William Friedkin's The French Connection, about ruthless cops chasing ruthless drug smugglers, is a sensationally effective and vastly overrated movie, and I doubt I'll ever want or need to see it again. Even on first viewing -- as a movie-crazed teenager in 1986, courtesy of VHS -- its slot in the pantheon of great '70s movies struck me as unearned. I dug its unglamorous violence, grubby locations, energetic camerawork and superb lead performances (by Gene Hackman as volatile NYPD detective Popeye Doyle, Roy Scheider as his level-headed partner, Frederic de Pasquale as the chief smuggler and Tony Lo Bianco as his Brooklyn contact). But the film -- now playing in a new 35mm print August 31-Sept. 6 at Film Forum -- struck me as very calculating, not in a Hitchcock/Spielberg way (i.e., perfectionist, hermetic, mechanical) but in the manner of a street hood who stages a distraction so his partner can snatch a purse. The average Adam Sandler comedy has more integrity than Friedkin's Oscar winner, which lovingly protracted scenes of police brutality for left-wingers, pre-Miranda-ruling nostalgia and tangible law enforcement results for right-wingers, and an ending that makes hash of both positions -- not to complicate viewers' reactions, but to provide rhetorical cover to the filmmakers no matter who gripes. How could such a pandering film be described as uncompromising?
Adapted by Ernest Tidyman (Shaft) from Robin Moore's book about New York cops seizing $32 million in heroin from a French smuggling ring, The French Connection was widely hailed as an aesthetically fresh, socially relevant new entry in the cops-and-robbers genre. It was lumped together with two other 1971 touchstones, Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs, as an example of the new fascist populism -- a subgenre that combined studio production values and exploitation tactics. Friedkin's film is the least of the three because it's got almost nothing on its mind but rattling the audience. It's a roller coaster ride posing as something more substantial -- or, God forbid, Important -- but doesn't have the stones to be that thing. The Siegel and Peckinpah films remain morally, politically and aesthetically problematic, but they aim higher than The French Connection; they're explorations of the attraction-repulsion principle, at once seductive and self-examining. There's a context for the movies' viciousness; they are fully thought-out and fully felt. To quote The Big Lebowski's Walter Sobchak, "I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos." That's more than can be said for The French Connection, the movie equivalent of a bad cop who exits an interview room with blood on his shirt, crowing about his keen interrogation skills.
Straw Dogs -- starring Dustin Hoffman as a mathematician named David who moves to his wife's Cornish hometown only to be harassed by local goons, one of whom is his wife's former lover -- is about man's quest to identify himself as masculine through the self-actualizing power of violence. It's half full of shit; Peckinpah was incapable of mounting a sustained critique of machismo because he couldn't resist kissing its feet. But its self-aware aspects complicate and justify the rest. Peckinpah reveals the primitive fantasies buried within supposedly civilized people -- the intellectual man's deep-down fear that he's not really a man until he's spilled blood to defend women and property (practically the same thing in Peckinpah's universe). Peckinpah's honesty comes through in the way he implicates himself in David's bloodlust. The movie doesn't say, "Here's the dirty truth about you people," but rather, "Look into my eyes, then tell me you don't see yourself" -- a distinction that separates hacks from artists. The movie's ultimate endorsement of purification-through-savagery (boldfaced in a climactic close-up of a home invader's leg getting chomped by one of David's bear traps) is questionable to laughable; but it's visualized without evasions or qualifiers, and the film's characters are more psychologically complex than their thumbnail descriptions might suggest. (The still-notorious rape of David's wife Amy, played by Susan George, does in fact depict a woman resisting a rapist and then succumbing to pleasure; but the rapist is her ex-lover, and when he's done, and his friend assaults her, too, she is utterly horrified.) All these qualities make Straw Dogs disturbing and still worth arguing about. 
Dirty Harry is slicker and and more simplistic, but it has a crude honesty that Friedkin's film rarely musters. The movie's straightforward, pre-Miranda definition of good police work is laid out in the scene where its snarling martyr hero explains the origin of his nickname: "Any dirty job that comes along." He's the police department's pit bull; one Harry poster's tag line promised, "You don't assign him to murder cases...You just turn him loose!" The iconic image of Harry tossing his police ID in the mud after killing Scorpio was interpreted by many critics (and later, film historians) as a kind of mea culpa -- an admission that Harry has besmirched his sworn duty to uphold the law but has enough self-awareness to realize it and enough decency to admit it in a gesture. I used to buy that reading, but I don't anymore; it's fundamentally at odds not just with Harry's character, but with the movie, which ennobles and validates Harry at every turn. The film's script stacks the deck in Harry's favor whenever his tactics are called into question. When a superior reminds him that he was disciplined for shooting a rape suspect without first proving his intent, Harry says, "When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn't out collecting for the Red Cross." There is not now, and never has been, a city or town anywhere in America where a cop would be disciplined for shooting someone fitting that description. That scene's straw-man approach to vindicating Harry's moral certitude is replicated on a grander scale in any scene that involves Scorpio, a cackling, effete, ransom-seeking beast who shoots citizens at random (but especially hates cops, blacks and priests -- a trifecta of targets designed to make him loathsome to pretty much everyone). 
Scorpio has a knack for political jiu-jitsu, a trait that raises him above a standard-issue psycho and makes him a law-and-order bogeyman. He turns society's relatively recent commitment to protecting suspects' constitutional rights (U.S. vs. Miranda was handed down in 1966) against it; and he carries out his campaign of terror in a left-leaning U.S. city that Nixon-era heartland conservatives considered even more deviant and debauched than New York. (Just desserts.) In the script's lefty-baiting show-stopper, Scorpio hires a black thug to beat him up, then goes on the local news claiming Harry did it. Message: criminals don't just deserve to be beaten by cops, they expect it, and since they're going to falsely claim police brutality anyway, they can be roughed up with a clear conscience. ("I didn't beat him up," Harry snarls. "He looks too good.") Harry's lonely quest for true justice (pursued even after his superiors take him off the case) defines social liberals as enablers of bug-eyed mass murderers. The movie is asking, "Do you really want to protect this scumbag's rights?" -- a question that has to be answered "No" because we've seen objective proof that Scorpio is a sniveling, hateful freak, a bug fit for squashing. There's no way that Harry wouldn't believe he did the right and necessary thing. When he chucks his police ID, he's not censuring himself, he's divorcing himself from the compromised institutions he once was proud to represent. His sullen walk-out (magically erased in the sequels) expressed Vietnam-era conservatives' overpowering feelings of alienation and despair -- their pervasive fear that the country they called the United States been taken over by bureaucrats and sissies who prized hippie idealism over common sense. Its cartoon fervor is rooted in political reality. By the film's logic, Harry hasn't failed society; society has failed him.
Straw Dogs is morally and philosophically suspect from frame one, Dirty Harry even more so -- Pauline Kael's infamous one-line summary of Straw Dogs, "the first fascist masterpiece" actually fits Siegel's film better -- but like John Milius' right-wing militia fantasy Red Dawn, both movies are brilliant works of provocation. They have incendiary viewpoints and articulate them with panache. The French Connection says close to nothing while pretending to tell us every manner of harsh truth -- which probably explains why it's the most influential panel in 1971's caveman triptych. 
On on this point, it's impossible to ignore Kael's review of the movie, titled "Urban Gothic." After an introductory section describing how New York lured Hollywood filmmakers with tax breaks, and how Vietnam-and-riot-era filmmakers responded by cranking out exploitation-influenced movies that fed off of the city's then-ominous seediness, Kael writes that audience were no longer going to "shock and horror films because of a need to exorcise their fears; that's probably a fable...I think they're going for entertainment, and I don't see how one can ignore the fact that the kind of entertainment that attracts them now is often irrational and horrifyingly brutal. A few years ago, The Dirty Dozen turned the audience on so high that there was yelling in the theater and kicking at the seats. And now an extraordinarily well-made thriller gets the audience sky-high and keeps it there -- The French Connection, directed by William Friedkin, which is one of the most 'New York' of all the recent New York movies. it's also probably the best-made example of what trade reporters sometimes refer to as 'the cinema du zap.'"
Kael was right to call out Friedkin for having no purpose beyond goosing the audience; her coup de grace is her citation of the scene where Popeye and his partner talk to colleagues at an accident scene that's in the movie mainly so that the director can show us a close-up of the accident victims' blood-smeared faces. Although she didn't give Friedkin enough credit for craftsmanship -- besides the car chase and the scene where Devereaux evades Popeye on the subway platform, the film is filled with absorbing lesser setpieces, including the cops' early information-gathering visit to a nightclub, the first part of which plays out in documentary-style observational shots, without audible dialogue -- she identified the essence of his filmmaking, which was to shock the eyes and ears rather than engage the imagination. "You don't have to be original or ingenious to work on the audience in this way," Kael wrote, "you just have to be smart and brutal. The high-pressure methods that one could possibly accept in Z because they were tools used to try to show the audience how a fascist conspiracy works are used as ends in themselves. Despite the dubious methods, the purpose of the brutality in Z was moral--it was to make you hate brutality. Here you love it, you wait for it--that's all there is."
Nat Segaloff's Friedkin biography, Hurricane Billy -- excerpted in Film Forum's press notes -- quotes the director recounting his original meeting with Popeye's real-life inspiration, NYPD detective Eddie Egan, who went on to become a technical adviser for movies and TV shows. "The first week I met Egan, he said to me, 'No matter how long you stay with me or how well you get to know me, you'll find there's only three things about me that you need to know: I drink beer, I fuck broads, and I break heads,'" Friedkin said. "He was right. There's very little else to the guy.'" That Friedkin's movie adopts the thickheaded mentality of its lead character ultimately seems less clever than underachieving. The movie doesn't connect Popeye's viciousness to the culture or the time, or even to the immediate setting, nor does it look beneath Popeye's hard shell in order to figure out what drove him and tease it out on screen. Siegel and Clint Eastwood did all of these things with Harry Callahan, whose wry sense of humor and widower's isolation humanize him even as his lethal temperament connects him to a long line of mythic movie gunfighters, detectives and psychopaths. (Like Popeye, Harry is a casual racist, but the emphasis is on "casual" -- it's just a part of his character, and the movie doesn't use Harry's bigotry to shock and titillate the audience, as Friedkin does throughout The French Connection.) Siegel's movie has a person at its center rather than a furious abstraction; that's part of the reason it can withstand repeat viewings.
"I remember going to Italy when [The French Connection] opened and being told by a group of journalists that it was the most pro-fascist film they'd ever seen," Friedkin told Nat Segaloff. "That certainly wasn't my intention. Then I'd come back to America and hear from people like the American Civil Liberties Union that it was really showing the cops for what they were: a bunch of thugs who shouldn't be let loose with guns, breaking heads. And I thought the film was even-handed." Being even-handed isn't the same thing as having no discernible opinion on anything, but the movie doesn't make that distinction. 
Popeye is only worth watching to see what crazy, hateful thing he'll do next. The movie invites us along on his petty power trips, and it frames his antisocial tendencies -- signified by his cruddy little bachelor pad in a housing project, his set-'em-up-and-lay-'em-down attitude towards his casually objectified one-night stand, and his apparent lack of any human warmth -- as signs of a Spartan mindset and fodder for male viewers' fantasy identification. (How much do you want to bet that the women that the real Eddie Egan nailed weren't one-tenth as young and gorgeous as the one Popeye brings home in the movie?) Popeye is a potentially tragic, fascinating character, but the movie just follows him around as if he were a carnivore in a wildlife documentary. Hackman is a magnetic goon, to be sure, but his Best Actor Oscar seems in retrospect like a poor choice, because the movie gives us no insight into Doyle and Hackman doesn't really do anything to mitigate that. Michael Mann's closed-off macho men are much more expressive; so are Peckinpah's heroes. Another famous Kael putdown, her description of Dustin Hoffman's performance in Rainman as the equivalent of a musician humping one note on a piano for two hours, could easily apply to Hackman here. He's one of American movies' most durable character leads, but I can think of few Hackman performances that are less interesting than his work as Popeye, which consists mainly of scowling, yelling, smirking and chewing gum. (Scheider, playing nursemaid to Hackman's drama queen manliness, is subtler and more recognizably human; he plays Buddy like a prisoner who got stuck with a crazy cell mate and resolved to make the best of it.)
In the end, what does the movie stand for, and what, if anything, is it saying about cops, drugs, New York, masculinity, movies or anything else? Not much. It's a hustle. The off-screen gunshot that ends the movie -- literally capping the moment where Popeye accidentally and needlessly shoots one of his own colleagues and then keeps going as if he had merely stubbed his toe -- epitomizes the film's smash-and-grab attitude toward film technique.
"If they're talking about what something means in a movie, usually you've got a movie that people will want to see," Segaloff quotes Friedkin telling the American Film Institute in 1974. "Example: the obelisk in 2001. People went around for years sitting around McDonald's, cocktail parties in Bel Air, saying, 'What the hell is the obelisk?' And that's why I put the gunshot at the end of The French Connection. It simply means that the movie ends with a bang. That's all. It wasn't in any script and I did it in the dubbing room on the day before I left as a kind of a joke. I said, 'Let's put a gunshot in the exchange.' So we stuck it in there and just let it go."
This is an astonishing quote. Friedkin comes right out and admits that he aped the conventions of ambiguous '60s and '70s movies (including intentionally muddled plotting, a tactic that led Mad magazine to title its parody of the movie, What's the Connection??!?) not because they necessarily suited the material, but because that's what was fashionable at the time. It's the sort of film that doesn't say to the audience, "Draw your own conclusions," but rather, "What would you like me to be saying?" The French Connection's transparent wish to be all things to all people, at such pace and volume that you don't notice that the director is a one-man focus group, makes it one of the most influential movies of the '70s -- and not in a good way.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Caveman valentines: The French Connection, Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs
Mad Men Fridays: Season 1, Episode 7 "Red in the Face"
By Andrew Johnston
Mad Men continues to bring the funny with an episode that furthers the exploration of Roger Sterling’s personality that began last week in addition to showing us a previously unseen side of Don Draper. His possessive, macho reaction to Roger’s drunken pass at Betty is consistent with the Don of previous episodes, but his revenge prank reveals a more playful sense of humor than the tendency toward dry, dark wit with which we’ve become familiar.
But while Roger is used as a source of comedy more than once (the scene where Don provides him with driving tips from the doorway is one of the series’ funniest), there are just as many scenes—if not more—that present him as a fairly pathetic figure. His unsuccessful attempt to schedule a last-minute tryst with Joan shows him longing for his youth (“I could put on my whites and we can pretend it’s V-J Day”), but even then his youth probably wasn’t all that—his naval heroism in the Pacific, revealed this week, falls short of his father’s WWI exploits, and he apparently went through childhood with the demeaning nickname “Peanut” (a nickname Bert Cooper still uses on occasion). No wonder, then, that he takes comfort in the privileges that come with having one’s name on the building.
Status and privilege play a big role in the episode. Even notwithstanding the era’s more permissive attitude toward driving under the influence, I’m sure some people will be disappointed in Don’s failure to keep Roger from getting behind the wheel after their massive binge, but Don has a zillion reasons to let Roger get behind the wheel. Above and beyond the being angry at Roger for putting the moves on Betty, there’s the simple fact that Roger’s his boss—an imperious one, as we see when he takes pleasure in yanking Pete Campbell’s chain by calling him “Paul”—and Roger wouldn’t have taken kindly to any attempt to keep him from driving. Then there’s the spite motive: Because Roger cozied up to Betty, there’s a level at which Don couldn’t care less if Roger has an accident.
Don’s actions against Pete Campbell in “New Amsterdam” showed him to be a very rash guy when angered, so the subtlety of his plot against Roger is a little bit unexpected but very, very impressive. All Don did was adopt the same deferential position he did at the beginning of the episode and the rest took care of itself (well, yeah, he bribed the elevator operator and then had to walk up all those stairs himself, but still). The dividends are significant: In addition to punishing Roger for scammig on Betty, the prank will presumably spare Don from working on the Nixon campaign (something he obviously wasn’t eager to do) and, by extension, spare him from having to work closely with Pete Cooper. Roger becomes the only conceivable scapegoat for the loss of the Nixon campaign, but he’s also the one person Bert Cooper is least likely to punish. It’s really kind of brilliant.
Pete Campbell’s subplot about the chip and dip raises the intriguing possibility that Pete is basically the guy Roger was 20 years ago. Yes, Pete tried to get proactive about manipulating Trudy in "5G", but here, he’s back to the thoroughly emasculated position he was in at the end of “New Amsterdam”, and her offscreen hectoring of him very much evokes what we can infer about the marriage of Roger and Mona Sterling (at least before the war made Roger more resigned and cynical). After “New Amsterdam”, there was a fair amount of fan speculation that Pete would try to turn his premarital one-nighter with Peggy into an ongoing affair as a means of compesating for his emasculation at home. After last week, talk turned to the possibility that this would be accompanied by Pete taking credit for her copywriting. Pete and Peggy’s first scene certainly seems to suggest this, but I think it’s a little too obvious a development. The odd bonding between them that we see in their last scene together made me think of another possibility: What if they join forces to advance each others’ position at the agency? Now that we’ve passed the halfway point of the season (sad but true), it seems pretty obvious that the narrative momentium will increase and the connections between characters will get tighter and more complicated by the week. In more concise terms, we’ll find out soon enough.
Miscellaneous points:
Pete’s acquisition of the rifle and his horsing around with it makes a nice callback to the hunting theme of the story that wound up in Boy’s Life back in “5G”. It’s a nicely metaphorical obsession for him to have, since hunting is regarded in so many cultures as a means of proving one’s manhood, and being his own man is obviously Pete’s most burning desire. It’s a goal that means so much to him that he’ll happily take shortcuts to achieve it, and ths, I suspect, will be his undoing on more than one occasion in the episodes (and seasons—I wish!) to come.
The details we get about Roger's father's WWI service are sketchy, but I'm inclined to think the elder Sterling survived the incident in the trenches, which--here's where the chronology gets tricky again--presumably took place before Roger was born (because let's face it, I can't see a rich guy with a kid being drafted to serve in the war--or, rather, I can't see a guy like that not being able to get out of the draft, unless of course he was as eager to get away from his wife as Roger is from Mona.
Being against smoking doesn’t usually make someone seem Machiavellian and evil, but so it is with Bert Cooper, whose chiding of Roger weirdly makes Sterling Cooper’s seniou namesake seem that much more slimy. His anecdote about Hitler and Chamberlain is absolutely brilliant, however, and while it’s probably too good to be true, I really wish it was. I’ve attempted to verify it on Google, but without success. If any readers know more about this, I’d appreciate it if you could lay out the details in a comment below, and I suspect others would be just as grateful as I.
Andrew Johnston is the television critic for Time Out New York.
Links for the Day (August 31st, 2007)
1. "Crowded House": Anthony Kaufman's Village Voice article on the indie-film distribution scene; his blog follow-up to the piece; and Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale's response.
["Gotham may be famous for its indie films, but the exhibition landscape is an increasingly contentious and competitive space, with too many movies struggling to stay alive on too few screens."]
2. "No End in Sight": Godfrey Cheshire on Charles Ferguson's Iraq documentary.
["There's been a small flood of documentaries about the Iraq war in the last two years, and movie-industry pundits have ruminated over why they've largely failed to click at the box office. Besieged with depressing war news at every turn, American filmgoers, it is said, would rather see something else. That may be, but Charles Ferguson's superlative No End in Sight begs to be considered the electrifying exception—the Iraq movie everyone should see, and surely the one to see if you're only going to see one."]
3. "One Sunday with Wilder, Ulmer, Zinnemann, Schüfftan and the Siodmak Brothers": Filmbrain on People on Sunday.
["Germany, 1929 – a period of relative calm and prosperity in the Weimar Republic. That brief period between the wars, when the market had not yet crashed, and the Nazis had captured less than 3% of the votes in the last election. Five young filmmakers, unknowns at the time, but who would go on to have illustrious careers in Hollywood, collaborate on an experimental feature – part documentary, part narrative, and starring a cast of five Berliners playing themselves. Dubbed "A film without actors", People On Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag) is a surprisingly modern work that is a major document in the history of German avant-garde cinema. "]
4. "Monster spider web spun": Deep in the heart of Texas.
[""At first, it was so white it looked like fairyland," said Donna Garde, superintendent of the park about 45 miles east of Dallas. "Now it's filled with so many mosquitoes that it's turned a little brown. There are times you can literally hear the screech of millions of mosquitoes caught in those webs.""]
5. "Fisted -- Without the Crisco!": House contributor Ed Gonzalez blogs on William Friedkin's Cruising.
["Both on a conceptual level and in practice, Cruising buys into and advances some of the most dangerous myths about homosexuality and the homosexual lifestyle—and you don't need Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet to tell you that. Before today, I only knew William Friedkin's film, an adaptation of New York Times editor Gerald Walker's 1970 novel of the same name, as That Film We Don't Speak Of, and my first exposure to its skuzzy, admittedly transfixing audio-visual atmosphere was through the two featurettes (from the upcoming Warner Home Video DVD release) we were told we should preview prior to press screenings for the film here in New York City. Walking out at the end of yesterday's screening, still suffering from a rather nasty cold, I felt as if I had been fisted—without the Crisco!"]
Quote of the Day: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "The Crowd"; Forty Shades of Blue (2005)
Clip of the Day: Theme Song Sondheim, Day Final: James Bond
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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.
Gunslingers in Macau: Johnnie To's Exiled
By Matt Zoller Seitz
Johnnie To is a bloodthirsty showman, but he loves people. Exhibit A is his latest film, Exiled. This tale of childhood buddies turned hit men squaring off against a malevolent gang boss in 1998 Macau — on the eve of that former Portuguese colony’s absorption by China — is the kind of film where flames roar, waves crash and dropped bullets thud like bowling balls.
Mannered as it is, however, Exiled is a tonic — a film that delivers all the visceral satisfactions of a super-macho action picture (close-quarters gun battles; slow-motion Wild Bunch-style side-by-side struts) and unabashedly sentimental depictions of loyalty and tenderness as well as plot twists that are surprising, often bizarre, yet feel just right.
Death Sentence: Violence in the Name of Justice
By Matt Zoller Seitz
Based on Brian Garfield’s novel — a sequel to the book that spawned the 1974 film Death Wish — James Wan’s latest film is a middle-class white man’s payback fantasy, leavened with phony references to class difference.
From the editor
By Matt Zoller Seitz
This is the 1000th post since The House Next Door began publication January 1, 2006. I'm using it to thank everyone who reads us, links to us, quotes us and takes issue with us. I'd also like to express my deep gratitude to my co-editor, Keith Uhlich; my art director and technical troubleshooter, Jeffrey Hill; the good Samaritan known as Ed Copeland, who has stepped in during many a crisis and saved my bacon; my treasured sounding board, Sars; my wonderful roster of contributors, all of whom I'm proud to call friends; and last but not least, Hannah and James, the most patient children who ever walked the earth.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
5 for the Day: Underdog Sports Movies
By Alan Sepinwall
Of the many addictions that rule my life, none has more controlling power than my chemical devotion to underdog sports movies. You give me a plucky loser trying to overcome the odds at any athletic endeavor, and I'm there. Doesn't matter if the movie is unfathomably stupid. If I stumble across The Air Up There (Kevin Bacon teaching basketball to Africans) or The Replacements (a movie that tries to make scab players sympathetic), I can't change the channel until it's over. Doesn't matter if I don't know or care about the sport in question. I have repeatedly Netflix'ed a four-hour Bollywood musical about cricket (Lagaan) and spent money to rent a comedy about curling (Men with Brooms). Curling.
My unfortunate condition dates back to the late '70s, when my father purchased our first VCR, a bulky monstrosity that didn't even have a wireless remote (it attached to the unit with a cord that was so short you were guaranteed to lose your eyesight using it long-term). We only had a couple of cable channels (HBO didn't program 24/7 back then) and the over-the-air stations were too full of news and soap operas and other shows that catered to grown-ups, so the idea of being able to record shows I liked and watching them over and over and over again was the bestest thing ever.
The first two movies I remember recording were Meatballs and The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. You may not think of Meatballs as an underdog sports movie, but it climaxes with Bill Murray's awkward kid sidekick winning a four-mile run against one of the meanies from Camp Mohawk. And, of course, Breaking Training is the only Bad News Bears movie where the team is any good. ("Let them play! Let them play! Let them play!") Channel 11 almost never showed the original because it was too dirty to be properly edited for broadcast, so when I finally got to see it, I was stunned to see the Bears lose the big game.
As I've grown older, I've learned to accept that my fake sports heroes aren't always going to win (and, in a movie like Tin Cup, the miracle win would've been pretty lame), but I find myself enjoying the fake sports a lot more than the real thing these days. Maybe it's because two of the three teams I follow, the NY Giants and Knicks, have made winning ugly into an artform, but it's nice to be guaranteed a victory in scripted form (even if it's just a moral one, like in Rocky). As I wrote in my first review of the Friday Night Lights TV show, the thrill of victory may be sweeter if you risk the agony of defeat, but sometimes we just don't want to suffer, do we?
In keeping with the "5 For The Day" tradition of avoiding the most obvious choices, I'm not going to include Hoosiers (a masterpiece, other than the fact that they cut the scene explaining how Buddy rejoins the team), Rocky, Breaking Away, or even Rudy (a movie I adore, even though it may be the most polarizing example of the genre). I also won't be including sports movies that don't follow the formula (i.e., no Bull Durham or Field of Dreams) or documentaries (not even When We Were Kings, which couldn't be better if it was scripted). I couldn't in good conscience consider chess a sport, or else Searching for Bobby Fischer would be on there. In no particular order...
1. Miracle: In my definitive list of the top 5, this movie would be in the mix with Rocky and the three aforementioned movies set in Indiana. But because it's one in a long run of factory-produced Disney movies in the genre (Father's Day gift gimmes each year), I don't think it gets the credit it deserves. (Not even on this blog.) It's a really superb movie, a great example of how it doesn't matter how familiar the tune is if you sing the hell out of it.
A lot of the credit for that goes to Kurt Russell as "miracle on ice" coach Herb Brooks. The Disney factory sports movies generally get strong lead performances (Denzel in Remember the Titans, Dennis Quaid in The Rookie), but Russell is a cut above in his dedication to portraying the flintiness of Brooks, who was the last man cut from the last U.S. Olympic hockey team to win the gold, and who spent the ensuing 20 years obsessing on a way to get the gold medal he was deprived of. The sequence immediately after the U.S. team pulls off the stunning win over the the Soviets is a masterclass in silent acting: Brooks first looks to the devastated Soviet coach, then to his adoring wife, completely at a loss of what to say to either one; then, as the crowd keeps cheering and/or running onto the ice, Brooks pushes himself out into the hallway, squats down in a deserted corner and simultaneously celebrates the improbable victory while grieving over everything he gave up in the last two decades to make it happen. The best moment of a really underrated acting career.
Russell has to dominate the movie in part because director Gavin O'Connor chose to fill the cast with hockey players who could be taught to act a little, rather than the other way around. (Eddie Cahill is the exception as goalie Jim Craig, since the mask meant he could be easily replaced with a stunt goalie for the game sequences.) Still, Eric Guggenheim's screenplay gives at least as strong a sense of the players as, say, we got in Hoosiers (where I still have no idea why the players stand up to Gene Hackman in the final huddle), with a handful -- sensitive Craig, cocky Jack O'Callahan (Michael Mantenuto) and team captain Mike Eruzione (Patrick O'Brien Demsey) -- becoming genuine characters. And by prizing hockey skill first, O'Connor (along with cinematographer Daniel Stoloff and editor John Gilroy) are able to do an astonishing 20 minute-plus recreation of the miracle on ice game, one of the rare occasions where scripted sports action is as exciting and easy to follow as the real thing.
There are the usual flaws you get in virtually all these movies (Patricia Clarkson is wasted as Mrs. Brooks, the attempts at putting the game in a bigger sociological picture don't really work), but I could watch the movie's final hour every day for the rest of my life and not get tired of it.
2. Slap Shot: One of my favorite comedies ever, one of my favorite Paul Newman movies ever (it's this or Nobody's Fool), and just a delightfully profane, cynical, fun sports flick. Newman, who was past 50 at the time and finally decided it was okay to move away from the handsome thing, is Reg Dunlop, the never-was player-coach of a minor league hockey team in a dying factory town. Faced with news that the Chiefs' mysterious owner plans to fold the team, Dunlop decides to drum up interest in a potential sale -- or, failing that, to land himself a job with another team -- by turning the Chiefs into an outlaw squad of goons, inspired by the acquisition of the cheerfully violent Hanson brothers (Jeff Carlson, Steve Carlson and Dave Hanson, who've been milking the characters for the last 30 years).
The movie is as anti-rah-rah as it gets. Even by today's standards, it's almost shockingly crude (go read some of the memorable quotes on its IMDb page, with Dunlop and Braden's exchange about underlining my favorite), The players -- with the exception of college-educated Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), who resists Dunlop's carnival goonery -- are depicted as uniformly dumb, interested in hockey not out of any love for the game but a desire to either beat other guys' brains in or get laid (or, preferably, both). The local sportswriter (M. Emmet Walsh) has no problem fabricating stories as a favor for Reg. The owner is selling the team for tax purposes. And just when it looks like we're headed for some uplifting ending where Reg realizes it's better to lose playing the right way than win through cheap violence, the general manager mentions during intermission that there are scouts in the building, leading to one of the great one-two comedy edits of all-time: the wheels turning furiously in Dunlop's brain as he says "Scouts?," followed by a shot of the entire team brawling with their opponents while Braden looks on in disgust.
One warning: depending on which version of the DVD you get, you may not be able to get Maxine Nightingale's "Right Back Where We Started From" out of your head for at least a month.
3. Diggstown: Here's one that vanished without a trace about five minutes after it was released. Fortunately, during those five minutes me and some college friends were desperate for a movie to see on a rainy Friday night, and my sports movie addiction and loud voice drove us into that. Starts off as another rip-off of The Sting, with James Woods and Oliver Platt rolling into a boxing-crazy hick town to take down the local crimelord (Bruce Dern, enjoying himself beyond the legal limit) with a simple bet: that a retired semi-pro boxer (Lou Gossett Jr., allowed to be genuinely funny for one of the few times in his career) can knock out any 10 men in 24 hours.
The opening drags, there are a couple of murders that temporarily derail the light tone of the movie, and a very young Heather Graham pops up in an unfortunate supporting part as Woods' love interest (mercifully, we don't see anything more than him leering at her in Daisy Dukes), but the fight scenes are terrific, and when (not-so-spoiler alert) Lou won the inevitable impossible final bout against a younger, stronger foe, my friends and I all cheered -- until the movie revealed that there was another fight to go, and the climax of that one was so brilliant and unexpected that we gave it a standing O. Maybe not a great movie, but it deserved better.
4. Major League: I wrestled seriously with giving this slot to the criminally underrated Bang the Drum Slowly (featuring Michael Moriarty as an ace pitcher and a young DeNiro as a catcher whose losing battle with Hodgkin's brings a bickering team together in a completely non-schmaltzy way), but eventually decided that the actual baseball action takes too much of a back seat to all the off-field shenanigans. (It's the right choice for the movie, but the wrong one for this list.)
That leaves Major League -- in which the greedy new owner of the Cleveland Indians (Margaret Whitton, during the two and a half years when she was a bankable middle-aged sexpot) tries to put the worst team possible on the field so fans will stay away and she can move the team to Florida -- as my token baseball pick.
When the movie came out, I remember sheepishly trying to explain to my father how the Charlie Sheen and Tom Berenger characters weren't wholesale rip-offs of Nuke LaLoosh and Crash Davis ("You see, the pitcher with the million dollar arm and the five cent head just needs glasses, and, um...."), but it's aged quite well. Sheen's barely-conscious deadpan has rarely been used better ("I look like a banker in this"), James Gammon gives new meaning to "crusty but benign" as the old warhorse manager, and Wesley Snipes (flashy speedster Willie Mays Hays), Dennis Haysbert (voodoo slugger Pedro Cerrano) and Chelcie Ross (over-the-hill junkballer Eddie Harris) steal the movie out from under bigger names (at the time) Berenger and Corbin Bernsen.
Bill Simmons, ESPN.com's The Sports Guy, likes to rate sports movies based on the number of "chill scenes," those moments that give you goosebumps every time, like Rocky getting up off the canvas and beckoning at Apollo Creed, or Shooter Flatch calling the picket fence play. I don't know how much of this speaks to writer-director David S. Ward's skill and how much to my weird predilections, but I consider the one-game playoff against the Yankees as one long chill scene. All of the earlier set-ups about players' struggles pay off (often in funny ways, like bible-thumping Harris doing his warm-up pitches with Cerrano's statue of Jobu at the base of the mound), with a series of quotes that I still toss out while watching tense actual game situations: "I say fuck you, Jobu. I do it myself." "Forget about the curve balls, Ricky. Give 'im the heater." "Going somewhere, meat?" "'Bout 90 feet." Etc. The sequels suck, but the repeatability factor on the original is enormous.
5. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India: Screw it. I'm going to include the four-hour Bollywood musical about cricket. After all, I've watched it two and a half times (the half time I fast-forwarded through all the romance subplots) and would have watched it many more if I actually understood Hindi. (As it is, I'm grateful for the presence of Paul Blackthorne in the Billy Zane role as the mustache-twirling aristocratic bad guy, just so there's an occasional hint of English. Reading? Bleh.) Not that I understand the rules of cricket, either, but that's the thing about underdog sports movies: the cliches make even the most alien sports perfectly relatable.
So, the basic plot: in 19th century India, an angry young farmer makes a cricket wager with the aforementioned British 'stache-twirler in charge of the province. If the farmers, who have never played cricket in their lives, can beat the Brits, then the traditional tax they pay will be suspended for three years; if they lose, then they have to pay triple tax for three years, a prospect that would ruin everyone. So our plucky would-be Burt Reynolds (Aamir Khan) recruits a power-hitting Sikh who used to soldier with the English, a palsied Untouchable with a wicked curveball, a mute drummer and the usual bunch of outcasts. Who do you think's gonna win? Just pure joy, from start to finish.
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Alan Sepinwall is a columnist for The Star-Ledger and publisher of the blog What's Alan Watching?
East-West, None Know Best: Balls of Fury
By Steven Boone
Balls of Fury looks like another sports-spoof throwaway, but it does have a piercing reason for being. American men love Eastern cultures in direct proportion to their staggering ignorance of same. They salivate over Asian women and cuisine; alternate between awe and mockery of the continent's ancient practices (religions, martial arts); snicker at their relatively petite, slender men (the same ones whose kung fu/jujitsu/karate they applaud); envy the wisdom, richness, efficiency, and industriousness of their societies. And so American fans kowtow and condescend in the same awkward motion. Charlie Chan. Kill Bill. Wax on, wax off. Balls of Fury is all about this phenomenon. It's a Chinese odyssey for people--men, especially--who call all Asians Chinese.
What makes it a men's picture? Well, aside from the dead-giveway title, the whole plot is about a white manchild who lost his mojo after a massive public humiliation/symbolic emasculation and goes on a quest to get it all back. (And so it is a white men's picture, too.) Twelve year old American champ Randy Daytona (Brett DelBuono) chokes during a pivotal ping-pong match at the '88 Olympics in front of the entire world, including Ronald and Nancy Reagan, who look plenty pissed (in a funny, old-fashioned bit of intercutting--no Zelig/Gump tricks here). 20 years later, he's a fat, disheveled has-been (Dan Fogler) doing ping-pong tricks as a dinner theater novelty act. When an FBI agent (George Lopez) enlists him to infiltrate an illegal ping-pong gambling ring run by the Chinese Triad, he must return to the sport. He trains with the legendary blind master Wong (James Hong) and his gorgeous niece Maggie (Maggie Q), a table tennis genius who can wipe out several fearsome male opponents at once--while taking phone orders for Wong's takeout restaurant.
So if the girl is that badasss, why doesn't the FBI agent swap out Randy for her? Well, that's the whole basis for Balls of Fury's comedy in its first half. The script is initially smart about Mystical Asian Others in American movies and their function as the white man's healers, redeemers and almost supernatural foes. Hong, who has played virtually every permutation of this figure in over 300 films (and who many Gen-Xers will remember as the fire-breathing villain Lo Pan in Big Trouble in Little China, which, along with The Golden Child, is this film's spiritual godfather), delivers some suffocatingly funny Wise Master monologues ("Ping-pong is like a prostitute..." spirals into a tortured confession of his woman troubles). Co-writers Robert Ben Garant (who also directed) and Thomas Lennon are great at bringing a heightened movie moment crashing hilariously to earth, as when sinister martial music cuts off when a villain's henchman stops to ask, sheepishly, for directions to the highway. Later, when Maggie sends Randy off on his journey, she kisses him passionately. Cut to the wide shot, and her legs are coiled around his blubbery waist. Garant and Lennon seem to get it: Movies about the Far East by white males tend to sell the same kind of "happy ending" you get in a Korean massage parlor.
Too bad they don't take the satire all the way. Once Randy finally enters the lair of ping-pong supervillain Feng (Christopher Walken), the jokes are more scattershot and begin to gently ease Ho'wood's history of insipid Orientalism off the hook. Randy joins an Enter the Dragon-style tournament of ping-pong. He takes on the world's greatest pongers in literal death matches: The loser gets a poison dart to the neck, shot from a blow gun by comedienne Aisha Tyler, as a Grace Jonesy nubian amazon. (Among the clutter of weak gags in this section: a bunch of stale homo-panic jokes about Feng's stable of male sex slaves.) Even though the film is right to show even less concern for coherent plot or motivation as it goes along, it loses traction when the theme lapses into generic silliness rather than running down and assassinating every last Asian stereotype in the movies. Yeah, too bad, because the flick's first half feels in part like the Chinese Hollywood Shuffle.
Balls of Fury will be worth a DVD glance only because of what some of its performers have done with Garant and Lennon's sometimes-inspired script. The comedian Patton Oswalt has a grand entrance as a rival player who, when he fails to burst through a paper banner held by cheerleaders, neatly tears it and steps through instead. Terry Crews, the funniest Big Mean Black Man since Tiny Lister, does every big mean black thing except threaten to eat Randy's children. In a terrycloth headband. Fogler makes a spectacular and sympathetic slob-hero, but when his character's fortune turns for the better and he tries to throw on some rock star charm, he comes off as an air-guitaring theme park rendition of Jack Black (see the School of Rock Stunt Show!). Lopez mutters some ethnic jokes that probably weren't in the script, tearing little subversive holes in the process. Hong, meanwhile, seems to enjoy the hell out of trashing the cinematic plantation that's been his bread and butter all these years. The weakest link turns out to be co-creator Lennon, whose turn as Randy's lifelong nemesis, German ping-pong team captain Karl Wolfschtagg, is broad, flat, and desperate for laughs.
Finally, there's Walken. Christopher Walken in faux Mandarin getup and villainous pompadour, furiously playing Sudden Death ping-pong on a rope bridge -- shouldn't that be enough entertainment for a lifetime? Not quite, but watching him essay a Triad kingpin with the voice and attitude of a Vegas casino magnate does bring joy. When the movie's table tennis death matches get too drawn out, Walken cries from the sidelines, chop chop, people: "We're missing Antiques Roadshow!"
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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.
Links for the Day (August 30th, 2007)
1. "Boudu": Tucker of PilgrimAkimbo on Renoir's classic film.
["For me, having just seen Boudu twice this past weekend was a revelation. It had been around 23 years since I last saw the film. The Criterion Collection DVD is a wonderfully produced copy of the film. But it is not the quality of the DVD that got to me. And it was not merely the incredible performance by Michel Simon as Boudu, as well as the rest of the cast. No, what got to me was the boldness of Renoir - both in terms of the story's subject matter and of his directorial choices."]
2. "A sad farewell to HBO": Edward Copeland loses his home box office.
["For nearly 30 years, aside from a gap here or there, HBO has been a part of my life. When my family first got it, it came through a strange little antenna placed on the roof of our house. Later of course, it came through cable TV. As of today, I don't have access to HBO anymore. I'm rejecting my local cable system's "friendly" blackmail of getting digital cable in order to keep HBO."]
3. "Swanberg on the Stairs": The latest episode of ReelerTV, featuring an interview with Hannah Takes the Stairs director Joe Swanberg.
["After a few weeks away, ReelerTV returns today with a busy episode full of news you can use. Hannah Takes the Stairs director Joe Swanberg joined me for a chat about his film's anchoring the ongoing Generation DIY series at IFC Center (not to mention a teaser of his forthcoming Web series, Butterknife), while Spout Blog's Karina Longworth dropped by the Pioneer Theater for to discuss some of the same series' lesser-known titles. We celebrated William Friedkin Week in NYC and mourned the untimely passing of IFC TV, hacked to death by stone-hearted marketers wielding euphemisms like machetes."]
4. "Look Who’s Talking: The New DIY": Jeff Reichert on that mumblecore thing, and one of its movies -- Quiet City. More from Michael Koresky and a one-line rebuttal (quoted below, from a review of The Nines) by the inimitable Armond White.
["It matters—or has Hollywood’s philosophical decline succumbed to the artistic wasteland of mumblecore?"]
5. "2007 TIFF—Eastern Promises": Michael Guillen on David Cronenberg's latest. Thanks to David Hudson and the indispensable GreenCine Daily for the link.
["Collaborating once more with his History of Violence leading man Viggo Mortensen, I had the chance to talk to both Cronenberg and Mortensen recently when they were in San Francisco on press junket and Greencine will be publishing that interview closer to the film’s distribution; but, for now, allow me to say that Eastern Promises delivers all it promises."]
Quote of the Day: Unknown
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "The Death of Chatterton"; Love and Death on Long Island (1997)
Clip of the Day: "Theme Song Sondheim" Round 4: Superman
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Links for the Day (August 29th, 2007)
1. "Virtual Gallery Opening!": Because Klaus Kinski must always occupy the top spot.
["If I were a millionaire I’d open a gallery containing nothing but original paintings (made for posters and VHS boxes) of Klaus Kinski. But I’m not a millionaire… nor even a thousandaire. Luckily, here at Scarecrow I can browse the shelves, for free, with the hope of coming across a box cover graced with Kinski’s likeness. While I’m sure our collection is incomplete (many titles that come out on DVD drop the beautiful paintings used to promote the film theatrically in favor of floating heads or gaudy Photoshop jobs that have nothing to do with the movie), at least I can scan these covers and keep them in a virtual gallery for all to see. Welcome to the Virtual Gallery of Klaus Kinski Paintings!"]
2. "Top 11 Uses Of Classic Rock In Cinema": By Jordan Hoffmann of Underground Online.
["He started it and he killed it. You are looking at a photo of Martin Scorsese and he is the one responsible for the marriage of awesome movie sequence and classic rock tune. No, it wasn't Easy Rider because those songs were still new at the time. It was Mean Streets, really, with its slo-mo barroom intro to the Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash," a pool hall brawl to "Please Mr. Postman" and car chase shootout to "Steppin' Out" by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers that really blew the door open. It seems like a cliché now - from Nike and Cadillac ads to kiddie flicks (none better than James Brown's "I Feel Good" in Soccer Mummy) but at the time it was revolutionary. With fists in the air we roll the projector: here's our Top 11 Classic Rock Moments in Cinema."]
3. "Love as an Illusion: Beautiful to See, Impossible to Hold": Dennis Lim on Ang Lee's upcoming Lust, Caution.
["In “Brokeback Mountain,” the 2005 critical hit and cultural flashpoint that won Ang Lee an Academy Award for best director, love is a haunting, elusive ideal briefly attained but forever out of reach. Mr. Lee’s new movie, “Lust, Caution,” which will have its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival this week, is also a tragic melodrama, one in which the lovers are up against forces beyond their control, but it takes a harsher view of romance. This time love is a performance, a trap or, cruelest of all, an illusion."]
4. "Whatever Happened to the Whoopee Boys?": Blue Mag's Fred Schroeder posits the question.
["The other day I saw the rather forgettable new comedy “Hot Rod.” In the background of one scene appeared the poster for the 80s sex comedy “The Whoopee Boys,” another forgettable movie. For some unfathomable reason this juxtopositioning of two forgettable films within each other like the renderings of a medium-talent Escher caused me to become obsessed with “The Whoopee Boys” and more importantly its director John Byrum."]
5. "'Star Wars' lightsaber will fly aboard shuttle": May the g-force be with you.
["May the force be with shuttle Discovery and seven astronauts on an October mission to the International Space Station. Coming from a galaxy far, far away, the lightsaber wielded by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars will fly aboard the orbiter three decades after the classic movie opened."]
Quote of the Day: Robert Frost
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "Hoppered Up"; Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
Clip of the Day: The "Theme Song Sondheim" does Back to the Future
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Links for the Day (August 28th, 2007)
1. "Resignations and Assignations": Gonzales and Craig... TWO WILD AND CRAZY GUYS!!!!
["Dramatic enough in itself, the announcement Monday morning that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had resigned also set the stage for what may be one of most contentious confirmation hearings since the Senate rejected John Tower as defense secretary in 1989. ...
Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, who has voted against gay marriage and opposes extending special protections to gay and lesbian crime victims, finds his political future in doubt after pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges stemming from complaints of lewd conduct in a men's room."]
2. "Decompression in Action": The changed face of comics. With a response at Bubblegum Aesthetics.
["Over at Bully's comics blog, there's an interesting discussion thread on the relative merits/demerits of "decompressed" comics, i.e., those which contain relatively little dialogue per page, stretch their narratives out across an arc of several issues, and use the space of a monthly "floppy" comic to only delineate a small amount of time passing. It's initially very tongue-in-cheek, but I think there's a more serious point underlying it, which is: what do we expect from our entertainment (or, indeed, any form of communication)?"]
3. "Not so mad about AMC's 'Mad Men'": Diane Werts, contrariwise.
["This show looks like a million dollars (before inflation). Everything is oh sooo perfect. That's the problem."]
4. "10 Movie Moments That Broke The 4th Wall": ... and crashed heedlessly into the 5th dimension beyond Pluto! (Thanks to Todd VanDerWerff for the link.)
["Here I go again with another meta-movie list! The phrase “breaking the fourth wall” has been around for over a century. Though as a concept it's been around since before Shakespeare the phrase itself originates from the theater of Bertolt Brecht. It simply meant that a character makes an aside to the audience. Through the invisible wall those watching are addressed, acknowledged and made to feel a little more “in on the joke” so to speak. It’s a device used a lot more in television than on film. In the 80’s it even became fairly fashionable on such shows like Moonlighting and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show – a show that had as its entire premise comedian Shandling talking directly to the studio audience and the viewers at home. The Marx Brothers may have pioneered the concept in cinema with Groucho’s many knowing winks but Bob Hope really nailed it in the seminal road movies he made with Bing Crosby which is where we’ll begin.]
5. "As Best as I Can Define It": S.T. VanAirsdale interviews William Friedkin.
["In a way, 2007 is shaping up as the year of director William Friedkin. At least in New York, anyway: In addition to May's unsettling paranoiac melodrama Bug, the coming weeks promise theatrical revivals of his Oscar-winning 1971 cop thriller The French Connection (opening this Friday at Film Forum) and his controversial 1980 leather-bar detective epic Cruising (opening Sept. 7 before finally arriving on DVD Sept. 18). The turbulent backstories of each film -- the former shooting live car chases in front of unwitting passers-by in Brooklyn, the latter enduring the wrath of the city's gay community while filming in the West Village -- bespeak only a few of the legends accompanying Friedkin's work, a 40-year canon as rigorous, challenging and demanding of its viewers as its haunted inhabitants onscreen."]
Quote of the Day:
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "Amour de Mère"; The Brood (1979) 
Clip of the Day: So it turns out the "Theme Song Sondheim" (see yesterday's Jaws parody) has quite the repertoire. The rest of this week's Clips of the Day are all his. Today: Batman.
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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.
A sunbeam in the abyss
By Matt Zoller Seitz
The three words that spring to mind when I think of Owen Wilson are "generosity of spirit" -- a phrase that's being returned in kind by strangers as Wilson recovers from what has been described as a suicide attempt.
Wilson and I are the same age, 38. We're both from Dallas, and although we didn't cross paths until our mid-20s, we glancingly share enough geographical flashpoints that I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner. Wilson and his friend and filmmaking partner, Wes Anderson, shot part of a black-and-white short film prototype for their first feature, Bottle Rocket, in Greenway Parks, a five minute walk from my house. We both frequented the Inwood Theater, the clubs in Deep Ellum, and the Cosmic Cup, a coffee shop and arts hangout owned by Indian-born actor, magician and juggler Kumar Pallana, who had small roles in Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. 
In the mid-'90s, I interviewed the duo twice -- first for a feature about the process of taking the short version of "Bottle Rocket" to the Sundance Film Festival, and then for a cover story that followed the making of the feature from principal photography through editing and marketing. After Wilson and Anderson became sought-after and busy, they continued to talk to me for stories that had nothing to do with their own projects. I interviewed them twice on the subject of Charles Schulz, first for a 1995 Star-Ledger feature about the 30th anniversary broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas -- a recurring touchstone in Anderson's movies -- and then again in 2000 when I was gathering quotes for a story about Schulz's retirement. 
Thinking back over that time span -- pre- and post-Hollywood -- what strikes me is the consistency of Wilson's temperament. Of all the people I'd ever interviewed who seemed to have the potential for stardom, he was the person who seemed best equipped to handle it, because he seemed capable of getting along with pretty much anyone, and had what might be described as a sporting curiosity about fame. When he talked about the movie industry -- his knowledge based, at that point, mainly on secondhand reports from older filmmakers and the same faux-insider film monthlies that everyone else read -- he sounded like a kid excitedly summarizing the research he'd done for a paper on deep-sea diving or petrified wood. In 1995, after he'd moved to Los Angeles and started going on auditions and meeting with powerful people, he still seemed more or less the same guy -- observant, bemused, inquisitive and entertained by the unpredictability of life. When I did some follow-up interviews in late 1995 for my Bottle Rocket cover story -- which turned out to be my last Dallas Observer piece -- Wilson told me about a recent family reunion at which a young cousin asked his opinion of the budget overruns on Waterworld. "He asked, 'What do you think about the cost?'" Wilson said. "He sounded like a Los Angeles agent. I thought, 'What an odd question for an eight-year-old to be asking!' I told him, 'I don't know. It's not really my position to think about the cost.' Then his dad came up. He said, 'Oh, you're just protecting the industry. You're just a home-teamer.' That seemed kind of unfair to me, because I saw Waterworld, and I kind of liked it." 
I lost touch with him about six years ago, but I saw him in a lot of movies, and enjoyed him even in ones that weren't good. I was pleased to see that he'd made a point of building an acting persona that was true to his personality. You could see bits and pieces of the performers who influenced him -- mainly Bill Murray, who perfected the art of being committed to a movie while still remaining amusingly and somewhat mysteriously outside of it. But he was never an imitator. From the moment he busted out that nasal drawl in Bottle Rocket, he was his own man -- a Zen clown, warm and laid-back but with a goofy streak. Although he has played roles with a hard edge (the downed flyer in Behind Enemy Lines) or a dark heart (playing an intriguing killer in Hampton Fancher's The Minus Man), his specialty is feather-light comedy spiked with unselfconscious yearning. He's at once knowing and sincere -- an almost impossible trick. To paraphrase Pauline Kael's review of E.T., he clears the bad thoughts out of your head. When I saw Meet the Parents in a lower Manhattan movie theater on opening weekend, I didn't know that Wilson had a small part in it, and I was surprised and glad to see him up there, unbalancing his soon-to-be inseparable screen partner, Ben Stiller, by casually referring to Jesus Christ as "J.C." I was even more gratified when the audience applauded his first appearance, then clapped again when he showed up presiding over the wedding ceremony. The character's hippie cleric robes seemed appropriate. Wilson's a good-time shaman; when he appears, you smile, because know you're about to have fun. He makes good films better and bad films tolerable. Onscreen, he's a human sunbeam.
Offscreen, who knows? I don't -- and frankly, to borrow Wilson's response to his Waterworld-obsessed cousin, it's not my position to speculate on what demons he might have been wrestling with when this horrible incident occurred. But I will say that when I read news stories expressing incredulity that a well-liked comedic actor might be depressed enough to try to end it all, I wonder what planet these writers are from, and if they've ever spent time among the humans that populate this one. Tempting as it may be to seize on cheap ironic contrasts between an artist's life and work -- and comb his career and personal life for harbingers of suicidal intent -- the process is usually reductive and sometimes insulting. Of course that hasn't stopped the media from trying. "Meanwhile, his fans and colleagues were left to wonder how the perennially good-natured comedic actor, nicknamed 'The Butterscotch Stallion' for his womanizing ways, could be struggling," wrote Marcus Baram, in an ABCNews.com story titled, "Tears of a Clown." "Wilson has been romantically linked to numerous women, from Demi Moore to Sheryl Crow, and reportedly has a healthy appetite for the night life. But since breaking up with actress Kate Hudson just before Memorial Day weekend, he's been much quieter...Numerous comedians, from Jim Carrey to Sarah Silverman, have epitomized the cliche of the sad clown, struggling with depression."
What rot. Wilson might have been sad as hell about any number of things, but comic actors aren't inherently more depressive than dramatic actors, novelists, police officers, schoolteachers or bus drivers. People are people, and each one is unique. 
As for the talk of warning signs, yes, Wilson co-wrote Tenenbaums, which contains a scene where ex-tennis pro Richie Tenenbaum (played by Owen's brother Luke) slashes his wrists over a woman, and yes, Wilson (and Anderson) could not have written it persuasively unless they had experienced despair. But what person hasn't experienced despair? All that scene tells me is that Wilson is a funny, honest writer who has had dark thoughts and isn't afraid to write them down. That scene is not his Rosebud, any more than the Elliott Smith song that serves as its soundtrack, "Needle in the Hay," inevitably foretold Smith's death by his own hand. Smith wrote a lot of songs that sound in retrospect like obvious cries for help, but Neil Young and Lou Reed wrote dozens more, and they're both in their sixties and still prolific. Art is always informed by life, but one doesn't automatically predict the other. Depression is a implacably private thing, a fog comprised of biography, present-tense experience and body chemistry. It's as unpredictable as the elements and as unknowable as God. It's an abyss that you fall into, and you either die there or climb out.
I wish Owen Wilson good luck in his ascent from the abyss, which I am sure will be willful and permanent. I look forward to seeing another five decades' worth of performances, and listening to his droll speech when he accepts his best original screenplay Oscar, and hearing secondhand reports of how he dotes on his grandchildren.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Big Love Mondays: Season 2, Ep. 12, "Oh, Pioneers!"
By Todd VanDerWerff
Big Love’s second season finale tries to do so many things at once that it periodically flies off the rails, only to find itself righted again by a single powerful scene or moment. The episode is perhaps the best evidence yet that the show can always rely on its phenomenal cast to grab hold of it and wrench it down to earth when it seems likely to go floating off into the stratosphere. The episode isn’t an awful one, by any means, but it commits one of the cardinal sins of the season finale: It turns into the “And then this happened! And this happened! And this happened!” like a child breathlessly recounting a series of events instead of an actual dramatic recreation of those events. A lot of season finales, trying to tie up everything that happened in the season preceding, fall into this trap, and it’s hard to skate past all of those plot points and make them feel like they have some resonance to them (the Battlestar Galactica season three finale, of all things, is just about the best recent example of how to make the overstuffed finale work).
Normally, I complain that Big Love spends too much time with the Juniper Creek gang (though I know many of you disagree -- thanks for the e-mails!) to the detriment of the more interesting, more believable Henricksons, working their way through life on their mini-compound in Sandy, Utah. This week, though the best scenes and moments are all Henrickson-centric, the Juniper Creek storyline is actually more compelling for once, as it illustrates perfectly how the compound’s tendrils wrap into the life of Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) and his wives. What’s more, the Juniper Creek storyline (featuring Alby (Matt Ross) trying to seize power while Roman (Harry Dean Stanton) worked to recover in time to reclaim his power) feels focused and assured, even as the Henrickson stories are jumping back and forth from plot point to plot point. In rough order, we retouch on Bill’s flirtation with taking a waitress (Branka Katic) as a fourth wife, Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) entertains an offer of being a surrogate for a neighbor, Sarah (Amanda Seyfried) struggles with her boyfriend AND her brother, Barb’s (Jeanne Tripplehorn) doubts about her polygamist life, and a host of other minor moments and storylines (from Nicki (Chloë Sevigny) suspecting Bill of having her father shot to the whole Weber Gaming situation). That’s a lot of story to service in one episode, and it meant that the show got to do very little in regards to its favorite themes of compromise, honesty, and choosing between the self and a greater creed. To actually do the episode justice would be to write a basic plot summary, as that’s what "Oh, Pioneers!" feels like at moments.
By far the material that is the most interesting on the Henrickson front involves the two teenagers. Sarah’s scene where she pretends to seduce a sleeping Roman don't feel real or quite work, but her scenes where she confronts her brother, Ben (Douglas Smith), asking him if he plans to leave the polygamist life are pretty great. Seyfried has grown substantially as an actress this season, and her final moment with Ben, where she weeps as he drives off, is quietly soulful. Near episode’s end, she chooses to have sex with her boyfriend, giving up the chastity she has been so certain is important to her life. Whether consciously as an act of rebellion or subconsciously as a way to gain some control over her own life, Sarah has finally made a decisive break with her family (obviously, she’ll still live and interact with them, but it’s becoming impossible to imagine her becoming just another wife for some guy someday). It isn’t the best way to do it (Sarah’s boyfriend obviously doesn’t have her best interests in mind), but Sarah has made a choice for the self over the greater creed -- both the creed of her religion and the creed of her family (though, in many ways, these creeds are the same). Ben, meanwhile, draws even closer to the family circle, wordlessly reconciling with his mother at the Pioneer Days party that closes the episode by stretching a comforting arm around her neck.
Barb, in the foreground of so much of the best stuff this season, takes a back seat role this week, but her big moment is another highlight of the episode. She finally makes a decision on whether she is going to stay in the life or try to find something better, and she chooses her family. While this might be disappointing when it comes to season three (an estranged Barb might make for an interesting story arc), it’s in keeping with the show’s belief that successful families can come in all shapes and sizes so long as the participants listen to each other and care for each other’s needs (Bill seemingly forgot Barb, to his own peril, but this episode, he begins pulling her into his circle of trusted confidants again, asking her to join the Weber board of directors). The moment when she goes over with Margie to the neighbor’s house to explain why Margie would be a surrogate for the neighbor turns into nothing so much as a coming out scene. Big Love has often played this polygamy-as-homosexuality allegory (and typically a bit uneasily or a bit sketchily), but the choice to write Barb’s tearful confession as a coming out is one of the times when it works quite well (thanks, also, to Tripplehorn). It feels honest and truthful, where other moments of confession have felt forced. And Barb’s insistence that she be number one (leading to Bill’s seemingly renewed fervor for her) is interesting on a variety of levels, restoring Barb as one of the family’s true power centers and seemingly suggesting that Bill likes his wives best when they’re playing his predefined roles for them (despite all of the times he says this isn’t the case, other episodes have borne this out as well, as when he suggested that he liked Margie to be a “bad girl” and Nicki a “good girl”).
But the other major Henrickson storyline is kind of a mess. Thrusting Ana the waitress back into the thick of things might have seemed like a promising idea at one time (she did, after all, lead to two of the season’s best episodes), but hers comes off as one storyline too many. The way the Ana storyline was set up and rounded off earlier this season made for an engaging and entertaining mini-arc that examined some of Big Love’s most intriguing themes and ideas. Bringing her back shuts off the absolutely perfect resolution to that storyline (Bill reaffirming his love for Margie while standing Ana up). Obviously, real life doesn’t have resolutions and it makes sense that Margie would seek out Ana again when she needed someone to talk to, but the choice for Margie to bring Ana in on her secret about whom “Phil” really is feels rushed. I’m still interested to see Bill consider taking a fourth wife, and Ana’s an interesting and vital character, but bringing her back in season three might have been a better idea. It would have given some distance from that perfect resolution and would have given much of the other stuff in this episode more room to breathe.
The Juniper Creek stories, however, work, especially in relation to Bill. Bill’s political machinations with Roman and Alby are often yawn-inducing precisely because we know that Bill will always prevail (if he winds up dead or something, the show would have nowhere to go). Bill’s not exactly Entourage’s Vincent Chase, prevailing simply by dumb luck, but his business savvy and general ambition make him too much better than the often needlessly stupid Juniper Creek gang. Season two tried to rectify some of this by making Bill and Roman uneasy partners, but then it seemed to get away from this by having Bill set Roman’s group at war with another polygamist group. Then, Alby succeeded his father and immediately put himself at odds with Bill. The finale sees Alby successfully seize power, even as his plot to kill Roman is foiled by Nicki’s mom (Mary Kay Place, always excellent even when she has nothing to do). Roman ends up taken away by the police while Alby continues to consolidate his own power (Nicki points out that he’s got 8,000 people at his beck and call now, ready to kill for him). Alby isn’t as developed of a character as his father (his pure evil seems motivated largely by his own frustrations with his father’s coddling of him and his self-loathing over his possible homosexuality), but it’s interesting to continue to see him prevail. As a cliffhanger, Alby’s ascension rather works, and I’m interested to see how much of his ability is intelligence and how much is pure luck.
The episode ends at the Pioneer Days party, right after Barb tells the neighbors who she is and what she stands for. The long-absent Don Embry (Joel McKinnon Miller) returns to commiserate with Bill, and a group of children do a choreographed dance to the song “Windy.” (This is perhaps a personal issue more than a criticism, but I simply never find these scenes of young children dancing in a pseudo-suggestive fashion -- and lots of shows and movies use them -- to be anything other than unpalatable. What does anyone try to suggest with these sequences? Our children are being sexualized? I guess. But it doesn’t fit most of the time, and it certainly doesn’t fit here.) Bill looks over at his wives, clustered together, then sees as they whisper a secret to each other. He looks on, obliviously. Bill feels as though he’s in charge in his family, but as long as the wives are together, he’s only in charge so much as they let him be. As the second season makes clear, he’ll always be on the outside, looking on at them as they share things he cannot hear.
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.
Links for the Day (August 27th, 2007)
1. "Tumult at City Pages: Film Editor Axed, Cost-Cutting Memo Leaked": On the unceremonious axing of City Pages editor Rob Nelson. From the Minnesota Monitor, via GreenCine Daily.
[""Everything we know about security is wrong," reads the headline of this week's cover story. Given today's firing of film editor Rob Nelson -- and considering other high-profile exits in recent months -- one might get the impression the piece is about job security."]
2. "Owen Wilson in suicide bid": From The Times of India.
["Magazines reported that Wilson tried to kill himself. Sources tell he cut his wrists and took a number of pills — and was discovered by a family member, who alerted authorities. "]
3. "The Greatest Directors Ever: Part 1 & Part 2": Thanks to Jim Emerson, who comments here.
["It took months of bickering – sorry, discussion – and weeks of sulking – sorry, reflecting – but here, finally, is Total Film’s locked down, rubber-stamped, definitive selection…"]
4. "The view: Is Hollywood America?": House contributor Edward Copeland gets a mention, and resultant discussion, on the Guardian blog.
["It's been listin' time again this week, as what seemed like every man, woman or child who ever blogged lined up to take part in a poll organised by Edward Copeland to find the world's most esteemed non-English language movies. And rigorous the process has been too, with a nominating committee, no less, proposing 122 candidates from which to choose your favourite."]
5. "Harry Potter and the Snarky Reviewer": Liverputty's Escutcheon Blot on the Harry Potter series.
["I want to talk about the Harry Potter series, and address the negative, both private and printed, critiques that I have read or heard from acquaintances. Please do not read this if you have not read the books. The following essay contains more spoilers than a white-trash Trans-Am circa 1979 (with a big fire eagle painted on the hood). I think that the series is a great one...one of the landmark literary achievements of our time, and do not want to spoil the pleasure of any body's first read of the Potter saga."]
Quote of the Day: Henry David Thoreau
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "The Scream"; House of Bamboo (1955)
Clip of the Day: So the theme from Jaws has lyrics...
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Links for the Day (August 26th, 2007)
1. "Ebert's Statement re: Thumbs™": The end of an institution?
["I am discussing with Disney my association with the show that Gene Siskel and I started more than 30 years ago. In addition to my personal involvement, we are discussing the continued use of our Thumbs™ trademarks, owned by myself and the Siskel family."]
2. "Mother Teresa’s turmoil laid bare": Exploring a crisis of faith.
["Mother Teresa’s hidden faith struggle, laid bare in a new book that shows she felt alone and separated from God, is forcing a re-examination of one of the world’s best known religious figures."]
3. "TIFF: The Man Who Viewed Too Much": Mike D'Angelo's Toronto Film Festival page, already updating...
["This year, for the first time ever so far as I know, TIFF is holding a limited number of advance press screenings here in NYC. None of the dozen titles in question is especially high-profile, but I'm planning to see at least the first two reels of all of them, by way of revvin' the ol' motor. NOTE: Ignore everything below this section for the time being -- the rest is last year, which I'm not monkeying with 'til I can fashion a tentative schedule."]
4. "Single winner in $314 million Powerball lottery": And it isn't me... (frell!)
[" Powerball lottery officials say one winning ticket was sold for Saturday night's $314 million jackpot. It was purchased in Indiana."]
5. "Artist in Residence, James Lyons": Zoom In Online's interview with the late editor.
["Zoom In Online and Manhattan Edit Workshop are proud to present the Artist in Residence series. This recurring segment will follow a series of renowned film editors, all Resident Artists from Manhattan Edit Workshop’s Six Week Intensive Course on the art and technique of editing. This episode features James Lyons, an exceptional Editor best known for his work on Far from Heaven, The Virgin Suicides, Velvet Goldmine and Safe."]
Quote of the Day: Eleanor Roosevelt
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "How I Feel Some Days"; Mars Attacks! (1996)
Clip of the Day: The Queen Mary 2 raving into San Francisco harbor
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Links for the Day (August 25th, 2007)
1. "Iraq fraud whistleblowers vilified": From the Associated Press.
["One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted. Or worse."]
2. "Dark and Fleshy: The Color of Top Grossing Movies": Does a movie's rating affect the color gradation of its advertising? Here's an experiment...
["What follows is the color breakdowns of 25 posters of the top grossing — actual, non-adjusted dollars, according to Box Office Mojo — movies of all time."]
3. "Ali Naderzad on Film": A review and news blog on the world of cinema, well worth checking out.
["Intelligent cinema. Intelligent opinions."]
4. "Film director kills woman in 'tragic' accident": 2 Fast 2 Furious.
["An SUV driven by film director John Singleton struck and fatally injured a woman as she walked across a Los Angeles street in what was apparently a "tragic accident," a police spokesman said Friday."]
5. "Support Your Local, Prick Independent Music Store": Pt. 1: Best Buy & Pt. 2: Indie vs. Mom & Pop
["I received a few e-mails giving me shit for buying ‘Underground Kingz’ from a Best Buy. Most were half-informed rants that repeat stuff like “corporate entities” but one was, although a bit condescending, earnest in its attempt to inform me of how independent record stores are going out of business, etc. etc. Of course, I know that, I just don’t care. Generally, I respond to just about every e-mail I get, but numerous attempts at concisely explaining my position got really long and not-concise and I figured I’d turn it into a blog entry."]
Quote of the Day: Armond White; "Official History of the Music Video"
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "If This Doesn't Bring a Smile to Your Face..."; The Thing With Two Heads (1972)
Clip of the Day: When the Whistle Blows, The Complete Series
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Doctor Who, Season Three, Ep. 8: "Human Nature"
The Doctor: “I’ll have to do it. Martha, you trust me. Don’t you?
Martha: “Of course I do.”
The Doctor: “Cause it all depends on you.”
Martha: “What does? What am I supposed to do?”
The Doctor: “Take this watch, because my life depends on it. This watch, Martha, this watch is--”
The story begins with the above, frantic exchange and immediately cuts to Dr. John Smith (David Tennant) waking up in bed from the dream. He’s a quiet, reserved English schoolteacher in 1913 who seems to have numerous dreams wherein he is someone else, and he proceeds to explain them to his maid, Martha (Freema Agyeman). Maybe because I was familiar with the source material, I was able to more or less see from the beginning what, exactly, was going on here; I’d like to believe, however, that to someone seeing the setup for the first time, it would be confusing, magical and dreamlike. How far has Doctor Who gone this time, and what kind of story is this?John Smith: (to Martha) “Sometimes I have these extraordinary dreams…I dream I’m this adventurer, this daredevil – a madman! ‘The Doctor’ I’m called…and last night I dreamt that you were there.”
The idea of the Doctor becoming human is grand. His alien nature is the one thing that’s always separated him from humanity, which is obviously his favorite species. When all of sudden he is finally one of us, it’s disorienting; because of this development, Cornell’s story is undoubtedly one of the most important Who tales ever.
As the episode unfolds, the pieces fall into place. The Doctor and Martha were on the run from a group of aliens with a limited lifespan and thus his solution is that the pair hides out until they die (three months precisely). He does this with a device called a chameleon arch, which rewrites his internal DNA as well as wipes his memory. Everything that is “the Doctor” is stored in a fob watch, which should be opened only under the direst of circumstances, which would mostly be if the aliens should find them. He’s left this instruction along with a set of rules in the powered-down TARDIS. Luckily he gave Martha a key in “42” so she can visit the machine for consultation from time to time. She is his protector at this point, yet the human John Smith doesn’t know it. But the one instruction he failed to give Martha is, what if he should fall in love? This spanner thrown into the works causes more problems than any other when Smith falls for the school nurse, Joan Redfern (Jessica Hynes). And maybe Martha should’ve taken better care of the fob watch, too, because a rather odd student, Tim Latimer (Thomas Sangster, Love Actually) not only nicks it from Smith’s study, but opens it. Before long, the aliens come a knockin’ and scarecrows across the countryside start coming to life. Where is the Doctor when everyone needs him? Well, he’s something of a quivering, human mess, and the fob watch is nowhere to be seen.
“Human Nature” has a lot going for it, but much of whether it works or not comes down to David Tennant, and his ability to play someone that isn’t recognizable as the Doctor. It’s tough for a while because we aren’t even sure what he knows and doesn’t know, but as the episode moves on, it becomes clear that he’s indeed out of the loop. One of the great scenes is when he shows Joan his “Journal of Impossible Things," a chronicle of his dream state. The volume contains text and illustrations of Daleks, Cybermen, Autons, K-9, Rose (“She’s just an invention”, he says), and the TARDIS. One of the great pictures that sets most any Who nut’s heart all aflutter is the page full of old Doctors (pictured at the top of this article): Sylvester McCoy, William Hartnell, Colin Baker, Peter Davison and, oddly, Paul McGann, who’s front and center. He waxes bizarrely nostalgic with Joan in the scene (as Martha looks on), blissfully unaware of why he has these dreams, yet quite proud of their diversity and imagination. David Tennant sets John Smith a universe away from the Doctor, and his performance is the backbone of the story. To watch the man we know is the Doctor falling in love while knowing that it must ultimately not work out is heartbreaking.But lest ye think this is a simple tale of "Hey, Won’t You Play Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song," evil lurks on the periphery. It closes in on the school dance in the episode's final moments and demands that Doctor come forward, as the series issues what may be the best cliffhanger sting it’s yet unveiled.
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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: Nothing! Even a Time Lord masquerading as human needs to take a break. Sci Fi gives Doctor Who the Labor Day weekend off. Tune in in two weeks for "The Family of Blood".
Classic Who DVD Recommendation of the Week: Check out Peter Davison's first story, the M. C. Escher-inspired, "Castrovalva".
5 for the Day: Cinema of the Personal Daydream
—credited to André Bazin in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963)
Bazin may or may not have actually said or written those words, but the above quote certainly explains a great deal about the universal appeal of the movies. Most of us would probably agree that, at its best, cinema can function not just as mere escapism, but also as a way of satisfying a desire to see characters or an entire world depicted on a big screen that reflects one’s own yearnings. (Why, for instance, do some moviegoers sometimes find themselves half-admiring movie killers like Jef Costello, the lonely contract killer with the sharply honed senses in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967); or Jules and Vincent, the two talkative hit men in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994)? Often there’s just something damn cool about them that makes you want to be like them.)
Even within that particular definition of cinema at its height, however, there is a certain category of cinema that I would like to propose — what I would call (somewhat reductively) the “cinema of the personal daydream.”
What makes up a “personal daydream movie,” you might ask? It is the type of movie that inspires — whether during the movie, days afterward, or both — a mood in the viewer of wanting to linger in the film’s particular world for hours on end, in the same way one might desire to linger in a dream at night before having to wake up to eye-crust-ridden early-morning reality. It’s the kind of movie whose mood might suddenly materialize in your mind as you sit during your lunch break at work (or, in my case, in a college classroom waiting for a lecture to start). One filmmaker’s daydream, in other words, becomes your daydream. And perhaps your reaction to a filmmaker’s vision reflects deep pools of yearning that the movie touches upon, whether consciously or subconsciously.
Of course, human beings are so varied that what one might find enchanting, another might find grotesquely whimsical. Consider, for instance, these two widely diverging reactions to Michel Gondry’s recent film The Science of Sleep: Slant Magazine’s Ed Gonzalez called it a “great punk record” to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s “good pop song,” while a considerably more hostile Fernando F. Croce dismissed it as “a nightmare.” (This writer loved it, by the way.) Dreaminess is, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder, it seems, and is thus subject to the whims and desires of the individual viewer, who is free to either reject a particular movie or to embrace it — to turn it into the stuff of one’s own daydreams.
Now, I’m not talking about movies that necessarily leave you thinking about the state of the world we’re living in, films that force you to reflect on a philosophical idea, or even films that get you to ponder the nature of cinema. Personal daydream movies, rather than being intellectually enriching, are much more visceral in their long-lasting effects, and as such perhaps cannot be described so much as felt.
I think everyone has their personal daydream canon. So, to start the ball rolling, here are five films that I would consider part of mine. These are works that I sometimes find myself thinking about at random moments during the day when I feel like mentally escaping from the drudgeries of my daily routine — works that inspire a particular mood, perhaps one that I wish I could recreate in real life. These films might not have the same effect on everyone, so I’ll honestly explain what effect it has on me and why. (Honesty is important because I suspect these lists may end up suggesting more about the list maker than about the films themselves).
In no particular order:
1. Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe (2003). A strange mix of deadpan comedy, tragedy, surrealism and visual and aural poetry, this sublime, wildly original Thai film pairs two contrasting characters — a willfully withdrawn neat-freak male Japanese librarian (Tadanobu Asano), and an impulsive, messy Thai female free spirit (Sinitta Boonyasak) — as they tentatively strike up a complex companionship after both experiencing personal tragedies. That brief little plot description makes it sound like a classic screwball-comedy plot, but director Pen-ek Ratanaruang masterfully shapes the familiar elements into a time- and space-bending meditation on the ways people deal with real-world pain. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s breathtaking, expressionistic/impressionistic visual tropes and the hypnotically spare, ambient drone of the film’s electronic underscore (by Hualampong Riddim and Small Room) help to create a haunting world in which these two characters, trying to find comfort in each other as the world around them continues to turn, seem to be the only inhabitants. I haven’t forgotten this film’s beautifully moody aura of loneliness ever since I caught a glimpse of it late one solitary night on television sometime last year; sometimes I feel exactly the feeling Last Life in the Universe evokes, during those late nights when I am sitting in my room, alone and with only my thoughts of movies like this to accompany me.
2. Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels (1995). I have written at length about Wong Kar-Wai’s glorious, underrated twisted sister to Chungking Express in this House Next Door piece, but even my intellectualized ramblings on this film’s significance in the director’s body of work can’t hope to convey its sensuality. Especially for someone like me who holds a perverse curiosity toward what goes on in big-city nightlife, Fallen Angels abounds with glamorous, savory neon-lit imagery of Hong Kong at night. Combine that with a doomed, unspoken love affair between a killer and his assistant; desperate attempts at human connection in such an impersonal landscape; and a jukebox that plays both Laurie Anderson and Shirley Kwan, and you have a movie that, along with Last Life in the Universe, very nearly defines my own personal cinema of daydreams. (And is it a coincidence that Christopher Doyle lensed both films? Maybe not…) Also recommended: Wong’s 1988 debut feature As Tears Go By, a powerful Mean Streets-inspired gangster drama that can be seen as a first draft for some of the nocturnal antics in Fallen Angels.
3. Luchino Visconti’s Le Notti Bianche (1957). As perhaps one can tell from my previous two choices, I am often a sucker for tales of romantic longing among loners, and Luchino Visconti’s Le Notti Bianche (“White Nights”), based on a Dostoyevsky short story, is one of the most enchanting romantic-longing-among-loners stories I have yet seen. It is also, as other critics have noted, an important work in Visconti’s oeuvre, representing a tipping point between his early neorealist films and his vastly more stylized later works. One can immediately sense that stylization in its deliberately artificial sets and in cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno’s expressive lighting in black-and-white (a snowfall towards the end of the film is its indubitable visual highpoint). The film’s world may seem on the verge of the fantastic, but the emotions being expressed are oh-so-real: the solitary clerk Mario (Marcello Mastroianni) stops an emotionally impulsive, distraught woman, Natalia (Maria Schell), from killing herself, and as he hears her story about how she is waiting for a lover who promised to return to her a year ago, he finds himself slowly falling in love with her, maybe as much out of his own need for companionship as out of genuine affection. Well, this romantically deprived loner can certainly relate! The ending of Le Notti Bianche may be a downer, but, just as Mario is left to mere memories of his four days with Natalia, we lucky viewers are left with memories of this film’s intimate moods and opulent images.
4. Michael Mann’s
5. William Friedkin’s “Self Control” (1984). A few weeks ago, in his New York Press feature story about his music-video “introspective” at
I know, I know: some of it is cheesy in a distinctly ’80s manner, and those masked figures encounters as she wades perilously deeper into the night’s forbidding waters now seem a bit like an unfortunate forerunner to the more grandiose cheesiness of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera musical. Still, I can’t resist it any more than Laura can resist that masked man: director William Friedkin — yes, the same guy who directed The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) — pretty much put my geeky fantasies about the simultaneous allure and danger of the wild, swanky nightlife into one five-minute package. I think the song is fantastic as well — surprisingly evocative for an overproduced ’80s synth-laden pop tune — and Friedkin’s video encapsulates the meaning of the lyrics pretty well through his images.
Though these are the ones that immediately come to mind, I’m sure that as I continue along my path to become more cinematically enlightened, my personal daydream canon will expand and grow. In the meantime, I open up the floor to more pathways for future daydreaming.
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Kenji Fujishima is a contributor to The House Next Door, a Rutgers University journalism student and the publisher of My Life at 24 Frames Per Second. Read more!
Links for the Day (August 24th, 2007)
1. "Aisle View: News, plagiarizing film blog": A response to "31 Days of Spielberg" by DK Holm.
["I don’t know how many others are going to pick up on this story and pontificate on it, but one thing that needs to be said is that plagiarism of the gross kind that Mr. Arlyn engaged in is not the real problem in contemporary film criticism. There is another kind, that is more pervasive and insidious and nearly invisible. That’s the group-think that sweeps across the nation as certain reviews and reviewers set the tone and limit the terms of response to a film. What these writers are doing is plagiarizing a tone, the way the Paulettes from long ago, and even to this day, took their cues from Pauline Kael’s New Yorker reviews and her private exhortations. Plagiarists such as Mr. Arlyn are always eventually caught out. Plagiarists of the second kind never are, yet can unduly influence the fortunes of a film. In this light, perhaps it’s a good thing that no one pays attention to movie reviewers any more."]
2. "September Dawn": Haven't seen a zero star Roger Ebert review in a while...
["What a strange, confused, unpleasant movie this is. Two theories have clustered around it: (1) It is anti-Mormon propaganda to muddy the waters around the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, or (2) it is not about Mormons at all, but an allegory about the 9/11/01 terrorists. Take your choice. The problem with allegories is that you can plug them in anywhere. No doubt the film would have great impact in Darfur."]
3. "Hiroshi Teshigahara": Filmmaker & ikebana master.
["In addition to his film work, Teshigahara was also a painter, calligrapher, potter and, most significantly, a member of an important ikebana (flower arrangement) dynasty. When Teshigahara's father — Sofu Teshigahara, the founder of the Sogetsu School of ikebana — died in 1979, his filmmaker son succeeded him."]
4. "Senator and filmmaker take on Fox News": Of course you realize, this means war ... again.
["Condemning the Fox News Channel as a warmonger that's agitating for a U.S. attack on Iran, documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald and independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders announced an "online viral video campaign" Wednesday calling on television news organizations "not to follow Fox down the road to war again.""]
5. "Dean Stockwell: The Dunwich Horror": Sheila O'Malley on a horrorshow favorite.
["Dunwich Horror from 1970 has pretty much nothing to do with the HP Lovecraft story from whence/which it came - and that's a bone of contention for many people, Stockwell included. He was disappointed in how the movie came out - being a huge Lovecraft fan. But the point must be made that it is, essentially, a B-movie, with all the glory and mortification that that implies. It must not be taken too seriously, and it must be seen as an homage to Lovecraft - rather than a faithful adaptation. I think the thing is a HOOT. I love B-movies anyway - I love camp classics - I love Ed Wood's movies, for example - To me, they are the best examples of the sheer JOY of film-making. And Dunwich Horror, while it definitely has much better production values than Ed Wood's stuff, is in the same vein. It doesn't take itself too seriously - it's not ponderous or pretentious in the slightest - it doesn't worry too much about itself - it is unapologetically manipulative - and frankly, it's a blast."]
Quote of the Day:
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "Le Paradis"; Femme Fatale (2002)
Clip of the Day: The Spider-Man 3 Super Set (with awesome forgiving action!)
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Mad Men Fridays: Season 1, Episode 6 "Babylon"
"Babylon" is probably Mad Men’s most entertaining episode to date, but it’s also the most frustrating installment in the series so far. On the one hand, it’s loaded with absolutely priceless lines of dialogue and does a lot to further our understanding of several characters and relationships. On the other, it takes too many of its jokes a little too far, resulting in the largest amount of annoyingly obvious period jokes since the pilot.
The episode begins with an intriguing coda to last week’s episode: Don Draper slips on the stairs and hits his head, resulting in a brief flashback to the day his brother Adam was born in the 1920s. At first glance, it seems to recall the numerous flashbacks to Tony Soprano’s childhood that The Sopranos offered over the years, but there’s a key difference—the flashbacks in “Down Neck” and other episodes were often shown from a relatively objective POV rather than being filtered through Tony’s memory. Here, however, Don Draper and his younger self seem to make eye contact through time. It’s a hallucination, obviously, but it’s also a very effective way to convey the uneasiness of his relationship with the past and the degree to which the events of “5G” continue to haunt him, his apparent ultra-stoicism last week .
After this emotionally tense scene, "Babylon"’s comic streak becomes evident when Don and Betty’s discussion of Rona Jaffe’s 1958 novel The Best of Everything and its 1959 screen adaptation results in Don obliviously claiming that Salvatore’s affection for Joan Crawford constitutes evidence of the screen legend’s sustained beauty. The meta nature of the line makes it a bit of a groaner, but it’s also so funny and effective in context that it’s hard to begrudge Weiner the joke (the same goes for an anachronism I’ll get to way down below).
In any event, the discussion of Crawford leads Betty to revisit her mother’s death, resulting in one of the series’ rawest marital scenes to date. Don waves away his wife’s melancholy mood, saying that “mourning is just extended self-pity” and then bringing up a pygmy tribe he read about that brewed their ancestors’ ashes into beer—a beautiful metaphor for the way he relates to his past, per his binge in “Marriage of Figaro”.
At Sterling Cooper, the focus shifts to Roger Sterling, who continues to be the series’ richest character. Sterling’s wife, Mona (Talia Balsam) makes a crack about how her husband’s grey hair makes him look older than he is, a joke that sort of breaks the fourth wall—many people assume that John Slattery is around 50, but he just turned 44 or 45 (depending on whether one believes Wikipedia versus the IMDB) on August 13—indeed, he’s at least a year younger than George Clooney, the ex-husband of Balsam, Slattery’s real-life spouse.
The interplay between Joan and Sterling’s family at the office, followed by the masterfully-staged revelation of Sterling’s affair with the queen of the steno pool, is one of the series’ most elegant and intriguing sequences yet (and it gives a whole new level of meaning to Joan’s “5G” quip about Don, unlike most of the men at Sterling Cooper, being handsome enough to snare a mistress outside the office). Her remark here about how “food that close to a bed reminds me of a hospital” hints at events which may have shaped her, and she has enough great moments in this episode to make me seriously hope that she continues to be a major player.
When Joan tells Roger that she knows as much about men as he does about advertising, she’s incriminating the hell out of herself in light of how Sterling’s insight into the business has been another source of many of the series’ best lines (this week: “They always say that”, in response to the Israeli official’s remark that her ideal tourist would make as much as Don does). As in Don’s bedroom scene with Betty earlier, there’s a jokey reference to women as the equivalent of cars that can be traded in forr new models. While that’s unfortunately true where the wives and mistresses of the rich and powerful are concerned, the wisecrack is undercut by Joan’s frank description of the sense of power she derives from stringing along multiple sugar daddies. The advent of serious feminism is still a few years off, yet Joan is hardly the only woman who enjoys a significant amount of control over the men in their lives.
Salvatore’s priceless remark about Israel's most marketable quality being the local tendency toward extreme attractiveness sets up the reintroduction of Rachel Mencken when Don asks for her unvarnished insights into the Israeli mindframe. It may seem like a flimsy excuse to have lunch with her, as Don is obviously still attracted to her, but it also speaks to the cultural-sponge sensibility that makes him so good at his job. Rachel maintains the upper hand throughout the encounter both because she has knowledge Don wants an because she plays her emotional cards so close to the vest. This leads to the breathtaking scene where she reveals her feelings for Don in a phone conversation with her sister. It’s an incredibly well-written and acted scene that may just be one of the most realistic depictions of the way siblings relate to each other that I’ve ever seen in film or television. The scene ends with a blistering assessment of the social rules that bind the characters of Mad Men as tightly as the codes that govern the lives of those in Pride & Prejudice. “It’s 1960, we don’t live in a shtetl, we can marry for love,” her sister argues to Rachel. “I’m not sure people do that anymore” is the solemn reply.
Matthew Weiner definitely overplays his hand in the sequence where the Sterling Cooper secretaries serve as an impromptu lipstick focus group while the men literally watch from the peanut gallery (Pete Campbell even brings a snack!). One secretary’s bleating remark that brainstorming sounds like something difficult is inches over the foul line—it’s hard to believe that any woman could have such a low opinion of her faculties when she’s got the example of Joan walking around in front of her daily.
Joan’s covert manipulation of the focus group and titillation of Roger through the glass marks another display of her power, which we soon learn is something she guards jealously when we see her patronizing the hell out of Peggy when relaying the message that Fred Rumsen (a terrific new character played by Joel Murray) is intrigued by Peggy’s potential as a copywriter. At first glance, Rumson seems like he might be the biggest lush at Sterling Cooper (no small achievement), but he’s soon revealed as someone whose clear-eyed view of the business rivals that of Roger Sterling. Rumsen’s put-down of Ken is classic; ditto the way he uses one of Salvatore’s snarky quips as the jumping-off point for an impassioned—and convincing—explanation of why Peggy might be an advertising natural. Unfortunately, Weiner once again gilds the lily by ending with Rumsen’s too-far-over-the-top observation that observing Peggy’s insight was “like watching a dog play the piano.”
The wave of verbal wit crests in the episode’s climactic sequence, the delicious war of words between Don and Roy, the bohemian poseur with whom Midge is apparently also involved. Midge displays her power by goading the two, then sitting back and watching the sparks fly, and the lads don’t fail to put on an impressive show. The montage that follows as the beatnik poets at the club hand the stage to a corny folksinger, like the wisecracks which cross the line, is annoyingly on the nose (and the song just doesn’t seem right for a 1960 folkie, though that may just be me), but it’s redeemed by the haunting final shot of Roger and Joan in front of the hotel after their latest tryst. Ultimately, we see, Joan’s power at the office and in the boudoir means little if she can’t be seen with Roger in public. And while the liaison may provide Roger with relief from a miserable marriage, the inherent nature of the relationship means that relief will forever be superficial and short-lived. As broad as "Babylon" is at times, it ends on a note that beautifully demonstrates the level of insight that makes Mad Men so special.
Some insanely nerdy historical points:
"Babylon" is by far the most specifically dated episode of Mad Men—since Mother’s Day is the second Sunday in May, the opening scene therefore takes place on May 8, 1960. During Don and Rachel’s lunch at the Pierre, she makes reference to Adolf Eichmann having been apprehended in Argentina by Israeli agents “last week”. Eichmann was captured on May 11, 1960, but was held in a safe house for ten days before he was flown to Israel. David Ben-Gurion made Eichmann’s capture public on May 23 and it first made the New York Times the following day.
For Rachel’s statement to be correct, three weeks would need to pass in the middle of the episode, placing their lunch during the week of May 30-June 3. Even then, a scan of the Times’ online archive suggests that Israeli authorities were vague about the specifics of the capture for quite some time: On May 26, the Paper of Record ran a three-inch unbylined item commenting on a storiy in the Isreali press, which reached the conclusion that “the implication of this dispatch, which was subject to Israeli censorship, was that Eichmann was kidnapped in Brazil or Argentina.” Not until June 2 was Argentina specifically identified by the Times as the locale of Eichmann’s capture, via an AP story which tantalizingly only cites anonymous “reliable sources” as the basis of an extremely detailed account of Eichmann’s life on the lam. This would push us into the week of June 6-11 1960, two weeks after the capture first made the news and a full month past mother’s day. Instead of delving further into pretzel logic to justify Rachel’s line, it’s probably best to just conclude that Matthew Weiner screwed up.
The use of The Best of Everything is a bit off, as Rona Jaffe’s novel was published in 1958 and the screen version was released in October, 1959. The references to Exodus, however, are chronologically accurate, as the Leon Uris novel, published in 1958, was still a bestseller two years later and reached the screen in December of 1960. Unfortunately, the funniest and most stinging line of the whole episode—Joan’s invocation of Marshall McLuhan—is unfortunately an anachronism. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in which the great Canadian cultural theorist coined the phrase “the medium is the message”, was published in 1964.
Andrew Johnston is the television critic for Time Out New York.
From the editor
In the first week of August, 2007, The House Next Door asked Damian Arlyn, publisher of Windmills of my Mind, to join our bullpen. I had been meaning to extend this offer for some time, but didn't move until Damian began publishing "31 Days of Spielberg," a series of critical/biographical articles taking readers through Steven Spielberg's career, title by title. The project's ambition and the critic's lucid style convinced me and House co-editor Keith Uhlich to enlist Damian immediately and send Web traffic his way via stand-alone links to each new article.
This week, a discussion thread at Spielbergfilms.com accused Damian of taking descriptive phrases and sentences from Warren Buckland's book Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster without attribution. Damian accepted the charge and posted an explanation and apology here. He says he has corresponded with Buckland about the charges and has removed the problem articles from his site until he can "revise them so as to satisfy everyone (hopefully) that they have come from me alone and from nobody else." He intends to continue publishing "31 Days of Spielberg," picking up where the series left off.
Unfortunately, the nature of the charges means that this site can no longer endorse "31 Days of Spielberg." The House Next Door will not publish any more stand-alone links to the Spielberg series, and Damian's name has been removed from the masthead.
Links for the Day (August 23rd, 2007)
1. "Mumblecore Inc.": S.T. VanAirsdale examines the "movement."
["Sometimes the stories write themselves: A few guys make a few movies; a bunch of festivals reject them. One event rolls the dice. Why not? The films are raw, different, even good. They do it again with some of the same filmmakers the next year, along with a few new ones who work along the same inexpensive DIY lines. Those filmmakers get to know each other, collaborate on some titles the fest groups together for year three. Everyone's a little older, more seasoned, more accomplished. Ready for the world. Stop me if you've heard this one before."]
2. "The Sound You're Watching": A new project by Vinyl is Heavy's Marc Lafia.
["In some sense the phenomenon of YouTube returns us to the early days of cinema which has been referred to, before its language of narrative and editing evolve, as a cinema of attractions. In these early days when cinema was a novelty, an entrepreneur, some one like Edwin Porter (who would go on to make, The Great Train Robbery) would buy up a number of short films, go from town to town, rent a hall, publicize his event and gather up an audience for a screening. There, with his reels of film and accompanying musician, the entrepreneur who was also the projectionist, would create an order to his films, cue his music and in many cases talk over them. The entrepreneur was a story teller, our first editor, who used sound to narrativize the image."]
3. "1941 (Steven Spielberg, 1979)": Noel Vera on his love for Spielberg's much-maligned comedy.
["This is the Spielberg I love. Screw heart, screw emotion, screw attempts to even sketch a realistic human emotion (don't get me started on tackling complex moral issues in the real world); Spielberg here just has creatures and objects and vehicles bouncing off each other for two or so hours, brilliantly. It doesn't have Spielberg's usually expert pacing, carefully calibrated not to overtax the audience's attention span too much, and I love that too--it's as if for once he's beyond such calculations, as if he's too wrapped up in his need, his lust to show us something never attempted before (and never equaled since, far as I'm concerned) to care about boxoffice potential. It's as if he's starting to learn what it's like to be an artist, pushing the boundaries of what's possible--in this case, in farce. "]
4. "Google Earth to launch Sky for stargazers": From CNN.
["Popular mapping service Google Earth will launch a new feature called Sky, a "virtual telescope" that the search engine hopes will turn millions of Internet users into stargazers."]
5. "Debate grows over use of Tasers by police": But it increases the ratings points for Cops!
["Chained to a 55-gallon drum to protest the proposed development of a vacant lot, Jonathan Crowell wasn’t threatening anyone. But he refused police orders to unshackle himself and leave, so they zapped him with a Taser, then charged him with trespassing."]
Quote of the Day: Artie (Rip Torn) on The Larry Sanders Show
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "Madness"; Cowboy Bebop
Clip(s) of the Day: Jim Emerson is a cruel, cruel man for calling our attention to both these videos (nice to know that someone other than me has a Bea Arthur fetish!)
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Hannah Takes the Stairs: Three Relationships, Seen Through a DIY Lens
By Matt Zoller Seitz
“I wanted to be the funny one,” laments the title character of Hannah Takes the Stairs, “and I’m never the funny one.”
That’s not true. As played by the actress-writer Greta Gerwig, Hannah is neurotic, sweet and mildly sarcastic, in a Gen Y-Diane Keaton sort of way, and her small-stakes odyssey through three relationships is wryly observed. That said, Hannah, the third feature by the Chicago writer-director-editor Joe Swanberg, is less notable for its story than for what the movie itself represents: an evolutionary entry in the so-called Do It Yourself (or D.I.Y.) independent film movement, which is being celebrated this week in Greenwich Village in an IFC Film Center series titled “The New Talkies: Generation D.I.Y."
To read the review, click here. Read more!
Links for the Day (August 22nd, 2007)
1. "Two Weeks in Manhattan": Scott Foundas on his first year as part of the New York Film Festival selection committee. For The Reeler; above photo collage by D. Fith.
["On Monday, July 30, as I arrived in New York for my first tour of duty on the New York Film Festival selection committee, I received an e-mail announcing the death of Ingmar Bergman -- one of two devastating blows that would be suffered by the world film community before the week was out (or even half-over). A fortnight -- and some 60 or 70 movies vying for a coveted NYFF slot -- later, I felt assured that, despite the doomsday tone of many Bergman and Antonioni obits, cinema itself was still very much alive and well, and that anyone claiming otherwise simply wasn't looking very hard."]
2. "DJ Caruso is a Hack Part II": House Andrew Dignan on "Brett Ratner with a smaller train set."
["Well, it’s been a few weeks now and I’m no less resigned to the fact that New Line is on track to make a god awful adaptation of Brian K. Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man. There hasn’t been any casting rumors or script pages leaked to the net. There wasn’t one of those nifty press conferences like the ones at Comic-Con where all the actors get up on stage and talk about how excited they are to be working on the project (because deep down they really consider themselves “nerds”). I’m to assume the project is just quietly progressing behind the scenes and will just as quietly be moved into production with sickening, factory-like efficiency. This is just how things are done. The last time I addressed this issue, the brunt of my annoyance was leveled at the man hired to direct the film, D.J. Caruso of Salton Sea and Disturbia fame."]
3. "Belated R.I.P.: William Tuttle, 95, makeup artist"
["William Tuttle, longtime head of MGM's makeup department, died of natural causes July 27 in Pacific Palisades, Calif. He was 95."]
4. "Mystery of 'Poe Toaster' revealed": Quoth the newsman, "Nevermore!"
[" For decades, a mysterious figure dressed in black, his features cloaked by a wide-brimmed hat and scarf, crept into a churchyard to lay three roses and a bottle of cognac at the grave of Edgar Allan Poe. Now, a 92-year-old man who led the fight to preserve the historic site says the visitor was his creation."]
5. "Man leads quest to find best N.Y. chicken wing": The picture above is all the proof I need.
["A caravan of chicken wing lovers began a trek last weekend across New York in search of the best wings. N.Y. native Matt Reynolds, a documentary filmmaker, was leading the “Great Chicken Wing Hunt.” He planned to make a film about his findings at the trek's completion."]
Quote of the Day: Anonymous
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "Ghosts"; The House of Mirth (2000)
Clip of the Day: Good heavens, why? (Felix Baumgartner jumps from Turning Torso, Malmö, Sweden)
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
"On the Circuit": The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon)
By Keith Uhlich
Screening as part of the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, the 45th New York Film Festival, and the 2007 Woodstock Film Festival.
[Editor's Note: "On The Circuit" is a joint production of The House Next Door and Zoom In Online. For stories, trends, events, and inspiration within the creative community, please visit Zoom In Online by clicking here.]
Jean-Dominique Bauby’s story is one of struggle and perseverance. In 1995, at the age of 43, the editor of the French edition of Elle magazine fell into a stroke-induced coma, only to awaken several weeks later with a rare disorder, “locked-in syndrome,” that left him a literal prisoner in his own body. Unable to speak beyond a 90-degree twist of the head and the occasional prehistoric gurgle or grunt, Bauby could only communicate by blinking his left eyelid in response to a specially designed alphabet, forced to spell out his each and every word one letter at a time. But rather than retreat into a petrified oblivion, Bauby patiently dictated a book, a slim memoir entitled “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” that deals with his recognition and acceptance of this most likely incurable condition.
Bauby died only a few days after the French publication of the memoir, which became a critical and commercial success, in no small part, one assumes, from the saleable hook of its one-note-at-a-time composition. Perhaps it is cruel to state that Bauby’s efforts, at least in English translation, are merely competent – a compelling collection of incidents, but little more. “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” stands out from the crowd because of the circumstances of its creation, but Bauby, for all his self-expressed disdain for the Elle editorship, still writes in episodic, glossy-ready bits and pieces. Even isolated in the seaside Naval Hospital at Berck-sur-Mer, Bauby’s mind is never far removed from the palatability of weekly-mag kitsch, though, to his credit, he’s not trying to rewrite Dumas (one of his stated goals pre-stroke, given in his memoir appropriately self-deprecating context).
Julian Schnabel, however, is trying to rewrite Bauby’s own history in his film adaptation of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Reaching for the stars, he ends up with little more than a Miramaxed pastiche: The Sea Inside by way of Lady in the Lake. Robert Montgomery’s subjective camera noir provides the visual template for a good portion of Schnabel’s exercise in pretense, which, at the very least, allows cinematographer Janusz Kaminski a canted-angle, direct-address showcase. Yet Schnabel’s attempts to put us inside his subject’s head never crack the superficial surface – in this canvas he and Kaminski are mere illustrators of Bauby’s personal metaphors, literalized onscreen to unintentionally eye-rolling effect. The butterflies emerge triumphantly from National Geographic chrysalises. The diving bell, limply hanging in murky aquatic space, might be waiting for Piano-era Jane Campion to call out “Action, signifier!” By the time those heat-weakened ice floes start collapsing from the “oh humanity!” of it all, ham is most decidedly in fist.
As Bauby, the great Mathieu Amalric maintains a stoic, unshowy dignity throughout, even if his part is little more than frustrated internal voice-over and deformed, drool-spackled lip. Mostly, he’s the soul trying desperately to inhabit Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood’s shell of a protagonist, a point-of-view they’d rather force on the audience through a variety of skewed photographic tricks (dig that eyelid-sewing scene!) and a simplistic, presumptive psychology that includes sexing-up several of Bauby’s female medical attendants (despite the proceedings, the ogle-worthy Marie-Josée Croze somehow retains a grounded majesty as Bauby’s speech therapist, Henriette).
Wheeled out into the hospital corridor – and onto a balcony that he nicknames, in both book and film, Cinecittà – Bauby’s imagination wanders. The Empress Eugénie (corseted and seductive) and Vaslav Nijinsky (practicing a gravity-defying Ballets Russes routine) share space with various figures of Bauby’s past and present (the slaughter-the-pig standout: Max von Sydow, as Bauby’s shut-in father Papinou). A brief interlude with an acquaintance who Bauby once gave up an airplane seat to (the plane was later hijacked to Beirut) speaks to an unresolved personal/political guilt that Schnabel sees fit, once more, to ruin with a literal-minded fantasy re-creation, while extended excursions to the beach (present day) and to Lourdes (flashback) serve only as excuses to indulge the music supervisor’s predilections for U2 and Tom Waits. One finally longs, at some point during these various and sundry intermini, for a self-aware Chico Marxist aside: “Get your artsy-fartsy ice cream!”
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Keith Uhlich is co-editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications.
31 Days of Spielberg, Day 19: Hook (1991)
By Damian Arlyn
[From the co-editor: Since publication of this article, the author was charged with partial plagiarism. See Damian's response to the charges here, and House editor Matt Zoller Seitz's note here.]
For the first twenty years that he was making movies, Steven Spielberg was often referred to as the "Peter Pan of Hollywood," a filmmaker who simply refused to grow up, telling fantastically fun and entertaining stories with child-like sensibilities. Though this perception eventually came back to haunt him later in his career, for a long time Spielberg himself proudly wore this label (going so far as to feature a passage from J.M. Barrie's book in E.T.) and even considered doing his own adaptation of the classic tale. When Steven did finally get around to bringing a version of the Peter Pan legend to the big screen, he himself was already trying to grow up artistically and the resulting film--pardon the expression--didn't quite fly. Like Always, another disappointing effort from his "professional adolescence," one can't help but wonder what Spielberg's Peter Pan would have looked like had he made it years earlier.
To read the article, click here. House contributor Damian Arlyn is the publisher of Windmills of My Mind, where he's devoting all of August to "31 Days of Spielberg," a series of comprehensive critical articles about Spielberg's career published on 31 consecutive days. Read more!
Links for the Day (August 21st, 2007)
1. "Rescue Dawn: The Truth": A website created by family members of those involved in the story of Rescue Dawn. (Thanks to Jeffrey Overstreet for the link.)
["The movie "Rescue Dawn" began showing at select theaters in New York and Los Angeles on July 4th with national distribution on July 13th. Its director is Werner Herzog who is a master at taking nonfictional truthful scenarios and twisting them into fiction, Hollywood style. Such is the case in "Rescue Dawn" which is littered with Herzog's errors of both omission and commission."]
2. "Sniper Team Observer Winona": Exploding Kinetoscope has much love for their Winona Ryder action figure. (Thanks to Nathaniel R. for the link.)
["Alien: Resurrection: not only is it Exploding Kinetoscope's very all-time favorite Alien sequel, but it provided the only collectable action figure recreating the personage of Winona Ryder! Despite more than twenty years of nonstop movie stardom par excellence, Ryder has been captured in plastic just once, unless one stretches to include toys based on the Beetlejuice cartoon show. Why is this? Imagine the throngs who would snap up polystone statues of Veronica Sawyer from Heathers, posed with a croquet mallet and a fistful of Red Vines!"]
3. "Sinus headaches are a punishment from a just and wrathful God": A cold occasions Lance Mannion to do some political soul-searching.
["Woke up this morning with a sinus headache and the depressing certainty that the box of Advil Cold and Sinus in the medicine cabinet was empty. Nothing to do but fortify myself with a pot of coffee and set out for my bi-monthly encounter with the Patriot Act."]
4. "'Queen of mean' Leona Helmsley dies": Now rejoining the "little people" of eternity.
["Leona Helmsley, the cutthroat hotel magnate whose title as the “queen of mean” was sealed during a tax evasion case in which she was quoted as snarling “only little people pay taxes,” died Monday at age 87."]
5. "Man rides mule from Minn. to Wyo. for work": Now that's dedication.
["He rode his mule into town looking for work. No, it wasn’t the opening scene of a Western movie. It was what Rod Maday did last week, ending a six-week odyssey from his hometown of Boy River, Minn. “I’ve done about 1,500 miles and I’ve got the saddle sores to prove it,” he said."]
Quote of the Day: David Carradine, "The Kill Bill Diary"
Image(s) of the Day (click to enlarge): "Tragedy and 'Biography'"; The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918)
Clip of the Day: Bart Simpson vs. The White Stripes (See here for original point of parody.)
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Choosing the Best Non-English Foreign Language Films
In a post over at his site, House contributor Edward Copeland writes:
"Over the past several weeks, I invited (or by extension invited) various people from critics to bloggers to professors and just plain movie fans to submit lists of their top 25 non-English language features so I could compose a list for a survey of all interested film fans to determine a Top 25 list similar to what the AFI does or what the Online Film Community recently did.
I now see how difficult list compiling can be. I set a few guidelines for eligibility: 1) No film more recent than 2002 was eligible; 2) They had to be feature length; 3) They had to have been made either mostly or entirely in a language other than English; 4) Documentaries and silent films were ineligible, though I made do lists for those in the future if this goes well. In all, 434 films received votes, not counting those that had to be disqualified for not meeting the criteria.
I see now why lists can sometimes cause such headaches. We had to decide things such as whether Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns were eligible (We decided no since most people are only familiar with the English dubbed version and the American actors didn't speak in Italian.) Some people voted for Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy as a whole, while others nominated some of the films, but not the others. In the end, all three titles made the cut, though interestingly White failed to receive a single vote for it outside the trilogy votes. Then there were the differences in titles. Thanks for IMDb, which helped me avoid listing the same movie under different names. I also originally planned to have the eligible list consist of films that made at least 5% of all ballots, but soon realized that that would make pretty much every film that got at least one vote eligible, so I opted instead for films that appeared on at least three ballots.
So now the computing has been done."
To read the list, visit Edward Copeland on Film. The ballot for House publisher Matt Zoller Seitz is after the jump.
MZS' ballot: "The 20 Foreign Language Films I've Seen Most Often"
In back-and-forth emails with Ed during the creation of this poll, participants agreed to keep things as loose as possible during the early round, and define our own lists however we chose. I wanted to avoid a canonical, Greatest Films Ever Made By Human Hands type list -- a strategy that usually ends up citing the same movies that always get cited in projects like this one; so I decided to list the 20 foreign language films I've seen most often, from high school through last week. I didn't list the number of times I've seen each movie because I wasn't sure how to count partial viewings toward the total, and on top of that, my memory isn't what it used to be. Suffice to say that these movies are either endlessly inspirational works or else comfort food that I saw multiple times on first release and have never grown tired of re-watching. 
You'll notice that I've got a couple of titles that Ed definitely disqualified (two Sergio Leone westerns, shut out because the lead actors spoke English) and two classic Japanese animated features that might have gotten red-lined for the same reason (dubbing). I wasn't sure if it was appropriate to list a Chan-Wook Park film that was released in its home country in 2002 but didn't play in the United States for another couple of years -- but I did it anyway. And I went back and forth on a particular wild card -- a 2004 international co-production that was not well-liked by U.S. critics and that's not thought of, first and foremost, as a foreign language picture. But being a guy who's willing to throw away perfectly good ballot slots to make a point, I listed them all, believing that a movie's original release date should be considered its official release date (America doesn't own the calendar), and that if dubbed foreign language films were ineligible, then a hell of a lot of foreign language classics (from early Fellini to late'90s Hong Kong action pictures) would be forbidden, because that's how many U.S. viewers originally experienced them. Maybe one of these days, if Ed's not suffering carpal tunnel syndrome from this project, he'll tell me which of my picks made it through the net.
THE LIST
1. Wings of Desire
2. Yojimbo
3. I Vitelloni
3. Hard-Boiled
4. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
5. High and Low
6. For a Few Dollars More
7. La Strada
8 The Exterminating Angel
9. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
10. L'Eclisse
11. Akira
12. Mon Oncle
13. Breathless
14. City of Lost Children
15. The Passion of the Christ
16. The Best Intentions
17. My Life as a Dog
18. Belle de Jour
19. Seven Samurai
20. Princess Mononoke
31 Days of Spielberg, Day 18: Always (1989)
By Damian Arlyn
[From the co-editor: Since publication of this article, the author was charged with partial plagiarism. See Damian's response to the charges here, and House editor Matt Zoller Seitz's note here.]
In February of 1989 (shortly before the release of Last Crusade), Spielberg’s three-and-a-quarter year marriage to actress Amy Irving came to an end. The filmmaker who for so long had told stories about divorce, having endured the separation of his parents when he was younger, had now experienced one of his own. Needless to say, it was devastating to Spielberg, but he continued to pour himself into his work (as he had done for twenty years by this point) and his latest project was a remake of one of his favorite movies: Victor Fleming’s 1943 A Guy Named Joe with Spencer Tracy (glimpsed briefly on a TV in Poltergeist). As with every film in his career, the emotional tenor of Spielberg’s personal life affected his art and in this case, unfortunately, not in a positive way. Spielberg had wanted to remake Fleming’s film for a long time and it is possible, even likely, that had Spielberg made Always several years earlier it would have been a very different, and probably much better, movie.
To read the article, click here. House contributor Damian Arlyn is the publisher of Windmills of My Mind, where he's devoting all of August to "31 Days of Spielberg," a series of comprehensive critical articles about Spielberg's career published on 31 consecutive days. Read more!
Big Love Mondays: Season 2, Ep. 11, "Take Me As I Am"
By Todd VanDerWerff
After the end of the penultimate episode of Big Love’s second season, “Take Me As I Am,” I thought the episode’s final shots, showing a knot of rattlesnakes lying beneath the covers of a perfectly made bed, was a little over-the-top as a symbol. But as I thought about it more, I realized the snakes are the perfect representation of every part of the Henrickson family’s life. On the surface, everything is pristine and perfect. As long as Bill (Bill Paxton) and his wives keep those smiles on their faces, they’ll get through anything and emerge on the other side the perfect, polygamist family. But that placid surface has been shown to have its wriggling bumps this season, and when you pull back the covers, you find something poisonous and potentially lethal. Some of these snakes are external, the sort that you can avoid, rebuff or wait out (from the threats to the family from Alby Grant (Matt Ross) to the family’s outing at the end of season one). But some of the snakes are internal, not so easily repaired, from Barb’s (Jeanne Tripplehorn) fears about how she’s harmed her family to Margie’s (Ginnifer Goodwin) fears of being marginalized as the third wife (tonight she even implies that she is little more than a baby machine to Barb). The actual, physical snakes are easily dealt with. But the idea that the marriage bed is poisoned, that the very security of your home is threatened, is more deep-rooted and far less easy to shake. In putting the snakes in the bed, Big Love found its own way of aping that famous shot from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet where the camera pans down into the roots of those perfectly manicured lawns to see the writhing, natural pandemonium at suburbia’s heart.
The episode largely focuses on Barb’s emotional pain and desire to put things back to the way they were before Bill took a second wife, while also keeping the things she likes about her polygamist lifestyle (namely, her two sister wives and their children). The whole season has been about reinforcing to her that this is impossible, as well as showing her that she lied to herself many years ago when she told herself she was fine with Bill’s decision. By ceding control to him, she ceded control of so many other things. Now, her attempts to get some control back threatens to roil and upset the family. On any other show, the way that this has been repeatedly drummed into the audience’s head would be tiring by now, but Big Love gets away with it because it’s believable (Barb's journey this season has seemed to be about coming to terms with the sheer volume of her self-deception), thematically apt (on a show about the lies we tell and the compromises we make to get by in suburbia) and well-acted (I know all of the buzz this summer is about Glenn Close on Damages, but I’d rather see next year’s Emmy trophy go to the remarkable Tripplehorn any day -- every week, you see more and more of her façade crumble ever so briefly before she realizes what’s happening and reassembles it). This week, Barb is finally asked point-blank by her mother (Ellen Burstyn, turning in fine work as a mainline Mormon “liberal”) if she’s going to leave Bill. She finally says she isn’t, but the long pause before she answers lets you know that the question has crossed her mind and that this leave-taking may be more permanent than the season premiere’s separation. (Speaking of which, is that a season finale I see on the horizon?)
We’ve gotten some broad hints over the run of the show that Barb’s decision to let Bill take other wives put her in opposition to her family. Now, we finally find out why. Barb’s mother is one of those people every conservative religious group has -- someone who doesn’t like the way things are run in the religious body, but loves it too much to leave and thus advocates for change. She’s fought to get women more recognition from the church. She's recognized her sister (a lesbian) and kept inviting her to family gatherings. And she’s perfectly willing to unseal herself from her first husband (Barb’s father, apparently dead), whom she was unhappily married to, to wed a new man (Philip Baker Hall, in a great cameo), even though this might mean she’s cut off from her children and other family members in eternity. (The Mormon faith believes that family units exist eternally, so when a wife and husband leave their families to become one, you really have to mean it -- hence the idea of being sealed in the temple. I’m sure there are contrarian scholarly opinions on this matter, and I hope you’ll share them in the comments if you know of them.) So Barb’s rejection of her faith to follow Bill toward the principle is more than just typical family religious squabbling; it, in essence, means that both women believe the other is destined for a very different afterlife (as Barb’s mother puts it, she’s responsible for Barb’s eternal soul; her failure to save Barb from a polygamist life isn’t just normal motherly concern -- it can mean damnation). Also, since Barb’s mother spent much of her life railing against the patriarchy of the church, it feels like a slap in the face to have her strong, independent daughter enter the ultimate patriarchal situation. The scene at the end of the episode, where Barb confesses that she doesn’t know if she’ll know her mother in eternity, but would love to know her in the here and now, was heartbreaking, and hopefully opens more doors for Barb’s family to enter storylines in future episodes and seasons.
In general, the scenes at the wedding are the strongest of the episode. Barb tries to save her son (now dating Juniper Creek twins) by sending him off on a trip with her mother and her new husband, but Ben (Douglas Smith) quickly catches on and grows angry, even as his sister Sarah (Amanda Seyfried) tries to talk him out of his new determination to live the principle. Sarah has a great scene with her father as well, where she tries to tell him that she won't ever consider what he thinks because of how disastrously some of his decisions have played out. He quietly and calmly gains dominance over the conversation by making her put on a placid surface to wave to her mother. The comedy works very well at the wedding as well, as Margie takes umbrage at being left to sit in the car while Bill goes inside to work things out with Barb and ends up roped into staying for a while. Perhaps Barb’s family is played as too judgmental when it comes to Bill and Barb (especially Barb’s sister), but it stands as a nice contrast to many of the “You’re a polygamist? Well, that’s OK!” scenes that have popped up this season. One of the things most wounding to anyone in a conservative religious creed (or any creed that professes to know the sole way to get to Heaven) is to have a close family member leave that creed in favor of something else, and Barb’s family’s judgment (especially of Bill) seems to believably stem from that place. What’s more, much of this plays as welcome comic relief in an episode filled with drama (particularly a young girl asking Bill if he enjoyed his apostasy).
The rest of the episode is not as compelling as the wedding, but, then, the rest of the episode takes a definite sideline to the wedding storyline. While there is more intrigue at Juniper Creek (especially as Alby plants seeds of doubt in Nicki’s (Chloë Sevigny) mind about whom was behind her father’s shooting, implicating Bill in the process) and while there is a story about Sarah’s boyfriend sleeping around with other girls (she eventually decides it’s OK, largely because Nicki speaks with her about her chastity and because she’s mad at her father for interfering in the matter), the majority of the episode is set at or around the wedding. By focusing its story on the heartbreak between one mother and one daughter, Big Love is able to tie in its other storylines more readily (the show often feels as if it is stitched together from pieces of many different series -- not so tonight). And by setting everything at a wedding, one of those places where families get together to bury old grievances in favor of putting on a happy face, Big Love is able to more aptly suggest that the snakes are underneath the covers, ready to strike and seize you by the throat.
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.
Links for the Day (August 20th, 2007)
1. "Korea, Beyond the Blockbusters": Simon Abrams reports on the sixth annual New York Korean Film Festival for The Reeler.
["No one loves movies the way South Koreans do. To American audiences, it seems extraordinary for a new film to approach the figures of national box office record-holders like Star Wars or Spiderman. And yet since 1999, at least one film per year has breached the South Korea’s all-time top-10 gross list. Successes in 2006 looked to make it a red-letter year as Bong Joon-ho's The Host, the current highest grossing film in
South Korean history, led a handful of domestic blockbusters including Kim Yong-hwa’s 200 Hundred Pounds Beauty (#9) and
Lee Jun-ik’s The King and the Clown (#2). However, according to an article from Hankyoreh, a noted South Korean
newspaper, only about 13 of the 108 Korean films released last year enjoyed such returns, while Variety reports that the rate of exports this
year has plummeted to two-thirds of last year’s number."]
2. "Bears eat man at beer festival": Guess he went and made a Boo-Boo.
["A 23-year old Serb was found dead and half-eaten in the bear cage of Belgrade Zoo at the weekend during the annual beer festival. The man was found naked, with his clothes lying intact inside the cage. Two adult bears, Masha and Misha, had dragged the body to their feeding corner and reacted angrily when keepers tried to recover it. "There's a good chance he was drunk or drugged. Only an idiot would jump into the bear cage," zoo director Vuk Bojovic told Reuters."]
3. "Sen. Leahy lands role in Batman movie"
["Holy Beltway, Batman! Sen. Patrick Leahy has a part in the next Batman movie. "I don't wear tights," the Vermont Democrat said."]
4. "The SLIFR Forum: Critics on Critics": Join the discussion at Dennis Cozzalio's blog, already in progress.
["So, what are you thinking about as you read these pieces and consider these questions, these writers and their thoughts? The SLIFR Forum is open! And by the way, don't get me wrong-- I think Anton Ego is a hero."]
5. "Unsteadicam chronicles": David Bordwell joins the shaky-cam discussion.
["I’m not against handheld styles as such, and even Late Tony Scott Rococo can have its virtues. Yet I find the style as practiced by Greengrass to be pretty incoherent and nowhere near as engaging as most critics claim. It just seems too easy. But then, I think that certain standards of filmmaking craftsmanship have pretty much vanished, and the run-and-gun trend is one more symptom of that. Given the praise heaped on The Bourne Ultimatum, however, things are unlikely to change. Next time you head to the movies, you might want to bring your Dramamine."]
Quote of the Day: Salman Rushdie
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "Jesus Wept"; Hellraiser (1987)
Clip of the Day: A Tokyo wave pool. (Where'd all the water go?)
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Links for the Day (August 19th, 2007)
1. "Superbad; or, WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE": Superbad takes Brendon Bouzard to an introspective place.
["You ever have one of those gut check moments when you’re watching a film and you realize how much it’s forcing you to reevaluate yourself and what you’re doing? I had one of those last night at a 10:45 screening of Greg Mottola’s Superbad."]
2. "ennui the door": Tucker of PilgrimAkimbo on Antonioni.
["The recent deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, on the same day no less, highlighted two realizations for me: 1) I am, in many ways, a "high modernist" in my aesthetic tastes and passions, and 2) the prevalent and particular questioning of the concepts of truth and hope found in high modernism seems to have disappeared as a noble pursuit. In other words, I long for the days (which were before my time) when artists and filmmakers saw the modern, industrialized, nuclear world as harsh and bleak, but believed that art could truly change that world for the better - even if only by asking the tough questions. (Of course we all imagine the past as we wish.) Today, artmaking is too often viewed cynically, that is, there is no point in tackling the grander themes, rather art is merely about what is only personal and private, and therefore essentially non-transferable, and therefore merely kitsch. That filmmaking can no longer change the world seems to be the prevailing perspective."]
3. "Naked people pose on Swiss glacier": Sexy-ska.
["Hundreds of naked people formed a “living sculpture” on Switzerland’s Aletsch glacier Saturday, hoping to raise awareness about climate change."]
4. "Barack Obama gets name-dropped in hip-hop": What's the word, B-Rock?
["Vibe magazine has dubbed him "B-Rock." He's getting shout-outs in some of the most popular hip-hop singles of the summer. He's even had a high-profile meeting with Ludacris."]
5. “The Born Ultimatum”: The Jason Bourne films as pro-life trilogy.
["Our story begins, not surprisingly, in the middle of a body of water, where our hero has mysteriously been found. For some reason he seems agitated. As he swallows the amniotic fluid he seems to have the hiccups. This unidentified unborn baby has been discovered – but what will happen next?"]
Quote of the Day: China Blue (Kathleen Turner) in Crimes of Passion
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "Torpedo Thighs"; The Indian Tomb
Clip of the Day:: Neil! The Drum Solo of Life!
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
31 Days of Spielberg, Day 17: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
By Damian Arlyn
[From the co-editor: Since publication of this article, the author was charged with partial plagiarism. See Damian's response to the charges here, and House editor Matt Zoller Seitz's note here.]
For years after the divorce of his parents, Spielberg had a contentious relationship with his father Arnold (the resentment being reflected in his films through the recurring theme of an irrelevant, absentee or even abusive father). Finally, after many years, Steven and Arnold reconciled in what the director has called as a “tremendous coming together”: a meeting of the hearts and of the minds between a father and a son. Thus, when the time came to make the third--and presumably final--Indiana Jones adventure, once again, Spielberg’s own life informed his work and he had the idea of including Indiana’s father in the story in a big way. Far from being a mere “gimmick” (as it was in Richard Donner's Maverick) this decision enriched the Indy character by providing more history than had been thus far (although Raiders did reveal some background too) and also creating another significant character in the world/life of Indiana Jones. As a result, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, while it may not have been the best, most balanced or even most exciting of the three Raiders films, was by far the most dramatic, the deepest and, from the perspective of Spielberg, the most personal.
To read the article, click here. House contributor Damian Arlyn is the publisher of Windmills of My Mind, where he's devoting all of August to "31 Days of Spielberg," a series of comprehensive critical articles about Spielberg's career published on 31 consecutive days. Read more!
When did Peter Berg become a better filmmaker than Michael Mann?
By Andrew Dignan
An intentionally inflammatory headline, and not entirely accurate, but it’s worth exploring if only in the “what have you done for me lately” vein. At 43, Berg is a relatively young man to have already directed four features, all the more impressive when you consider he worked as a successful character-actor for almost ten years before making 1998’s sophomoric, but loved in some circles, “dark comedy” Very Bad Things. Since then Berg directed the underrated The Rundown which has the dubious distinction of being the only film in history where The Rock and Arnold Schwarzenegger share screen time together and the well-liked Friday Night Lights which has spawned a critically adored television show that he also executive produces.
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To read the rest of the article at Andrew's blog, Punitive Superego, click here.
Links for the Day (August 18th, 2007)
1. "Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up": Errol Morris' New York Times article on the identity of the man in the infamous Abu Ghraib photograph.
["It was arguably one of the least newsworthy pictures in the world, if only because it had already been seen by everybody. And yet, on March 11, 2006, The New York Times published on the front page of the first section, upper left-hand corner, a photograph of a man holding the photograph that had been seen around the world. Ali Shalal Qaissi, the man in the Times photograph (below) had told a group of human rights workers that he was “The Hooded Man” or “The Man on the Box.”"]
2. "Art Film Pissing Contest": Glenn Kenny joins the Bergman fray in his own inimitable way.
["I didn't comment on Jonathan Rosenbaum's New York Times op-ed "Scenes From An Overrated Career" for a variety of reasons, the first of which is that I came to it a little late. Second, just reading the headline made my stomach sink. I got a mental picture of a meeting of the Times' op-ed staff, and some callow dickwad saying, "Hey, you know how everyone's saying how great Ingmar Bergman was? Why don't we run a piece saying that he sucked?" and heads bobbing wildly in agreement. Jeez. The guy's not even in his grave yet by then, probably. But you know these Times types—they all like to think they're Rick James, bitch, right after hitting Charlie Murphy in the forehead. "That was—'Coooold Blooded'!! Ha!" In other words, I was repelled by precisely the kind of forced, fake-ass "contrarianism" that animates the 85% worthless e-mag Slate."]
3. "Hey, baby — will you marry me?": Guaranteed they blame this on the Clintons.
["Thanks to one little misplaced word, it appears that people of any age can legally be married in Arkansas, with parental consent."]
4. "The Moment I 'Got' Ingmar Bergman": By E.W.'s Owen Gleiberman.
["When it came to watching Bergman's films, I passed through various phases, and I have a feeling that I wasn't alone. Here, in fact, is what I think of as the Four Stages of Watching Bergman:"]
5. "At Netflix, Victory for Voices Over Keystrokes": Just don't call them 'operators.'
["Ms. Funk is one of 200 customer service representatives at the Netflix call center here, 20 miles west of Portland, where she is on the front lines of the online movie rental company’s efforts to use customer service as a strategic weapon against Blockbuster’s similar DVD-mailing service."]
Quote of the Day: Gian Vincenzo Gravina
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "Pardon", Claire's Knee
Clip of the Day: I want what this guy's smoking
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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.
Doctor Who, Season Three, Ep. 7: "42"
“42” seems to have a few elements working against it: It’s highly reminiscent of “The Impossible Planet”/“The Satan Pit” from Season Two. It coincidentally echoes the movie Sunshine (which was released some time after this was scripted & shot). It spews rapid-fire technobabble that’s nearly impossible to keep up with. Yet it’s got a massive positive: Its real-time countdown gives it an entertaining, gut-wrenching urgency, so the negatives don’t really matter.
I’ve viewed the episode three times now, but I’m not even going to pretend I understand half of the goings-on -- it unfolds at a breakneck pace (accompanied by some great work from composer Murray Gold), and much of it seems designed only to keep the roller coaster on the track. Despite its seeming complexity, isn’t it really a pretty simple piece? The TARDIS materializes onboard a cargo ship plummeting toward a sun. The Doctor, Martha and the ship’s crew have 42 minutes to avert the disaster, whilst also staving off a couple of infected crewmembers (including the captain’s husband), who’ve been turned into space zombies uttering the battle cry, “Burn with me”.
In the midst of the frenetic tale, Martha (Freema Agyeman) manages to spend a few minutes with her mother Francine (Adjoa Andoh). Thanks to the Doctor upgrading her cell phone to “Universal Roaming” status (just like he did for Rose), Martha’s now able to call home whenever the mood takes her. What Martha doesn’t know is that the shady government goons employed by Mr. Saxon are listening in on the calls -- and Francine’s invited them to do so from her living room. Again, this woman’s a far cry from Jackie Tyler, who’d rather have gone to prison than sell out her daughter.Martha also manages to make some time with one of the crewmembers, Riley (William Ash) and the episode’s strongest sequence begins with the pair being jettisoned off the ship in an escape capsule. “42” is loud, but suddenly the sound and music cuts off altogether as the Doctor screams at Martha from the ship, and she looks back at him from the capsule. The silence of space is given a fantastic nod here as he repeatedly mouths to her, “I’ll save you!” – from Martha’s POV it’s just dead quiet. Martha’s faith in the Doctor is put to the test here. She wants to believe that he will save her, but the entire scenario looks pretty bleak, especially when you’re hurtling into a sun.
The Doctor of course does save her, but not without an immense amount of testing of his physical endurance. He’s forced to don a space suit and climb out onto the ship's exterior. It’s a thrilling sequence that seems as if it couldn’t possibly get any more intense – but it does, when the Doctor, too, becomes infected. David Tennant’s at the top of his game here and I think I’ve said before that there’s just something about seeing the Doctor in unbearable pain that always gets to me. His cries of “I’m scared. I’m so scared” are genuinely unnerving and when he begins babbling to Martha about the possibility of this “process” he might go through if he dies, you almost wonder if he will. Any story that tests the Doctor’s resolve to this degree gets high marks from me.
The sun is actually a living organism, which should please fans who tire of the bipedal alien of the week. Coupled with the revelation that the entire scenario was Captain McDonnell’s (Michelle Collins) fault makes for an innovative finale and her self-sacrifice, while deliriously over the top, is a fitting exit for the character who didn’t want to go on living anyway with her husband’s blood on her hands. Last season I often complained about the deus ex machina resolutions of many of the episodes. There seems to be much less of that this season. Even if the resolutions aren’t always 100% sound, it feels as if the writing team is trying harder to tell good stories and not assume viewers will eat up any ending thrown out there as long as there are plenty of monsters and ‘splosions along the way.Any TV episode is better without commercials, but “42” is one piece of television that must be severely hampered by words from our sponsor. (I’ve only seen it without interruption -- hopefully somebody will chime in and talk about the Sci Fi broadcast.) The title’s clever spin on the series 24 demands that it play out in real time and network pimping of fast food chains can only hurt the manner in which the piece is constructed and plays out. It’s also a great companion piece to last week’s “The Lazarus Experiment”. They have a major yin and yang thing going on. Together they squarely occupy the middle of the season and it’s this sort of episodic pairing that makes Doctor Who so unique. If one were experiencing the series for the first time through these two episodes, it’d be tough to believe they’re part of the same series, much less the same story arc.
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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: Season Three hits its final stretch with deadly scarecrows, creepy aliens and the Doctor’s discovery of what it means to be human in “Human Nature”. (Don't miss this one, kids!)
Classic Who DVD Recommendation of the Week: Pick up where last week’s recommendation left off -- see Tom Baker regenerate into Peter Davison in “Logopolis”…the story that taught the teenage me all about entropy.
Things that Go Burble in the Night: Them
By Matt Zoller Seitz
The eerie suggestiveness of the French-Romanian fright flick Them — an almost-real-time thriller, set in and around a besieged house in the woods — seems less old-fashioned than classical. The movie revels in atmosphere, using long unbroken takes and ambient sound (crickets, wind) to lull you into complacency before unleashing nerve-jangling shocks. And yet even the most frightening moments aren’t as punishingly literal as are those of today’s norm. The directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud have reached past the current splatter-flick fad and cherry-picked devices from Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski and early Steven Spielberg (particularly Duel and Jaws, two masterworks of strategic concealment). The elliptical editing, plentiful medium-distance compositions and haunted-house sound effects (rustling leaves, snapping twigs) obscure the physical facts of menace and violence. Imagination fills in the blanks.
To read the rest of the review, click here. Read more!
Death ’n’ Yucks, Hallucinogens ’n’ Stiff Upper Lips: Death at a Funeral
By Matt Zoller Seitz
There’s no dearth of rude humor on screens right now, but Death at a Funeral stands apart because its characters — mostly reserved upper-middle-class British folk who have gathered to bury a patriarch — are determined to keep a stiff upper lip no matter what. That’s no small feat when one of the mourners has ingested a psychedelic drug and another is secretly holding a would-be blackmailer hostage in a room mere meters from where the body lies in state.
To read the review, click here. Read more!
Friday, August 17, 2007
Mad Men Fridays: Season 1, Episode 5, "5G"
“Donald Draper? What kind of name is that?”
That explosion you just heard was the sound of the skulls of several hundred Mad Men fans erupting, Scanners-style, from the stress of trying to make chronological sense of Don Draper’s life given what we learn of his past in “5G”. We’ll deal with the continuity issues in due course, but suffice it to say that, pending future revelations, a whole lotta fanwank is required. But first, on to the story itself....
“5G” makes it official: Don Draper, in a past life (almost literally, since he apparently faked his own death) was Dick Whitman. “It’s not me,” Don tells Adam Whitman (Jay Paulson), the sad-sack janitor who turns up at Sterling Cooper after seeing a photo in Advertising Age of the man who used to be his older brother. Indeed, while many viewers over at Television Without Pity have been quick to conclude that Don is a cold, cold guy on the basis of his treatment of Adam, I’m inclined to think that his behavior is more the result of cognitive dissonance. Dick Whitman’s transformation into Donald Draper is so complete that, as we saw in “Marriage of Figaro”, the tiniest crack in the facade is enough to send him on a huge bender. In "5G", the gig is very close to being up--both because of Adam’s arrival and because Peggy learns of Don’s affair with Midge and then reveals it to Joan (Christina Hendricks), which she really shouldn’t have done. Even if Adam never appears again, Peggy’s knowledge that Don was up to something when he slipped out for lunch--knowledge Don is entirely ignorant of--will surely have consequences down the line.
Once again, because of Don’s lack of a Jennifer Melfi figure--or even a good friend--it’s impossible to tell what’s going on in his head after Adam surfaces. This, of course, makes it possible for viewers to assume that Don’s going to shoot his brother (technically, they’re half-brothers, as this week’s episode strongly implies and next week’s makes clear). Certainly, there are few reasons to doubt that Don has the intestinal fortitude required of a killer--it would come as no surprise to learn that he’s killed men on the battlefield--he’s also smart enough to know that he’d never get away with the cold-blooded murder of Adam in a flophouse where dozens of fellow occupants would hear a gunshot. There’s the slightest twinge of actual affection in the brothers’ embrace in room 5G, which probably comes more from their status as mutual survivors of what was presumably a very brutal household than it does from any blood tie.
So much of what happens to Don in "5G" hinges on information that has yet to be revealed that it’s premature to evaluate the episode within the context of the series. Even so, the story works surprisingly well as a self-contained piece—like “Marriage of Figaro”, it provides strong evidence of the influence of short-story writers—most specifically John Updike and John Cheever—on the direction of the show. On the subject of short stories, the B plot about Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Stanton) being pubished in The Atlantic Monthly is a gem. Ken is the junior executive about whom we’ve learned the least, so the fact that he’s a writer—and a productive one—is as surprising to us as it is to Pete Cooper and Paul Kinsey. Pete’s reaction—he’s envious enough to seriously consider pimping his wife to her ex-fiance to get published—builds on “New Amsterdam” in interesting ways. It’s possible to read Pete’s reaction as the result of entitlement, but probably more accurate to take it as additional evidence of a burning desire to make it on his own and prove himself to his father (who reads The Atlantic), even if doing so requires stooping to extreme sleaziness. Paul’s response is funnier, and makes me love the character even more. He clearly fancies himself the smartest guy—and the most frustrated artiste—among the ranks of the junior execs, and it’s equally obvious that his high opinion on himself isn’t based on any actual work (Don’s probably on the money about Paul with his amendment to Roger’s crack about everyone at the agency having a very small percentage of an unfinished novel in their desks). And lord almighty, does his story about that night with those “negroes” in Jersey City sound terrible or what? His I-can’t-believe-I-said-that-out-loud reaction to Ken’s description of his two (!) novels (“Those don’t even sound stupid!”) is one of the series’ funniest moments to date, and it—along with incidents in the next two episodes—helps an important aspect of the series come into focus. My friend Charles B. François has always maintained that The Sopranos was, above all, a comedy of manners, and it’s increasingly obvious that this is the case with Mad Men as well.
Some miscellaneous points:
Continuity-wise, the big issue with "5G" is reconciling the amount of time Don would need to rise to his position at Sterling Cooper with him having joined the army at seventeen or eighteen (I’m going to go out on a limb and assume he voluntarily enlisted as a means of leaving home) and being a veteran of the Korean war rather than WWII. It only makes sense if you figure Don spent a fair amount of time in the service, (which isn’t a huge stretch if he indeed signed up as a means of escape). Figure he enlisted in mid-late 1946 after reaching the age when he could do so, then was sent to Korea pretty early in the conflict—while still Richard Whitman--and then, after seeing a fair amount of action and getting wounded, was honorarily discharged as Donald Draper before the end of 1950. I’m imagining a scenario in which he was the only survivor of a patrol that got wiped out and who, before being rescued, donned (no pun intended) the uniform of a dead-and considerably more privileged—comrade. If the real Don Draper already had a college degree, this could give him nine years in the trenches at SC, which seems about right—though of course the unanswered question of how much of Don’s résumé has been spun out of whole cloth gives Matthew Weiner a fair amount of wiggle room. I didn’t see last week’s behind-the-scenes segment, but some fans were apparently annoyed that Weiner and/or Jon Hamm offered up the “spoiler” that Don is an orphan. That may turn out to be a vicious tease—yes, Don Draper may be an orphan (it’d certainly have made his identity easier to steal), but Richard Whitman obviously lived with his stepmother until he was around 18, and his biological father was in the picture until he was at least 10 (his presumed age at the time of Adam’s birth). For this to work, Don would be around 33 and Adam 23, which doesn’t quite jibe with the actors’ apparent ages (I read somewhere that Hamm is 36; Jay Paulson looks more like he’s in his late 20s), but we’ll pretty much have to live with it.
The sum that Don gave Adam--$5000—gives the episode title a neat double meaning (in addition to the room number, it’s shorthand for “five grand”), and in today’s money that comes out to about $33,000 and change. It was also the average annual US salary then, and it’s not too far removed from that of today (the most recent median number I can find is around $43K; factor in differences and buying power and it probably all evens out). Of course, Don’s ability to produce the money nicely dovetails with the thinking behind the Liberty Capital “executive private” account that serves as "5G"’s Product of the Week. His inclination to keep that much cash lying around suggests it might have been a personal safety net for him to hightail it on if his secret was exposed—or, like his beer drinking in “Marriage of Figaro”, it could be read as a sign of the culture he grew up in (a child of the depression might have a gut distrust of banks that wouldn’t be there for someone who grew up as privileged as, say, Roger Sterling did).
Finally, the choice of The Atlantic as the magazine with Ken’s story resonated with me on a personal note, since a few years ago I was dumbstruck upon learning that my father had published a poem in the magazine right around that time (well, in ’64 or ’65). Dad downplayed his accomplishment when I made the discovery (“they just put it in this section where they ran light verse and stuff, it was a funny piece and not a ‘serious’ poem”, etc), but it nonetheless completely changed the way I think about him. That one-off publication in The Atlantic was the end as well as the beginning of Robert C. Johnston’s professional literary career; Kenneth Cosgrove, I’m assuming, will ultimately prove to be somewhat more successful.
Andrew Johnston is the television critic for Time Out New York. Read more!
Eclipse Series 5: The First Films of Samuel Fuller
By Keith Uhlich
Tempting as it is to describe Samuel Fuller as the cinema’s brute poet, the three films included on The Criterion Collection’s fifth Eclipse series (“The First Films of Samuel Fuller”) encourage a more multifaceted reading. Whether working as reporter or soldier, Fuller always had his hand in the arts, and he might be the living epitome of that old John Ford/Liberty Valance saw: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” His autobiography, A Third Face, pushed several friends and colleagues to an enthusiastic epiphany (“Sam Fuller won World War II!”) that I’m sure the stogie-chomping stalwart would have basked in for a delirious moment or two. But guaranteed the seriousness of his experiences would have intruded on this hypothetical reverie; for all his gruff joie de vivre, there’s a concomitantly profound sense of sadness underlying each and every shot of Fuller’s cinema.
As both reporter and soldier, he was no doubt trained to bear witness to the moment, and it is this, more than anything, that ensured his long-standing B-level status among the cinema cognoscenti. Fuller isn’t one for making artful, mock-definitive statements about the world we live in – when he gets polemical (as in the explicit racial commentary of The Steel Helmet, one of the films included in this set), his observations tend to be intentionally rough around the edges, treading bitter, defeatist misanthropy. As a liberator of the concentration camps, Fuller certainly saw his fair share of the evil that humans do, and the majority of his films suggest that such collective dis-ease is ongoing, never-ending. Contented happiness, if it comes, is either a deceptive load of bullshit or merely a momentary uplift of the soul, unique to the individual experiencing it (and how often this latter incidence occurs, for Fuller’s characters, at the point of dying).
I Shot Jesse James (1949) provides one such example of this. Fuller’s debut feature is remarkable for its sophisticated and intuitive treatment of a famed tale of the Old West, viewing Robert Ford’s (John Ireland) cowardly assassination of his friend and fellow thief Jesse James (Reed Hadley) as a quintessentially gay love story. Of I Shot Jesse James’ producer, Robert L. Lippert, Fuller observed, “[he was] too uptight to even pronounce the word homosexual,” and Fuller most certainly used this instinctive fear (one not only limited to his business partner) to his advantage. It’s not so much the explicit nature of some of the film’s allusions (James asking Ford to wash his back; the assassination itself, shot in such a way as to evoke rape) as it is Ireland’s interiorized performance and Fuller’s matter-of-fact mise en scene (complete with ripped-from-the-headlines transitional montages) that solidifies I Shot Jesse James’ accomplishments.
It would be enough for some artists to challenge the status quo by aligning audience sympathies with a murderer, but Fuller goes deeper into his protagonist’s tortured psyche, uncovering a sublimated sense of love that only finds expression as climax to his death rattle. Otherwise, Robert Ford walks around like an empty shell of a man, shunned by the community at large; forced, by monetary need, to re-enact James’ murder onstage; rejected by his actress girlfriend Cynthy Waters (Barbara Britton), who seems less put off by the murder itself than by the implication of something untoward underlying Ford’s actions. Fitting that it is she who hears his dying confession (“I’m sorry for what I done to Jess. I loved him.”) and that Fuller sees fit to exit the film on this decidedly bitter moment out of time. Like a ground-in punctuation mark closing out a frenetically hand-written confession, it packs a wallop.
In contrast, Fuller’s second feature, The Baron of Arizona (1950) is all thumbs, as much a forgery as the one perpetrated by its protagonist James Addison Reavis (Vincent Price). Price can get his freak on with the best of them, and he’s justified in declaring Reavis one of his all-time favorite roles. But his assaying of this charismatic con artist (who creates a detailed rock-paper-people trail that ascribes to he and his heirs full ownership of the state of Arizona) is strangely muted within Fuller’s muddled whole. The Baron of Arizona is a globetrotter, traversing a poverty row-forged path from the United States’ harsh western countryside to a puzzle-box Spanish monastery (where books are chained up for their own protection) and back again. Yet it never attains the hypnotic precision of Fuller’s best work (the psychologically charged sense of a nightmare unfolding), and this despite the presence of master cinematographer James Wong Howe, working for chiaroscuro-evocative scale.
But Fuller’s next film (the final one in this set) is an indisputable masterpiece. The Steel Helmet (1951) is a fever dream of the Korean War, entirely possessed of its own unique, inimitable rhythms. Gene Evans’ gruff, cigar-chomping Sergeant Zack acts as de facto head of a ragtag assemblage of soldiers and hangers-on only a few steps removed from complete caricature. The film is primarily a series of clashes between skin color, physiognomy, ideology, and attitude, but what separates this from the liberal pieties of lesser filmmakers is Fuller’s masterful abstraction of the landscape in which these confrontations occur. A battle with snipers in a fog-shrouded forest seems to go on for an eternity – it goes past the point of exhaustion to a disquieting place of hyper-awareness. Like a virus, it infects each and every subsequent action so that, say, a booby-trapped explosive packs all the numbing, horrific punch that it should – it’s not merely a punctuating, manipulative grace note; it resonates with all that has come before and all that is yet to be.
The Steel Helmet’s primary location is, fittingly, an abandoned temple that the soldiers attempt to fortify. But even with the presence of a literal deity (a passive-aggressive statue of Buddha), God is entirely absent from this place. The men argue over menial tasks, engage in casual racism and impromptu discussions of same (in this respect, Fuller was way ahead of his time, practically predicting the progress made by civil rights luminaries like Rosa Parks), but the only certainty in this brute-intellectual hothouse is death, which comes, quickly and gracelessly, on a good many of the inhabitants. The loss of William Chun’s young Korean tag-along Short Round (no doubt an inspiration for Steven Spielberg, who owes a mostly unexplored aesthetic debt to Fuller, especially in The Steel Helmet-reminiscent War of the Worlds, similarly a tale of battle-scarred survivors) drives Sergeant Zack over the edge, though his madness, for all its outward aggression, is in no way physically debilitating. Perhaps this is the ultimate tragedy for Fuller: that despite the many horrors we witness and experience, our bodies so rarely allow us respite from the everyday grind. To some, this might be a prevailing example of the indomitability of the human spirit, but Fuller’s cinema, for all its life, for all its bravado, possesses a troublingly antithetical undercurrent, a resolute desire – on the part of its characters and, perhaps, of their Creator – to escape into the pure, unencumbered bliss of insanity.
Maybe that’s what movies are for.
Image/Sound/Extras: Each film in “The First Films of Samuel Fuller” box set is presented in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio, slightly pictureboxed to compensate for television overscan. For a more detailed discussion of this, in some circles, controversial practice, see DVDBeaver webmaster Gary Tooze’s discussion in his review of Kind Hearts and Coronets. Relatively, The Baron of Arizona fares worst in the image department, though this has more to do with existing print damage than anything. Per Criterion’s reputation, this is a more than satisfactory visual presentation. Sound on all three films is Dolby Digital mono in the original English, similarly issue-free aside from any source-related defects that more attuned ears may pick up. Per the Eclipse series mission statement, there are no extras included.
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Keith Uhlich is co-editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications.
31 Days of Spielberg, Day 16: Empire of the Sun (1987)
By Damian Arlyn
[From the co-editor: Since publication of this article, the author was charged with partial plagiarism. See Damian's response to the charges here, and House editor Matt Zoller Seitz's note here.]
Continuing his artistic "adolescence" (a period where he tried to grow up but didn't quite succeed) Spielberg followed the controversial Color Purple with the epic wartime drama Empire of the Sun. Although the latter did not connect with either critics or audiences at the time of its release, and although it still suffers from some of his typical storytelling indulgences and occasional heavy-handedness, it nonetheless manages to surpass the preceding film with a more mature treatment of its subject matter and a greater congruity between its content and its style. Indeed, while it may not be one of his masterpieces, I believe Empire of the Sun is perhaps Spielberg's most underrated work.
To read the article, click here. House contributor Damian Arlyn is the publisher of Windmills of My Mind, where he's devoting all of August to "31 Days of Spielberg," a series of comprehensive critical articles about Spielberg's career published on 31 consecutive days. Read more!
Links for the Day (August 17th, 2007)
1. "Folie a deux": Roger Ebert's re-evaluation of Godard's Pierrot le fou.
["Godard's "Pierrot Le Fou" (1965) is the same film I liked so much when it opened here in 1968, and assigned a 3.5 star rating. In fact, it is probably a better film, because the Music Box is showing it in a new 35mm print. But while I once wrote of it as "Godard's most virtuoso display of his mastery of Hollywood genres," I now see it more as the story of silly characters who have seen too many Hollywood movies."]
2. "America Loves its Big Dumb War": By Erich Kuersten at Bright Lights After Dark.
["The morals on display in these long and bombastic previews turns out to be that we need crazy tyrants like Nixon, like Kissinger, like Sterling Hayden in DR. STRANGELOVE, like George C. Scott as PATTON, Brando as the GODFATHER, John Huston in CHINATOWN, Gene Hackman in FRENCH CONNECTION, Robert Shaw in JAWS: we need real characters unafraid to bloody up the joint. That is if we want to win the unwinnable, or do you want bombs in your living room? Do you want to get trampled on by the muddy feet of terror? The ominous bass synth chords gradually fade against the bright dawn of military trumpet fugues and slow motion flag folding and white-gloved salutes. Damn right, you don't."]
3. "Government upset by parents’ request to name son after e-mail ‘at’ symbol" And this is our daughter, Ampersand.
["A Chinese couple seeking a distinctive name for their child settled on the e-mail ‘at’ symbol — annoying government officials grappling with an influx of unorthodox names."]
4. "The bear is not talking. It's what the hunter imagines the bear to be thinking.": House contributor Todd VanDerWerff on Mad Men.
["I know a lot of people love that the show finally confirmed that Don Draper was, at one time, Dick Whitman. And I know that a lot of people feel that this is the show finally kicking in with something resembling a "storyline." But I, well, I. . .kind of don't like this aspect of the show. I don't think it's awful, and they're certainly doing a good job of making it believable and having it tie into the show's themes and such, but it just feels so prosaic, like Mad Men is down in the muck, having a game try at doing what all of these popular "serialized" shows are doing and sort of not getting the hang of it. It's like a kid who's only ever seen football on TV getting together with his pals and trying to play for real -- he sort of gets the idea, but he spends most of his time standing off to the side with a bemused smile on his face (OK, I was that kid)."]
5. "The Long Good Friday": Michael Atkinson compiles commentary on the greatest long takes in cinema.
["And so, the Long Take Hall of Fame Part II, which should of course reference the precedent of the Daily Film Dose reader’s poll this May, complete with YouTube clips."]
Quote of the Day: Henry James
Image of the Day: (click to enlarge) "Lamentation," Mission to Mars
Clip of the Day: Days of Being (Frisbee) Wild
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
The King is Dead, Long Live the King: Elvis: That's the Way It Is
By Steven Boone, Sarah D. Bunting and Matt Zoller Seitz
The following is a transcript of an online conversation between three House contributors that occurred while watching Elvis: That's the Way it Is, part of Turner Classic Movies' all-day tribute on the 30th anniversary of Presley's 1977 death.
Sars: I can't wait to see the infamous karate moves.
Steven Boone: This Elvis (circa 1970) is like Michael Jackson JUST before the surgery went mad. Thriller Michael.
Sars: I didn't realize Elvis dressed right.
MZS: It's hard to get my mind around the fact that Elvis was only in his mid-thirties when this was shot. I have this mental image of him in his Vegas period being 60 years old and as fat as Brando near the end.
To read the rest, visit Television Without Pity. Read more!
31 Days of Spielberg, Day 15: The Color Purple (1985)
By Damian Arlyn
[From the co-editor: Since publication of this article, the author was charged with partial plagiarism. See Damian's response to the charges here, and House editor Matt Zoller Seitz's note here.]
In reaching the halfway point of "31 Days of Spielberg" we arrive at a significant shift in the life of the famous director. As he approached his fortieth birthday, Spielberg felt the desire to want to tell more dramatic, character-driven stories free of any fantasy elements and special effects. If one were to characterize Spielberg’s career as a “journey” (which I have), that journey can be almost neatly divided into three distinct "phases" which, not coincidentally I think, correspond perfectly with three stages of human development. If the early period of his career can be called his professional “childhood” and the later part (from Schindler’s List on) his “adulthood,” then The Color Purple was about to bring Spielberg into his artistic “adolescence,” a time where he desperately wanted to “grow up” and be taken more seriously as a filmmaker but, in spite of his enormous talent, still lacked the maturity, perspective and responsibility of being able to deal in heavier subject matter with anything other than juvenile sensibilities.
To read the article, click here. House contributor Damian Arlyn is the publisher of Windmills of My Mind, where he's devoting all of August to "31 Days of Spielberg," a series of comprehensive critical articles about Spielberg's career published on 31 consecutive days. Read more!
Links for the Day (August 16th, 2007)
1. "Scenes from the Cinematic Scorekeepers." Self-Styled Siren wonders what it takes for a director to rise into the pantheon and stay there.
["Back in the 1980s the Siren had a hard time getting a serious discussion of Billy Wilder going, unless she wanted to talk about his supposed misogyny. (She didn't want to talk about that, because she doesn't think he is a misogynist, but that's another post.) Reagan was in office and, not coincidentally in the Siren's view, Frank Capra was fashionable. It was a go-go era, a time of vocal patriotism, even more so than now. Capra was better suited to it than Wilder, with his mordant view of what success means for Americans, and what we will do to achieve it. With the publication of Cameron Crowe's book (Conversations with Wilder) and the tributes after Wilder's death in 2002, suddenly the Siren had no trouble finding Wilder admirers. He is better suited to the tenor of our own times than Capra--Ace in the Hole is a lot closer to the age of reality television than Meet John Doe--so it isn't surprising that Wilder now is more in vogue. In vogue, if not in full pantheon membership. According to Brian Baxter of Britain's Guardian, Wilder is still 'second rung' (though 'never second rate'). In this Guardian obituary for Ingmar Bergman, Baxter names a "handful of geniuses--Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir, [and] Roberto Rossellini" who outrank Bergman and Antonioni, and by the way, they're also better than Wilder, Visconti, Kurosawa and Ray. You might think that with six Film Pageant Runner-Ups (if Mr. Bresson cannot fulfill his duties as Greatest Director of All Time...) you would have just six different ways of getting pissed off. But the Siren's initial reaction was "What about Max Ophuls, huh?""]
2. "New Level of Horror in Iraq." From World News with Charles Gibson. AP photo by Mohammed Ibrahim. Related: "Iraq Progress Means Petraeus Will Send GIs Home," "In Magazine Article, Giuliani Details His Policy on Iran," and "Internet is the New Afghanistan."
["There seems to be no limit to the carnage and cruelty visited upon the people of Iraq. Bad as the killing of civilians has become in the past four years, there is now a new degree of horror in the country. Four suicide bombers have executed the deadliest attack since the war began. It is impossible to know the overall death toll, estimates run from 200 to 500 killed, but entire neighborhoods and families have been wiped out. Scores of mud homes crumbled, leaving enormous craters in their place. After the blasts, emergency rooms were quickly overwhelmed with the wounded, many of them children."]
3. Michael Sicinski on Rescue Dawn.
["Engrossing and repellent in equal measure, Rescue Dawn served to coalesce some of the strange, hard-to-place emotions I've had about Herzog's work, from the earliest short films right through Grizzly Man. Herzog is committed to bringing the story of Dieter Dengler to life, as Dengler experienced it and with nary a consideration for present-day canons of good taste or racial sensitivity. Herzog, and many others besides, would probably dismiss such concerns as political correctness, the simpering of weak minds incapable of staring harsh truths dead in the eye. And the thing is, such a viewpoint is both right and wrong. Dengler, a German immigrant so awestruck by the Allied planes strafing his village that he came to the States and joined the Air Force as soon as he could, is in some senses the perfect Herzog protagonist, not, as one would expect, because of the internal contradictions such a primal past would imply, but precisely because Dengler, by all appearances, completely transvalued that experience into a life of action and pure affirmation of the power that once lorded over him. That's to say, Dengler shed all that crippling modern psychology and reinvented himself as a kind of homespun Nietzschean, the embodiment of power as a kind of unstoppable innocence. The man we finally see in the prison camp, forced to face his mortality, instead seems to radically opt to forget that very basic human frailty. Instead, he becomes MacGyver crossed with Forrest Gump."]
4. "Voices, Tilted Screens and Extended Scenes of Loneliness: Filipinos in High Definition." A review of Filipino filmmaker John Torres' documentary about his relationship with his father. By Oggs Cruz of Oggs' Movie Thoughts.
["The film really begins when the narrator starts declaiming ten important points of his life, read like the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses (which gives me a theory that Voices is a spiritual movie (note, not Catholic) in a way that it uses traditional religious concepts to release a much more relevant images of humanity and the so-called soul). Torres’ camera then lingers inside a dwelling wherein pirated VCDs are labeled in a book-cramped storeroom (which also serves as the family’s dining room); his camera finds an object to concentrate on --- a kid playing his portable video game. The curiosity shifts to the kids' parents, more specifically the father; and it starts examining the nooks and crannies of the father’s body (he uncomfortably closes in on the aged curves, the bald spots, the hardened epidermis, and the enlarged belly). It's a very tender sequence, wherein Torres relates a very normal scenario to his extraordinary project. He divides the father into geographic regions, each relating to an unfinished business, an undelivered legacy on the verge of bursting with all its repressed hurts and pains."]
5. "Hollywood Survivor John Frankenheimer." From the MovieMaker Magazine archives, an interview with Frankenheimer by Tim Rhys and Ian Bage. The conversation occured in 1996, the year that Frankenheimer became the first person to be honored with complete and simultaneous career retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Television and Radio.
["At the end of the day you have to be a great storyteller. And you have to be able to master the tools that you have to tell the story, which are, in order of importance, the script, the actors, and then the technical means. You should have studied drama, how it works, the three-act structure. I think that's basic. You have to be able to communicate with actors. It's very well for William Wyler to say 'I just want it better,' and do 30 or 40 takes, but there's only one William Wyler. And you have to find a way to master the tools of your trade. There are so many people making movies today that know absolutely zero about the camera. To my mind, that's personal suicide. They say to the cameraman 'Well, how should we photograph this scene?' And the cameraman photographs it the way he or she thinks is best. That's wrong. The young director should have a collaborative relationship with the cameraman the way Wyler and Welles did with Gregg Toland. A director has to have tremendous input into where the camera is, what it sees and how the film will be edited. You have to have knowledge to do that. They may even learn some of it in film school, but there's no substitute for going out and doing it."]
Quote of the Day:
Image of the Day:
From a photo gallery accompanying a London Times story about an international feud between rival Mafia families that spilled into Duisburg, Germany yesterday when a hit squad murdered six men at a pizzeria. To read the story or view more images, click here.
Clip of the Day: "John Cleese is dead. Nearly."
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
31 Days of Spielberg, Day 14: Amazing Stories - "Ghost Train" & "The Mission" (1985)
By Damian Arlyn
[From the co-editor: Since publication of this article, the author was charged with partial plagiarism. See Damian's response to the charges here, and House editor Matt Zoller Seitz's note here.]
By the mid-1980's Steven Spielberg had become more than just another director. He had become an institution. Many of the films directed and/or produced by him were among the highest-grossing of all time and his own production company Amblin--named after his amateur short film--allowed him to develop projects not only for himself to direct but for other filmmakers. Furthermore, as with Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney before him, "Spielberg" had come to represent a certain kind of product: namely, slickly produced, predominately family-friendly fantasy entertainment. Spielberg's latest venture would fit into that category quite nicely.
In 1985 Spielberg returned to the medium that had helped launch his career: television.
To read the article, click here. House contributor Damian Arlyn is the publisher of Windmills of My Mind, where he's devoting all of August to "31 Days of Spielberg," a series of comprehensive critical articles about Spielberg's career published on 31 consecutive days. Read more!
Links for the Day (August 15th, 2007)
1. "45th New York Film Festival Slate Announced." The festival, which runs Sept. 28-Oct. 14, will open with Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited; screen the Coen Bros' No Country For Old Men as its centerpiece, and close with Marjane Satrape and Vincent Parronaud's animated feature Persepolis, based on Satrape's graphic novel about her childhood in Iran.
["Noah Baumbach, Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, Sidney Lumet all return to the festival with American productions; Julian Schnabel and Abel Ferrara come back with international co-productions; and Brian DePalma, John Landis and Ira Sachs each make their festival debuts...[Foreign language titles include] Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly...Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage, Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, which shared with "Persepolis" the Jury Prize at Cannes; Abel Ferrara’s Italy/U.S. co-production Go Go Tales; Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress; Claude Chabrol’s A Girl Cut In Two; Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Flight of the Red Balloon; Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon; Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra; Béla Tarr’s The Man from London; and Jia Zhang-ke’s documentary Useless. Cannes Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Best Actress prizewinner "Secret Sunshine" were previously confirmed."]
2. "The 10 Most Awesome Movies Hollywood Ever Killed." By David Wong, for Cracked.com.
["#8: Ghostbusters in Hell. [Dan Aykroyd] wrote a script years ago called Ghostbusters: Hellbent (later changed to the more descriptive Ghostbusters in Hell when co-conspirator Harold Ramis got involved) where the ghostbusting crew wind up in a version of New York that exists only in Hell. As the original actors aged and the film continued to not get made, the script was changed to accommodate new, younger group of comedy all-stars to play newly-hired ghostbusters—which, for better or worse, was going to include Ben Stiller."]
3. "The First Films of Samuel Fuller." Dave Kehr of The New York Times on Volume 5 of Criterion's "no frills" Eclipse DVD collection, featuring Fuller's I Shot Jesse James, The Baron of Arizona and The Steel Helmet.
[This trilogy provides a perfect introduction to Mr. Fuller’s personal brand of “in your face” filmmaking. That’s “in your face” in an almost literal sense: Jesse James contains the famous shot in which a barroom brawler takes a poke right at the camera’s lens, the defining moment in a style that Jean-Luc Godard would later characterize as 'cinema-fist.'"]
4. Video Q&A with David Lynch." By Jonathan Marlow of GreenCine. Related: Print interviews with GreenCine's Sean Axmaker and Village Voice critic Nathan Lee. (Hat tip: GreenCine Daily.)
["In January, director David Lynch visited the Bay Area to present an advance screening of his latest film, Inland Empire, at the Smith Rafael Film Center. Starring Laura Dern (in her fourth collaboration with the director) as 'a woman in trouble,' the story transverses the realm between reality and fantasy, present and past, exploiting the benefits (and, to great effect, weaknesses) of small-format digital video in this discomforting, nearly-three-hour film...For those fortunate enough to attend the sold-out screening, Lynch used the occasion to talk briefly about Inland Empire and other topics, fielding questions from the Rafael's Director of Programming Richard Peterson and the audience. Fortunately for the rest of you, these comments are reproduced below."]
5. "Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?" At Shooting Down Pictures, House contributor Kevin B. Lee writes about a recent trip to New York's Anthology Film Archives, where he watched Pedro Costa's 2001 movie about filmmakers Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub and spoke briefly with Costa.
["Listening to (Huillet and Straub) go back and forth at length about which frame upon which to cut to another shot, launching into various theories to support their respective preferences, I found the differences to be microscopic at best and unapparent to most viewers upon watching the results. Only by being privy to such discussions could I realize what values they laid into their aesthetic decisions in the course of making their films. But that only goes to support my first opinion — that it’s difficult to appreciate these films without an instruction manual. I have problems with their direction of actors, which to me feels largely artificial and emulates the limitations of Bresson’s technique with few of the benefits. I think I react to Straub-Huillet the same nonplussed manner that my friends who dislike Bresson react to his films."]
Quote of the Day:
Image of the Day:
Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in 1953's From Here to Eternity.
Clip of the Day: "What did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?"
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Big Love Tuesdays: Season 2, Ep. 10, "The Happiest Girl"
By Todd VanDerWerff
At the end of "The Happiest Girl," the tenth episode of Big Love’s second season, Rhonda Volmer (Daveigh Chase) sings the titular song, leading into a montage that is slightly too obvious; throughout the hour, every woman on the show has had her happiness undermined except for the ever-oblivious Rhonda. But Chase's sad performance and the song's untapped irony manages to put the sequence over, completing an episode that is a welcome return to form. The most famous version of "The Happiest Girl" (performed by Donna Fargo) takes on a sheen of irony to modern audiences simply because it is so earnest and unironic: she’s in love with her husband and no one’s going to take that from her, dammit. In this day and age, that sort of thing automatically seems suspicious, and Big Love mines these moments of suggestion as persistently as it can without overplaying them. It makes sense that Rhonda would want to sing this song on local TV (and that the show's hyper-focused producer would use her to get at bigger targets -- namely, Amanda Seyfried’s Sarah). It also makes sense that Rhonda's rather uncharismatic manner would come off as flat and mournful. It's nice to see a musical montage done well in a medium that so often does them poorly.
But this one also works as an expression of one of the show’s central themes. Big Love is obsessed (sometimes too obsessed) with the notion that our public faces conflict with the faces we wear in in private. Even some of the non-polygamist characters are forced to live in secret, whether by choice or as a defense mechanism (for instance, Rhonda forcing Tina Majorino's Heather into a tight spot by threatening to expose Heather's love for Sarah).
The "faces" theme comes through especially strongly in the subplot where Bill (Bill Paxton) goes to a trade show and brings his third wife, Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), to act as his public wife (a role usually filled by Jeanne Tripplehorn's Barb, who's still angry about Bill’s decision to purchase a gaming company). When Bill is cornered by old acquaintances who knew him as Barb's husband, he could lie and say that he and Barb are divorced, but he apparently finds that option so repellent that he introduces Margie as his secretary. Margie is forced back into the closet by one of Bill’s stories -- and by the looming presence of Barb, who truncated Bill and Margie’s honeymoon by calling to report that one of Bill’s daughters had a fever. Margie goes from ecstatic to heartbroken in an instant. An early scene where Margie rattles on about how it feels to be the third wife is overstated (even though it works as the vocalized thoughts of a frequent divorce's third wife -- sort of an inner-monologue-made-external). But aside from that, Goodwin's performance is perfect. She’s never played Margie as so wounded, and she transfers the character's anger and hurt to Barb, who shows up at the trade show midway through the episode to once again act as Bill's public wife. Barb is still struggling with her own fear of what polygamy has done to her life and her children. Last week Sarah told her she wasn’t fooling anyone; this week, Ben (Douglas Smith) tells her the same thing, more harshly. But she still sides with Margie, sharing a room with her and forcing Bill to sleep alone.
Big Love's biggest strength is its portrait of power dynamics within the Henrickson family, which shift and change as its various members adapt to new circumstances. This episode is no exception. Margie, stunned into silence, weeps in the gaudy bathtub in the hotel’s honeymoon suite, then snipes at Barb in person and cries on the phone to Nicki (Chloë Sevigny). Ultimately, though, she heads into public with some of Bill’s new clients. In a shot where Bill and Barb flank either side of the quartet behind them, you can see Margie just out of focus, laughing raucously, her red clothes setting her apart from the other characters in their drab garb. Margie, ironically, is almost freed by telling this lie. She seems able to cut loose and have fun in a way that we’ve been told she did before she met Bill. She even extends the role of Mr. Henrickson’s dutiful secretary further, telling the clients that she’s Bill’s mistress. The embellishment is one more complication for Bill, who had sold himself to the clients as a squeaky-clean (but poker-playing) Mormon.
Bill’s solution to this problem is to tell the clients that he is the husband of both Barb and Margie. I'm not sure I buy it, but the clients' divergent reactions to Bill’s gambit make for an interesting reading on how the show uses the three women to portray the different stages of marriage. Margie finds Bill's defense of her to be terribly noble and chivalrous; she gushes about it to Barb as the two lie in bed that night. But Barb is less sure. After all this time, she's gotten used to being the public wife -- a role that let her lie to herself about the reality of her situation and who she was. This season, as the various facades of that public lie have crumbled down around her, Barb has been forced to confront her true self, a person who’s probably laid dormant for years.
Barb is unique among Big Love characters in that the public lie she presents is who she really wants to be; even her teenage children are more honest about their family situation and its detrimental effect on their lives. So long as Barb could convince herself that she was the person she presented herself to be, she would be able to continue that same lie in private. (Nicki doesn't indulge her; indeed, the snide tone Nicki takes with Barb indicates that she feels Barb treats her as little more than a servant.) Barb can be eminently practical about finding ways to make the plural marriage work, but she’s also very good at finding new ways to delude herself.
Back in Sandy, Nicki is planning a party to announce that Bill’s brother Joey (Shawn Doyle) is adding a second wife to his marriage to Wanda (Melora Walters). Throughout the season, Joey has steadfastly refused to add a second wife. But he and Wanda’s attachment to Kathy, who was brought in to help Wanda recover after her stint in an institution, seems genuine. (The story sheds light on the process of bringing Nicki into Bill’s household under similar circumstances.) The strange love story of Joey and Wanda has been my favorite part of the Juniper Creek scenes this season, especially as it comments on the even stranger and more muted love story of Bill and Barb; so it is nice to see this significant shift in their relationship get the play it deserves. Nicki funds the party with some of the money she stole from the compound last week -- money that puts Alby (Matt Ross), the UEB's new head, in a bit of a bind, since it seems to confirm to many, including his mother, that he is less than capable. Alby quickly figures out her scheme and threatens her, then says that Kathy is already spoken for by Frank (Bruce Dern), Joey’s father. Alby’s not my favorite character, but it’s interesting to see his ineffectuality try on more powerful shoes. I don’t believe he’ll ever supplant the still-critically-injured Roman (Harry Dean Stanton), but his haphazard bid for more influence is fascinating to watch.
The musical montage starts with Alby and Roman watching Rhonda sing on television (Alby’s care almost seeming calculated to keep Roman dependent). From there, the camera drifts past all of the other characters, including many of the women who might once have imagined themselves the happiest girl only to end up devastated. For someone like Margie, small cuts like Bill’s rebuff can be healed with marital Band-aids. But when it comes to something like the pain Barb is feeling, the wounds go deeper, to the very heart of the marriage.
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Note: Big Love finishes out the season on Sunday nights, now that John from Cincinnati has completed its first season. As a result, Big Love recaps will move to Mondays at 9 p.m., starting August 19. Each new episode will also repeat on Mondays at 9. House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.
31 Days of Spielberg, Day 13: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
By Damian Arlyn
[From the co-editor: Since publication of this article, the author was charged with partial plagiarism. See Damian's response to the charges here, and House editor Matt Zoller Seitz's note here.]
When George Lucas captivated Steven Spielberg with his concept for the action-packed Raiders of the Lost Ark on the beach in Hawaii, Lucas also told his friend that he hoped it would be the first installment of a trilogy. The subsequent success of Raiders ensured that Indiana Jones would have another big-screen adventure and, once again, Spielberg stepped behind the camera as director. It was the first time in his career that he made a sequel to one of his own movies (he had been offered Jaws 2 but declined). What the two ended up creating was certainly a very different--though no less exciting or commercially successful--product than Raiders, but it also turned out to be a rather controversial--not to mention divisive--entry into Spielberg's body of work.
To read the article, click here. House contributor Damian Arlyn is the publisher of Windmills of My Mind, where he's devoting all of August to "31 Days of Spielberg," a series of comprehensive critical articles about Spielberg's career published on 31 consecutive days. Read more!
Links for the Day (August 14th, 2007)
1. "Bergman, Antonioni, and the stubborn stylists": David Bordwell responds to Jonathan Rosenbaum's Bergman article "Scenes from an Overrated Career." Much to chew on...
["We can talk tastes forever. Maybe you think Bergman is great, or the greatest, or obscenely overrated. I think that there’s something more general and intriguing going on beyond our tastes. What makes this hard to see is that the venues of popular journalism don’t allow us to explore some of the ideas and questions raised by our value judgments."]
2. "Trapped in the Closet: It’s Here, But it Could Be Queerer": Karina Longworth on R. Kelly's "hip hopera."
["Recently, IFC’s Evan Shapiro defended his company’s production and distribution of new chapters in R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet saga by comparing the “hip hopera” pioneer to postmodern trash god John Waters. Trapped, according to Shapiro, “challenges the traditional mores and sexual stereotypes of the current climate as boldly — and hysterically — as many films coming out of Hollywood or the indie movement.”"]
3. "Jeffrey on Bond": House contributor Jeffrey Hill on one of his favorite subjects: James Bond.
["Tonight marks the posting of Notes of Interest's first interview and I don't think I could be any happier with the result. At the beginning of this week I asked Liverputty's Jeffrey if he wouldn't mind writing down his thoughts and opinions on the James Bond character and the books and movies he's starred in over the past fifty years. For the past few months Jeffrey's been posting his Bond observations and select passages from the Ian Fleming novels at Liverputty. I credit his posting of the gun barrel video for my rebirth of interest in the Bond franchise after a looong six month hiatus."]
4. "Hollywood cliches abound in 'Californication'": Our colleague Alan Sepinwall on David Duchovny's new series, plus the season premiere of Weeds.
["Duchovny, who has a producer credit -- usually the sign of a star who wants a guarantee of being shown in the most favorable light at all times -- has tried to compare "Californication" to '70s movies like "Shampoo" and "Blume in Love," dramedies about SoCal men with complicated love lives. But "Californication" doesn't have the courage of those movies' convictions."]
5. "GLAAD condemns Sopranos star and billiards company for new product: "A Cue to Die For"": Ouch.
["The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) today condemned a grotesque, violent new product marketed by actor Joseph R. Gannascoli and Rockwell Billiards. Gannascoli, who played the gay character Vito Spatafore on the hit HBO drama, The Sopranos has authorized his name to be used on a pool stick branded with the phrase "A Cue to Die For." The new product plays on the fact that Vito was beaten to death on The Sopranos with pool cues and then sodomized with one."]
Quote of the Day: Michel de Montaigne
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "Sephirot," The End of Evangelion
Clip of the Day: Cute little doggies in the cruel hands of fate
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Monday, August 13, 2007
John From Cincinnati Mondays: Season 1, Ep. 10, “His Visit: Day Nine”
By Keith Uhlich
“Back in the game, Mitch Yost.”
– John Monad (Austin Nichols) –
Here is the revelation: John Monad and Shaun Yost (Greyson Fletcher) – missing for all of a purgatorial day – surfing in unison across the Imperial Beach horizon, a picture-perfect, per the accompanying Bob Dylan song, “Series of Dreams”. The return of the monad and his young prodigy in the final installment of John From Cincinnati’s first season (“His Visit: Day Nine”) sends a similarly unifying shockwave through IB – whether aware of it or not, all are now joined in singular principle and purpose, even if the only explicit example of this, at first, is the prophesied blow job that rocks Meyer Dickstein’s (Willie Garson) world.
Revelation takes many forms, and creator David Milch (in collaboration with writer Zack Whedon and director Dan Minahan) chooses a more subdued and implicative tack in closing out this particular chapter of the John From Cincinnati narrative. John and Shaun’s return is intoxicating, miraculous, but it cannot exist, independent of itself, in the world of mortals. It must be given context and explanation – in effect, the event and all that it implies must be shrouded in conspiratorial silence (the surfwear company Stinkweed here acting as guise) so that its continued existence is assured. With the threat of the unfeeling, unthinking mob removed, this seemingly divine chain of events can proceed on an unencumbered course. Or as former Stinkweed CEO Linc Stark (Luke Perry) explains to a still-levitating Mitch Yost (Bruce Greenwood), “It lays down cover… for whatever’s going on, as long as it’s going on.”
Far from a simplistic, anti-business diatribe, the assimilation of the Yost family into the Stinkweed corporate structure plays as Milch’s own meta-textual observation, and not just on the plight of the artist. How, indeed, does any single individual speak personal truth against a perceived hegemony? This is one example out of many of John From Cincinnati’s resolute self-awareness – the series is simultaneously narrative and comment on same, as exemplified, in this installment, by the frequent point-of-view shots from the camera of filmmaker Cass (Emily Rose). “Without Cass’ camera big and huge won’t mean dick,” says John to Linc, both seemingly unaware that Cass is filming them and that their conversation is somehow being viewed on a computer in the café run by Jerri (Paula Malcomson) and Dwayne (Matt Maher). So it goes: The individual requires the soulful tools of expression; from there, the faithful shall gather and bear witness. But as with Saint Veronica’s veil, on which was supposedly imprinted the face of a Calvary-bound Christ, no one person will ever see exactly the same thing.
These many differing viewpoints can lead one, inexorably, to a damning crisis of perception, which is why Barry Cunningham’s (Matt Winston) mid-episode observation to Ramon Gaviota (Luis Guzman) cuts so deeply to the matter’s heart. “I choose to believe they played nicely,” he says of the two stuffed-bear companions he continually carries around with him. “And I choose to do so still. Even in their proximity to the flame.” Choice is the key concept here. We may all be, as John frequently states, “frail vessels”, but the prisons we find ourselves in are, more often than not, of our own devising. Such is the case with elder surf-statesman Mitch Yost, whose frequent levitations are here revealed to be an outward expression of his own inner turmoil. The literal interpretation applies: despite his so-called “spiritual discipline,” Mitch sees his problems as above and beyond everyone else’s. In an episode of many sublime moments, perhaps the most beautifully understated is the image of Butchie (Brian Van Holt) and Shaun pulling the elder Yost down to earth, tears in his eyes as John smiles and states, definitively, “Back in the game, Mitch Yost.”
An impromptu, beachside gathering – where Linc unveils a new line of divinely gifted, monad-figure surfwear and publicly turns control of Stinkweed over to his second-in-command Jake Ferris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) – seals the deal, and status quo is apparently achieved. But what of the sure-to-be consequential, once-removed negotiations between Hawaii-based drug dealer Steady Freddy Lopez (Dayton Callie) and his quietly intimidating “Chinaman” boss (Keone Young)? What of the used car dealer (Peter Jason) – speaking in between-the-lines allusions and riddles – who seems to hold some fatherly sway over John? What of the entirely absent Dr. Michael Smith (Garret Dillahunt) who, as John’s closing narration implies, is, was, or will soon be off on his own spiritual quest? Frayed narrative threads all, each holding signs of development and promise that, in this uncertain present moment, may never reach fruition.
And so we are given, through John (this divine entity as kino-eye), a seemingly haphazard glimpse of things to come. Of character arcs and actions collapsed into a prophetic haze of home-movie asides (the fourth-wall breached once and for all) and near-subliminal acts of god (an exploding supernova transposed onto a moment of tender sexuality), all scored to the frenetic rhythms of Little Richard’s cover of “Long Tall Sally.” But before this frenzied climax reaches its apex (in a twelve-second ellipsis that recalls, in its aural/visual interplay, the revivifying final image of Jacques Rivette’s Out 1), narrative interruptus … followed immediately by a quiet scene of Bill Jacks (Ed O’Neill) ascending to the room he promised to never again enter, the space housing the deathbed of his late wife Lois. Bill talks to the ether, narrating the events of the past few days in brief (a special aside reserved for his lost bird Zippy), then says, in what comes off as more than just a personal lament, “Where do you start/stop. Every event and incident. Oh, if she could have only seen this! Wouldn’t she have laughed to have seen that?” Remorse threatens to overwhelm. Regret, it would seem, for everything left unaccomplished. But Bill rights himself. “I love you my Lo,” he finishes, “and hold you tight.” And the universe responds, finally, in avian kind.___________________________________________
Keith Uhlich is co-editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications. John From Cincinnati recaps run every Monday for the duration of the series. Read more!