The House Next Door

By Todd VanDerWerff

Every season, Battlestar Galactica does a Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) episode, which delves into the character's motivations and her dark past. How much you like these episodes usually hinges on how much you like borderline melodrama and how much you like Sackhoff’s performance, but I’ve tended to find them pretty reliable studies of a character that could feel been-there, done-that but has always had a kind of livewire confidence that makes her fascinating to watch. I’m sure there were a good number of fans as frustrated by “Someone to Watch Over Me,” the final script from David Weddle and Bradley Thompson and the final directorial effort from Michael Nankin on the series, since it featured very few major plot revelations, which were all crammed into the last five minutes, and since it was, again, a leisurely character piece, but I thought it was pretty terrific and maybe the best of the show’s “Starbuck episodes.”

To be fair, there was some stuff here that walked right up to the edge of the cliff of overdone implausibility. It made sense to have Boomer impersonate the trusted Athena (both Grace Park) since the show has noted that humans can’t tell one Cylon from another to any degree of accuracy, but having Boomer seduce Athena’s husband, Helo (Tahmoh Penikett) just felt too much like every scene you’ve ever seen where the evil twin pops in and twirls her metaphorical mustache. The episode ultimately earned this by showcasing Athena’s rage, but it was touch-and-go there for a while. It also must be said that since The Sixth Sense hit theaters in 1999 and repopularized the old narrative gambit of a special helper only one character can see or hear, every time the gambit pops up again, it feels a little more tired. As soon as I figured out piano player Slick (Roark Critchlow) wasn’t really there, I kept waiting for the scene where Starbuck realizes, amazed, that she’s been talking to a hallucination (or a projection, but more on that in a minute). To the show’s credit, though, they didn’t play this in a big way. Slick was there one moment and then he was gone the next. The audience was largely expected to have figured it out a while ago (probably when Starbuck was the only one clapping for Slick after he finished a piece), and the storyline was less about its “twist” and more about its psychological exploration of the great, unanswered question of Starbuck’s life: how she feels about her abandonment by her father.

There’s probably a great debate to be had as to whether Slick actually IS Starbuck’s father (or, rather, her hallucination of him), but he’s obviously a paternal stand-in regardless. So much of the story of Starbuck has revolved around her relationship with her abusive mother that her father has always seemed kind of an afterthought. We’ve known he was a musician for some time, but we’ve never known just how much of a role he played in her life before he took off for reasons we’re still not fully clear on (though, again, more on that in a minute). With the fond stories of learning the piano at the side of her father, of the happy-sad songs he taught her, we saw just how much of Starbuck’s persona is her bluster designed to cover up some of her sadness at losing the man who provided a vital part of her personality, the warmth and vulnerability she keeps buried down as deep as she possibly can. After her father left, Starbuck gave up the piano, yes, but she also gave up the other things she associated with him, shunting aside what appears to have been a kind of incipient artistic gift in favor of trying to make herself even more of a warrior than her mother and finding herself terrorized by said mother at every turn. Starbuck’s father didn’t just leave his wife and kid (just like Slick did, hint hint); he also, to a real degree, CREATED STARBUCK. Before he left, there was Kara Thrace, and after he left, there was a new persona in the place of that sweet little girl, determined, now, not to be hurt again and not to give in to the sorts of things that might remind her of her pain.

A real reason we’re able to go with Starbuck on this voyage into the subconscious is because the episode does such a good job of placing us in her frame of mind. The teaser is almost entirely hypnotic, edited to convey the terrible drudgery of Starbuck’s attempts to just keep getting up in the morning, to just keep herself and everyone around her going. One of Battlestar’s best character decisions has always been to play the thin line between Starbuck’s determination and her desperate depression, and since the fleet found Earth and Starbuck discovered her own corpse, she’s crossed over that line almost completely. She’s drowning. She has no purpose and nothing driving her forward, and she’s finding herself lost in resurfacing memories, in trying to deal with a past that she kept buried underneath her bravado and her constant attempts to push towards newer and bigger goals. To a real degree, she’s the best of the best, and now, she’s found Earth and found it lacking. Those opening passages expertly conveyed the dull monotony of just trying to hold out against the very real and creeping fear that there is nothing ahead for these people but death, as supplies grow short and the Galactica itself starts to fall apart. The words Starbuck recites to her pilots about how they’re going out to try to find habitable planets become a kind of liturgy, a thin chain that Starbuck clings to just to keep going. Otherwise, she’ll probably just die.

Also central to the Starbuck storyline was the suggestion that the fan speculation just might be right and that Kara Thrace was the original Cylon-human hybrid. The description of the long-lost Cylon seventh Daniel seemed to suggest that he was the type who would be a composer of classical pieces, and this episode also revealed that Starbuck’s father’s first name, Dreilide, which is definitely what I’m naming my firstborn son, starts with D (and, hey, the recording of him says that he was playing in an opera house – ring any bells?). Plus, as it just so turns out, the song Starbuck’s father taught her as a child is the Battlestar universe’s version of “All Along the Watchtower” (much to the astonishment of Tigh’s (Michael Hogan) great, buggy eye), AND Starbuck draws the inspiration that leads to her performing the song from a drawing given to her by our one confirmed Cylon-human hybrid, Hera. The sequence where Starbuck puts all of this together, intercut with Tigh, Tory (Rekha Sharma) and Ellen (Kate Vernon) sharing drinks and the kidnapping of Hera, is another terrific editing job, concluding in a beautifully orchestrated overhead shot that starts on Starbuck’s fingers pounding at the keyboard and pulls back and back into a wider shot. (A friend speculates that Hera suggesting her drawing of the “All Along the Watchtower” notes is actually a drawing of stars may indicate that the song itself is a kind of star map to the fleet’s final destination, which is a cool idea, even if I’m not sure how that would play out, exactly.)

Before we talk about how all of this might suggest that Starbuck was just projecting Slick, though, we should go back and catch up with the episode’s other major thread, which finally revisited the long dormant love of Boomer and Chief Tyrol (Aaron Douglas). Ever since Tyrol was revealed to be a Cylon, this was a relationship that anyone who was interested in the show wanted to see revisited, since a huge portion of the first season was tied up in Tyrol attempting to help Boomer out as the two of them grew increasingly suspicious that she was a Cylon and just how affected their relationship was when it was revealed that, yeah, she was one after all (though, obviously, the audience knew this from the first). Tyrol first dumped Boomer, then watched her die in his arms after she was shot by Cally, whom he later married and ostensibly had a kid with. Now, he’s having a really bad year, even for someone on board the Galactica, as he’s discovered he’s a Cylon, lost his wife AND found out his son wasn’t really his son (though I still don’t get why he’s turned over full-time custody, seemingly, to Hot Dog). You can forgive the guy for falling for Boomer’s leading him on. While Boomer seems legitimately conflicted over what she does to Tyrol (at least some of her old feelings for him still exist), she’s also on a mission from the villainous and still lurking Cavil (Dean Stockwell), so she expertly uses projections of an imagined life with Tyrol in a world where no Cylon massacre of the colonies ever happened and the two of them had a kid, despite all the obstacles standing in their way. These sequences in the projected home are shot with all the seductiveness that such a normal life would hold for someone like Tyrol, who’s been through the ringer, and that makes it that much more horrible when he realizes that when he helped Boomer escape, he inadvertently helped her kidnap Hera and bring destruction to the Galactica. This whole plot throws Tyrol’s actions this season into new relief. Since he’s found out he’s a Cylon, he’s been all over the place, but we increasingly realize that’s just the guy looking for a normal life, a world where he can feel like everything won’t be pulled out from under him at a moment’s notice. Tyrol’s efforts to help Boomer by springing her from the brig are played with a mounting horror at just what he’ll do to attain that life, but they feel absolutely like the actions of an imperfect man trying to deal with things beyond his comprehension.

This brings us back to Starbuck and her hallucinations. I don’t think it’s coincidence that this was the episode to reintroduce the concept of Cylon projection, and I also don’t think it was a coincidence that virtually every Starbuck sequence was somehow intercut with the Tyrol storyline, even when there were occasionally other places to cut to (like Adama (Edward James Olmos) and Roslin (Mary McDonnell) realizing the Galactica has only a handful of jumps left before it crumbles and takes everyone with it). What’s more, many, many of the Tyrol sequences had Slick’s piano scoring (or Starbuck’s father’s piano playing) laid underneath on the soundtrack. Notice, for example, how the episode cuts from the scene where Slick talks about how composer’s block is hell to Tyrol’s increasing desperation as he goes down to those working on the ship’s hull to find another Eight to replace Boomer with, knocking out the power in the process. From there, the episode cuts to Starbuck and Slick, shot in silhouette, wreathed with red light, Slick’s cigarette smoke drifting up into frame. It was as if the two were in a weirdly literalized Hell, one shared by Tyrol, unable to cope with finding the love of his life again (or so he thought) only to realize moments later the terrible, terrible mistake he’d made.

On just about every level “Someone to Watch Over Me” was Battlestar at its best, and I’d suggest to any that think it’s moving too slowly that the series simply doesn’t have enough masterplot LEFT beyond ironing out these character stories. You either like the character stories on the show, or you don’t, but I still maintain that Battlestar’s dedication to illuminating every aspect of these characters is what has kept it from just falling into a trap where it tells the same stories, the same ways, over and over. “Someone” perfectly sets up the series’ final three episodes (spread over four hours), and it’s an absolutely terrific showcase for so many things the show does well.

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Some other thoughts:

• I really should have written about Bear McCreary’s score in the review proper, but I just didn’t find the place for it. Suffice it to say that McCreary’s piano compositions for the episode were striking and managed to find just the right place between playful and melancholic to keep the episode rolling along. I still think his composition for the end of “Revelations” is a better piece of music, but this was probably his strongest score for a single episode, top to bottom, and that’s saying something, as he just might be the best composer working in TV today, even doing some interesting things with the far more generic soundtrack breaks on a VERY network-y show like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. McCreary’s been asking fans to suggest which tracks they’d like from Season Four on the Season Four soundtrack, and I’m hopeful he can include a full suite of songs from this episode.
  
  
• I really, really hoped that when Tyrol just burst into his fake daughter’s room like that, she would look up and throw something at him and scream, “GET OUT OF MY ROOM!” like most of us might have at eight or nine, but I guess it was a fantasy world in every sense of the term.
  
  
• So, uh, what are we to make of Roslin just collapsing like that at the end of the episode? The series has always linked Roslin and Hera fairly explicitly (as well as the opera house), so it makes sense, to a degree, but it could also be the cancer.
  
  
• Loved the shots of the various Galactica occupants looking up as the power flickered on and off or the Galactica’s hull creaked ominously. Also, the decision to frequently “score” dramatically intimate scenes like Helo and Boomer having sex while Athena watched with the sounds of the ship creaking and crackling in the dead of space is one that the show has made on several occasions, and it usually works pretty well. (As a matter of fact, the last time I remember something like that happening was in ANOTHER Weddle/Thompson/Nankin episode, the pseudo-season premiere “Sometimes a Great Notion.” Maybe those three should work on a film adaptation of Dan Simmons’ The Terror, a great novel that relies, to a large degree, on the feeling of being all alone in a big ship that could snap like a twig at any given moment.)
  
  
• We’re starting to say our farewells to people who’ve been with the series from the beginning. Weddle, Thompson and Nankin have given the series many of its greatest episodes. Weddle and Thompson wrote such terrific scripts as “Downloaded,” “Exodus” and “Revelations,” while Nankin has directed episodes like “Maelstrom,” “Faith” and “The Ties That Bind.”
  
  
• McCreary’s got an insanely detailed tale of the production process on this episode up at his blog, and he includes the notion that this out-of-tune piano in the Galactica bar might just be the last piano in the universe, just as that toothpaste is the last toothpaste in the universe. It’s a deeply romantic notion that fits in well with the show’s sense of grand apocalypse.
  
  
• On a personal note, I was pretty much predisposed to like this episode from the get-go. I actually spent most of my childhood and adolescence building towards a career as some sort of concert pianist, but once I got to college, I realized I would always be good but never GOOD ENOUGH, so I largely abandoned it. I play the piano rarely now, even though I always intend to start up again at the local church, so every time I hear the instrument, it’s like a door being unlocked directly into my childhood.

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

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By Jonathan Pacheco

Most TV shows hit a few rough patches within a 20-24 episode season. This lull can happen right before or after the season’s halfway point, but most often around the “teen” episodes. Some shows choose to instead go with fewer episodes per season, partially to eliminate the “fluff” that shows up when you’re trying to stretch your plot over the course of a couple of dozen episodes. So you would think that Season 3 of Friday Night Lights, with only 13 episodes to fill, would be able to avoid these issues altogether. You’d be wrong. Despite having some of the more interesting situations and developments of the season, “Keeping Up Appearances” contains way too much filler to be effective. And it was all just so darn cutesy that I began to cringe after every “aww, how sweet” moment.

Landry spends his days doing the whole “Emo thing” over the loss of Tyra, but Devon, his cute new female band-mate, comes along and tries to cheer him up with an extremely summer camp-ish rendition of “She Don’t Use Jelly” by The Flaming Lips. Aww, how sweet. She gives Landry a kiss on the head. After receiving practically all the right signals, he decides to give Devon a real kiss when he drops her off from band practice. The kiss is returned, and the boy is so elated that he seeks out Tyra and thanks her for breaking up with him, because it allowed him to get over her and find a girl that’s right for him. Well, Landry, one kiss does not a girlfriend make. When he tries to ask Devon out on a bit of a date, she stops him and informs him that she’s a lesbian. “I’m gay. I like girls, not boys,” she says, just to make sure he gets it. She even goes so far as to thank Landry because their kiss confirmed to her that she has no interest in guys. All of a sudden, Landry’s looking like a 21st century George Costanza (who, if you’ll remember, confirmed for several women that they were lesbians).

Landry doesn’t stay down for too long after Principal Tami comes by (looking much more attractive than any principal I ever had) and reassures him that he’s going to move on to better things than what Dillon holds. Successful men like that get whoever they want. So the next time Landry sees Devon at band practice, things are no longer weird between the two, and he even promises to keep her sexuality a secret. Just to drive home the point, though, the band starts playing, and Landry begins singing “She Don’t Use Jelly” by The Flaming Lips. Aww, how sweet.

In case you forgot, Buddy Garrity has two other kids that followed their mother to California to be with her hippie tofu-eating husband (there’s nothing wrong with tofu, my friends). Well, said kids are back in Texas for a visit, and oh, how things change. The young boy doesn’t like football anymore, he likes soccer—a global sport. Both kids are glued to their electronic devices, and the young girl, Tabitha, seems hell-bent on giving vegans a bad name. Buddy takes them camping where they continue to behave like spoiled brats (Lyla’s words, not mine), causing their father to toss some quality meat into the woods out of frustration. He later confesses to Lyla that he’s lost his younger kids, and he believes that he deserves what he’s getting. That’s too bad and all, but honestly, I had a hard time feeling for Buddy, simply because we barely know these kids. We haven’t seen them in ages, and now they’re just a couple of snot-nosed punks (sorry, I’ve always wanted to use that one). The impact is lost because I’m thinking, “Who would want these kids?” However, Minka Kelly salvages the scene with a great, quiet moment in which she reminds her dad that he still hasn’t lost her. The silence and the looks between the two bring back some of that lost impact.

The story doesn’t end there. Friday night, the Garrity clan heads out to see the Panthers do battle, and by gosh, Buddy’s kids actually start coming around! They’re reluctant at first, but no one can resist the magic of Dillon football. By the end of the game, the kids are cheering and laughing, and hey, Tabitha the Vegan even asks for some dairy ice cream. Aww, how sweet.

Speaking of Dillon Panther football, it seems that there’s a bit of a troublemaker on the team. Jamarcus, a character who annoyingly pops up out of nowhere (much like a new castaway will ascend from the extras in Lost), has had a few run-ins with Tami, and to make matters worst, it’s revealed that he forged his parents’ signatures and lied to them to join Coach Taylor’s team. These parents don’t share the same passion for football with the rest of Dillon; they find it to be a waste, and something that merely serves to stroke Jamarcus’s massive ego. Eric and Tami persuade the parents to witness one game, just to “give it a shot.” So they do, and I’ll be darned if Jamarcus’s parents don’t start coming around as well and enjoying the magic of Dillon football. Aww, how sweet.

I realize how snarky I’m being, but it’s to emphasize just how trite so much of this episode ends up being. There was too much misused potential in all of these stories. They were steered to neat, easy to swallow conclusions instead of exploring more interesting paths.

The episode begins with one of the most intriguing dilemmas I’ve seen all season from Friday Night Lights. Eric and Tami visit the McCoys for dinner, an occasion that Eric dreads; Joe’s overbearing nature toward J.D. is worrisome, to say the least. Yet, as the adults finish their meal, the young quarterback comes home and his basic, casual interaction with his dad doesn’t support the overbearing father picture of Joe that Eric had painted. Instead, he sees a father and a son who love each other and who like each other. When Coach confronts Joe about the incident at the church (forcing his son to confess to his coach that he got drunk), the father is apologetic and genuine when he says it won’t happen again. I imagine that this must put a kink in Eric’s thinking.

But before long, Mr. Hyde is back in full force. Not only is Joe excessively critical of his son during practice, he even pulls the boy from the session to give him his own critique. Things only get worse on Friday night when J.D. begins playing poorly (partially due to his maniac of a father screaming instructions and berating him from the stands). At halftime, Joe stalks the clubhouse, waiting for his boy. He again pulls him aside and gets forceful in his instructions. When Coach intervenes, Joe claims that it’s a family matter. Eric manages to say the right things to Joe to avoid any more conflict, but now his starting quarterback is shaken up.

Eric takes him into his office and begins telling him how his own father had lofty expectations that he as a child could never live up to. J.D. interrupts him to say that Joe only wants what’s best for him. He just wants him to succeed. In a way, Eric is speechless at this. The boy genuinely loves his dad, and because of this, he’s been conditioned to believe that if his father ever gets overbearing or forceful, it’s just because he wants his boy to succeed. Sadly, J.D. has been, in a sense, almost brainwashed to believe this, and it prevents him from seeing what’s really going on. Finally, to instill some confidence back in the boy, Coach tells him to call the plays from the field—no looking at daddy, no looking at coach. The plan works and the Panthers clinch the playoffs, but not before Joe McCoy sulks out of the stadium. Earlier at dinner, Joe told Eric that he believed the two of them would make a great team, but I get the feeling that he’s now feeling much differently about that statement.

Billy Riggins has talked for quite some time about how success for Tim is success for both of them. “We’re going places,” he’ll say. I honestly feel that when he approaches Jason in private about Tim’s recruitment letters, asking Jason for help and advice on how to get his brother into a college, he’s only thinking of Tim. Jason, to my surprise, shows a bit of jealousy at seeing one of those recruitment letters. He downplays them, talking about how much of a standard letter that is, and how he received hundreds of those when he was in high school. If only for a moment, he’s belittling Billy for placing significance in those letters. The moment passes, and I was glad that it did. The show plays the jealousy angle so intelligently by letting the moment arrive without fanfare, and letting it pass in the same manner.

Jason tells Billy that the first order of business is to put together a highlight reel for Tim with some “testimonials” peppered in. Soon enough, Jason’s following Tim around with a camcorder and getting interviews. In the meantime, the house renovation has finally been completed. “Look what two idiots and a couple of cripples can do,” Jason applauds, comparing the success to the Special Olympics. Now all they have to do is sell the home, which is easier said than done, considering that Jason wants them to sell it themselves and he wants to bump up the price.

Okay, I think we can all agree that this storyline is astoundingly unrealistic. Four guys, two of whom are restricted to wheelchairs, none of whom have any experience, manage to renovate a sizable house in just a couple of weeks? Even with Tim going to school and football practice, and the others presumably heading to jobs at some point or another? I suppose that’s where suspension of disbelief comes in, this being a TV show and all.

But for me the disbelief continued as the foursome held an open house. Here are a couple of kids and goofballs trying to sell a very expensive home, and people are taking them seriously? I would think that at least one of these people would recognize Tim Riggins and walk out of the house right then, based on his reputation alone. But no, the house is getting legitimate consideration, no thanks to Herc and Jason, who end up getting into a tussle in the backyard. Jason’s price raising is met with a dissenting voice or two who feel that placing an even higher price in this economy is suicide. However, Jason uses his son, Noah, as his reasoning. The boy is on the other side of the country because Jason can’t even afford to put him in daycare. He needs a bigger payoff from this risk if he’s going to win Erin and Noah back. Not to mention that Billy’s about the get married and Tim is trying to get into college. Those are some legitimate points if you consider that the initial payoff of $30,000-$40,000 was going to have to be split 4 ways. Hiking the price almost doubles their nest egg.

Eventually, all the work and scheming works out when they finally get an offer on the house. Like I mentioned when this plotline began, we knew this was how it would end up. There’s no way that Friday Night Lights would bring the character of Jason Street back for a brief, guest stint, just to have him fail. Like with Smash Williams, Jason’s plot is merely a way to answer some lingering questions and ultimately reassure us that the boy is going to be okay. Knowing this doesn’t rob the plot of all enjoyment, but it sure deadens some of the potential impact. In Jason and Lyla’s final scene (one of the better scenes of this story, and a great scene altogether that exemplifies how much Scott Porter and Minka Kelly have grown as actors), we start to feel some of that reassurance, but I don’t think we’re all the way there yet. When Jason tells Lyla that, once the money clears, he’s heading up to the Northeast to win back Erin and Noah and get a job as a sports agent (after meeting the World’s Friendliest Agent at the Panthers game), it doesn’t feel like the end of the story. Sure, it would be a great ending point for this subplot, one that would leave a little bit to the imagination, but I think, based on the way Smash’s plot played out, that this is the penultimate point of Jason’s story. It’s the equivalent of Smash finding out that he’s got a tryout at A&M. It’s great, and you can kind of fill in the rest from there, but again, to get some closure on both these storylines, Friday Night Lights will give us a little bit more. I suspect next week we’ll get our last look at Jason Street.

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Jonathan Pacheco is a current web developer and future freelance writer. He blogs and reviews films at Bohemian Cinema.

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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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Lauded by the likes of Susan Sontag as one of the greatest works of 20th century art, while reviled by many both in Germany and abroad as a work of depraved reactionary nostalgia, Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s epic rumination of Germany’s Nazi past remains as troubling and troublesome today as it was thirty years ago. (Two top German critics I met in Berlin admitted to not having been able to sit through the film.) Syberberg takes the old adage of confronting the mistakes of the past lest they be repeated and puts it to an extreme test, immersing its audience in seven-plus hours of Naziana drawn out to such length and breadth that it suggests a morbidly intractable fixation with its subject.

A historical zombie movie for intellectuals, the film fixes an unwavering gaze on reanimated Nazi figures like Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler (whose obsession with a mythic Germany Syberberg seems to share), Hitler’s personal valet, and Hitler himself, toga-clad and rising from Richard Wagner’s tomb, as they deliver endless monologues amidst a landscape of kitschy Third Reich paraphernalia and atmospheric dry ice fog. The film itself creeps like a mist, heavily influenced by a Wagnerian aesthetic of total immersion and seductive stasis whose registers of portentous yearning shift gradually from one motif to the next. Other monologues delivered by contemporary performers often teeter into tedious, sermonizing self-absorption and effete irony (as if to counterpoint the passionate conviction of Nazi orators), bringing out an anti-cinematic element that denies pleasure and resists rapture. The film comments on cinema itself through a series of rear projections of paintings, newsreel footage and other iconic imagery. Sets cluttered with stuffed animals and uniformed mannequins suggest the basement of a Neo-Nazi taxidermist, the detritus of the past splayed out haphazardly yet betraying a precision of design, and an overall funkiness that becomes perversely appealing.

Also telling is the film’s dual attributions of Nazism as both a precursor and an antidote to the 20th century American capitalism that, according to Syberberg, threatens the freedoms of the world. It’s an argument often waged on the battleground of cinema, with Hitler posited as the greatest filmmaker of all time, and Syberberg actively deconstructing the “movie” that was the Third Reich, that massive production that was able, however temporarily, to break capitalist Hollywood’s industrial and cultural stranglehold on world cinema. This thorough disenchantment with contemporary film culture is what has Syberberg reaching for his Nazi revolver, loading it with the ammunition of mythic enthrallment and redemptive cultural pride—and yet not quite willing to pull the trigger. It’s a deeply ambivalent work, both longing to return to an eden of enthrallment to a German ideal while cautious of the consequences that such an impulse has already wrought on the world.
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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 entry is cross-published with Shooting Down Pictures.]

For the first video essays I’ve published since the YouTube fiasco, I am honored to have Kristin Thompson as guest commentator. Not only is she the author of The Frodo Franchise and co-author with David Bordwell of those ubiquitous textbooks Film Art: An Introduction and Film History: An Introduction, she is also author of the first report on the fair use of film frames, sponsored by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Read her invaluable article on the use of film frames in scholarship.

These videos are published in conjunction with Kristin’s illustrated entry on La roue, which can be found on her and David’s blog.

SCHOLARS AND STUDENTS: If referencing these videos for scholarship, please cite as “Kristin Thompson and Kevin B. Lee. Shooting Down Pictures video essay on Abel Gance’s La roue / E.A. Dupont’s Variety.” and attach either the URL for this page or the YouTube links.

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La roue:



Variety:

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By Vadim Rizov

[Dillinger is Dead opens today for a one-week run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Click here for screening information.]

Dillinger is Dead opens with worker Glauco (Michel Piccoli) at the gas-mask factory. As someone stands in a poisonous gas chamber testing out his latest product, his co-worker announces he'd like to declaim a little essay he's written and starts orating about how the image before us "strangely evokes the conditions in which modern man lives." No one bats an eye. Dillinger unfolds in a post-Antonioni landscape; the nameless dread has become all too nameable, and everyone can speak at length about their own alienation. Yes, this is the kind of movie where women go to sleep in their eyeliner and sex is either desultory or denied. Anomie, meet your late-60s endpoint.

Marco Ferreri's film arrives 40 years late for its first US theatrical run—a public service performed, once more, by Janus Films, ignoring the movie's long-past expiration date. Ferreri's never been much on my radar—I now can't find anyone to say a kind word for films like La Grande Bouffe, once all the rage—but Dillinger is his highest-profile film. It's entertaining and well-worth rediscovering, which doesn't mean it should be taken seriously; despite trying to think slightly ahead of the times, it's firmly trapped in them, like a smart-ass who's less self-aware than he realizes. Structurally and premise-wise, Dillinger is like a less extreme version of Jeanne Dielman: witness Glauco cook dinner, reconstruct a gun he finds in the closet and watch home movies in real time.

Glauco cooking for himself is the film's best part: AM pop blathers away in the background, there's an unattended TV upstairs whose volume gets too loud sometimes, and there's that gun he finds wrapped in newspaper in the closet—he needs the meticulously filmed spice rack to make dinner, and he needs lemon juice to work away some of the rust on the gun, and he can do both at the same time. It's delightful to watch Glauco, not least because he's the opposite of Antonioni's ennui-laden types: he takes pleasure in cooking for himself and realizing everything, in general, he's capable of. After cooking, he sets up a 16mm projector in the living room and watches home movies of a trip he recently took (to Spain, evidently) with his wife and another couple. The footage is silent, so Glauco mashes it up with random home-stereo accompaniment, futzes around with the projector so that the image forms ad hoc Cinerama patterns on his walls, and inserts himself into the footage. He's realizing the 21st-century Internet ideal of multimedia interaction way ahead of his own time, but there's a flip side, then as now: experience the whole word in your living room, sure, but only at the cost of flattening everything into its most outsize, sensationalist, grotesque aspects—sensory overstimulation that quickly becomes its own kind of banality.

That little critique seems inadvertent though. If Dillinger is riveting at its most ostentatiously purposeless, it's also more conventional than it knows. Per Chekov's maxim (now cliche) about what must happen in the third act with a gun shown in the first, things go exactly where—by the additional logic of post-capitalist alienation—they must. When Ferreri is content to simply observe Glauco's spice rack and listen to the sugary radio pop—a truer reflection of the late 60s than any Woodstock leftovers, really—it's gold; when events are "shocking," they're less than, really. Dillinger aspires to the status of pop art and achieves it, but it's a double-edged sword.

_________________________________________
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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1. Dictaphone Diaries : an interview with the director of Must Read After My Death, by Kjerstin Johnson at Bitch Magazine. As somebody perpetually puzzled by the navigation of the first person in art, a kind of diaristic documentary such as this intrigues me. Also, you can watch it online, which signals another current interest: new forms of distribution for new forms of media. That is, a new authorship. Earlier: a fine Manohla Dargis review, a good Andrew O'Hehir plug and some hammered-home words by Cullen Gallagher.

["This archival stuff was really fun footage that was just brimming with blatant misogyny and really showed the background of what the country was living through. But the more I worked with the material, the more it seemed to take you out of the story. Slowly I realized that the most powerful thing was what these people on the tapes were say to each other and sometimes to this disembodied listener who winds up being us in the audience forty years later."]


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2. Shahn at six martinis and the seventh art considers cabaretera noir.

["There's a lot more besides the noir beauty."]

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3. This Designboom post on Amy Bennett and her miniaturist art made me think of Beetlejuice. Anybody? Anybody? (Also worth noting that the quote is all [sic]...damn bloggers...)

["two years ago, artist amy bennett designed and built a scale model of her neighbourhood. through buildings this miniature world, bennett began to image the people and events that occurred in this alternate place. she later decided to translate the sotries she imagined in this model into a series of paintings. these works each appear to be a painting of the model, complete with cut-aways and small people. each one allows the viewer to image what is going on, creating their own narrative in their mind. the series is filled with reoccurring scenes, that have evolved over time and are intended to be read in order. however other are singular and their past and future is up to he viewer. amy bennett is a young artist living in portland, maine and first displayed the neighbourhood series at richard heller gallery in los angeles. "]

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4. At infinite thØught, the i/t lady gets into a tiff with the one and only Alain De Botton, which starts here and spills here. Why? Read the clip then read more in the links.

["With my reviews editor cap on, I'm somewhat unfortunately not allowed to merely endlessly commission my dirty, filthy friends from Warwick to write blood-n-cum-spattered commentaries on the latest Bataille volume, or my militant-kulak-massacring friends to write point-by-point dictats on the best way to read Badiou. Occasionally I have to get people to review books like this. Now I don't know about you, but I find the idea of someone who doesn't have to work for a living (his father founded Global Asset Management - hopefully they've got about one left at this point) writing a book about work rather in, um, poor taste."]

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5. WebEcoist offers (1st) 7 Phenomenal Wonders of the Natural World and (2nd) 7 (More!) Phenomenal Wonders of the Natural World. Really just an excuse to geek out at pretty pictures of rarities in our world.

["Blue holes are giant and sudden drops in underwater elevation that get their name from the dark and foreboding blue tone they exhibit when viewed from above in relationship to surrounding waters. They can be hundreds of feet deep and while divers are able to explore some of them they are largely devoid of oxygen that would support sea life due to poor water circulation - leaving them eerily empty. Some blue holes, however, contain ancient fossil remains that have been discovered, preserved in their depths."]

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Quote of the Day:

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary."
— James Madison

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): From Albert Serra's Birdsong, now playing at Anthology Film Archives.


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Clip of the Day: The Coen Brothers tell us clean coal isn't exactly clean for ThisIsReality.org, via BoingBoing

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"Links for the Day": A selection of Links that will hopefully spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to ryknight at gmail dot com.

Read more!

1. Why TV Is Better Than the Movies. Hey, is it February and/or March and therefore kind of a wasteland at the theaters? That means its time for Marshall Fine of Hollywood and Fine (who used to work for the Argus Leader of Sioux Falls, S.D., which got me addicted to newspapers as a young-un, way back in the day) to re-ignite a debate that's been going on since at least the early '90s. Take your side in comments! I'll say, "Both!"

["A number of years ago, a colleague and I debated in print about the relative merits of TV vs. movies. At the time, I was a movie chauvinist and believed that anything TV did well, it did accidentally. But, after splitting my time during the last five years between reviewing movies and TV, I’ve undergone a conversion."]

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2. Top 50 Movie Special Effects Shots. Den of Geek uses insanely specific criteria to pick just what the title says.

["Jim Danforth - twice nominated for an Oscar - was the powerhouse matte painter and animator called in by Hammer Films when Ray Harryhausen was too busy with The Valley Of Gwangi (1969) to take part in the studio's sequel to One Million Years BC (1966). Though not as quick as Harryhausen, Danforth - pre-empting 'go-motion' - experimented with motion blur and got better results out of his flying pterodactyls than the master himself. However, that's not why this shot is in here. What's exceptional about the dinosaur's pursuit of Victoria Vetri is how optical wiz Les Bowie has really inserted him into the environment, whereas so much stop-motion animation of the 1960s was clearly divided between freeze-framed background/foreground plates and the animator's work. It's a challenging piece of matting, particularly on one of Hammer's notoriously penny-pinching budgets."]

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3. Mike Leigh's Oscar diary. Last Oscar link, I swear, peaches. But Mike Leigh's inside commentary on the surreality of the process is one of the better I've read.

["What a strange, surreal experience it is. A tremendous honour to be nominated - but then you trek across the planet, you squeeze into your tux, you squeeze into a stretch limo, you squeeze through the security tent on to the jam-packed, chaotic red carpet, and then you sit through a very long show (which turns out this year to be far less tacky and schmaltzy than usual). At one, weird moment, some strange force suddenly convinces you that you're about to win, while you affect to look benign and generous for the camera that's suddenly in your face; then you don't win, and you spend the rest of the night trying to be grown-up and sporting. You even try to enjoy yourself."]

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4. In Search for Auteurs: TAMIL MAINSTREAM CINEMA. Brand spankin' new e-zine Indian Auteur digs deep into the world's busiest film industry.

["Tamil Nadu has always been one crazy state as far as film watching is concerned. Tamil Nadu, along with Andhra Pradesh, contributes to a large fraction of the total film output of the country every year. But like in the rest of the world, cinema had immediately been reduced to a way of telling stories almost as soon as it arrived to the state. To assess the role of the director as the author of the movie, one has to travel as far as the 60s. This is because till the 60s cinema had always been a medium of either recording theatre or promoting political activism during the pre-independence period. Particularly, one has to come till the films of K. Balachander to measure the extent to which the director has dictated the film and how much it bears his personal stamp."]

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5. It's time for HND to jump on the latest silly Internet meme, don't you think? Go to Wikipedia and click on random. That's the name of your band. Now, go to Quotations Page's Random Quotations feature. The last four or five words of the last quote on the page shall be your album title. Finally, go to Flickr's exploration of interesting photos from the last seven days. The third photo there is your album cover. You can make your album cover (as I did) or just post the album title and band name in comments with a link to the photo via TinyURL. Have fun. (h/t: The AV Club)

["Peleg Wadsworth's "It Always Has to End" combines the sound of psychadelic guitar playing with the hardcore glockenspiel of group leader/musical dynamo Todd VanDerWerff. Buoyed by lead-off single "The Trees, They Are Shouting at Me," Peleg Wadsworth looks poised to rocket to the top of the charts with their heavy-metal influenced hillbilly funk, inspired by such diverse groups as Husker Du and The Dixie Chicks."]

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Quote of the Day:

"The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another."
—George Eliot

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): The Internet is truly a wondrous place when a site like this can take off. (I'd say the link is NSFW, but I'm pretty sure no one would have ANY IDEA what you were looking at.)



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Clip of the Day: This music video for the band Chairlift will most likely hurt your brain.



_____________________________________________________
"Links for the Day": A selection of Links that will hopefully spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to todd@vanderwerff.us.

Read more!

By Todd VanDerWerff

I’m sure ten million Lost fans have made this joke already, but “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” was essentially The Passion of John Locke (Terry O’Quinn). Not for nothing, apparently, did the last episode prominently focus on Jack’s (Matthew Fox) role as the doubting Thomas of our little band of players.

But then, Locke, especially as played by O’Quinn, has always been the self-appointed messiah of the Island. He believes there’s a destiny that everyone who crashed there is living up to. He’s willing to make the ultimate sacrifice when he’s told he has to and barely even questions it until the midpoint of this episode. And, really, all he wants to do is save everyone. Sure, everyone on Lost has a BIT of a savior complex, but Locke’s comes with the kind of manic fury that one would need to really get things done. He was a broken man off-Island, but on the Island, he’s been given everything he would ever want, so he becomes its chief witness and bearer of its testament. “Life and Death,” written by Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindeof and directed by Jack Bender, is as much about removing that casual swagger and confidence from Locke and reducing him to a broken man again as it is playing out the beats that led to Locke attempting to kill himself. It’s very similar to last week’s “316,” right down to the structural level, but I liked it quite a bit better for a variety of reasons. It’s a fairly bold piece of television – and bold in a way Lost rarely has been in the past – for the way it focuses so singularly on one man’s despair and for the way it refuses to be especially plotty outside of its opening and closing segments. It’s a straight-up character piece, so it helps that the character being examined is possibly Lost’s most fascinating (and well-played).

The structure of “Life and Death” is pretty predictable once you get into the swing of it. It opens on the Island, where Locke meets our two new recurring players, Caesar (Saïd Taghmaoui) and Ilana (Zuleikha Robinson), and spills a little information on the Island and how he came to be there (including the ominous line, “I remember dying”). From there, the show pulls a straight-up flashback for the first time this season (complete with flashback whoosh-y noise and everything), sending us off-Island to see what happened after Locke pushed the giant wheel at the end of the season’s fifth episode. From there, the episode consists of a series of scenes designed to build Locke up and then tear him down. It seemed a bit plodding at first, until you got into its rhythm and remembered that all passion plays are driven as much by the great, underground tug of the power of ritual as by anything else. Locke’s crusade takes on something of that ritualistic fervor by the end of the episode, as he is stripped of all support, of all things he believes to be true about himself, of his very reason for being. Locke’s decision to commit suicide might have been a grand sacrifice the Island required, but it was also a choice made by a man filled with despair, as pointed out to him by Matthew Abbadon (the great Lance Reddick making what would seem to be his first AND last appearance this season). Something about the way Locke visited first Widmore (Alan Dale), then Sayid (Naveen Andrews), then Walt (Malcolm David Kelley), then Hurley (Jorge Garcia), then Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and then the grave of his former girlfriend Helen felt grandly pageant-like, vaguely reminiscent of something like the Stations of the Cross. It all ended with a visitation from Jack (Matthew Fox) in the hospital, Locke’s Thomas, to be sure, but also his Peter, the person constantly in denial of what Locke knows to be true. Fittingly enough, the episode ended with Locke’s very own Judas, Ben (Michael Emerson), arriving at the seedy hotel Locke was staying in to interrupt Locke’s suicide attempt and then go ahead and strangle the guy anyway. All the episode needed was to have Locke’s arms outstretched, crucifix-style, at the end of the episode as his body hung from the ceiling to hammer the point home even more.

Lost is rarely subtle in these sorts of things, but I was surprised at how in-character and graceful much of the writing in the individual scenes was. Freed from the need to serve character needs AND move the plot forward, the characters stopped being mere game pieces on a giant chessboard and became a group of people who had been changed, some for the better, some for the worse, by a life-altering tragedy, and the scenes took on some of the feel of ABC’s fascinatingly flawed The Nine from a few seasons back, which was a show dedicated almost ENTIRELY to understanding how post-traumatic stress disorder might bring a band of disparate survivors together by improbable means, but was also a very small-scale character drama. This being Lost, we were soon back on the Island (or, rather, the smaller Island off the coast of the main Island, if eagle-eyed viewers who saw that Caesar had stumbled across Hydra station were to be believed) and back into the intrigue of the series proper, but “Life and Death” was primarily a one-episode chance to focus on one person and how their life had or hadn’t been changed by the Island. It has the kind of subtle character writing that the show just couldn’t do, seemingly, in its first few seasons, and it really marks just how far Cuse and Lindelof have come AS WRITERS since the show began.

Locke, for his part, doesn’t seem all that INTERESTED in bringing everyone back to the Island. He’s going to make a go of it at the behest of Widmore, but he seems properly skeptical of the man’s motives for sending him back, as it’s hard to just write off a dude sending a freighter full of people looking to kill anything that moves. Locke seems to bond with Abbadon during their time together, and Abbadon’s talks with him seem to slowly suggest that it’s possible Locke needn’t go back to the Island, that he could build SOME sort of life off-Island that would approach the kind of confidence he found on the Island. Abbadon, who indirectly put Locke on the plane that brought him to the Island, says he gets people where they need to go, but he also seems to understand that Locke has a choice – not just a choice to die or live, but a choice to go back to the Island or to stay in the real world, to eke out a new living there. Of course, Abbadon is shot by Ben in a thrillingly edited sequence that punctuates the episode just when it might become too solemn. Locke, as he so often does, attempts to escape the assassin and only gets into more trouble, landing in a catastrophic car crash that sends him to the hospital where Jack met him.

But there was more going on in the attempts to get Locke to stay on the mainland – indeed, to get ALL of the characters to stay on the mainland. The writers of Lost seem to see the Island as something of a trap. It gives you what you THINK you want, but it also takes away so much. When you come to a kind of peace with your past, it inevitably kills you, for example, and its tendrils extend into the “real world,” to the point where those who leave are filled almost with a compulsion for it. The Island is one of those all-purpose metaphors authors of pulp love so much, and when its motives are mysterious, it makes the show more of a fun guessing game, but for Locke, the Island has always been his everything, just because it healed him in the first season, made him able to walk again. Indeed, as soon as he lands back on the mainland, he’s in a wheelchair again from the broken leg he suffered falling into a hole, though he’s slowly regaining his mobility throughout the episode. Locke, to his mind, is helpless, but the episode is filled with signifiers that he may not necessarily HAVE to be helpless.

Take, for example, Locke’s first visit, which is to Sayid. Sayid is working on building homes for the poor in the jungles of Central America. He’s extricated himself from the web of death Ben had trapped him in when he was working as an assassin, and while he seems mournful over the death of his wife, Nadia, he also says that he’s doing good work. He invites Locke to come help him when he gives up his quest to return, and Locke politely declines, but he also doesn’t insist too heavily to Sayid that he return, after he learns all that being trapped between Widmore and Ben has taken from Sayid. Locke’s meeting with Walt is frustratingly short (and given how important Walt was to the show’s first season, I hope this isn’t the last time we see him), but it also points to a potential life off the Island, as Walt inquires after his father and seems to be trying to live a relatively normal pre-pubescent life. Hurley, meanwhile, suggests that it IS possible to rebuild after returning; everyone else has after all. It’s Kate, finally, who raises the specter of Helen, the woman Locke loved and the one person he says he might give up his Island quest to be with. Both Kate and Jack rub in to Locke that he was just a lonely old man who found a new lease on life on the Island, but his speech to Kate, pointing out that he was bitter and obsessed and that’s why he lost Helen, shows that he didn’t HAVE to be a lonely old man. It was, instead, kind of a choice he made that was buoyed by the circumstances he was born into.

The only other thing Locke has to hang on to is that he’s special, but all of this seems fairly specious. This being Lost, I’m going to assume he IS as special as everyone says he is. Locke’s specialness, his purpose, though, is not terribly well spelled-out to him. Widmore’s answer when he asks why he’s special is that he just is, which seems a bit lacking, and Ben refuses, as always, to speak in specifics. So when Jack attacks the final thing holding up the pedestal Locke has placed himself upon it hurts Locke more than anything even Kate had said. He’s already, seemingly, decided that he’s too old and too lonely to try to make another go of it, and he’s struck out with everyone he’s tried to convince to return to the Island (though I wonder why he didn’t have Desmond on his list). And so, so chastened, he returns to his hotel room to hang himself in the middle of the night in a strikingly-shot sequence that concludes with Ben cleaning up the aftermath of his murder, the shadow of Locke’s corpse looming large on the wall behind him.

It’s, really, as fine a portrayal of a man pushed to the brink as a show with a marauding smoke monster might be able to pull off. Since this is Lost, Locke probably really IS important, and all of the people who got off the Island are going to end up forced to go back there for one reason or another, but I’m glad the show was so tenacious in showing us Locke reach his breaking point. The Lost writers seem dedicated to doing this at least once a season, and it helps that O’Quinn always delivers, but this episode featured standout work for the other cast members who appeared, even Lilly, who was probably the best she’s ever been on the show, gently needling Locke but still driving the knives in deep.

Lost is, at its core, a religious show. That’s what drives its engines, really. It may say it’s about men of science and men of faith, but it’s always come down so hard on the side of the men of faith that the argument always seemed too one-sided to really be focused on. That may be why its best characters are men like Locke and Ben, men driven by a small voice inside of them that’s just always telling them what the Island wants them to be doing. Lost pretends to be a science fiction show some of the time with stuff like time travel thrown in there, but it’s really a show about a group of religious pilgrims, in thrall to a force they don’t really understand and throwing their weight behind a series of imperfect leaders. It was this episode’s greatest conceit that it so deeply humanized one of those leaders.

Some other thoughts:

Geez, so much for my Left Behind theories from last week. I guess flight 316 made some sort of crash landing (on the runway on the smaller Island?), and then a few of the survivors, including Lapidus (hurrah!) took off to the larger Island in some of the boats. Seems we’re obviously going to see those in the boats shooting at those left behind in the episode “Jughead” in a few weeks.

Great, great shots on the beach tonight, which made me all the more depressed that my ABC HD continues to be out. That pan from Locke’s shoes sitting atop his neatly folded suit jacket to the man himself staring out into the blue, blue waves, a look of contentment on his face, was pretty exquisite.

On the other hand, Locke apparently playing a monk at the episode’s very beginning? Not so much.

So, anyway, is 24 just gonna START OVER? I know that the show’s kind of done that in the past by blowing up the nuclear bomb with several episodes left in Season Two and by shifting the threat after the first 13 episodes in Season One, but this is just a blatant way for the show to remove itself from a plot conceived before the writers’ strike that didn’t make a ton of sense and embark on a new plot. Here’s hoping for better from what’s to come. At least, if I’m going to keep watching, that is.

So if Jack, Kate, Hurley and Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) are in the 1970s with the DHARMA Initiative (along with Dan (Jeremy Faraday), if the season premiere began with a flash-forward, of sorts), and Locke, Ilana, Caesar and Lapidus are in the present (with Sun (Yunjin Kim), presumably, since the show seems dedicated to keeping her and Jin apart), where are all of our other players going to land, exactly? I guess we’ll find out next week.

I’m assuming this coming war will be the driving narrative force for Season Six, but it really seems as though we’re being set up to not especially trust EITHER side in the war (both Ben and Widmore seem pretty evil at this point). Perhaps the Island needs Locke because it knows he will lead a small force of parties not loyal to either side that will finally bring peace to its shores. But who can tell? Widmore seemed intent on returning him to the Island, while Ben wanted to kill him.

And on that note, does Ben REALLY expect Locke to resurrect when he gets to the Island? He was very insistent that the corpse needed to be with the Oceanic Six when they went back, but when he leaves Locke’s hotel room after killing him, he sure seems to act as though he’ll never see Locke again.

Man, seedy-lookin’ hotels are just a great setting for TV shows. Every show should have at least one major set piece per season set in one.

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

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1. The shuttering of New Yorker Films has been a big thing in the lives of many New York film people, including a number of friends of The House. As can be expected, David Hudson does a fine round-up job. So does Christopher Campbell at SpoutBlog. I quote Ray Pride below.

["The idea of a Christmas promo from the company still makes me smile, but not the news that its library had been used as collateral on a loan that went into default and the company was shut down today. And, among the various modest honorifics that have ever came my way was being quoted on New Yorker DVDs from Tim Roth, Emir Kusturica and Claire Denis, even if the quotes are goofy. For Underground, it's something about beer and women; for Beau Travail, it's the ellipsis-heavy "A MASTERPIECE! Exquisite... Mysterious... Magical." Missing only a second exclamation point! Presentation treatments and the seven-to-fifteen second fanfares that accompany them have always given me a little rush, on films old or new. But the silent white-on-blue New Yorker logo that accompanied movies like Wim Wenders' American Friend is forever married in my memory to the low hiss and crackle of a well-distressed 16mm optical soundtrack."]

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2. All things considered... at The Kind of Face You Hate, with comments (bill's first quoted below).

["My dad told me that, many years ago, Winters came through his old hometown -- why, I don't know, because he's not from a very cosmopolitan area, but then again soem films have been shot there, so who knows -- and spent her time there getting so hammered and behaving so badly that they had to throw her out. Of town! Who gets thrown out of whole towns anymore?
"]

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3. Suggested Scenarios for Howie Mandel's Howie Do It, by Benjamin Kumming at McSweeney's

["The contestant finds him- or herself embroiled in a plot by fellow National Socialist Party members to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The plot is spearheaded by Tom Cruise. As the plan begins to unravel, Cruise lures the contestant into an argument over the best way to proceed. When the contestant finally utters the catch phrase, "This is Howie Do It," Tom Cruise removes his eye patch and wig to reveal that he is, in fact, Howie Mandel."]

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4. Mathscape, at BLDGBLG.

["Project H Design recently completed the installation of a "math playground," or Learning Landscape, at the Kutamba School for orphans of AIDS in rural Uganda. Part outdoor classroom, part spatially immersive lesson in arithmetic, the project gives students a place to study in at least two senses of the phrase. On the one hand, it's simply a forum for learning; on the other, it is literally a place to study: the space itself, if I've understood this correctly, serves as a model for play-based education."]

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5. The Evolution of Life in 60 seconds at SEED Magazine.com, via Dave McDougall. Click through to watch. It only takes a minute, dummy.

["The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds is an experiment in scale: By condensing 4.6 billion years of history into a minute, the video is a self-contained timepiece. Like a specialized clock, it gives one a sense of perspective. Everything — from the formation of the Earth, to the Cambrian Explosion, to the evolution of mice and squirrels — is proportionate to everything else, displaying humankind as a blip, almost indiscernible in the layered course of history. Each event in the Evolution of Life fades gradually over the course of the minute, leaving typographic traces that echo all the way to the present day. Just as our blood still bears the salt water of our most ancient evolutionary ancestors."]

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Quote of the Day:

"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means."
—Oscar Wilde

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): via So Much Pileup


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Clip of the Day: The trailer for Jia Zhang-Ke's Still Life, one of the last titles put out by New Yorker Films. And it's a stellar disc, too! It has Dong on there as well in the "Special Features"...


_____________________________________________________
"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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By Lauren Wissot

[Bandaged will have its world premiere at the London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, April 3rd and 5th. Maria Beatty’s Belle de Nature, Strap On Motel, and Post-Apocalyptic Cowgirls, and Lauren Wissot and Roxanne Kapitsa’s Un Piede di Roman Polanski will all be screening at this year’s CineKink Film Festival (February 24th -March 1st).]

Bandaged is S&M filmmaker Maria Beatty’s foray into the indie mainstream – if one could call a flick best described as Mädchen in Uniform meets The English Patient meets Eyes Without A Face “mainstream.” Fittingly, none other than Abel Ferrara is serving as executive producer, though it just as easily could have been David Cronenberg since Beatty’s stunningly visceral cocktail of sex and bodily terror would surely merit that auteur’s seal of approval.

The plot revolves around young Lucille (Janna Lisa Dombrowsky), a beautiful blonde but unhappy young romantic with a passion for poetry and Oscar Wilde. Imprisoned in a sprawling mansion by her cold, scientific-minded father after her mother’s death, Lucille decides to end it all right before her eighteenth birthday, but instead ends up with third degree burns on her face. Even more unlucky, her mad doctor daddy Arthur (Hans Piesbergen, who appropriately resembles David Bowie) happens to be a plastic surgeon, thus she can be healed at home with the help of his trusty assistant Ingrid (played by Martine Erhel in an Olympia Dukakis-type role). Into this family tragedy steps pretty brunette nurse Joan Genova (a stoic Susanne Sachsse) to insert some hot “mädchen” into Lucille’s lonely life.

Though Bandaged refers to the dressings wrapped mummy-like around Lucille’s head throughout most of the film, a more telling title would have been Skin, for the warm touch of a human being, a piece of another, is what Lucille most craves (a point eventually rendered literal when Joan makes the ultimate sacrifice of her own live flesh to her lover). With gorgeous imagery and lighting courtesy of DP Caro Krugmann, and tactile production design by Stefan Dickfeld, what could have been cheap melodrama becomes a meticulous study in detail, from shots of dead lab rats to close-ups of sexy heels. Trying to figure out what period the film is set in (“somewhere in the distant past” a title card teases at the beginning) becomes part of the tense ride. Wristwatches and alarm clocks look shiny and new but Lucille writes with a fountain pen and those medicine bottles Joan grasps in her smooth manicured hands reek of antiquity. Only at the end are we treated to a clue via the announcer on a B&W television set who chirps, “The Guiding Light, presented by Ivory soap.”

With minimal dialogue and an unobtrusive, classical, elegiac score by Mikael Karlsson, Beatty delivers an enigmatic film comprised of sultry pacing and slow pans that is wondrously all show and very little tell. The director takes her sweet time, unafraid to linger on simple pleasures, from an erotic foot massage to the ingénue’s expressive eyes that flash longing looks from beneath those sterile bandages – these wordless moments are worth a thousand screenplays. Lucille’s nosebleed that begins the film mirrors the red liquid that flows through her father’s ominous vials – the color of blood and lust.

This exquisite little movie would be near-perfect if filmmaking were merely the sum of its technical parts. Unfortunately, all of Beatty’s talent as a visual artist can’t make up for her miscast leading ladies whose line delivery is a bit off beat – not quirky “offbeat,” but literally arrhythmic. They would have done better to speak Claire Menichi’s sparse script in their own native (non-English) language. Add to this the more problematic aspect that, for all of the graphic shots of tongue kissing and nipple licking, there is absolutely no chemistry between the two. Lucille and Joan’s lovemaking feels more like a competition to see who can be the most uninhibited on camera, with each in her own separate sexy world. When Lucille’s face starts to decompose as she climaxes (Joan’s head buried between her legs!) it’s a triumphant moment in the annals of gory art films that would make Cronenberg stand up and cheer – but is it hot?

“Your face should be in a Michelangelo or something,” Dombrowsky as Lucille improvises with a clunk while ravishing Joan after tying her to the bed in an inorganically arrived at S&M scene. For one moment Lucille is contemplating slashing her throat with a razor and the next she’s topping her nurse. It’s one thing to be a switch player, but to go from vulnerable to dominant in mere seconds? Soon after, a scene falls flat in which Lucille and Joan playfully chase one another in the woods surrounding the house because it, too, feels forced. And why even open up the film to daylight and the freeing outdoors when the claustrophobic atmosphere of the confining “haunted mansion” is the only thing keeping the tension (sexual and otherwise) high?

Like The Guiding Light program that plays on the old B&W set, the film’s ending is rushed and overly soap operatic, though its last image is breathtakingly lovely. And like the portrait of Lucille’s dead mom that hangs on the wall, watching over the dining room table as though she too were seated with the family, we’re left haunted by a painful reminder of what could have been and of that which is missing.

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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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By Todd VanDerWerff

So let’s talk about God.

I mean, He’s arguably the most important character in Big Love, even if we never directly see Him, even if we never are sure how He feels about the Henricksons. Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) is always so concerned about how the two of them are getting along that we are forced to take these sorts of things into account, even if we don’t particularly believe in God in any way, shape or form. Bill’s deteriorating relationship with his faith has provided a hidden spine to Big Love’s third season, and it finally erupts in tonight’s episode, in one of the all-time great television images to my mind.

Bill, having just traveled from Utah to upstate New York in the hopes of burying a time capsule in the soil where Joseph Smith found the gold tablets after being prompted by the angel Moroni, has realized just how little his family regards this whole odyssey, which Bill has managed to make central to his entire belief system. Bill’s faith, like his life in general, tends to be filled with little tasks designed to build up to a greater whole. Bill, abandoned by his family, who have all raced off to watch a pageant recreation of Moroni’s visitation to Smith, kneels in the green grass, turning his concerns skyward, asking God why He’s seemingly hiding from Bill, why his family seems to be falling apart. The camera dollies in on his face as he says this and then cuts to an evocative wide shot, Bill kneeling on the frame’s left, a medium distance from the camera, the pageant grounds rumbling to life with light and sound behind him. And then, an actor from the pageant, playing the part of Moroni, rises into the sky so high that he rises above the walls surrounding the pageant grounds. From our perspective, he seems to be blessing BILL, not Joseph Smith, offering Bill a path to find what he wants most. It’s a gorgeous shot, highly symbolic and yet somehow prosaic at the same time, and it feels almost like something out of Fellini.

And then, through unsettling means, God answers Bill’s prayers.

One of my favorite television scenes of all time is from the first season finale of Deadwood, “Sold Under Sin.” If you’ve never seen the series, all you need to know is that, throughout the first season, the character of Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) has been built up as both a fascinating self-made man and an adversary to the growing pressures of civilization, best represented by Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant). Throughout the first season, the town preacher (Ray McKinnon) has been increasingly descending into dementia, brought on by a brain tumor (and I haven’t seen this scene in some time and don’t happen to have my Deadwood DVDs by me at the moment, so if I’m getting the details wrong, feel free to correct me). As the doctor (Brad Dourif) works to save him, he comes to realize that his cause is hopeless. The preacher isn’t going to be saved by the crude medicine of the time, and, indeed, might not even have been saved by MODERN medicine. The doctor cries out to God, asking for Him to spare the preacher further pain. And at that very moment, Al Swearengen happens upon the struggling preacher and, moved, puts him out of his misery swiftly and quietly. God answers the doctor’s prayers, so far as the doctor is concerned, at least, but He does so through a very unusual instrument, through murder, through a mercy killing.

Deadwood argued that even if you didn’t believe in a higher power, just the very serendipity of being a human being, of living in a larger community, could occasionally take on the same effect as believing in God anyway. Big Love doesn’t go that far – the Henricksons are deliberately set apart from everyone else in their lives – but it does argue that the process of living in a family, especially a big one, is a lot like being a part of a religious congregation, and I’d say the final answer to Bill’s prayer in this episode comes close to matching the brilliant poetry of the Deadwood scene, especially as it digs into the messy faith of the man at Big Love’s center.

Television doesn’t do terribly well in portraying people of faith. To a real degree, this is a function of television being a mass medium and mass media wanting to do their best to keep their audiences as mass as possible, even in today’s age of niche markets. To some degree, this has to do with fundamentalist Christian and Mormon audiences in the U.S. being deeply suspicious of a pop culture that portrays them as buffoons more often than not. Indeed, a good number of evangelical Christians have embraced The Simpsons’ Ned Flanders, satirical warts and all, simply because he’s a nice guy trying to live up to his creed in a world that continually tests him. The Simpsons holds him up for laughter as often as it does any of its other characters, but because he’s not a hypocrite, because he cares about his kids and because he’s just trying to make his way in the world, a lot of Christians love the guy.

The Simpsons, though, has always been more nuanced about faith than most other shows, which use faith as a prop for the guest star of the week (too many episodes of C.S.I.), mock people of faith for believing at all (House) or toss faith in as an all-purpose character-building concept, to be discarded blithely when the storyline calls for it (Friday Night Lights’ Lyla comes to mind as a current example of this time-old TV technique). Worse, because of fears of boycotts from fundamentalists (as slew NBC’s short-lived The Book of Daniel) or Catholics (as ended ABC’s short-lived Nothing Sacred – seeing a pattern?), TV pastors, when they’re not blinding hypocrites, tend to be absolutely uninteresting saints. Think of that dude on 7th Heaven or any character in any Christian film ever produced (especially the recent, unremittingly awful Fireproof). There’s probably a fascinating series to be made about the pressures of being a modern-day pastor, but the entrenched positions on both sides of the divide mean this show will probably never be produced, even with more daring networks like HBO and AMC diving into the content-production world.

Well, I say all of that, but Big Love has pretty much just gone ahead and MADE a show about the struggles of having faith in the modern world and has done so in a largely respectful and fascinating way on the network you’d least expect to be interested in broadcasting the good, clean fun of living by a strict religious creed. Big Love’s occasionally anthropological feel – the series tends to shoot the religious ceremonies of the Henricksons as though it’s a National Geographic documentary – is often overwhelmed by the sheer compassion it feels for all of its characters (outside of, arguably, Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), who seems to be viewed as venal and unsalvageable). There’s another scene in “Come, Ye Saints,” scripted by Melanie Marnich and directed by Dan Attias, that struck me silent with its beauty. Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), reeling from the death of her mother and the revelation that Bill’s oldest son Ben (Douglas Smith) is in love with her, is destroyed when she accidentally leaves the urn carrying her mother’s ashes atop a car and then drives off, scattering the ashes to the wind. She finally seems to let loose some of the grief she’s been carrying, and then, Bill baptizes first wife Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) in a hotel room hot tub as a proxy for Margene’s mother, ensuring that when Margene dies, her mother will be there waiting for her on the other side.

It would be easy to play this scene for goofy laughs (it IS a pretty weird concept), but Big Love plays it for every ounce of poignancy it can muster, from the look of comfort on Goodwin’s face to the cool lighting of the hotel room. “No soul is lost,” says Bill, and for an instant, Big Love strikes you with the sensation of why these people are in this seemingly unsustainable setup, of why anyone would want to be a part of a religious tradition seemingly at odds with the modern world. In the Henricksons’ creed, everyone has a place to belong, so long as they follow the rules.

But it’s the rules that always mess you up, isn’t it? And that brings us back to the end of the episode and the answer to Bill’s prayer. Bill’s daughter Sarah (Amanda Seyfried), you see, is pregnant. And she’s planning to keep the baby, drawing up a plan and slowly incorporating Ben and her friend Heather (Tina Majorino) into it. Granted, her plan is a bit too idealistic, but Sarah’s determination to make sure her baby is not raised by her polygamist parents OR an adoptive couple that would provide the baby with a strained upbringing (as with the man struggling not to be gay and his wife in the episode a couple of weeks ago) seems as though it would override most of the things life threw at her as a young single mother. Sarah has always been one of the strongest people in the series, so it’s easy to overestimate her maturity, and this episode served as a necessary reminder of just how young she really is. She gets excited when her dad, who doesn’t know about the pregnancy, promises her a special night out on the town in Chicago on the way back. She bristles at the involvement of her mom in her life. She can only keep quiet when her parents angrily yell at her about the birth control pills Barb found, knowing that they’re not HER pills, obviously, but also unable to correct them until Nicki (Chloë Sevigny) admits that they’re her pills, and the fury shifts to her. And then, at the end of the episode, immediately following Bill’s prayer, Sarah miscarries.

I normally hate miscarriages on TV (I railed against them in my latest BSG review) because they tend to be the easy way out of not dealing with adding a baby or the complications of an abortion or adoption to the storyline, but I thought the miscarriage was well-handled here, both for how seriously it was played by Seyfried, Sevigny, Tripplehorn and Paxton and for how complicated it makes the show’s issues of faith. Bill prays for God to make His presence felt in his life and for his family to be repaired, and Sarah’s miscarriage both draws the family together – after all, Nicki, who would seemingly be the least sympathetic to Sarah’s plight, is the first to learn of the miscarriage and also the most compassionate – and removes something that Bill would probably regard as a “problem” in his deepest heart of hearts (not that he would ever say that) when he found out about it. The sense of the gravity of the situation propels these final passages (mostly scored to the hymn “Softly and Tenderly”), but there’s also the weird sensation that Bill’s prayer HAS been answered there to keep you off-balance. It’s one of the subtlest portrayals of that old question of just how big a role God plays in the lives of His followers AND just how malicious He would be in doing so that I’ve seen in a filmed entertainment.

And, look, I’m out of space, and I’ve barely touched on anything else in the episode. “Come, Ye Saints” has a lot going on (most of the secrets the characters have been carrying around since Season One – including Bill’s Viagra use and Nicki’s birth control pills – come out), but it never feels overstuffed as some other episodes have this season, perhaps because it doesn’t try to shove in a plot at the Juniper Creek compound. It moves with a calm grace of its own as the characters retrace the steps of their ancestors, chased across the country and into the wilderness by angry mobs aplenty. It’s a deeply moving tribute to the idea that a big family can be both a hindrance and, in times of trial, a salvation. It’s easily Big Love’s best episode ever, and, if we’re being honest, one of the best television episodes I’ve seen in a long, long time.

***
Some other thoughts:

• Sorry for the lateness of this review. I’ve been battling a cold and the Oscars all weekend long, even as I really intended to have this up early, thanks to having seen the episode in advance. I hope the piece was worth the wait!
  
  
• I think I could have written my whole review based entirely on who ends up riding with whom at the various stops on the Mormon Trail, including the stop where Bill is forgotten at a roadside picnic area. The way the episode shuffles its characters around from car to car to maximize dramatic potential is one of the things that makes it so good.
  
  
• To a real degree, I was worried that the drama-addicted Big Love would have Margene take advantage of Ben’s feelings for her, but I was glad that the show didn’t go there, as she very clearly made explicit the lines that could not be crossed in their relationship. Big Love is addicted to dramatic complications, yes, but it holds its central family fairly sacred, and I think that’s one of the things that makes the show work as well as it does. I think James Poniewozik is also right when he says that the episode subtly shows how Margene having to deal with her mother at a young age gave her a degree of self-sufficiency that comes out when she has to deal with situations like this.
  
  
• Nicki’s flirtation with Ray the DA, meanwhile, grows more and more worrying, as her giggly flirtations start to be obvious to even her. She buys Bill a cardigan, so he can look just like Ray, and she calls Wanda (Melora Walters) for advice. Wanda, true to form, offers up the line of the episode: “Has he chased you at night? Has he tried to put you in a trunk?” The show has stepped back a bit from Nicki in the last two episodes, but she had some fine moments tonight, and how the Ray story resolves itself is probably what most interests me for the next four episodes of the season. Sevigny is perfectly portraying the woozy uncertainty that comes from realizing that there are other things in your life than what you’ve built it up to be.
  
  
• Bill Paxton gets ragged on a lot for the inconsistency of his performance from a lot of quarters, largely, I think, because Bill Henrickson can be such a cheerful asshole, but his work here was stellar, particularly in the episode’s final ten minutes, when he really made you feel for the poor bastard.
  
  
• I have absolutely no idea why HBO scheduled new episodes of this up against the Super Bowl AND the Oscars (and both episodes were actually season highlights). I realize that the series airs four or five times per week, and a lot more people catch it that way than on Sunday nights, but that scheduling seems a little nuts.
  
  
• I usually watch the week’s United States of Tara while I’m typing up these reviews, and I’m starting to regret only writing a review from seeing the pilot. The series still has a lot of problems, but it’s moved from the category of trying too hard to legitimately interesting over the past few weeks, and this week’s episode, which portrayed Tara (Toni Collette) trying to keep herself together while her passive-aggressive parents visited, was a genuine success. I’m pleased to see that this series, which stars a lot of actors I like and comes from writers I’m fond of as well, has turned out to be a grower. Even Big Love took a while to figure out what it was doing, so keep at it, Tara!

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

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