The House Next Door

By Vadim Rizov

[Transporter 3 is now playing in theaters.]

When XXX came out in 2002, a popular theme for entertainment journalism trend pieces was to note that—with the rapidly approaching end of the Schwarzenneger, Stallone and Seagal era—there was a gaping hole where a new generation of action star should be. Vin Diesel was supposed to take up the mantle, but, his career having subsequently gone too far in some direction or other, Jason Statham made for a plausible second contender. Cf. a far-seeing Manohla Dargis reviewing 2002's The Transporter: "the actor certainly seems equipped to develop into a mid-weight alternative to Vin Diesel."

It's a strange movie—a Besson production designed to appeal to every European with a yen for trashy action, directed by Cory Yuen in a hyper-melodramatic style suggesting he thought he was making a real Hong Kong action-drama, rather than just synthesizing everything Besson liked about those movies in a faster package. There's some stellar fights and some HK grace notes (Statham's opening drive to classical music is the kind of shock you'd expect to see in a clean action package from the 90s), but mostly it succeeds by pummeling you with constant, mostly plausible havoc. 2005's Transporter 2 is something else altogether, a gleeful celebration of the possibilities for action set-pieces once you decide to ignore physics. Ditching the first film's rote romance for asexual machismo and inventively absurd choreography, Transporter 2 delivers guilty fun on schedule. Statham came into his taciturn own, embodying macho self-confidence with a touch of the archetypal wounded wanderer without playing any of the elements too heavily. His persona didn't get in the way of the fun.

Unfortunately, someone decided that what audiences really cared about weren't the constant absurdities, but the psychological nuances of Jason Statham, like whether he'd get laid or not. So Transporter 3 is full of a lot of talking—more talking overall than chasing or explosions—and, most ingloriously, a seduction scene that feels about 10 minutes long, wherein a Ukrainian woman (Natalya Rudakova) bullies and coaxes Statham into an ad hoc-striptease/copulation session. I know Statham has his gay fans, but did anyone really want to stop for that long to look at his chest? Statham's pretty good at a low-grade, steely-eyed unflappable macho kind of mode; to bog everything down by tokenly humanizing him (to an even greater extent than the first film did) is roughly as bad an idea as thinking The Good, The Bad And The Ugly would be improved if Clint had some hot sex scenes.

A lot of Transporter 3 is wasted on talk and character bonding between Statham and the Ukrainian. Occasionally something happens to deliver on the ostensible premise: a well-choreographed jacket fight, with Statham making use of his wardrobe to throw people around. There's also a market chase scene which—for mostly logical reasons—requires Statham first to make like Indiana Jones in the marketplace, then jack a bike and use dumpsters as ramps for a ride over sweatshop tables, and finally crash through the car window and throw someone out (the car, of course, being precisely stopped outside the sweatshop window). This is why I come to watch Transporter movies.

The Ukrainian woman comes in handy exactly once, when—as prelude to a surprisingly mundane car chase—she pops some leftover ecstasy from Ibiza, which at least suggests a new strategy for enjoying yourself at these kinds of things. Maybe I just haven't seen a blockbuster in a multiplex in a while, but Transporter 3 is relentlessly loud, a constant roar, and director Olivier Megaton—a self-important former graffiti artist who apparently thinks he has a vision—cuts everything to coherence's breaking point. (Transporter 2 understood that to be completely over-the-top, you also need to be clear on what exactly is happening.) In its dreary "characterization," Transporter 3 forgets what I (and presumably everyone else) came to see: not the time-filling drama of bad network TV, but the limitations of movement in Earth's gravity defied every two minutes.
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Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

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By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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Stan Brakhage’s approximation of what it’s like to see as a child, drawn from years of footage of his own children, is nothing as crude as a literal re-enactment of a child’s point of view, but something much more vivid and disturbing. The film opens with a series of red screens, suggesting light filtered through closed infant eyes, before launching into lightning flashes of white: a nascent gaze opening to the world and hardly able to take in its brilliance. This traumatic sensation is the underlying emotion that runs through the film’s four chapters, and it’s a marvel how Brakhage’s panoply of images—progressing from the abstract to the very literal—can be such an emotionally affecting account of how children come to perceive the world. Mostly shot in handheld with the flickers and jumps one expects of Super 8, the film has been described as the greatest home movie ever made, with Children playing in a yard bathed in impossibly beautiful tree-dappled light or a close-up the upturned carcass of a dead wasp on a bathtub lip strike the heart of a uncanny left behind by adulthood. There’s little nostalgic about this wonder though, as such images will be interspersed by recurring fades to a haunting, ghostlike formation of undulating crystals, suggesting human cells regenerating feverishly. At times the gaze is simply blank, looking at nothing or no one in particular, focusing more on negative spaces than objects, the indeterminate time of childhood with no purpose but to be. A soup of memory, liquid and light, churning with life.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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This lavish farce about a 17th century Belgian town whose women openly welcome Spanish invaders when their cowardly male counterparts go into hiding is a classic model of the ebullient pacing and jaunty eroticism that’s long been associated with French comedic cinema. Feyder orchestrates his ensemble and witty dialogue with a lilting, musical efficiency, a quality that’s also reflected in the camerawork, which moves sinuously across lavish sets inspired by Flemish paintings of the period. Feyder’s fanciful farce envisions a marriage of pacifism and sexual equality yielding an idyllic society, which, despite strong critical support, rendered it anathema to contemporary politics. The Belgians saw it as a mockery of their leaders’ ineffectuality during their occupation by the Germans during World War II; the Nazis eventually banned it when links between them and the film’s invading Spaniards became apparent. It’s utopian vision of international peace brokered by the fairer sex, while amounting to a feminist statement ahead of its time, seems downright naive in the immediate context of Petain and Chamberlain’s appeasement policies to the Nazis (much in the way that the “we should have stayed in Iraq” argument underlying David O. Russell’s Three Kings looks very different in the Bush era). But the film managed to place on many top ten lists in a poll conducted by the Belgian Cinematheque only a few years after the end of World War II, possibly attesting to the triumph of laughter and masterful filmmaking over one of the darkest moments of humankind.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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By Dan Callahan

It’s been close to twenty years since Mia Farrow did battle with her one-time boyfriend/boss Woody Allen, in actual law courts and in the even nastier courts of public opinion. She wrote an autobiography in 1997, What Falls Away, in which she described her life up to the point Allen started an affair with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi, which resulted in accusations on both sides that were so ugly that we’ve all made a kind of pact of forgetfulness so that we can go on seeing Allen’s movies. Farrow has continued to work as an actress, but in fairly obscure films. She turned up this year in Michel Gondry’s loopy Be Kind Rewind; at 63, she looked almost exactly the same as she had in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and it was a reminder that she has spent her whole life pursuing a dream of childhood, both in her compulsive adoption of children, many of whom have special needs, and her determination to keep herself childishly pure in looks and attitude. “She lived all alone in her own world,” said Bette Davis, observing a teenaged Farrow on the set of John Paul Jones (1959), which was directed by her father, John Farrow.

Farrow grew up in Beverly Hills with John Farrow and her mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, a minor movie star at MGM and Jane to Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan. At age 9 she was stricken with polio, which seems to have been a seminal experience for her that created both fear and guilt in equal measure. In What Falls Away, Farrow is always describing her feelings of embarrassment and mortification in all sorts of social situations, and it’s easy to feel how her neuroticism and low self-esteem could eventually shade itself into a passive aggressive pride and a kind of ruthless avenging conscience. She was in love with Michael Boyer, the son of movie star Charles, and the most touching scene in the book is when she comes to see Charles and his wife Pat after Michael has killed himself: Farrow is very good at describing the opulent ghostliness of the Beverly Hills of her childhood, where people are always sequestered away in different rooms, either weeping or drinking.

When her father and then her older brother Mike died, Farrow felt the need to go to work to help support her family, and she started making the rounds as an actress, since it was the only world she knew. In New York, she made friends with Salvador Dali, and you can see why the great surrealist was so drawn to Farrow, for she was like a figure from one of his paintings: flat, two-dimensional, a little harsh, more than a little strange. Farrow feigns helplessness at all points in her book, but this starts to feel pretty peculiar as a number of big-deal things happen to her; she becomes a huge star on television in a series of Peyton Place, then marries the much-older Frank Sinatra. She cuts her hair pixie-short to avoid “vanity,” but when she becomes an even bigger star after the release of Rosemary’s Baby, she hightails it to India to meditate, and the Beatles just happen to drop by….

Farrow fell quickly away from these lurid extremes of fame, for she was hard to cast: as a smart modern girl in John and Mary (1969), Farrow is out-of-it and fey, and she looks too stunned to get any of her chit-chatty dialogue out. Worse was The Great Gatsby (1973), a decidedly heat-struck, unsuccessful version of Fitzgerald’s novel, where she gave a bizarrely artificial performance as Daisy Buchanan, like Tarzan’s Jane ready for the nuthouse. In her book, Farrow is especially vague when describing the circumstances of her 70s marriage to the composer Andre Previn, though she does apologize, grudgingly, to his ex-wife Dory, a songwriter who wrote a tune about Farrow’s husband stealing. Previn doesn’t seem to have been around much during their marriage, which is when Farrow started her children collecting in earnest. As she describes her relations with Sinatra, Previn and then Woody, it’s hard not to notice how she gravitates to difficult, famous men as if she likes the idea of their partnership more than the reality, which is what got her into such trouble with Allen, of course. In a recent interview, when Farrow was asked if she was seeing anyone, she girlishly revealed that she was getting close to (wait for it) Philip Roth!

Clearly, this is a woman who is drawn to disaster in her personal life, but there’s a brighter flip side to this strain in Farrow that has come to the fore in her fierce activism against the genocide still going on in Darfur. Religiously, she keeps up a blog about Darfur, www.miafarrow.org, where all sorts of information about the genocide can be found, and she almost single-handedly shamed Steven Spielberg into declining any role in staging the Olympics in China, which she claimed was helping to fund the genocide. Farrow may still look as frail and defenseless as Rosemary, but this is a woman who knows how to play hardball to get what she wants. Her queasy public life is always going to take precedence over her work in films, but let’s not forget her achievements in that area, especially in the movies that Woody Allen built around her in the 80s. In thirteen films, Allen celebrated and sometimes assailed Farrow, and they both emerged victors, artistically, at least.

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1. Rosemary’s Baby: Farrow eases us into Roman Polanski’s almost self-indulgently disturbing picture of the occult with a plangent, uncertain “la la la” lullaby under the credits, and she keeps up this mood with her dutiful, people-pleasing manner in her early scenes. She looks both sexy and innocent in her pigtails and short skirts, and she’s charming when she keeps reciting her struggling-actor husband’s meager credits. The Catholic schoolgirl guilt sequences in the first half of the film match up neatly with Farrow’s own childhood experience, and her spacey quality is perfect for this role: you can believe that Rosemary wouldn’t be suspicious about her devil baby until it was much too late. Borderline ridiculous pulp material is made seriously upsetting by Polanski, especially when he has Farrow cut her hair, so that she looks like a Holocaust victim (“It’s Vidal Sassoon … it’s very in,” Farrow chirps, obliviously). Toward the end of her nightmare, Farrow’s Rosemary has her small spurts of aggressiveness, but they prove pitifully ineffectual. Throughout the ordeal of this justly famous horror movie, Farrow ideally embodies Polanski’s insight into the overall impotence of basically decent people in the face of total evil.

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2. Secret Ceremony (1968): Saddled with an absurdly unconvincing long black wig, Farrow leaps right into the center of Joseph Losey’s classic bad movie we love, which stands as a mother lode of unintentional hilarity. It’s a three-way contest between Farrow, Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Mitchum to see who can give the most outrageous performance, and though Liz tends to dominate, Farrow wins if we’re using a yardstick of sheer lunacy. Farrow plays her damaged rich girl Cenci as a full-blown village idiot who’s utterly without guile or protection, all wide eyes and smarmy smiles and physical abandon. Underneath all the laughs, though, lies a retroactive trap for Farrow: she’s playing a sly child abused by her stepfather (Mitchum), a child who evidently likes being abused by him, on some level. So, yes, she’s basically playing Soon-Yi many years before the early 90s catastrophe, but any attempt to suss out deeper meanings is wonderfully defeated by the film’s insistently, triumphantly vulgar tone, which Farrow captures perfectly, to her peril and our delight.

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3. The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985): This uncharacteristically specific poisoned valentine to 30s movie escapism is one of the best films Woody Allen has ever made, and at its center is Farrow’s lyrical Cecilia, a Depression waitress who lives exclusively in her own dream world. Allen is not usually a generous director of actors, but he always films Farrow with mistrustful love, and he gives her close-ups in Purple Rose where he seems to marvel at the flood of idealistic feeling that lights up her fine-boned little face. This nearly perfect film is the clearest indicator that Allen and Farrow were completely mismatched temperamentally (pessimist versus optimist) and this mismatch creates the hard-to-place tension in all of the films they made together. At the end of Purple Rose, when Farrow’s Cecilia has been heartlessly jilted, Allen gives her a moment where she slowly raises her head to look up at Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing “Cheek to Cheek” in Top Hat (1935). Farrow doesn’t do any tricks with her face to show us what she’s going through; she simply sits there in her movie theater and lets her whole being fill up with apprehensive hope and love. This close-up is deluded and incriminating and very moving, and it says a lot about Farrow, but it’s big enough to make a claim far beyond Farrow and Cecilia and the fantasy of the Purple Rose plot. It’s the feminine answer to Charlie Chaplin’s last close-up in City Lights (1931), all the more heartbreaking because it is so much more reserved.

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4. Alice (1990): A modest but underrated Allen movie, Alice functions largely as a vehicle for Farrow, who plays a rich, spoiled housewife tickled by the idea of an affair with a jazz musician (Joe Mantegna), but too timid to do anything about it until a Chinatown sage (Keye Luke) gives her a potion that unlocks her inhibitions. When Farrow swallows Luke’s magic herbs, her face opens up like a flower; what follows, in a very long take, is the best single scene Farrow has ever played, a hair-raising seduction of Mantegna that begins when she says, “Your eyes are really … on fire,” and builds wildly from there. Every time she says his name (it’s Joe), it sounds more indecent, more provoking, and she punctuates every intimate “Joe” with subtle little mouth movements and knowing glances. When she dares to put the back of her hand to one side of his face and then another, it really feels shockingly bold, but she manages to top this moment of physical contact when she purrs, “Duke? My favorite, Joe,” then finishes this perilously forward flirtation with talk of how Coltrane “opened up a whole new world of harmonics for me.” The meek Mia mask is dropped, and here we have the woman who bewitched Sinatra, Previn, and Allen himself. Alice is a straightforward gift to Farrow, who Allen seems to see as a small, impregnable fortress, almost as infuriatingly goody-goody as her overly content matriarch Hannah in Hannah and her Sisters (1986).

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5. Husbands and Wives (1992): In her autobiography, Farrow revealed that she actually shot some scenes of this unforgettably raw Allen drama after she found out about his betrayal with her adopted daughter, but she must have had premonitions, for her Judy Roth is all of a piece, the gamine gone sour: quietly furious, almost feral, encased in bulky sweaters, awkwardly tripping down the street. It could be argued that what’s striking about Farrow here is beyond her control, and that this isn’t really a performance, per se, but her anguish in this film is so punishingly real that it must stand as probably the most affecting thing she has ever done on screen. She looks as if she hasn’t slept in days, and she’s always touching her face self-consciously; her voice has become terminally whiny, and she’s capable of scathing attacks. A negative force field surrounds Farrow here, and her constant state of irritation sometimes boils up into outright hostility (she always seems to be crying, “Bullshit!”). What must be stressed, however, is that though Allen did her unbelievable damage in life, he always remained charitable and sensitive to her on screen, to the last. Instead of leaving her on the discordant note of Husbands and Wives, let’s remember the conclusion of Alice, where Allen imagines an ending for his heroine that has her throwing off materialism and actually working with her idol, Mother Teresa, just as Farrow herself has found meaning in her aggressive and tireless humanitarian work.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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By Odie "Odienator" Henderson, John Lichman, and Keith Uhlich

[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]

INTRODUCTION

Happy Thanksgiving!

Between personal coffee drinking and attending Apple Store seminars where I was reminded to even be so lucky to be interviewing for a retail job, I forgot to finish the write-up for this podcast! We recorded this the day before Episode 9, a Sunday. And little did we realize, after nearly a year recording at Grassroots (and my having been there for the last few years), that they had live jazz on Sunday nights!

And it's good—but loud. I mean, Grassroots with a sound system is already a bit of a noise maker. But live jazz band with drums, sax and horns? It's like trying to talk over the dull monotone droning that Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz consider acceptable numbers.

So, Keith, myself and Special Guest Odie Henderson packed up and made the cold, harsh trip over to the Holiday Cocktail Lounge for $4 drinks. We were three of seven people in the bar, and our topics ranged from Odie's viewings of Slumdog Millionaire and W. to why Soul Men matters and the fears of the FCC in an Obama cabinet.

All in all, we go through everything—since this is one of our longest episodes yet!

And Vadim isn't here. And Keith kept flashing Odie.

And and and ... here's Episode 10: "Vadim's New Roommate."

So if you see either of us at the bar, buy us a drink! Or if you're AOL, The Onion or the Fifth Avenue Apple Store, please give me one of those many jobs I applied for. I don't have the luxury of going to Grad School, so I need to—you know—"work." (JL)

Podcast is embedded below. Any problems, it can also be found here as a downloadable mp3 file. (TRT: 1 hour 08 minutes 39 seconds)

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PODCAST



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Odie Henderson's varied interests include postcards and sandals.

John Lichman is a freelance writer who contributes to The Reeler, Primetime A&E [print only] and anyone with cash. He works odd jobs to afford his vices, sleeps on couches and can drink Vadim Rizov under a table.

Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.

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By Vadim Rizov

I know I keep coming up with constant excuses for this column's (to put it politely) somewhat irregular publishing schedule, but this one I need to make. Briefly: The Onion AV Club is in the thick of its year-end process, which meant I just couldn't pass up the chance to make a year-end top 10. I just couldn't; it's an addiction. So maybe my AV Club list and my list here will be markedly different; perhaps not (it's been a weak year and I don't imagine many more surprises cropping up). In any case, I've been cramming like a guilty high-school student on 2008 releases; notes below represent things I was thinking about intensely a month/month-and-a-half ago. Please accept the mental distance; soon enough I'll be catching up on everything that ostensibly matters musically about 2008.

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Here's the thing about The Broken West: they're one of the most derivative bands working today. They have no ideas of their own. They never met a Big Star track they didn't like, except for maybe "Holocaust." Am I being clear enough in explaining why I like them? Their 2007 debut I Can't Go On, I'll Go On was a huge guilty pleasure for me, ridiculous titular Beckett allusion and all. Back then, I shamefacedly wrote out my qualifications with more conviction than I felt, and they're all still true: "sneering lead singers who assert themselves like American Gallagher brothers ... no breathing room except for ballads ... don't have a whole lot on their mind besides, you know, girls and place-holder lyrics ... consciously anti-intellectual...They're not clever, but they're satisfying." This was an oblique (OK, trying to avoid chastisement for my taste) way of saying that I listened to their album way too many times, and I'm not real sure why. There's a lot of filler there: looking on the track-listing a little over a year later, I can't remember what half of it sounds like, and re-visiting tracks like "You Can Build An Island" or "Brass Ring" isn't really helping.

The reason I'm revisiting them: they were the only great thing I saw at CMJ. Granted, I didn't get out a whole hell of a lot (other bands seen: The Browns, The Muslims, Wye Oke, Portastatic). Still, I was in a really bad mental headspace, which was compounded by the fact that I find most shows to be more trouble than they're worth. The Broken West's performances of "On The Bubble" and "Down In The Valley" gave me six minutes of visceral, head-thrashing, non-thinking joy, and if I'm doing better now, I owe them at least a little debt of thanks. (This despite the fact that The Broken West apparently read the same guide to being an LA band everyone else did and wear the same stupid neck-length hair and pseudo-rock-star button-down shirts as every other goddamn LA buzz band. They can still play.)

All of which is a roundabout way of saying I don't really want to pan their new album Now Or Heaven. The press kit announces that the band felt the need to tear it up and start over from rhythms rather than guitars; this basically means the album is all treble and no bass. For a band wanting to bring the retro-hooks, this is not a particularly satisfying approach. There's a lot of skittery machines and pseudo-electronics that provide tentative rhythms, which isn't particularly satisfying; the songs play better live, with the drums giving enough muscle to melodies that aren't as ridiculously big as before but still get the job done. Lyrics are cursory; the best song is probably "Ambuscade," which announces "these are ruthless people," which probably means this is yet another song about how awful the music industry is, which is about as meaty a topic as The Broken West can touch without lapsing into cliche. The rest is inoffensive and unmemorable. Props to The Broken West for not resting on their laurels, but what a way to go about it: ditching all your assets for experimentation that isn't even that experimental. Next time, guys; still love the show.

***
I don't have a whole lot to say about Prodigy's album H.N.I.C. Part 2. Like last year's Return Of The Mac, it's good for three spins and little more aside from a few stand-out tracks. Last year, the stand-out tracks were mostly courtesy of Alchemist's production, and while he and associate Sid Roams still do a good job running things (Roams gets first single "ABC," which has a bunch of little kids singing the alphabet, leading to an oddly Boards Of Canada-type effect), that's not really the point.

H.N.I.C. Part 2 comes down to three tracks. The record's most anomalous is "Veterans Memorial Part 2," which induced a Pavlovian response in me from its opening chipmunk vocals and soul strings; Prodigy drops the kill-you-for-no-reason bullshit for a second and tells a predictable litany of street reprisals, jail terms and unnecessary deaths with poignancy and original details: there's a killer out there, sure, but at one point a man kills people for no reason (he can give and take it—he gets shot in the head, goes home and takes the bullet out himself), goes to jail, "came home Muslim," and two months later is at it again. That version I hadn't heard before. Prodigy also unsentimentally remembers his dad teaching him how to rob a jewelry store—who knows if it's true, but he's a convincing narrator anyway.

But the really compelling and fucked-up stuff comes on two conspiracy-track numbers. The album kicks off with "Real Power Is People"; it starts with the usual kill-protect-get rich nonsense, in convincingly threatening but slightly dull fashion. Then suddenly Prodigy has some unusual images to drop: "Pedophiles rape little kids for energy / Satanic rituals, WTC (RIP) / They lit the Pentagon on fire / That's lighting the pentagram on fire." The first time I heard this, I sat bolt upright and started paying extra-close attention. "Wow," I wondered, "has Prodigy just found a completely irresponsible but effective persona to grab my attention with? Or does he really believe this, in which case he's gone completely insane?"

Let's be clear: even when Prodigy was deep in Mobb Deep's heyday, he never seemed like our most responsible citizen; when he got arrested for possession of a weapon (for the third time) and sent to jail for three and a half years, it sort of made sense. Prodigy's lawyers may well be on firm ground when they claim he's being shaken down by the NYPD hip-hop squad, but I still only half-believe everything Prodigy says. But this is a whole new level of crazy. On "Illuminati," he merely claims that one of the conspiracy theorists' favorite is out for him: "Illuminati want my mind, soul and body." Up until now, I didn't know that Prodigy and my conspiracy-theory-minded dad had anything in common; I'm sure it would be a nasty shock to them both.

As Prodigy's infamous prison blogs confirm, he's not joking. Check out installment #3, the bluntly titled" RITUALISTIC MURDER". Prodigy begins nice and easy with a few reasoned words about 9/11 ("THERE WERE BOMBS GOING OFF ON JUST ABOUT EVERY FLOOR AND THAT'S THE ONLY THING THAT CAUSED THE TOWERS TO COLLAPSE SO PERFECTLY IN DEMOLITION FORMATION.") Then he gets to the Pentagon: "THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IS THE FACT THAT THE PENTAGON WAS SET ON FIRE, THEY'VE ACTUALLY SET A PENTAGRAM ON FIRE. ONLY SATANIC WORSHIPPERS SET PENTAGRAMS ON FIRE, WHEN THEY PRACTICE THEIR RITUALS."

After some more talk of energy lines, the investigative work of Alex Jones (if you don't know, don't ask) and so on, he finally gets around to telling where all the missing children are going: "PEOPLE I'M SORRY TO SAY BUT 95% OF THESE MILLIONS OF MISSING CHILDREN ARE BEING USED AS A PART OF THESE ELITE SOCIETIES DEMONIC AND SATANIC RITUALS. THEY ARE BEING SEXUALLY MOLESTED BECAUSE IN THESE IN THESE SATANIC RITUALS WHEN THEY MOLEST A CHILD THEY'RE CONJURING UP A NEGATIVE ENERGY. ... NOT ONLY ARE THESE MISSING CHILDREN BEING USED AS SEXUAL TOOLS IN SATAN WORSHIP, BUT THEY'RE ALSO BEING EATEN AS A PART OF THESE VERY SAME RITUALS." He also cites Hannibal. You get the idea. Every track has been "researched"; this is no longer just an album.

Where Prodigy is going with this (I won't take you any more of the long way) is a very freaky version of black nationalism where white people invent power structures to oppress the Muslim nation or whatever. And while all this is pretty absurd from where I sit, it's good to hear it. I'm sort of thinking like this: I like to read The New York Times and Dirty Harry's Place back to back, so that I can read what seems like a reasonable perspective on the world, only to have my brain cleansed with a right-wing lunacy so strident I know it represents a perspective I'd never encounter otherwise in a few sharp, short blasts. (I also enjoy the site because, when not waxing political, Dirty Harry wants to do things like pay tribute to Dana Andrews; ain't nothing wrong with that.) Listening to Prodigy as opposed to pretty much any other rapper with mainstream recognition—even the devout Lupe Fiasco—is a quick clue to certain avenues of life I will never be invited into, because I'm probably the enemy. Condoning it is beside the point; I'm just intrigued it exists. Besides, like Prodigy really gives a fuck what I think. I wonder what he thinks of Obama.

***
Like The Walkmen, TV On The Radio are a wildly-acclaimed band every bit as obsessed as what they should sound like as how their songs are constructed. And, like The Walkmen, they've just had their breakthrough moment. Not to get all "I was there," but the brief year that I subscribed to Magnet Magazine, I was briefly insanely dedicated to trying to download sample MP3s of every single band they featured in any capacity, whether in one of their excellent features, the (mostly overwritten) album capsule reviews, and especially the full-page glossy buzz artists who'd get a color photo and a brief write-up. Most fell into the ether, but TV On The Radio had their shot at the moment they were passing through Austin on what I presume was one of their first national touring-laps. At a small in-store at the now sadly defunct 33 Degree Records they were pretty thrilling, running through erratic sound conditions in a way that was improvisatory and engaged, making up plausible songs on the spot. Their trademark empty spaces and drones weren't in place.

I was mostly annoyed by their first album, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes: now they had a sound, but that sound seemed calculated to resist every pop pleasure that didn't involve going a capella. No harmonies or complexities, just reverb and lots of droning; not droning in the sense that some bands embrace full-on, just straight lines that reveled in a sound rather than song. 2006's Return To Cookie Mountain was a step up—producer Dave Sitek came into his own, and the album did more in its first thirty seconds to harmonically stun than the entirety of its predecessor—but the last half degenerated into 8-minute jams going nowhere in particular besides the mixing board.

So, of course, I waited forever to get into this year's Dear Science, because all I was told was that they'd gone pop, which is what everyone said about their last album, which was only relatively true. Within thirty seconds, they've hit clarity: "Halfway Home" opens with one chord being hammered at by the full band, but then suddenly Tunde Adebimpe's vocals go for a perfect ba-ba-ba equidistant from The Beach Boys and The Ramones. This means two things: that TV On The Radio, having gotten their sound down perfectly, feel free to reference other bands now, and also that they're comfortable giving you a pop song without feeling all guilty about it. "Dancing Choose" kind of sounds like Barenaked Ladies, I swear to god, but a lot of the album is accessible relative. Kyp Malone's tracks tend to be a little tricksier, imagining (I know this is a really hackneyed reference point, but I honestly feel it's justifiable) a world in which the Talking Heads didn't drop the polyrhythmic experiments but went even further, instructing pizzicato violins to join in. All of which is admirable and interesting to listen to, but the standout track for me is also, typically, the least overtly ambitious. "Family Tree" is 5 1/2 minutes built upon a few simple elements amplified to infinity: a string quartet, a piano whose simple depressed chords echo over and over, and various production frills that use almost ineffable moments to swell everything up. It's hard to tell exactly what it's all about, but there's a general sense of a pathologically damaged family ("in the shadow of the gallows of your family tree"), something I can always get behind.

TV On The Radio are now meeting me 75% of the way there, in that they've given me one gorgeous (but not overly sentimental) song for late nights and a bunch of intellectually interesting songs that kind of get my blood pumped and kind of are just cerebrally intriguing without collapsing into drones. I'll take it.

***
Grand Archives is as fun a band to listen to as they are boring to write about. Their self-titled debut was respectfully received and promptly forgotten, but this Band of Horses defection deserves at least as much attention as their last album. Seemingly misremembering Howard Hawks, Grand Archives offer up three great songs and no bad ones. Opener "Torn Foam Blue Couch" offers up their vision of unostentious maximalism. Where Band of Horses aim to be an old-school rock band, using only the core instruments at maximum reverbed volume, Grand Archives summon up a slow-building storm from, at first, nothing more than a tambourine, a harp and a boy-girl duo. By the end, the whole band's in, the drums are pounding, horns have shown up somewhere along the way, and—in time-honored rock fashion—someone's hitting the same piano octave over and over again.

None of the songs go anywhere surprising, but they get there with confidence, deliberation and consistent skill. The three knock-outs: "A Setting Sun," a twangy stretch with a surprisingly bouncy chorus. The epic "Sleepdriving" (at 5:20, easily the longest track), the only track that seeks intensity. (NB: there's something wrong with the version in this video.) Beginning with an urgent guitar-picking riff, "Sleepdriving" settles into a grim but pretty verse (it sounds like one of Elliott Smith's angrier moments) before an unexpected string bridge comparable to The Shins' similar one in "Saint Simon," whose arrangement crawls over the rest of the song. "The Crime Window" sounds kinda like a wussier bar band, which is cool too. (Preferable really.) Predictable but very well-crafted, Grand Archives is my guilty pleasure of the year for the sheer margin between actual merit and number of times played (it's one of my ten most played bands for the last three months). Not exactly slept-on, but undervalued all the same.
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Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

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By Keith Uhlich

Like a good many film biographies, Milk reduces the struggles of its subject—gay-rights activist Harvey Milk (Sean Penn)—to a mostly inoffensive checklist. It’s a dispassionate piece of work that I suspect will have the firebrand emotion it so sorely lacks foisted upon it by preached-to choirs and blubbering bleeding hearts stoked by the passage of Proposition 8 and its ilk. Bad art serves no one, but the reach for significance is often enough to proffer a pat-on-the-back and an affirmative nod, as if ‘attempt’ and ‘achievement’ were suddenly synonymous terms of action.

There’s a lot of attempting in Milk, from identifiably hetero actors giving their best gay to director Gus Van Sant going, um, straight after a few years wandering the Bela Tarr-derived arthouse hinterlands. The film is worst when Van Sant falls back on his hand-me-down instincts, shooting an entire conversation in a blood-covered whistle’s reflective surface or Steadicam-tracking Milk’s assassin Dan White (Josh Brolin) in a reprise of the simplistically troubling aesthetics of Elephant. Most problematic are Van Sant’s parallels of Milk to the doomed heroine of Puccini’s Tosca, especially during a howler of a death scene (featuring a rack focus of most unintentional hilarity, however geographically accurate) that forces an unearned sense of martyrdom onto the fictive puppet at the movie’s center.
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To read the rest of the review at UnderGroundOnline, click here.

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By Tom Stempel

COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: Changeling, I’ve Loved You So Long, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, ER, 30 Rock, Some Quick Sweeps Updates, and Trailers, but first:

***
FAN MAIL: I can appreciate theoldboy’s disappointment that I did not deal with the opening monologue in Crash. I often have a similar reaction after I send off a column to Keith and suddenly think, hey, why I didn’t I mention that.

I think Max Winter’s take on Sidney in Rachel Getting Married is a very interesting one, and I know there are a lot of people who feel as theoldboy does that the energy of the actors and the music make that film more entertaining than a lot of what is around. So far it has not been all that great a year for films and we have to take our pleasures where we can find them.

***
CHANGELING (2008. Written by J. Michael Straczynski. 141 minutes): The flaw in Eastwood’s iris.

One quality that has kept Clint Eastwood a major star, director and producer for over forty years is that he has a great eye for screenplays, not only to star in, but to produce and direct. And even more important for screenwriters is that he tends not to spend a lot of time in “developing” scripts. The original draft of a script is on white pages, and revisions are on different colored pages. Most “final” scripts look like rainbows on LSD. Frances Fisher, who was in Unforgiven, has said that it was the only film she ever worked on where all the script pages were white. You can see what that can get you with Unforgiven and Mystic River, just to name two of his best.

That’s the upside. The downside is that sometimes the scripts should have been developed more. Both Bird and Flags of Our Fathers could have been better focused. The Bridges of Madison County and Million Dollar Baby both go on much longer after their climaxes than they should. The latter problem affects Changeling, as in the long, long scene of the killer being hanged. Do we really need to see this at this late point in the film?

The screenplay’s author, J. Michael Straczynski, told Jason Davis in the September/October issue of Creative Screenwriting that the script first went to Ron Howard and his company. Straczynski and Howard worked on revisions, but when Eastwood came on board to direct, he wanted to see the writer’s first draft. Eastwood looked at the other drafts, but went with the first one, since he felt “the voice was clearest in the first draft.” That is usually true, and it is often the author’s voice that gets “developed” out of the script. The trick is to keep the author’s voice while improving the script. I have seen this happen with my screenwriting students and have to fight against it. It can be very tricky to improve the script without destroying what made it interesting in the first place. It takes executives and producers with restrained egos to do it right. You see the problem.

The story of Christine Collins is a true story, and Straczynski, a former journalist, compiled three file folder boxes of historical accounts, trial transcripts, and other material. Like many authors of novels, nonfiction, and screenplays, Straczynski tended to put as much of his research as he could into the film. In the second half, as Collins tries to find out what happened to her son, the film bogs down in commission hearings and trials, all of which are true, but get exhausting to watch. Those scenes could have been handled quicker.

The script also gets repetitive, especially with Collins. Her son Walter disappears and she bombards the police, repeatedly asking “Where’s my son?” When they bring her a boy they think is her son, she insists he is not, repeatedly stating, “He’s not my son.” OK, we get it, move on. The odd thing about these repetitive scenes with Collins is that instead of wanting to see the scenes with our star (Angelina Jolie plays Collins), we are relieved when she is not on screen asking about her son.

Straczynski has not focused the character of Collins as sharply as he might. We cannot tell exactly when this ordinary woman moves into being an implacable force. For all the power Jolie brings to the part, and it is considerable, it never quite comes together.

I hope you have not decided from all of the above to give the film a miss because there are things it does very well. The reconstruction of Southern California in the late 20s and early 30s is superb, as is the feel for the corruption of the police department at the time.

Straczynski has written some great scenes, not only for Jolie but the others. He said in the Creative Screenwriting interview that the one area he could not find any documentation on was what happened to Collins in the psychiatric ward. He based his scenes on what he was able to find out about treatments of the time. Since he is not tied down to the “facts” (i.e. transcripts, reports), he can use his artistic license, which he does well. Two of the film’s best scenes are in the ward. First is a nice little scene in which Carol Dexter, a prostitute, explains how the system works. This leads to a great scene in which Collins tries to outwit the shrink, using what Dexter has told her. Straczynski, Jolie, and Denis O’Hare as the doctor bring their A game to that scene, and Eastwood is smart enough as a director to just set back and let them go.

There are two great scenes in which young boys talk about what happened at the “ranch” where a serial killer took young boys. The first one is focused on the police officer interviewing the boy and realizing the horror of what the boy is telling him. The other, near the end of the picture, focuses almost completely on the other boy telling of his escape from the ranch. The scene leads to as much of a happy ending as this grueling film can provide.

***
I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG (2008. Written by Philippe Claudel. 115 minutes): Some movies move forward. Some movies move backward. This one does both.

We do not know much about Juliette when we first meet her, waiting at the airport. Her face has an emotionless expression. Her much more cheerful and open younger sister Lea picks her up. There are obviously things they are not talking about. As often happens, what people are reluctant to talk about it with their family gets discussed outside the family. We learn from other scenes that Juliette has been in prison. For fifteen years. For murdering her son. Don’t worry, that last is not a spoiler. We learn it half an hour into the film, and the revelation at the end if why she killed him. We work backwards, as it were, to that revelation.

We are working forward as Juliette begins her new life, and Lea and her husband adjust to having her around. At first Luc, the husband, is reluctant to have Juliette babysit their children and one can understand why. Eventually he suggests she babysit. Stated that way, it sounds obvious, but it is not. The film is a very subtle look at the changing relationships of Juliette, Lea, Luc, and their friends, most of whom do not know where Juliette has been. In one of the most suspenseful scenes in a film this year, a dinner at a country house turns into a guessing game as to where Juliette has been. The payoff is terrific.

Claudel, a French novelist and screenwriter, has written some great roles for the actors to play, and in his first directorial job, he does not fall into the trap Charlie Kaufman did with Synecdoche, New York (see US#10). The scenes, and the film, move. I knew I was in good hands when the opening shot on the great Kristin Scott Thomas as Juliette was not held too long. Thomas said in an interview in the Los Angeles Times there was “tension on the set,” since she kept telling Claudel she could do the role with less dialogue. He was smart enough to listen to her.

The one downside is the ending. I am not sure I agree with David Denby in the November 10th New Yorker when he says it is a “cheat.” It has been prepared for, but Claudel has gotten us so deeply into the characters both intellectually and emotionally that the ending does not take us a far as the film has. It also leaves open a gaping plot hole. I won’t of course tell you what it is, but let’s just say that if Grissom and his gang of CSIs were on the original case, the outcome would have been different.

***
ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO (2008. Written by Kevin Smith. 101 minutes): Not really.

The idea had potential: two slackers, male and female, who have been friends since grade school decide to make a porn video in order to earn money and pay their bills. They have been platonic friends, but decide to do a sex scene in the film, during which they discover they are in love. So far, OK, but the details of the making of the porno are not particularly well handled, and the characterization of the participants is limited. Miri is set up to be just as foul-mouthed as Zack and most guys in Kevin Smith’s movies. Fine, but she is something of a step down from the similar Becky character in Smith’s Clerks II. And that film suggested the two guys from the first Clerks were at least showing hints of growing up. The romance between Zack and Miri is supposed to serve the same function here, but if anything it seems more adolescent rather than less. What inventiveness the first part of the film has fades away as it becomes more conventional and even sentimental by the ending.

If you do see it, however, you should stay through the credits, because there is a great payoff in the middle of the credits as to what the porno led to. Smith would have had a better movie if he had told the story the payoff suggests rather than the one he did.

A word on language. Part of why we go to a Kevin Smith movie is that the characters are all foul-mouthed, and you never know what they are going to say. I suppose making Becky and Miri just as foul-mouthed is a triumph for feminism, but this is the first Kevin Smith film where I really felt the language was excessive, or at least unneeded. That may sound odd, given that the characters are making a porno, but the language seems more generic gross language than the language that would come out during the making of a porno.

***
ER (1994. Episode “Pilot” written by Michael Crichton. 120 minutes): Michael Crichton died on November 4th. While he will be remembered for his novels and screenplays, one of his more lasting legacies is the television series ER.

Crichton went to medical school before he became a writer, and in 1974 he wrote a screenplay titled EW (for Emergency Ward). Nobody wanted to buy it. As Crichton later told Janine Pourroy for her book Behind the Scenes at ER, “I wanted to write something that was based in reality. Something that would have a fast pace and treat medicine in a realistic way. The screenplay was very unusual. It was very focused on the doctors, not the patients—the patients came and went. People yelled paragraphs of drug dosages at each other. It was very technical, almost a quasi-documentary.” He is right. His script resembles Frederick Wiseman’s 1970 Direct Cinema documentary Hospital, not only in content, but in structure. While there were a number of fiction films of the period that borrowed the Direct Cinema filmmaking style (M*A*S*H, The Candidate), very few borrowed the structure.

Crichton put the script in a drawer, where it stayed for fifteen years. In the late 80s, it came to Steven Spielberg, who expressed an interest in doing a medical drama. As Crichton and Spielberg talked, the director asked Crichton what else he was working on. Crichton said his newest novel was going to be about the cloning of dinosaurs from … well, that was the end of Spielberg’s interest in EW. A few years later Tony Thomopolous of Spielberg’s Amblin’ company found the script and suggested it might make a better television series than a film. Thomopolous put Crichton together with the former showrunner of China Beach, John Wells. By now several series, starting with Hill Street Blues in the 80s, had brought that multi-story, multi-character Direct Cinema structure to television. (For a more detailed look at how that happened, see my 1992 book Storytellers to the Nation: A History of American Television Writing.) There were still concerns about what was now titled ER.

The two-hour pilot of ER establishes the tone and rhythm of the series. In the first act, we start with Dr. Mark Greene asleep. He is awakened by Lydia, an ER nurse, since the incoming patient is Dr. Doug Ross, the playboy pediatrician, coming in to sober up. The quiet of the morning gives way to action as victims of a building collapse are brought in. We see that Ross is a top-flight doctor, even when a patient vomits on him. At the end of the first act, Greene and Ross are asking Carol Hathaway, the head nurse, if there are any more patients. Hathaway, who has wandered through several scenes, tells them no and quietly walks off.

In the second act, we learn that Greene’s wife wants him to interview at a plusher hospital. This is one of few recurring storylines in the pilot. He goes for the interview later and near the end of the pilot decides to stay in the ER. I suspect that in Crichton’s film version we get him telling his wife, but here it is left up in the air. In the ER, John Carter shows up. He is a third year medical student starting a rotation. In a “normal” script, we would have started with him, so he could have “introduced” us to the ER. Here he comes in after we have a sense of the action of the ER. The doctor he is assigned to, Peter Benton, gives him a quick tour, which makes more sense to us since we have already seen some of the places. Later Carter has to try his stitches on Frank, a cop who shot himself in the leg while trying to hit his wife. There was no way anyone, on the show or just viewing it, would know that Frank would return several years later to work the main desk at Admitting.

Shortly before an hour into the show, we have what is so far the longest scene as Dr. Lewis talks to a man who suspects, rightly, that he has cancer. He asks Lewis to level with him, which she does. His reaction is to think of all the things he wants to do with his wife. Since character has never been Crichton’s strong suit (see my book Understanding Screenwriting for a discussion of Crichton’s writing on the three Jurassic Park movies), I suspect this may have been written, or at least rewritten by John Wells. Crichton gets the sole credit on the screenplay, but the scene feels less like him and more like Wells.

Shortly after the hour mark, at the end of Act Four, a new patient is brought into the ER. The doctors and nurses are in shock. The patient is Carol Hathaway, who tried to commit suicide. Ross seems the most stunned. We learned earlier that Hathaway and Ross flirt, although she is now engaged and as she says to Ross, “You had your chance.” Crichton has upped the ante because this is a patient we know, at least slightly, and her suicide attempt has shaken the major characters we have been following. In the original screenplay for the film, Hathaway died, but that was rewritten so at the end of the pilot we do not know whether she lives or dies. She went on in the series to rekindle her affair with Ross and go off with him to live happily ever after.

In Act Five they are treating Hathway and trying to figure out why she did it, and we get additional patients. One element in the pilot episode that does not appear to be continued into the series is that the doctors and nurses are constantly pulling sheets over patients to show they have died. In the series, patients die, but usually with really impressive death scenes.

In Act Six, Benton has a patient he thinks needs surgery. Since all the surgeons are away at a conference (possible, but unlikely) he decides to operate, at least until Dr. Morgenstern, the head of the ER, can get there. This, in spite of the fact that in Act One, a surgeon has told Benton he is not ready for surgery. The operation, which turns out well, was obviously intended to be the climax of the film.

What Crichton laid out, and what Wells and the other writers on the series carried through, was a complex structure that allowed for a variety of characters and stories to be told, either in single episodes or over several seasons. Since it was an ensemble show, cast changes, including the death of Mark Greene, were relatively easily worked into the show.

***
ER (2008. Episode “Heal Thyself” written by David Zabel. 60 minutes): Speaking of Mark Greene…

As I noticed in writing about Dr. Banfield’s arrival in “Another Thursday at County” (US#8), she seemed to have a passing familiarity with County General, especially one of the examination rooms. This week we learn what that was all about.

Banfield and her husband discuss something he brought up at a party last night, and she is not happy about it. We don’t know what. Out running, Banfield comes across the site of an accident, where a little girl has fallen into the lake. We begin to get flashbacks of Banfield, her husband, and their son (so it appears my guess in US#8 that the father was one of the show’s doctors was wrong; but is the son in the photograph the same one in the show?). How do we know they are flashbacks? Yes, Angela Bassett has on a long-haired wig, but she also looks younger and more at ease. How do actors do that? It’s a mystery.

As Banfield in the present accompanies the child and her father in the ambulance, we get more flashbacks of a seizure Banfield’s son had and her reluctance to take him to the hospital. She finally agrees, and at the end of Act Two they arrive at County General. The door of the ambulance is opened by Mark Greene.

Both in the past and the present we are in Trauma One, the room Banfield reacted to. In the past, Banfield gives Greene a hard time, and she eventually realizes her son has leukemia. The son dies, but in the present the girl lives. The past and present are seen in the same scene; at one point Banfield in the present looks at Banfield in the past. The cutting between the past and present has gotten quicker, as have the medical discussions. Crichton’s idea that there would be a lot of technical stuff the audiences would not necessarily understand is still alive and well on ER.

In the last of the flashbacks, Greene sees Banfield out by the river and reassures her that there was nothing she could have done that would have saved her son. Having Greene deliver the message should probably work better than it does. If you are going to bring Greene back from the dead, it had better be to have an impact on Banfield now. We do not really see that in this episode. It is nice to see Anthony Edwards (Greene) again, but he is not doing anything we did not seem him do for eight years before on the show. The same is true with the brief cameos of Dr. Weaver and Dr. Romano.

***
30 ROCK (2008. “The One With the Cast of Night Court” written by Jack Burditt. 30 minutes): November 13th seemed to be a “bringing back the dead, or at least canceled, night” on NBC.

In addition to Greene returning to ER, 30 Rock pulled a twofer. Liz and Jenna’s friend from Chicago, Claire, showed up and was played by former-Friend Jennifer Aniston, hence the episode title in the “The One…” form used by Friends. The show was smart enough not to make Claire a Rachel clone, but rather a total whack-job, determined to seduce Jack in as many different situations as possible. Great choice of character and Aniston, who looked like she was having the time of her life, knocked it out of the park. Brad who? See, I told you they should have been promoting the writing rather than the guest stars.

The other canceled show that was referenced was Night Court. Kenneth, the page, was upset that the show had been canceled before the wedding between Harry and Christine got married, so Tracy arranged for some of the cast to come and enact the scene. Not quite as high flying as the Claire scenes, but meta-enough.

Ah yes, one other small point. Let me extend my personal thanks to all the American voters who made it possible that Tina Fey will not have to be moonlighting as Sarah Palin and can devote her full time and talent to this show.

***
SOME QUICK SWEEPS UPDATES: On Two and a Half Men, Alan had a brief affair with his ex-wife, but sanity prevailed and they broke up again. She got back with Herb, her second husband, and she is now pregnant. Doing the math, it is clear to everybody but Herb that the child is probably Alan’s.

On CSI we finally got an episode in which we see Grissom suffering from Sara’s leaving, “Leave Out All the Rest.” It came while the CSI’s were investigating a murder involving torture, S&M, and other good things. So Grissom naturally went to talk to Lady Heather, his friendly neighborhood dominatrix. She recognized the murder was just a pretext. At least the issue was being actively dealt with by the show, rather than just lingering on close-ups of Grissom looking depressed. On the down side, the new CSI, Riley, was introduced in her first episode as having a sense of humor, which subsequently went missing in the following episodes. A little levity might not be out of the questions, team.

On Boston Legal David E. Kelley and Amanda Jones came up with a new take on an abortion episode, Roe, in spite of Denny’s insistence that audiences would be turning it off. The episode, broadcast on November 10th, does not seem to have caused any outrage.

And CBS, not having the courage of Kevin Smith’s convictions, has canceled The Ex-List.

***
TRAILERS: I have written about movie trailers a couple of times in relation to specific films, but this is more general.

On one of the Mad Men episodes, they ran several trailers for the upcoming remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, presumably because Jon Hamm has a supporting role in the film. I am sure many Mad Men fans loved the quiet subtlety of the original, but the trailers make the new one look like a remake of Independence Day. I doubt if the Mad Men audience is the desired demographic for that.

On the other hand, on another episode of Mad Men, there was a trailer for Revolutionary Road, which may have been too close to Mad Men in setting and tone. But it may well appeal to that demographic.

With most trailers, my general reaction is “no way.” Only occasionally do I see one that immediately makes me want to see the film. One such, in theaters now, is for Last Chance Harvey. It sets up the situation quickly: Harvey has gone to London for his daughter’s wedding, but she wants her stepfather to give her away. Harvey gets a call that he’s been fired. He meets a woman to share his troubles with. I assume from the one review I have seen so far that it is not the whole story. The trailer also suggests the script is providing a couple of great roles for its two stars, Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, who appear to have great chemistry. I turned to my wife at the end of the trailer and said, “Shall I go out now and get tickets?”
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Tom Stempel is the author of several books on film. His most recent is Understanding Screenwriting: Learning From Good, Not-Quite-So Good, and Bad Screenplays.

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By Dan Callahan

[Milk opens in theaters on Wednesday, November 26th.]

Slain politician Harvey Milk was a gay pioneer and by all accounts a real mensch and role model, and his story was told in full for the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. Now Gus Van Sant is trolling for awards with Milk, a paint-by numbers biopic of the tireless activist that wastes the efforts of some fine actors, most notably Sean Penn, who strives to play Milk as a three-dimensional person with idiosyncrasies and failings even as the “let’s get from A to B” script by Dustin Lance Black boxes him into textbook sainthood. Penn manages to get some energy going in his public speeches, especially when he’s riling up a crowd in the Castro, the gay area of San Francisco where Milk served as unofficial Mayor and then elected official, and he has nice moments of physical schtick that involve subtle, queeny eye flares and dainty hand gestures. Penn even reaches for Brando-esque tragedy in the last scenes, but the straightforward corniness of the script foils all his actorly nuances.

Milk begins with black-and-white footage of gay bars being raided, then moves to the courtship between a forty-year old Milk and Scott Smith, a curly-headed hedonist played as a series of stoned/sexy smiles by James Franco. Penn and Franco work hard at their romantic chemistry (if they smiled any harder at each other their heads would explode), but Van Sant keeps us at a distance from their connection with the smooth assurance of a disconnected voyeur and a half-assed audience pleaser. Franco did some early publicity on the film where he talked about several sex scenes he shot with Penn, but these have all been cut, and it can’t help but seem peculiar that the more Penn’s Milk talks about how every gay needs to come out of the closet, the more Van Sant keeps the politician’s personal life in the literal shadows; there’s some smooching out in the open, yet whenever clothes come off, Van Sant cuts or turns out the lights, all the while asking us to believe that this is supposed to be the freewheeling 70s Castro.

Grainy television footage of sweetly-smiling, viperish gay rights foe Anita Bryant is mixed with grainy new footage in Milk’s apartment and campaign headquarters, but there’s no juice, orange or otherwise, in the bland back-and-forth conversations about grassroots political strategies, even when an avid Emile Hirsch and a fragile Diego Luna are trying their damndest to pump some youthful energy into this hagiography. Luna is especially ill-served by the narrative; we see glimpses of his fraught, sexually charged relationship with Milk, but Van Sant and Black handle his sad exit from the story in a “moving right along!” fashion that is borderline offensive. As Milk’s murderer Dan White, who was given a light sentence after his attorney argued that junk food had impaired his judgment, all Josh Brolin gets to do is sulk and pout, and Black’s theory that White was a closet case is just as ineffectual as the film’s patchwork, uncertain style of directing (again, there were reports that Brolin got to go all-out in a late-night Twinkie binge scene which is nowhere to be found in the final cut).

Van Sant fails most conspicuously in the many scenes of marches and riots; he has no feel whatsoever for a crowd and no way to animate a locale. There’s no life around the edges of these sequences, just a careful period re-creation that comes nowhere near convincing us that we’re really in a certain time and place and that something important is at stake (if you want to see the film Milk could have been, look at the Stanley Kubrick-styled trailer). Two key scenes where Milk talks to a despairing young gay kid in a wheelchair are so poorly played and shot that they reduce what was obviously a heart-rending exchange in life into something almost laughably mawkish on screen. This film might get some tentative acclaim in some quarters for its pro-gay cheerleading. But it cannot be denied that a movie as wishy-washy, trite and simplified as Milk denies and destroys the complexity of life as it is really lived, and Van Sant can’t even fashion the kind of basic Hollywood energy that might give at least the second half of this very dramatic true story the rousing call-to-arms mood needed for the no-less crucial next steps of today’s gay rights movement.

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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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By Sal Cinquemani

In his Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about the white moderates who sided with him on the issue of civil rights but who were reluctant to act, who told him to have patience and wait: "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." It's something that has stayed with me since I first read the text over a decade ago, and in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8 (the California initiative that defines "marriage" in the state constitution as a union between a man and a woman, and which was largely funded by the Mormon Church and disproportionately supported by the African-American community compared to other racial groups), King's words have never felt more prescient.

In the midst of an economic meltdown, and with the moguls of the Big Three automakers arriving in Washington to, as one legislator astutely put it, beg for money like someone showing up for lunch at a soup kitchen in a top hat and tails, the Office of the President-elect has unveiled the details of Barack Obama's agenda for, among other things, civil rights. The plan proposes to expand hate crime statutes, as Obama did as an Illinois State senator, expand federal anti-discrimination employment laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity, repeal the U.S. Military's misguided "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, and expand adoption rights (an important stance considering the precedent set by a new ban on adoption for unmarried couples in Arkansas, a state with a shameful foster-care record).

Obama's position on the issue of gay marriage, however, is mixed at best. He opposes a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and even went on record in opposition of Prop 8, but he also opposes using the word "marriage" for gays and lesbians, preferring the much-ballyhooed institution of "civil unions" instead. Some, including myself, have asserted that civil unions should be enough, that progress takes time and change comes in measured steps. But if he were alive today, where would Martin Luther King stand on the issue?
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To read the rest of the article at Slant Magazine, click here.

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By Lauren Wissot

[Milk opens in theaters Wednesday, November 26th. Click here to read Lauren's Spout Blog coverage of the film's press conference.]

Milk, Gus Van Sant’s labor of love biopic about civil rights leader Harvey Milk (the first openly gay man elected to higher office in the United States and later gunned down, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, three decades ago this month), is mainstream filmmaking at its finest and a perfect wedding of subject matter to director. For Milk, like Van Sant, was a former “radical” who learned to work within—even to embrace—the system, stealthily turning it to his advantage. What Milk is to extremist activists like Larry Kramer, Van Sant is to fellow filmmaker Todd Haynes—no longer a director of experimental art in the moving picture medium, but a maverick of the mini majors.

Even comparing Van Sant to Haynes is like weighing apples against oranges: Van Sant is as much of a sly showman as his subject, who grasped the power of rallying crowds with catchy lines (“My name is Harvey Milk, and I want to recruit you,” a play on Anita Bryant’s scare tactic of gays “recruiting our children”) and staged events (stepping on dog poop to promote a pooper-scooper law)—an insider working covertly within the system. Indeed, Van Sant understands the power of schmaltz above nuance. Whatever you need to do to make your message accessible and heard loud and clear—evidenced in the director’s casting of straight marquee names (like Sean Penn as Milk, in an Oscar-worthy performance) in the lead roles at the expense of actual gay actors—is worth the creative price.

Told in broad strokes with a swift-moving script by Dustin Lance Black that can be prone to cringe-worthy scenes (the small town, suicidal queer kid who can’t run away to the big city because he’s in a wheelchair most definitely should have been cut), Milk as a whole is more than the sum of its cheesy missteps. As with Charles Burnett’s Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation I’m willing to forgive the blunders because the images are so strikingly inventive, because the director has such sheer passion for his story. Van Sant, like Burnett, combines a master’s expertise with a child’s sense of play.

Deftly, he weaves actual archival footage (often seen through the POV of the lead character’s camera lens), archival photos (including snapshots passed around in Milk’s camera shop), and news reports and interviews from the 70s (that Milk and his confidants watch on TV) with the footage from the San Francisco-based shoot where Van Sant and his crew recreated Milk’s store in its original location. The period costume and production design are meticulous—so much so that you can actually feel the Bay Area itself come out as a character. Van Sant and his longtime DP Harris Savides (Zodiac) work as one, most noticeably in an incremental slo-mo towards the end when Milk is about to be shot, the freeze on his profile more spectacular than any blood spilled.

The entire film is one seamless melding of past into present, much like Prop 6 (a battle that makes up a big chunk of Milk and which would have banned gay and lesbian teachers and their allies from California’s public school system had it not been defeated) is paralleled to the current Prop 8. And the straight actors, especially Penn as Milk and James Franco as his lover Scott Smith (Penn and Franco give Brokeback Mountain's Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal a run for their chemistry money), are all astounding. If ever there was a reason for Sean Penn to stop pursuing his career as a mediocre director, this performance is it. Penn is an absolute chameleon; a metamorphosis occurs in which not a trace of the actor can be seen. He captures Milk’s sweet vulnerability, the essence of his charm, to a degree that is nearly shamanistic. Even the miscast Alison Pill as campaign manager Anne Kronenberg and a way-too-old Josh Brolin as assassin Dan White—a role originally meant for Matt Damon who would have been pitch perfect—are thrilling, as is the reclamation of hope that was the crux of Milk’s life.

Screenwriter Black rightly focuses on the “personal is political” love story (“It wasn’t just about rights or electoral politics, it was about the fact that he was in love with Scott or he was in love with Jack Lira—and he wanted that to be okay. He didn’t want to be judged for it. He wanted to have the right to be himself … politics for the sake of love” is how Black puts it in the press notes), of one man who never gave up against all odds. The opposite of an overnight success (Milk was in the closet until age forty, and the many years of losing election after election before reaching the San Francisco Board of Supervisors cost him his relationship with Smith), Milk was a hardworking everyman who only went into government because he believed he could make a positive difference in people’s lives. Politics transformed him, made him mature from an angry hippie reactionary to an open-minded optimist. After ticking off a list of gay community grievances in an early debate, an opponent wisely asks, “What are you for?” It was the last time Milk would be defeated in a campaign.

And yet, sadly, this American hero in the mold of MLK, Jr. is known more for his violent death (shot point blank inside city hall by a colleague who would later claim the “Twinkie defense”) if he’s known at all. Smartly, Black sets out to rectify this by putting Milk’s life and love story at the forefront, virtually ignoring the lurid aspects of the tale. Killer Dan White is merely a footnote, not a raging right wing homophobe (he was too self-involved to be homophobic), but simply an unstable man who took every slight personally. When Milk is the only supervisor to take White up on the invitation to his son’s christening, he’s naively oblivious to the fact that Milk’s friendliness is also a calculated political move. Sappy? No more so than one of the lines Milk speaks into his tape recorder, a last will and testament to be played only “in the event of my assassination.”

“If a bullet should go through my head, let that bullet go through every closet door,” he states. Romantic and melodramatic and heartfelt and beautiful—that’s Milk, and Milk, in a nutshell.

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Brooklyn-based writer Lauren Wissot is the publisher of the blog Beyond the Green Door, the author of the memoir Under My Master's Wings, and a contributor to The Reeler.

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