By Jonathan Pacheco
Tami’s an intelligent woman, but she also carries a bit of innocence, a trait that has aided her in her quest to help others, specifically as a guidance counselor. When the jaded people of Dillon deem someone to be a hopeless case, Tami has been the one to step in and have faith in that someone. Her belief in the good of others makes her a very trusting figure, which, in turn, enables others to trust her. But if she’s not careful, someone with Tami’s inherent trust can get herself into trouble by placing that trust in the wrong person. Such is the case in “How the Other Half Live,” where Tami befriends a very friendly woman who just happens to be J.D. McCoy’s mother. When Eric confronts his wife about the dangers of this friendship, Tami defends it. She insists that she’s not being played by the McCoys, but from what I can tell, that’s exactly what’s happening. To use the words of Bill Parcells, “Consider yourself sucked.”
It’s not that the McCoys are malicious, but they’re powerful people who get what they want, even if it calls for a little manipulation. I’ll forgive Tami for this lapse in judgment because she was stressed and nearly at a breaking point. But it was obvious that Katie McCoy was saying all the right things—she’d love to help the school with actual money, offering to take the hosting duties of the annual Panther Barbecue off the Taylors’ hands .... Eric sees right through this because it’s what he’s been afraid of all along. First come the gifts (Cuban cigars and bottles of whiskey), then the McCoys are doing big favors for them. Next thing you know, Eric and his wife are indebted to this family. It could put a lot of pressure on Coach to make a decision he’s hesitant to make, and he’d then be making it unethically.
Not that coach doesn’t have enough pressure on him already. At this barbecue, now taking place at the McCoys’ mansion, Eric tries to escape the never-ending questions from Joe, Buddy, and the boosters, only to be trapped by them in a billiards room. It’s here that we get another hint why Coach doesn’t want to play J.D. It’s more than mere loyalty to Matt Saracen. First, Eric knows Matt. He knows him as a player, and he knows him personally. He hasn’t gotten to know this McCoy boy, and he’d take the time to do so if everyone would stop shoving the kid down the his throat. But another reason is pointed out through Kyle Chandler’s perfect delivery of Eric’s backhanded compliment, “I admit that your son is an incredible 15-year-old.” J.D.’s only recently hit puberty, which means he’s still growing and changing. So not only is he practically a baby compared to some of those kids on the field, but who knows what he’s really growing into?
This scene finally gives us a formal introduction to J.D.’s personal quarterback coach, Wade Aikmen (a blatant cross between Wade Wilson and Troy Aikman who also reminds me of the current Dallas Cowboys Offensive Coordinator, Jason Garrett). This is part of what makes J.D. so scary to someone like Matt; not only does the freshman have plenty of natural talent, but he’s got a father with the time and means to get his son the best training. Aikmen has been flown down from Dallas and is being paid handsomely every week to train a 15-year-old backup high school quarterback. If I’m Matt, I’m sleeping with one eye open.
What I like about the Matt vs. J.D. plot is that, while we’ve done the whole “quarterback controversy” thing before, it still feels fresh. Season One had Matt fighting for the starting job against “Voodoo” Tatum, but the arc only lasted a few episodes, and it was clear from the beginning that “Voodoo” was the bad guy in the situation. He walked around with an ever-present scowl, he disrespected his coaches and teammates, and he did whatever it took to pad his statistics. We knew that, while “Voodoo” had more football talent than Matt, he wasn’t the right quarterback for that Panther team.
It’s a little different with J.D. McCoy. While we still know that we’re supposed to root for Matt in this situation, the writers are smart enough to not paint J.D. as another villain. The kid is just trying to play football. His father is the one muscling him into games, but J.D. has been very respectful, training and doing his job as a backup QB (there’s even a shot of him on the sideline with infamous backup QB clipboard during the Friday night game). We get a glimpse of another side of him at the party when he catches Matt and Julie in his trophy room, making fun of him behind his back. Instead of getting defensive, making snide comments, or rushing out after a silent glare, J.D. actually pokes fun at himself, claiming his parents bronzed his first dirty diaper. He knows how people look at him, and he knows he has a dad who probably needs to back off a little bit. J.D. is very different from “Voodoo” Tatum, and that scene looks like a setup for a much longer quarterback conflict than the one we saw in the first season.
In all this, Matt gets little support from Landry (who insists that Matt needs an “angle” if he wants to beat the “media machine J.D. McCoy”), so the quarterback turns once again to Julie for support and relief. It’s during Matt’s lunchtime rant that we get the best line of the episode: “Meantime, I got some freshman named Joe Doyle breathing down my neck...” Because of the duo’s history together, I’ve noticed Julie being more aggressive in her pursuit of Matt than I can ever remember. Not only does she tell him that he’s cute when he rants, but when he asks, “Are you gonna eat your tacos?” she comes back with, “I didn’t come over here to eat tacos.” Oddly, though, the rest of their scenes together didn’t seem to have the magic that they had last week, and I’m not totally sure why.
I was surprised when Smash showed up this episode. Somehow I had forgotten about this guy. His tryout at A&M is still another week away, but this week he’s faced with the news that his mother has taken on a second job to be able to pay for A&M or whatever school he ends up at. This shakes the boy a little, who went through high school telling his mother that he would be the one buying her a new house. Coincidentally, one of his bosses at the Alamo Freeze decides to offer Smash a regional manager position that includes a pay raise and a company car. Smash has always been proud, so one might say that his pride would never let him give up on his football dream to get a cushy position at the Alamo Freeze. Then again, his pride also doesn’t allow him to sit back and let his mother work through 2 jobs to pay for his schooling, especially when he had promised her a better life. While this story was brief, I liked the selflessness it brought out of Smash as well as the dedication and fire we saw from his mother. It’s a sweet little subplot, but somehow it felt like it didn’t belong in an episode already packed with stories. Maybe it’s there to bridge Brian’s story from last week to next week (when, I assume, he’ll have that tryout), but the episode would have been stronger without it (despite my love for all things Mama Smash).
So far this season I’ve been critical of how Tim and Lyla’s relationship has been handled, so it was a relief to see some compelling scenes this week, specifically from Lyla. We’re also treated to a better side of her father Buddy; he doesn’t display so much of a disapproving attitude toward Tim as he does a loving attitude towards Lyla. All he’s got in his life anymore is football and his baby girl; knowing Buddy, he’ll do whatever it takes to protect both. I loved his scenes with his daughter, especially when he admits that he actually likes Tim, but knows too many bad things about him to be able to sit back and let Lyla get hurt. There’s always something poignant about a dad showing love, chivalry, and protection towards his daughter, so when Buddy approaches Lyla at the Panther party, asking her if he needs to give her a ride home (and doing his best not to humiliate her), her response made the heartwarming moment heartbreaking as well.
Which leads to the scene that brings weight to her relationship with Tim. She conveys a desperation that we didn’t see before. Everyone has warned her about getting involved with Tim, and a few weeks ago, she herself had a hard time taking him seriously. But she sees something in Tim that no one else sees, and that’s what she points to and holds onto. When she pleads, “Please don’t make a fool out of me,” I think (and hope) that she finally gets through to him.
If there ever was a time that the Riggins boy needed a wake-up call, it’d be right now, after being suckered into another boneheaded scheme by his brother. Billy, concerned about having money to pay for his wedding and provide a decent life for his bride, resorts to shady methods. I probably wasn’t the only one groaning when he ropes Tim into being his wingman on a mission to steal copper wire from an abandoned power plant. For some reason, I feel like we’ve been down a similar road when the brothers had their run-ins with the crazy drug-dealer of Season Two. The shot near the end of the episode seems to indicate that we haven’t seen the last of this subplot, and I worry that it will wear out its welcome very quickly. Most of all, I thought Tim was beyond falling for something like this. Tim, consider yourself sucked.
Some miscellaneous notes:
Jonathan Pacheco is a current web developer and future freelance writer. He blogs and reviews films at Bohemian Cinema.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Friday Night Lights on Saturday: Episode 3.3, "How the Other Half Live"
BSG Saturdays: Season 4, Ep. 13, "The Oath"
By Todd VanDerWerff
The first five minutes or so of “The Oath” were pretty good Battlestar Galactica, if a little on the on-the-nose side of things (as the show can be every so often). But then, oh, then, “The Oath” turned into the awesomest thing that ever walked the face of this Earth. It had its flaws, and I want to pick on them, but, man, oh man, Starbuck shot a guy in the head, and Baltar and Roslin had to work together to help quell a growing mutiny in the fleet, and Adama and Tigh had their very own version of the impossible last stand of so many siege movies, and the whole thing just rocketed along like a leftover script from Season One (when the series was most overtly an “action” show). I’d like to criticize the whole thing, but did you hear me? It was AWESOME!
Let’s set aside 8-year-old Todd for the moment, though, and see if we can’t dig more into the meat of what was going on in this episode. The all-hands-on-deck mutiny is one of the few stock military plots Battlestar hasn’t really used in the past (elements of it have popped up in a variety of storylines, but never something this streamlined and close-to-the-bone), which may explain why it felt like a Season One throwback (most of the stock military plots were exhausted in that season). Unlike the last handful of episodes, as well, “The Oath” had all of the major characters (I didn’t see any regulars missing) focusing on the same plotline, and I’m sure the folks who’ve been concerned about the seemingly aimless plotting of the last two episodes were probably thanking episode writer Mark Verheiden and director John Dahl for an hour that never meandered.
In addition, the episode had some interesting parallels to the miniseries that kicked off the pilot and quite a few callbacks to the Pegasus arc and the TV movie “Razor,” which preceded the fourth season. All of those arcs were, in one way or another, about how human beings deal with chaos, how they self-organize to create societies that make sense (or don’t) and how they pull together or fall apart in the face of extreme circumstances. When faced with the prospect of the vast majority of their species dying in a genocide, the humans of the miniseries pulled together and gave themselves a purpose (finding Earth), something that could pull them together in the face of annihilation. From there, they reconstructed the society they had lived in as best as they could. The Pegasus, however, was unable to do this. Faced with the new chaos of the world they found themselves in, the crew of the Pegasus gave in to a kind of fascism, wherein Admiral Cain’s (Michelle Forbes) word was THE word and all objectors were removed.
For this reason, the callbacks to the Pegasus arc and “Razor” (mostly from all of the actors in the episode who appeared in those arcs and seemed to be back to deal with unfinished business) stuck out. The Galactica and the fleet have discovered that Earth is not able to be occupied. Roslin (Mary McDonnell) and Adama (Edward James Olmos) are mostly unable to deal with the pressures of holding the fleet together now that things are so dire (there are offhand mentions to supplies slowly running out in the last two episodes). Baltar (James Callis) has turned to his new cult, while Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) seems just inches away from another nervous breakdown. Only Lee (Jamie Bamber) remains, trying to hold things together and trying to keep the rest of the fleet from rebelling in the face of the uneasy alliance he signed with the rebel Cylons in “Revelations.” But the fleet wants to hear from Roslin. They trust her. And in the absence of her, they’ll listen to the Cylon-phobia of Tom Zarek (Richard Hatch). After all, the fleet hasn’t seen everything we’ve seen. They’re going to find it very hard to just forgive and forget a genocide.
And so we find the seeds sewn for the action-packed “The Oath.” But for as much complaining as last week’s episode garnered for its strange, wandering plotlines and heavy focus on character moments (Entertainment Weekly’s Michael Ausiello called it “the painfully tedious and self-indulgent art film that we had to sit through last week,” somewhat uncharitably, but his opinion seemed to be the majority one in fandom), this week’s episode doesn’t work nearly as well without it. (The Webisodes featuring Gaeta (Alessandro Juliani) aired in the build-up to this season also provided some interesting character background and may be the first time Webisodes have been used to beef up a main plotline to such a degree in the very short history of the medium.) Did we really need two episodes dedicated to showing us just how lost the fleet was without the hope of Earth hanging out there ahead of them? Maybe not, but last week’s episode so effectively put us in the headspace that leads to this episode that I’m loathe to simply write it off as many have. But enough about that.
“The Oath” is like a primer as to why we came to love all of these characters in the first place. Even the weaselly Gaeta has a few moments where we see him contemplate the graveness of the task he’s launched upon, the deaths that he’s wrought, the lack of direction he feels even as he’s accomplished his goals. It’s rather brilliant that this mutiny is carried out, for the most part, by background characters like Zarek and Gaeta and Seelix (Jennifer Halley). Most TV series keep the characters in the background out of the course of decision-making, leaving them to simply live with whatever the main characters decide is best. For the most part, these characters just go along with whatever’s decided for them (it’s why we’re watching the main characters in the first place, after all), but this has always seemed a missed opportunity. There’s not really room in a novel or film to think about the agency of the background players, unless said production is consciously an attempt to ignore the main players in favor of the background folk (like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), but a TV series has enough time to play with that, so it can do things like show us the growing sense among the people that the decisions being made are not in said people’s best interests. “The Oath,” by and large, pits the above-the-title stars (except for Gaeta) against the guest players, and in that regard, it’s almost an amusing commentary on the television star system itself.
As mentioned, though, this is mainly an effort to remind us why we’re on this ride with these people in the first place. (If we think of season 4.5 as its own mini-season, these episodes occupy the same place as “Exodus” did in season three and fulfill many of the same functions.) Baltar gets to upbraid Roslin hilariously. Roslin rediscovers her spine when she sees just how far her people have fallen and just how much it has hurt her beloved Bill. Lee picks up a gun and joins the fray. And Adama and Tigh (Michael Hogan) fight their way out of being dragged to the brig by the mutineers, then shoot their way to an alternate airlock to get Roslin and Baltar safely off-ship, ending the episode by holding off the mutineers in a lonely last stand (and providing the “to be continued”). Even Tyrol (Aaron Douglas), who’s been a little underused, gets a moment to shine, getting said airlock in shape to get our heroes safely off the Galactica.
But it’s Starbuck who shines the most here. Grumblings about how Starbuck has turned into a whiny soap opera character have plagued the show since the start of its second season, when she less frequently featured in action sequences, but by keeping Starbuck out of the action so often, it makes the episodes when she takes initiative (like this one) that much more effective. Starbuck is a born warrior often sidelined by circumstance or her own hang-ups, but she’ll be there when you need her the most. And, man, does the fleet need her in this episode. From the moment Starbuck sees the mutineers arming themselves in a gun locker, Sackhoff takes complete control of the episode, finally turning her live-wire performance from this season into an excuse to cut loose and beat some people up, and it’s thrilling to see. She singlehandedly takes down a group of several mutineers aiming to kill Lee. She arms herself. She passionately kisses Lee. She seems to be having a ton of fun, even if the circumstances are dire. And she’s the only one who realizes exactly what’s at stake when she reminds Adama that the mutineers are no longer his men. They are the enemy. In a society as small as the one pictured in Battlestar, this isn’t just a mutiny. It’s a civil war.
I was impressed by Juliani’s work as well. Gaeta’s long been one of my least favorite characters, simply because he’s never seemed as developed as some of the other CIC denizens. But here, as he singlehandedly stays one step ahead of Adama and Tigh in order to bring about their downfall, Juliani plays both the moral doubt and the sheer conviction to the cause that the role requires. He always seems like he’s about three seconds away from throwing up, but he also realizes that what he’s done can’t be undone, and if he doesn’t see it through to its end, he’ll be a dead man (“You’ll have nothing,” snarls Adama). He blanches when Zarek brains Laird (Vincent Gale) with a wrench, killing him, and he hesitates perhaps a moment too long when issuing the order to shoot down the ship bearing Roslin and Baltar to the Cylon basestar, but he’s quickly gaining control of a situation that could very rapidly spiral out of control. Despite his essentially villainous intentions (from the audience’s standpoint), Juliani plays just how necessary Gaeta seems to think this is and makes the audience feel it as well.
If there were characters who got short shrift, it’s everyone who got sent to the brig, including Helo (Tahmoh Penikett), Athena (Grace Park), Anders (Michael Trucco) and Six (Tricia Helfer). There were points raised in this storyline (like Athena’s insistence that Anders pretend to know more than he did if questioned), but for the most part, it seemed to be foreshadowing for what’s to come next week, though the moment where Seelix came to reminisce with Anders about when they were good friends down on the Caprican surface was a nice scene that felt like it might be another understated character moment and quickly turned into the queasy horror of an insurgency in its infancy.
“The Oath” isn’t perfect. There are lines that are a bit clunky (Starbuck suddenly has an affinity for action movie clichés), and the opening five minutes contain two monologues that are a bit on-the-nose (Roslin admonishing Adama about his passive-aggressiveness and Zarek talking with Gaeta about the problems of revolution). And this is to say nothing of the moment when Lee somewhat unexpectedly turns on Tigh for being a Cylon (of all characters who would know just how much Tigh is dedicated to the human cause, Lee would be one of them). But the whole thing moves like a rocket and does a good job of wedding the show’s high-minded ideas about how humanity deals with chaos with strongly dramatized action beats. If the previous two episodes were necessary to get us to the place where “The Oath” would happen, “The Oath” does a good job of lining up payoff after payoff, to the point where we have no recourse but to groan loudly at the “To be continued” and ask what comes next.
Some other thoughts:
House contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Serbis
By Andrew Schenker
[Serbis opens today at the Angelika Film Center in New York City. Click here for screening information.]
Like Goodbye, Dragon Inn without the protective layer of nostalgia, Brillante Mendoza's Serbis crafts a self-contained world from a dilapidated movie house given more to gay cruising than cinema watching. But whereas the theater in Tsai Ming-liang's film still offers relatively straight fare (classic wuxia films) and the sexual encounters come free of cost, the programming at Serbis' theater has given over entirely to porn and, in the relentless everything-for-profit world of Mendoza's film, each blowjob necessitates an exchange of pesos.
Busting at the seams with activity, The Family Theater is decidedly a family affair. Set in a noisy Filipino metropolis, the film details the lives of an extended clan who not only run the theater but live in it. From the aging matriarch, embroiled in a lawsuit against her bigamous husband, to the young boy who proudly recites his grade school arithmetic, Mendoza builds a multi-generational gallery of character sketches, all of whom assist in the day-to-day operation of the cinema. At the center of the film is Nayda (Jacklyn Jose), principal manager of both theater and family, an overeducated woman squandering her cultural capital maintaining what amounts to a brothel. Constantly in unhurried motion as she wends her way through the theater's cavernous alleys, she's a lone stabilizing force in a messy, chaotic world, a fixed point in Mendoza's intentionally rough visual scheme. While Odyssey Flores' handheld camera often lags behind the film's faster moving characters as it follows them around the theater, Nayda’s steady, measured movements make sure that she remains ever in focus amidst the surrounding flux.
Because of the dual function of the theater (residence/social nexus) the boundaries between public and private are constantly blurring, the free intermingling between patrons and residents adding to the film's well established atmosphere of frenzy. At the Family, there is little opportunity for any character to maintain a personal privacy. When the young boy returns home from school, for example, he has to thread his way through a mass of lewd gesturing before he can regain his bedroom. And in an environment where sex unravels daily on the big screen and blowjobs are delivered out in the open, the possibilities for true sexual intimacy are even more severely limited.
The central sex scene between one of the younger family members, Alan (Coco Martin), and his girlfriend is immediately preceded by a shot of the white light of the film projector, so that at first the viewer thinks he's watching footage from the porn film being screened for the patrons instead of the intimate detailing of a supposedly private act. Throughout the sex, too, the soundtrack picks up snatches of overheard conversation and street traffic audible through the paper-thin walls. As Mendoza's viewers take in the awkward erotic fumbling of his young performers, so the Family Theater patrons watch their own filmed moments of onscreen coitus. The difference is that while the porn films are intended to arouse, Mendoza's sex scenes are intentionally unerotic, contrasting a commodified view of intercourse with the "real thing" in all its uncouth gawkiness. The result is, unsurprisingly, a scene that feels uncomfortably intimate. But that, of course is the point; we've come to require our onscreen sex to be properly filtered, if not for explicit content, then for lack of grace. And in Mendoza's blatantly uncommercial film, this filtering apparatus is pretty well absent.
But in Serbis, sex, like everything else, is first and foremost a question of economics. The theater itself, we learn, is the last in what was once a three-location chain and, with its marble columns and filigreed banisters, it was likely once an impressive operation. But now lewd graffiti covers the walls, filth stains the floors and the place seems to barely break even. And selling sex, whether virtual or actual, is hard work, a point Mendoza continually emphasizes with his lingering attention to the processes of labor. Whether detailing the physical legwork involved in screening the films (rewinding the heavy reels by hand, spooling the film through a Chaplinesque maze of gears and switches), the maintenance of the building (a nauseous bathroom cleaning) or the sex act itself (a graphic bit of fellatio), the director lingers just long enough on each activity to give us the felt weight of duration. But while each of these tasks is onerous, they're not entirely unpleasant. And while the lives of the characters may be comprised of just such labor-intensive activities in the pursuit of a not-particularly profitable enterprise, that isn’t to imply that they're filled with nothing but misery. Amidst his critique of a debased free-market economy which impinges on individual privacy and reduces sex to commodity, Mendoza creates a vivid, flamboyant world that offers moments of humor (as when a goat makes its way into the theater) and sweetness (mostly involving the young boy) amidst the general sense of decay. Which is not to say that he ladles sugar atop his bitter portion, but that he understands the Family Theater as an extravagant, messy and always vital locus of activity and not merely as a stuffily schematic microcosm of late capitalist society.
Andrew Schenker is a freelance writer based in New York. His work can be accessed at The Cine File.
Things That Made Me Go, "Hmmm..."
Igor at Driven By Boredom 3.0 directs our attention to the period news report (1981) embedded below, worth discussing in light of all the new developments between newspapers and The Internetz. Related: Take a look at this new CNN article for the latest report on the changing role of film critics.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Lost Thursdays: Season 5, Ep. 3, "Jughead"
By Todd VanDerWerff
When Lost had the idea to reveal that there was a man living down the hatch, a second season premiere development that emerged from much of the back half of the first season’s mysteries, I doubt anyone had any idea that character would prove as integral to the show as Henry Ian Cusick’s Desmond already has. If Hurley (Jorge Garcia, not in tonight’s episode) is the show’s soul, as I argued last week, then Desmond has evolved almost accidentally into the show’s wildly romantic heart. This has been quite a feat for a character many fans never thought would turn up again after he split at the end of season two’s third episode, “Orientation” (and, indeed, Cusick turned up on a few OTHER series in that TV season), but the amount of pathos the show is able to wring from the Desmond/Penny (Sonya Walger) pairing, a relationship that even the forces of space and time often seem to be against, makes the show’s clumsier attempts at relationships seem that much more ham-handed. The interminable Jack (Matthew Fox)/Kate (Evangeline Lilly)/Sawyer (Josh Holloway) triangle was all right in seasons one and two when it was just One of Those Things Genre Shows Are Expected to Do, but the unexpected WEIGHT of Desmond and Penny makes it seem that much more superficial, even in retrospect. It’s tempting to just point at this pairing and say to the producers, “Guys? More like that, please.”
It’s interesting that Desmond has come to fulfill this function, and I think it’s as much a case of the writers having planned a longtime love for Desmond that had led him to the Island as it was Cusick and Walger pushing the writing staff to give them material for them to live up to. The reason season three’s “Flashes Before Your Eyes” and season four’s “The Constant” pack such wallops is because Desmond has messed up and lost the love of his life (established in “Flashes”) and then, improbably, the Island, which grants desires almost as easily as it brings nightmares to life, goes to great lengths to bring her back to him. Lost is a show packed with romance in all meanings of the word, from the equally moving Jin (Daniel Dae Kim)/Sun (Yunjin Kim) marriage (one of the few vaguely interesting examinations of a mostly functional marriage on broadcast TV, to say nothing of a “genre” show) to the aforementioned love triangle to the very romantic notion of being lost on a deserted island, of being able to reinvent yourself. Lost’s roots lie in the action-adventure genre, and at its best, the show feels like a Victorian potboiler wedded to a vintage, 1950s-era Boys Life cover. Victorian potboilers, of course, had their fair share of romance, but Boys Life covers thrill with romance too. In that case, it’s the romance of the unknown, of venturing into new territory, of the very act of GROWING UP, wherein, of course, the more physical kinds of romance become an important part of our lives.
So if Lost’s whole premise essentially demanded it be a romance on some level, it would seem odd that the show wouldn’t find its beating heart until the second season finale (the first full Desmond flashback and the introduction of the Penny character). Sure, there were the usual attempts to play various actors off of each other to see if sparks flew. (As a commenter last week reminds, remember when it seemed like Michael (Harold Perrineau) and Sun were going to become an item? Or when Sayid (Naveen Andrews) and Shannon (Maggie Grace) briefly WERE?) Doing this sort of thing is a part of the fluid alchemy of building a hit TV show. So rarely in TV can you explicitly plan for which characters are going to spark the sorts of will-they/won’t-they chemistry that can drive a successful hit. More often than not, this sort of thing fails, and producers are surprised when a Sarah Michelle Gellar and a James Marsters or a Lauren Graham and a Scott Patterson play so well off of each other (Buffy and Gilmore Girls, for those of you playing along at home). Most of the best TV shows, Lost included, strike a careful balance between the exciting fluidity of figuring out a show as it goes along and fastidious planning. Since love is usually a matter of chemistry overwhelming the rational, it is thus very hard to strictly plan out who’s going to pair up with whom on a series (even Lost has had the brief lightning bolt of the chemistry Lilly and Holloway shared in season one). Interesting, then, that Lost’s greatest romance was COMPLETELY the result of careful planning – of conceiving of two characters in love, carefully plotting out their love story and then carefully casting the two actors as well as possible.
Tonight’s episode, “Jughead,” written by longtime series hand Elizabeth Sarnoff and newcomer Paul Zbyszewski and directed by Rod Holcomb, didn’t even really focus on Desmond and Penny all that much, but it did use the foundation it had built for that relationship to propel Desmond’s character and to use a fairly consistent TV trope against the audience. When the episode opened with a brief flashback (hey, I thought those were verboten now) to the birth of Desmond and Penny’s son and continued with shots of a perfectly content Desmond piloting his boat towards Great Britain, his son in his lap, no one in the audience could be blamed for thinking that something terrible was about to happen to Pen. It’s a pretty established rule of serialized TV that a happy character usually leads to that character being emotionally destroyed in some way, and this episode made so much of Desmond’s connection to his lover and child that even I was pretty sure he’d return from his Oxford outing to find the boat at the bottom of the Thames. But Lost was after something entirely different – Desmond was being forced to choose between helping the friends he’d abandoned and the new life he was building, and when he tried to choose the latter, Penny wouldn’t let him. The most popular fan speculation seems to be that Desmond and Penny will turn out to be the Adam and Eve skeletons discovered in season one, and this episode seems to point in that direction somewhat. Penny wants nothing to do with the Island. She hates how it ruined Desmond’s life. But she knows that he’s bound by his own code of honor (it’s not without reason that Desmond has been shown to be a soldier and a monk), and she’s going to follow him on this adventure, even if it ends up sucking her into her father’s war, something she wanted no part of. (On the other hand, Ben (Michael Emerson), who swore to kill Penny, is alive and well and in Los Angeles, where Desmond and Penny are heading, so I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet, D&P fans.)
The scene between Desmond and Penny’s father, Charles Widmore (Alan Dale) was exactly the kind of scene the show would have bungled back in season two. Instead, Desmond walked straight in, asked for an answer to a question he had and received it (“hallelujah!” say the fans). And where second season Lost probably would have had Widmore explain at length just why he was willing to deal with Desmond, a man he considers beneath his daughter, this episode rather elegantly filled in three years of history in the relationship between the two by having Widmore so acquiescent to Desmond and concerned only with whether or not Penny was safe. Dale can deliver a monologue with the best of them, but the time for every character explaining all of their motivations at length is over, one would hope, and the show is the better for it. (Another welcome moment of this – Penny immediately calling Desmond on his lie at the end of the episode. Earlier seasons would have drawn this lie out over several episodes.)
The episode eschewed Ben and the Oceanic Six, whom much of the two-hour premiere had focused on, in favor of following up with Desmond and finding out just what was going on on the Island, where the various left-behind folks found themselves confronted by soldiers armed with flaming arrows last week. If the off-Island action this week focused on Desmond, the on-Island action focused on Jeremy Davies’ twitchy Daniel Faraday. Faraday is rapidly becoming one of the show’s best characters, and the way that Davies is able to convey just how tired Faraday gets of everyone not being able to follow his huge leaps of quantum physics logic makes a tired character type (the super-smart nerd who knows way more than anyone) somehow new again. Davies even somehow sells the somewhat improbable notion that Faraday has suddenly realized a deep and abiding love for Charlotte (Rebecca Mader), which was seemingly tossed in to give the soldiers a reason to trust Faraday to disarm the hydrogen bomb he happened upon (which gave the episode its title) and also to make what appeared to be Charlotte’s episode-ending death (though in a season focusing on time travel, I’d bet we’d see a character with such an unexplored backstory again) have some sort of emotional heft. To extend my heart and soul metaphor (which is already tortured) even further, Faraday is becoming the show’s brain, the guy who’s there to explain the tricky time travel theories the show is basing its plots on as quickly as possible. (And in a world where Heroes has so abused the idea of changing the past to save the future, it’s a real pleasure to see Lost develop such seemingly rigid formulas for time travel. This gives moments when a character is able to change the timeline, like Faraday was with Desmond last week, that much more heft.)
The big revelations of the episode focused on one of the young soldiers, who was revealed to be a very young Charles Widmore, and on Locke (Terry O’Quinn, who turned what could have been a pretty weak moment where young Widmore said, “Who could track me?!” into something somehow iconic) confronting Richard (Nestor Carbonell) for the first time chronologically but just the latest time from his and the audience’s perspective (got all that?). The Widmore revelation was the sort that raised more questions (something Lost is very good at), but the Locke and Richard conversation made a number of puzzle pieces snap into place, particularly regarding Richard’s visits to a very young Locke in last season’s “Cabin Fever.” For as long as it seemed like the answers the show would dole out had no possible way of matching up to fan’s expectations, these plot revelations and missing pieces of the puzzle snapping into place are surprisingly satisfying every time they come around. Maybe I’ll always miss some of the meandering mystery of the show’s first two seasons, but Lost does this kind of storytelling much better. (Another moment where this happened was when Faraday, confronting the H-bomb leaking radioactivity, had the sudden realization that since the Island still existed in 50 years’ time, he didn’t really have to deal with the problem and recommended that the bomb be buried in concrete – just like the huge, mysterious concrete block the hatch was built around.)
In so many ways, “Jughead” is Lost at its best. The Faraday and Desmond stories each have a nice emotional pitch to them, but both also offer up plenty of surprising twists and cool action beats. Lost often lives or dies based on which characters it centers episodes around, and it has rarely gone wrong with Desmond or Faraday, two characters who weren’t even on the show in its first season. If there’s a greater split between what Lost was in its first couple of seasons and what it is now, it’s from the fact that the first-season characters so rarely seem as integral to the story as they once did (only Sawyer and Locke even appear tonight, though both get nice moments). This may give the show’s first season a bit of a feeling of being unnecessary, but I think anyone who says that is forgetting that the show’s most compelling character has always been the Island.
Some thoughts:
House contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.
Immediate Impressions #4: Der Amerikanische Soldat (The American Soldier) (1970)
By Keith Uhlich
[Immediate Impressions are same-day responses to first-ever viewings. Not to be taken as rounded critique or final word. More a first step on a journey. Comments and dialogue encouraged.]
[Viewed (on Wellspring DVD) and written up late evening/early morning of January 28th/29th, 2009.]
“So much tenderness,” as Rainer Werner Fassbinder gazes unflinchingly into the abyss (of a country and of a cinema). The references have been well-noted: characters named Murnau, Fuller; a club called “Lola Montez”; high-contrast B&W photography that seems to regress into history as the film proceeds (from 70s self-aware to 40s noir to 30s melodrama, finally resolved and reconciled in an eras-spanning tableaux mort). Less remarked on is the sense that The American Soldier is itself a desiccated object, an effective corpse that nonetheless contains signs of life, even if only mere twitches. The catch is that once a beating heart is espied herein, it must be annihilated, all the better to maintain official, sanctioned histories (devoid of soul and spirit) over more multifaceted realities. As Billy Wilder turned a crumbling Berlin into a slapstick, satirical playground in One, Two, Three, so Fassbinder offers up The American Soldier’s Munich as a monochrome city of sadness, peopled by a stoic rogues gallery (most of them screaming in silence) and presided over by Karl Scheydt’s fedora-clad angel of death, Ricky.
A cold, contract killer cast in the elegantly lumbering mold of Lemmy Caution and Jef Costello, Ricky is continually nagged at by conscience, though he swats down such pangs as if they were gnats ravenously buzzing at ear. Like Godard and Melville’s protagonists, Ricky works best when he’s unmoored from reality, though he’s cursed to feel in ways that distinctly separate him from his nouvelle vague forbears and more readily ground him in mortal concerns. The telling sequence comes after Ricky is hit on by a flamboyant male gypsy: he follows the man upstairs to his bedroom, allows him to strip seductively, then shoots him dead. The act is unspeakably cruel, but Fassbinder views the scene with an empathy all-encompassing, the camera (courtesy DP Dietrich Lohmann) taking in the full scope of the gypsy’s horror, then capturing Ricky—post-shooting—in a length-wise mirror, uniting murderer and victim rather than dividing them through privileged perspective. Fassbinder then skewers his subject’s overdressed alpha-male exterior via a hard-cut to Ricky pleading on his hotel phone for a prostitute, though the damage has been done—emotion has seeped in to where it shouldn’t. When Elga Sorbas’ comics-reading femme fatale, Rosa, answers Ricky’s call, she comes upon him lying (queerly) prostrate, naked, vulnerable. Without looking at her, Ricky demands that she strip. Rosa complies and covers herself awkwardly with hands and arms. The duo then lock eyes and burst into laughter, but only for a moment before resuming the empty sexual exchange (this interaction is reflected in a no less bizarre sequence where Ricky shoots down a giggly male and female, freshly home from a night of carousing).
Sentiment dooms Fassbinder’s characters, though they push on as long as they can, even deferring their inevitable ends to proxies. As Ricky and Rosa make love, Margarethe von Trotta’s Zimmermädchen enters their room unacknowledged, sitting on the edge of the bed and outlining, to camera, the story that will eventually become Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. It’s a decidedly more melodramatic telling of the tale, climaxing on a note of interruptus and quickly followed by the von Trotta character’s over-eager, barely acknowledged (by Ricky and Rosa) suicide. But the mélo weighs on Ricky, following him home to a mother (Eva Ingeborg Scholz) and brother (Kurt Raab) whose icy contempt masks unspoken agitations (as glaringly obvious as the anachronistic pinball machine—Ophuls’ reckless moment as literal, mechanized kitsch—placed smack-dab in the middle of otherwise antique furnishings) that can’t help but come to the fore.
All throughout The American Soldier, Ricky attempts to counter the burden of influence and experience. Asked by his confidante Franz (Fassbinder) how it was in Vietnam, he responds with a hilariously terse, “Loud,” thus reducing war (presently and presciently) to a purely superficial sensory experience. Fassbinder answers Ricky’s shallowness via the above-mentioned tableaux, a no-less prophetic capper (one which eerily called to mind Nick Út’s two-years-hence photograph of napalm attack survivor Kim Phúc) that illuminates the inexplicable horrors of a loved one lost to war, the battle—so it comes clear—as much within as without, and the retribution demanded by even the basest twinge of morality forever muddied by the lifeless thing now cradled, flailingly, in arm.
Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.
952 (54). Shin heike monogatari / New Tales of the Taira Clan (1955, Kenji Mizoguchi)
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?]
One of Kenji Mizoguchi’s most lavish productions, this chronicle of the rise of the samurai amidst the oppression of 12th century Japan is heavy on plot and crowd scenes, but strangely inert at the center. The Mizoguchi themes of class and authoritarian injustice, the burden of family legacies, and female bondage are all present to varying degrees, but seem at odds with an implicit samurai movie imperative to move the proceedings along briskly and noisily. The film isn’t stuffed to the gills with swordfights; the sparring takes place mostly in terms of political maneuverings between the samurai, the ruling court and a powerful order of monks, with screen-cluttering armies being mustered less to wage combat than to intimidate (the viewer as well as their opponents).Perhaps in this light Mizoguchi is subverting the genre, shifting his emphasis away from bloodshed to the hero’s pseudo-Oedipal angst-ridden search for his true patrilineage involving the three factions. Most of the thematic richness that emerges from this scenario can be traced to the script, adapted from a serialized novel by Eiji Yoshikawa. For his part Mizoguchi seems to be preoccupied with making tentative forays in color (this being one of two color films he directed in his career; the other, The Empress Yang Kwei Fei [TSPDT #617], also from 1955, achieves a more expressive palette), and with keeping the proceedings lively through a brisk editing scheme and a variety of compositions and camera movements that animate rather than contemplate. An effective, meaningful effort by most standards, it registers as a kowtow to prestige picture impulses when considering the singular achievements of Mizoguchi’s earlier works.
To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here. Read more!
951 (93). Limite (1931, Mario Peixoto)
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?]
The current wave of art cinema in Latin America—featuring the likes of Carlos Reygadas, Lucretia Martel, Lisandro Alsonso et al—boasts as much boldness of vision and cinematic lyricism as the region has ever seen. But even the best of these films can’t match the breathtaking audacity of one of the earliest films from Brazil. Limite existed for decades as apocrypha, its only surviving print sequestered during a 20-plus-year restoration process interrupted by confiscation by the nation’s military dictatorship. The only film by novelist Mario Peixoto looks like a summation of 1920s silent avant garde techniques that Peixoto absorbed while in Europe, but launches into new dimensions of synthesis that carries the viewer aloft on the feverish velocity of its inspiration. Peixoto practically exhausts the lexicon of silent cinematography with every shot conceivable from the era, but arranges them in a cascading visual pattern of sharp angles, deceptively vast vistas and sumptuous close-ups of worldly surfaces. I can’t think of another film that savors its shots as much as this one, taking each one in long enough that even mundane images (train engines, spools of thread, telephone poles, a woman’s silk stockinged calves) ooze with sinister energies. It’s a world turned upside down: a woman set atop an endless hilltop view of the Brazilian shoreline swoons, the camera spinning wildly in vertiginous ecstasy; a roomful of cinemagoers laughing at a Charlie Chaplin movie achieves a nightmarish lunacy. Each shot hangs in the air before evaporating into the next; the ghostly traces of each image build a sinuous path resisting the limits of worldly logic with the assured intuition of a dream. I desperately need to see this film again, but upon first glance, comparisons to Sunrise [TSPDT #12] are not unwarranted.To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here. Read more!
Links for the Day (January 29th, 2009)
1. The Auteurs' Notebook is in the midst of an extensive e-mail discussion entitled "Epilogue '08" (see excerpt below for description. Participants include Andrew Grant from New York, Harry Tuttle from Paris, Kevin B. Lee from New York, Edwin Mak from London, Nitesh Rohit from Delhi, and Alexis A. Tioseco from Manila. All entries can be found here. Keep checking back for updates.
["Epilogue '08 is the final chapter of the year 2008. An online roundtable looking back one last time on the past year in films, after 2008 came to a close and every year-end poll and commentary has been published. We have gathered here a panel of passionate film critics from around the world to feel the pulse of the cinephile life as it unfolded in half a dozen capital cities where cinema is lively and brewing. We get a chance to take a look at the global village of cinephilia, more than ever bound together by the communitarian feelings of the blogosphere and the communication between foreign film cultures, through films and also the international exchange allowed by film discourse in the English language. We decided to propose this interactive event to the readers of The Notebook, with the generous help of Daniel Kasman, because The Auteurs is a website representing the evolving face of online cinephilia, opened to the international market and dedicated to provide serious knowledge and quality taste to online audiences. The roundtable conversations will be published two-a-day beginning Monday, January 26. Please join our debate with your reactions, questions and comments."]
2. John Kenneth Muir calls our attention to Rich Handley's Timeline of the Planet of the Apes: The Definitive Unauthorized Chronology. More information on the book, with links to purchase, can be found here.
["So here comes intrepid author Rich Handley, a skillful writer who first discovered the Apes movies as I did in my youth: on the 4:30 pm Movie, Channel 7, out of NYC in the mid 1970s. You can tell from a reading of Handley's foreword and introduction that the detailed alternate future history presented by the Apes franchise has consumed him since he first starting watching the movies. I get it. The gaps. The inconsistencies. The brilliant connections. The subtle reflections. The unique repetitions. Handley has has worked out this obsession (an obsession, I share...) in his exhaustive new book, Timeline of the Planet of the Apes: a meticulous chronology of all the events featured in the Apes franchise. And Handley hasn't limited himself to the films, either. On the contrary, the author has incorporated a wide array of filmic and literary sources and compiled all of them into one, amazing, gigantor timeline. You'll find here references to the movies, the live action series, the cartoon series, and comic stories both published and unpublished. Even the derided Tim Burton re-imagination of 2001 is included. And Handley accounts for everything, down to the minutest detail, including the invention of the Internet and the ascent of bloggers in the early 1990s of the Apes universe. He doesn't miss a fact, a nuance, a connection, or even an inconsistency. When an inconsistency does arise (and there are plenty in the Apes universe), Handley does a good job of reconciling facts as he can, and explaining why he has selected the answer he has."]
3. One of the Sundance '09 entries I'm most interested in seeing is Oren Moverman's The Messenger. A few reports on the film: from Michael Ryan of Hammer to Nail; The Carpetbagger in the Times; and Peter Debruge in Variety.
["Ryan: I saw two Iraq war-themed films at this year’s Sundance, Ross Katz’s Taking Chance and Oren Moverman’s The Messenger. Both were strangely similar in their plot and characters. Both films are about soldiers stationed at home who must deal with the casualties of war stateside. In Taking Chance, Kevin Bacon is a clench-jawed, highly decorated officer who volunteers to escort the body of a fallen soldier to his family in Montana as a way of dealing with his guilt over the level of his commitment to the war effort. In The Messenger, Ben Foster is Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery, a clenched jaw Iraq war vet, who is forced into joining Gulf War vet Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson) in the task of notifying Next of Kin that their child or husband just died in the war. Taking Chance is a solemn, sober look at the pain of losing a loved one, but ultimately it is a comforting film that wants to wrap all of America into a big group hug. The Messenger directly confronts the rage, anger and fear of the Iraq war veteran in an honest, non-manipulative style, and in the end it provides no easy answers. Guess which one I preferred?"]
4. Via David Hudson at IFC Daily: J. Hoberman on Soderbergh's Che for The Virginia Quarterly Review.
["Since then, Soderbergh has tweaked his movie’s first half in ways that soften its strangeness and blunt its intellectual edge. Most obviously, a number of mock cinéma vérité flash-forwards have been added to The Argentine, enabling the protagonist to address his Anglophone audience with a lightly accented English-language voiceover. Annotating the past with the “present” and tightening the movie’s overall sound/image connections, these inserts do allow for another sort of dialectic, but their presence serves to subtly normalize Soderbergh’s distancing strategy. (Or what was taken to be his strategy. “With all the subtitles, we thought it was Jean-Luc Godard,” a colleague joked.) More crucial is Soderbergh’s shortening of certain choreographed battle scenes and the omission of a five- or six-minute sequence concerning the trial of Lalo Sardiñas which served to demonstrate application of guerrilla justice.4"]
5. "The Cobra: Inside a movie marketer’s playbook": Tad Friend profiles Lionsgate theatrical marketing co-president Tim Palen for The New Yorker. Via J.R. Jones at The Chicago Reader blog, who comments here.
["Publicity is selling what you have: the film’s stars and sometimes its director. Marketing, very often, is selling what you don’t have; it’s the art of the tease. A première lets the marketing and publicity teams join in a final effort to “eventize” a film, to move it to the top of the nation’s long to-do list. Many premières feel slack and dutiful, but this one had the fizz of a genuine event. Lionsgate, which, together with “W.” ’s other investors, spent about three hundred thousand dollars on the début—three times its usual outlay—later reckoned that coverage on “Entertainment Tonight” and “Access Hollywood” and in dozens of other outlets was worth more than a million dollars in advertising."]
Quote of the Day: Jonathan Lapper, responding to Jim Emerson's recent Dark Knight postings. UPDATE: Jim responds to the response here.
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): And so we are cast...
Clip of the Day: A pitch-perfect parody of a favorite WTF infomercial. (Hattip: Jason Bellamy)
"Links for the Day": A selection of Links that will hopefully spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
No-Prize Animated: Hulk Vs.
By John Lichman
[Hulk Vs. is a Direct-to-DVD release now available nationwide.]
Tie-ins are the lifeblood of any successful comic franchise and essentially every major blockbuster film. Of course, when you get down to it, these ventures tend to be vomited out as one-shot comics, coloring books or god-knows-what-you-get from a McDonalds' Happy Meal.
In the latest of Marvel's animated DVD outings, which began with Ultimate Avengers, the Hulk is the mindless, rage-filled destructive force that we all know and mildly anticipate. In lieu of the norm, Hulk vs. begins with the assumption in mind that everyone knows the basic back story that Bruce Banner was caught in the wake of a Gamma Bomb, a Gamma engine, or something vaguely Gamma powered depending on your familiarity with the story and which film or TV show you saw.
Little time is wasted on this since it isn't integral to the Vs. title. Hulk Vs. Wolverine pulls the old "start in the middle" trick, as we're given 18 seconds to hear Wolverine (Steven Blum) go through the trademarked line, "I'm the best there is at what I do, but what I do--isn't very nice." Playing with the established time-lines that the live-action films have given us, Wolverine is back working for the Canadian Department H and agrees to hunt down the Hulk, who appears to be tearing through small towns in the Great White North. A few minutes later, Wolvie is leaping out of a plane and into the Canadian wilderness where he happens upon a regressed Banner. And then, the fight happens.
Comic "team-ups" of ancient lore (i.e. "the eighties, nineties and whenever") always came in two varieties: the "Oh hey, you look like a bad guy and I've never met you before, despite being the Number Two Main Character in this universe. Let's fight. Mm. You know, you're not a bad guy. There's another bad guy. Team-Up time!" Or: "Hey, you're a superhero too and fighting this bad guy? Let's team-up and stop him!"
The Vs. shorts are perfectly shoe-horned into the former category as whoever the Hulk meets is destined to fight the lumbering beast thanks to the power of "Comics' Logic." Wolverine fights for a while until Weapon X appears and reveals--shock--the Hulk went ballistic because they were hunting him. Similarly, in the second short, Hulk vs. Thor, it takes nary 8 minutes, after we're given some back story about how Odin must enter "Odinsleep" to recharge his "Odin Battery." Luckily, dastardly half-son Loki captures Bruce Banner and explains that he has once almost beaten Thor as the Hulk. Loki takes over the Hulk after mystically separating him from Banner and begins to make his way toward Asgard. Why? Well, unlike the brief back story we're thrown in Wolverine, we must simply accept this as fact. Yet Thor still ranks in as the longest short, taking up half the running time at 45-minutes out of the combined 78.
Classic shots are recreated, such as the cover of The Incredible Hulk that introduced Wolverine for the first time. Of course, this turned into "Team Up #1" again when they joined forces to fight the Wendigo--which conveniently ties into a future episode of new Nicktoons show, Wolverine and the X-Men.
For two shorts that will inevitably wind up on Cartoon Network--such is the fate of all Marvel animated DVDs sold through Lionsgate--there's nothing overly damning or special here. Wolverine does feature at least five arms being torn or chopped off--in fact, four of them are always the left arm. The fifth mixes it up by making it the right. And the battles involve some instances of blood, but wounds heal as if the animators forgot they ever existed. Thor is slightly more action-packed, but draws on far too much history to pick up the first-time view that Wolverine was supposed to do. Oddly, these one-off shorts are no better than the concept behind Kill, which is a series of "final fights" that draw upon classic genre plots you don't need to watch.
Hulk vs. is perfect as a series of straight-to-DVD shorts featuring fights, but all of them seem better suited to an open-ended online series or TV show that makes Monsters of the Week and instead turns him into an opponent. But there's no way to justify buying something that you've already read countless times in the comics.
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.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
The Cherry Orchard at BAM
By Lauren Wissot
Even as the Oscar push for Revolutionary Road remains in full swing, director Sam Mendes returns to his theater roots with his latest production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through March 8th as part of The Bridge Project, a sort of theatrical foreign exchange program that for the next three years will combine talent from both sides of the pond (in this case the Americans include Josh Hamilton and Ethan Hawke, while Simon Russell Beale, Rebecca Hall and Sinéad Cusack bat for the other side of the Atlantic) both at BAM and at Britain’s Old Vic where Kevin Spacey is artistic director.
Yes, it seems Hollywood has come home, something more than apparent in Mendes’ gala staging of the incomparable Tom Stoppard’s new and timely take on the Russian classic by Anton Chekov. It revolves around a well-to-do family suddenly facing financial meltdown and foreclosure on their fabulous estate with its crown jewel cherry orchard as the old economy and its inherent bourgeois values makes way for the new. Without a doubt this is the most accessible version of the play I’ve ever seen thanks to Stoppard’s genius, and the most downright fun production thanks to Mendes’ direction. And while the first quality is a triumph, the second nearly does the whole thing in.
The fantastic cast includes veterans of Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia and Rock ‘N’ Roll, who fully grasp the gravitas that lies beneath the dark humor (Stoppard’s stock in trade as a playwright as well). Especially nuanced are Beale as Lopakhin, the former servant turned rich businessman, and Hall (who showed Woody Allen how to do neurosis without grating on our nerves in Vicky Cristina Barcelona) as the stressed-out, lovesick Varya. Director Mendes, in contrast, desperately seems to be dancing as fast as he can. Instead of calmly placing trust in the playwright and the formidable actors, Mendes puts exclamation marks on the already exclamatory dialogue, adding a superfluous layer of nonstop comedy on top of Stoppard’s already hilarious and delectable writing (“To be or to shoot myself—that is the question,” one character declares).
Absent is a continuous flow from poignancy to humor and back, resulting in two hours and forty minutes of easy “pop” Chekhov. Ominous music roars as Lopakhin, in a drunken, violent rage, knocks over chairs one by one. A colorful ball scene with wondrous costume and production design takes place simultaneously onstage and through the massive shadows thrown onto the back wall, revealing that the characters are both overpowered and dwarfed by their essences—i.e., haunted by the slavery of the past. As with American Beauty, Mendes wraps deep meaning in sumptuous kitsch, then delivers the package with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. With The Cherry Orchard, he hits us over the head with explicit staging like the many pratfalls and physical comedy relief bits that can be counted on to interrupt every intense moment. A major turning point occurs during a fight between Sinéad Cusack’s Ranevskaya and Ethan Hawke’s Trofimov—only to be followed within seconds by the sound of Trofimov falling down the stairs offstage and Morven Christie’s Anya rushing in to announce the “It’s only a flesh wound”-like incident. The characters don’t slow down long enough for us to feel their pain; Mendes doesn’t seem to get that Chekhov is not screwball comedy.
And all this empty confectionery visualization over substance becomes a huge problem in the end with actors emphasizing that one light note for so long that the depths of darkness become unreachable. Mendes has muted the underlying anguish at the heart of both Stoppard and Chekhov to the point that the awareness of the epic tragedy of (and hope in) the family’s situation arrives not like an organic revelation but like a tacked on sad ending. “Can I give you a piece of advice?” Trofimov finally asks Lopakhin before suggesting he stop waving his arms around so much (that, by the way, all Lopakhin’s bragging is a form of arm waving). If only Mendes had heeded such advice, restrained those showman’s arms, and made room not for the audience to be entertained but to think, to be profoundly moved. Ironically, the director’s deep-seated desire that all enjoy his tasty Cherry Orchard, his fear of Chekhov’s brutal black humor, results in alienating us all the more by the time the curtain descends.
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.
Links for the Day (January 27th, 2009)
1. "3D porn to revolutionize industry": From LiveNews. Remember when we all we had was Ms. Pac-Man?
["Hong Kong film makers are preparing to leave filmgoers goggle-eyed by releasing the world's first pornographic movie in 3D, a news report said on Sunday. Shooting on the Chinese-language film 3D Sex And Zen, budgeted at 4 million US dollars, is scheduled for April with producers promising some of the most realistic close-up sex scenes ever. "Just imagine that you'll be watching it as if you were sitting beside the bed," Stephen Shiu Jnr told the Sunday Morning Post. "There will be many close-ups. It will look as if the actresses are only a few centimetres from the audience.""]
2. "Dude, where's my breakfast?": Roger Ebert on the inimitable Jeff Dowd, with embed (also above) from Movie City News, where Jeff talks, among other things, about the recent John Anderson fisticuffs.
["The Anderson-Dude bout will go into Sundance legend along with Harvey Weinstein's celebrated shoving match, the booing of Bob Dylan after the premiere of "Masked and Anonymous" and Tammy Faye's inspirational Q&A after "The Eyes of Tammy Faye." Only at Sundance do people fight about ecological documentaries that reach into the vastness of time and space."]
3. Can you find yourself in the Inaugural Gigapan?
["I made this Gigapan image from the north press platform during President Obama's inaugural address at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC on January 20, 2009. It's made up of 220 images and the final image size is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels."]
4. "Yo, Rocky": By Zach Campbell for Elusive Lucidity. With a post-script.
["White ethnicity, that is, working class 'whiteness' that is markedly separate from WASPishness within that larger category, seems to get no play in movies anymore. (I welcome counter-examples: this is my impression, not a categorical claim to fact.) Irish kids from Southie seem to be the rare exceptions; but semi-literate neighborhood wiseguys (Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Greek) trying to make a buck? Puh-leeze. To represent a character like this today, I feel, one would need to forestall him having charisma, and one would try to tie all his intelligence to his literacy. But Rocky is the kind of people marked by slang, local dialect, streetwise ways of not only of communicating to other people, but of conceptualizing one's own relationship to other sentient beings. The scene with the realtor in Rocky II is entertaining for this reason. Of course American English is becoming ever more standardized (but not more beautiful or learned) and we are impoverished for it, though it suits the new business mold and its functions in global commerce, where various Englishes must cohere to aid transactions."]
5. "Can You Believe That Molly Ringwald is 40?": Purely academic curiosity, of course. (Via Women & Hollywood)
["I can’t say that I miss the '80s at all. I’m all about the here and now and the future. I have a book coming out next spring called Getting the Pretty Back. It’s about turning 40 and that phase where you’ve had kids or decided not to, for me it’s a real turning point. It’s kind of I Feel Bad About My Neck pimped out with illustrations. But I do miss hanging out with my friends, drinking coffee, and not having responsibility."]
Quote of the Day: W.C. Fields
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Two from the Studio Museum Harlem exhibition "Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool." (Via Chris Koh's Random Thoughts)
Clip of the Day: Look into his eyes...
"Links for the Day": A selection of Links that will hopefully spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
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