature."
-Michelangelo Antonioni-

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Keith Uhlich is managing editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications.

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Links for the Day (July 31st, 2007)

1. "Tom Snyder, one of a kind": Missed this yesterday in all the brouhaha.

["Before he was encased in that peculiar amber known as the celebrity impersonation -- that is, before he became the late-late-night talk show host whose actual self was subsumed in Dan Aykroyd's famous parody in the early days of "Saturday Night Live" -- Tom Snyder was an L.A. anchorman."]

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2. "De Düva: The Dove": A parody of Bergman, featuring Madeline Kahn. And Rob Humanick reminds us of a time when you could meet Ingmar for a quarter.

["This short film is a parody of some of Ingmar Bergman's best known films, including Wild Strawberries (Smultronstaellet) and The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet). The dialog, seemingly in Swedish, is actually a Swedish-accented fictional language based on English, German, Latin, and Swedish, with most nouns ending in "ska". The principal character, Professor Viktor Sundqvist, 76, is being driven to a lecture at the university, when dove droppings splatter the car's windshield. Detouring at his uncle's old house, his mind wanders back to his youth, when Death came to a family picnic to claim his sister, Inga. Knowing that Death is a gambler, Viktor has Inga challenge Death to a single-point game of badminton for her life."]

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3. "Police attack gangs with Bach, Beethoven": The original gangstas.

["City authorities, fed up with gang activity in public places, are taking Bach their bus stop."]

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4. "Colossal Youth": Fernando F. Croce reviews Pedro Costa's film for Slant Magazine.

["Walking into Colossal Youth without any knowledge of Pedro Costa's work feels akin to watching The Mirror without having ever seen a Tarkovsky film; in both cases, there's the shock of an augustly personal, even private style that would have been impenetrable if not for the piercingly fierce emotions that pull the viewer into them."]

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5. "Brendon to ‘Online Film Community’: “Seriously, dudes?”": Brendon Bouzard reacts to the Online Film Community's Top 100 Movies list. Also Edward Copeland.

["Let’s stir up some shit."]

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Clip of the Day: Psycho Waldo (danke Jim Emerson)


Wheres Waldo? - Watch more free videos
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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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John From Cincinnati Mondays: Season 1, Eps. 7 & 8, "His Visit: Day Six" & "His Visit: Day Seven"

By Keith Uhlich

“To think that this place could be a setting for some building-up of the spirit.”
– Barry Cunningham (Matt Winston) –

“Congratulations on imitating a human being, Mr. Cunningham. You fucking faggot.”
– The Announcer (David Milch) –

That was most certainly the voice of the Creator taunting the fragile Barry Cunningham in the dilapidated barroom of the Snug Harbor Motel. Figures that Barry’s momentary epiphany about his surroundings (which he parallels to a catbird seat anecdote about Daniel Frohman's Lyceum Theatre) would be so suddenly quashed by a sentiment from the void. Milch gives voice to the fears that hinder us all – there’s a touch of the misanthrope in how his characters come off as puppets constantly in service to an unfathomable Divinity, but he likewise recognizes that, every now and again, we are capable of breaking through the programming, becoming, even if only for a moment, our tried and true selves.

Based on episodes seven and eight of John From Cincinnati (entitled, respectively, “His Visit: Day Six” and “His Visit: Day Seven”), I’d posit that the characters who most often transcend their hardwired natures are Shaun Yost (Greyson Fletcher) and Palaka (Paul Ben Victor), the former by celestial (and hormonal) default, the latter by naïve virtue. More and more apparent that Shaun is some kind of divine instrument, born of a porn star Magdalene (Chandra West’s Tina Blake) and set for some purportedly greater purpose outside the border town boundaries of Imperial Beach. “Shaun will soon be gone,” is the echoing refrain, courtesy John Monad (Austin Nichols), through these two episodes, though it’s impossible to get a clear read on his declaration: is it a warning or merely an irreversible statement of fact?

When John’s proclamation becomes a matter of public record, via a video message sent to Butchie Yost’s (Brian Van Holt) “hairlip” webmaster Dwayne (Matt Maher), numerous characters scramble to-and-fro, attempting to head off this perceived threat at the proverbial pass. The results aren’t pretty: tensions rise, accusations fly, misunderstandings abound – imagine a Pirandello play populated almost entirely by freshly beheaded chickens. John even stages a miracle for the benefit of shell-shocked former policeman Bill Jacks (Ed O’Neill), as well as an off-screen one for Hawaii-based drug dealer Steady Freddy Lopez (Dayton Callie), that only confuses this Neanderthal odd couple more. In the absence of answers and awareness, which can never be forced, they accept their role as protective muscle. “Whatever the fuck he [John] is, he’s got to come through both of us,” says Freddy.

For Shaun, the stir of activity surrounding him takes something of a toll, though, ever the adolescent, his emotions are raw and amorphous. “I wish Zippy hadn’t kissed me,” he says of Bill’s curative avian companion before breaking into tears. Bill comforts him, casting a scowl up towards the spiral staircase that serves as a constant reminder of his deceased wife Lois. In this moment, Bill’s refrain from the series pilot comes to mind: “When you’re older you’ll understand.” This is exactly the situation he wanted to prevent – to his eyes, Shaun is not ready to experience adulthood’s twin pains of responsibility and regret. But the elder characters on John From Cincinnati tend to be prisoners of their own perspectives, and so when Shaun later lays a confidently benedictive hand on his father Butchie, Milch and his editors insert a cutaway to Bill, shaken, nervous, and uncertain. Age does not necessarily beget wisdom.

But it does increase one’s sense of foreboding. By the end of episode eight, the momentary threat of Shaun’s disappearance has dissipated, yet members of both his immediate and surrogate family gather round him like hawks, waiting for an outcome they must subconsciously recognize to be inevitable. One particularly intriguing scene sees Cissy Yost (Rebecca De Mornay), Shaun’s live-wire grandmother, sign his sponsorship over to Stinkweed surfwear CEO Linc Stark (Luke Perry), a Faustian culmination of two episodes' worth of corporate machinations that have seen Linc ousted from his own company, and Dr. Michael Smith (Garret Dillahunt) prepped for some sacrificial lamb treatment at the hands of his former employers. “Lawyers together. Can’t be good,” says Ramon Gaviota (Luis Guzman) of the meeting between hospital liability attorney Mark Lewinsky (Stephen Tobolowsky) and ambulance chaser Meyer Dickstein (Willie Garson), their business tellingly transacted in the Snug Harbor Motel’s much-feared Room 24. There’s room within both these storylines for caricatures (between this and Deadwood, Tobolowsky is now the go-to performer for obsequious notaries) and shades of grey (one step outside their devilish professions, and both Dickstein and Stark reveal all-too-human concerns).

Milch rightly questions corporate structures, but he never loses sight of the people inhabiting them, and this essential humanism extends to all his characters, even to a fumbling second banana like Palaka. The trials and tribulations of Steady Freddy’s (broken) right-hand man take precedence in John From Cincinnati’s seventh episode, as he becomes the unwitting victim of a tattooing gone wrong. It threatens to be a tangential comic aside stretched to the breaking point, but Milch is after something more. In Shakespearean terms, Palaka is the clown, the character everyone else either abuses or ignores. Yet this seemingly lower-class station has its advantages, as humor is perhaps the greatest guise with which to force introspection and revelation, if not always of the individual self, then of the numerous currents in the community at large.

The clown rarely accomplishes this consciously. Palaka’s poisoning puts him in a regressive trance state where he mumbles about his mother and confesses, in childlike terms, his love and admiration for Freddy (his tattoo was meant to emulate one of Freddy’s own). Freddy is clearly touched by the sentiment, even though he can barely muster any words of appreciation. And after Palaka makes a full recovery, courtesy Dr. Smith (who takes his patient’s slow ice-bath recovery as an opportunity for pensive monologue), he once again becomes Freddy’s punching bag. Palaka’s importance to the Imperial Beach rogues gallery will never be explicitly stated – he’s background through and through, and he knows it. But the benefit of occupying that space in a Milch narrative is that it you will very likely, and more often than you realize, come to the fore. The image of Palaka at the end of episode eight is one such profound aside. “You keep watch on that boy, boss, and I’ll keep watch on you,” he says from his hidden vantage point as Freddy and Bill camp expectantly outside the Yost residence. Through all these layers of perspective, it’s clear that no one knows what it is, exactly, they’re supposed to be waiting for, though a seemingly harmless, yet all too hypnotic game of juggling (reminiscent of an anticipation-laden Sopranos climax) serves as ample evidence that a reckoning is upon us.
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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.

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Ingmar Bergman, July 14, 1918-July 30, 2007

By Keith Uhlich

Well, goddammit.

"I hope I never get so old I get religious." -Ingmar Bergman-

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Keith Uhlich is managing editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications.

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Links for the Day (July 30th, 2007)

1. "Hollywood pigeons to be put on the pill": It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

["Hollywood residents believe they’ve found a humane way to reduce their pigeon population and the messes the birds make: the pill. Over the next few months a birth control product called OvoControl P, which interferes with egg development, will be placed in bird food in new rooftop feeders."]

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2. "Days of Whine and Roses": James Wolcott responds to David Denby's romantic comedy essay from The New Yorker. Do check out the other links he cites.

["Who knew that an essay by David Denby could induce more than groggy nods from readers fortunate enough to make it across the finish line? Yet his New Yorker "Critic at Large" cogitation-lamentation on romantic comedy in the gastrointestinal era of Judd Apatow has incited quite a salon exchange over at Emily Gordon's Emdashes, with Katha Pollitt dropping into the comments section to reiterate her recoil at Seth Grogen and the stunted, grubby man-boyhood of Knocked Up."]

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3. "Shirley Temple: America's Sweetheart Collection, Volume 5": A special Film Freak Central review, by Alex Jackson, from the deck of the good ship Lollipop.

["As you might know, Shirley Temple had been considered for the role of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz but was eventually passed over either because her singing voice was inadequate or because MGM and 20th Century Fox couldn't come up with a satisfactory trade. In an attempt to beat MGM at their own game, Fox bought the rights to playwright Maurice Maeterlinck's "L'Oiseau Bleu" ("The Blue Bird") with an eye on Temple for the lead. Ironically, The Blue Bird became her very first box-office dud and signalled the end of her career as a child actress."]

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4. "Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)": Edward Copeland remembers the bloody Swede.

["What a startling way to wake up in the morning. Just weeks after I wished the great filmmaker good wishes on his 89th birthday, he has lost the figurative chess game with Death. Still, Ingmar Bergman will live on forever with his remarkable body of film work. What worries me is how his stock has fallen over the years and how many younger film buffs have little exposure to his works. Sadly, not one of his many remarkable films made the final 100 on the list put together by The Online Film Community announced yesterday. Hopefully, in my just-waking-up haziness, I can do at least a somewhat reasonable tribute to the Swedish filmmaker."]

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5. "Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'Catch Us If You Can'": Glenn Kenny on John Boorman's feature debut.

["The downbeat flipside to Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night, released less than a year after the Beatles-starring picture, John Boorman’s 1965 Catch Us If You Can (the director’s feature debut) sees the Dave Clark Five—at the time the Beatles’ most formidable rivals in what we in the States called the British Invasion—trying to get away from it all in the dry chill of a British winter."]


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Clip of the Day: Adolf Hitler, heartbreaker (Sims 2 style).


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

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The Whole Tooth: Discovery's Shark Week Turns 20

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Each year sharks attack 50 to 70 people worldwide, killing 5 to 15 of them. That’s bad news for the poor souls who get bitten, but for the rest of us, it means death by Jaws is extremely unlikely. Compare the 300,000 fatalities that result annually from automobile accidents, and the whopping 3.5 million from smoking-related illnesses. Yet the rare violence caused by razor-toothed fish has for 20 years inspired Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, the network’s highest-rated regular programming event—a marathon of mayhem whose offerings have included Great White! Parts One and Two, Sharks of the Red Triangle, Great Shark Hunt, Anatomy of a Shark Bite, Shark Attack Survivors, Perfect Shark and Air Jaws: Sharks of South Africa, which included never-before-aired footage of great whites jumping from the water like Flipper.
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Links for the Day (July 29th, 2007)

1. "The Mistress & the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer": Michael Joshua Rowin covers the retrospective, Part 1 & Part 2. Also see our Clip of the Day.

["If there's one film in the Mistress & the Muse series that should convince you that Norman Mailer's foray into filmmaking was not in vain, it is Maidstone. Nay, more than that, I'll go so far as to say that Maidstone is an extraordinary film, maybe even a masterpiece, the sort of passion- and ambition-fueled endeavor that through the madness of unguided improvisation arrives at truths movies infinitely more seamless and desperate for importance fail to even touch."]

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2. "Not That There's Anything Wrong with That...": Fernando F. Croce on I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, Hairspray, and Goya's Ghosts.

[""What you shove up your asses is your business," Dan Aykroyd declares in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and damned if that isn't the most progressive sentiment to come out of a Hollywood film so far this year."]

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3. "Generous ATM dispenses an extra $7,000": You lucky bastards!

["An ATM at a northwest Louisiana truck stop gave out $20 bills instead of $5s, but authorities say they know who used it and plan to purse the extra $7,000 the machine spit out."]

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4. "Dateline NBC: To Catch a Predator": Sal Cinquemani better prep for an unannounced visit from Chris Hansen.

["It's kind of like the MTV Beach House, only instead of teenage sluts flashing their tits and muscled-up boys licking whipped cream off girls' stomachs, the house is filled with creeps whose kismet is public humiliation, divorce, and probably some jail time."]

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5. "Whoopi Goldberg joining 'The View'": And Academy Award winner Whoopi Goldberg as the Hollywood liberal...

["ABC's daytime show "The View" appears close to adding Whoopi Goldberg and Sherri Shepherd as regular cast members following a year with more plot twists than a soap opera."]


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Clip of the Day: Mailer vs. Torn in Maidstone


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

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Links for the Day (July 28th, 2007)

1. "Muppet Reunion, with Paul McCartney, in the Works?"

["Sure, they’ve had their share of squabbles over the years. But that hasn’t deterred Kermit and Miss Piggy from rekindling their romance. TV Guide has learned that a digitally enhanced pilot for a new version of The Muppet Show is in the works at Jim Henson Studios. “The show will have the original puppets but they’ll be able to walk around,” says a source close to the project. “It’s going to be like the original variety show, not the cartoons that came out afterwards.”"]

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2. "Report Uncovers Astronauts’ Heavy Alcohol Use": Less filling. Tastes great.

["NASA administrators promised fast action today in response to an internal investigation that said astronauts had flown after drinking heavily on at least two occasions."]

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3. "Tuning in and flipping out": A blast from the past, courtesy our editor-in-chief.

["Something about this war is making TV newspeople think like movie directors. When that happens, it's worth asking why."]

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4. "Suspect in custody after 2 choppers crash covering chase": Anything for the shot...

["Two news helicopters covering a police chase on live television collided and crashed Friday, killing all four people on board in a plunge that viewers saw as a jumble of spinning, broken images."]

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5. "Firing Back": A Newsweek interview.

["He will go down in history as the guy who called the victims of September 11 “little Eichmanns”—a reference to the notorious Nazi bureaucrat who helped ship hundreds of thousands of Jews to concentration camps. Ward Churchill’s comment, included in a long-forgotten essay dug up by an enterprising journalism student, stirred a national debate about the power of unpopular words—and the proper consequences for those who use them."]


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Clip of the Day:: Mark Malkoff visits every New York Starbucks


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

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Doctor Who, Season 3, Ep. 4: "Daleks in Manhattan"

by Ross RuedigerSomeday I wanna make a list of celebrities who’ve “admitted” to loving Doctor Who. The Brits on the list wouldn’t be quite as impressive, because in a lot of ways, they’re a given. Last week I met Joel McHale of E’s The Soup and I don’t recall how Who came up, but he immediately confessed rabid adoration for the show – especially the classic series (weird, huh?). He gave me permission to spread it out amongst the world, so that’s what I’m doing. A quick look at Joel’s IMDB page reveals that he’s a mere 6 days younger than me. Maybe we went through the same teenage Who experiences? I wonder if some asshole on the school bus ever grabbed his novelization of "The Five Doctors" and waved it around, threatening to throw it out the window (as high school jock dickheads like to do)? This has nothing to do with "Daleks in Manhattan" -- but the recap needs some padding since it's Part One of Two, and it seemed a more interesting intro than rehashing the finer details of those metallic bastards from Skaro.

“Daleks in Manhattan” -- what a great title! It holds the distinction of being the first new Who story written by a woman, Helen Raynor, yet there isn't anything intrinsically feminine about the goings-on (certainly no more than any other episode). It’s a bang-up intro for a two-parter; nicely paced, sufficiently moody and never too busy. All that said, the title could be a killer for certain viewers. Daleks? Come on…haven’t we seen enough of them? My first reaction was, “Yes”.

The Doctor: “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They survive. They always survive, when I lose everything.”

At the close of last season’s “Doomsday”, Dalek Sec disappeared into thin air amongst the madness. Where did he go? 1930 Manhattan it seems, and the other three members of the Cult of Skaro (Caan, Thay & Jast) went with him. The Cult are an ingenious invention as they’re not like other Daleks. They possess the capacity for thought, imagination and reason. It’s a diabolical Dalek development, and perhaps what most excited me about “Manhattan” was the presence of only four phallic symbols; a limited number is dramatically engaging, however a bazillion of ‘em seems too easy. The Cult of Skaro is desperate for Dalek survival. They’ve finally glommed onto the notion that humans are far better survivors -- and perhaps warriors -- than they. (Though what are the human race’s odds without the Doctor’s protection?) I’ve come to be excited by the Daleks through the new series. They’re not like anything you’ll see on any other sci-fi show, which gives them a televisual edge, and this two-parter is their most intriguing outing since “Dalek” back in Season One.

Dalek Sec: “The Cult of Skaro was created by the Emperor for this very purpose: to imagine new ways of survival.”
Dalek Thay: “But we must remain pure!”
Dalek Sec: “No, Dalek Thay. Our purity has brought us to extinction! We must adapt to survive. You have all made sacrifices and now I will sacrifice myself, for the greater cause, for the future of Dalek kind.”

The Daleks’ hatred of humankind manifests itself in the bizarre concept of the Pig Slaves – humans who’ve been genetically manipulated into grotesque animals. It’s easy enough to ask, “But why pigs?” My answer is that it’s one of the most degrading forms the Daleks could foist upon humanity. Again, the Cult possess imagination, and this particularly ugly sidebar of their ultimate scheme demonstrates contempt for the entire operation and an amount of self-loathing at “How far we mighty Daleks have fallen”. They can’t afford to merely exterminate at this point, so they do the next best thing by removing what makes a human a human. Laszlo (Ryan Carnes of "Desperate Housewives" -- which just feels weird to type) is the human caught somewhere in between and his and showgirl Tallulah’s (Miranda Raison) storyline is a tragic nod to The Phantom of the Opera. Indeed, the story pulls from numerous sources including The Island of Dr. Moreau, Frankenstein, and even classic Who’s “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”, which is Top Ten material for many a fan. Heck, I’d even argue that a story featuring The Empire State Building owes just a little bit to King Kong.

The production values are mighty fine and the team does an excellent job of recreating a believable 1930s New York on a limited budget and by setting the story in only a handful of locations (most of which are interiors). Central Park’s Hooverville was an inspired choice given that from a location standpoint, it could be recreated in the UK without too much problem -- although, believe it or not, there was some filming done in New York for this story.

The characters are strong here, despite the guest cast mostly being drawn in a broad, stereotypical fashion. Eric Loren’s Mr. Diagoras is probably the most over the top, but that’s exactly the sort of guy the Daleks would choose to do their bidding. It’s unfortunate we don’t get to find out a little bit more of his backstory, but then again, he’s written very much in the classic series’ megalomaniac vein – the powerful, rich human who thinks helping the aliens will get him somewhere. As the episode draws to its peculiar close, Diagoras is absorbed by Sec, and the resulting hybrid could very well elicit a few giggles as might his line of dialogue leading to the cliffhanger sting: “I am a human Dalek. I am your future!”

Having reached a point where little more can be said until next week’s conclusion, I’ll go full circle and point out that Joel McHale’s got a cameo in Spider-Man 2. Could the guy be any cooler?

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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.

NEXT WEEK: Find out if the weirdest Dalek story ever filmed sinks or swims in “Evolution of the Daleks”.

Classic Who DVD Recommendation of the Week: “Spearhead from Space” – a story of firsts: The first story televised in color, the first Jon Pertwee story, the first story of the ‘70s, the first appearance of the Autons & the Nestene Consciousness, and the first and only classic Who story shot entirely on film.

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Links for the Day (July 27th, 2007)

1. Karen Allen confirms she will be in the new Indiana Jones movie - No word yet if the spider monkey will return.

["An MTV.com observer at today's Paramount panel at Comic-Con reports that Karen Allen appeared on a video feed earlier this afternoon to confirm that she'll have some kind of supporting or cameo role in Indiana Jones IV."]

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2. Richard Wong on How To Make a Musical - an interview.

["With the all-singing, all-dancing reboot of "Hairspray" opening in theaters tomorrow and the successes of "Dreamgirls" and "Chicago," it's clear that after a long banishment the movie musical is struggling back into the cineplexes, though not without leaving behind a chunk of its soul..."]


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3. Leonard Nimoy to return as Spock - you can't see me right now, but one eyebrow is considerably higher than the other.

["Leonard Nimoy strolled out on-stage to thunderous applause during the Paramount Pictures panel on the new 'Star Trek' film. The film, to be directed and produced by J.J. Abrams, follows the iconic crew members of the USS Enterprise during their early years in Starfleet."]


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4. Dennis Cozzalio defends his appreciation of Rush.

["Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before: the mechanistic, time-shifting, soulless anthems; the stupefying lyrics drawing from the most ponderous and lugubrious science fiction; Geddy Lee’s shrill, shrieking vocal style; drum solos that never die; blah blah blah."]


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5. Self-Styled Siren reviews Nightmare Alley.

["The Siren was prepared to like Nightmare Alley, the 1947 noir set in the world of carnivals and con artists, but instead she loved it. "]


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Clip of the Day: Be careful out there in the office hallways.

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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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Ch-ch-ch-changes at the MOFTB

By Keith Uhlich

My friend and colleague Ioannis Mookas of Gay City News has alerted me to some proposed policy changes at the New York Mayor's Office of Film, Theater, and Broadcasting. For some, this is a seemingly harmless re-write of the existing rules of conduct and permissions for photographers and filmmakers operating in New York City. Others see it as an infringement on First Amendment rights, a subtle under-the-radar way of curtailing our necessary liberties. At heart, an issue worthy of contemplation, discussion, and individual action (though before August 3rd, when the Mayor's Office no longer accepts feedback on this issue). Following the break are links to documents and other writings pertaining to this event.

1) The proposed film permit rules, from the MOFTB website. A more in-depth PDF of the amendments can be accessed at the bottom of the MOFTB entry.

2) Information on a press conference and rally organized by Picture New York, to be held this evening (Friday, July 27th) at 6:30 pm in Union Square.

3) Click here to e-mail the Mayor's Office about this issue.

4) Click here to sign the Picture New York petition protesting these amendments.

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The Simpsons Movie: Dusty Springfield

By Andrew Johnston

Has there ever been a more what-you-see-is-what-you-get title than The Simpsons Movie? It’s the last word that’s the key: The brain trust behind the series (11 of its writers are credited with the screenplay) have emphasized theatrical presentation above all, even building a curtain-raising short (starring Itchy and Scratchy, natch) into the feature. The opening gimmick allows for a change in aspect ratio (from 1.85:1) to the Cinemascope range (2.35:1) that’s probably the most effective use of such a trick since Galaxy Quest. From there on, there’s seldom a scene that fails to make use of the wide canvas the creators have allowed themselves. The visual upgrade (among other things, the linework is cleaner and more fluid than it’s ever been on the series) is one of the main reasons I’d strongly encourage anyone inclined to see the film to do so on its opening weekend with the largest crowd possible.

The film’s most unique quality is how it offers, pretty much for the first time ever, the chance to see how the series’ brand of humor goes over with a big audience. The first 15 minutes are basically a series of vignettes, and for anyone who’s spent the better part of their life watching the series, the communal response to the film’s first gags involving Milhous, Abe Simpson, Ned Flanders, Monty Burns, et. al. is pretty close to exhilarating (ditto reaction to a couple of priceless moments that could never pass Fox Standards & Practices, which I wouldn’t dream of spoiling). Seeing the movie at home could never come remotely close to matching the experience.

The biggest problem is that the film peaks before the plot really kicks in. The story itself is awfully similar to that of a great many episodes, and it makes the deadly mistake of separating the Simpson clan from their fellow Springfieldians for the bulk of the running time. And the familiar nature of the plot only serves to underscore a myriad of baffling creative decisions: Lisa and Marge get virtually nothing to do, there are no musical numbers to speak of, and loads of mainstay characters barely appear, with major fan favorites such as Patty and Selma, Principal Skinner, Ralph Wiggum and Krusty the Klown among the near-absentees. Also peculiar is the lack of pop culture references (the series has never been afraid to date itself) and the decision to begin the movie with an ultratopical gag and then avoid such humor thereafter.

If a Simpsons movie absolutely had to be made, it should have happened prior to 1998—in other words, before the death of Phil Hartman, whose Lionel Hutz and Troy McClure, two characters with enormous potential to help drive a plot that could remain interesting for seventy-some-odd minutes (the running time minus credits). And if the writers were going to take another trip to a creative well they’ve visited time and again over the years, they’d have been much better off serving up an epic Bart vs. Sideshow Bob confrontation than a predictable Homer-centric plot. The end credits inevitably include a sequel tease (the manner in which it’s done is one of the film’s few real eye-rollers, unfortunately), and the producers may well rectify some of their omissions if the charcters make another trip to the big screen. Will they get the chance? The Simpsons Movie isn’t bad, but neither is it good enough, I suspect, to convince a lot of people to buy the proverbial cow after seventeen and a half years of getting the milk for free.
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Andrew Johnston is the television critic for Time Out New York.

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Mad Men Fridays: Season 1, Episode 2 "Ladies' Room"

By Andrew Johnston

AMC’s press mailing of the Mad Men pilot included a note asking critics not to reveal Don Draper’s “secret” to readers. Naturally, on my first viewing, I kept wondering what the heck the secret would be. Don’s response when Roger Sterling asked him if he’d ever hired any Jews (“Not on my watch!”) had me inclined to think Don was a member of the tribe who was “passing” as a WASP, and that may yet be the case given the mysterious origins that are referred to in the opening scene of “Ladies’ Room” (the way he compares himself to Moses in the opening scene could certainly be construed as a hint in that direction). Of course, AMC was referring to Don being married with kids (“I saw that coming a hundred miles away,” my ex-girlfriend said, and I probably should have as well), and the heavy emphasis on Betty Draper (January Jones) in the second episode reveals a good bit more about where the series is going.

“Ladies’ Room” evokes The Sopranos, where Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner made his bones as a dramatic writer, in a number of ways: Simply by merit of being a housewife--and a woman whose comfortable lifestyle is the result of her husband's morally dubious career path--Betty is, obviously, the series’ closest analogue to Carmela Soprano; inevitably, her behind-the-wheel panic attack (and subsequent treatment by a psychiatrist) also brings Carmela’s husband to mind. But there’s also a more subtle influence: As was often the case on The Sopranos, the episode title has a number of meanings—both Betty and Sterling Cooper’s newest secretary, Peggy, spend time in literal ladies’ rooms, but the title could just as easily refer to the kitchen where Betty trades gossip with her neighbor, or to the psychiatrist’s office (since therapy is clearly seen by Don et. al. as something that’s only for women), Don’s mistress’ apartment (where she makes the rules), and the Sterling Cooper steno pool (governed by a complex all-female pecking order that Peggy is clueless about, in part because she has little concept of her effect on men until the end of the episode, notwithstanding her tryst with Pete Campbell last week).

The housewife whose personality is smothered by suburban peer pressure is, of course, one of the biggest clichés there is. I’m inclined to think, however, that what’s stifling Peggy isn’t suburbia per se but rather her marriage to Don, who clearly sees emotional repression as both a virtue and one of the main reasons alcohol exists (“Maybe your wife is just a better drinker,” Don tells Roger after his boss says he probably knows more about Betty than he does about his own spouse). We’ll obviously get to know Betty better in the weeks to come; in some respects, the most important thing about her plot tonight was simply that it reveals she’ll be having her own major story arcs as the series progresses and that the action won’t unfold strictly from the POV of Sterling Cooper employees.

Insofar as doings at SC are concerned, one of the most interesting aspects of “Ladies’ Room” is how it presents Don as seriously emasculated. To be sure, he’s the alpha dog where Pete, Paul, Salvatore et. al. are concerned, but he quickly rolls over when Bert Cooper (one of my very favorite characters on Mad Men, even though he only has two brief scenes in the first four episodes) orders him to develop an advertising strategy for Richard Nixon, whether the GOP’s 1960 presidential candidate likes it or not. Similarly, Don unblinkingly follows Roger’s example vis-à-vis his boss’ philosophy that women’s problems are something you deal with by paying other men to handle the situation. One could even argue that Betty has Don by the short and curlies merely because she’s capable of making him ask what women want.

That age-old question is raised in the scene where Don’s team presents their Right Guard ideas, a scene that will surely strike some as laden with irony that plays to the cheap seats. I don’t see it that way: Right Guard was introduced in real life right around the time Mad Men takes place, and the ideas that Don is pitched seem exactly like the sort of thing that real ad guys would have come up then. Similarly, there’s nothing eye-rolling about Peggy’s discussion of her salary—to dismiss that scene as audience pandering is to say that nobody in 1960 ever talked about money (likewise, the bathroom attendant’s line about decreasing purse sizes threatening her livelihood is by no means unrealistic given the way actual trends were going at the time). Having period characters comment on the world around them isn’t necessarily equivalent to making jokes at their expense or urging viewers to congratulate themselves for living in a more “advanced” era.

One difference between today and 1960 (and between 1960 and the late sixties) that the pilot skipped over, but which surfaces this week, is how the Mad Men era is one of the last times in American social history when younger men strived to appear older rather than vice versa. The main vehicle for this observation is Paul, who the episode establishes as another of my favorite characters. Weiner et. al. are clearly taking advantage of Michael Gladis’ astonishing resemblance to the young Orson Welles, and it works like gangbusters (I thought Gladis might have been asked to gain weight to emphasize the resemblance, but friends who saw him onstage a couple of years ago tell me he had a fairly pudgy face even then; I forgot to ask them if his voice was as Wellesian as it is here...and man, do I wish I could have found a photo of Gladis smoking that pipe!). We don’t spend a lot of time with him, and even then we mostly see a façade he’s mounting to hopefully score points with Peggy, but there are plenty of throwaway lines that make me love the guy—his affection for radio (pretty obviously a tribute to Welles), his mortified reaction to Peggy’s disdain for science fiction and his thinly-veiled contempt for his job all really make me want to see an episode devoted to him. Given that Weiner & Co. are already writing to Gladis’ strengths just two episodes into the series, it seems inevitable that he’ll get some time in the spotlight—but not until after Don receives heavy scrutiny next week, and Pete Campbell the week after that.
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Andrew Johnston is the television critic for Time Out New York.

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The Host is Hungry

by Ryland Walker Knight
Scott Wilson’s deliciously hammy presence as the American captain in the opening scene indicates that Bong Joon-ho’s The Host is, in the broadest sense, a politically charged diatribe against both American and Korean political cover-up machinations of misinformation. But that aspect is rather bland in comparison to what else the film has to offer. For, like any great monster movie, this isn’t a film strictly about a monster (or, for that matter, the monstrous countries that spawned it), but about something else — like the significance of sustenance. That is, The Host is a movie chiefly concerned with food: who-how-where we get it from, what it is we choose to eat, and why we eat it at all.

To answer these questions Bong structures the film around a more pointed one: how is a family defined, and sustained? In the center of this disaster, the Park family is built around its pair of fathers, their paternal responsibilities to provide protection, love, and food, and the family food cart, on the banks of Seoul's Han River. For all their quirky-go-lucky characterizations, the Parks do not fall into self-parody because the melodrama in The Host, like all great horror films, is grounded in a particular humanism striving to overcome all the supernatural chaos infecting the protagonists’ reality. Their frailties are not plot contrivances; they are simply flawed. What draws them together is the bright, young Hyun-seo (daughter of pie-faced Gang-du), who is kidnapped by the fishy monster the title alludes to in the film’s perfect opening action sequence.

As a host, the monster is a vessel, and a facilitator — it carries things. Lacking arms, it uses its pretty-in-pink lotus-petal chompers and slimy tongue to tackle and transport its spoils. And boy does it have an appetite. Or so it seems to those too busy screaming and running. In fact, it does not gather to eat right away. Rather, it sucks up people to carry them home where it regurgitates them for storage in a remote cavern to, just maybe, consume later: it's a bulimic’s worst nightmare. Still, the host is hungry, and out to eat, to chew the scenery as much as people.

The Host opens with a monster attack so visceral and so smart it almost imbalances the film. I kept waiting for the other foot to drop, as with the mid-movie meltdown of Spielberg's War of the Worlds, yet that dead-in-the water turning point never comes. The film, while messy, is rather perfect in its execution, akin to a few choice early Spielberg films. But forget Spielberg for a second: the best moment in The Host is straight out of a Bergman chamber piece, complete with a magical apparition. True, The Host thrills much like Jaws (consistently, to the end), but there’s something else at work here besides that dynamite third act so many recent Spielberg films have lacked. It’s a film about family, resilience, horror, love, and food. It is hardly one note, or tidy. In fact, its mess is one of its virtues. Such reckless abandon, which is mirrored in the havoc of the monster’s presence, affords the film the right to risk its credibility on a few fantastic moments that, if mismanaged, would fall flat and empty, deflating the third act’s pay-off resonance. More than one scene begins with true pathos and ends in howling comedy. Or, moves from slapstick to horror to giddy action then back to comedy before settling on mournful resignation. Despite switching tones frequently and abruptly, The Host runs along this tightrope high wire throughout and, thankfully, it holds its footing, due in large part to its rather obvious obsessions with consumption — of goods, of countries, of people, of food.

Such weight is given to the importance of food that it intrudes even on action scenes, like in the opener when Hyun-seo (Ah-sung Ko) kicks a beer can and watches it fizz empty, metaphorically signaling her fate and linking it to food. (When asked what kind of food she wants most later in the host's cavern, Hyun-seo looks straight into the camera and replies, "Beer. A cold beer.") Near the middle of the film, in the midst of the search for Hyun-seo, Gang-du’s medalist archer sister, Nam-joo (Du-na Bae), asks, “How long do you think it’s been since she last ate?” This question prompts the family’s return to their food shack caravan for a moment of respite to stuff their faces. The four Parks (Gang-du, his sister Nam-Joo, his unemployed drunk brother, Nam-il, and his gruff father, Hie-bong) sit around a squat table covered with garish snacks, wrapped and naked alike, that we Americans rarely, if ever, eat (but still look at salivating). While Hie-bong pours hot water into his children’s ramen bowls, one senses their thoughts remain with the missing girl: a mixture of guilt and remorse and silent desperation plays across their stonewall faces. After all four bowls are filled, there’s a reverse shot cut to an angle above the table showing the family sitting in silence waiting to eat, holding their respective lids down, trapping the hot water and steam, biting their tongues. Bong holds this shot for the rest of the sequence.

As the family members open, and begin devouring, their ramen, a small hand appears on Gang-du’s (Kang-ho Song) shoulder. We see the hand is connected to an arm, which is connected to a body, which is the body of Hyun-seo, there, in the caravan, joining their meal. Instinctually, the family begins to feed her — first her father, then her aunt, then her uncle, then her grandfather, all counter-clockwise — stuffing her face, all in silence. She’s smiling and can barely fit all the food into her small mouth. Each family member looks in love and awed. Each puts a hand on Hyun-seo’s fragile body. It’s one of the best communion scenes ever filmed.

Bong’s fluency in these personal moments, in the quiet, set his film apart, like Jaws before it, as made of something stronger than a thin, generic rampage plot. As I compared this communion scene to something out of Bergman (say, the magical escape scene in Fanny and Alexander), The Host truly does inherit more key traits from Jaws, such as family and redemption, which can found in the whole of Spielberg’s work. However, Bong risks an ending here that even something as great as Jaws would not dare; which, along with the thematic exploration of sustenance’s existential importance, distinguishes The Host as something special: it has the gumption to meet the challenge of the genre head-on and do its messy best to rewrite its concerns and outcomes. With The Host now available on Region-1 DVD you can program your own home-theatre double bill and see for yourself how well the films play with one another. Be sure to pause for snacks._______________________________________
House Next Door contributor Ryland Walker Knight is the infrequent publisher of the blog Vinyl Is Heavy.

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Links for the Day (July 26th, 2007)

1. Disney films quit smoking.

["It’s going to be a little more complicated because Miramax sometimes distributes movies that are produced independent of us,” Mr Iger told the FT.
He acknowledged that some filmmakers would want to include smoking scenes to reflect adult themes but said Disney would seek to discourage them. “It’s a confrontation we are certainly willing to have."]

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2. Alan Sepinwall teases us with the Simpsons movie. Some further details in the thread.

["To quote the Bizarro Jerry, me so happy. Me want to cry."]


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3. All in all, I'd rather be watching Fields - Ed Copeland is back again - this time taking a look at the films of W.C. Fields

["Thanks to an insanely good deal on one of the W.C. Fields DVD collections, I've recently gone on a spree of watching and re-watching the works of the late comic actor."]


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4. Daniel Craig becomes Britain's highest paid actor.

["Daniel Craig has reportedly signed a £13 million contract to reprise his role as James Bond."]


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5. Hirayama Hideyuki's Three for the Road Premieres at Lincoln Center

["One of the film's three stars, Kanzaburo Nakamura, in his enjoyable pre-movie remarks, told us to think of the film as a nice, warm bath. 'Nothing much happens, but you'll find it relaxing.' He also warned us, 'If you don't enjoy it, I don't want to know.'"]


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Clip of the Day: W.C. Fields in the Bank Dick

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

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5 for the Day: Peter Lorre

by Dan CallahanRecognizable to practically everyone by looks (short and stocky, with fried egg eyes set wide apart) and voice (purring, lightly accented, cutely ghoulish), Peter Lorre has lived on as various cartoon characters, such as Ren on Ren and Stimpy, and as a fondly remembered, idiosyncratic supporting player in Warner Brothers’ films of the forties. In memory, he is always appealing to Humphrey Bogart for help (“You despise me, don’t you?” he asks, in Casablanca) or hiding out in the capacious shadow of the unpredictable Sydney Greenstreet, dreaming of the Falcon and the heist that will bring a big payday. Lorre began spoofing himself quite early, and wound up having to play in a lot of junky projects, the fearsome promise of his early work forgotten.

In a recent, comprehensive biography of the actor by Stephen Youngkin called The Lost One, the author detailed Lorre’s obscure early years. He was born Laszlo Loewenstein in Austria-Hungary in 1904, and his mother died when he was a kid. Generally bookish and anti-social, Lorre worked in a bank for a while, but that didn’t last long, and he eventually took to the streets, where he got scurvy, went hungry, and even robbed people for bread. At loose ends, he joined a troupe called “The Therapeutic Theater,” where he specialized in extreme, weird improv, and where his talent for mimicry got him his stage name (“Lorre” means “parrot” in German). On the Berlin stage, he turned a one-line bit part into a triumph: playing a servant, he was supposed to come on and simply say, “Frau Schultz is here to see you.” Instead, Lorre entered insolently, slowly lit a cigarette, and turned Frau Schultz’s arrival into an extended improv interrogation with the lady of the house (a portent of his later scene stealing). Trouble with his appendix started him using morphine, which he would be addicted to, with often major consequences, for the rest of his life. He tried all manner of cures, even shock treatments, but never managed to get off the drug completely.

Lorre made a big impression in the plays of Bertolt Brecht; indeed, he was and remained Brecht’s favorite actor. After his success in Fritz Lang’s M, Lorre played small, comic parts in German films, and eventually had to leave Germany after the Nazis came to power. Peripatetic for a while, he worked for G.W. Pabst in Paris, did two superb turns for Hitchcock in England, then landed in Hollywood, where he enjoyed the sunshine and money with relief. At first, he was publicized as a great actor from Europe, another Charles Laughton, or Emil Jannings. Lorre had ambitions to play Napoleon on stage, and he nursed a lifelong desire to play Kaspar Hauser (imagine him in a Herzog film with Klaus Kinski!) But projects like this didn’t work out for him, and by the late thirties, he was trapped playing a Japanese sleuth in the popular Mr. Moto series. When director Vincent Sherman asked Lorre how he endured playing Moto in eight films, Lorre replied, “I took dope.” As a young man, Lorre took acting very seriously indeed. At Warner Brothers, and in various B and even Z pictures later on, he spoke derisively of getting paid to “make faces.”

A self-styled intellectual, Lorre had a quick, morbid wit, loved to blow cigarette smoke into people’s faces and thrived on doing unexpected things (during a party at Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s house, he hungrily sank his teeth into Mrs. Korngold’s ass). Lorre had three wives, but he seems to have married them all after he had fallen out of love with them. “Do you think you could get used to my body?” he would ask, forlornly, as he approached a pretty starlet; this line worked for him more often than not. His plummeting status as an actor clearly hurt him, and he sank lower and lower as time went on, doing several movies for Irwin Allen, a Frankie and Annette opus, and sidekick work for Jerry Lewis and Vincent Price. Brecht’s favorite actor had turned into “that lovable boogey man.” Lorre’s work with Brecht on stage is lost to us (though the stills of the productions are evocative). But his best early movie work remains a testament to his perverse talent.

1. M: In Fritz Lang’s masterpiece, Lorre’s child murderer is a little like the shark in Jaws: barely seen most of the time, but shocking in glimpses. At first, he is just a shadow on a wall, talking to a little girl in a quiet, uninflected voice, then whistling a bit of Grieg’s Peer Gynt as he leads her away. He whistles the tune again as he writes to the press, his back to the camera. Then, the reveal: we see Lorre’s round, young face in a mirror, and a gross shudder runs through him, as if he’s masturbating. To quell this disturbance, he pulls his mouth down into a frown with his middle fingers, and his eyes pop out of his head as if they’re on springs. Lorre’s face is malleable, a piece of clay, a mask, capable of any contortion. When his killer sees another little girl, Lorre’s eyes deaden slightly as they bulge with desire. The girl is whisked away by her mother, so Lorre sits to drink, obviously suffering under some kind of demonic influence. This is big-scaled acting: it’s not a naturalistic performance, but this isn’t a natural man. In the suffocating finale, where he is trapped by a kangaroo criminal court, Lorre plays his finest scene on screen, an animalistic, freakishly convincing defense of his sickness, his need to kill. M defined Lorre in the movies for all time, dwarfing the rest of his work. And it had a curious coda: in the late seventies, his only daughter Catharine Lorre was accosted by the Hillside Stranglers, dressed as policemen. When they saw a photo of her with Lorre and realized she was his daughter, they let her go, providing a poetic twist to Lang’s view of corruption and desolation, and her father’s iconic portrait of tormented evil.

2. The Man Who Knew Too Much: In Hitchcock’s early British thriller, Lorre is introduced smiling and joking about his English (he learned the role phonetically). In hat, fur collar and white gloves, he seems a jolly dandy. But when he emerges as a kidnapper and leader of an assassination plot, all bets are off, visually and emotionally. The hat is removed, and underneath is a white skunk stripe running down his dark hair and a lengthy scar over his right eye. His manner is similar, but he smiles now when he jokes about killing a child, if necessary. This is a reasonable man, easily tickled, seemingly impassive, above it all. When he is forced to shove Leslie Banks in the head, he turns sheepish afterwards, even apologizes. But this man, like Lorre’s killer in M, is also subject to mood swings and is at the mercy of his dark compulsions. He’s a cultured fellow, quoting Shakespeare, eating meals with cool relish, but his almost bored demeanor hides the danger of a lethal villain. In this film and M, Lorre is clearly a major actor capable of creating large portraits of all-too-human monsters.

3. Mad Love: In his first Hollywood film, for MGM, Lorre plays Dr. Gogol, a bald, Vulcan-eared, not-of-this-world scientist with a droning, hallucinated voice and huge haunted eyes. It’s a silly film, and audiences’ generally laugh at Lorre here, but that’s only because he’s offering such an unnervingly distinctive portrayal of romantic obsession. “I, a poor peasant, have conquered science, why can’t I conquer love?” he wonders, and can only close his eyes in ecstasy when he watches his unrequited beloved (Frances Drake) being stretched on the rack and tortured in a play. Lorre’s work here cannot be judged by any normal standards: his performance of thwarted passion is so far-out, so bizarre in its details, yet it somehow remains gentle and human. The script and the other actors give him no help, but Lorre more than lives up to the title; after this lead, he played a fastidious Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment for Josef Von Sternberg. Both films flopped with critics and audiences, and Lorre soon fell into the Mr. Moto series and small roles.

4. The Maltese Falcon: This campy granddaddy of all private eye movies amounted to something of a comeback for Lorre, who is introduced via a gardenia-scented calling card. His pansy Joel Cairo wears curly hair and carries a walking stick which he caresses suggestively as he speaks to Bogart’s Sam Spade (Lorre even sticks the tip of the stick into his mouth). He pulls a gun on Spade, insists on frisking him, and goes right for his ass; Spade eludes this advance in the nick of time, disarms Cairo and punches him. After this too intimate exchange, Cairo asks, “May I please have my gun now?” like a sweet, deadly little kid. At this point, and for the rest of the forties, Lorre became a heavily seasoned side dish among many other character types, but he was still capable of outrageous invention when given a chance. After the Falcon is revealed as a fake, Lorre’s Cairo denounces his partner, Sydney Greenstreet: “You imbecile! You bloated idiot! You stupid fathead, you!” His hissing anger gives way, amusingly, to childish tears. Lorre’s creativity was harnessed now to Hollywood fun, and it would be churlish to deny the pleasures of this work. But something was lost in this transition, and that shouldn’t be forgotten.

5. Beat the Devil: In this cult film, one of the few respectable items of his later career, Lorre is white-haired, portly, his big eyes melancholy and quizzical. As Julius O’Hara, an inept crook, Lorre smokes his cigarette in a long holder and talks a lot of charming nonsense, courtesy of scriptwriter Truman Capote. During one scene with Robert Morley, Lorre’s silent, infinitesimal wince at his fellow crook’s laugh and bluster is an advanced master class in effortless scene stealing. Lorre really enjoys himself in this likable free-for-all, as he did briefly in Rouben Mamoulian’s Silk Stockings, where he actually gets down on the floor and does a Russian dance (his own idea). His sole directorial effort, the German-made Die Verlorene, was a commercial/critical disappointment, and remains hard to see (he played a murderer of women, and apparently did a lot of improvising). Lorre’s cry of, “REEEK!” in Casablanca remains more indelible to most viewers than his unanswerable, “But I can’t help it!” in M. There is merit in both his Weimar pain and his Hollywood drollery. Both are the mark of an artist who was drastically undervalued by his peers and himself._________________________________________________
House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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Links for the Day (July 25th, 2007)

1. Matt Damon craps on James Bond. Shocking. Positively Shocking.

["Bond is 'an imperialist and he's a misogynist. He kills people and laughs and sips martinis and wisecracks about it,' Damon, 36, told The Associated Press in an interview."] It's called entertainment, Mr. Damon.

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2. This isn't Chicago after all – it's London. Ed Copeland compares two versions of Pennies from Heaven.

["When I recently reviewed the 1981 film version of Pennies From Heaven, I guessed that the original British miniseries would work better and feel less truncated and now that I've seen it, I see that my intuition was correct."]

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3. First Look: Darjeeling Limited Trailer - Anne Thompson has an early trailer.

["Older brother Owen Wilson is on a quest to re-forge family bonds with his younger siblings Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman. En route they have various exotic adventures."]

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4. I Can't Believe I Ate the Whole Thing. Paul Matwychuk serves up a review of No Reservations...raked over the coals.

["The character (here named Kate for some reason instead of Martha) is conceived so aridly that in some ways you can’t really blame Zeta-Jones for giving such an uninteresting performance—after you get one look at her suffocatingly tidy, perfectly decorated apartment, there’s absolutely nothing left to discover about her."]

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5. Prince - Planet Earth. Eric Henderson looks at the new album.

["Planet Earth, the third album in what may end up being dubbed his un-emancipated period (well, there was also Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic, but the history books will hopefully find a way to forget about that one), finds Prince trying to forge some sort of acceptable balance between his Herculean reputation and the sense that his return to pop is really a veiled form of condescension."]

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Clip of the Day: Robot Dancing. (Found on Japundit)

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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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T.V. on TV: Damages

by Todd VanDerWerffDamages is a fairly typical FX show. It’s got the look of quality television down, and it has the ambiguous characters most other quality shows have. It’s got a strong central performance from Glenn Close, and the plotting is so comprehensive and tight that it leaves you little room to breathe. But, at the same time, it feels a little shallow, as though there’s nothing more going on in its head than being riotously entertaining and keeping the plot moving along. It’s been compared to movie thrillers simply because of its labyrinthine plot, but if this were a movie, we would sigh at its convolutions and just long for something more straightforward, about real human beings. In short, Damages feels like a show that you should like more than you actually do.

Don’t blame any of this on Close. As star litigator Patty Hewes (the woman goes on the Greta Van Susteren show), Close turns in a great performance. Her tightly pursed smile is terrifying, and the way she makes everyone around her dance to every little tune she conjures up is mesmerizing. FX has made a lot of noise about coming up with a female protagonist who is the unethical match of Michael Chiklis’ Vic Mackey on The Shield or Denis Leary’s Tommy Gavin on Rescue Me (most of this noise was centered around the debut of the Courtney Cox vehicle Dirt). The network may have finally found that character in Patty. Close holds Patty’s motivations so close to her chest that you watch just looking for a chink in the armor, a way to figure out exactly what she’s up to and what her end game is.

The problems with the show start with the other cast members. Rose Byrne’s Ellen Draper is a twist on the wide-eyed ingenue who falls under the tutelage of an mentor she’s not sure she can trust. This, in and of itself, isn’t so bad. It’s the basis of plotlines stretching from The Devil Wears Prada to Harry Potter (and that’s just recently). But if you’re going to do this storyline, the ingenue has to be someone who grows to a place where they can give and take with the mentor, particularly if they’re going to split off from the path the mentor has set for them. Byrne is a capable actress, but her character here is underwritten, and she doesn’t have the level of skill Close has to simply wrestle the part to the ground and make it her own. She’s a naif trapped in a season-spanning mystery, and it’s never immediately clear why, exactly, we’re supposed to care about her. We’re probably supposed to care because she’s an “innocent,” but Close’s character is just so much more interesting that we end up siding with her in the balance of things because we want to see what she’ll do next.

Ted Danson is the other leg of the central triangle here as Arthur Frobisher, a man accused of stealing money from his employees (in a plotline that has shades of Enron and feels a few years too late for the oft-timely medium of television). Danson, of course, is better known for his roles in comedies, but he carries himself well here as yet another morally ambiguous character in the show’s universe. The biggest problem with his storyline is that the Frobisher trial just isn’t that interesting, especially as the engine that is meant to drive the show for a whole season. The shocking twists involved in this storyline aren’t all that shocking, and some of them feel downright convoluted (let’s just say there are ulterior motives for Patty in hiring Ellen).

The most interesting thing about Damages is its structure as essentially two mysteries at once. There’s the mystery of Frobisher and whether he did what he’s accused of (and whether he’ll get away with it) and there’s a mystery that kicks off the pilot and takes place six months after the bulk of each episode’s action. Ellen stumbles out of an apartment, bloody and distraught. The police investigate the mysterious circumstances around what happened to her, and as the first two episodes wear on, we’re slowly drawn into this parallel plotline. It’s interesting to see how this plot intersects with the plot in the past, but it also kills some of the drama there. All things considered, this whole “How did Ellen get so bloody?” plot is so much more interesting than the Frobisher one that the breadcrumbs we’re dropped take on graver importance than they’re really merited.

Another problem is that these twists aren’t that hard to figure out. If, indeed, you have seen a movie thriller, then you’re half way there. The law of economy of characters (there are only as many characters as are absolutely needed) pretty clearly indicates which characters in the past will end up in which situations in the present. A series like this thrives on its twists (and making sure they don’t feel forced) and it’s never good when the audience is two steps ahead of the show itself.

I don’t mean to make it sound like I hate the show. There’s a lot of good stuff here, and Close’s performance is worth a watch or two. What’s more, it’s always fun to see an intricate plot like this unfurl in the serialized television medium. And somewhere in there, there’s an interesting show about how far the people at the top of society are willing to go to ensure that they’ll stay at the top. But all of that gets overshadowed by the show’s desire to stay edgy. And that’s where the network the series is on comes into play.

The FX house style is that of a gritty, grim look at life in the big city, where everyone’s corrupt and everyone’s willing to bend the rules. But the shows never move beyond the feel of simple plot momentum relentlessly driving forward. While other networks as diverse as HBO and AMC slow down their plots and let their characters breathe in their series, FX is always ramping up the speed, trying to chase their first big hit (The Shield). Damages is yet another attempt to recapture that moral ambiguity, that sense that anything can happen. Sadly, these shows seem to burn out faster and faster. Perhaps, it’s time for FX to step back and stop pushing at envelopes.
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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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Big Love Tuesdays: Season 2, Ep. 7, "Good Guys and Bad Guys"

by Todd VanDerWerffBig Love’s seventh episode of its second season, “Good Guys and Bad Guys,” written by series creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer and directed by Michael Lehmann (yes, the Heathers director), bounced back and forth between the series’ best and worst impulses, often irritatingly. Even the scenes at Juniper Creek, often the series’ Achilles’ heel, bounced back and forth between very good and overstated and over-obvious. The war between the two sects of polygamists arrived as promised, and if it wasn’t quite as bad as the audience might have feared, it didn’t work entirely, either.

At least the episode crystallized the season as being the Ginnifer Goodwin show. The other actors have all turned in great performances from week to week, but Goodwin has taken her character, Margie, to new heights this year. From her adoring glances toward her mother during that awkward get-to-know-the-family-you-don’t-know-is-my-family meal to her near meltdown when Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) outed the Henricksons as polygamists to Margie’s mother, Goodwin took her meatiest script yet and knocked everything she was given out of the park. It’s rare to have a show that has, effectively, four lead characters, but the one thing Big Love does better than just about anybody else is balancing those characters and their storylines. The show has subtly shown the selfishness of Bill (Bill Paxton), increased Barb’s (Jeanne Tripplehorn) claustrophobia, redeemed Nicki’s shrewish character from the first season and given Margie more to do, all without losing track of the other leads (or the Henrickson children).

The show has mostly increased the storylines and time spent on these characters at the expense of the Juniper Creek storyline (Harry Dean Stanton’s Roman Grant has barely appeared since the season’s third episode). While a few of the show’s fans get wrapped up in the Machiavellian intrigues of the Juniper Creek gang (and, I must admit, I do find Bill’s immediate family entertaining), the show’s significant ramp up in quality in season two has come from its focus on Bill’s suburban lifestyle and how that clashes with his polygamist lifestyle. And while this episode was strong when it focused on those issues (aside from the script’s portrayal of Margie’s mother -- more on that in a moment), it also honed in more on the Juniper Creek-ers, to its detriment.

The central plot of the episode was the first visit of Margie’s mother, Ginger (a terrific Bonnie Bedelia), paying her first visit to the Henrickson homes. Initially, Margie tried to tell her mother that she was just really close to her two neighbor ladies, but when Ginger saw Bill kissing Barb, she cornered Nicki, who was forced to admit that the family was a polygamist one. All in all, this wasn’t a bad plot. It was nice to get an idea of why Margie seems to have tossed herself so blindly into following the principle (her mother’s various debaucheries caused a rift between the two), and seeing Nicki thrill to having Ginger take a friendly interest in her was a great chance for Sevigny to play comedy, something she does well, but rarely gets to do on this show (the moment when Nicki didn’t realize that Ginger was drunk first thing in the morning was priceless and indicative of just how naïve Nicki can be when off the compound).

But the story was marred by the script’s cheapening of Ginger. It wasn’t enough to make her a bit of a lush and a bit of a slut. She also had to be unmitigated, wacky trailer trash, passing out in a shirt that had blinking lights, making a pass at Bill while drunk and strutting about like a penguin for the amusement of her grandchildren. To the script’s credit, Ginger’s final moment was a good one (she showed unexpected powers of perception when she told Margie that she was the one with all of the power in the Henrickson family), and the character played more as a sad one than a quirky one, as she might have in the first season. It’s just unfortunate that the show feels the need to go one step too far when introducing characters like this (they’re rife throughout Henrickson Home Plus). Characters that could be good comedic foils for the impossibly upstanding Henricksons or sad contrasts to them are pushed a step too far until they’re simply unbelievable caricatures. Bedelia was able to salvage a lot of this, and, as mentioned, this arc ended well, but it still needed to find a more realistic place to come from in the first place.

Meanwhile, the Juniper Creek people were drawn into all-out war with the Hollis Green sect. This was mostly played on the periphery of the episode, which was a wise choice, considering how much potential there was for this plot to dominate the episode with forced quirkiness and intrigue. Instead, the war was contained to a few small moments on the margins (I particularly liked those two silent women who torched Bill’s boat last week confronting Adaleen -- Mary Kay Place -- and leaving her trussed and tied up). Still, the more polygamist sects the show brings in (all with their own religious codes and so on), the less interest we have in any of them, simply because the only thing that’s compelling about Juniper Creek in the first place is how its tendrils sink into the Henrickson family and threaten to drag it down into the mire. If this is all a way to unburden the show of the polygamist sect storylines, that’s fine, but it’s an awfully elaborate way to do so.

Bruce Dern returned this episode as Bill’s father, Frank, and it was fun to see him match up with Grace Zabriskie’s Lois again. The scenes between the two were often overburdened with exposition (Frank found out about Lois’ Laundromat and wanted a share of the profits), but the two have such a zestful chemistry that it’s just fun to watch them spar, even when what they’re saying isn’t of all that much interest. Much better was Barb going down to the compound to try to save Wanda (Melora Hardin) and Joey (Shawn Doyle) after Lois tried to get Joey to take a second wife while Wanda was institutionalized (something else Lois was responsible for). In a moving scene, Wanda correctly surmised that Barb was only there because she wanted to keep Joey and Wanda’s marriage pure in the way that she and Bill’s marriage had not stayed pure. Barb’s not-so-subtle longing for a traditional marriage and a traditional life has burbled underneath the show’s surface all season long, and it will be interesting to see if it boils over. (The Wanda/Joey/Barb storyline certainly boiled over in an over-the-top scene where the power went out, but one of the final moments with Joey -- where he talked about how he could wait out Roman and see Juniper Creek return to the place he wanted to live in the first place -- was a nice, small one, the likes of which the show could use more.)

Bill didn’t get as much to do, outside of playing Roman and Hollis Green off of each other, but his scene with Don (Joel McKinnon Miller) where Don expressed his uneasiness again with the plan to buy Weber Gaming (Don correctly pointed out that the only three people who wanted Weber were Hollis, Roman and Bill) worked as yet another example of just how headstrong Bill has gotten this season about getting what he wants. And Bill’s defense of his daughter by beating down Albie (Matt Ross) was another nice moment in his ultra-masculine character progression.

If “Good Guys and Bad Guys” didn’t hit the heights that the last four or five episodes hit, it at least moved a lot of the show’s pieces further on up the game board. Next week’s episode looks as if it will bring several plot points to a head, so here’s hoping it’s able to bury some of the show’s less-interesting aspects.

Other news: HBO has officially renewed Big Love for a third season, according to Variety, so any speculation about what might happen in season three will no longer be idle. Production will be sped along to make sure the third season is completed before any work stoppages. In addition, the show will apparently inherit the coveted Sundays at 9 p.m. time slot after John from Cincinnati ends its run.

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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.

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Links for the Day (July 24th, 2007)

1. Hollywood is game for Gaiman - Anne Thompson recounts Neil Gaiman's Hollywood efforts: past, present and future.

["Besides such celeb fans as Tori Amos, Norman Mailer and Clive Barker, hip studio execs and producers have long chased after Gaiman. He wrote the English-language script for "Princess Mononoke," and the Henson Co.'s Lisa Henson gave Gaiman and his longtime collaborator Dave McKean the chance to make the $4 million "MirrorMask," which barely got released."]

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2. Michael Tolliver Lives - Ross Ruediger reviews the latest from Amistead Maupin.

["Reading Maupin is an effortless endeavor -- the guy just knows how to economically and entertainingly tell a story."]

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3.Cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs dies

["Laszlo Kovacs, the Hungarian-born cinematographer who shot counterculture classics such as Easy Rider as well as more mainstream pics including Ghostbusters and Miss Congeniality died Saturday in his sleep in Beverly Hills. He was 74."]

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4. Viacom Shakeup: Redstone vs. Redstone and DreamWorks - Anne Thompson (see above) looks at what might become of the troubled three way marriage between Viacom, Paramount and DreamWorks.

["It's hard to figure what would make the DreamWorks troica happy, since boxoffice success seems only to have made things worse. The DreamWorks/Paramount impasse reveals yet again the risks of moving from one corporate culture to another. In ways that are hard to measure, you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone."]

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5. Dennis at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule has his Summer Midterm up. What? You haven't studied? You'll just have to wing it.

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Clip of the Day: To prepare for the quiz, here is Professor Wagstaff. Remember, according to Von Sternmetz, the eminent physiologist, "There is ever present a group of white phagocytes--"

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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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Discretion is Everything: Jorge Gaggero's Live-In Maid

by Steven Boone

Dora (Norma Argentina) has been Beba's maid for 30 years, and, man, does it show. So many decades of Beba's casual condescension and terse commands are taking their toll, and when Beba brusquely orders Dora to fix her a drink, you can almost hear the maid snap, "Fix your own damn Scotch." But she doesn't say a word. She pours the liquor, mouth clamped shut, even though her sharp, clanging movements betray frustration and desperation. In Live In Maid discretion is everything.

Director Jorge Gaggero has made a film about the tensions between two Argentine women of different economic classes that is to women's pictures by the likes of Cukor and Almodovar what The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is to gangster films or The Conversation is to espionage thrillers--a superior example of restraint in harmonious proportion to ambition. Critics and moviegoers will describe Live-In Maid as a "little" picture, but in soul it is roughly the size of Transformers.

The plot is classically simple: Rich Beba (Norma Aleandro) is falling on hard times during one of Argentina's infamous economic catastrophes. She can't afford to pay Dora her wages anymore, but does her best to keep up appearances, hocking some of her valuables at the pawn shop and making empty promises to settle her debt soon enough. Dora has had it. She starts plotting her escape after suffering such indignities as having to pay for the disinfectant spray she uses to clean Beba's house and serving as a live conversation piece for Beba's rich-bitch party guests. You get the sense that Dora's used to putting up with just about anything, so long as she got paid. Beba is counting on some kind of bond and understanding between them to carry Dora through this turbulent time. Dora is probably thinking, "What friendship?" They share anxiety over money, aging and an unspoken longing to re-connect with Beba's estranged, offscreen (and presumably, scandalously, lesbian) daughter, but economic realties are only pushing them further apart.

The beauty of Live-In Maid is how it induces us to read these womens' minds. Graggero is an action director. No, Beba and Dora don't end up fist fighting on a rooftop, but Gragerro's storytelling is propulsive and nimble enough for an actioner. Almost every time Beba leaves the apartment to face the unforgiving outside world, Graggero jolts us with the sudden blast of light and ambient urban noise. His camera lopes along with Beba on her humiliating march to scrounge for money. And it is just about literally a march: Beba's crisp footsteps, strobing slightly (from a presumably fast shutter speed) might as well be those of the Nazis at the beginning of Army of Shadows. At first, she's that intimidating, but soon enough we see that her imperious bearing is sheer, flailing terror. Beba is about to lose everything, and the only person she can turn to, Dora, can't afford to stay by her side.

Gragerro's sensitivity and simplicty reach an operatic peak in the scene where Dora brings Beba a birthday cake. He puts natural sunlight, a tiny birthday cake with one candle and Norma Argentina's kind round face to sublime use.

My screening companion said of her own Argentine friends, "They are very proud people-- but good, decent people. It's the pride that makes them suffer even worse during economic troubles." Graggero's film is all about this phenomenon: a proud, even vain and self-absorbed rich woman who is actually just lonely and afraid; a poor woman whose resentments conceal a wealth of empathy for her boss. No, put thoughts of Jessica Tandy going, "Hoke, you're my best friend," out of your mind. Live-In Maid makes such openhearted declarations in pictures and sounds as discreet as a put-upon maid who knows exactly when to speak.
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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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Links for the Day (July 23rd, 2007)

1. Matt Groening: Life is Swell - An interview from last Wednesday's LA Weekly.

["In his 30 Los Angeles years, Matt Groening has never been busier than he’s been over the past few months: The Simpsons recently broadcast its 400th episode and shows no signs of slowing down. Futurama’s back in production (although not necessarily for prime time). He’s got a new book out, an empire to oversee, his Life in Hell deadline each week, two teenage sons and, of course, The Simpsons Movie."]

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2. Gore and Diaz team up for climate contest - Just as Live Earth Aid 8 is cooling down, they've made it clear they are not through saving the planet.

["Diaz adds, 'It is an exciting opportunity for young adults from around the world to inspire change because the planet needs a good publicist.'"]

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3. Ben and Dan discuss The Bridge Over the River Kwai. "Wherein Ben and I, whenever we feel afraid, we whistle a happy tune. And could there be a more misleading movie poster?"

["So, just as Herzog had his crew haul that boat over that hill, Lean had his men construct the titular bridge. So, if you knew nothing else about TBOTRK, you could be excused for believing that everything about the film screams megalomania and self-indulgence. Even the fact that it won the Oscar for Best Picture is hardly enough to allay fears that the film was sure to be bloated and self-congratulatory." - Dan]

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4. Hollywood luminaries welcome Beckhams - When does the welcoming stop?

["David Beckham attracted Hollywood stars Sunday the same way he draws defenders on the soccer field....In large numbers."]

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5. Restoring Hill masterpieces - Constantino Brumidi's frescoes and murals are getting the treatment at the Capitol.

["The restoration project began in the mid-1980s with Brumidi's lunettes. The crescent-shaped frescoes painted above doorways depict snippets of America's history, such as inventor Robert Fulton looking at his steamboat on the Hudson River or the signing of the first peace treaty with Britain.

Next on the renovation list were the elaborate wall paintings done between 1857 and 1859 by Brumidi and his assistants. A 10-year program to restore them is winding down, said Barbara Wolanin, curator for the Architect of the Capitol."]

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Clip of the Day: The evolution of the Simpsons, as told in an intro.

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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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"Are we happy, Wonderboy?": John from Cincinnati

by Todd VanDerWerff(While Keith is off on vacation, I'm cross-posting my JFC post from my blog here as an open discussion thread. Discuss it here or at my blog. -- Todd V.)

So what if Shaun has been the Christ figure all along?

I mean, yes, I briefly considered this after the second episode when he was the one resurrected (by a parrot, you'll recall). But, by and large, I've lost all of this in the John from Cincinnati as Christ speculation. But what if John from Cincinnati is more of a John the Baptist figure after all -- here to tell us all that a little child shall lead us and all that. If you'll recall, in the New Testament, Jesus was initially seen as just a follower and rip-off of John the Baptist (OK, I'm paraphrasing and speculating here, but you'll notice that Jesus is referred to as John's cousin more often than not until he really takes off on his own). Now, there are a lot of holes in this theory (not the least of which is that speculating about this show still feels kind of irreverent), but I'm going to jump onto it -- for this week at least. I don't know exactly what Shaun's message to the world is (and John certainly seems to claim God as his father), but some of the other pieces fit.
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More is available at my blog, South Dakota Dark.

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Links for the Day (July 22nd, 2007)

1. Sunshine: The Movie Clothed in the Sun

["There are no easy answers in Sunshine, which is part of what makes it such an enjoyable film—it's happy to be complex. It's a good thing that Danny Boyle countered the atheism Alex Garland saw in his screenplay—the movie thrives on the multiplicity of its attitudes."]

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2. Film’s mood, charm, humor stir the soul - N.P. Thompson reviews Syndromes and a Century, playing this week in select theaters.

["Part of what makes Syndromes and a Century as charming as it is enigmatic stems from the way Weerasethakul combines formal rigor with delicacy of mood and spirit."]

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3. Hairspray Marches On - another take on Hairspray from Nathaniel Rogers. (hat tip Ed Copeland)

["Hairspray’s colorful songs, big dresses and bigger hair are more than a little like cotton candy. The sugar rush is unmistakable as is the feeling that it’ll be disintegrating moments after you’ve tasted it. But, if you have the craving, it offers short term heaven."]

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4. Another film list! The UK Guardian releases Top 50 Comedies.

["When we asked readers to pick their top comic movies last month, hundreds of you voted. Here is your top 50 - ranging from The General, made in 1926, to this year's Hot Fuzz - with quite a few surprises thrown in."]

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5. Norman Mailer will chew your ear off...literally.

["What about this vicious clash, between Norman Mailer and his co-star Rip Torn, that was the culmination of the filming of Mailer's "Maidstone" in 1970? Is it staged, authentic or something in between?"]

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Clip of the Day: Create your own gun barrel sequence. It's a simple 17 step process.

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

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Links for the Day (July 21st, 2007)

1.Five reviews by MZS:

The Inquisition in Spain: Expected and Even Hailed - Goya's Ghost

They’re All Through With Love, Yet Searching for More - Time

Adolescent Concepts of Beauty - Cashback

On the Road - Walking to Werner

Finding a New Calling in Grass Skirts - Hula Girls

from Goya's Ghost:
["By recreating Inquisition brutality, “Goya’s Ghosts” aims to denounce the West’s bludgeoning response to terrorism. But its rhetorical tactics are jejune; its comparison of 21st-century America and Inquisition-era Spain doesn’t track; and its second half abandons satire for half-baked historical melodrama."]

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2.Jeremiah Kipp reviews Sunshine.

["Ever the cinematic stylist, director Danny Boyle goes for strong visual choices including transposing claustrophobic shots from inside an astronaut's helmet to the overwhelming vastness of outer space. But despite all that talent on display, Sunshine is a philosophical blank slate."]

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3.Alonso Duralde reviews I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

["Subtlety and intelligence are rarely the hallmark of Hollywood movies, so it's certainly likely that I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry will both make money and maybe even win a few straight hearts and minds along the way. Bully for it if it does. But movies that are this stupid about gay life, made by straight people, exist as object lessons of why it's so very important that queer artists tell our own stories from our own point of view. "]

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4.Wizard day for publishing's biggest event. More on the Harry Potter craze.

["A study by the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, showed that the number of children aged 7-15 attending casualty wards fell from an average of 67 to 37 when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was published on July 16, 2005"]

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5.The Rued Morgue continues its 007 in '007 series with Dr. No with a special guest contributor.

["As much as I enjoyed watching Daniel Craig reboot the character and start the developmental process from getting his double 0, honing his taste for inebriants, learning the place of love in the workplace, etc…I couldn’t help but think that as the end credits for Casino Royale rolled, the Bond character was ready to emerge again as the final product that is Sean Connery in Dr. No."]

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Clip of the Day: from The Nutty Professor - the transition into Buddy Love - in German. Tonight, make it an Alaskan Polar Bear Heater!
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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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Mad Men Fridays: Season 1, Episode 1 "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes"

by Andrew Johnston
It’s a little uncommon for The House Next Door to recap a series from the very beginning—thus far, it’s only been done with John from Cincinnati—but Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men is really something special: After seeing the first four episodes at least twice each, I’m as hopelessly infatuated as I was when I got seduced by The Sopranos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer during their first seasons back in the late '90s--yes, it's that good. So yeah, I’ll be dissecting the travails of Don Draper and his Sterling Cooper Andvertising colleagues every Friday for the next 13 weeks, in the process offering those entranced by the series a place to discuss it (as I write this, TelevisionWithoutPity had yet to devote a thread to it). If you missed the premiere, be aware that mild spoilers follow—so look away if you want to approach he series tabula rasa, but do come back after catching one of AMC’s rebroadcasts (the series is also available on iTunes).

Matthew Weiner wrote “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” in 1999 as a spec script when he was a staff writer on Ted Danson’s sitcom Becker who was eager to make the leap into drama. It somehow crossed David Chase’s desk; as a result, Weiner became a key creative player on The Sopranos, writing or cowriting a number of seminal episodes (among them “Unidentified Black Males”, “The Test Dream”, “Kennedy and Heidi” and “The Blue Comet”). Yet, terrific though Mad Men’s pilot may be, there are ways in which it’s clearly the work of a less mature writer than the Weiner beloved by Sopranos fans—of the first four episodes, it’s the only one to make ironic jokes at the expense of the era in which it’s set. Such gags seem a bit like showboating by a writer eager for attention, but they’re forgivable in light of how substantial the episode is as a whole. The series’ main influences are evident from the word go: Weiner has obviously seen The Apartment and Sweet Smell of Success several dozen times. It’s equally clear that he’s a big fan of Cheever and Updike--Our protagonist, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) has the same opacity to him that often characterizes the leading men in their stories.

The lack of exposition in the pilot is one of its most seductive qualities—the little we learn about Don (he’s brilliant but impatient as hell and does not suffer fools gladly, and there are hints that traumatic battlefield experiences in either WWII or Korea did a lot to shape his personality) makes us eager to know more, and the subsequent episodes make it obvious that Weiner & Co. are goig to take their sweet time about revealing what makes him tick. There’s no equivalent to Tony Soprano’s sessions with Dr. Melfi to let us know what’s going on inside his head; indeed, the thesis that drinking served the same function in the 1950s that antidepressants and talk therapy do today is shaping up to be one of the major themes of the series. It also takes awhile for the relationships between some characters to become clear—only from reading the press kit did I discover that Don’s boss Roger Sterling (John Slattery) is the son of one of the agency’s cofounders, a man who died at a very early age (we learn a tiny bit about this in the brilliant fourth episode, which provides our second glimpse of the agency’s other namesake, Bert Cooper, an eccentric played to perfection by Robert Morse—who, appropriately enough, created the role of J. Pierrepont Finch in How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying).

Social anthropology is one of Weiner’s main concerns—we’re dropped into this world and allowed to draw our own conclusions about it, as was generally the case with The Sopranos (at least before Chase began his meta-critique of audience bloodlust). This is especially effective in relation to the depiction of gender roles via Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), whose ignorance of her effect on men plays a big role in next week’s episode.

The cynic in me wondered if the use of Lucky Strikes in the episode was a backdoor advertising strategy—an extension of Don’s end-run around the ban on marketing cigarettes as “healthy”—until I learned from Wikipedia that Luckies disappeared from the U.S. market last year. Don’s invention of the “It’s Toasted!” tagline is one of the few major anachronisms (the phrase began appearing in Lucky Strike ads in 1917; if Weiner wanted to be scrupulously accurate, he could have had Don coin the early-‘60s TV ad slogan “Lucky Strike separates the men from the boys....but not from the girls”), and the use of a real-world brand poses some thorny creative issues. Fake brands are a long tradition in film and TV satires of the ad world, including many of the works that inspired Weiner. Using a real product adds verisimilitude, but creates the possibility Weiner and his writers could get lazy and make a corny period campaign for a well-known product a weekly staple. And though Don and his team work on print ads for Right Guard deodorant next week (and Bethlehem Steel in episode four), the products so far serve the plot rather than vice versa (it’s pretty clear that Weiner is going to go fictional whenever a Sterling Cooper campaign factors into an ongoing story arc, as with Rachel Menken and her department store).

As Nancy Franklin’s review of Mad Men in The New Yorker reminds us, the “office movie” was a major genre in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, and if Weiner just wanted to pay tribute to it, Don could have worked in any number of fields. Advertising has a particular association with the culture of the three-martini lunch, however, and it points us toward what appears to me the major theme of the series: Frustration. Following one of the best-known clichés about ad men, both Don and Paul (Michael Gladis) have unfinished novels in the hopper and, as Don memorably says in the fourth episode, Sterling Cooper is home to “more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich.”In coming episodes, the theme of frustration expands to encompass the relentless conformity of suburban-housewife culture as well as the awkward relationship between Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) and his his aristocratic parents. Per the calendar on the wall of the gynecologist Peggy visits, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” takes place in March of 1960. We’re about six or seven years away from when America’s collective frustration came to a boil; in the first episode of his remarkable series, Weiner turns on the gas, lights a match and places his characters on top of a long, slow flame.

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Doctor Who, Season Three, Ep. 3: "Gridlock"

by Ross Ruediger
In “The End of the World” Russell T Davies had the Doctor take Rose to the year 5 Billion to see the Earth explode. The following year, he brought the pair to “New Earth” in the year 5 Billion & 23. Humanity had moved onward and upward, further out amongst the stars. With “Gridlock” he completes a trilogy by returning the Doctor to New Earth once again -- only another 30 years have passed…and this time the future’s so dark, you gotta change lanes.

I didn’t really care for “Gridlock” on the first viewing. It was too busy and too chaotic to get a proper grip on. Subsequent viewings proved those very qualities are the backbone of the story. Like the concept it’s named after, the tight, claustrophobic atmosphere, I believe, is as it should be. Adding to that, there’s much technical brilliance at work here. The episode is jam-packed with CGI – more than in probably any other episode of Doctor Who. What feels expansive and huge simultaneously emits oppression and ugliness.

That isn’t to say “Gridlock” is without moments of beauty. Early on, the Doctor (David Tennant) and Martha (Freema Agyeman) have a moving exchange about his home planet, Gallifrey. She suggests they visit; he waxes nostalgic – almost choking on memories -- failing to inform her it no longer exists. It’s as if he can perhaps keep it alive in her imagination. Maybe if he can do that, it won’t really be gone. Maybe he wasn’t at the center of its destruction. Or maybe he never should have left Gallifrey in the first place. But there remain places and times that even this Time Lord cannot reach, and Gallifrey is one of them. I love Tennant in this scene and he plays it effortlessly. All of sudden the Doctor's 900+ years seem wiped away by this distant memory of a world he’d always taken for granted – a world so pompously powerful, before it actually happened, he assumed it could never die. It’s another one of those “Doctor defining” moments where one senses exactly how much the Doctor as a concept means to David the actor and Russell the writer.

But back to the future. New New York has changed considerably since his last visit. It appears that the sparse populace has become addicted to “moods” which are in this case a family friendly version of drugs. One can purchase moods such as Happy, Forget and Honesty as if they’re vitamins. The moods are taken via a patch placed on the neck – and they bear the green crescent moon symbol, which (as revealed in "New Earth") is the universal symbol for hospitals. It seems quite the coincidence that the Doctor’s last visit revolved around chemicals and a hospital outside of New New York; here it appears that the hospital system has led to the near-fall of humanity. (So much for socialized medicine.) It’s certainly never stated that the Doctor’s previous actions led to this situation, but one simply must wonder if they inadvertently were, given his propensity to overlook the obvious.

From moods Davies takes us to the Motorway, where the majority of the denizens of New New York simply drive around and around in an apparently endless circle of exhaust fumes and closed exits ramps. It’s a maddening conceit, and one that first time around really played to my own feelings of claustrophobia. The bulk of the episode features the Doctor trying to get to Martha in the midst of all this hideousness (please don’t ask me to explain – you’ve gotta see it for yourself). Along the way he meets a zoophile whose beau, Brannigan (Ardal O’Hanlon of Father Ted), doesn’t seem to mind, as he’s the animal she philes. By the time their children are revealed, you’ve either joined in the insanity or thrown your arms and remote up in the air. But if you give up, you’ll miss the geriatric lesbians and the nudists! (Who says Doctor Who is just for the kids these days?)

Oh, and the Macra! You gotta stay for the Macra!! “What the fuck are Macra?” you’re most certainly wondering. Well a long time ago on television sets far, far away there was an old black and white serialized TV show and it was also called Doctor Who. It starred a guy named Patrick Troughton and he looked sorta like Moe from the Three Stooges. One time he encountered some giant crabs in a story named “The Macra Terror”. Guess what the giant crabs were called? Don’t bother trying to find this fossil of BBC history; it was scrapped ages ago and all that remain of the Macra are some crummy stills. When the Macra showed up in “Gridlock”, every single old school Who fan popped a boner (yes, even the ladies). Why we did this, I do not know. We did not ask for Macra, we did not care much about Macra, but we were puzzlingly, orgasmically elated to finally see some fuckin’ Macra. Maybe the Macra are the sole reason I didn’t care for “Gridlock” so much the first time. I wanted more Macra! The episode should have been presented in MacraVision!

I'd love to believe that somewhere in England, there were a couple old hippies hanging out watching "Gridlock" a few months ago. One turned to the other at the revealing moment and said, "Fuck me! Bloody Macra!!!" To which the other replied in the midst of taking a hit, "I told you this was some good shit, mate". (Note to Russell T Davies: In Season Four, I demand some Killer Weed. That is all.)

Oh, I suppose this review simply wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t make some mention of the Face of Boe’s silly revelation to the Doctor: "You are not alone." Whatever the hell that means.

There. Now, back to the Macra…
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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.

NEXT WEEK: “Daleks in Manhattan”! (Come now…what more do you really need to know?)

Classic Who DVD Recommendation of the Week: To prepare you for the next two weeks of Dalekmania, I’m suggesting a science fiction double feature: The two Who theatrical outings from the sixties, entitled Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. Both star Peter Cushing as a human named Dr. Who. He’s created "TARDIS" in his laboratory and before you know it there are ranting pepperpots all over the goddamn place. They're the most fun you’ll have this side of a William Castle flick.

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Links for the Day (July 20th, 2007)

1."Jon Lovitz roughs up Andy Dick" Perhaps the funniest skit Andrew Dick has been in.

["Lovitz confirmed the altercation happened, adding, 'All the comedians are glad I did it because this guy is a (bleep).'"]

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2.Salon's Stephanie Zacharek reviews Hairspray

["Shankman's new 'Hairspray,' of course, has no Divine, and John Travolta, looking believably pretty and sweet under layers of fondant Latex, is a wholly different incarnation of Edna. And he's not bad. But that right there is the problem with 'Hairspray': It's all so "not bad" that it isn't nearly enough, even when Shankman and his cast work hard to send it soaring over the top."]

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3. Xu Jinglei: the most widely read blogger in the world. I'm not a scientist, so I might be wrong, but I think she may have more page views than I have molecules.

["Chinese actress-turned-director Xu Jinglei became the world's most widely read blogger this month when her blog logged 100 million page views within about 600 days, the Beijing News said on Thursday."]

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4.Kenji Mizoguchi to get tribute at Osian’s-Cinefan film festival in India. The focus of the festival will be on Japanese cinema.

["This year the Festival with the tagline Recreating Cinematic Culture will focus on Japan with a tribute to Kenji Mizoguchi. A number of samurai films will be accompanied by the largest ever exhibition of Samurai Armour and Helmets, and on Japanese Dolls, all from the Osian’s Archive."]

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5.Ed Copeland on the 59th annual Emmy nominations - with the list.

["Frankly, every year I still expect to see nominations for Frasier, The West Wing, Everybody Loves Raymond or Will & Grace even though those shows are off the air just because I assume they are preprinted on ballots. I have a suggestion for improving the process: Stick all the possible nominees into a hat and draw five out at random."]

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Clip of the Day: Move over Bill Murray, here's an actual Suntory commercial. Suntory whisky: bringing people together since 1899.

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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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What ever happened queer cinema?

By Alonso DuraldeOscar Night 2006 feels like a million years ago. You remember – it's the night that Brokeback Mountain, although being shamelessly robbed of its deserved Best Picture statuette, still managed to take home three awards. It's the night that Philip Seymour Hoffman's gay novelist squeaked past Heath Ledger's gay cowboy in the Best Actor race. Felicity Huffman was up for Best Actress for playing an MTF in Transamerica. And at the previous day's Independent Spirit Awards, pioneering queer filmmaker Gregg Araki was basking in multiple nominations for Mysterious Skin, a film considered to be a high watermark in an already remarkable career.

GLBT stories had made it to the grownups' table. More importantly, they'd made it to the multiplex where they were enjoying both good reviews and impressive box-office tallies. The terrain was changing.

So what happened?

Yes, the success of Brokeback lifted long-gestating projects like The Mayor of Castro Street, The Front Runner, Stone Butch Blues, and The Dreyfus Affair out of development limbo, but as of today none of them have a firm shooting date set. And independent cinema, where queer voices have been breaking the rules of cinema and exciting audiences with new possibilities for at least the past few decades, seems content to make one toothless genre picture (lesbian romantic comedies! gay thrillers!) after another.

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To read the article, click here. House contributor Alonso Duralde is the author of 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men. His writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Advocate, Detour and other publications.

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930. Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie/The Saragossa Manuscript (1965, Wojciech Has)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the 930th 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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Commonly referred to as Jerry Garcia’s favorite film (he put up much of the funding for the film’s restoration in the 1990s, but sadly did not live to see its completion), this 1965 adaptation of a precociously formalistic 19th century novel by Jan Potocki is a mindbending succession of people telling stories within other people’s stories, going several layers deep (not counting the fact that the film itself is a cinematic telling of Potocki’s story). Two opposing soldiers make peace when they happen upon a book recounting one of their ancestors’ adventures in Spain, hectored and seduced by a hallucinatory pair of Muslim sisters. This plot thread has an almost tangential bearing for the middle stretch of the film, involving a loquacious gypsy’s convoluted recounting of encounters with other yarn-spinners._____________________
Click here to read the rest of Kevin's text entry, and see after the break for his video essay on the film.

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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.

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Links for the Day (July 19th, 2007)

1. "New York Times reviews Potter before publication": Damn Muggles. Click here for the Times review

["So, here it is at last: The final confrontation between Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, the Chosen One, the “symbol of hope” for both the Wizard and Muggle worlds, and Lord Voldemort, He Who Must Not Be Named, the nefarious leader of the Death Eaters and would-be ruler of all. Good versus Evil. Love versus Hate. The Seeker versus the Dark Lord."]

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2. "ReelerTV: Reeler on the Street!": The latest episode of the S.T. VanAirsdale-hosted web series.

["This week's episode of ReelerTV is coming from the streets -- well, part of it, anyhow. We fled the theater at the midsummer mark to check in with New York moviegoers about the season's hits and misses so far; we also found out what folks are anticipating in the busy fall movie schedule ahead."]

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3. "No reservations — toughest tables in the U.S.": Guess I'm eating at Subway the rest of my life.

["That a dinner reservation can be compared to a lotto jackpot is a symptom of the restaurant mania that has taken root in recent years. With the rise of chefs as celebrities, and the proliferation of food blogs detailing news and gossip from the restaurant world at a level once reserved for Hollywood stars, there’s even more pressure for the food-obsessed to score a table at the most in demand restaurant, particularly at prime time (7-8 p.m.). And would-be diners will do almost anything to get in."]

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4. Take Two: In the Cut: Reverse Shot's latest issue. With contributions from House contributors Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Ryland Walker Knight, and Kevin B. Lee.

["Even though the shot may be the most instantly relatable element of film form, the captured image isn’t the exclusive domain of cinema; it’s the cut, the edit between two images, that has most clearly defined the unique character of the seventh art. What’s contained in this instantaneous, invisible break—in time, space, and perception—either unites a pair of images or cleaves them in two. Where before we offered our writers the shots of their choice, here we gave them not only two shots, but the space in-between as well."]

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5. "Squirming fly larvae pulled from traveler's head": Um. Ewwwww!

["Doctors thought the strange, bleeding bumps on Aaron Dallas’ head might be from gnat bites or shingles. Then the bumps started moving."]

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Clip of the Day: Television will change your mind. Videodrome will change your bah-deeeeeeeee!

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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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Dialogue vs. Duplicity: Notes on Syndromes and a Century and I Don't Want To Sleep Alone

By Ryland Walker Knight

1. Friday the 13th, July, 2007: Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA:
7:00 — Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century
9:05 — Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone
My seat: dead-center, five rows back from the screen.
My posture: slouched, a little pooped, but wide-eyed; I ate some semi-sweet chocolate chips on the low and drank water from my Nalgene.

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2. This was my first encounter with both filmmakers, a pair whose reputations invariably precede their films in the “art house” film world. While divisive, the lauds usually drown out the dismissals. The Thai director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (who goes by “Joe” in English), is the current it-director among critics, mainly for his ability to foreground highbrow aesthetics and formalism without losing a humane sensibility. The Malaysian/Taiwanese director, Tsai Ming-liang, is noted for his obsession with water, his fascination with sexuality (roles, fluid reversals, seemingly inexplicable transgressions), and the preponderance of static long takes. Being a fan of such qualities in film, I thought this spelled, at the least, an invigorating night of film watching. For the most part, I was right.

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3. Syndromes and a Century is like hanging out: a breezy conversation punctuated with laughter, perhaps a bit of foreplay (or simply flirting), a few tunes, and some well-warranted smiles. In this framework, it is easy to fall in love with the film. We in the audience sat stunned, rooted to our chairs through the end credits.

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4. I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone is like going to work: frustrating, rigorous, demanding serious attention for a little longer than expected — and punctuated by some truly odd happenstances. Oh, and some “inappropriate” sexual advances. This is a tough film to love, let alone like, or simply enjoy, on any passive spectator level. Half the crowd was gone when the lights came up.

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5. Tsai is easily the more “challenging” director of the pair for me. Yet this is not to belittle the achievements and ambitions of Weerasethakul and his film. Syndromes and a Century is not light cinema, despite its go-nowhere ease: unlike I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone, where the camera stays put in each scene, offering only one vantage, the camera moves, and often, in Weerasethakul’s film, but it remains particularly rooted in place, and almost as stubborn as its program-companion. There are stretches where the camera sits still, trained on an actor simply standing, doing nothing but riding an elevator — or other times when it fixes on the back of someone’s head, obscuring a kiss being shared — or there are shots that track ever-slowly from left to right, looking up at idols. In an audacious movement towards the end of the picture, we’re offered a crowded, smoked-in assemblage of machinery that has been likened, by some colleagues, to Kubrick’s 2001 monolith: we track up to a black intake-vent that sucks up smoke, seemingly out of the camera, into its eye of darkness, which stares back at the audience, from dead-center in the screen, for a solid two minutes. But then it shows some monks zip-cording a toy-UFO up into the air — and the finale is pure joyful movement, although restricted to the space of the frame, which sits away from the scene in observation. It could be the vent is indeed an eye, akin to HAL 9000, looking back at the audience; it could be the toy-UFO is above the crowd, watching the calisthenics at the close: surveillance is recalled in these final minutes from earlier in the picture when a character says, “Someone is always watching you.” The camera in Syndromes operates as a surreptitious spectator, surveying the varying landscapes — of trees, of machines, of humans, of emotions — captured. This is not the trope Tsai’s camera embodies. I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone stagnates to best exemplify the rot on display: it wants you to feel icky. And it succeeds. Its rigor is, at first glance, merely ingratiating. But its rhythms within its boundaries (the frame, the beds, the homes — all artificial and self-imposed) continue to build as the film plods on so that its final shot achieves the epiphany it shoots for.

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6. I saw Syndromes and a Century a second time on Sunday. As the lights came up I thought, “I could watch that film again tomorrow, or any day, forever, but I never want to see the Tsai film again.” (I did not stay for the second half of the program.)

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7. I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone requires not just patience but fortitude. One hopes such devotion yields a resolution that inspires, or illuminates, and Tsai’s film mostly gets there in its final five minutes. But its path wears one thin as it teeters on the edge of redundancy, and revulsion. Yet I would never recommend walking out. The compositions are flawless — as they should be in this restricted construct — and the sight of people enveloped in smoke, and coughing, trying to fuck under a mosquito net with home-made gasmasks (a plastic bag, a paper bowl) around their necks, is uncannily funny and horrific.

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8. My resistance may also be attributed to the fact that I don’t think it was a very well programmed double bill. Rather, as easy (to say obvious) as it is to link the two films (both were commissioned by New Crowned Hope, both are part of the new Asian vanguard, both are about “love” in some fashion or another), I would not program them together because the films do not dialogue. And part of this discrepancy, I fear, lies in the fact that Syndromes and a Century is a much more successful film than I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone. The latter only problematizes its premises whereas the former, oddly, resolves its mysteries by proposing new ones. The new mysteries act in conversation with the earlier ones in Weerasethakul’s film as it is structured around a series of dialogues: past-present, country-city, sunshine-fluorescence, light-dark, man-machine, green-blue, foliage-prosthetics, love-lust, faith-medicine, science-medicine: how do we love one another, and ourselves? How do we heal ourselves? Tsai’s film, on the other hand, proposes a solution that, at bottom, is simply duplicitous, not dialogic: its protagonist does not choose anything, he only takes everything. I’m all for fluid morals that shift terms according to the encounter, but the sleep attained at the close, while a beauty to behold, is transparent, and selfish. And given the finale’s ecstatic accompanying opera soundtrack, the love triangle (and its nodal nexus, the protagonist) is a condoned and complicit spectacle. Still, one might argue I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone does, in fact, ask, “How do we love one another, and ourselves? How do we heal ourselves?” as well as "How do we transcend existential pollution?" My reply would be reiteration: it is not as interested in the answer/s as Syndromes appears, regardless of the fact that Syndromes does not answer, in full, either question posed, while Tsai's film closes on what could easily be read as its (I'd say facile) synthesis of such resolutions. Despite my limited exposure, and the seeming disconnect between the films, I can see why the two directors might be paired, even if I think this most recent film from Tsai is not the proper match for Weerasethakul’s newest film. I can say that 2001: A Space Odyssey may, indeed, be a more apt choice to share a double bill with Syndromes and a Century, if only for the story their titles tell side by side — and, of course, their respective magic monoliths — and their continually disassembled narratives — and their celebratory, philanthropic finales.

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9. I am drawn to films I will not know fully, just as I will not know myself fully. Mysteries will forever eclipse the whole. The delight comes when, in a flash, we can sublime such a logic, and sense the whole, however oblique, in fractions.—For this, I cannot dismiss Tsai’s work: my dialogue with it will continue.—For this, I will continue to seek out the earlier films of both directors, in time.—For this, I thank the work, and our world, and all the inherent mysteries abounding in plain sight or hidden from view.

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10. The final exchange in Syndromes and a Century may depict my relationship with I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone. Just as Tsai’s film is obsessed with water, and nature, so too is Syndromes preoccupied with Thailand’s landscape. This comes to the fore when a young woman asks a young man to join her in her move to a new, modern town outside Bangkok. She says, “It’s near the ocean.” He looks out the window they stand in front of and replies, “Do not try to tempt me with nature.” I’m very much drawn to liquids, and their metaphysical significance, but such a trope is not enough to sustain Tsai’s newest film as other concerns eclipse the water theme, like its protagonist’s dual character-actor presence. More intriguing than the film’s relationship with water, here, is its relationship to self-identity. Both roles Lee Kang-sheng plays, however fickle, remain at the mercy of others, to the end: his warmth with one lover is cooled in the face of the other, and vice versa, like switching pillows in the night. His life is incapable of finding root, forever drifting, which is where the final shot comes into play: the love triangle on a bed, afloat in a dark pool, moving aimless across the water. The nature-love conversation comes in flashes, but the spark is dim and painfully delayed, and the threads rather tenuous. It's frustrating, even if unavoidably compelling. And for this I hope I find one of his films that will better sustain such a theme of liquid temporality. My guess is a movie called The River might live up to that.

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

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Links for the Day (July 18th, 2007)

1. "Happy Birthday, Clifford Odets!": Sheila O'Malley starts the celebration.

["Clifford Odets (playwright in the 30s and 40s - inspiration to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, a generation of playwrights - and he inspires still although some of his plays have dated badly) kept a journal throughout his tumultuous life. One year of that journal has been published - 1940 - and the title of the book is "The Time is Ripe". It's a classic. Practically required reading for those of us in the theatre, but chock-full of stuff that would be interesting and illuminating to anyone. Marvelous first-person document. A couple biographical notes:"]

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2. "Queer as Folk": Nathan Lee spreads some cheeky Sandler love. Not so much from Ed Gonzalez.

["There are faggot jokes and flaming galore in Chuck and Larry, a movie that exploits gay stereotypes even as it mounts (from behind) an ingenious dismantling of homophobia. Made by straight people for straight people, this lowbrow comedy about super-butch firemen (Sandler and Kevin James) faking a gay marriage is a very queer landmark indeed. No joke, the bar has been raised, not least on the potential of "don't drop the soap" routines."]

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3. "Who said it: Charles Barkley, or Werner Herzog?": Your guess is as a good as mine.

["Centuries from now our great-great-great-grandchildren will look back at us with amazement at how we could allow such a precious achievement of human culture as the telling of a story to be shattered into smithereens by commercials, the same amazement we feel today when we look at our ancestors for whom slavery, capital punishment, burning of witches, and the inquisition were acceptable everyday events."]

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4. "Nev. couple blame Internet for neglect": I blame World of Warcraft.

["A couple who authorities say were so obsessed with the Internet and video games that they left their babies starving and suffering other health problems have pleaded guilty to child neglect."]

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5. "One Book and beyond: Vol. 2": Wallace Stroby on Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder novel, The Devil Knows You're Dead.

["It may seem odd to qualify any of Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder novels as overlooked or underappreciated, considering the amount of attention he generally gets, but his 1993 novel THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD has never been granted the status I think it deserves. It is, in my mind, the ne plus ultra of the Scudder books and maybe one of the ten best private eye novels ever."]

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Clip of the Day: Ah, pop culture. How I love thee (three times over).





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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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Big Love Tuesdays: Season 2, Ep. 6, "Dating Game"

By Todd VanDerWerff

Big Love’s halfway point for its second season, “The Dating Game,” written by Doug Jung and directed by Jim McKay, is frustrating first because it’s so good and then because it seems to mire itself in the plotline that’s the least interesting on the show. Up until about 10 minutes from the end, the episode is unconcerned with wacky antics at Henrickson Home Plus or on the Juniper Creek Compound. It’s simply an examination of how the process of bringing another person into a plural marriage can warp and break some and bring spirit to others. But then, the episode turns to some unfortunate business with a third band of polygamists who have come back out of hiding to fight with Bill (Bill Paxton) and Roman (Harry Dean Stanton) over the ownership of Weber Gaming. While we haven’t ever seen an all-out polygamy war on TV (and at least it will give Roman’s character something interesting to do), this plotline stands to bring in more of the weirdness for weirdness’ sake that occasionally weighs the series down (though, admittedly, it’s hard to normalize bands of polygamists who go into hiding at the drop of a hat -- but did the leader really need a seemingly transsexual right-hand woman?). Still, if the plotline brings a definitive close to the often draggy Juniper Creek stories, the show will be all the better for it in season three.

But enough of those concerns. The episode was owned by Ginnifer Goodwin, who finally got a perfect showcase for her powerhouse performance as Margie, the youngest and most naïve of the Henrickson wives. In last week’s episode, Margie accidentally discovered Bill was romancing Ana (Branka Katic), a waitress at a local restaurant. At first, she seemed crushed by Bill’s actions, even though it’s a part of the life she has chosen. At the end of the episode, though, she went to the restaurant and seemed determined to find out more about Ana. As this episode picks up, Ana and Margie are becoming fast friends, even as Bill and Ana’s relationship is progressing. In a short scene set in Ana’s dingy apartment, Ana talks about how much she misses her girlfriends in her native Serbia. Margie thinks for a moment, every thought crystal clear in her eyes (the show is only giving us broad hints about who Margie was before she met Bill, and it’s probably better that way), then admits to Ana that she’s a polygamist, describing her entire family and her husband (the first word she thinks of to describe him is “thoughtful” -- an unusual one for someone she knows is contemplating complicating her life even more). Goodwin plays the moment as a huge relief -- as though Margie had been waiting to make this confession to a friend for a long, long time, and her giddiness afterward, when she sweeps Nicki (Chloë Sevigny) of all people into a hug, is palpable.

Bill’s dating of Ana is just as well executed. Once again, the creative team behind the show doesn’t push the squeamishness the audience must be feeling about the whole situation. The show continues to play that feeling off of the fascination we feel in seeing how these families grow and expand, and that underlying tension drives much of the relationship. It helps that Paxton (in what’s probably his single strongest episode in the show’s history) plays Bill’s lust as right on the surface when he’s around Ana and that she clearly feels similarly about him, even if she can’t understand why he won’t bed her. Religion is the basis of Bill’s problems in the relationship. He’s simply unable to tell her who he is and what he believes, unable to make her understand (as she seems decidedly irreligious). Throughout the episode, he waits for a sign from the Holy Spirit that this is the woman he should take as a fourth wife, but none is forthcoming, even when Margie tells him that she’s received a sign from the Holy Spirit (or, at least, she thinks so -- she asks Bill what that would feel like). Bill has to balance his understanding of God’s ultimate plan for his life with his very real, very carnal desires along with Margie’s sudden realization that she’s a little lonely and would like having a friend around as fourth wife. He even goes to visit a group of fellow polygamists in some sort of weird twist on a Promise Keepers meeting (one of the men describes his realization that he was to take a fourth wife as a “Holy Spirit sucker punch”). It doesn’t help that the code Bill lives by means that every other word to Ana must be a lie if he wishes to not send her away screaming. Bill’s greed and lust almost get the better of him, but he eventually lands at the realization that all he wants from her is sexual, leading him to break up with her (he’s pretty cold about it -- unable to tell her the truth -- but it may be the most selfless thing he’s done all season).

The Ana/Bill/Margie triangle dominated the episode, but Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and Nicki both found themselves enmeshed in intrigue focusing on Rhonda (Daveigh Chase), the onetime child bride of Roman who managed to sneak off the Juniper Creek compound and into the Henricksons’ lives. Some fans of the show find Rhonda completely unbelievable -- a one-dimensional mini-harridan dropped into the middle of the show’s rich understanding of the push and pull exerted on modern suburbanites. But I’m rather fond of Rhonda, who can be a bit one-note, but at least seems to have the ability to improvise her way to a better life. It could also be said that her upbringing has simply created a pathological liar who knows no other way to get by in the world, though that would be a bit reductive. Rhonda charms Roman when it seems advantageous, then runs from him when it’s not. And she quickly soaks up the knowledge of exactly what she has to say to those who would protect her from the polygamist bogeymen in her life to get them to keep her safely enmeshed in her new life with the family of Heather (the always-winning Tina Majorino). Rhonda’s far from the best character on the show -- I doubt I could stand a whole episode about her -- but in small doses, she’s fine, especially as she tries to wrap the world around her finger, but doesn’t quite grasp exactly how to make that work to her advantage. She’s certainly a sure-handed manipulator of the press, though, even as Nicki seems unable to deal with anyone who views polygamy as a negative choice.

The episode concluded, as mentioned, with the Hollis Green clan capturing Bill and threatening to brand him for buying Weber Gaming, followed by Bill throwing the blame onto Roman. Some of this worked (the idea of the Greens hiding out in a nearly abandoned little town was a bit of real-life polygamist behavior I was happy to see captured on screen so eerily), but much of it just went too far. Selma, the aforementioned apparent transsexual, and the branding just seemed tossed in there (even though, again, I would not be surprised to find both things based on something in real life). The problem stems from the show’s commitment to portraying the Henrickson life as something almost within the American norm -- “Polygamists! They’re just like us!” could be the battle cry -- which comes in conflict with the haphazard way this life is thrown up against the other groups -- who seem to say, “Polygamists! They’re so damn weird!” I can certainly see the show drawing up believable psychological portraits of all of these characters (explaining why Bill’s mom is such a liar or why Roman is so power-hungry), but the fact that Bill’s life alone is so far outside our normal realm of experience makes scenes outside of Henrickson Central play as one-dimensional escapades dropped in from what you suspect a CBS show about polygamy might look like.

It was a shame that scene occurred in an episode that was one of the series’ finest so far. It was certainly one of the funniest episodes of the series (I even laughed at the cheap joke of Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” playing when Bill almost had sex with Ana), boasting such only-in-this-show quips as “Honey, you’re my wife. You can’t be seeing the girl I’m dating.” And the episode ended strong, Bill returned to town after his encounter with the Greens, even as Margie was trying to tell Ana how to fight for Bill’s love (even though Ana still had no idea Bill was Margie’s husband). Margie suggested that Ana fake devotion when Bill prayed, once again perhaps alluding to a less-than-solid commitment to the principle on Margie’s part. Margie leads completely with her heart (she earlier explains to Bill that she didn’t need to hear the Holy Spirit when they were dating because she knew she was in love with him), and when Bill has to tell her that there’s no way he’ll marry Ana, she’s crushed but touched by his admission that he was in love with her from the first (who wouldn’t be?). The two pull away from the restaurant, forced to leave Ana behind as a signal of all sorts of things they can’t have -- another wife, perhaps, or just a really good friend to have pie with.

Next week: The return of Bruce Dern as Bill’s father and the resurrection of Bonnie Bedelia’s career when she plays Margie's mother. Plus, all-out polygamy war!
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.

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Links for the Day (July 17th, 2007)

1. "Geniuses who will change your life": ...and who do not include the gentleman above.

["Eight trailblazing scientists who are about to change your life."]

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2. "Influence.....or merely coincidence?": Head on over to Filmbrain's site and discuss the connections between Seconds and 2046.

["Ok, on the surface it's just a four-digit number. But are there shared thematic links between the two films?"]

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3. "The Bicycle Thief--or for you purists Bicycle Thieves (1948, Italy, Vittorio de Sica)": Dan Jardine and Ben Livant praise de Sica's classic film.

["Simply put, after a diet of Disney, a portion of realism is not so easy to digest."]

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4. "Bookstore moves ‘Tintin’ out of kids’ section": A panel from the offending work.

["“Tintin in the Congo,” an illustrated work removed from the children’s section of Borders Group, Inc., stores in Britain because of allegations of racism, will receive similar treatment by the superstore chain in the United States."]

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5. "Paint by Numbers": Michael Joshua Rowin on Milos Forman's Goya's Ghosts.

[""Goya's Ghosts" is half what one expects from Milos Forman. As in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Amadeus," "The People vs. Larry Flynt," and "Man on the Moon," its protagonist is a daring iconoclast who stands intrepid against the uncomprehending conventionalists of his time. But it significantly departs from those earlier films by making its hero more an observer than an instigator."]

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Clip of the Day: Views from inside and outside the fastest train in the world.

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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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John From Cincinnati Mondays: Season 1, Ep. 6, “His Visit: Day Five”

Editor's Note: John From Cincinnati Mondays will be on hiatus next week, but will return Monday, July 30th with a dual recap of episodes 7 and 8.
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By Keith Uhlich

“Well. This was time well spent.”
– Vietnam Joe (Jim Beaver) –

Indeed it was Joe. Not that the residents of Imperial Beach, California are likely to have much cognizant memory of the events, mind-blowing all, of John From Cincinnati’s sixth installment (“His Visit: Day Five”). But certainly an interconnected impression has been left, set in stone by John Monad’s (Austin Nichols) final commandment to the gathered masses (in both body and spirit) at the rundown Snug Harbor Motel: “You will not note my Father’s word. Nor remember Cass’ camera. But you will not forget what we did here.” The divine emissary has tipped his hand, revealing the machinations and, at least in part, the intentions of the man behind the curtain.

Or the camera, as the case may be, since John’s proposed trinity invites such a Brechtian metaphysical reading. By this formulation, we might see series creator David Milch as the Father to a kino-eye Son, both working in tandem to bring forth the Artist’s longed-for Holy Ghost. What is this phantom they seek to reveal? For me, there are no sufficient descriptive words, only implications and actions that mark the way to epiphany and revelation. When Steady Freddy Lopez (Dayton Callie) and Bill Jacks (Ed O’Neill) – characters originating from markedly different backgrounds and inhabiting, in this episode, two vastly contradictory space-time continuums – perform a duet that owes equal debt to the saxophone stylings of John Coltrane and the spiraling sketches of M.C. Escher, the sense of wonder comes, primarily, from their interaction, from the simple and unassailable fact that they make beautiful music together.

Like Coltrane’s cover of “My Favorite Things” (this week’s end-credits song of choice), John From Cincinnati is an extended riff on things familiar, now made strange. Per the dictates of the medium, Milch is making things up as he goes along, but in this context it’s a vivid and viable artistic choice. The sense of the series as a composition – as an extended ballet of suffering and redemption – was never so strong as in “His Visit: Day Five”, which opens with a brilliantly self-referential scene in which filmmaker Cass (Emily Rose) avoids any direct contemplation of the footage she shot of John in the previous episode. There’s a history of Godot-like figures in Milch’s work (Deadwood’s Hostetler and Nigger General being, perhaps, the ultimate, tragicomic examples), though he recognizes that Vladimir and Estragon’s dual sense of impatience and entitlement exists in us all. Any artistic type should be able to sympathize with Cass’ plight; the creative process is rarely a straight line – more a formless, engulfing void given as much to intense lulls as to fresh bursts of inspiration.

Similarly lost in the abyss is Cissy Yost (Rebecca De Mornay), whose live-wire manic-depression is this week given context. A visitation by John, who, it’s now definitively revealed, can be in more than one place at a time, exposes a horrible truth – an acid-fueled instance of molestation, by Cissy, of her son Butchie (Brian Van Holt). Whatever criticisms I leveled against De Mornay last week are here rendered moot. She’s exemplary in this scene, practically vomiting her pain as John confronts her in the parroted tones of a radio huckster (“Act now Cissy. Baptize that fuckin’ pistol!”), though one genuinely pointing her toward a righteous path.

Salvation comes in the form of a semi-reconciliation with her grandson Shaun’s (Greyson Fletcher) porn star mother Tina (Chandra West). Before her encounter with John, Cissy selfishly enlists Butchie (who teeters on the edge of drug-addled madness) to call his ex-lover back to Imperial Beach, mainly to satiate an angry and unforgiving Shaun. Cissy subsequently comes around, ever so slightly, and offers tentative advice to Tina on how best to prepare a tuna fish lunch for Shaun. She lists the ingredients as if the weight of the world rests on each syllable, then delivers the heartbreaking kicker (“It’s how I make it. I don’t know how he likes it. I never asked him.”) Interestingly, Milch, writer Alix Lambert and director Tom Vaughan deny us the moment of Shaun and Tina’s first meeting, choosing instead to focus on a near-silent lunchtime ritual as both characters playact the roles of mother and son.

As the goings-on at the Snug Harbor Motel reveal, everyone has a role to play in the monad’s grand design. In the ninth season X-Files episode “Improbable,” Chris Carter explored the idea of a universe controlled by numbers, patterns, and rituals, with a benevolent deity at the center who tried, almost always unsuccessfully, to get his creatures to see the configurations (to grasp the design, so it is implied, is to understand one’s rightful place and mission, even if we are no more than a twinkle in God’s eye). Milch’s take on this idea is no less complicated, tinged as much with paranoia (are we really little more than Pinocchios at the mercy of a divine Stromboli?) as with potential (a near-subliminal flash of the entire Yost family, lined up as if for a definitive portrait, hints at one of the many goals of the monad's ongoing mission).

It would require a separate essay to break down every beat of this episode’s climax, which I will hyperbolically state to be the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Faced with the dreadful possibility of killing it with both analysis and over-praise, I find I’d rather go off on a tangent and mention how cool it is that Meyer Dickstein’s (Willie Garson) fiancée is played by Baby-in-a-corner Jennifer Grey, or how awesome it is to see Deadwood’s Trixie, Paula Malcomson, doing tight T-shirt waitress duties. Such greatness, you see, strikes me fanboy dumb, leaves me gasping for air in its wake. I wouldn’t dream of ruining such a potentially profound experience for others with my inadequate words. Better, like Shaun with Tina, to trust in the quiet gaze, in the hope that – by merely bearing witness – the mystery, the miracle, shall reveal itself.
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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.

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Movie Geeks United!: Brian De Palma

By Keith Uhlich

Jamey DuVall, one of the three co-hosts of the Blog-Talk-Radio series "Movie Geeks United!", graciously invited me to participate in an extended discussion of the work of Brian De Palma. We talked for nearly thirty minutes about various topics related to and surrounding the work of this, to my mind, unequivocally great film director.

Click here for the link to the broadcast (the discussion begins at 2:32, right after Jamey's intro -- but do the guys a favor and listen to the whole show. Great stuff.) Also be sure to tune in next week for the Movie Geeks' two-hour De Palma tribute show, which will feature discussions with Eyal Peretz, William Katt, William Finley, Geoff Beran, and Armond White. Finally, see after the break for links to the three articles (par moi) that are mentioned during the segment.

1) My Senses of Cinema profile of De Palma

2) My two takes on The Black Dahlia -- at Slant Magazine and Reverse Shot
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Keith Uhlich is managing editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications.

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Links for the Day (July 16th, 2007)

1. "Vermont town considers banning nudity": Get it while you can, folks.

["Topless women on parade? That was fine. Teenagers loitering in the buff, in a downtown parking lot? No problem. Naked sunbathers at swimming holes? It was just au naturel. But a senior citizen in his birthday suit, walking through the center of town on a Friday night, wearing only a fanny pack? That's where Brattleboro draws a fig leaf."]

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2. "Knocked Up": Zach Campbell goes against the Judd Apatow consensus.

["What I see are two bald wish-fulfilment fantasies about groups of guys whose One Dude ends up romantically linked with a much hotter, and bizarrely much-more-socially-isolated woman. (Male comeraderie is important here, and Apatow himself acknowledges this in his films by giving Heigl a line about it in Knocked Up: it's not unself-conscious comeraderie, god forbid.) So there's obviously a wish-fulfilment element in these movies; OK; not the end of the world--tons of movies similarly are made with wish-fulfilment functions. But whose wishes, and how are they being fulfilled, and how honest are these films about it all?"]

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3. "Disapedia.com": Stephen Kuusisto of Planet of the Blind spreads the word on a new website dedicated to the disabled community.

["Thanks to Ruth of Wheelie Catholic we've discovered yet another ambitious project (besides with[tv] that is). This one is called Disapedia and what better way to sum it up than to borrow from the "About" page: We are a community of individuals creating a collective disabled knowledge. We are of the opinion that each disabled individual has a piece to the puzzle that is living life with a disability. It is our hope that by combining them together we may one day help someone arrive at their own solution."]

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4. "Home Country, Plastic Materials": Cyril Neyrat on Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone. Thanks to GreenCine for pointing out the link.

["What is left today of that trend of Asian film from the 1990s, whose European bridgehead was Tsai Ming-liang ? Many quickly forgotten films, all merging together in the memory, all with the same academic style, with two recurrent symptoms : silence and formalism. Tsai himself was not far from getting lost in it, and if he managed to avoid tedium, it was mainly through excess and the radical nature of ordinary places. With the ultra-silent The Wayward Cloud, he took a risk bordering on staggering formalism. Less spectacular, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone has the simple confidence of a new start. It is not an aesthetic revolution, but a geographical shift. Moving from Taipei to Kuala Lumpur is enough to shift the balance. Loaded with new solemnity and political necessity, and free of any formal overstatement, Tsai’s slow rhythm renounces emptiness and concentrates on the length of affective relationships. The comparison with Apichatpong Weerasethakul is not merely geographic :Tsai accepts his penchant for sentimentality, and leaves behind his entomologist’s coldness, instead paying tender attention to his characters’ ardor, which alternates between rough and gentle."]

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5. "Romijn, O'Connell's Really Hot Nuptials": Which gives me an excuse to post a Clip for the Day of their (potential) wedding night bliss. Jerry's a lucky boy.

["With the mercury pushing 100, one can forgive Rebecca Romijn and Jerry O'Connell if they sweated out their vows Saturday. "]

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Clip of the Day: Femme Fatale striptease and aftermath (dubbed in French no less!)

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

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Links for the Day (July 15th, 2007)

1. "A Modest Proposal." At The Women's Media Center, Gloria Steinem ponders "chick flicks." Related: a response by Jenny Colgan of The Guardian's arts blog.

["So what exactly is a 'chick flick?' I think you and I could probably agree that it has more dialogue than special effects, more relationships than violence, and relies for its suspense on how people live instead of how they die."]

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2. "What the Fuck Are You Doing in the Dark?" Courtesy of our friends at ScreenGrab, English filmmaker and rhetorical bomb-thrower Peter Greenaway becomes the two millionth person to declare cinema dead. Congratulations, Peter!

["What I am interested in is a kind of post-cinema phenomenon, which is basically non-narrative, which is going to upset an awful lot of people."]

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3. "Martin Luther King: Star Trek fan?" Via Undercover Black Man, an audio clip in which Star Trek castmember Nichelle Nichols, aka Lt. Uhura, recalls being talked out of leaving the show by a certain civil rights pioneer.

["I had pretty much made a decision that I was going to leave the show after the first season, and I felt that the role was not growing to where I would have liked it to go...By chance, I met Dr. King at a fundraiser, and he told me that I was one of the most important people in his family, that they watched Star Trek and that I was a role model and their hero...He said, 'Do you know that you have the first non-stereotypical role on television?'"]

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4. "Screen door slams on niche films: Summer glut makes it hard to retain theaters." By Pamela McClintock of Variety.

["Here's the good news: Audiences no longer have to wait in line to see summer blockbusters. The bad news: They'd better like popcorn movies, because not much else may be playing."]

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5. "Professor Corey's Honor Society," parts One and Two. Dennis Cozzalio solicits fellow bloggers' answers to some of the most important questions of our time.

["Favorite movie featuring a rampaging, oversized or otherwise mutated beast, or beasts?"]

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Clip of the Day: "Akira Ifukube Symphonic Fantasia No. 3, Part 1."


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

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Links for the Day (July 14th, 2007)

1. "Critique, Death Proof, a Grindhouse film by Quentin Tarantino." By Emmanuel Burdeau for Cahiers du Cinema.

["Death Proof sees the fast paced succession of two similar parts which no reason binds, twice the same story of an old wolf, the stuntman Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), who is chasing four young ewes who have gone out for a ride, sporting long legs and a gift for blabber. Only the locations (Austin, Texas then Lebanon, Tennessee), the feminine quartet and the outcome change. The structure remains : chatter, then rustling metal plate, both full blast. Structure no longer resides in any one of the parts, in the substitution of car pile-ups to conversations. Tarantino contents himself with bouncing from one to the other, unraveling two times two ribbons, language and the road. From this moment on, sequences take place below or beyond logic, on the mode of reruns or accidents. First comes the decision to start over the same movie twice. One could serve as a model for the other, the other as the commentary for the former, as if repetition sufficed to suggest a relationship. Pure hypothesis. Then come the gaps and scratches that impact the 35 mm, stemming from a desire to reproduce the poor quality typical of “Grindhouse” film prints. We could choose to see only fetishistic nods in them. Preferably, we will recognize a superior truth: Death Proof’s race is first and foremost that of film stock. Chatter may abound, tires may crease, but without the stock, the two films would go limp, cut short."]

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2. "It's Not a Press Conference, It's HBO." Alan Sepinwall reports from the Television Critics Association's summer press tour in lovely Pasadena, California.

[Even the new head of HBO thought something was wrong with his TV when The Sopranos went to black. 'I saw the show probably three weeks before it went on the air,' new HBO co-president Richard Plepler told the critics, "and I actually called (Sopranos producer) Ilene Landress and (HBO executive) Carolyn Strauss and thought they had withheld from me the final 15 seconds. And they said, 'No, that's the ending.'" Not surprisingly, discussion of how The Sopranos ended -- or didn't end -- dominated HBO's executive session, though Plepler and partner Michael Lombardo had time to answer -- or not answer -- questions about the futures of Deadwood, John From Cincinnati, The Wire, and more."]

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3. "Four Films Noirs." Dave Kehr's DVD column in The New York Times.

[The Stranger, in a radiant new print, gains most in this collection. Long and, to me, unaccountably dismissed by Welles scholars for being too 'commercial,' it may be Welles’s most explicitly political work, made at a time when his activism was at its height."]

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4. "Time." Nick Schager on Kim Ki-Duk's latest.

["His hysterical melodrama and half-hearted suspense ultimately seem like cheap creative crutches designed to help the director avoid any incisive psychological study."]

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5. The Friday the 13th Blog-a-Thon. Hosted by Stacie Ponder, publisher of Final Girl.

["Can you feel the kismet, people? All 'round Ye Olde Internette, people are talking about the Friday the 13th films and giving Jason Voorhees and Company some well-earned props. It's glorious in a sort of Hands Across America kind of way, don't you think?"]

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Clip of the Day: "Bright Eyes."

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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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Beware of Darkness: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Dread pervades Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the series' most propulsive and altogether satisfying installment. It's not just the story that's dark: it's the film itself. From the opening section, which finds Harry fending off an attack by Dementors in a storm sewer near his neighborhood and running afoul of wizard rules prohibiting spell-casting in the presence of Muggles, through the installation of a chillingly polite authoritarian named Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) as Hogwarts' new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher and future grand inquisitor, to the near-collapse of the wizard world's governing body, the increasingly ossified and timid Ministry of Magic, Phoenix is steeped in a mix of fear and futility confirmed by the movie's visuals, photographed by cinematographer Slawomir Idziak. They're bleached-out, silvery-- reminiscent of Emmanuel Lubezki's work in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, a stealth black-and-white film with lonely daubs of color. The movie seems to have been bled by leeches. The gloom doesn't begin to lift until Harry and company abandon faith in their elders and institutions and re-create a young magicians' insurgency that Harry's father helped form the last time Voldemort loomed; from that moment on, director David Yates slowly and subtly restores warmth to the film's palette, to the point where the images mimic the hard luminescence that distinguished The Prisoner of Azkaban and The Goblet of Fire. The visuals still favor darkness, though. When events turn against our heroes, light and color ebb again, then return on tiptoe, and in nighttime shots of the heroes zipping around Hogwarts or London on brooms, they're nearly silhouetted, and the backgrounds are shadowy compared to similar scenes in Chris Columbus' early installments, which were often overlit in the manner of a mid-60s live-action Disney adventure. Throughout, the movie rides a melancholy undercurrent, born of the young heroes' suspicion that adults are corrupt, uncaring or helpless, and that only your friends can see you through.

The anxious air isn't just stirred by the increasingly bold provocations of returning supervillain Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), a.k.a. He Who Shall Not Be Named. It's also a byproduct of the Harry's feelings of isolation, weariness and self-doubt. More than any previous Potter movie, and more so than almost any big-budget franchise since Lord of the Rings, Phoenix acknowledges the emotional toll of heroism. Poor Harry is battered and wrung out; his encounter with Voldemort at the end of The Goblet of Fire has afflicted him with nightmares (unfortunately conveyed in fashionable strobe-flash bursts, a la The Jacket). And despite the near-legendary status accorded by his peers, deep down Harry knows he's not a messianic warrior king -- just a talented young wizard who defeated a series of much more powerful foes thanks to good luck and a little help from his friends. When the hated Umbridge rises to power at Hogwarts -- removing real danger from spell-casting exercises, punishing students for the vaguest hint of disrespect and posting proclamations on the schoolhouse wall -- Harry rises to the occasion. His comrades include the increasingly poised Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), brave but still-nerdy Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), good-natured dork Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis), lovely and hesitant Cho Chang (Katie Leung), and a moon-eyed kook named Luna Lovegood, played by Evanna Lynch, an authentically weird actress whose counterintuitive line deliveries are the film's most delightful special effect. (Potter-heads already know that Harry has his first kiss with Cho, and I'm told this is consistent with the novel, which I haven't read; nevertheless, I'm bummed that Harry didn't smooch first with Luna, whose Wednesday Addams deadpan will be catnip to young nerds everywhere.)

But even as Harry makes like a teenage Morpheus, there's no swagger in his step. He's doing the job because someone has to, and because his fellow insurgents assume he's the best candidate, having faced terrors most of them have only read about. He's a shell-shocked young veteran instructing cadets on the reality of combat. There's a newfound gravity to this character -- nicely articulated by Radcliffe, whose "old before my time" seriousness and ego-free toughness are just right -- but it's tempered by Harry's fear of inadequacy before evil. The film's alternately doubting and exultant mood -- encapsulated by Radcliffe's nuanced performance -- at times reminded me of George Harrison's great solo debut, All Things Must Pass, arguably flower-power-rock's most moving contemplation of love, cruelty, spiritual yearning and the quest for self-knowledge. One of its finest songs, "Beware of Darkness," could double as the viewer's admonition to Harry:

Watch out now, take care
Beware of the thoughts that linger
Winding up inside your head
The hopelessness around you
In the dead of night

Beware of sadness
It can hit you
It can hurt you
Make you sore and what is more
That is not what you are here for.

Am I overselling the movie? I hope not, but given the genre--a slick, big-budget fantasy, designed to fit into a series whose formula is established--such are the risks. The fifth Potter isn't a transcendently great adventure, nor is it a work of pop art to rival Metropolis, Close Encounters of the Third King, Blade Runner, Brazil and City of Lost Children (movies that were stylistically accessible but more wholly original; watching them, both fans and detractors could say, "I've never seen anything like it"). Phoenix's excellence falls within a narrow bandwidth that includes the Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and X-Men pictures and much of Pixar and Disney's animated output. It has inherent constraints and occasionally bursts them, delivering more humor and feeling, and a smidgen more complexity, than you expect. It personalizes -- makes idiosyncratic -- a property that ultimately belongs to Potter creator J.K. Rowling, and that has a fiduciary duty to replicate the essence of its source.

Yates, an English TV and indie film veteran who has never worked on this scale before, doesn't re-invent the wheel here, but his direction has real snap -- a Howard Hawks agility. Everything happens a wee bit faster than you expect -- except in the final 20 minutes, which, like all the Potter films, center on pyrotechnic exchanges of sorcery that ultimately become wearying. (It was the only part where I stole a glance at my watch -- not because it was poorly done, but because it felt like the end of every Harry Potter film, and the most tedious parts of the Rings movies.) There's nothing in Phoenix as unexpected and splendid as the way Alfonso Cuaron and his cinematographer, Michael Seresin, directed the time-travel sequences in The Prisoner of Azkaban -- in sinuous, De Palma-seque, super-long takes. But Phoenix is more consistently delightful from start to finish than any previous Potter film. It is to this series what The Empire Strikes Back was to the Star Wars saga: authentically dark with a light touch. Speed is Yates' ally, exemplified in a tracking shot past Potter's chums as they gorge on magic sweets. Yates shows the children's delight in devouring the candy, and a split-second later, the ill effects (a wattle the size of a hillbilly beard; an eruption of M&M-sized zits), always keeping the previous victim in frame as he reveals the next.

The film also displays an old-movie knack for visual metaphors that are simplistic in essence but subtle, sometimes profound, in execution. On the day of Harry's appearance before the high council's governing body on charges of using magic in a Muggle's presence, there's a shot of Harry and company riding an elevator alongside magical memos -- paper airplanes that fly themselves. A later scene in Umbridge's classroom starts by following another enchanted paper airplane as it spirals through the air; then the memo transforms into a paper bird; then it catches fire, courtesy of the off-screen killjoy, Umbridge. This is, first and foremost, a sight gag, but it ties in with one of the film's themes: the adult reflex to stifle youthful assertions of independence, even when they're harmless -- and in so doing, foment resentment, so that resistance flowers into rebellion. In its natural state, the memo represents the status quo; then the kids make it into something new, something that expresses their restless need for play and their desire to remake the world in their image; then a representative of adult authority literally destroys what they've done, re-asserting the primacy of the status quo. Another, more moving example occurs in a scene in the forest outside Hogwarts where Harry talks to Luna Lovegood (why the James Bond films didn't already use this name is a mystery) while feeding thestrals, spooky creatures that look like skinless winged horses. Luna explains to Harry that thestrals "can only be seen by people who've seen death." As she tells Harry of her mother's demise in a spell-casting accident, she feeds a baby thestral, first by tossing it an apple (which it ignores), then a slab of red meat (which it devours). When the foal's snout dips toward the meat, Yates cuts to a scene in Hogwarts' mess hall, starting with a closeup of Ron Weasley tearing into a sausage. This, too, initially reads as a mere sight gag, but it plugs into the story's core as surely as the paper airplane business. Harry, Luna, Ron and the series' other significant young characters are baby thestrals -- unsettling but deep-down-beautiful creatures whose specialness is associated with trauma.

These moments rarely play like heavy lifting; they're of a piece with the picture's fleet-footed sense of fun, spurred by Yates' altogether reasonable attitude toward Rowling's writing (he's respectful of her imagination but not leadenly servile, like Columbus, who insisted on reminding you every two minutes how magical it all was) and to a huge cast of ace character actors you're nearly always glad to see: Gary Oldman as Sirius, wise and gentle yet intangibly, irrefutably badass; Maggie Smith as the spiky McGonagall; Emma Thompson as the hapless-seeming Sybil Trelawney, peering at the world through Mr. Magoo glasses; Michael Gambon as the heroically obstinate Dumbledore; Imelda Staunton as Umbridge, twitting about in her psychedelic Jackie Kennedy outfits and spouting soul-crushing aphorisms like Mary Poppins' wicked stepmother; Ralph Fiennes as imperious Voldemort, who'd be scary even without the leprous nose-hole; and most delightful of all, Alan Rickman as Snape. Rickman's line readings, like Ian McDiarmid's in the Star Wars films, have a self-awareness which suggests the character realized long ago that he was a character in a drama and can't believe no one else has figured it out. (He's the Thomas Crown of acting: there's no scene he can't steal.) The film's admixture of unease and joy holds together, and it's consistent with Sirius Black's assurance to Harry that darkness and light coexist in every human soul, and that "what matters is what we choose to act on. That's who we really are."

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Doctor Who, Season Three, Ep. 2: "The Shakespeare Code"

by Ross Ruediger


The Doctor crossing paths with William Shakespeare is such an obvious gimmick, it seems an improbability that it’s never been portrayed onscreen before now. “The Shakespeare Code” seeks to rectify the omission by introducing wordsmith to John Smith and the adventure, written by Gareth Roberts, casts a potent spell and I dare say even old Bill himself would be both bemused and bewitched by the results.

Shakespeare: “To be or not to be..Oooh that's quite good.”
The Doctor: “You should write that down.”
Shakespeare: “Bit too pretentious?”

As has been the tradition so far with Russell T Davies’ incarnation of Doctor Who, an early season adventure must feature the Doctor meeting up with an historical figure who’s unknowingly plagued by an intelligence of extra-terrestrial nature. Season One unveiled “The Unquiet Dead” with Charles Dickens and Season Two’s “Tooth and Claw” featured a run-in with Queen Victoria. Both were considered by many to be season highlights, but fan consensus doesn’t appear to believe “Code” is up to snuff. Me? Just the opposite. Of the three tales, the latest is easily my favorite. But then again, I love me some witches. Witches of all shapes, sizes and superstitions have been a big part of my imagination’s mainstay as far back as I can recall. “Code” boldly delivers the hot, the bad and the ugly in the forms of Lilith (Christina Cole of Hex), Doomfinger and Bloodtide. But also in true Who tradition, these witches are actually alien beings called Carrionites – and they live and die via the power of words.

The power of words!? Sure, that might be considered a load of hokum in some parts (“Whatchew a readin’ for?” – Bill Hicks recalling a memorable encounter with a redneck), but this story purports to introduce TV’s most engaging time traveler to history’s greatest scribe and then tops it off with a heaping helping of faux-witchcraft. The play’s the thing and words equaling power must be the most inspired, fantastic notion that could have been used to execute this story. The idea not only backs up the presence of the Bard, but it practically demands his involvement. “The Shakespeare Code” may be a pedantic, derivative title, yet the tale is anything but.

Gareth Roberts and Doctor Who go back a long way and like many of the new series writers given the chance to finally pen the real deal, he enters the ring with kid gloves left behind. What I enjoyed most about “Code” is the sheer amount of thought put into every word in the script and reference thrown into the proceedings – it feels like a pop culture Billy Shakes/Doctor Who explosion from the word go. I make no claims to be a Shakespeare scholar of any kind, but this should register as great fun for anyone into this sort of fare as long as stiff upper lips are traded in for senses of humor at the door. The episode has the Doctor explaining to Martha time travel concepts via Back to the Future’s plot and has the courage to use Harry Potter’s “Expelliarmus!” as a means to a resolution; if that sort of stuff doesn’t amuse, then this ain’t your bag, baby.

Martha Jones: “So, magic and stuff? It's a surprise, it's all a bit Harry Potter.”
The Doctor: “Wait ‘til you read book 7. Oh, I cried.

Dean Lennox Kelley (The Secret Life of Words) plays Shakespeare with panache. This must’ve been a daunting role to take on due to the revisionist flair of this figure we think we’ve come to know. The guy just looks like he’s having fun, and this has become the hallmark of these types of Doctor Who episodes. Our lowered expectations are dashed when these characters are touched by the presence of the Time Lord. Shakespeare is uncommonly at ease with this peculiar Doctor and the beguiling “Blackamoor lady” traveling alongside him.

Martha (Freema Agyeman) is shown to be a tad sharper than Rose was at this stage of the time travel game, which makes it all the more tragic when the Doctor moans about wishing “…Rose was here. She’d know what to do.” Yes, the Rose of “The Satan Pit” might very well know what to do, but the Rose of “The Unquiet Dead” would be clueless. The Doctor’s blindness to Martha’s potential is on display here and it’s a dramatic thread you’ll see more of as the season unfolds. However, what’s beautiful about Martha is that she doesn’t let it get her down. She’s a strong, capable individual and hopefully the Doctor will learn as much sooner rather than later.

The Doctor: (screams in pain) "I’ve only got one heart working! How do you people cope?"

David Tennant again does some stellar work here, but what really sells this material is the gorgeous production design. The episode is allegedly the most expensive yet produced for the series, and when one really counts every factor involved in the production, the money’s up there onscreen. Creating a space station in the 51st Century? Easy. Elizabethan England, however, takes a hell of a lot more work.
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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.

NEXT WEEK: Another trip to New Earth, some nasty exhaust fumes and Father Dougal McGuire turns into a big pussy in "Gridlock".

Classic Who DVD Recommendation of the Week: "Ghost Light", starring Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred.

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Links for the Day (July 13th, 2007)

1. "kjewell81's "Things to do before age 30"": I've done numbers 4, 6, one-third of 8, and 9. Now you tell me, does that guy in the Meryl-Streep-without-makeup-in-The-Devil-Wears-Prada pic above look 30 years young? Be vicious boys and girls!

["Happy birthday to me!"]

***
2. "Letters From Gordon": Would that Gordon Willis had shot the picture above. I might have looked like Bree Daniels.

["A few days ago I received a brief note. "Hi Stu......" it began. "I'll be happy to answer some questions by Email. Write when the mood strikes you. "Best, Gordon." As in Gordon Willis. The mood struck pretty quickly. "]

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3. "Mandy Patinkin might be losing 'Minds'": I am Inigo Montoya. I kill my series. Prepare to die!

["CBS' "Criminal Minds" could return for a third season without Mandy Patinkin. This week the star didn't show up for the drama's table read (an initial run-through of the script), which first was reported by E!."]

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4. "Springfield, Vermont, wins Simpsons contest": D'oh! I mean... Woo-hoo!

["Maybe it was the pink doughnut. Maybe it was the clever homemade video, or small-town charm. Maybe Homer just figured it was time to go green. Whatever the reason, this much is true: Tiny Springfield, Vermont, beat out 13 other like-named cities for the right to host the premiere of "The Simpsons Movie," winning an online poll it wasn't even invited to participate in."]

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5. "Welcome Back Potter": Sean Burns is wild about Harry, while Ed Copeland takes Manhattan.

["Okay, so now I finally get it."]

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Clip of the Day: So all us July 13th-ers can celebrate together...

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

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Links for the Day (July 12th, 2007)

1. "1.18.08": The much talked about trailer for the J.J. Abrams-produced monster movie. Choose your size and discuss.

["It sounded like an animal."]

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2. "Zero for Conduct": A hearty blogosphere welcome to Michael Atkinson.

["So, here is my inaugural blog-gout, sent spraying into an abyss already crowded with free-falling voices, yowling and yelping (in too often incomplete sentences and reckless and subliterate opinionation) for a readership that may not, probably won’t, often shouldn’t, come. Several years too late, I come yelping myself into the void because whereas I was for over a decade a diligent weekly writer for a single publication (The Village Voice), and already enjoyed a regular forum and was paid for it, too, now I am, octopus-like, writing in scores of different venues and forms, and suddenly see the helpfulness of a blog to help me pull it all together, and to coordinate the tendrils not only in terms of craft but also concept and exposure. Suddenly, I’m all over the map, writing for up to a dozen publications semi-regularly (in various cities and countries), writing and publishing several books (and kinds of books) at once, and venturing further than I already have into the mysterious bowels of television and feature writing. Zero for Conduct, then, will be my home base, for all intents and purposes."]

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3. "'In the Valley of Elah': first thoughts": A discussion is brewing on Glenn Kenny's blog over the new Paul Haggis film.

["Well. As someone who despised Crash so much that I was almost moved to a physical fight on the night it won all its Oscars (there were aggravating circumstances, I grant, but still—I'm not a physical-fight sort of person), I have to say I was pretty surprised by writer/director Paul Haggis' new picture, In the Valley of Elah, which many will describe as his follow-up to Crash, as it comes after it and all."]

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4. "ReelerTV: Steve Buscemi's Meta Moment": The latest episode of ReelerTV.

["You wanted it, you craved it -- and it's here. The latest episode of ReelerTV features actor/director Steve Buscemi discussing his new film Interview, an adaptation of the late Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh's 2003 movie of the same name. We also caught up with IFC News correspondent (and frequent Reeler contributor) Matt Singer for a discussion of Interview and another of this week's new releases, Talk to Me, starring Don Cheadle as iconic Washington, D.C., disc jockey Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene. In our news roundup, we provide a sneak peek at the trailer for the much-buzzed-about New York monster movie 1.18.08 (or is it Cloverfield? Secrets abound!) as well as catch up with a Brooklyn filmmaker's quest to raise funds for her forthcoming pot culture doc, 420:NYC. It's almost more than the Internet can contain, really, but miracles happen every day."]

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5. "House for sale! Vultures included!": What a deal!

["The house is for sale well below its assessed value, has four bedrooms and sits on more than a half acre of land. It's also got lots of vultures, and that's made it a tough sell."]

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Clip of the Day: Joe Dante discusses the trailer for The Terror. From the great new website Trailers From Hell.

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

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Links for the Day (July 11th, 2007)

1. "Man floats 193 miles using chair, balloons": There's a "filled with hot air" joke somewhere in here. Anyone care to make it?

["Last weekend, Kent Couch settled down in his lawn chair with some snacks — and a parachute. Attached to his lawn chair were 105 large helium balloons. Destination: Idaho."]

***
2. "In the Works: The Online Film Community’s Top 100 Movies of All-Time": From Cinema Fusion.

["With the recent reevaluation of the greatest American movies by the American Film Institute, my mind started to wander. In all honesty, I’m a fan of their lists; I don’t necessarily agree with them and am often baffled by some of the films left off and included on their lists, but overall, I think they provide a solid starting point for a casual movie-watcher trying to get into classic American films. However, as much as I do respect the list, I felt it was somewhat lacking and didn’t convey the average movie enthusiast’s thoughts. This is how the idea for the Online Film Community’s Top 100 Movies of All-Time started, and from there it would only be a matter of a couple weeks before there were over fifty movie website journalists, writers, critics, and bloggers who were eagerly on board to help make it a reality."]

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3. "The Performance That Changed My Life Blog-a-Thon": Which one changed yours? Discuss...

["Could we live a happy life without films? Certainly not. Could we live a full, well-rounded life without films to guide, teach, instruct, show, and live with us? No again."]

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4. "Senators push anew to force troop pullout": From The Boston Globe.

["Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine declared yesterday that "the tide has turned" against President Bush's Iraq war strategy among her fellow Republicans, as Bush fought to control growing disenchantment on Capitol Hill."]

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5. "Cartoonist Doug Marlette Killed in Crash": From Forbes.

["Doug Marlette, the North Carolina-born cartoonist who won a Pulitzer Prize and created the popular strip "Kudzu," was killed in a car accident Tuesday morning in Mississippi, authorities said. He was 57."]

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Clip of the Day: And I said Letterman wasn't funny... shame on me.

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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!

Big Love Tuesdays: Season 2, Ep. 5, "Vision Thing"

By Todd VanDerWerff

One of the things that makes Big Love such an engrossing show is that it’s not afraid to make its central character -- Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) -- kind of a selfish ass. He’s not always this way; his wives and family love him, and you can tell the show’s writers have a general affection for him. But he frequently slips into a mode where he seems to be thinking of himself, rather than the people around him, just often enough to let you know that you’re not watching the overly godly man Bill thinks of himself as (the caricature the show let him be too often in the first season). Bill is a very fallible human being, who spends just as much time screwing up his assorted affairs as he does getting things right.

Bill’s usually the central character of Big Love, in that every plotline somehow runs through him, but he’s rarely the most interesting character in a given episode. Monday’s episode, “Vision Thing,” written by Eileen Myers and directed by Igby Goes Down director Burr Steers, was the first of this season that seemed designed to be almost completely about Bill and his rigid view of both his own microcosm and the world at large. Sure, there were vital subplots dealing with the show’s teens, and another that put Chloë Sevigny’s Nicki in conflict with a bunch of Catholics, but all of these other plots were built on or centered on Bill in some way.

One of the hardest things for any progressive and/or feminist viewer of Big Love to get over is the fact that Bill is completely and totally in charge. His wives rarely question him, and even when they do, he almost always gets what he wants (witness how Barb -- Jeanne Tripplehorn -- tried to leave the house in the season premiere, only to eventually come back home at his bidding). The show is careful to portray this less as some sort of sexist compact and more as the way Bill has always known this to be the “right” way (notice, also, how he tends to spend way more time with his sons than his daughters -- certainly, if someone pointed out to him this disparity, he’d spend a couple of days trying to make it up to the girls, but he’d probably slip back into his old ways after those few days). By most measures, Bill’s a good husband, a good father, a good boss. But because he’s used to getting his way, he rarely thinks about how others will feel. In “Vision Thing,” this was most notable in the way that Bill began a tentative courtship with a waitress (Branka Katic) at a local greasy spoon. Bill tried to play this off as a sudden revelation, but it was clear from his flirtatious manner that he just thought she was good-looking. (And the script and Steers played this romantic comedy set-up almost perfectly straight -- any queasiness over what was happening was felt from the audience or for Margie (Ginnifer Goodwin) who stumbled across the situation late in the episode.)

From a purely voyeuristic standpoint, this is one of those things we’ve been wanting to see as an audience. How, exactly, does one find a new wife and court her and clue her in to your way of life, particularly if she doesn’t emerge from the Juniper Creek Compound or another polygamist sect? Big Love, of course, has succeeded because it has drawn a wide variety of interesting characters into the Henrickson household, but it’s also fascinating from a purely procedural point of view. The somewhat lackluster pilot and early episodes were perhaps too fascinated by how a family like this would work, but that element is an important point of the show’s success. No detail has been skimped. So it’s curious what the contradictory impulses the courtship of the waitress stirs in a viewer. The largely mundane rom-com setup and the “meet cute” scenario play against our resentment of the usurper on a happy family (as we would be angered at, say, a potential temptation for one of the spouses on a family sitcom) and perhaps our buried frustration with Bill, who apparently has a thing for a lady who makes a good pie. Can’t he leave well enough alone?

And yet, when we take a moment to give this a second thought, why should we resent her or Bill for this meet cute? The waitress is completely oblivious, and Bill is simply living true to his moral code. If we enjoy the series for the way it portrays the modern fundamentalist in conflict with the modern world, shouldn’t we have to take the ickier bits with the backyard pool baptisms? And all of this plays against our desire to simply see how all of this works and how a family like this might expand or not expand to include another member. Certainly Margie seemed open to the idea when she went to see the waitress at the end of the episode, all goofy grin and sparkling eyes.

Perhaps surprisingly, given how heavily it weighed on the rest of the episode, the waitress subplot didn’t occupy that much screen time. Bill got just as much time to consider further whether or not he’s going to purchase a line of video gambling machines (from an almost unrecognizable Jim Beaver, briefly stepping outside of the David Milch company of players to essay this role). It was interesting to see the show juxtapose a selfish decision on Bill’s part in his domestic life with what amounts to a selfish decision in his work life, where he’s largely bullying his subordinate Don (Joel McKinnon Miller) into going along with the gambling deal, a deal that makes Don uncomfortable for a number of reasons. Don has never been my favorite character. He’s played a bit too broadly, and he often seems like the kind of gung-ho polygamist I feared Bill would be when the series began. But here, he functioned well enough as a conscience for Bill, questioning whether this deal made the most business sense or was simply a way to strike back at Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton).

Meanwhile, Bill’s brother Joey (Shawn Doyle) found his mother (Grace Zabriskie) foisting a new woman on him after she announced she had had his wife committed (in the episode’s funniest moment). Joey is another character who has become tiresome -- he’s often too spineless and simply uninteresting -- but here, in a moment of clarity, he confirmed that Bill (or any man who lives by the principle) can’t help but be selfish. Barb quickly shut him up and told him not to speak that way about her husband, but given her travails earlier in the season when she questioned whether she had made the right choice in letting Bill take other wives, it was clear some of Joey’s words had taken root. Joey’s mild crush on Barb has always been a bit of subtext that the show hasn’t felt the need to outright express, and the scene where Joey confessed his feelings on the principle used that subtext well.

Bill’s second wife, Nicki, spent the episode confronting another of the horrors of the suburbs -- Catholicism. Her son, Wayne (Keegan Holst), was attending a summer program at a Catholic school apparently far enough away for her and Bill to appear as a happily married (and monogamous) couple. But when Wayne brought home a rosary, Nicki feared that he was going to be ripped away from her and into the bosom of a false religion (Margie, for her part, seemed entranced by the rosary and her memories of going to Catholic school as a girl). And, indeed, Steers shot the Catholic church where Nicki went to confront a nun as a welcoming safe haven -- candles and stained-glass windows glowing in the darkness. While this was another example of Big Love showing us something we don’t view as terribly out of the ordinary through a new prism, it was also another example of Nicki being forced to step out into the world around her, and much to her chagrin. She even wore pants (for the first time ever in the series, if memory serves) in her attempt to make friends with the other moms. She attempted to pull Wayne out of the program and teach him herself, but it soon became clear that she wasn’t up to it, and soon he was back at the school, dressed as an angel (perhaps a too literal bit of symbolism), happy to see his father and mother and greet them as his father and mother.

In some ways, temptation was everywhere in the episode. Bill faced his twin temptations, while Joey faced the temptation of another wife (and seemingly overcame it). And while Nicki resisted the allure of that church, Rhonda (Daveigh Chase) spent much of the episode trying to shut herself off from the allure of the suburbs, which she had seemingly embraced just an episode before. There wasn’t a lot to the Rhonda arc in this episode, but it’s playing fascinatingly like a detox, as she’s forced to remove herself from everything she ever knew simply to survive.

Big Love is at its best when it’s contrasting the notion of an individual with the notion of a larger organism. Usually, the show pits its individual characters up against their various creeds, but “Vision Thing” suggested that these individuals also have to work to differentiate themselves from the society they live in. It’s not enough to reject a creed or to reject society. To function in the world of Big Love (and the world at large), you have to draw a long line of compromise and pray that you don’t lose yourself in the process.
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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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929. Ceddo (1977, Ousmane Sembene)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the 929th 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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In the same year that George Lucas released Star Wars, Ousmane Sembene, who passed away last month, offered his own tale of rebellion and liberation, depicting a Wolof-speaking African kingdom’s capitulation to Islamic rule. While Lucas’ film made a ton of money and changed mainstream cinema forever, Sembene’s film was banned in its own country, allegedly for misspelling its one-word title — a perversely fitting fate for a film that scrutinizes the politics of language and the erosion of an orally-based culture while under the rule of the Koran. Given the influence of Islam in Senegal, it’s not hard to see how this film was banned, and it would be just as incendiary today if it were to be released (assuming that people would pay attention to an African film not involving Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie).
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To read the rest of the article, click here.

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Links for the Day (July 10th, 2007)

1. "Sprint hangs up on ‘excessive’ complainers": Can't hear me now, can ya?

["Sprint Nextel Corp, which recently launched an advertising campaign to attract new customers, is disconnecting more than 1,000 subscribers for calling its customer service lines too often and making what the company called unreasonable requests. The No. 3 U.S. wireless provider with 53 million customers said on Monday it started sending service termination letters on June 25. Sprint said the cancellations involved 1,000 to 1,200 customers who had called the company about 40,000 times a month in total. Now how’s that for customer service?"]

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2. "Monsters beat Live Earth on US TV": Pixar dominates, even in re-runs.

["A three-hour NBC programme marking the global day of Live Earth concerts was the least-watched show on mainstream US television on Saturday night. It attracted an average audience of 2.7 million viewers and was beaten by a re-run of animated film Monsters Inc."]

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3. "Genealogy Gets Genetic": From Forbes.com, courtesy Kevin Lee. Be sure to check out the accompanying slideshow.

["By analyzing a sample obtained by a cheek swab, African Ancestry can tell its clients the region and ethnic makeup of ancestors who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Paige says the company has already tested more than 10,000 customers, including big names like Spike Lee, Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg. But not all of her clients have star incomes; the procedure costs just $349, $600 for tests of both paternal and maternal lineage."]

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4. "Cream of the Crop": Robbie Freeling discovers the pleasures of Ratatouille.

["It's always such a treat to discover that, once in a while, consensus isn't dead wrong. Brad Bird's second Pixar outing, Ratatouille, may have been hyped as one of the summer's sure things, but it surely crept up on me most unassumingly."]

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5. "Talking the Talk": S.T. VanAirsdale talks to Don Cheadle about his role in Kasi Lemmons' biopic Talk to Me.

["Don Cheadle shrugged. "Obviously any time you do a movie that's based on a real character over a series of years, things..." said the actor, who portrays the incendiary Washington, D.C., folk-hero DJ Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene in the new film Talk to Me (opening Friday in New York). He indulged the briefest of pauses, shrugged again. Rationalizing biopics will do that to a man."]

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Clip of the Day: Al Swearengen - King of Cocksuckers (plus an extra, 'cause I can't resist)

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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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John From Cincinnati Mondays: Season 1, Ep. 5, “His Visit: Day Four”

By Keith Uhlich

"I’m no good at puttin’ shit into order, Shaunie. Sometimes it takes stickin’ around to give things a chance to work out."
– Kai (Keala Kennelly) –

With that midpoint line of dialogue, the fifth installment of John From Cincinnati – entitled “His Visit: Day Four” – quite mindfully announces itself as a placeholder (much in the same vein as the Deadwood season one intermediary, “The Trial of Jack McCall”). Points to creator David Milch and this episode’s scriptwriter Steve Hawk for their resolute self-awareness, though it doesn’t offset the somewhat uneven tone of the final product, which opens on an off-putting note of hysteria. Thus far, Milch and his cast have trod a fine line between the captivating and the repellent; by this point, we should understand that the characters inhabiting the border town surf community of Imperial Beach are, for the most part, a tenuous bundle of exposed nerves, in no way traditionally “likable.” The slightest stimulus sets them off, and then they'll frequently go on destructive, tangential tirades. In this community, not even miracles can capture one’s attention entirely; worldly digressions (the devil’s playthings) are everywhere.

So it is for Cissy Yost (Rebecca De Mornay), who wakes this morning to a call from Tina Blake (Chandra West), the long-forgotten mother (now something of a porn-star Mary Magdalene) of her grandson Shaun (Greyson Fletcher). Cissy quite believably goes into protective overdrive, but De Mornay at first overreaches the character’s paranoia. The point may be that Cissy is a burned-out loose cannon, but Milch and director Ed Bianchi allow De Mornay too much fourth-wall breaking free rein. When Cissy violently rouses both Kai and her drug addict son Butchie (Brian Van Holt) from a peaceful post-coital slumber, the seams of her performance show, and it distracts from the general thematic point of the episode, encapsulated by its end credits music cue – Elvis Costello’s cover of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”

The unimpeachable structure of “His Visit: Day Four” is built on a series of misunderstandings: by Cissy of Tina, certainly (by episode’s end, De Mornay’s gun-toting madness is tempered into something quietly profound; her piercing blue eyes – Yost family eyes through and through – seem to hide the untold pain of the universe), but most notably by Vietnam Joe (Jim Beaver) of his fourth-episode encounter with John Monad (Austin Nichols). Joe’s two scenes in this installment act as microcosmic counterpoint to Cissy’s journey: he enters a local VFW pub, gun at the ready, prepared to confront Ernie, the bartender who he thinks is in cahoots with John, purveyors both of a cruel, past-exploiting practical joke. Joe quickly realizes his mistake – Ernie has no knowledge of this particular incident from Joe’s past (which involves a wounded Joe’s inability to assist his army platoon) because he’s never spoken of it. Having never mentioned his sense of helplessness to anyone, Joe has instead wallowed in it, kept it hidden away. His subsequent scene on the Imperial Beach pier (the punchline of which recalls the title of a recent David Lynch tome) provides the episode’s one true epiphany. Everything, and everyone, else seems in either a destructive or an impatient holding pattern.

Milch believes in human beings’ capacity for love and tenderness, but he never sees that as an endpoint in and of itself. No such thing, in this world, as happy endings: thus is Butchie’s memorably affectionate fourth-episode interlude with Kai brutally torn asunder in the wake of Cissy’s panic and by Tina’s ultimately selfless intrusion. Allowing things to work themselves out, as Kai says, only leads to more misunderstandings – the signature image of “His Visit: Day Four” might be the one in which Tina drives off in her sin-red Mustang, Kai walks off in a depressive huff, and Butchie stands flaccidly in-between them, left finally to himself (his subsequent walk of sorrow recalls James Caan’s exit in Michael Mann’s Thief, minus the transcendent complement of Tangerine Dream).

To my mind, a potential second season of John From Cincinnati might best be conceived with the lack of its titular leading man (first installment: “His Absence: Day One”); it’s clear by this point that John is the balancing element in the series’ ever-expanding rogues gallery. Vietnam Joe’s moment of clarity on the Imperial Beach pier was no doubt fostered by the fact of his very recent contact with the monad, yet the further these characters get from John, the more likely they are to succumb to their earthly foibles. John’s hand is always apparent in their lives, but – as befits a divine emissary in mortal form – he can only be in so many places at once. The object of his attention this week is Cass (Emily Rose), the documentary filmmaker formerly in the employ of Luke Perry’s surf-promoter Linc Stark (whose own story quite interestingly intersects with Tina’s). In the wake of her termination by Linc, Cass is hindered by deep-rooted feelings of uncertainty. “In summary, John, I am no longer able to trade on my sex, and I need to make some money,” she says. John replies, “You need your camera, Cass.”

This exchange acts as prelude to the episode’s major setpiece, where John wanders among the Imperial Beach masses at a streetfair while Cass films his every move. Even lost among this crowd of California surfers, Mexican wrestlers, and prayerful Hare Krishnas, John’s harmonizing effect takes hold. Though his mission seems more or less specific to the Yosts and their immediate circle, it’s clear that John is having an effect on the community at large. Cass intuitively understands this (she now continuously refers to her project as “the work”), but she seems unwilling, at this point, to come over to John’s side completely. “Look, John. Leap of faith, huh?” she lightly taunts before jumping, fully exhausted, onto her bed at day’s end. Yet the work she’s done remains, and John’s beatific expression at the close of this sequence suggests that Cass has finally found the right path, even if she (much like we, the John From Cincinnati faithful) can't yet entirely contemplate her surroundings.
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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.

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Links for the Day (July 9th, 2007)

1. "HWJAAB: How would Jesus advertise a bidet?": Rather an ass-backwards start to the day.

["A bidet company's advertising plans in Times Square are too cheeky for the pastor of a nearby church."]

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2. "Sheehan Threatens to Run Against Pelosi": From The Washington Post.

["Cindy Sheehan, the slain soldier's mother whose attacks on President Bush made her a darling of the anti-war movement, has a new target: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi."]

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3. "Meal guest finds host's wife, stepson in freezer": I thought that liver tasted a bit... bilious.

["Police detained a man in eastern Belgium after a dinner guest found the bodies of the host's wife and stepson in a freezer, authorities said Thursday."]

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4. "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix + summer movies.": GreenCine Daily collects the reviews of the latest Harry Potter (movie, not book).

[""So here we are: at the end of the Harry Potter decade. The books have been printed and are under lock and key. (Presumably.) JK Rowling has made her choices." The New York Times asks four writers and one artist to dream up possible endings to a remarkably successful franchise. But the real ending will be revealed when 12 million copies (in the US alone!) of the 7th and last volume in the saga, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, appear in bookstores, whether virtual or brick-n-mortar, on July 21. But first, there's a movie to see to, of course, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, based on book #5, opening pretty much around the world over the final days of this week."]

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5. "Mirror/Stage": Be sure and check out Andy Horbal's new blog, especially this essay.

["As a cinephile who has lived his entire life during the age of at-home movie watching, I often wonder how my relationship with the movies differs from those of the film lovers who came before me. This must always be conjecture, but I imagine that once upon a time the opening of a movie was something like the enchanted isle Avalon appearing off the coast of Brittany; the lucky moviegoer paid the boatman a fare to ferry him or her across the water, and then he or she was free to roam about a magical new world for an hour or two, his or her joy tempered by the knowledge that the chance might never come again."]

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Clip of the Day: "The World Wife Carrying Championship"

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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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Return to the movies, return to the world: Ratatouille & Paprika

By Ryland Walker Knight

If Brad Bird has a signature auteur trait it would be that each of his films are struggles with and reactions to modernity. Across his thus far brief, yet rich, three-feature career, Bird has built three distinct modern worlds and populated them with characters seeking to reckon their modern experience through outlandish, cinematic means. In his latest, Ratatouille, the main character is Remy (Patton Oswalt — charms, not whines), a rat in Paris with the sensory palate of an aesthete food lover and the overactive imagination requisite to become the best chef in France. But he’s a rat. Life is tough for a rat. This modern world of Ratatouille wants nothing to do with rats. All they do is muck up the joint.

Throughout the first act, Remy is tossed around and shot across the screen, the world of the film: he is rejected. Yet Remy remains fearless, seeking the life he thinks his should be — breed’s birthright be damned — as a chef like his hero, August Gusteau (Brad Garrett — disappears in his accent). But he’s a rat. Even though Gusteau says, “Anyone can cook,” the world will not have it. Especially if a critic like the dour snob Anton Ego (Peter O’Toole — a god) proclaims Gusteau’s maxim naïve and declares, “No, I don’t think anyone can do it.” What Ego seems to overlook is how Gusteau, and the film, qualify their maxim: “Anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great.” Which is also to say, anybody can make art (movies, say) but great art (great movies) are only ever instances of the truly imaginative and innovative, the kinds that offer new perspective — on art, on movies, on life. Ratatouille isn’t simply about food, or the broad scope of art, but about our great modern art: the movies.

While the gourmet kitchen is a tidy metaphor for the collaborative food-chain process of filmmaking, it’s Ratatouille’s theatrical puppetry and visualization of the non-visual senses that makes it explicitly about movies. As an animated film is composed of handcrafted images moving at the will of the animator, so too does Remy move his counterpart, the ever-limber Linguini (Lou Romano — goofs well), to create dishes. In gourmet cuisine we know the presentation — that is, the image — of the food is almost as important as its taste and texture. Each dish is literally an image forged, like each shot in a film, like each shot in an animated film is literally imbued with vitality: the visual texture of Bird and Pixar’s animation technique makes objects like rats, humans, onions, sweet breads, and sauces, look pliable and plastic and delectably supple.

Remy is not just a surrogate filmmaker creating great films-as-meals, he’s a distinctive animator. His sense of taste isn’t restricted to his palate: when he tastes something, the world disappears and a discothèque flurry of colors swirls around his head. He also imagines Chef Gusteau floating around his head as his own Jiminy Cricket, a figment of his imagination acting as guide and conscience. As much as they are the film’s flights of imaginative fancy, the dancing colors and the apparition all spur on from Remy’s imagistic mind. Another crucial dash of imagination is how, perched atop Linguini’s head, Remy is able to marionette Linguini’s limbs as would an animator bend characters to his or her will. Form and content reflect one another, in Linguini’s body and in the film. But, of course, Remy is a rat. What sets Remy apart in his quest to live in the modern world as his own, uh, being, is he is not happy to simply take, to collect garbage, as are the other rats: he wants to add something to the world, to create. It takes more than one shift in perspective for this quest to succeed.

While geared towards a specifically adult audience, and employing much more blatant cinematic themes and movements, Satoshi Kon’s newest anime feature, Paprika, is after a similar end to that of Ratatouille. For Kon, the modern world is run rampant with delusions, and the cultural aimlessness has spilled over into dreams, rearranging the borders of reality. In the climax, periphery and center finally collapse into a waking nightmare. Paprika horrifies where Ratatouille delights, but it is equal parts in awe of the world as is its family-friendly cinematic neighbor. The possibilities are endless, it would appear, but all are somehow inhibited by modernity in some fashion.

In Paprika, as in Ratatouille, dreams are wonderful, but dangerous. Yet, while Ratatouille rejoices in cooperation, Paprika fears the perilous fallout from merging, or sharing, dreams. Moreover, it is afraid of a loss of self in such a shared dream as the movies, or the Internet, or the modern world: to lose self in this world is to lose perspective of the world, and one’s relation to it. Paprika’s reaction is to employ both movies and dreams rather explicitly to investigate (1) their independent and collaborative worth; (2) how they work alone and in tandem; (3) what they mean to us, as individuals and as the world; (4) why they are seductive; and (5) when & how to use (and enjoy) them in light of such complications. All of which is to say: how do we return, from such a disassociated and de-centered reality, to the modern world, to life?

To situate such a reaction, the films must situate their particular modern worlds: country rat moving to Paris; woman of science diving into irrational dreams. Here, too, in the film’s world-building, form and content cannot be divorced. However, Ratatouille’s formal choices for building its world are less evident and more classically seamless than those of Paprika, which exists seams exposed, its surreal inconsistencies always apparent. Yet both reactions are rooted in the respective protagonists’ perspectives.

Ratatouille’s world is seen primarily through Remy’s point of view until he meets Linguini, when the point of view shifts often between the two, and eventually merges for their alchemic moments of puppetry-as-cooking. Since the camera is always an artificial perspective in animation (the principal machinery used is imagination, and drawing), Bird’s camera can shrink or balloon to adopt the differing perspectives without fail, appearing seamless because the scale of the world is never in doubt. The film operates seamlessly because all of Remy’s imaginative flights of fancy further the story while simultaneously commenting on image making.

The scenes of Remy imagining the colors of taste establish him as a unique mind since, when he attempts to teach his brother, Emile (Peter Sohn — clowns well), about food, Emile can only get a fraction of the picture. When we see Remy imagining Gusteau, we see Remy as a creative mind, conjuring a companion. He sees no boundaries. Yet Remy knows he’s small — he sees the world as big and the world sees him as small; and Linguini knows the rat is small so he sees the rat in the appropriate scale. Their perspectives are matched by the camera work in their respective registers. What binds them is they are both a little awkward in their respective worlds (which are the same world): rats are routinely shunted, Linguini’s limbs move like his name, like liquid. So it makes sense that their union makes a kind of perfect (seamless) being in this insistent modern world: part human, part rat, all cook. They divorce bodies at the end, however, as each finds his being validated — as rat, as human — in their respective domains.

Paprika’s world is only ever built through proliferating (and sometimes abutting) perspectives across a plenitude of platforms. Here, to reckon oneself is to be divided from the outset. Our eponymous heroine Paprika is the dreamland doppelganger of Dr. Chiba (both Megumi Hayashibara), an identity easily inhabited with the aid of a magical piece of electronics, the DC Mini. The primary point of view is always already dialogic. When the dream world merges with the waking world towards the close of the film, the two identities physically work in tandem: so much so that by the end of the film they are completely divorced, autonomous from — but not forgotten by — one another. The other major seam exposed is the divide between computer animated images and hand-rendered cel animation. Paprika is built chiefly from hand drawings, but at key junctures it augments the images by merging with computer-modeled animations.

Early on, the Chief doctor’s mind is taken over by a rogue member of the DC Mini team (the film says “terrorist”), predicting the formal conflation: “Even the five court ladies danced in sync to the frog’s flutes and drums. The whirlwind of recycled paper was a sight to see. It was computer graphics!” In the following sequence we see a parade led by a refrigerator to a beat drummed by frogs amidst a computer-generated whirlwind of confetti. And that’s just the beginning. The climactic merging of dream and waking worlds is spurred on by a computer-aided vortex that tries its damnedest to swallow the cel animation world. The perspectives are thrown together, and a new kind of composite world is created. Yet, once again, they are divorced in the end, and the hand-drawn waking world, all distinct lines, literally swallows the computer-aided dream world, restoring the domains to their respective relevance, and composite hierarchy: dreams are sub-conscious, kept at bay by the screen of sleep. Paprika lives there, enfolded in the dream world, while Dr. Chiba prospers in the waking world; each rules a part of the whole.

But they cannot completely disconnect: Remy needs Linguini to serve his creations to the world just as Paprika needs Dr. Chiba to exist to spin out dreams and understand them, and each other. The dialectic construction of both films is a means to navigate that return to living in the world.

Ratatouille begins in the country and moves into the city, where food is almost dematerialized, a plastic product (as signified by the cardboard and imaginative Chef Gusteau). Paprika begins in the virtual world of dreams and moves out into the reality of the waking world. Both return to their origins to reckon their present. In Ratatouille’s thoughtful, tender climax, the critic Ego, who up to this point has been an emblem for analytic detachment, is physically thrown back into his past (in the country) when he tastes the eponymous, peasant dish as prepared by Remy (and friends). In Paprika’s almost-terrifying, but still light-hearted climax, Dr. Chiba returns to a place where she is able to dream again, alone, true to herself: she comes to realize pulling her friend Tokita (Tôru Furuya) out of the elevator is pulling him back into her life, and their embrace is the embrace of love. This is only furthered in that the film’s other hero, Detective Kogawa (Akio Ôtsuka), opens the film afraid of movies, but in the closing moments decides to indulge, guilt- and angst-free, in one adult ticket. The movies are scary, but unavoidably awesome. To refuse such an admittance is to refuse the world in these films: perhaps that which we resist most will, in the end, wind up defining our lives in the world all the more. One's past (one's inheritance) is unavoidable, but manageable — with skill and a will to risk danger — in the present.

The overriding dialectic at play in my pairing of these films, however, is the kids versus adults axis, epitomized by which sensual engagement each film privileges. Ratatouille serves food while Paprika offers sex. Which, in turn, helps one to sense their generic inheritance: classical Disney/children’s literature and film noir. Divergent as they are, the films (and their respective genres inside the world of animated film) pair perfectly in their engagement with modernity and movies, and how they are inextricably tied together in the image-oriented culture we find ourselves inhabiting today. Here, where boundaries are routinely collapsed and overlapped, the abutting of worlds helps one sense that the possibilities inherent in movies and in life are endless. That seeming boundlessness is what makes the movies, the worlds they imagine, and the world-bound life itself, so exciting.
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House Next Door contributor Ryland Walker Knight is the infrequent publisher of the blog Vinyl Is Heavy.

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Nudging the Mind: James Benning's 13 Lakes

By Andrew Chan

The most advertised aspect of James Benning’s landscape film 13 Lakes is the fragmentation of its 135-minute running time into thirteen stationary shots, each ten minutes long, each separated by a black screen. So a few moments into the first segment, amid the nervous coughing and rustling of a New York audience, my MTV-bred attention span felt a twinge of panic and secretly wanted to negotiate for mercy. Instead of thirteen lakes, why not ten? Instead of ten minute shots, how about eight minute shots? Then came predictable suspicions about the sentimentality of yet another artist calling us to smell the roses, and the film’s ability to evade all criticism by consisting solely of unquestionably beautiful images.

Benning’s collection of lake-portraits is an oddity: an experimental film that effaces authorship and demands no mental somersaults; a work of art that looks uncomfortable on a theater screen, but would be inappropriate on a gallery wall. Choosing to sit and behold it, one can’t help but think how perversely it agitates the urban sense of what constitutes wasted time. How should we react to it? 13 Lakes is substantially different from any contemporary nature documentary I can think of; on the surface, it doesn’t pretend to offer any images that couldn’t be found through regular sightseeing. It doesn’t flaunt technology’s enhancements of the naked eye, like Microcosmos, nor does it orchestrate a dance between objects and the elements, like Abbas Kiarostami’s Five. For all its subtle environmentalist implications, there isn’t a single-minded, apocalyptic agenda being promoted here, as in Koyaanisqatsi or the recent Manufactured Landscapes (right).

By aiming for a tone more austere than any of these previous films, Benning achieves something far more complex and valuable. What at first comes across as a naively Zen privileging of order over thought soon opens the floodgates to a cycle of art-centered ideas. You would never anticipate this by how sneakily Benning draws us in. The illusion of ascetic purity he sets up, the sense of our being left alone to receive sound and sight without a filmmaker mediating or intervening, only serves to make us hypersensitive to the moments when art does interrupt, when the switch between the appearance of objectivity and the camera’s essential subjectivity is flipped.

Benning sets out to replicate the actual experience of perceiving, and to prove what this experience can teach us when paralleled with the act of filmmaking. Rejecting the fetish for spectacle and grand scope that has marked contemporary photography (including the work of modern landscapists Andreas Gursky (left) and Richard Misrach) and popular cinema, he has chosen plausibly human angles and an aspect ratio that fills our vision without crowding our periphery. We emerge from the film with our natural sense and scale of sight intact, but also with the desire to see as if our eyes were cameras, tools that could automatically aestheticize and record.

Despite Benning’s superficial attempt to make a film in which the auteur disappears, 13 Lakes reveals itself to be mindfully directed, as when a shot lasts just long enough for a boat to drift from the center to the outside of the shot, or when the final segment contrasts boldly with its predecessors by framing the tide so that it comes at a parallel angle toward the screen’s bottom edge, as if to meet the audience on the other side. In these scenes, we realize how new an experience the filmed landscape is in the history of the arts, how the movie camera is able to capture, with a visual soberness, the sensuality of motion that literary descriptions and still photographs don’t access.

The film multiplies in meaning when we can see through to Benning’s agency as a creator (a role it seems he would rather we forget). His choice of form turns time into an aesthetic question, and the viewer’s short-lived restlessness is a natural first response. By seizing a subject that is so obviously the province of the other visual arts; by offering viewers the freedom of attentive perception so rare in movies; by setting a ten-minute limit to control that freedom, Benning highlights the temporality of cinema against the materiality of painting and photography, and contrasts the different levels of attention we use to regard these art forms.

Benning’s construction of reel time—slow and patient, but also charged and anxious—is built out of our knowledge of how long each shot will last, a length that feels either too long or too short, but is always somehow unsatisfying. The rigid structuralist formula, combined with the almost mathematical precision of the film’s half-sky/half-water compositions, clash with the unpredictability of nature and the fluidity of our reactions to it. That tension is what seduces us. As in the outside world, during the rare moments when nature-watching is at its most focused and pleasure-driven, these cinematic encounters can be addictive, partly because they pull us closer to the terrible beauty of the sublime as Edmund Burke described it, closer to the infinity that nature symbolizes when pitted against our mortality.

Like many practitioners of photography’s deadpan aesthetic, Benning chooses to alert us to our contemporary world in crisis by nudging (rather than wedging) the mind open, by leaving space and silence for us to consider (privately, prayerfully) what issues may lie beneath the placid surface. This isn’t the same as avoiding taking a stance; Benning’s intentions are sewn into the editing, even if he rejects the argumentation of montage in favor of the hard facts of the landscapes. Vital to 13 Lakes’ formal impact are the seconds-long blackouts separating each segment, simple gestures that become progressively more moving and are sometimes quietly devastating: without a warning or fade-out, they yank us from the abundance we enjoy in the appearance of reality into the blank-faced artifice of art.

On the most obvious level, their meaning is a link between the film’s aesthetic inquiries and its political/moral implications. We start off interpreting these moments of emptiness as subtle reminders that the physical world can indeed be destroyed, that our current situation has provided us with shortcuts to this most extreme, unimaginable erasure. Then we start to notice how the blanknesses reiterate for us a series of truths in their rhyming of camera and eye: how they indirectly demonstrate that cinema is not just documentation but also perception; that the camera has become as permanent a participant as the eye in the act of making the world visible; and finally (perhaps most significantly) that there is a paradox between the reassuring belief that the visible world needs the eye for its existence and the crushing fact that the actual world continues without us.

The film’s first scenes seem to stretch on and on before we get the hang of how to approach them, but as the sheer luxury of close perception proves habit-forming, and as we recognize that Benning is trying to teach us how our adoration of the physical world is the blueprint for all aesthetic experience, we begin to read the ends of scenes as pleasure being denied. Benning’s (and our) gaze moves from blank-eyed to enraptured to elegiac, an evolution that duplicates the disappointment experienced in daily life when we realize we cannot stare indefinitely at a sunset or a flower or a mountain. Despite always being there, the world is constantly wriggling out of our possession.

This is the lesson Keats had to learn when he couldn’t merge with that nightingale, and it’s a truth that paintings and photographs don’t easily express because of their tangibility, their illusion of control and fulfillment, the fact that we can touch them and often throw our arms around them. Only cinema—the art made of light, with its simultaneous evocation of the eye’s clarity and memory’s mistiness—could so naturally celebrate how intimate we can sometimes feel toward the physical world while also mourning how fundamentally alien we are from it. Though the scariest potential tragedy Benning’s blackouts hint at is a political/moral one—that of the world in future being snatched away by our carelessness and abuse—this is nested in the unavoidable existential/aesthetic tragedy of our senses, memories, and art being incommensurate to the world and our deepest longings for it.

As if in answer to Cézanne (above, right), who once claimed his goal was to make nature and art the same, Benning has proven—even while giving us the closest approximation of what the world is as it meets our eyes and ears—that the distance between nature and art (as well as nature and us) will always be too far to bridge. 13 Lakes offers up humility not as a fancy moral pose, but as an acknowledgment that art reflects (rather than transcends) human weakness. Its overwhelming power springs from its suggestion that art, artists, and audiences must now and then be humbled by the world they live in.
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Andrew Chan is a poet and film critic currently studying at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the creator of the blog Movie Love.

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Links for the Day (July 8th, 2007)

1. "Drama Queens: A Mighty Heart, La Vie en Rose" & "Rats in the Kitchen, Rats in the System": The two most recent columns from Fernando F. Croce.

["The airbrushed triteness of Evening is the kind that lends "chick flicks" their patriarchy-imposed stigma. "Mysterious creatures," my ass -- it's no secret that Lajos Koltai's adaptation of the Susan Minot novel is The Hours, Redux (Michael Cunningham co-wrote the screenplay, Claire Danes, Toni Collette, Eileen Atkins, and Meryl Streep are all again aboard the pimpmobile), serving up the oppression of women and gays as antiseptic bourgeois swank. No movie with Vanessa Redgrave can be wholly worthless, but the need to watch shit blow up afterwards seems overwhelming. Live Free or Die Hard satiates that need nicely."]

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2. "Seven 'new' Wonders of the World named amid controversy": It's a wonder to me that people still cast Robin Williams in dramatic roles.

["Seven "new" wonders of the world including the Great Wall of China and the Coliseum in Rome, selected by nearly 100 million voters and upsetting cultural experts, were announced late Saturday at a celebrity-studded televised ceremony in the Portuguese capital."]

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3. "Bush's support in GOP slips": From The Baltimore Sun.

["Wearied by the lack of progress in Iraq and by the steady stream of military funerals back home, a growing number of Republican lawmakers who had stood loyally with President Bush are insisting his strategy has failed and calling on him to bring the war to an end."]

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4. "Poler bear just another roadside attraction": Hey MSNBC, I'm the incorrigible punster.

["Must’ve been a poler bear. In fact, it was a black bear that climbed 100 feet up a power pole in the sweltering high desert Friday and brought traffic to halt on a highway below as motorists stopped to gawk and take pictures."]

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5. "August Rush": Did I mention that people are still casting Robin Williams in dramatic roles?

["Tells the story of a charismatic young Irish guitarist (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and a sheltered young cellist (Keri Russell) who have a chance encounter one magical night above New York’s Washington Square, but are soon torn apart, leaving in their wake an infant, August Rush, orphaned by circumstance. Now performing on the streets of New York and cared for by a mysterious stranger (Robin Williams), August (Freddie Highmore) uses his remarkable musical talent to seek the parents from whom he was separated at birth."]

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Clip of the Day:: Never forget... Patch Adams, that is.


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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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Herzog's Tricky Rescue Dawn

By Dan Callahan

Most critics have approached Werner Herzog’s latest film Rescue Dawn with qualifying kid gloves, as if it would be impolite to question a late work from such a grand old man of the seventies German New Wave. Those who are respectful of his earlier career but not exactly enthused may be perplexed by this odd duck of a film, a hybrid of Herzog’s patented man against nature impulses and a smoothly engineered piece of studio product.
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To read the rest of the article, click here.

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Doctor Who, Season Three, Eps. 0 and 1: "The Runaway Bride" and "Smith and Jones"

By Ross Ruediger

The Runaway Bride is the second Christmas special of the new Doctor Who and it packs a special punch. It���s an action spectacle about yet another alien invasion of Earth, framed by a secondary storyline about loss and living. And, as is often the case with Doctor Who, it���s that secondary story that separates it from the rest. Picking up immediately where ���Doomsday��� left off, the Doctor (David Tennant) is baffled by the Bride���s (Catherine Tate) sudden appearance in the TARDIS. Turns out her name is Donna and she���s obnoxious, rude and loud ��� the antithesis of Rose Tyler. Even worse, she doesn���t seem particularly impressed by any of his gimmicky gadgetry and insists that he���s been hired by a jealous friend to kidnap and spirit her away from her wedding. Why anyone would want to marry this woman seems at first to be the biggest mystery of all. Before long, the Doctor and Donna are caught up in an alien plan of which Donna���s unknowingly at the center.

The alien in question is the Empress of Racnoss, a giant, spider-like creature who must rank amongst the most impressive-looking aliens Doctor Who has yet un