By Jeremiah Kipp
[The Limits of Control opens tomorrow at Angelika 6 in New York City, The Landmark in Los Angeles and ArcLight Cinemas 14 in Hollywood. Click venue names for screening information.]
If you were listening to a piece of groovy music and were responsive to it, you wouldn’t mind following its vibe, nodding at refrains, enjoying the use of instruments, tempo, rhythm—so why is it audiences get impatient when movies attempt to do the same thing? Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control feels both formally rigorous and genuinely spontaneous, the way good musical improvisations allow for freedom within selected confines. And I’d argue it’s enough to create a movie about an actor with a very strong presence (in this case, Isaach De Bankolé) moving through spaces (in this case, various locations in Spain) and allowing the images to convey a sense of mood, tension, atmosphere, whatever you want to call that feeling we get from watching moving pictures on the screen. The narrative is pared down to a man purposefully going forward, occasionally stopping for Tai Chi or two separate cups of espresso.
If the pictures are formally interesting, accompanied by a slow-driving score, we’re along for a journey. If we were traveling by bus through a foreign city, we might want to look out the window and absorb as much detail as we could. Why, then, can’t we do the same within a movie? Instead of looking through the window, we look at cityscapes and landscapes on the screen—and let’s not deny that when you have a charismatic actor on the screen, his face, his body, his movements become a landscape. In much the same way the image, if it moves with the actor, has a rhythm, the actor’s body also provides a sense of rhythm. But writing about The Limits of Control in this way strikes me as painfully theoretical, and if you were listening to that piece of groovy music I mentioned earlier, you would either respond or not respond. You wouldn’t sit there and theorize if the music were any good in the first place; you’d feel something.
While almost two hours of a “vibe movie” can get a little tedious, that’s not the problem with The Limits of Control. It’s not the music, it’s the refrains that got me—involving individual cameo scenes for actors who encounter De Bankolé along his trek. He will sit in a café and an iconic screen actor (such as Tilda Swinton or John Hurt, for example) will approach, ask him if he speaks Spanish, then ramble on about whatever topic seems to interest them. One talks about movies, another about biological cells, a third about bohemians—and so on. Something about these moments rang false for me, as if Jarmusch couldn’t resist a little earnest philosophizing about both the world around him and a few of his favorite, most fascinating subjects. The effect isn’t really pompous or pretentious so much as it feels like a Jarmusch sound-bite; a use of the monologue when the images were saying so much more, and even the framing feels pedestrian (locked down two-shots, close-ups, and fetishistic overhead shots of cups of coffee). I’d inwardly groan with frustration at the scenes—that is, I did until the final sequence (with Bill Murray) which ties together all of the different monologues, but also validates them. There’s a touch of wish-fulfillment fantasy in how Jarmusch’s Perfect Man handles an Ugly American with no comprehension of the value of culture, but more than that it feels like Jarmusch says ideas are worth fighting for.
“Wasn’t that such bullshit?” a woman asked me in the elevator after a screening of The Limits of Control. I confess, I didn’t feel like having an argument while coasting on what I felt was a good movie experience, with arresting visuals that felt very present, very spontaneous, very rich to me. I demurred something about how, yeah, the movie was long. Admittedly, at one point I reached the limits of my control (about 100 minutes into the picture) and felt like saying, “Just do something already, for God’s sake!” But I wouldn’t change the climax for anything, where our hero reaches the end of his mission, the camera literally shifts off of the cameraman’s shoulder and it feels like a break in the reverie. This woman, however, remained unconvinced. “This movie was an excuse for a bunch of movie stars to hang out on vacation in Spain and drink some wine!”
I just responded by raising my eyebrows and saying, “Jarmusch!” But how else are you supposed to respond? She already made up her mind that she didn’t want to participate in sitting through a movie that is a vibe, whereas I’d gladly watch The Limits of Control again over most of the movies I’ve seen this and last year, or most of the films Jarmusch has made since Dead Man. When I interviewed the director a few years ago, he said the crews on his past couple of films were too big for him, with union considerations and an unwieldy crew size of 20-25 people. “On Ghost Dog, there’d be times when just driving to our location I’d see another location and think, ‘Ah, I’d like to grab one shot where he’s walking along this street.’ But I would be prevented from doing that. ‘Well, that scene involves a company move. Where do we park the trucks? What about the teamsters?’ I felt restricted in a way that wasn’t healthy creatively.”
On Year of the Horse, the concert film about Neil Young, Jarmusch felt great relief because “it was like having no road map at all. It was like, start driving and see where you end up. That helped me a lot. I hope it will have repercussions on future work somehow.” But Broken Flowers and Coffee & Cigarettes still felt too formal for my taste, and it took working with free-form cinematographer and all-around genius Christopher Doyle to get Jarmusch to that place again—not to mention that they were working from a 20-25 page short story that he didn’t really adapt into a screenplay. I suspect these things helped Jarmusch, and allowed him to be free somehow, to be able to go wherever he wanted with the camera, and with someone as daring as Doyle, the camera finds itself in odd and unlikely places, from high and low angles or shooting reflections in mirrors or drifting along flat surfaces or doing slow dolly creeps to the back of someone’s head. The images are alive in The Limits of Control, they breathe.
In Dead Man, Jarmusch never filmed postcard vistas; instead he’d turn the camera around and shoot a cactus and a pile of rocks. He applies the same unlikely choices, the same sense of a surprise about what the picture will be, to The Limits of Control. But he probably should have called this movie The Perfect Man, since Isaach De Bankolé embodies everything I suspect Jarmusch would love to be in his life—a perfectly attuned, perfectly Zen, perfectly meticulous, awake and aware individual who uses economy in his every look and gesture. He doesn’t even smile when he sees a Flamenco dancer, and yet through the slight and subtle movements of De Bankolé’s face, he is smiling.
Jeremiah Kipp's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Filmmaker, Fangoria and other publications.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
The Limits of Control
Understanding Screenwriting #24
By Tom Stempel
COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: Monsters vs. Aliens, Grey Gardens, Parks and Recreation2, Southland2, 30 Rock, Saving Grace, Desperate Housewives, but first:
FAN MAIL: In response to Matt Maul’s question about The Dirty Dozen, Franko does try to kill Reisman in the book, which Nunnally took over into the script. It would have made the ending a whole lot less conventional, but that’s true of Nunnally’s script as a whole.
MONSTERS VS. ALIENS (2009. Screenplay by Maya Forbes & Wallace Woldarsky and Rob Letterman and Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger, story by Rob Letterman & Conrad Vernon. 94 minutes): List-making, not screenwriting.
In the opening scene, a computer geek at an Antarctica tracking station knocks a paddle-ball out into the faces of the audience. Since this is one of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s hopes to dominate the world with 3-D movies, I thought it was kind of cutely nostalgic that the opening scene imitated one of the most famous in-your-face moments from House of Wax, one of the best of the 1950s 3-D movies. But then the other references began to pile up: The Day the Earth Stood Still, George Lucas (the movie starts in his home town of Modesto), Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, War of the Worlds, E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mulan, Creature From the Black Lagoon, The Blob, The Three Stooges, Star Wars Episodes II and III, and on and on and on. It was as if the writers felt it was enough just to make the connections, a technique that has thoroughly been discredited by such disastrous move parodies like Date Movie, Meet the Spartans, and Disaster Movie. Just referencing other films without doing anything more simply gets exhausting. Although I should mention that my wife, who has not seen as many science fiction movies as I have—she is a scientist and always objects to the science parts—enjoyed the film more than I did, as did the audience we saw it with.
The film is also very clearly one of those films and television shows (see below) that were conceived and created in the last years of the Bush administration and now seem slightly dated because of it. One of the characters is a general named W.R. Monger and in the beginning he sounds like Bush and acts like Cheney. When we get to the war room scenes, which are modeled on Ken Adam’s design for Dr. Strangelove, he morphs into General Ripper, but the damage has been done.
There is one character the writers have come up with that shows what the film should have been. He is a version of The Blob, here called B.O.B. In the original The Blob it was just that: a pile of Jello that ate people. Here is given a doofus personality, with a voice by Seth Rogen to match. Rogen may end up with Eddie Murphy’s career: much more successful doing voices for cartoons than live action films. B.O.B, in what may be a reference to Dory, the amnesiac fish in Finding Nemo, has no brain and simply picks up on what anybody else says or does. The character, both as written and animated, has a freshness the others don’t. The voice cast is first rate, but the writing for the rest of them blends together so that none of them other than Rogen shine.
Ah, yes, the 3-D elements. The system is used very effectively to give us a sense of the space the characters inhabit, which given that Susan/Ginormica changes sizes several times in the film helps. On the other hand, when Entertainment Weekly recently ran an article hyping the return of 3-D, their letters column a couple of weeks later had two replies, both of them complaining about the return of 3-D. I particularly agree with Mike W. Barr of Akron, Ohio, who asked, “how about some solid scripts and good stories?”
Katenzberg’s millenium is not quite here yet. And you still have to wear those damned glasses.
GREY GARDENS (2009. Screenplay by Michael Sucsy & Patricia Rozema, story by Michael Sucsy, inspired by the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens. 104 minutes): Back up the truck.
As we have talked about both in this column and in various comments on it, documentaries, particularly in the last forty years, have given us a lot of great characters. As cameras and sound recording devices became lighter weight, it began to be easier to show the audience what people are like. In America, this resulted in films mostly in the direct cinema style, in which the camera follows people as they run for president (Primary), attempt to integrate a university (Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment), treat the criminally insane (Titicut Follies), or sell expensive Bibles to people who cannot afford them (Salesman). In Europe and occasionally in the United States, the lighter-weight equipment was used to interview people, as in the French film Chronicle of a Summer or the American Word is Out. Using the lighter-weight equipment to interview is the style known as cinema verité, although that term has come to be used interchangeably with direct cinema and even documentary itself.
David and Albert Maysles were two of the pioneers of the direct cinema style, but in the late sixties, they began to sneak beyond it into a hybrid style called self-reflexive documentary, which was a mixture of direct cinema and cinema verité. In direct cinema you are usually not supposed to be aware that the filmmaker is there, but in self-reflexive films, you are aware that you are watching a film being made. Why pretend the camera is not there? So in the Maysles’s 1970 film, Gimme Shelter, we watch Mick Jagger’s reactions as he watches the footage the Maysles caught at Altamont of the Hell’s Angels killing a member of the audience.
When the Maysles came around to making Grey Gardens, about two bizarre relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who were living in a decaying mansion in the Hamptons, it was impossible for the film to avoid being self-reflexive. The two women, Big Edie and her daughter Little Edie, kept talking to the brothers. What the film gave us was a stunning and often hysterically funny portrait of two of the most memorable characters in the history of documentary film. Once you saw the original Grey Gardens, you never forgot the Beales. So Albert Maysles (David died in 1987) put together the outtakes into the 2006 documentary The Beales of Grey Gardens, and there was a 2006 Broadway musical Grey Gardens. You would think all of that would have exhausted the subject. Not so.
The original documentary, done in the combination of direct and verité, could only deal directly with the present, one of the limitations of the styles. We get the Edies’ versions of what happened in the past, but they are the epitome of unreliable narrators. The musical dealt with the past by setting the first act in 1941 and the second in 1973, but a film can, more easily than a stage play, jump back and forth between time periods. What Sucsy and Rozema do is set the “present” in the time when the Maysles are filming their documentary. So we get something similar to the self-reflexivity of the documentary, as well as a comment on the documentary making process, AS WELL AS the opportunity to see the Edies go through their routines once again. The documentary making process then becomes a structural element of the film. The second structural element is the backstory in which we find out how they came to be living the way they were. This involves going back to the thirties and coming up to the present. The documentary is not noted for its structure, although there are subtle structural elements in it. We tend to be more demanding of feature films, even if they do premier on HBO.
Sucsy and Rozema bring the two structural lines together in the scene of the Edies watching the completed documentary. This is followed by a brilliant scene in which Big Edie tells Little Edie it would not be good for her to go to the film’s premier, since Little Edie is “an acquired taste.” Little Edie runs out, comes back, and Big Edie admits it was her fault she did not let Little Edie stay in New York City, but insisted she come back to the house. Little Edie replies she could have gone away any time. The women have come to understand how they came to where they are. Little Edie goes to the premier and is delighted to be the center of attention.
That confrontation between them is not the only great scene in the film. When news gets out that two of Jackie O’s relatives are living in squalor, Jackie comes to visit (we have seen her as a seven-year-old earlier, not knowing who she is until someone calls her “Jacqueline”). Now how would you write this scene? You could make Jackie imperious, or disgusted. You could make the Edies ashamed. Or you could do it the way Sucsy and Rozema do it. Jackie is serious (this may be one of the few film portraits of Jackie that takes her seriously) and wants to help. Big Edie is trying to be the gracious hostess. Little Edie is more and more agitated as the scene progresses, then lashes out at Jackie. Little Edie insists she was dating Jack’s older brother Joe, who was supposed to be the one to run for president but was killed in the war, and Little Edie thinks Jackie ended up getting the life of First Lady that she should have had. After she is gone, Big Edie reminds Little Edie that she only met Joe once, at a party, and they never dated.
Another reason for doing a feature film on the subject, beyond giving us their backstory, is to let two actresses have at these two characters. Now let me explain what I meant by “back up the truck.” When you watch a movie, you know fairly early on if it is going to work (I knew a guy who insisted he could tell from the first shot, but I’m not that good). Then there are movies that you know immediately are doing everything right. This films opens with a bit of the scene of the Edies watching the documentary, and we see their reactions. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. This is it. This is the real deal. I felt the same way I did after the first ten minutes of John Adams: forget holding the Emmy nominations and ceremonies, just back up the truck and start shoveling them out to everybody connected with this. I am not an Emmy voter, so I do not know how I could choose between Jessica Lange’s Big Edie and Drew Barrymore’s Little Edie. Lange we are used to giving great performances, from King Kong on (yes, I know the critics slaughtered her for that, but look at it again: it is a brilliant comedy performance), but Barrymore is a revelation. She has done nothing to suggest she has this kind of range. Jeanne Tripplehorn is not obvious casting for Jackie O, but she nails the nuances the writers have given her. And for best supporting actor, look at Ken Howard husband and father, Phelan Beale: Phelan knows what he has to deal with and he knows when he has to get out. I have already told what makes the script great. And Sucsy’s direction follows my general rule for how directors should work: get a great script, get great actors, and then get the fuck out of their way. And, unlike Tom Hooper on John Adams, he does not screw it up by shooting everything at off-kilter angles. As Olivier once said to/or about Orson Welles, “If you’ve got a good script, you don’t have to shoot up the actor’s pantsleg.”
PARKS AND RECREATION (2009. Episode “Make My Pit a Park” written by Greg Daniels & Michael Schur. 30 minutes): The bastard child of 30 Rock and The Office.
Here’s one problem with this new show: like Monsters vs. Aliens, it is very much of the George W. Bush era. In the 30 Rock episode “Cutbacks,” which aired the same night as “Make My Pit a Park,” Liz has to deal with the cutbacks that the company has asked for. We get a number of scenes of Jack firing, or about to fire, assorted people, and a discussion of where to cut Liz’s show, as well as her seducing the company hatchet man. In “Park,” on the other hand, the Parks Department seems to be going along just fine, with no budget problems. The satire is Bush-era “bureaucracies screw up all the time,” a descendant of Reagan’s “Gummit [I could never completely trust a man who mispronounced the name of the organization he worked for] is the problem, not the solution.” Bush seemed to make a concerted effort to make his government not work. Granted, though there has been a lot of satire of bureaucracies since long before Bush and will continue to be, the tone in Parks and Recreation still seems a little off. They may recover.
I love 30 Rock, as you have gathered, but I have never gotten into either the British or American versions of The Office. One reason for my not caring for both The Office(s) and this first episode of Parks and Recreation is the use of the faux-documentary style. Christopher Guest makes it work in short 90-minute doses in films, but it can get unwieldy over the length of a series. But wait a minute, this is just the 30-minute pilot for the new show. Yes, but the basic problem is the concept is inconsistently used. Are the characters being filmed in a direct cinema style or in a cinema verité style? It seems to be a combination of both, which certainly can work in documentary films such as Grey Gardens. If you are going to shoot the show in that way, then the writing has to be very particular to that style, and in Parks and Recreation it’s not. As JJ said in comments on my item on Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 in US#21, “documentaries are unbeatable resources for writers in regards to authentic dialogue and unforgettable characters.” Listen to what Frederick Wiseman HEARS people say in his documentaries. Daniels and Schur have not come anywhere close to that in this script.
The other part of what JJ said dealt with characters, and at least in this pilot episode, the characters are not nearly as interesting as those in Grey Gardens, the Wiseman documentaries, or the Guest mockumentaries. Here is also where 30 Rock has it all over Parks and Recreation. There is no one the equivalent of Jack or Jenna here. Amy Poehler may have a wider acting range than Tina Fey, but the character of Leslie Knope does not so far fit her talents the way Liz fits Tina.
Hmm. Could that be because Tina Fey also writes the character of Liz?
SOUTHLAND (2009. Episode “Pilot” written by Ann Biderman. 60 minutes): FROM THE PRODUCER OF ER JOHN WELLS.
That’s the way the hype for this new show went, and you can understand why. With the series finale of ER, Wells was in the news. And NBC ran this in the old ER timeslot. And the IMDb seems to have gone along with the hype, since Biderman’s name does not yet show up on the page for the show, nor does her credit appear on her page (ed. note: Biderman's name has subsequently been added). She already won an Emmy for writing the “Steroid Roy” episode of NYPD Blue back in 1994, and she is the co-writer of the new (lower voice here to show respect) MICHAEL MANN FILM Public Enemies. According to the on-screen credits, she is not only the writer of the pilot, but also the creator of the show. What does a girl writer have to do in this town to get noticed?
Unfortunately, what I am noticing is that her script is not very interesting. It is one more cop show that looks and sounds like all the others. One of the main cases, the cops deal with is a missing child, could have come straight out of Law & Order: SVU. The other is a gang drive-by shooting that could have come out of any number of shows.
Well, what about the characters? The pilot primarily follows new officer Ben Sherman on his first day of patrol. Standard way to start a series, even if it does bring to mind Training Day. But Ben is a blank (and it does not help that Benjamin McKenzie is no Ethan Hawke). We get no sense of his inner life, if he has one. We have no idea how he is reacting to what he sees and what he does. His partner is John Cooper, and his rants are not nearly as wonderful as those of Denzel Washington’s Alonzo. We also get very little sense of the other cops, with the slight exception of the black woman detective Lydia Adams, but she does not seem that swift when it takes her longer than the audience to figure out the significance of the ants at her crime scene. Yes, it is nice to have a black woman detective, but it’s been 35 years since Get Christie Love and even longer since S. Epatha Merkerson came to Law & Order. And while there is one cop that may be Latino, there are no Asians in Biderman’s LAPD. The racial and sexual makeup of the LAPD has changed a lot, but this series makes it look like the LAPD of Police Story in the 1970s. The cinematography, by the way, also recalls the bleached out look of Police Story, so at least they have the light right.
Even the one potentially interesting plot twist is 28-years-old. In one of the final shots we see macho training officer Cooper at a bar. He notices a guy he had previously seen arrested for gay prostitution. We notice it’s a gay bar. O.K., but the discovery at the end of the pilot for Hill Street Blues that Public Defender Joyce Davenport and Captain Frank Furillo, whom we have seen arguing all episode, are in the bathtub together got there first. O.K., that one was heterosexual, but still…
PARKS AND RECREATION (2009. Episode “Canvassing” written by Rachel Axler. 30 minutes): Episode two.
Episode two is a slight improvement. I don’t know what the time gap was between when the pilot was filmed and when the second episode was written, but the writing has begun to take into consideration that we are now in the Obama era. Ron, Leslie’s boss, has a to-the-camera speech in which he talks about how with all the stimulus money coming in, the department will actually have to DO something, which obviously offends his bureaucratic heart.
Axler has also begun to add layers to the character of Leslie. In the pilot she was sort of a general doofus, but she gets an edge in here, since we see her manipulative side. While canvassing the public, she tells one of her co-workers that she learned from Karl Rove how to phrase the questions so you get the answers you want. We see her sneaky in some other ways. Amy Poehler can do all that and more, so this is a good trend. And she was joined in this episode by the great Pamela Reed as her mother Marlene, who appears to be successful in every way Leslie is not. If the writers are looking for ways to separate this show from The Office, they may have found it with Marlene.
I am still dubious about the faux documentary style, but with better character definition with Leslie, I did not find it as objectionable.
SOUTHLAND (2009. Episode “Mozambique” written by Ann Biderman. 60 minutes): Second episode. And Biderman’s name is still not up on the Southland page on IMDb (ed. note: see above Southland entry).
This one has not improved. Ben is a little livelier than he was in the pilot, but we still do not get much of a sense of an inner life. The plot lines are still very conventional and the other characters are not showing much definition. And we get the old plot gimmick of one of the cops sleeping with a TV reporter, which Boomtown did better. There was one flicker of life in that storyline. The cop and the reporter are making out and his daughter sees them. And the daughter is not that upset, since she thinks mom’s a bitch. Boy, could you run with that, but Biderman doesn’t.
We also get no more about Cooper’s homosexuality, and we still don’t have the racial and gender mix of the real LAPD.
30 ROCK (2009. Episode “Jackie Jormp-Jomp” written by Kay Cannon & Tracey Wigfield. 30 minutes): That’s how you do it.
Liz has been suspended for sexual harassment for seducing the corporate guy and is going nuts trying to figure out what to do with her days. She falls in with a group of rich women in her building who get massages and go shopping. The writers wrote in a nice semi-montage in which Liz is talking how she cannot spend the day with them as, behind her, the day passes by. Sharp writing, sharp acting, and a nice use of computer technology. And a great payoff: just as Liz thinks she can adjust to this lifestyle, she discovers the women are so lacking in any emotional connection to the real world that they are in fact a fight club. That’s taking an audience around a corner they did not even know was there.
SAVING GRACE (2009. Episode “But There’s Clay” written by Danitria Harris-Lawrence & Talicia Raggs. Episode “So What’s the Purpose of a Platypus” written by Mark Israel. Episode “I Believe in Angels” written by Nancy Miller and Roger Wolfson. 60 minutes each.): Hello Maggie. Goodbye Maggie. Goodbye Leon.
“But There’s Clay” introduces us to another new foil for Grace, now that Abby has gone back to IA. And Grace is just as restrained as she was with Abby, which suggests a change on the part of the showrunners about Grace’s character. The new character is Maggie, and the widower of Grace’s sister is attracted to her. We can see why: she is earthy and lively and fits right in. Grace is suspicious and in “What’s the Purpose of a Platypus” she discovers that Maggie is part of a two-person team of con artists who are out to scam Chuck, the widower of the money he got from his wife’s death. Too bad, because as played by Kathy Baker, Maggie could have been an interesting addition to the show. That’s always a problem with introducing new characters into an ongoing show: how does it affect the mix? It may have been that Maggie was too similar to Grace.
As I mentioned in my comments on reader’s comments in US#23, I have put off dealing with the increasing time spent with Leon, the man on death row, since I wanted to see how it played out. It did seem to take away from those two episodes mentioned above, but in “I Believe in Angels” the episode focuses on Leon’s execution. I think what they were doing was wrapping up Leon’s story, since they had gone about as far with him as they could. What the episode does do is end up with a suggestion of another plot line involving Earl and the black girl Grace goes to see at the end. Grace asks her if she knows an angel named Earl, and the girl’s lack of a “What the hell you talking about, crazy white lady?” suggests she does. I, for one, got tired of the Leon story and am interested to see where they take the new one when the series resumes.
DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES (2009. Episode “Look Into Their Eyes and You See What They Know” written by Matt Berry. 62 minutes): Drat! Edie really is dead.
I did not write about the “A Spark to Pierce the Dark.” (This show, having run out of the titles of Sondheim songs for their episodes, is now using lines from within the songs; as one of the 73 straight men in the U.S. according to the last census who likes Sondheim, I find the habit only mildly amusing.) I noticed that at end of “A Spark,” after Edie had wrecked her car and been jolted with electricity, her hand was still moving. Yes, I know about all the on-and-off line discussions, arguments, etc. about Nicollette Sheridan leaving the show. But perverse character than I am, I hoped it was just showrunner Marc Cherry and Sheridan setting us up so they could pull a fast one on us. No such luck.
This episode does give Edie a very nice farewell. The surviving wives and Mrs. McCluskey are taking Edie’s ashes to, well, we don’t know where at first. In each of the acts, one of the wives tells of some dealing with Edie that gives us a rounder picture of her. Each one is appropriate for the character it is given to. I particularly liked the scene of Edie taking Lynette, suffering from chemo treatments, to a biker bar to “teach her how to flow her own pillows,” i.e., be the strong person that Edie knew Lynette is.
Given all the Sondheim references, I was a bit surprised by the end. As Edie’s ashes float around Wisteria Lane (her son did not want them), Edie gives us a voiceover that sounds cribbed from Emily’s speeches about appreciating life at the end of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Hey, if you are going to steal, steal from the best, whether it’s Sondheim or Wilder.
Tom Stempel is the author of several books on film. His most recent is Understanding Screenwriting: Learning From Good, Not-Quite-So Good, and Bad Screenplays.
Lost Thursdays: Season 5, Ep. 14, "The Variable"
By Todd VanDerWerff
One of my favorite American novels of the last 30 years is John Crowley’s Little, Big, a book that straddles the line between realistic fiction and genre fiction, between the mundane and the miraculous. Briefly, it’s the tale of a large, rambling family in upstate New York who seem curiously devoted to a strange belief system that they refuse to spell out in its entirety for either their baffled new son-in-law or his son (the two point-of-view characters). The reader gradually grows aware of just what’s going on inside the giant home, Edgewood (a house with its own secrets), but everything fantastical is kept just off the page, as it were, until the climax, which seems more like a post-apocalyptic phantasmagoria than anything else. It is, above all else, a story about faith. About people in thrall to a force beyond their power that they’re not even sure they can understand or control. It contains some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever encountered. And it reminds me a lot of Lost.
I suppose the same could be said of a lot of genre fiction. Fans turn to a lot of it with a sort of religious fervor, I think, because it provides that sense of being overwhelmed by mystery that we lack so often in our less spiritual age. When, 500 years ago, our ancestors needed to explain the world around them, they had science and the like, yes, but they also had folk wisdom. Mythology. Religion. Methods of explanation that did not rely on a cold, clinical universe, but, rather, on one that was inexplicable, yes, but guided by personalities, not physical forces. Now, we live in an age when religion is the sort of thing you adhere to out of modern convenience or because you always have. Actual religious experience – Saul on the road to Damascus, Mohammed moving mountains, the Buddha under the tree – seems a foreign country to us, like something out of science fiction. What religious experiences we have are small, personal, not easily hyped. We understand the world better, but we feel less connection to it too often. Modern life is somewhat designed to be isolating, and the sorts of spiritual communities that, say, the church provided in colonial America just don’t exist at that same level of prominence.
Genre fiction rose to its current level of consumption in the mid-point of the 20th century, at roughly the same time these disconnecting influences were being felt throughout the Western world. Write a book where God swoops in and saves the day at the end, and you’re laughed off the stage, but write a book where aliens or wizards or, I don’t know, vampires do the same thing and you’re catering to a niche market (or you’re writing Childhood’s End, and doing a good job of it). There is a sense of inevitability in all of the best religious stories – Judas’ kiss or the great Greek tragedies, where no one can avoid their fates – and that same sense of inevitability pervades a lot of genre fiction, even the really good stuff.
The characters in Little, Big are swept along by a force they barely understand until they get to the destination and then, enveloped by that force, they change in ways so alien to the reader (without spoiling) that the reader, like the point-of-view characters, is finally left apart from the story, having grasped at a glimpse of the fantastical without ever actually attaining it. A lot of people read (or write) genre fiction because they long for that glimpse of the fantastical, keep chasing it, without ever really understanding that all we can get is a snapshot of people in thrall to things beyond their control.
I think you see where I’m going with all of this. The characters on Lost (whose writers, so far as I know, have never read Little, Big but have cited the vaguely similar The Stand – more characters trying to avoid a metaphysical destiny they simply can’t – as a touchstone) have always tried to assert their free will in the face of a seemingly sentient Island that can control whether they live or die and various powerful players who keep maneuvering them into place on the big chessboard that is the show’s masterplot, but they’ve found themselves stopped, time and again, by the destiny that sweeps them along. Lost has suggested, from time to time, that there may be ways around this, but it seems to always come back to the notion that things are going to happen as they always have because that’s the way they happened. You can’t change the past, because it already happened, basically.
“The Variable,” written by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz and directed by Paul Edwards, is the show’s 100th episode and its most direct in asserting that we humans are merely pawns in the Island’s game. At the same time, though, it suggests that we have come to a point where free will could hold sway again, that determinism only works so far in the Lost universe.
“The Variable” is the condensed story of the troubled physicist Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies in another deeply empathetic performance), who has returned to the Island after three years away, researching at DHARMA headquarters in Ann Arbor. He’s come back because Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Hurley (Jorge Garcia) have all returned and signed up with DHARMA, and he wants to know exactly how they got back. He seems to have an alternate mission, though. He wants to stop The Incident, something that’s been bandied about since Lost’s second season that finally gets a concrete definition here. In six hours, something is going to happen to release a great burst of electromagnetic energy at the future site of the Swan Station (better known as “The Hatch”), killing many people.
Faraday thinks he can stop it, but he’s going to need the hydrogen bomb he asked Richard Alpert (Nestor Carbonell) to bury way back in “Jughead” (the season’s third episode). When he can’t get Pierre Chang to evacuate the Island, he apparently jumps to this plan B and brings Jack and Kate along when he goes to meet the Hostiles. In the course of his research, he’s come to believe that he can change things, that the forces he claimed held the Losties in place (time being a straight line that can’t diverge) aren’t constant, necessarily, not with the right people in place as variables. It’s a heady idea, but almost immediately upon stepping into the Others’ camp, he’s shot and killed by none other than his mother, Eloise Hawking (played here, variously, by Alice Evans and Fionnula Flanagan).
It’s here that Lost reveals itself to be in league with everything from Oedipus Rex to the story of Christ’s crucifixion to, yes, Little, Big. When Eloise shoots him, she has no idea who she is, but when she leaves the Island and raises the child (in a rather confusing chronology, all things considered - just how old IS Faraday?), she knows that at some point, he will go back to the Island she spent much of her life, travel through time and be shot by her. Every action she takes in his life, getting him to give up the piano, trying to get him to ditch his girlfriend, asking him to take the new assignment Widmore (Alan Dale) has given him, is about maneuvering him into a place where the younger version of herself can shoot and kill him.
On one level, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense just yet (if you knew you were going to shoot your son someday, wouldn’t you try to stop him from being in that place at that time?). On another level, it speaks to just how deeply being cast out of the Island has bruised people like Eloise. On yet another level, it’s deeply sad. When Eloise sends her son, his mind shredded by his time travel experiments, to the Island, she knows it will heal him, make him the genius he was again. And she knows it will kill him. She knows she will kill him. From the almost fetishistic way Edwards’ camera took in Faraday’s journal throughout the episode, it almost seems as though Faraday is nothing but the person who will deliver the book to the Island, to get it in the hands of the people who will use it, for good or ill, in the way it needs to be used. Faraday needs to go to the Island, so she keeps her distance, maneuvering him to a place where she can eventually destroy him.
As in Little, Big, the more we get to know the people who are behind the scenes on Lost, the more we realize just how much our point-of-view characters are looking in on a battle they will never really understand. When Eloise finds the distraught Penny (Sonya Walger) in the hospital she has brought her husband, Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), to after he was shot by Ben (Michael Emerson), she apologizes, somewhat tearfully, for Desmond becoming just another casualty in this long, long battle (before we discover that Des survived the shooting), she’s both sad over her sacrifice and over the fact that the war continues and now she doesn’t know what will happen.
Much of the Island’s history, it now seems, has been some sort of elaborate loop, culminating in 2007, when Eloise places the Oceanic Six on board Ajira 316. She’s been working, with Widmore and Ben and Richard and all the others to be in the right places at the right times to ensure that everything works out just so, and now, she’s at the end of that process, hoping that everything will work out in the right way, casting her lot with an uncertain faith in the Island. It’s starting to seem as though the first five seasons of Lost have been about offscreen players moving the characters into the places they need to be to make sure that everything will be where it needs to be in 2007, motivated both by a desire to possess the Island and by the place’s inscrutable wishes. The sixth season, then, may end up being about what happens when our characters are put in a position to seize their own destinies. There’s a growing sense of this, of apocalypse coming, of paradise in the process of being lost (perhaps that’s what the title has meant all along). No one can know what comes after this moment. It is the point where we realize that anything that is to come is too different from what has come before to be comprehended.
In some ways, this is all a little high-minded for a show where a major plot point involved a guy tied up in a closet, but at its best (as “The Variable” was), Lost is an elegant puzzle box mystery with bigger-than-life characters who may have their own concerns but often see those concerns get kicked around by the Island (seen in this light, the flashbacks of the first three seasons are less about how these people came to be who they are and more about a series of lives interrupted by a crisis, similar to the flashbacks in the Battlestar Galactica series finale). When Faraday suggests that by stopping The Incident, by changing this one bit of history, the Losties can erase all of the heartache and problems that merely crashing on the Island caused in all of their lives, it’s a vision of some unattainable Utopia. Charlotte may never meet him and he never meet her, but she’ll be alive, at least.
Similarly, when he meets the child Charlotte and decides, despite all he knows, to issue the warning to her to not return to the Island, it’s a quiet, subdued moment. The camera pulls back, not allowing us an ear into this conversation, expressing a certain reverence for the privacy of the moment.
“The Variable” was very much a spiritual sequel to season four’s marvelous “The Constant,” but it also had a lot of this season’s earlier “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” in it. Both episodes had that religious fervor to them, the sense of the pilgrim completing his journey, rewarded at the end with death (though I do not think Faraday will be resurrected). It was an oddly ruminative episode of TV, shot through with a sense of all that these people have lost by manipulating those who would possess the Island or by being manipulated by others. More and more, one gets the sense that Lost is about people whose lives were disrupted by a series of seismic events and, now, are finally reaching a place where they might be able to do something about that. Just not with Faraday, the latest casualty.
Some other thoughts:
House contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark and co-host of the podcast TV on the Internet. His writing also appears at The AV Club.
Links for the Day (April 30th, 2009)
1. AppleInsider has some evocative and eerie photos from the inside of the mansion Steve Jobs used to live in, which has fallen into disrepair. Jobs reportedly wants to tear the house down, while local preservationists want it to stay standing. These photos are courtesy Jonathan Haeber, whose work can be found here.
["The Jackling House, so it's called, was built back in 1925 for copper mining mogul Daniel Jackling. Preservationists have opposed Jobs' efforts, arguing that it represents one of the few remaining examples of a Spanish Colonial Revival style home and is therefore too historic to destroy. They also allege that Jobs, who reportedly lived in the house sometime between the 80's and 90's, intentionally let the house fall apart so that it would be easier to justify a case for tearing it down."]
2. And now, unofficial sequels to films that came out in 2007. First, Steve Wiebe of The King of Kong has set a brand new video-game record for Donkey Kong, Jr. Fortunately, it is not the Donkey Kong Jr. Math edition. (I actually think everyone who linked to this has made that joke.)
["The new World Record mark was accomplished on March 14 and verified by Twin Galaxies Chief Referee David Nelson. Steve's new World Record mark of 1,139,800 points takes the Donkey Kong Junior crown from fellow Washington state native Ike Hall, who was crowned the DKJ World Champ in August 2008 with a score of 1,033,000, taking the crown that Billy Mitchell had held on the game since 1985."]
3. Woman Claims Father Was Infamous Zodiac Killer. Sequels, part 2. Now, there are a few people every year who come out, claiming to be the Zodiac (and/or D.B. Cooper), but this one seems to have a little more to it than most of the others. Also, I am Jack the Ripper. And the Lindbergh baby.
["She said her father took the glasses off of Stine's face and she kept them all these years and only recently realized they belonged to a murder victim and not her father. Perez said she saw a composite sketch of the Zodiac killer in August 2007 and recognized the man as her father, who died in 1983. She said she had never heard of the Zodiac killer prior to seeing the composite sketch."]
4. Maybe I should just make this unofficial summer movies week here because there's that feeling in the air. I mean, YES, new Jarmusch and all, but HOLY HELL WEREWOLVES. To that end, Robert Zemeckis unfairly gets the Internet in a tizzy when he brings up a potential sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, one of my five favorite films about Los Angeles. Please discuss HOW AMAZING it is in comments. (I agree with Internet consensus, though. Please don't make this a CGI fest.)
["But when MTV News caught up with director Robert Zemeckis recently, he dropped a news bomb that had our eyes popping cartoon-style out of our sockets. 'I’ll tell you what is buzzing around in my head now that we have the ability—the digital tools, performance capture—I’m starting to think about Roger Rabbit,' he told us."]
5. Apropos of nothing, buzz for James Cameron's deeply mysterious Avatar is busting out all over. Time appears to be likening the experience of watching a few minutes of the film to some sort of drug. Steven Soderbergh calls it one of those benchmark movies. The New York Times (quoted below) is apparently making up buzz that doesn't exist. This sort of hype is usually impossible to live up to, but editor emeritus Matt Zoller Seitz has long thought 3D had lots of potential to energize the film-going experience, and it sure sounds like Cameron's experiments with the technology are going to be INTERESTING at least.
["Questioned by telephone recently at his home in Mill Valley, Calif., Mr. Quittner said he was still reeling from the experience. 'It was like doing some kind of drug,' he said, describing a scene in which the movie’s hero, played by Sam Worthington, ran around “with this kind of hot alien chick,' was attacked by jaguarlike creatures and was sprinkled with sprites that floated down, like snowflakes. 'You feel like the little feathery things are landing on your arm,' said Mr. Quittner, who remained eager for another dose."]
Quote of the Day:
-Ted Kotcheff
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Love Obama or hate Obama, slapping this photo of his dog at six weeks on as much merchandise as possible and then selling said merchandise will end this economic crisis post-haste.
Clip of the Day: Jon Stewart vs. Cliff May on the subject of torture. Surprisingly entertaining for something that goes on this long.
For our international friends who can't see Daily Show clips, fun with spelling!The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M - Th 11p / 10c Cliff May Unedited Interview Pt. 1 Daily Show
Full EpisodesEconomic Crisis First 100 Days The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M - Th 11p / 10c Cliff May Unedited Interview Pt. 2 Daily Show
Full EpisodesEconomic Crisis First 100 Days The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M - Th 11p / 10c Cliff May Unedited Interview Pt. 3 Daily Show
Full EpisodesEconomic Crisis First 100 Days
"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.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Links for the Day (April 29th, 2009)
1. So ... just WHY is it called Swine Flu? The New York Times is glad you asked! And here's an excellent post on the wannabe pandemic.
["Pork producers question whether the term "swine flu" is appropriate, given that the new virus has not yet been isolated in samples taken from pigs in Mexico or elsewhere. While the new virus seems to be most heavily composed of genetic sequences from swine influenza virus material, it also has human and avian influenza genetic sequences as well, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta."]
2. Marshall Fine celebrates the journeyman character actors of the small screen in "He Certainly Looks Familiar."
["There’s something similar happening on TV, though the actors aren’t unknowns. Because of the staggered nature of TV seasons these days, actors are suddenly available for more than one series at once – and can have two or more shows on the air at the same time. I think of them as serial actors – not because they act in serials but because they seem to move so quickly from job to job. So quickly that they sometimes can be seen on a couple of series at a time."]
3. Via Coming Soon, we learn that a.) Peter Jackson's film of The Lovely Bones actually exists, b.) Saoirse Ronan's eyes have been replaced by digital effects and c.) there are apparently Saoirse Ronan fan sites. Make of this what you will.
["Saoirse Ronan fansite Access-Saoirse has received more scans of photos from Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones that can be found in the new issue of Empire magazine. Opening December 11, the big screen adaptation of Alice Sebold's best-selling novel stars Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Michael Imperioli and Ronan."]
4. If you've been paying attention, you know that I have a soft spot for things that were way more popular in the early 20th century than they are now and are thus Hopeless, Lost Causes (TM), like baseball and jazz piano recordings and big tent revival meetings. But, Lordy me, don't get me started on the lowest of the low art forms, the newspaper comic strip. You comics fans may attempt to justify your existence by pointing to All-Star Superman or whatever, but the best WE can do is say, "Well, Calvin & Hobbes only ended a little over 10 years ago!" and pretend we're still relevant. Also, we make fun of the zombie strips. Often. Which is why you need to be reading The Comics Curmudgeon.
["Hey, kids! Remember the Jungle Patrol? This exciting Bangallan law enforcement agency featured into a Phantom storyline from year and change back, in which a lady cop and and waitress shook up that formerly all-male bastion by combining toughness, trigger-happiness, and lady parts. The story lasted long enough to prompt some t-shirtage, then faded into that narrative netherworld where all Phantom storylines go, presumably never to be heard from again."]
5. Funnyman Patton Oswalt just had a kid (not the one pictured, though that IS a cute baby), and he uses the opportunity to muse on the ascent of nerddom, the death of MySpace and Jason Statham. As you might expect.
["But MySpace has become a neglected strip mall, which is slowly going out of business because someone built a shiny new mega-mall just down the street. Every now and then you stop by because abandoned, derelict buildings have a weird beauty to them. Have you been over to Friendster lately? The rats are so tame they’ll let you pet ‘em. So think of this as me taping up a discreet flyer in the window of the sketchy Chinese restaurant next to the dollar movie theater where they’re still showing THE WILD WILD WEST. I want to announce this, but people are going to have to pack a sandwich and drive somewhere to find it."]
Quote of the Day:
-Charles Schulz
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Oh, come on. You knew it had to happen eventually.
Clip of the Day: Look! Kids! Singing! A song from a Rocky movie! Surprisingly well!
"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.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
TMI Trumbo: Johnny Got His Gun
By Lauren Wissot
The too-much-information age is a strange thing indeed. Take for instance Shout! Factory’s long-awaited DVD release of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, which takes place mostly inside the mind of wounded WWI vet Joe Bonham, a deaf/dumb/blind quadruple amputee. Smoothly and effortlessly the film weaves back and forth in time, from the present, B&W hospital setting (seen from third-person POV) to Joe’s colorful memories of the past to the trapped soldier’s vivid fantasy world. Adapted from the legendary screenwriter’s own award-winning book, Trumbo’s sole directorial effort was a film I’d never gotten around to seeing, so I was pretty thrilled when I noticed that the DVD contained a slew of bonus features. In addition to Robert Fischer’s 2006 doc Dalton Trumbo: Rebel In Hollywood, there’s a 2009 interview with star Timothy Bottoms, and the music video for Metallica’s “One” (a metal homage of sorts to Johnny). As if that weren’t enough, there’s also behind-the-scenes peeks with Bottoms and DP Jules Brenner providing commentary, the 1940 radio adaptation of Johnny (the book) starring James Cagney, a 1971 feature article from “American Cinematographer,” the original theatrical trailer and, oh yeah, a replica of the original poster! It’s like an all-in-one, film junkie overdose kit.
Which would be great, save for one giant spoiler, which I could have avoided had I not been so geeky that I watched the extras first. You see, I had no idea Buñuel, who Trumbo first met when they were both in exile in Mexico, was originally slated to direct Johnny. I only learned this by viewing Fischer’s highly insightful documentary. And yet, knowing this little tidbit, I could no longer watch Trumbo’s flick with a blank slate mind. Every frame suddenly became imprinted with the question, “What would Buñuel do?” (Though I guess that’s preferable to “What would Julian Schnabel do?”) And this included an actual Buñuelian image of Christ on a locomotive, played by a damn sexy Donald Sutherland, who had two days to film between Klute and his next pic. Trumbo was only inspired to adapt and direct the book himself after Buñuel didn’t happen and the Vietnam War did.
But back to the film, which gets off to a sensational start, opening with marching music set to patriotic WWI footage (Teddy Roosevelt orating grandly, military parades, etc.) that runs directly above the credits. The last title fades, followed by an explosion—to black screen and heavy breathing. Though Trumbo penned his novel in the years leading up to America’s involvement in WWII, there’s no mistaking Johnny for a quintessential 70s flick. And herein lies the problem, and perhaps also the reason the film itself faded into semi-obscurity. By connecting the bloody historical past to the (Vietnam-era) present, Trumbo followed directly in the footsteps of some maverick directors who were doing likewise—but who had a firm grasp of visual language in ways that Trumbo (who understood the written word) did not. After all, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde hit theaters in 1967 while Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch came out in 1969. Not to mention the nefariousness of military institutions had already been addressed—in B&W to boot—in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove all the way back in ’64! By the time Trumbo’s onscreen lead wonders to himself, “What kind of doctor would cut a man down to what I am now and still let him live?” the rhetorical question seems less prescient or timely than passé.
Yet the movie remains an interesting combination of Trumbo’s “realistic” Hollywood style sprinkled with elements of Buñuel and Fellini surrealism (and most likely would have been a classic had Buñuel been at the helm pushing the envelope). The bold contributions from DP Brenner and production designer Harold Michelson make the directing seem nearly timid, though Brenner assures in the doc that Trumbo knew exactly what he wanted. The film’s “three colors” motif came directly from the script. Trumbo desired a heightened “color of memory,” a gauzy “color of fantasy” for when Joe was being drugged in the hospital, and a B&W “color of reality” (which was actually de-saturated color stock since Kodak was moving away from B&W by the 70s). Several sequences especially have a Buñuel feel, from soldiers playing cards with Christ before being called to their deaths (“All aboard!” the Jesus train), to Joe’s recollection of leaving his girl at the railroad station, which split-screens into an explosion to the tune of a shrieking bomb.
And Johnny stays grounded through the director’s Oscar-caliber writing, and in the heartfelt performances by a then unknown Timothy Bottoms (a natural who went directly from high school to Johnny to Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show) and Jason Robards as Joe’s wry and witty, Trumbo-esque dad. Scenes straight out of the director’s own life (the house where Joe’s dad dies is the actual house where Trumbo’s dad died) merge with scenes straight out of the director’s head (like the “diatribe with the tennis players” in which Trumbo himself plays the orator) to the point where the line between fantasy and reality disappears for the audience as it does for Joe. Or as Sutherland’s carpenter Christ notes, at night your dreams control you, whereas in the day you control your dreams. It's a sentiment the blacklisted Trumbo wrote, believed, lived and breathed.
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 (April 28th, 2009)
1. Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret: Post-production in a Courtroom. The Los Angeles Times looks at what happens when rampant perfectionism, final cut and disgruntled moneymen collide.
["A number of producers and editors -- including Rudin, Pollack and Martin Scorsese's legendary editor, Thelma Schoonmaker -- have tried but failed to help Lonergan complete his movie, court documents and interviews show. With his financing from Gilbert and Fox Searchlight cut off, Lonergan borrowed more than $1 millio from actor and close friend Matthew Broderick (who has a small part in Margaret") in an attempt to complete the editing of the movie, according to a person close to the production. (A Broderick spokesman said the loan was a private matter and disputed the dollar amount but did not provide another figure.)"]
2. Matt Maul linked me at this list of the 10 most influential films of the last 10 years, and I lost it in an e-mail deluge. So here it is a week or so late. /Film makes a list of exactly what you'd think they would.
["Sky Captain is on the list for kick-starting green-screen mania. Sin City advanced the technique significantly, and 300 sprinkled a few extra tricks on top, but it was Sky Captain that generated the first wave of headlines and got moviemaking minds to thinking. It may have even indirectly inspired Dogville and Manderlay (I have my suspicions) but that sub-set, no matter how incredible those films are, has probably already come to an end."]
3. The story of Centralia, Penn., came up on last night's In Treatment, and since it's one of my favorite bits of American history, I thought I'd direct you to this excellent write-up of the story from Damn Interesting.
["There is a small town in Pennsylvania called Ashland where Route 61's northbound traffic is temporarily branched onto a short detour. Exactly what the detour is circumventing is not immediately clear to travelers, however few passers-by pay it any mind… a detour is nothing unusual. But anyone who ignores the detour and ventures along the original route 61 highway will soon encounter an abrupt and unexplained road closure. Beyond it lies a town filled with overgrown streets, smoldering earth, and ominous warning signs. It is the remains of the borough of Centralia."]
4. The time for Bea Arthur tributes was a couple of days ago (look a few posts down), but I thought this NPR piece on how there are no women of her standing and stature on the tube anymore was interesting.
["The death of Bea Arthur on Saturday broke my sitcom-watcher's heart, and also got me thinking about this fact: The Golden Girls ran from 1985 to 1992; Designing Women ran from 1986 to 1993; Murphy Brown ran from 1988 to 1998. That means that from 1988 to 1992, all three of these shows were on at the same time. Ninety minutes of prime time given over to comedy driven by a total of nine mouthy women (that's a compliment), six of whom were over 40. (All the Girls, Candice Bergen, and Dixie Carter.)"]
5. I don't know about you, but there's pretty much no way I can see the headline "Giant Mystery Blob Found Near Dawn of Time" and not smile.
["Scientists don’t even know what to call it. So they just called it a radiation-emitting 'blob.' They used that horror-film staple 34 times in their peer-reviewed study, which will be published in next month’s edition of the Astrophysical Journal. More formally, they named it Himiko, after a legendary ancient Japanese queen."]
Quote of the Day:
-Winston Churchill
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): It's apparently Space Day here at the House, as here's a photo of Saturn from the Cassini mission, via the Boston Globe Big Picture blog.
Clip of the Day: So I saw this last Friday and was mad that I couldn't make it a clip of the day before every other site would have posted it. But I still really like it, so here it is. For those of you who've seen it, I also include a video of a cat trying to conquer a box. Complications ensue.
"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.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Breaking Bad Mondays: Season 2, Ep. 8, "Better Call Saul"
By Todd VanDerWerff
“Better Call Saul” is the kind of episode that made me get interested in television in the first place. It’s not perfect, by any means, but it would be nauseatingly hilarious in one shot and then cut to another that would load on the unbearable tension. In so many ways, it’s a minor encapsulation of so many of the show’s major themes (from the idea that you can’t be just a little bit of a criminal to the thought that resisting temptation is so very, very hard), but it’s also a surprisingly fast-paced episode of the notoriously slow-moving series. The episode even manages to make famed comedian Bob Odenkirk seem like a part of its universe with a character who is both the sort of joke-y character he plays well and a necessary piece of the puzzle of Walter White’s (Bryan Cranston) burgeoning criminal empire. Season two has been building to this. Hell, the SHOW has been building to this. We’re at a precipice, and the RV is pointed downhill. We just passed the point of no return.
“Better Call Saul,” written by Peter Gould and directed by Terry McDonough, opens inauspiciously enough, with Badger (Matt L. Jones) sitting on a park bench emblazoned with an ad for the titular Saul. He’s approached by a man played by DJ Qualls, who asks him if he’s got any meth for sale. Badger lays out exactly why he suspects the man is an undercover cop (right down to two vans parked inconspicuously on the street that he believes to contain police surveillance equipment), then puts the potential buyer through a long series of tests designed to prove that he’s not a cop. The buyer feeds him the old line about how if you ask a cop if he’s a cop he legally has to say yes (“It’s in the constitution!” “The constitution of America?”). When Badger falls for it and sells the buyer some meth, we’ve already figured out what we always suspected – that the buyer was a cop all along – and we’re unsurprised to see Badger taken down (indeed, by the very vans he said would be his downfall in the first place).
What’s surprisingly elegant about the way McDonough shoots this scene (in a way that suggests Gould initially scripted it that way as well) is just how he lets you in on the fact that Qualls IS playing an undercover cop. The entire encounter is shot in a long shot from across the street, cars zipping by between the camera and the actors. At first, this just seems like it might be an arty attempt to do a scene already loaded with tension in one take in one shot, but just when you’re starting to think, “C’mon, let’s get moving already,” the camera JIGGLES, just a little bit, and that’s when you start to realize – before the cop even tricks Badger – that what we’re seeing isn’t the omniscient point of view of the audience, but, rather, the omniscient (as far as this park bench is concerned) point of view of the Albuquerque police department. Once that camera jiggles the first time, it moves and shifts even more, as the cop nearly loses control of the potential deal, then regains it with his flat-out lie about what’s in the constitution (which relies on his assumption that Badger is an idiot – Walt wouldn’t have fallen for it). We’re not just voyeurs; we’re voyeurs actively working at cross-purposes against the show’s purported heroes.
But that’s what Breaking Bad does so well, and it had to trick us to get to this point. One of the uneasiest aspects of the series’ first season was the idea that Walt had cancer, that his actions were somewhat forgivable because his ultimate motives (providing for his family after his death from the disease) were so good. To a degree, I think, the series had to build up those ideas both to get us into the series, whose high concept is a bit harder to stomach at first glance than similar antihero-driven series (like The Sopranos or The Shield) were, but also to allow for maximum impact in a second season that has revealed that almost everything Walt believed about why he was doing this was both a lie he was telling us and the audience. To a degree, Breaking Bad couldn’t remind us too often of just how badly Walt’s actions could hurt other innocent people at first. It had to make him SEEM sympathetic and then pull that rug out from under us in a way that some viewers may find somewhat cruel. The further Walt goes, the less he can pull back, the more people he draws into his web. But because we’ve been led to sympathize with him, we’re also forced to try to understand why he’s doing what he’s doing instead of just sitting in simple judgment of him. It’s one of the trickier balancing acts with a main character I’ve seen, and it’s remarkably clear just how much series creator Vince Gilligan trusts his creative team and, particularly, Cranston to get his message across.
That opening scene encapsulates another important theme in Breaking Bad. When Badger lays out the two vans that will ultimately be responsible for his arrest, we think that maybe he has just enough of a brain in his head to avoid getting caught. But, of course, he’s caught in exactly the way he said he would be. Walt also knew exactly how he would eventually get caught (hell, his brother-in-law is a DEA agent), but he figured he was smart enough to get out, and, even if he wasn’t, death was close enough at hand to provide the ultimate escape route. Now we’re seeing that there IS no escape. Walt will eventually be captured like Badger was, and every time he narrowly escapes, the retribution will be even worse. You might say that he still has the opportunity to cheat justice by dying, but I think the Badger scene is key in implicating us, the audience, as the people watching all of this going on. We’ve gone from saying, “Isn’t Walt such a sad man?” to “God, Walt’s a bastard” in under 20 episodes.
This also may be why the series is expanding its scope in season two, showing us more of the way Walt’s poison is infecting the streets of Albuquerque. Just as the police are the people who judge Badger when he makes the ill-advised drug sale, we are the ones who will end up judging Walt most harshly because we can see the full scope of everything he did. It’s not just a neat narrative trick the series pulled off by putting us in the lens of the police camera; it was thematically vital.
But enough about that. “Better Call Saul” scores big because it’s based, as the best Breaking Bad episodes are, around a relatively simple question: How do you protect your burgeoning criminal empire without killing the loyal foot soldier who seems likely to rat you out to the DEA? Badger’s sitting in that holding cell, and the DEA, led by the newly returned Hank (Dean Norris), is excited to get some information out of him on the mysterious Heisenberg. Realizing what they have on their hands, they essentially co-opt the investigation from the local police and begin cutting deals with Badger for information. Walt and Jesse (Aaron Paul) know that Badger knows enough to bring down their whole enterprise and land both of them in jail, but Jesse also has no desire to kill his friend (Walt initially seems appalled, but he then seems to warm slightly to the idea, though this is never verbalized and is played entirely in Cranston’s eyes).
So they decide to lean heavily on Badger’s lawyer, Saul Goodman (Odenkirk). Saul’s the kind of small-time lawyer who mostly makes his living off of finding loopholes in the law to get lower-class folks who get into accidents lots of cash (if his waiting room and commercials are any indication), but he’s also seemingly the self-appointed lawyer of the Albuquerque small-time criminal element. Walt and Jesse’s initial plan – bribe the lawyer to reject the reduced sentence plea designed to get Badger to fess up – isn’t the best plan in the universe, but it makes a sort of sense. Saul definitely seems unctuous enough to take a big enough bribe, and that might buy them enough time to figure out a way to deal with the situation. Saul, however, appears to have SOME standards, and he rejects Walt’s (who’s posing as Badger’s uncle) offer as morally repulsive.
The two jump to their alternate plan, which involves driving Saul into the desert in the RV (in a gorgeously lit sequence taking place in a desolate landscape only highlighted by the slight pinks of the disappearing sun) and pull a gun on him. He at first jabbers in Spanish about not being the enemy of the cartel (further foreshadowing, it would seem), but he floats the idea that Badger could just be killed, something that Walt and Jesse categorically reject. When an inopportune coughing fit links the masked man standing before him to Badger’s uncle from earlier in Saul’s eyes, he quickly becomes a confidante of the two and hatches an even more improbable scheme.
The plan to save Badger leads into another great, suspenseful scene at the park bench, this one shot and edited more conventionally as a mini-thriller. Badger is to identify a man who doesn’t mind going back to prison if the price is right as Heisenberg, but another man who looks similar enough to the description of the first man sits down, confusing Badger, who attempts to make the deal with that man. As the DEA agents (and DJ Qualls) look on, Walt realizes he needs to take action, using his connection to Hank to put everything in jeopardy so Jesse can give Badger the message that he’s in the wrong place and needs to be on the other bench. It’s a masterfully edited little scene, and watching Walt’s ability to improvise a solution to an unexpected problem, something he wasn’t so great at when the season began, is appreciated.
That said, the unspoken tension in the scene comes from the idea that the man who’s willing to go back into prison isn’t going to be out of prison every time. More of Walt and Jesse’s crew is going to get picked up, and it won’t be as easy to contain them in the future (especially since Hank seems doubtful that Jimmy In-and-Out is actually Heisenberg). This, in many ways, is the moment when Walt and Jesse must embrace the nature of their enterprise (the moment, as mentioned above, when all starts to go downhill). In the future, they probably WILL have to arrange for the deaths of those who are entangled in their webs if they want to protect themselves, and what began, ostensibly, as a way for one man to provide after his death will have turned him into just another criminal, just another drug lord, making his minions as expendable as he often feels in his own life. This is the moment when he could have accepted what was coming and didn’t. This was the last moment to retain just a little bit of sympathetic season one Walt. He let it pass.
The episode’s final moments focus on Walt back at school grading papers. Saul wanders into the room, and at first we fear that he has a kid in the school, but, no, he was just able to find Walt after hiring a PI for a few hours’ work. When he points out that if he could find Walt, pretty much anyone could, he’s both making an offer for himself as a sort of silent partner (he likens himself to The Godfather’s Tom Hagen) and suggesting that he can help Walt navigate the Albuquerque underworld better than Walt could on his own. It’s a nicely muted moment, for all its import. The shady lawyers who help criminals get away with what they get away with are a staple of crime fiction, and this is one of the first times we’re seeing a relationship like this at its inception. It’s like seeing Avon Barksdale meet Maury Levy for the first time or, OK, Vito Corleone meeting Tom Hagen. In the moment, it seems small, but it’s yet another seismic moment for Walter White, who may say he’s not a criminal but is acquiring the accoutrements of one rather rapidly.
Some other thoughts:
House contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark and co-host of the podcast TV on the Internet. His writing also appears at The AV Club.
Links for the Day (April 27, 2009)
1. The Limits of Control. Glenn Kenny takes on the latest from Jim Jarmusch at his blog.
["The Limits of Control takes its title from a phrase of William S. Burroughs, and given the habits of 'Lone Man,' the unnamed operative portrayed by DeBankolé, one might also presume that the film will reveal the limits of his own self-control. Here is a man who is meticulous in every respect. Sitting in a swank airport lounge, taking instructions from Alex Descas' 'Creole' and his 'French' translator Jean Francois Severine, he sits with exemplary posture, palms on the tops of his thighs, and betrays no emotion or beffudlement when Creole begins mixing philosophical aphorisms with his directives. Lone Man does not order double espressos, but rather two espressos in two cups. He can get insistent on this point. The various coded messages he receives, on small slips of paper folded into match boxes bearing the logo 'Le Boxeur,' he memorizes in a matter of seconds. He then crumples the paper and swallows it. When confronted with a gorgeous young woman in his hotel room—'Nude,' she is called, for she is that, throughout the entire picture, except when she's wearing a see-through plastic raincoat—he rejects her advances. 'No sex?' asks the woman (incarnated by Paz de la Huerta), who by all accounts would be entirely irresistible to any other heterosexual male. 'Not while I'm working,' Lone Man says."]
2. Twitch has a great question. Assume you had $500 million dollars and needed to spend it all Brewster's Millions style. Which five directors would you each give $100 million to to make whatever film they wanted with?
["Richard Raaphorst: Everybody who doesn’t want to see “Worst Case Scenario” please raise your chainsaw! Thought so… The big question here is of course if Richard has the talent to make a watchable film after having been given the money. But the two brilliant trailers he shot for his nazi-zombie epic makes me salivate when I think what he could do with his current projects with all possible financial troubles out of the way. Be it the indefinitely shelved “Worst Case Scenario” or the tentatively probed possibilities of “Army of Frankenstein”, I very much would like to know if Raaphorst could rise to the challenge of becoming a great filmmaker, or if he’d be forgotten within a year with a nasty clunker on his resumee…"]
3. Begging Naked. My good pal Jonathan B. saw this film at EbertFest (so far as I know), and it left him raving.
["I can't remember the last time a movie left me floored the way Karen Gehres' Begging Naked did. A buried treasure on the film festival circuit, it accomplishes so much that it's almost overwhelming. It works as a first-hand look at the sex businesses of New York City before Rudy Giuliani's 'Disneyfication' of New York City. It works as a portrait of a struggling artist that lives above an elevator shaft working as a stripper. It works as a look into the life of a schizophrenic homeless person and how one can end up in such a position. But more than anything, it works as what set out to be: the recorded 'autobiography' of Elise Hill, one of the most unique film subjects you will ever find, fiction or non-fiction."]
4. The save-one-show cause celebre of this TV season is NBC's beleaguered action-comedy Chuck, which airs its season finale tonight. While I don't think it's AS GOOD of a show as its fans do, it's very much a well-done hour of entertaining TV week after week, and doing an entertaining hour with deeper emotional arcs is not as easy as it might seem. For that alone, it deserves to come back. Cultural Learnings' Myles McNutt has an impassioned plea for the show that makes me wish I liked it as much as its hardest of hardcore fans do.
["But I can honestly say that this is the first time that I am entering, albeit late thanks to my vacation, a fan campaign primarily because I love the show involved. Chuck was an engaging series last year, but this year it has elevated itself to an entirely new level: this is not the most intelligent show on television, or the funniest, or the most dramatic, but its ability to combine all of these elements into a single package has created a series that myself and hopefully many, many others view as worthy of our time and energy. Saving Chuck is not just some sort of experiment, but something that is necessary for my faith in NBC as a network, and network television as a medium for high-calibre entertainment, to remain intact."]
5. I had a fellow cinephile friend in college who usually enjoyed watching the latest classic films and foreign finds I would bring home from the Hollywood Video 60 miles away (our only connection to the cinematic world at large). But one day, he got tired of all of this, and he said, "Todd, sometimes I just want to see some goddamn spaceships." Well, readers, I, too, have felt this primordial urge, and this summer, I'm hoping J.J. Abrams can sate that desire with his new Star Trek. Over at Hitfix, Drew McWeeny is getting me psyched.
["I've never been a complete fan of 'Star Trek.' I'm more of a grazer. I like what I like, and I disregard the rest completely. For me, I still say that 'The Original Series,' the Gene Roddenberry 1960's version, is the best. That's what I like. I like the archetypes of Kirk, Bones, and Spock, and the way that dynamic allows the writers so much room to explore ideas. I like the on-the-nose allegorical SF writing of the era, the Rod Serling-like way they explored the issues of the day. And above all else, I like the optimism of Roddenberry's original vision, the idea that once Earth's problems are fixed, we can move outward, exploring in the purest sense of the word. That vision of the future is unusual, especially since the '70s, when SF went completely dystopian and never really recovered."]
Quote of the Day:
-Werner Herzog, on figuring out if the stories that enthrall him are features, documentaries or even books
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Hungry?
Clip of the Day: In memoriam.
"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.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Anticipation (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
By Ed Howard
[This review of a largely unknown and unavailable Jean-Luc Godard short is presented here as a plea that The Criterion Collection should include this film as an extra on one of their forthcoming Godard DVDs. It would be a very timely and appropriate inclusion for any of the Godard films that Criterion currently plans to release. If you're interested in seeing this film, write to them and tell them about it.]
Anticipation was Jean-Luc Godard's contribution to the multi-director anthology film The Oldest Profession, a collection of shorts on the theme of prostitution, with contributions by Claude Autant-Lara, Philippe de Broca and other minor French filmmakers of the time. Needless to say, Godard's segment stands out. He filmed his contribution in late 1966, not long after finishing 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, with which it shares some commonalities in theme and style. But the film Anticipation resembles more than anything else is Alphaville, Godard's futuristic take on a society that has forgotten about love. In this short, the space traveler John Demetrius (Jacques Charrier) takes a break from his interstellar journey on Earth, where the solicitous planetary government—a Soviet-American alliance, confirming that this is the distant future—provides prostitutes for all travelers who request them.
To read the rest of the article at Only the Cinema, click here. Read more!
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Beatrice Arthur (May 13th, 1922—April 25th, 2009)
Godspeed, Dorothy Petrillo Zbornak Hollingsworth. After the break, some choice Bea moments. Share your thoughts, remembrances and links in the comments section.Roast of Pamela Anderson Bea Arthur Uncensored Joke of the Day Stand-Up Comedy Free Online Games
Ride with The Devil: Il Divo
By Lauren Wissot
[Il Divo is now playing at Landmark's Sunshine Cinema and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in Manhattan. Click venue names for screening information. Also see here for House contributor Kenji Fujishima's WSJ interview with Il Divo director Paolo Sorrentino.]
Il Divo, Paolo Sorrentino’s 2008 Cannes Jury Prize-winning study of Italy’s “Life Senator” Giulio Andreotti (who shares his titular nickname with Julius Caesar) is an art-house crowd popcorn flick. Dense with Byzantine political information—blink and you’ll miss a crucial subtitle—the film should have been a miniseries, but nevertheless is steeped in the country’s populist operatic tradition, and moves with the speed (not to mention slo-mo action sequences) of a Luc Besson film. And like that high-flying Frenchman’s movies, Il Divo has the feeling of being completely choreographed. It’s a ballet on steroids, downright militaristic in its precision. Between the lush production design and sweeping camerawork, the overwhelming opera score alternating with roaring rock and roll (and even a silly tune from 80s pop-tart Trio), you forget you’re watching the story of a leader whose ruthless administration makes Bush & Co. look like Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity. (Though all those Bush conspiracy theories do find their counterpart in Italy’s “strategy of tension,” which holds that the government causes chaos to create fear and maintain power—in this case for decades. In lieu of Skull and Bones there’s the secret society of the P2 lodge, of which Silvio Berlusconi, naturally, was a member.)
This puts Il Divo at odds with that other recent study of Italian systemic corruption, Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah. Whereas Gomorrah features the gritty realism of wannabe gangstas reciting lines from Scarface, Il Divo absorbs the slick Hollywood viewpoint itself, spewing it back out in highly stylized imagery. Andreotti’s inner circle is first presented in Reservoir Dogs fashion, with aliases like “The Shark” and “His Holiness” flashing onscreen under their names as they fill the frame. A sequence crosscuts between a horse race and a vicious murder a la The Godfather. Goodfellas comes to mind after The Shark, who resembles Tony Soprano, quits Andreotti’s Christian Democratic faction, leaving the rest to ponder his Judas-like behavior while dining Last Supper-style by a pool. For all its heavy exposition Il Divo is less journalistic than Gomorrah. Indeed, it’s great surface entertainment that doesn’t dig deep; an Italian film for those Hollywood-worshiping Italian youth in Gomorrah.
But then, comparing Sorrentino’s Steadicam biopic to Garrone’s handheld epic is probably as ridiculous as comparing Spielberg to Soderbergh. Il Divo is, in fact, a damn fun ride, a go-go film that truly moves. Even before a dry courtroom scene where Andreotti is finally about to be tried, a sequence of reporters loading video cameras is edited like a chorus line, as security checks every nook and cranny for bombs, and the paparazzi’s bulbs flash like gunfire in the defendant’s face. Sorrentino’s movie is made all the more engaging by Toni Servillo (who also showed his suavely corrupt side in Gomorrah), as the highly uncharismatic, hunchbacked leader with the perfect comic timing. When a doctor suggests the premier try playing sports instead of anxiously pacing, Andreotti wryly replies, “All my sporty friends are dead.”
Seeming like a stone-faced, robotic, nearly autistic version of Kissinger, Servillo’s Il Divo commands the screen even when sharing it with a kiss-ass strategist and budget minister (alias “Minister”) played by the Larry David look-a-like Carlo Buccirosso, and Flavio Bucci’s Dali-resembling “right arm” (alias “Lemon”) who gives the ruler a watch as a gift. Interestingly, it becomes nearly irrelevant that a seven-time prime minister whose opponents just happen to die on a regular basis remains an enigma throughout Sorrentino’s film. Andreotti, who is called an “extraterrestrial” by a journalist in Il Divo, and even today at 90 remains evasive and unapologetic, is a mystery the director wisely chooses not to unravel. Why bother when the mystery in itself is so captivating?
There’s one fantastically surreal scene that takes place during a vicious rainstorm. (It’s every bit as bizarrely dreamlike as the imagined, rapid-fire, seated confession Andreotti later delivers to the camera that finishes with a theatrical lights out.) Il Divo’s bodyguards struggle one by one, and then hilariously all together, to open a stuck backseat door as torrents of water strike like bullets. Inside sits the premier safe and dry, not lifting a finger to let himself out. He’s not so much stoic in the face of the mayhem all around, but terrifyingly, purposefully unaware.
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.
Stage Frights: The Soloist and Is Anybody There?
By N.P. Thompson
[The Soloist is now playing nationwide. Is Anybody There? is now playing in limited release.]
Even if The Soloist, with its hack screenplay by Susannah Grant, didn’t have Robert Downey Jr. (as the real-life LA Times columnist Steve Lopez) slipping on his own spilled piss onto a bathroom stall floor (after answering his cell phone while giving a urine sample), and even if it didn’t also feature Downey, scenes later, getting a leaky bag of bodily fluids full on in the face, the movie would still be a crude fiasco that trivializes the very values it allegedly enshrines.
The narrative follows a chance encounter between Lopez and a homeless violinist named Nathaniel Ayers (here stiffly personified by Jamie Foxx), a schizophrenic street person with a Beethoven fixation, and who was once (supposedly) a promising cellist, a man who briefly attended Juilliard but was too unhinged to amount to much. Shortly before the fateful first meeting of journalist and musician, the British director Joe Wright stages a scene of Lopez amongst his Times colleagues. Although the staffers, seated in their cubicles, don’t appear to be multi-tasking, everyone speaks in an identical rapid-fire delivery, as if they were moth-eaten holdovers from Ben Hecht’s and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page, prattling and rattling on about the loss of readers in this or that demographic. Wright overlaps the dialogue (seemingly to resurrect an Altman touch) yet he overlaps the four voices in such a way that we don’t miss a word; the sequence is so fustily neat, it’s drained of any life-like energy. Wright and Grant mean for us to be supportive onlookers of the journos’ noble calling, but if newspapermen (and –women) are anything like the glib solipsists represented here, then, by all means, the industry deserves to fail.
Having read neither Lopez’s columns on Ayers nor his subsequent book on the same topic, I can only speculate that the first-hand account must have, in some ways, felt moving and true. And undoubtedly there’s a vital, compelling story here somewhere—the sustaining power of classical music within a human soul. But it’s buried—buried deep—under the wrong actors, the wrong director, the wrong script, and the wrong approach.
Grant receives the sole writing credit, yet in the worst Hollywood tradition, her work plays out as if penned by a committee. OK, we got Foley of someone defecating to loop to the aerial tracking shot of a guy on the toilet—check! OK, we got debilitating mental illness portrayed exclusively in horror movie terms—natch! OK, we inserted the sentimental moment of a black mother telling her son she hears God in his cello playing—and so on and on and on. Grant thoroughly falsifies wherever she goes. And Wright consistently obliges her with his own high-falutin’ tastelessness. Perhaps it’s the journalistic milieu, or perhaps the director fancied that he was making a statement on being poor and black and disenfranchised in our land of excess, America; whatever the case, throughout the first hour, Wright blips in footage of Katrina, Bush, the Iraqi war dead. What do these juxtaposed images mean in the context of screechy, major-studio hermeticism? (Screechy not because of Nathaniel’s two-stringed violin, but because much of the scenario unfolds in the middle of highway traffic.) They’re intended to foster the impression that the filmmakers are commenting on something, when in fact the filmmakers are free-associating. Wright, additionally, loves close-ups of wounds, of a drug addict’s fatal injections, the faces of the diseased and deformed. (The Soloist treats urban poverty like something out of Grand Guignol: junkies fistfight against backdrops of chiaroscuro, billowing smoke, and flickering firelight, so that the movie becomes a kind of skid row Phantom of the Opera.)
Furthermore, when Nathaniel acquires a cello and plays for the first time in several years (in front of a rapt audience of Downey and oncoming cars), Wright doesn’t even trust the unadorned resonance of the solo instrument; we hear only a few seconds of the performer’s unaccompanied bowing before the soundtrack swells with the liltingly sweetened uplift of soupy orchestrations. Wright’s idea of rapture consists of showing us a pair of birds flapping and flying over a maze of LA interstates, circling to the swoon of Romantic bombast (that all but drowns out the person we’re supposed to be listening to). What’s worse, this sugared-up notion of classical music, even though it’s performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, doesn’t sound anything like what you’d hear in a concert hall; it sounds more like Jerry Bruckheimer meets Mantovani, and as the end credits roll, there’s this unassailable gem—“music composed by Beethoven, arranged by Dario Marianelli”—a credit that merits its own place in movie history, right alongside “Written by William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.”
What about the two lead performances? They are as mechanical as anything else. Downey recycles the same-old huffy-puffy shtick that he always does, which is all he can do since Grant conceives Lopez as an Everyman cipher. In some shots, he’s meant to be a soulful loner, wandering around the cavernous house that he singularly occupies, listening to Neil Diamond croon “Mr. Bojangles.” In others, he’s the slapstick buffoon dousing himself with the aforementioned urine; and of course, he’s a do-gooder who reacts angrily when Nathaniel can’t get it together to attend a Philharmonic rehearsal. “I’m a professional person!” the columnist spews over the cellist’s schizzy diddling away of valuable time. Is Lopez intended to be smug and self-righteous? With his salt-and-pepper buzz-cut and his inflated chatter about the sanctity of media, he certainly could be a huckster goon gainfully employed by MSNBC. Yet Downey never pushes the role’s limitations into parody; that would be too disrespectful, I imagine.
As for Oscar-recipient Foxx, his face as large-boned as a hockey mask, he has neither the technique nor the inspiration to make Ayers into anything beyond a generic crazie. When pantomiming at violin or cello, Foxx gets by; when he opens his mouth to speak, however, phoniness comes pouring out. He’s been directed to recite his stream-of-consciousness rambles in the exact staccato rhythms of the pompous newspaperpersons. After a while, a long while, of observing Foxx’s one-note interpretation, of watching him guardedly wheel around a treasure trove shopping cart brimming over with festooned junk, as he mutters indecipherably to himself, white greasepaint smudged across his cheeks, nose, and forehead, it occurred to me that Foxx’s Ayers had begun to resemble WALL-E. The homeless man as Disney character—what an achievement.
For some highly inexplicable reason, I had (how many qualifiers can I inject into a single phrase?) sort of, in a mild fit of curiosity, been looking forward to seeing the Michael Caine vehicle Is Anybody There? The notion of Sir Michael playing a magician—a role that might have let him tap into those vaudevillian wellsprings of his, the ones he so artfully conceals a good bit of the time, struck me as—fun, potentially. If the trappings do not burst with promise (and they don’t), there was (I hoped) the bliss of Sir Michael enjoying himself silly pulling rabbits from hats.
Minutes into Is Anybody There?—actually, it would be more accurate to say mere seconds in—two things become painfully unambiguous: the movie’s curdled humor dictates that everyone in this saga set in a seedy old-folks’ home will be paraded around as a freak, regardless of age; and that the scriptwriter Peter Harness, to say nothing of the director John Crowley, will desperately go to any length to avoid having anything to say on any subject. (The movie also fails dismally as “pure” entertainment, whatever that may be.) If Caine’s Clarence (once known as The Amazing Clarence, in his prestidigitatory days on the music hall circuit) reminisces too poignantly over his late wife, why, let’s chase that scene with screeching tires and a car crash, a crash, I might add, that advances the slender reed of a storyline not an iota. Or there’s this: an elderly woman collapses and dies the instant before her estranged daughter arrives on the boarding house steps. (The mother had so been looking forward to the reunion.) What does Crowley do? He strikes up a band of kazoo players on the soundtrack, as we watch two skinny persons hoist the deceased’s corpulent corpse up a stairwell. (Visually, the movie’s astoundingly ugly, which should come as no surprise—its low-lit, dingy horrors match its desiccated formula of morbid-equals-cute.)
Eventually, Clarence, who has staggered through his every waking hour at the retirement home in stoic misery or in tears, finds himself cajoled into performing at a child’s birthday party, to dust off that conjurer’s wand, to doff that top hat in the service of illusion.
But by that point the only magic trick I wanted to see Caine perform was to make this entire film disappear.
A former contributor to GreenCine, House favorite N.P. Thompson photo blogs at Centuries Since the Day.
Friday, April 24, 2009
The Alligators Have Good Graphics, Vol. 1: Beginning Game Criticism, Vol. 1
By Logan Crowell
The Internet has been extremely successful in making things seem bigger than they are. If you judge by the Internet, you’d probably think film criticism, amateur and otherwise, is a healthy and thriving hobby that a large portion of society partakes in. We know that’s not really true, with most of society paying to see movie sequels where the only thing new are the articles that have been taken out of the title. But the Internet is still full of highly-read film, TV, music and literary criticism. Much of that criticism is good criticism. Decades of slowly evolving art criticism have finally given birth to a world where a large number of people do engage in meaningful discussion, by reading or writing, on a daily basis.
It seems strange, then, that the most technological of all entertainment forms, video games, has almost no criticism to its name. There are thousands of sites devoted to writing about games and hundreds of thousands of people talking about games, but almost no one is doing so from anything resembling a critical perspective. There’s the occasional exception, but most game writing is either industry analysis or qualitative reviewing (usually amounting to some variation of “EA (Electronic Arts) is evil” and “I can’t move and shoot...FAIL”). Video game criticism, as a form, just doesn’t exist.
Do a quick Google of “video game criticism” and the evidence is compelling. The first page results show one site devoted to the type of game “criticism” which spends its time praising the realism of alligators in Resident Evil 5, and nine sites lamenting the lack of quality in video game criticism. The first result, one of the lamentations, is Chuck Klosterman’s essential Esquire piece, “The Lester Bangs of Video Games,” where he concludes “there is a void, but there is still time to fill it. Somebody needs to become the first significant Xbox critic, stat.” It was written three years ago. We’re still talking about the alligators.
Now, to be fair, there absolutely are exceptions. Articles can be found that delve deeper, usually analyzing the game creation process or phenomena like sexism in gaming (Kotaku is especially good for these pieces). Video game reviews are also really good. They’re by far the most useful of all the functional media reviews. If you want to know what exactly a game contains and what does and does not work, you can’t do better than video game reviews. They’re a shopper’s best friend.
They’re useless, though, if we’re interested in something more, something deep and meaningful. A functional review is fantastic before I go to the store but largely useless after I’ve played the game. Unless I’m looking to disagree with someone or have my own feelings reinforced, reviews are best had as an appetizer. Good luck finding that post-game dessert.
But why do we even need game criticism? Because criticism enriches art. There’s something rewarding about watching a film, reading a piece of criticism, re-watching and the film and feeling like you get it. Likewise, there’s an immense pleasure in being a critic and unlocking a complex piece of art. Criticism is an empowering form. Which brings us to the main question: If criticism is so great, why is there no great game criticism?
This is initially a hard question to answer, largely because there’s no one place to lay blame. The blame lays everywhere, from the community to the industry to games as a medium. Game criticism doesn’t flow as naturally from film criticism as film criticism did from literary criticism. There’s a hurdle to overcome, because our interactions with a game are not the same as our interactions with film or music. The malleability of a gaming narrative makes it difficult to analyze in a traditional way. This requires extra effort. Criticism has to be forced out; there will be no Caesarean sections for game criticism.
This is where we encounter our first problem: the gaming community. In order for there to be game criticism, there has to be someone willing to work on it. That requires the gaming community to show an active interest in criticism as it develops. That interest is sorely lacking. Why? The easy answer is audience. The average gamer is a male between twenty and forty and he plays Grand Theft Auto and Halo. This is a stereotype, but even with female friendly consoles like the Wii, the majority of active gaming is being done by the male demographic. These are the kids who grew up with Super Mario. I’m one of them.
The Halo set, if we dare call them that, aren’t exactly prime targets for analysis. They’re largely equivalent to the mythic “average moviegoer” or that juicy TV “demo.” If they don’t want to read criticism, then it’s hardly surprising that hardly anyone wants to write it. Even the most selfless critics want some kind of audience.
But, this is the easy way out. Blockbusters can be discussed in meaningful ways. Blade Runner, initially a failure but now seen by millions, has a thriving fan community that tears the film apart and finds incredible secrets hidden inside. Academic works have been written about these fans. And yet, gaming fans seem different. A quick browse through a gaming message board or the comments section of a gaming blog, will show a strange preoccupation with brand loyalty and a tendency towards the type of qualitative arguments that reviews rely on. Discussions on the level of the meaning of humanity, a Blade Runner staple, rarely show up.
This disparity seems to have two causes. First, the gaming community is disadvantaged. Film fans have a massive body of criticism to model themselves after. When the internet came along, film criticism was already fully developed. Gaming criticism is a blank slate. It seems disingenuous to disparage “lolomfgisuck” or “xxXX_Insanities_Birth_XXxx” for not creating a new form of criticism. Second, the interest of fans is largely reliant on the games being produced. We can’t blame fans for a lack of serious analysis if the industry itself isn’t taking itself seriously as art.
(“Are games art?” is an entire discussion, or more, in and of itself. In lieu of that discussion, I’m just going to dismiss the debate outright. I’m not a fan of low or high art distinctions, and I’m also extremely leery when engaging in any type of “art” and “not-art” classifications. If games can provide an experience that is meaningful, either as entertainment or something deeper, I’m willing to engage them as art. I also suspect that after a decade or so of serious game criticism, we might see this debate become a relic of a naïve earlier age.)
I want to be careful and not paint all game developers as financially motivated, as I doubt the ratio of financially- to artistically-motivated developers is not that different than in the film industry. Most people, whatever their primary motivation, want to make something good. They want their work to be remembered. But gaming is a much less individual-driven medium than even other collaborative art forms like film or television. The average cost of games, at least until the XBOX Live Arcade/Apple App Store era, was exorbitant. Most games were developed by large companies. They were, by and large, blockbusters. There are indie games, but their average consumption is far less than many indie films. There are no second-run consoles focusing largely on indie games. Games are funded by big companies, and by and large, big companies care about money.
This severely disadvantages a game critic. Not only is the auteur theory rendered almost useless, but the industry is the equivalent of a library full of only Steven Spielberg films. There are brilliant gems, many of them rich and meaningful, but the general intent is one of entertainment. For every Schindler’s List there is a Lost World, while Sansho the Bailiff is nowhere to be found. There is great potential to analyze Spielberg, but his films often work on a mostly surface level. The advantages of engaging Spielberg critical are not as profound as the advantages of engaging Mizoguchi critically. (I should add this isn’t a qualitative statement, both filmmakers are indispensible to the medium.)
Likewise, as much as I love Super Mario Bros., the game doesn’t instantly lend itself to criticism. There are interesting discussions there, but my replay time is enhanced very little by a study of feminist archetypes in the Nintendo classic. It’s an interesting topic, but the Koopas don’t care. Many games do attempt to contain a somewhat richer intent, but by and large, these games are concerned with play experience and not theme. The men and women of Bungie may aspire to create a commentary on humanity and war, but Halo’s success is measured by enjoyment per frag, not intellectual stimulation. This cause isn’t helped by foul-mouthed teenagers who render the multiplayer experience nearly unbearable.
The industry needs to mature past these tendencies for criticism, if it develops, to thrive. Developers need to step up their game. While this seems unlikely - the current model is a cash cow - there is some motivation. The biggest boon to the “violent games corrupt our children!” argument is the relative lack of purpose to game violence. The more seriously games are taken, especially if taken as art, the less the industry will have to defend itself. There will still be battles, as we see in the film industry every so often, but the argument for games would be stronger. Everyone would be better off if people saw Grand Theft Auto as a comment on violence in society and not a murder simulator.
Which brings us to the one hurdle of game criticism that we cannot actively change: the nature of gaming. Auteur theory is not the only critical tool that falls by the wayside once the secret gaming weapon, interactivity, is introduced. The minute you give control to the player you encounter a plethora of problems. Roger Ebert went so far as to say, rather naïvely I think, that “art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices.”
The problem with interactivity for a critic is that it defies traditional criticism. Most of our critical tools are geared towards analyzing a given text. The text may be of any of a number of varieties, but the text is, usually, the text. We can touch it, watch it, read it and analyze it. It may not be easy, but by and large, it is consistent. The blue key will always be the blue key, whether we comprehend its meaning or not. Mario, however, won’t always grab the same mushroom or play all the same levels. Niko Bellic won’t always beat up prostitutes. The text is ever-changing. Somewhere, physicists are laughing; quantum mechanics have finally found their way to art. Nothing is anything anymore. Instead, everything might be something. Or nothing. Or both.
We can’t simply ignore interactivity, either. Looking at story, character and design while ignoring interactivity would be akin to analyzing a movie based solely on the script; the entire point of the medium would be lost. To make it worthwhile, we need to analyze what the game allows the player to reveal. Be it a revelation about a player’s own tendencies in a given environment or a deeper thematic connection through immersion, game criticism needs to address how the player plays.
When we do this, we begin to lose interest in the artist and begin gaining interest in the player. There is little use in asking “What is the artist saying?” and every use in asking “What has this game helped me to say?” That type of change defies most notions of criticism, which is why gaming demands new forms. Our old standbys aren’t good enough any more. Game criticism needs us to go one step further.
Is it any wonder, then, that game criticism has taken so long to develop? The community is stuck in a Catch-22 of supply and demand, while the industry is being given little motivation to challenge the minds of its audience. Add to that the need to develop new techniques just to begin work, and it’s somewhat surprising that there’s any game criticism at all, however feeble. It’s hard. It’s different. It’s demanding.
So, if we’re serious about game criticism, where do we begin? I think if we’re going to give it our best shot, we should start with the games that take themselves seriously, games that challenge the player. There is value in Mario and Halo, just as there is value in Star Wars and Indiana Jones, but if we want more Sansho the Bailiffs we need to engage and reward those who attempt to reach those heights. Games such as Jonathan Blow’s brilliant game-deconstruction-as-game platformer, Braid, deserve serious criticism. Games that offer something more when understood on deeper levels will prove criticism, however hard, worthwhile.
We also need to really take a good, hard look at what interactivity means to individual games. It rarely functions the same way. We need to examine the player’s role in a story, and we need to be willing to offer different analysis for different players. The more we engage the interactive aspects of a game, the greater our toolset will be. If we’re starting nearly from scratch, then we need to dive in. If interactivity is our bane, then the more quickly we turn it into our boon, the better. Interactivity is what makes games special, and it is almost certainly what will make game criticism special.
Ultimately, though, we need to begin. We need to stop asking why there isn’t game criticism and start writing some. Maybe it will fail to distinguish itself. Maybe few games are ready for serious critics. We still need to try. If we don’t, then someone, sometime down the road, is once again going to ask why there isn’t any real game criticism. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be off discussing how realistic the alligators are.
Next time: A deeper dissection of Braid and what it has to say about interactivity.
Logan Crowell has a degree in film from York University. He is a lifelong gamer who has written for both print and online media.
Links for the Day (April 24th, 2009)
1. I promised I'd post some coverage of the PaleyFest '09 Big Love panel here when I last wrote about the series, and here's a link to my coverage of the event at Hitfix.com.
["Every time HBO renews its deeply involving polygamy-themed dramedy soap Big Love, it says something about how the series boasts a huge contingent of extremely loyal fans in the renewal press release. If the show's PaleyFest session is any indication, those fans are exactly as legion as HBO says they are, and they're about as passionate as TV fans get as well. The surprisingly in-depth panel, at turns thoughtful about the show, at turns incredibly goofy, offered up hints about what will happen in Season Four, discussed the series' relationship to real-world polygamists and allowed for plenty of time for the actors to wax about how they see their characters. And the extremely crowded room (far more crowded than last week's Dollhouse panel and slightly more crowded than the panel for Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog) ate it all up."]
2. U.S. Soldier Who Killed Herself -- After Refusing to Take Part in Torture. The release of the torture memos has Editor & Publisher editor Greg Mitchell thinking back over a tremendously sad story from the early days of the Iraq War.
["A 'non-hostile weapons discharge' leading to death is not unusual in Iraq, often quite accidental, so this one apparently raised few eyebrows. The Arizona Republic, three days after her death, reported that Army officials 'said that a number of possible scenarios are being considered, including Peterson's own weapon discharging, the weapon of another soldier discharging, or the accidental shooting of Peterson by an Iraqi civilian.' And that might have ended it right there."]
3. Cinematographer Jack Cardiff died earlier this week, and Edward Copeland has an appreciation up.
["By God, we can find plenty of space to go on about that 47-year-old woman who shocked Simon Cowell because she knew how to sing. This is pathetic and sad. A true great artist has died, but the mainstream media has determined that a short segment on a British reality show is more important. Screw them. I'm here to salute a Brit with decades of evidence of real talent."]
4. Sitcom vet Earl Pomerantz's blog is one of my favorite TV-related blogs out there, boasting a strong connection to the medium's history and several thoughts on its present and future. Check out two recent posts, one on what made Taxi so good and the other on why laugh tracks exist in the first place.
["Movie actors needed the protection provided by the single-camera approach. Comedians need to hear the laughs. That’s why Lucy, or more precisely Desi, devised a system (which became the three-camera technique), where you ran three cameras at the same time, accelerating the process, and allowing the inclusion of a live studio audience. Lucy heard the immediate response, which undoubtedly bolstered her confidence and energized her performance, allowing her to stuff more candies into her blouse."]
5. I'm a little in love with this Curious Expeditions blog, a collection of strange and unsettling stuff from around the world and throughout human history.
["Men working in basements were suddenly drowned in molasses, grandmothers napping in first floor houses likewise. Molasses filled eyes, mouths, lungs and most who died, died of suffocation, trapped in the molasses like insects in amber. One man was lucky enough to be swept all the way into the harbor where he was picked up by a passing tugboat, but most were not. An entire company of firefighters were trapped in their crushed firehouse. A father watched as his child was swallowed up in the wave, never to be seen again."]
Quote of the Day:
Aboard a tidal wave
Come about hard and join
The young and often spring you gave
I heard the word
Wonderful thing
A children's song"
—Brian Wilson
Images of the Day (click to enlarge): It's all over for the human race when you can search "flourescent puppy" on Google News and get hits. Who was calling out for a glow-in-the-dark dog anyway?
Clips of the Day: Two clips for you today. First, see how everything will almost inevitably end via a pretty cool little short film. Second, see what happens when Lost's Jorge Garcia goes on a Spanish talk show. The look on his face throughout is priceless.
"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.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Links for the Day (April 23rd, 2009)
1. Why there is no iTunes for movies. Slate's Farhad Manjoo takes a look at the various deals in place that keep an online site that offers streaming movies for a monthly fee from happening.
["Sound like a lot to ask for? In fact, it's pretty much the same system that Netflix has been offering with DVDs for years. I'm only calling for someone to give me all the splendors of Netflix, but through the Web. Netflix proves that even if you give people unlimited subscriptions, they'll still watch only a handful per month. My guess is that the same sensibility governs online rentals. Sure, a few uninspired people will sit around streaming movies every spare moment, but most of us have too much to do to abuse an unlimited subscription, even when we cut out the postal service as the middle man."]
2. 4 Favorite Earth Day Movies. Current Movies rounds up the four movies that could make anyone an environmentalist, including ... a Godzilla flick? Related: Check out the new trailer for Oceans, the latest from the folks behind Winged Migration. The actual footage from the film is compelling, but there's a ton of Disney self-congratulation. But, then, what else do you expect?
["Directed by Yoshimitsu Banno, the film is a hodge podge of hippie-dom when Godzilla (everyone’s favorite foil for nuclear holocaust) must step up to battle the alien Hedorah who feeds off pollution and gives off all sorts of bad things. This somehow damages everyone’s favorite nuclear monster, but the Big Green Guy wins in the end."]
3. Variety talks to Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the guys behind Lost, and gets a nicely wide-ranging interview out of them that focuses less on where the show's going heading into its final handful of episodes and more on the show's past and long-term recognition.
["I think our hope is that looking back on the entire run of the show, that people remember the EXPERIENCE of watching it — what it actually felt like to be mystified and frustrated and surprised — as opposed to just where it landed storywise. When all is said and done, we’ll have consumed six years of our fans’ lives and our greatest wish is that they look back on that time and feel that it was all worth it. As far as whether we’ll want to revisit “Lost” 20 years from now, the answer is probably no… though it would be pretty cool to see what someone else might come up with!"]
4. I know I force my personal obsessions on you people a lot, but if you don't like this Quiet Bubble roundtable on baseball and literature on some level, well, then I don't much like you.
["But baseball time is something else. Not the clock's tick but a series of tableaux. You don't just watch it, you study it. What else is there to do?! Baseball fandom is stats-obsessed partly because the discreteness of baseball play makes for easier counting, but partly (mostly) because the game's visceral thrill is the waiting, savoring, dwelling, ruminating. Marinating. Only in baseball does the radio guy go, 'Here comes the windup...'"]
5. The 20 Male Poses of Facebook. On the other hand, this is just funny. (h/t: Jason Bellamy)
["The Facebook Photo— a bitch and a lover. As a girl, I choose my facebook photo primarily by how unrealistically attractive I look in it. It’s narcissistic, but you can’t deny that you do the same thing. I’m not going to lie, sometimes when I’m getting ready to go out, I’ll evaluate whether or not I’m lookin’ “Facebook-worthy” that night. In other instances I’ll even attend certain events just because I think I’ll get a cute Facebook pic out of it. Overall, it’s accepted that girls use their Facebook pic as an outlet to display their “Oh my Gawd I look HAWT!” pictures. What about guys? With guys it’s harder. It would be a little gay for a guy to display a nicely cropped photo of himself trying to look as cute as possible, workin’ all the right angles and sucking in like the world is about to end. While I was searching through the Ryans, I discovered that there exist 20 different standard shots that guys use for their Facebook picture. It’s like guys got together and agreed that these 20 poses will make them look good without trying to hard because that would be gay dude. The best part is that most of them are a hilariously horrible call. Let’s do a little study, shall we? I present to you, The 20 Male Poses of Facebook!"]
Quote of the Day:
—John Updike
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): This "Kids' Letters to Michael Bay" feature over at Screen Junkies is pretty amusing.
Clip of the Day: My latest YouTube obsession: this Edarem fellow, who is apparently an insane old man fascinated by TV theme songs. This is what I will become, folks. This is what I will become.
"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.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Treeless Mountain
By Vadim Rizov
[Treeless Mountain is now playing at Film Forum in Manhattan. Click venue name for screening information.]
I feel positively churlish for disliking Treeless Mountain. Actually, I don't dislike it; I just don't really care for it, which is a distinction worth making. So Yong Kim's second feature was drafted by A.O. Scott for his strange "Neo-Neo Realism" think-piece, and by the time I saw it—through no fault of the film—I was thinking about it both as a stand-alone aesthetic unit and as potentially symptomatic of what Scott was angling at. Taken on their own, both this film and Kim's previous, In Between Days, are well-crafted, painstaking, deliberately "small" works that bring potentially invisible, underage female protagonists into the light. But they also seem like apprentice films, and therein's the problem.
As Scott gets at in his piece, Treeless Mountain owes no small debt to Hirokazu Kore-eda's 2004 Nobody Knows. This strikes me as pretty remarkable: To make a movie that's openly indebted to (and greatly resembles) one made five years ago isn't new, but it's normally reserved for blockbusters with groundbreaking f/x. What Kim largely took from Nobody Knows (and a conversation with its maker) were tips on how to work with children and the knowledge that—post Ponette and way past Truffaut—you can make movies about very, very small children and try to penetrate their experience of the world without infantilizing or sentimentalizing either them or your movie. The performances (Korean non-pro kids Kim Hee-yeon and Kim Song-hee) are excellent, and you can tell there's some kind of alchemic mix between what Kim's aiming for and what the kids can process and project. The whole thing is well-filmed, competently paced and generally praiseworthy.
There's only one element that's nakedly grating, and it points to what's wrong as a whole. Every now and then—presumably, to break scenes up—there's shots of electric/telephone lines slashing against the sky, or buildings against the dying light, or something. These shots don't have any real thematic function, and they're not particularly elegant; they're just placeholders, tasteful dollops of atmosphere. Now, critics who rail against "taste" and create a false binary where oppressive notions of "good taste" are somehow destroying "vitality" or "real art" or whatever are playing one of the most tiresome and pointless games possible; the real problem here isn't Kim's purposefully modest aesthetic, it's that she's borrowed it wholesale and doesn't seem to have any true conviction to back it up, besides wanting to avoid sentimental crassness.
The child actors are about as good as they can be, and that's obviously a tribute to the adult working with them. Sometimes, though, Kim's camera will linger with infinite patience on their faces, waiting for something, and the connection never comes. Filming children generally involves projecting some of the film onto them, to compensate for what they don't know how to do, but when Kim waits and waits and waits while the children stare, it becomes clear that sometimes a child staring is just a child staring. Kim's aesthetic playbook, in large part, owes its studied patience and leisurely feel to Iranian cinema of the '90s, but there's a key difference: Iranian filmmakers use kids as part of an allegorical set-up that lets them dodge censorship. Kim really is just filming children, and that's about it.
The plot revolves, with a pleasing lack of urgency, around two young girls left by their mother while she goes to find their father; first they stay with their alcoholic, brusquely indifferent aunt, and then with their grandparents on a farm. It's in the warm sequences on the farm that Kim shines, as grandmother and girls bond and work; Kim's naturally tendency to soft-pedal everything means that the film (whose plot, summarized, would seem to revolve around peril and danger) is a resolutely non-threatening zone. And I don't want to fall into the trap I named above, of insisting the film left me naggingly unsatisfied because it's "well made" or "avoids conflict" or whatever Ray Carney-ish claptrap we're peddling today (or Richard Brody-ish, for that matter). It's just that in avoiding making the kids cute or toying with your emotions, there's not a whole lot left besides a handsome shell of a movie.
As a victim of Scott's well-meaning but (to my mind) fatally flawed piece, Treeless Mountain should not, of course, be answerable for Scott's thesis, so here's a little kicker that really has nothing to do with the film. To my mind, there's a world of difference, aesthetically, between what Scott considers the fellow travelers of Kim and Kelly Reichardt; still, it's fair to say (at the very least) that he yoked together a bunch of resolutely modest films on downer topics. Let me suggest that this kind of well-meaning modesty, coming from an entirely laudable desire not to bully the audience, can be fatal when misused, and we have more than enough of it to go around. Better to look at recent movies like Hunger and Tony Manero as reminders that overwhelming aesthetic ambition (and a level of slickness that could easily fit into a music video), combined with in-your-face horrors might just be what we need right now.
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.
Links for the Day (April 22, 2009)
1. Sorry for randomly disappearing, all. Just when you think you've got a handle on a gig like this, life throws 15 million other things at you. But over at The End of Cinema, Sean has also been having trouble keeping up. Unlike me, though, he's providing actual, original content, with a ton of short reviews of movies he's seen.
["Synecdoche, New York - I'm not a Charlie Kaufman fan. I find him overly clever, narcissistic and depressing. All of that is here in this ambitious and opaque film, about a theatre director using a theatre grant to relentlessly gaze at his own icky navel. Like all of Kaufman's films, its construction is ingenious and there are several moments of near-brilliance (the burning apartment, for one), but ultimately his misanthropy is so distancing that he film never manages the kind of transcendence it appears to be reaching towards. The #10 film of 2008."]
2. Bill Moyers and David Simon have a chat here. I'm reading Nixonland by Rick Perlstein (an EXCELLENT political history) at the moment, and a much younger Moyers is a tangential player in that story. So that's where my mind went.
["You see the equivocations. You see the stuff that doesn't make it into the civics books. And also you see how interconnected things are. How connected the performance of the school system is to the culture of a corner. Or where parenting comes in. And where the lack of meaningful work in all these things, you know, the decline of industry suddenly interacts with the paucity and sort of fraud of public education in the inner city. Because THE WIRE is not a story about the America, it's about the America that got left behind."]
3. Fringe is kind of a junky show, but I admire the initiative of this young fellow, who cracked its supposedly VERY DIFFICULT cipher using only gumption and the patience required to watch, well, all of the episodes of Fringe.
["So the code is nothing fancy: It’s a simple one-to-one, monoalphabetic substitution cypher. But it’s isolated words, not a sentence, so handy strings like “the” or “and” don’t recur. Crucially, there are a couple of letters missing from Erica’s transcription of the pilot episode glyphs and possibly an extra glyph for episode 3, at least as compared with the list here. Also, it looks like there was a flub in the glyphs aired for episode 5. Throw a couple errors into the mix and a dictionary attack on a string of characters with no breaks becomes computationally infeasible. (If you want a reasonably quick result from your laptop, anyway.) But it’s trivial if you know where the word breaks are."]
4. David Lowery's still keeping a pretty useful directing log, and he's complaining about what we all are here in SoCal (the cursed HEAT!) and celebrating the arrival of a computer program designed to change his life.
["I was flattering myself. I don't deserve the luxury of commiserating over such creative pangs because these days I scarcely let myself feel them, so consumed am I with that most modern of distractions: the internet. I can't even pretend I'm browsing for information anymore: my online behavior these days is unmistakably that of an addict. In the amount of time I spend per day clicking listlessly through the same cycle of websites, I could have multiplied my output - or, at the very least, have a trail of bloody fingerprints on the parchment to prove that I'm working towards an output, multiplied or otherwise. It gets in the way of everything else, too; had I merely avoided Facebook just in the past week alone, I could have not only have finished reading Sebastian Knight, but devoured Nabokov's entire ouvere."]
5. The heat in LA is not worth it, but the tacos really, really are. If you're in the area and just want some great damn tacos, Taco Hunt has you completely covered.
["Best Tacos in Los Angeles.......drum roll please!!..............Sergio's Tacos! - No I wasn't bribed, and yes I'm a little frightened the dictator himself King Taco will have me arrested for sedition. Sergio's just overwhelmed me on my visit. The tacos are classic LA tacos, packed with flavorful meats and topped with a shot of spicy salsa roja."]
Quote of the Day:
—Jim Gaffigan
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): A nicely abstract piece of concept art from the upcoming adaptation of The Road. More art here.
Clip of the Day: YEAH! Babies on AUTO-TUNE!
"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.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Breaking Bad Mondays: Season 2, Ep. 7, "Negro y Azul"
By Todd VanDerWerff
Early in Sunday’s episode of Breaking Bad, “Negro y Azul,” there’s a shot of Walter White (Bryan Cranston) extending a bond from nitrogen to oxygen on a whiteboard, creating a connection where one didn’t exist before. Walt’s trying to explain chemistry to a student who’d really rather just get a better grade so he doesn’t have to go to summer school, trying to tell him how bonds are what makes “matter … matter,” a lovely unintended pun that says so much about this episode and Breaking Bad in general. Though the student is just trying to put one over on Walt (“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter,” the teacher says with just a hint of menace), the notion of bonds forming between elements or between people unites everything in a rather quiet episode of the show. It even concludes with a beautiful shot of one person reaching out a hand to another, tentatively forming that new connection, just not at an atomic level.
“Negro y Azul,” written by X-Files vet John Shiban and directed by Felix Alcala, who’s directed episodes of a number of distinctively shot television series, from Battlestar Galactica to, most recently, Dollhouse, comes smack-dab in the middle of Breaking Bad’s second season, six episodes preceding it and six episodes to come. It’s an episode that allows all of the characters to step back for a second and breathe, something they very much need after the events of the first six episodes. It opens, though, with a hint of menace. A Mexican drug cartel, possibly involved with the long-dead Tuco, is now aware of the strange new drug kingpin named Heisenberg, and they’re gunning for him. The music video that announces all of this tries a little too hard to inject a note of cheeky humor (though, apparently, these drug cartel-sponsored music videos actually exist in Mexico) and it goes on way, way too long, but it’s a nice extension of the way the series has been using the pre-credits sequences to do prologues disconnected from the episodes proper.
After that suggestion of dark things just over the horizon, the episode spends surprisingly little time on the process of cooking up drugs and getting them onto the streets, choosing instead to spend time dealing with the aftermath of last week’s death of Spooge, killed at the end of a long standoff with Jesse (Aaron Paul). Jesse’s a nervous wreck about what happened, holing up in his new apartment, dressed in a ridiculous Jack o’Lantern T-shirt and avoiding Walt’s calls. He’s relatively certain that he can’t be tied to what happened, even though he called the cops, but the whole situation has left him obviously squeamish about the human cost of what he’s doing, especially when he considers the kid living in Spooge’s house. Walt, who’s spent much of the season berating Jesse for some of his stupider decisions, takes a moment to consider what’s going on and then does something unexpected: He takes on the more fatherly role Jesse has always seemed to want him to take on.
The bond between Walt and Jesse has been evolving all season, changing from the simple needs-based relationship it was at the show’s beginning (Walter needed someone to connect the meth he could produce to street-level distribution; Jesse needed someone who could cook better meth). Walt’s frustration at Jesse’s intellectual limitations and the way the kid always seems to be bouncing from one drug-fueled bad turn to another has grown and grown, to the point where it seemed as though he was unable to recognize just how much he was hurting Jesse, who really only had Walt to turn to early in the season. Tonight, though, as Walt saw Jesse’s pain, saw the human being still inside of his partner in crime, he both comforted the boy and began launching a plan to build up his confidence again.
As it turns out, most everyone in the Albuquerque drug trade has heard that Spooge died from an ATM to the head sometime around the same time that Jesse was in his house. Naturally, they believe Jesse was responsible, not Spooge’s woman, and when Walt realizes that rumors of Jesse’s hand in Spooge’s death have begun to circulate through the Albuquerque underworld, he does absolutely nothing to quell those rumors (“You didn’t hear it from me,” he tells two of Jesse’s lackeys as they all meet at a museum dedicated to the development of the atomic bomb). Walt realizes more quickly than Jesse that Jesse’s presence at Spooge’s house is going to build up his legend as drug lord badass, and when he goes back to meet with Jesse, he launches into a speech about how Jesse can be a blowfish on the streets, someone who is basically harmless but appears to be much more dangerous than that. The blowfish inflates its own body to frighten off other fish; Jesse, similarly, can inflate his own reputation as a madman who’ll drop an ATM on your head if you don’t pay up to frighten junkies into paying him. Walt sees this all as a way to expand the two’s operation, enter the void left by the death of Tuco in other parts of the city, but he knows he’s only going to be able to work effectively so long as he remains anonymous and so long as people believe Jesse really is the craziest bastard out there.
We’ve gotten hints that Jesse’s relationship with his father has mostly been severed over the course of the series, and we’ve also gotten hints that he views Walt as a bit of a father figure. The show made that explicit tonight, as Walt tells Jesse’s landlady, Jane (Krysten Ritter), that he actually IS Walter Jackson, Jesse’s dad. But those implications were also present in the speeches Walt gave his ad hoc son, speeches that were both weirdly inspirational and sort of insulting (he tells Jesse he’s not all that bright). Hell, Walt even drops in a lesson on basic economics when Jesse questions why they wouldn’t raise prices on their product, like a dad trying to teach an apprentice son the family trade.
The Walt-as-dad moments were some of the nicer references in an episode that was a little too cluttered with them. Walt talks about forming new bonds at an atomic level, and not only does every character form some sort of new bond, but we’re shown, at the atomic bomb museum, just what can happen when those bonds are ripped apart, when, say, a Mexican drug cartel comes gunning for you. The museum is playing a song about a turtle who needs to learn to duck and cover (which sounds like it might be authentic mid-50s educational propaganda played to teach kids the protocol for “surviving” an atomic blast), and we later see a tortoise who’s literally been made into a bomb. I don’t know if the series needs all of these cutesy reference points, though I’ll admit they provide a certain satisfaction on their own once you see how things tie together. I usually prefer my television a little messier, and there were points when “Negro y Azul” felt just a little too sharply like it was trying to tie its symbolic touches up with nice little bows.
All of that feels a little nitpicky, though, in the face of something like that terrifically surreal moment in the desert sun when Hank (Dean Norris), struggling both to cope with emotions he’s keeping deeply buried after his shooting of Tuco and a new job in a new city with new co-workers who don’t regard him as a hero, comes across the head of Tortuga (Danny Trejo, whose character’s name means “The Turtle”), the man he and his colleagues had been dealing with for information earlier (by ordering what the guy wanted out of a Skymall catalog, of all things). The head has been attached to the aforementioned tortoise, made an example of and sent ambling towards the DEA agents. When they try to pick it up, the head explodes, taking out a number of agents, reducing even more to grievously injured men in need of medical attention and leaving Hank (who had to rush back to the car thanks to a wave of nausea) scurrying from downed agent to downed agent, trying to make sense of the new world he’s been dropped into. I have absolutely no idea if the DEA has ever encountered an informant’s head turned into a bomb and strapped to a tortoise (the Skymall thing being true wouldn’t surprise me), but it feels like the sort of darkly mordant detail that completely fits the harsh-light-of-day universe of Breaking Bad.
Hank’s completely at sea in El Paso, where the methods of dealing with informants are foreign to him and where his lack of Spanish language is a hindrance that it just isn’t in Albuquerque. His wife, Marie (Betsy Brandt), can tell that he’s spinning his wheels and unable to articulate quite why. Hank’s bullheadedness, which makes him such a good guy to have in your family, has been carefully built up by a life in one city, and it’s ill-suited to the task at hand in El Paso. He’s going to have to build up a new life, now, form new bonds with new co-workers, and it doesn’t seem likely that he’s going to be able to, with all of the emotional turmoil and cultural differences holding him back.
Finally, there’s Skyler (Anna Gunn), stepping out of the home to regain her old job, even when she’s massively pregnant. She says it’s due to the economy, but her story for why she left the company also shifts depending on whom she’s telling it to. Walt believes she left because the welding the company was doing was causing her health problems, while Marie seems to know another side of the story, involving a co-worker who got a little frisky with Skyler at a company party. Skyler now insists it was just the one time, and he was obviously drunk, and he’s a committed family man with two kids and on and on, but the prevarications begin to become too much, especially when confronted with the guy himself and when he gets her her old job, fancy office and all, back. As it turns out, he’s no longer married, and he just might still have that old drinking problem. And when Skyler is unpacking her belongings into her new office, she takes a long, hard look at a photo of her and Walt before setting it on her desk. After her perhaps too-friendly boss invites her to lunch, she picks it up again and takes another long, hard look at it. It’s easy to completely blame Walt for what’s going on in his marriage, and, indeed, if he hadn’t gone down the path he’s gone down, there would be no lies, and Skyler would feel more secure in him. But now that she’s clearly telling different people different things about how her departure went down and making numerous excuses for just why, exactly, she needs to be going back into this previously bad situation, it’s hard not to feel that she’s at least a LITTLE complicit in what’s happening to her marriage. Birds of a feather and all.
But, of course, it’s Walt who’s pulling all of these strings and trying to stay one step ahead of everybody else. It’s his little speech to Jesse that sets new wheels in motion for their latest business venture. And it’s the false confidence he fills Jesse with that prompts the young man to come clean to Jane about how he’s not really named Jesse Jackson, how Walt isn’t really his dad and then invite her in to watch his new flat screen TV. Jane, in her own way, is just as rootless as Jesse; she’s just channeled her rootlessness into something more societally acceptable (she’s a tattoo artist, or, as Jesse puts it, a “good drawer”). When these two lost people sit down in front of that TV in Jesse’s big, empty apartment on two patio chairs, facing its blue glow, Jesse babbling about how it makes the black look really black, you begin to realize just how alone they are. And then Jane reaches across the gap between their chairs, a gap that’s very small, like the gap between atoms, but might as well be the size of that erupting mushroom cloud, and silently takes Jesse’s hand. Jesse takes hers, and the two face the blue screen, the words “Still Searching” displayed on it. Jesse and Jane ARE still searching for some sort of purpose, but in that moment, they find something worth clinging to. For a little while, at least.
Some other thoughts:
House contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark and co-host of the podcast TV on the Internet. His writing also appears at The AV Club.
Caprica Pilot: A New Chapter for a New Era
By Tony Dayoub
[Caprica debuts in 2010. An extended edition of the pilot will be available on DVD and Digital Download on 04/21/09.]
With the recent demise of the much beloved Battlestar Galactica, this avid TV watcher found himself mourning the loss of its wonderful characters in a way he seldom has before. Perhaps it was because the series reached what is generally rare for television: a satisfying conclusion. I actually found myself wanting to follow the new adventures these characters had set out on in the final minutes of the show. It is fitting that the science fiction series, an allegory for Bush's "War on Terror" era, would wrap up as America enters a new, hopeful, but more opaque era of economic uncertainty. The new prequel spinoff, Caprica, is a chapter in the Galactica saga that captures the feeling, characteristic of the Obama era, of American life at a crossroads.
The opening title card states, "Caprica: 58 Years Before the Fall." It is a world we've seen in glimpses on Galactica, beautiful, glistening buildings forming a gleaming skyline overlooking an ocean. But it is a society on a precipice. It has reached the apex of its civilization and the seeds of its ultimate destruction are being sown right now. It is a world much like our own where there are differing socioeconomic levels because of class and racial bias. And its young people rely on virtual technology to fill the void in their lives where the gradually disintegrating family structure once existed.
The Graystones are representative of just such a dysfunctional family. The patriarch, Daniel (Eric Stoltz), is a Bill Gates-type billionaire genius in the robotics field, struggling to find the missing component necessary to bring his cybernetic life-form nodes to life. Wife Amanda (Paula Malcolmson) is a surgeon. They both have a contentious relationship with their good-hearted but rebellious daughter, Zoe (Alessandra Toreson). Zoe is one of a whole generation of kids that retreat into a virtual world called the V Room, a rave-like atmosphere where one can participate in orgies, Fight Club-like match-ups, or even kill avatars that stand in for people you hate. But Zoe has built a separate room for herself and her friends within the V Room, a spiritual oasis where she and the others can share their newfound monotheistic religion secretly, without being ostracized in Caprica's polytheistic society.
More than that, Zoe, apparently a cybernetics wunderkind, has found a way to download enough of her medical, scholastic, economic, and personal data into her virtual avatar that she has imbued it with life in a way that still eludes her father. So when she is killed in a suicide bombing by her religiously radicalized boyfriend, the Zoe avatar is all that's left of her. Here is a scene where Daniel first meets the Zoe avatar:
Discovering his daughter's creation, Daniel sees a way to both bring Zoe back into the real world, and resolve the issue with his cybernetic life-form nodes, which we'll henceforth call Cylons.
Also killed in the bombing are Joseph Adams' wife and daughter. Adams (Esai Morales) comes from a different planet and background than Graystone. The economically depressed world of Tauron is still crime-ridden as it continues to recover from a civil uprising decades ago, and it supplies Caprica with its farming and labor classes. Joseph emigrated from Tauron as a child, and is now a mob lawyer. His brother Sam (Sasha Roiz) is a hit man—for one of the Tauron mob families that Joseph represents—who promises to find out who was responsible for the bombing.
Daniel and Joseph soon form an unlikely bond over their shared grief in a wonderful sequence where they go to a cafe, and smoke and drink coffee together for the better part of a day without speaking. Daniel shares his discovery about the new AI technology with Joseph. Despite some reluctance, Joseph is willing to see what it can do. But a haunting scene with his daughter's avatar soon makes Joseph call the whole idea an abomination.
Joseph realizes that he must let go of his grief and focus on raising his 11-year-old son. In a portentous scene accentuated by one of composer Bear McCreary's familiar musical motifs from Galactica, Joseph opens up to his son about his background, how he named him William after his own father who died in the uprising, and how he changed their family name from the more ethnic Adama to hide the fact that they are Taurons. William Adama will, of course, grow up to be the protagonist of the previous series.
The events in Caprica cleverly foreshadow much of what happens later in Galactica, while still managing to make a clear break with the mother show. The pilot feels a bit overstuffed with characters and ideas that will certainly be delved into later in the series. This also occurred in Galactica, which didn't really show its potential until its first regular episode, "33." My favorite actress from Deadwood, Paula Malcolmson, doesn't get much to do just yet. And I didn't even mention another powerful actress, Rome's Polly Walker, who plays the sinister leader of the cult behind the bombing, Sister Clarice. She establishes a strong presence in the pilot, but she is tangential to this story at the moment. I have a feeling that her true contribution to the series hasn't yet begun.
The cinematography by Joel Ransom is a lot less vérité than it was on Galactica, setting a much more formal tone. McCreary's score is more lyrical, weaving in more string motifs throughout while avoiding the drums associated with the mother show…until we get a look at the birth of a Cylon where the drums are a welcome callback to Galactica. Also back is production designer Richard Hudolin who remembers that, though this is a prequel, the technology should look newer since this pre-Cylon war society was still a bit more arrogant about its advances. And costume designer Glenne Campbell returns as well, offering some interesting eccentricities in the clothing worn by Capricans, the men wearing fedoras and sporting suits and overcoats much like you'd find in a period piece.
Thematically, Caprica picks up where the epilogue to Galactica's final episode left us, with a society overconfident in its technology and dependent on its consumerist creature comforts, but spiritually bankrupt. This new chapter is far more in keeping with the turbulent and confusing times we live in today. Where Galactica's Cylons and their destruction of the Twelve Colonies were clear stand-ins for 9/11 and Al-Qaeda, Caprica could potentially confront the moral gray areas that arise when we are our own enemy. Our country's decline in power and our decisions to throw multiple rescue plans at the problem to see what sticks is alluded to in Graystone's approach to solving his Cylon development issues. Another theme: The social stunting of our youth and the degree to which it involves computer social networks as a replacement for forming real relationships. Even the spillover of drug violence from Mexico as a result of corruption and economic strife is referred to in the Tauron subplot.
And so the Galactica saga begins to take shape in Caprica. While the show's focus is still a bit scattered, there is a lot of substance to this allegorical look at our increasingly complicated times.
Tony Dayoub considers all manner of films and TV at Cinema Viewfinder.
Friday, April 17, 2009
In Treatment revisited: Week Two
By Libby Hill
At the end of last week’s review, I noticed a tag identifying me as a psychology student. While technically correct, I wanted to clarify my point of view a bit beyond that of an aspiring Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne). For most of my adult life, I’ve bounced from therapist to therapist, the success of my therapy being less a direct result of the quality of professional I was seeing, and more manifesting as a direct corollary of how much I was willing to work in therapy.
So perhaps I’m biased by reality when I watch In Treatment and see groundbreaking results (or the forerunners of such) by clients who not only are resistant to the process, but really would rather not be there whatsoever. “But Libby,” you protest, (Yeah, I’m psychic, it’s a gift.) “Such is the nature of television. The show would be so tedious if it merely detailed the lives of people with issues and a sincere desire to resolve said issues.”
To that I say, "Bah!" (What? I said I was psychic. I never said I was persuasive.)
Regardless of my qualms about the reality of one of the most “real” series on television, week two of In Treatment’s second season was a strong continuation to last week’s openers. Breakdowns to follow:
Dear, dear, Mia (Hope Davis) - who last week only hinted at the crazy she was marginally keeping at bay - revealed this week, to the audience and Paul alike, the depths of some of her delusions. We find out that her meeting with Paul last week - along with memories of a 20 year-old pregnancy - started a series of events that left Mia reeling with revelations of near infertility and a newly-ended adulterous affair.
Mia insists that ending her pregnancy all those years ago was Paul’s doing, a decision that she’s still bemoaning, especially in light of her recent fertility issues. But ultimately, it seems that what Mia is suffering from is not some booming biological clock but rather a bad case of loneliness. She’s desperate for a relationship, desperate for a child, desperate for anything that won’t leave her. So much so that she has convinced herself that her father is her lone ally and was always her lone ally, even back when she was an unmarried, pregnant, aspiring law student.
He was even so supportive that he scheduled her abortion FOR her. Mia, so isolated in her world of corporate dominance, foists all of her sublimated anger and disappointment onto Paul, because he’s the one that abandoned her, as she clings to her father, her lone port in a storm, regardless of the part he truly played in her abortion decision.
The show also makes mention of the secrets kept between fathers and daughters, leading one to wonder if Mia’s storyline isn’t going to delve into some sort of long-hidden abuse, a turn that would dismay me, more than surprise me. Abuse, specifically sexual, seems to be a catch-all diagnosis in most portrayals of therapy on television, so that In Treatment would wait to address such a case until season two is sort of unprecedented. All the same, as a personal preference, I’m always more intrigued by those individuals whose baggage is that of subtle mis-parenting, as opposed to the blatant treachery of abuse.
Week one’s standout character returns to Paul’s office this week with new complications to her burgeoning disease drama. As the episode unfolds, we learn that in the past week, April (Alison Pill) has reached out to her ex-boyfriend, on just a friendly level of course, but that the encounter ended with them falling into each other’s arms. It was only afterward that April reveals that she’s ill and Kyle reveals that he’s engaged to his new girlfriend Sienna. Complicating matters even further is that Kyle tells Sienna about April’s revelation and privileged Sienna offers to pay for April’s treatments.
This olive branch only serves to outrage April, who uses this perceived indignity to further facilitate her ongoing game of emotional tug-of-war between herself and everyone in her life. It’s hard to pinpoint what about the seemingly generous offer drives April to such anger. It may be that she feels pitied or patronized by Sienna. Or maybe she’s just angry at herself for reaching out to Kyle and letting him get close to her again. It’s clear that Paul senses this true nature of her unrest, even asking her if ultimately, she’d rather die than let herself appear weak.
Pill is again phenomenal, imbuing her rage with an underlying vulnerability, even while subtly manipulating Paul into letting her use his phone at the top of the episode. Even Paul is helpless when faced with the possibility of a more relaxed and open April and he acquiesces in short order.
“Wednesday’s child is full of woe …” Boy howdy, is he ever. This week’s Oliver (Aaron Shaw) episode is a distinct step up from the premiere week’s decidedly mediocre showing. From the opening shots showcasing the family sitting together on the waiting room couch, each lost in their own world, each scored by their own iPod, to the penultimate shots featuring the strained family leaving, again, together, yet still separately, the anguish of the broken family radiates. And none is so pained as Oliver.
Perched in Paul’s chair, he recounts the horrors of his day-to-day life, from falling asleep in class to the hurtful actions of his peers. Feet searching for their footing, he repeats his heartbreaking mantra time and time again when questioned by Paul as to why he doesn’t share his pain with his parents, “If I tell my mom, she’ll call my dad, and then they’ll fight.”
Oliver is a child in crisis. He is caught in the middle in every metaphorical sense, but beyond that, even in the literal sense. Every scene has Oliver flanked by either parent, neither willing to give up ground to the other, so they remain mired in perpetual orbit around their faltering son.
Bess (Sherri Saum) and Luke (Russell Hornsby), while speaking with Paul privately, continue to war. It becomes increasingly clear that Bess is struggling with the process considerably more than her husband. Driven by guilt and second-guessing or perhaps just desperate to go back to the life she used to know, Bess suggests that, really, reconciliation would be what’s best for Oliver, regardless of whatever problems they may have as a couple. The news, then, that Luke has started seeing someone new is more than she can bear, and she bolts, only to be reined in by the fact that Oliver wants to go home with his father for the first time in ages.
All in all, the episode was strong, if a bit disheartening. It remains unclear how this broken family will ever find any semblance of peace, especially with all the members seeming to need intensive therapy of their own, but I'm more interested to see how Paul tries to help them than I was last week. The question of how they will come together is more potent than the question of how the parents will screw up Oliver.
The generational divide is difficult to navigate, especially if you belong to a generation as self-involved as the one I belong to. Which is to say that last week, in my haste to dismiss Walter (John Mahoney) as one-note and vaguely grating, I forgot to consider the fact that he is from a vastly different era than myself. Born in a time where men kept their emotions close to their chest, Walter carries with him the burdens of a childhood filled with loss. It is only now, when his well-structured, insulated world threatens to crumble around him that he finds himself unable to process even simple stresses in his life.
We learn that since last week, Walter has suffered from another anxiety attack, this time, though he is loathe to acknowledge the connection, it is shortly after learning that a long-term, roughly contemporary employee has died. It’s then that Walter regales Paul with tales of several people who have, to a certain extent, just disappeared from his life. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, the amount of anxiety Walter feels with regards to his absent daughter.
The episode ends rather simply with a rough solution, a seeming answer to the source of Walter’s anxiety attacks, but there are still five episodes remaining. Clearly, Paul and Walter have much left to delve into, but where this source material will come from remains to be seen. Though hesitant at first, I’m now intrigued by how the show is fleshing the character out.
From first to worst pretty much sums up my thoughts on the Gina (Dianne Wiest) episode this week. The relationship laden with so much dramatic potential last week felt merely weighted down this week. Evidently, the deconstruction of one Paul Weston is not as fulfilling as I previously imagined it would be and what once seemed promising now seems pedantic.
Forgive me, if you will, for being not even a little bit interested in the Tammy Kent-laden back story. Beyond the fact that last week’s meeting was so much unbelievable happenstance, but the fact, now, that she played a KEY ROLE in Paul’s adolescence and upbringing just smacks of complete implausibility. How fortuitous that she happened to occupy the appointment time directly before his!
I understand that his childhood holds the key to what makes Paul who he is: the savior complex, the complicated women, the fear of walking in his father’s footsteps, but I just can’t bring myself to care. Perhaps I’m being too harsh on the show. Perhaps this is a testament to me writing the review after a week of mulling the episode in my head. Or perhaps the show is just really fumbling this storyline. You tell me.
Random thoughts:
Libby Hill is a psych student and co-host of the podcast TV on the Internet.
The Criterion Collection # 414: Two-Lane Blacktop
By Chris Gisonny
[Two-Lane Blacktop screens tonight and tomorrow at midnight at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema in Manhattan. Click venue name for more information.]
Cult director Monte Hellman lets the motors do the talking in Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). Poignant and unique, this road movie cruises across the border of entertainment into the realm of art. The film evolved from a screenplay penned by novelist Rudolph Wurlitzer and features performances by singer-songwriter James Taylor and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. The great Warren Oates, the sole professional actor in the main cast, delivers a performance that not only approaches brilliance, but speeds clear past it with a raucous howl. The sparse plot leaves plenty of room for meditative long takes, gorgeous shots, and intimate monologues. The Driver (Taylor) and the Mechanic (Wilson) drag race for cash in the Car (a ’55 Chevy). They pick up the Girl (Laurie Bird), a possibly under-aged free spirit who adds some tension to their quiet co-existence. The manic GTO (Oates) menaces them playfully in his slick 1970 Pontiac until they all meet at a gas station and agree to a cross-country race. They mail their pink slips to an address in D.C. and the first to arrive gets the other guy’s car. The film’s collaborators alchemized this simple premise into a complex work that explores the notion of competition and its failure to provide a lasting escape from an existence often stalled by malfunctions no mechanic can fix.
Emotion is rather shy in this film; it shivers in the Driver’s cold eyes, lounges in the Mechanic’s relaxed body, laughs behind GTO’s flimsy mask. The Driver is an ascetic, alone with the road no matter who surrounds him, a hermit behind the wheel, in communion with his ascending speed. “You can never go fast enough,” he scolds a naive GTO. There is no heater in the Car because, he explains, “it slows it down.” The Mechanic is his loyal guide, typically quiet but prepared to perform surgery on the machine’s inner workings if anything threatens its thunderous power. The Mechanic fixes not only the Car—he uses his handiest tool, his affability, to ease the tension between the other characters. The Girl is a drifter in everything she does. She drifts from the Mechanic to the Driver. She drifts from the Chevy to the Pontiac. In the end, she just drifts away.
While the Driver, the Mechanic, and the Girl lack personal histories, GTO serves as their comical opposite. In contrast to his reserved opponents, this man is a poet, spouting such gems as, “Color me gone, baby” and “If I’m not grounded pretty soon, I’m gonna go into orbit.” With a kaleidoscope of fictional anecdotes spinning inside his mind, GTO recites a different story about his past to each of the unimpressed hitchhikers he picks up. His consistent inconsistencies find their reflection in his wardrobe—he wears the same style sweater without fail but every time he appears the sweater is a different color, appropriate for man who is always the same and always different. Collectively, GTO’s lies conspire to provide us with the truth: He is a middle-aged man desperate to escape from himself, racing against his disappointing past for the prize of a fulfilling future.
The characters speed through epic wide-screen compositions that render the commonplace profound. Headlights soar through the dark like shooting stars. Landscapes unfold solemnly beyond voyeuristic windshields. Greasy diners and gas stations blossom along the side of the road. The visuals find worthy competition in the soundtrack, a symphony of baritone motors, falsetto breaks, tuneful horns, humming engines, and a harmony of lonely voices. Music leaks out of radios and characters sing along as if they had finally found a friend. Despite all the fuss about the cars, the camera and the sound equipment are the greatest machines at work.
Critics often affix the word “existential” to Two-Lane Blacktop because its stylistic austerity easily invites the label. A look beyond the stark visuals and minimal dialogue, however, reveals that Two-Lane Blacktop primarily concerns competition and its tendency to veer from its rightful course and become ubiquitous in the characters’ lives. Tension between competing elements defines the film. It is an American road movie that looks like a European art film. It is a slow-paced movie about speed. The characters strive for both solitude and camaraderie. The Driver lusts for the Girl but is married to the Road. GTO is desperate to communicate but avoids the truth. The Driver and the Mechanic compete for the affections of the Girl and then GTO competes with both of them. It is a film of many thematic layers competing to rise to its stylistic surface.
The other major theme—obsession—thrives in the subculture of car freaks who haunt the characters along their frequently stilted journey. The Driver and the Mechanic obsess over the Car like finicky parents and exchange obscure technical lingo as if it is the only language they speak. They mingle at racetracks and street races with other car nuts. Minor characters lingering in gas stations and parking lots marvel at the Car and enthusiastically inquire about its engine power. Scouting suckers for a race, the Mechanic notes the attributes of the assembled cars with the knowing air of a scholar. These esoteric rituals might stir vague feelings of recognition in the film buff, as if by viewing this film the obsessive cinéaste in question had wandered into a house of mirrors that distorts his reflection and renders it somewhat comic. “They’re not for you,” GTO warns the Girl of the two gear-heads she’s riding with. “All they think about is cars.” Some of us think only about films.
The film’s finale finds GTO offering a lift to two soldiers on leave. He provides them with his final lie, the most moving and pathetic of them all because he pieces it together with actual fragments from the film’s story, suggesting that he might have cannibalized bits of disappointing truths for the construction of his previous lies. Following the painful fiction he offers the soldiers, he explains that there is nothing like building an old car from scratch and beating a Detroit machine in a race. “That’ll give you a set of emotions that’ll stay with you. Know what I mean? Those satisfactions are permanent.” He disappears in his yellow chariot and we visit the Driver one last time as he awaits the starting signal for yet another race. A peaceful silence descends and places us within his devout concentration. In what might be one of the greatest final shots in history, as the Driver accelerates silently towards the horizon, the film stutters, halts on a freeze-frame, and dissolves from the heat of the projector, punctuating the film with a poignancy only cinema can provide. It is as if the characters refused to stop moving, so the movie itself felt obliged to. Two-Lane Blacktop proves that great films can spark the same set of emotions GTO referenced, the ones that stay with you. Those satisfactions are indeed permanent.
IMAGE/SOUND/EXTRAS: The Criterion Collection presents Two-Lane Blacktop in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio in a digital transfer supervised by Monte Hellman. The sound is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1. Two commentary tracks accompany the film, the first a conversation between Hellman and filmmaker Allison Anders that primarily focuses on details of the production, the second a conversation between screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer and film professor David Meyer that is more analytical. In addition to the standard rare production stills, screen tests, and original theatrical trailer, Disc Two contains many filmed conversations between the collaborators that provide the viewer with everything they would ever want to know about the film. The production was an interesting one—Hellman filmed the scenes in order so the crew essentially embarked on the very same cross-country journey as the characters and he only gave the actors portions of the script as filming progressed, a decision that must have added to the film’s natural feel but apparently frustrated James Taylor to no end.
The DVD booklet contains an interesting and informative essay by Kent Jones, an enthusiastic blurb by Tom Waits, a list of Richard Linklater’s very amusing reasons for loving the film, and a piece by Michael Goodwin about the production originally published in Rolling Stone in 1970. The most interesting inclusion in this Criterion package is Wurlitzer’s screenplay, which Esquire had originally published in its entirety with the declaration that Two-Lane Blacktop was the “Film of the Year” before it had even been released, dooming its chances with a counterculture audience anticipating another Easy Rider. The screenplay features many scenes that didn’t make it to the final cut, providing a context for certain sequences that might seem idiosyncratic but have merely been stripped of the passages that explain them, which indicates that the editing also played a huge role in creating the film’s atmosphere. The screenplay and the many extra features enhance the experience of this incredible work, unappreciated on its release and largely unavailable for years.
Chris Gisonny blogs at What is the Fourth Dimension?.
Links for the Day (April 17, 2009)
1. Okie doke. The news is a bit old, but TCM came up with their 15 most-influential films of all time to celebrate their 15th anniversary. It's a solid list, if definitely geared towards making people argue. Roger Ebert had a similar piece almost 10 years ago.
["Arguably the most influential science fiction film ever made, Metropolis has inspired everything from video games to rock videos to comic books. Its futuristic sets helped spread the popularity of art deco, while the gadget-filled lab of mad scientist Rotwang has become a sci-fi staple. Eugene Schufftan's special effects work set new standards for the craft. And Gottfried Huppertz' original music, with leitmotifs for key characters and themes, was one of the first modern motion picture scores. Beyond its technical and design influences, Metropolis virtually invented the genre of dystopian science fiction on screen: the creation of bleak visions of a future still afflicted with contemporary problems has become the heart of numerous films. The plot, created by director Fritz Lang and his screenwriter-wife Thea von Harbou, revolves around class struggle, anticipating decades of dangerous visions in the struggle to define humanity. The film's dehumanized laborers are the spiritual ancestors of the affectless astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey as much as the villainous, sexy Robot Maria would give birth to the runaway replicants in Blade Runner and the tragically human Cylons of Battlestar Galactica. "]
2. Woody Allen Says American Apparel Is Harassing Him. And no one harasses Woody Allen!
["A clothing company known for its racy ads is fighting a $10 million lawsuit brought by Woody Allen, arguing that it can't have damaged his reputation by using his image because the film director has already ruined it himself."]
3. Look, dudes, I don't let my gustatory enthrallments pollute the water here at the House all that often, but you gotta admit that cutting metal with bacon is pretty great.
["Cucumber is an *excellent* base for these things because it's air-tight, moist (to resist fire), easy to core, and has a rubbery skin that makes an air tight seal. About the only thing wrong with cucumbers is that they are not made of bacon. (I have a thing called a "fruit coring tool" which is like a very small round cookie cutter on a stick. You drill it down the middle of the cucumber until it comes out the other end, then stuff the cucumber with the chosen fuel.)"]
4. Bill O'Reilly and Co. Investigate the Nintendo Craze. Over at Gawker, they're checking out the Fox News host back in his "What's the matter with kids today?" days at Inside Edition.
["In 1988, a young Bill O'Reilly and his Inside Edition team tried to answer the question: "What the hey is this 'Mario Brothers' craze sweeping the nation?" They failed, of course. Entertainingly!"]
5. Seems every few years, there's another story about how many people have listed their official religion as "Jedi," and this is the 2009 version, only it involves Scotland and cops! Love that passive voice at sentence's end.
["Eight police officers serving with Scotland's largest force listed their official religion as Jedi in voluntary diversity forms, it has emerged."]
Quote of the Day:
Moving pictures helped us get through to september.
They made a movie about me and you.
It was half nude and half true."
—The Hold Steady (See 'em at Coachella, everybody!)
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): If you're a bigtime fan of newspaper comic strips, you've probably heard of Mort Walker's weird, short-lived, fourth-wall-breaking meta-strip Sam's Strip, now collected in a book by Fantagraphics!
Clip of the Day: Here's some stop-motion animation to make your weekend pleasant.
"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.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Lost Thursdays: Season 5, Ep. 13, "Some Like It Hoth"
By Todd VanDerWerff
Father issues are to the Lost flashback what cancer is to a diagnosis on House. There’s always a tumor somewhere on that show, and if someone has emotional trauma in their past on Lost, it almost always stems from their dad doing them wrong somewhere along the line. One could type up an exact recounting of whose father wronged them how, but that would take up the whole of this piece, and no one would want to read that. Suffice it to say that when Lost confirmed what we all suspected and let us know out front the parentage of Miles Straum, we longtime fans probably braced ourselves for another vaguely dissatisfying hour of a character working through a variety of complexes all linked to the man who walked out on them. Or, y’know, threw them out a window and paralyzed them. Whatever.
Actually, it’s not just Lost that suffers from an overabundance of father issues. It’s TELEVISION that suffers from an overabundance of father issues. Despite the old joke about the man laying down on the psychiatrist’s couch and the shrink saying, “Tell me about your mother” still garnering laughs on hoary sketch comedy shows, the number of significant drama characters with mother issues since Hill Street Blues ushered in the modern age of TV drama is incredibly small. Off the top of my head, I can think of Tony Soprano and … uh … Don Draper, maybe? His issues are really more all about just how much he hated EVERYthing about his upbringing, so the fact his mother was a prostitute seems to have as little to do with that as anything. Oh, there was Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica! But outside of that? Having a little trouble.
If no other shows on TV had father issues, though, Lost would more than pick up the slack. Only Claire (Emilie de Ravin) seemed to have a significant problem with her mother, and that was just as much stemming from the fact that she (say it with me now) Never Really Knew Her Father, who, incidentally, turned out to be Jack’s (Matthew Fox) shitty dad as well. Sawyer’s (Josh Holloway) real dad was a bastard, and his surrogate dad was Locke’s (Terry O’Quinn) terrible dad, the aforementioned guy who tossed Locke from aforementioned window. And those are just the people with REALLY bad father issues. It’s not even dealing with Hurley (Jorge Garcia) trying to handle that his dad left when he was a kid and only came back when he struck it rich, which is psychologically scarring but is no “My Dad Threw Me out a Window: The John Locke Story.”
I’m being a bit cheeky, obviously, but “Some Like It Hoth,” written by Melinda Hsu Taylor and Greggory Nations and directed by Jack Bender, inspires that sort of goofiness. It’s a pretty lighthearted episode at its chewy center, which is sort of nice in a season that’s been filled with Locke going through the stations of the cross on the way to his suicide and Ben (Michael Emerson) being judged for all of his misdeeds. I doubt “Some Like It Hoth” will make anyone’s top ten lists at the end of the series or even the season, but it’s a sweetly enjoyable hour of television, a reminder of when Lost would do off-format hours that felt more like little comedies than anything else, like the deeply divisive “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead” in season three. In fact, I don’t have a great deal to SAY about “Hoth,” which only offered up the mythological geekiness in pellet-sized form, like a season two holdover, and delved deeply into the past of a character we knew little about prior to its airing, like a season one holdover. Despite the time travel trappings and the fact that it took place in the glory days of the DHARMA Initiative, “Hoth” was maybe the first episode this season to really feel like it belonged to the early days of the show, which is a fairly impressive feat, all things considered.
But, OK, what actually HAPPENED in “Some Like It Hoth”? Not a lot, actually. Miles (Ken Leung) was recruited to deliver a package to Radzinsky (Eric Lange) out in the middle of nowhere. Radzinsky sent Miles off with a dead body, and Miles asked the body what had REALLY happened and gained the insight that the dude’s metal filling loosed itself from his tooth and shot into his brain (ew), killing him. Miles then took off for the in-construction Orchid with Hurley on board (he had to deliver some sandwiches), where the two ran into Miles’ dad, Pierre Chang (Francois Chau), who then took them to the in-construction Swan station, where Hurley got to watch the numbers he freaked out over so much get drilled into the side of the hatch. Along the way, Hurley tried to get Miles to bond with his dad to no avail, but the things he said had some effect, as Miles got all teary when he saw baby Miles hanging with his dad. Then Pierre came out and was all, “Miles, I need you,” and Miles TOTALLY THOUGHT HE MEANT SOMETHING ELSE, but really he just wanted him to go and pick up the scientists coming from Ann Arbor aboard the sub, and one of them was Daniel (Jeremy Davies). Awwwww. And, also, yay, Daniel!
The above was pretty much it for the episode’s A-story (there was also a flashback-driven B-story and a much more traditionally Lost-ish C-story), but the above also doesn’t capture how genuinely amusing much of the storyline was. Humor is one of the tools in the Lost toolbox that the show too rarely goes for. The actors are funny people, and there are a lot of characters who can BE funny under the right circumstances, but the show plays everything so portentiously that there’s rarely room for much humor, unless Hurley’s in the scene or unless Sawyer is giving everyone nicknames. This episode, though, was one of the funnier Losts ever, from lines like “The ditch had a gun” to Hurley’s idea that he could write The Empire Strikes Back since in 1977, George Lucas would just start to think about Star Wars sequels, and he had seen the thing enough times already (but the idea that he could make improvements? Blasphemy!).
In general, pairing Hurley and Miles up has been comedy gold on the few occasions it’s happened in the past, and it was again here. Similarly, tossing the stiffly awkward Pierre in the van with the two (and watching Miles recoil as he realized the kind of music his dad liked) offered plenty of funny business for the actors to play. One of the best things was the way the show played Miles revealing Pierre was his dad. Since so many fans had guessed as much so long ago, the show just tossed it off but also added the amusing conceit that Miles had figured it out on the third day in the ‘70s, when his mom had gotten in line behind him at lunch. Good time travel humor!
The B-story flashbacks were serviceable as Lost-style, “Miles Straum? THIS is your LIFE” flashbacks go, and Leung is a solid enough actor that he was able to play things that were a little ridiculous on the face (like Miles coming to his mother’s deathbed and trying to get her to tell him all about his powers) and make them affecting. It was also nice to see Naomi (Marsha Thomason) turn up again in the flashbacks, as well as Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris as a concerned dad who just wanted to make sure his dead son knew he loved him. Having Miles go back to return the guy’s money and lecture him about how he should have told his son he loved him all along was a BIT too on the nose (Miles has father issues, OMG!), but I liked the earlier scene between the two, where we suspected Miles might be faking and the way the later scene let us know that Miles didn’t always practice being a psychic in the most reputable way possible.
Miles’ flashbacks also had a couple of mythological nuggets in them. For starters, the kinda shifty guy who’s teamed up with the new arrivals on the Island in the present day (they of the cryptic questions about the statue’s shadow) gets a name (Bram, oh, and he’s played by Brad Henke), and we also get the sense that not only is this, indeed, yet another faction struggling for control of the Island (since they’re not aligned with Widmore and don’t seem to be in league with Ben), but they’re also incredibly similar to some sort of religion with the Island as its focal point. Earlier in the season, I speculated that the story of the Oceanic Six and Locke returning to the Island was essentially a religious pilgrimage, but it sure seems like this new group has taken that concept to an extreme new level. Also, Naomi took Miles to “speak” with a dead body, who offered us tantalizing hints that Widmore was actually the one behind the faked Oceanic 815 crash (one of the less pressing questions in the show’s mythology but present nonetheless), not Ben. None of these pieces add up to a coherent whole, but they contribute to one of my favorite concepts in the series – the idea that the Island is a lost Shangri La for many, many people in our real world, who mostly do their dealings in secret but are always, always lusting to return to its splendor.
The big development in the episode, I suspect, will stem from the fact that Miles being called away to deal with Radzinsky’s problems meant that he didn’t get time to erase the tapes showing Sawyer and Kate (Evangeline Lilly) delivering the injured Lil’ Ben to the Others. These, of course, were found by Phil (Patrick Fischler), so Sawyer had to knock Phil out and tie him up (loved the look of placid acceptance on Juliet’s (Elizabeth Mitchell) face when Sawyer asked her to get the rope). Sawyer was able to keep up his front of being head of security Jim LaFleur for three years until Jack, Kate, Sayid (Naveen Andrews) and Hurley returned and ruined everything, mostly just by being there. When well-meaning Kate went to tell Roger that his son would be fine and he quickly got suspicious, it seemed just another chapter in a long-running story of Kate messing up whatever she touches, but Jack, of all people, managed to smooth over the waters through some strategically placed words in Roger’s ear. Jack’s not exactly a model citizen in his DHARMA guise, but he’s also not trying to tell everyone what to do, probably a good idea when Sawyer’s kept everyone so safe for so long. Now, however, with Phil on to him, it seems likely it will be a sprint to a point where the conveniently returned Daniel can get everyone who belongs in 2007 (including the still-missing Sayid) back to the future.
As much as this plotline seems to point the way to the season’s end game (and there are only four hours spread over three episodes left), the best thing about “Some Like It Hoth” was the way it gave us insight into Miles, a previously entertaining but unexplored character, without getting too into its own importance. Just seeing Miles and Hurley drive around and compare their speaking-to-dead-people powers was fun, but to have it capped by Hurley rubbing in that Miles was just jealous because Hurley’s power was better was the perfect capper. I don’t want Lost to be funny every week or anything (anybody remember how The X-Files turned into a comedy for the first half of its sixth season for no real reason?), but having an off-format episode like this every once in a while can be a refreshing change of pace from the usual pell-mell forward momentum.
Just so long as there aren’t any more characters with father issues.
Some other thoughts:
House contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark and co-host of the podcast TV on the Internet. His writing also appears at The AV Club.
Links for the Day (April 16th, 2009)
1. Illustrating Death and Taxes via ANIMAL New York. Something about yesterday, I guess. After the jump you can play with the image yourself.
["Today you were supposed to pay your taxes and this handy image nicely details how the government plans on wasting all that money. "]
***
2. Hey film blog nerds, do you remember Andy Horbal? Well, he's got yet another new blog. And his latest post is an update on the custom Google search engine he put together called Film Blogs, Etc. Click through to see his list of sites searched, and, you know, to bookmark this tool. It's cool.
["A few years ago I put together a Google custom search engine called Film Blogs, Etc. that I remain quite pleased with, and that I use all the time. It includes a good mix of high-quality web-based publications that approach film from a variety of angles. A number of these sites cover new movies, often in the form of festival dispatches, making this a good resource for finding information about films that haven’t yet garnered enough reviews to appear on sites like Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes, and the online film journals and blogs by Film Studies academics that it includes make it a nice complement to scholarly databases like the FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals and the Film Literature Index Online."]
3. This should probably be the number one link, but, well, I went for the joke to lead. Thus, now, third: there's a new issue of Senses of Cinema. My buddy Darren Hughes is all over it, as he notes. There's also a typically great Tag Gallagher piece called Why Samuel Fuller? Our quote is from that essay.
["We are programmed, but try to be heroes nevertheless, and Fuller’s camera looks up at us, isolated unhappily against the sky. There is pretence, too, that Truth is in front of us, that film shows it (“This is History!”, Fuller announces, often with dates written on the screen), and that Truth only needs good intentions (“The press is good or evil according to those who direct it”, Park Row tells us). “I saw film!”, a German boy exclaims, saying how he learned of the death camps, and Fuller, like Rossellini, dreamed of saving the world by filming the encyclopædia."]
4. This bit at The A.V. Club about an online Book Club sounds promising.
["How does it work? It’s remarkably simple. Each month, a member of our blue-ribbon panel of writers—Donna Bowman, Zack Handlen, Noel Murray, Leonard Pierce, Tasha Robinson, Ellen Wernecke, and myself—will choose a book to discuss. Four weeks later, we’ll reconvene to talk about the book in a series of posts, but not just among ourselves. We’ll be paying particular attention to points raised in the comments section and incorporating these in our discussion. Then, at the end of the week, we’ll be hosting a live chat about our selection. In short, we want to recreate the experience of a book club here at The A.V. Club. (Except for the wine and cheese; you’ll have to supply your own.)"]
5. Patton Oswalt has some ideas about Jason Statham. Our quote is just a hook. Cuz Patton goes further. (This one's for Keith.)
["I'm buying THE BANK JOB and DEATHRACE on iTunes today. After CRANK, Mr. Statham can count on my $10 every time he makes a movie. If someone figures out how to make a movie for $8, and it stars Jason Statham, then they're guaranteed a $2 profit."]
Quote of the Day:
— Walter Benjamin
Image of the Day: Raquel Welch (on cross). Get yours today! [via BoingBoing]
Clip of the Day: All the right nerds got on this before we did. My boy Kasman showed it to me this afternoon. I then saw it on my own via Cargo. It's David Lynch's video for a Moby song called "Shot In The Back of the Head" (as the video informs you below).
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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 keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
And A Day: Forever
By Lauren Wissot
While a recent slate of American fiction film directors, including Lance Hammer, Ramin Bahrani and Kelly Reichardt, grab the public’s imagination on these shores by making the intricacies of everyday life riveting onscreen, Lima-born/Rome-educated/Amsterdam-residing director Heddy Honigmann is quietly doing the same in documentary form with Forever, just released on DVD (click title for more information) to coincide with her latest work, Oblivion, premiering at Film Forum. Who would have thought that a slow-paced, poetic meditation on France’s famed Père-Lachaise cemetery could be so edge-of-your-seat engrossing?
It's a testament to skills that go beyond that of a filmmaker, though Honigmann’s mastery of craft is abundantly clear in the fixed and methodical camerawork that floats about the Père-Lachaise grounds like an inquisitive spirit (yet keeps a respectful long and medium shot distance from its visitors), and in editing that alternates meticulously composed frames of the gorgeous graves with straightforward interviews with the living who together make up the cemetery “community.” But what sets Honigmann wholly apart is her childlike curiosity, her ability to actively listen, her bravery in not having a story to tell, but a story to find. This is fearless filmmaking at its finest.
Because Honigmann is in a constant state of discovery, the audience becomes captivated as well. In lieu of the final resting place of Jim Morrison—who is only referenced by an old woman visiting her late husband (“He’s with Jim Morrison now!” she wryly exclaims) and via an apropos shot of “The End” scrawled on a headstone before the end credits—Honigmann visits the gravesite of an Iranian writer. There the director gets an immigrant cab driver to sing a Persian tune for her after delivering an in-depth monologue on the author’s importance to Iran and to him personally as an artist. Innocently and non-intrusively she asks one elderly lady about her beloved husband, and is treated to the woman’s vivid and frighteningly immediate recollections of fleeing from Franco and her Spanish homeland, how that experience caused her to give up on religion because it taught her that “a priest can kill.” Honigmann even expands her view beyond the cemetery, following one visitor all the way to the Louvre where she discusses a portrait by Ingres of a girl who died and is buried near the master painter at the cemetery. “The form takes precedence over reality,” she says of the picture. Honigmann herself is not afraid to penetrate through those layers that make up images.
It is the filmmaker’s profound humanity that not only gives her work a quality of magical realism, but allows her to connect with her living subjects—as deeply as they, in turn, connect with the dead whose spirits are alive and well. Through the living, she’s able to visualize the essence of Chopin who lives on in the heart of the Asian pianist who visits his grave, practically allowing us to see the composer’s soul light up her face as she channels him through her fingertips during a recital. With breathtaking openness, Honigmann asks, “What did your father love?” to an Armenian woman who’s been cleaning her dad’s gravesite every week for nearly ten years. The revelations to be unearthed at Père-Lachaise have a vital living quality; the man whose “tear ducts are blocked,” and who rhapsodizes at Modigliani’s grave about the importance of faces to the work of his inspiration, just happens to be an embalmer.
Lacking any preconceived notions the director blindly follows two blind men home to listen to “Les Diaboliques” before visiting the grave of Simone Signoret, and later trails another gent to hear of how his hatred of Proust turned to love, and finally into a passion for creating graphic novels of his books. With the same intimacy of the cemetery guide who touches the last time-faded remnants of an unknown writer’s poetry (which are inscribed in the granite of her tomb), Honigmann reaches out to her subjects both living and dead. “True life is art,” the Proust fan says to Honigmann's lens. It’s this life force that continues to give art its power to move us long after the artist’s own life has gone. Through art, emotional connection springs eternal.
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 (April 15th, 2009)
1. I've always loved this "group project" essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Ehrenstein and Raymond Durgnat called Obscure Objects of Desire: A Jam Session on Non-Narrative. JR reprints it at his website.
["JONATHAN ROSENBAUM: To broach a subject and isolate a problem that most film criticism represses, stumbles over, or refuses to acknowledge, preferring to stick to the authoritarian guidelines of the synopsis and the plot summary. “Telling a story” — the task that for many critics is the only game in town twenty- four hours a day, 365 days a year — becomes a singular grid through which all the diverse structures and operations of movies can theoretically be apprehended, codified, and converted into meanings. The implicit suggestion that nothing important can elude this structural model of plot — acting, editing, direction, theme, social relevance — becomes a self-serving prophecy that freezes film analysis into a monotonous treadmill of tautologies. The question is, does this correspond invariably to the way that nonspecialized viewers look at movies, or is it a model that exists in order to facilitate the critic’s work? The synopsis that is handed out at press screenings only to be regurgitated or adapted into reviews (and related marketing devices) clearly bypasses a complex set of experiences that every spectator has, but few are able to articulate in critical frameworks."]
2. David Hudson (of course) tips us to the fact that Movieline is back in an online-only form that looks surprisingly WordPress-y, but, naturally, very classy as well. Explosions are classy right?
["Audiences like to complain that a trailer gives all the movie’s best jokes away, but we think the same could be said about its explosions being spoiled. We took a look at five of the most combustible summer movie trailers to see what impressions we could extract (using a pincer-equipped bomb squad robot, of course)."]
3. I know you're probably sick of it already but here's a couple of late entries in the "nope" category for Observe and Report. First, Vadim over at GreenCine Daily. Second, Koresky at Reverse Shot. I haven't seen the flick, but interest has waned ever since I read Manohla Dargis' angry notice and my friend Glenn's "who cares" post. It's moments like these when I realize just how silly this hobby-profession can be. Our quote is from Koresky.
["Not every chintzy Hollywood comedy that comes down the pike need be held up as an example of the State of Contemporary Entertainment, but a film like Jody Hill’s pretend-flippant, zeitgeist-baiting Observe and Report practically begs for serious consideration. And who am I not to take the bait? And since the film is as assaultive and glib as it wants to be, I’ll lower myself to its level right up front and directly state that Hill’s proudly “dark,” emptily “provocative” Seth Rogen vehicle is shocking only in its blatant contemptuousness for suburban America, not for its silly, prurient plot contrivances and slickly packaged audience goosing. Even if Hill (whose prior film, The Foot Fist Way, has its passionate defenders, but just got deleted from my Netflix queue) aims for some sort of tacky commentary on warped machismo, in which a mall security cop’s swaggering delusions of grandeur eventually spiral out of control and wreak havoc on those around him, his message, as it were, gets lost in a tired, generic movie language. Not just failing to subvert the basics of film to get his point across, Hill isn’t even sophisticated or daring enough to meld his movie’s ghastly shocks with the ingredients of veritable comedy. These days, shock factor trumps careful comic calculation: why mount a successful joke when you can just flash a penis onscreen and be called “visionary” and “raw”?"]
4. To keep it within my little network, and branching a bit from that Rogen guy, Daniel Kasman's little essay on Adventureland has me wishing I could see that sooner rather than later. And, here I go again, Glenn's Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report this week was dope. Our quote is part of GK's lead.
["One might have assumed at the time that Losey was thus perfectly positioned to bound from strength to strength. But his could not be called a fluent career. Late in the Milne interview, he alludes to working with Tennessee Williams; "Well, that sounds promising," one might have said at the time. However, the result turned out to be the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor-starring Boom!, an multi-leveled disaster that John Waters has called "the best failed art film ever." It is not available on DVD. However, its followup Secret Ceremony, starring Taylor but not Burton (and despite that, some wag at the time tarred Losey as "the house director for the Burton-Taylors") is, and it's a fascinating mish-mash."]
5. Today is the final day in the regular season of the NBA. A lot of people who read this blog probably do not care. But I do. So there. It's been a fun season, somewhat unpredictable and surprising, though when you think about it, it's not all that out of left field for the Lakers and the Cavaliers to be headed on what some might call a collision course with destiny. And, please, remember: there's the interminable divisional playoffs to power through before any Finals talk gets serious. The East got a lot better this year, it's true, and I probably watched more Heat games than ever before due to D-Wade's crazy performance and the stupid Michael Beasley saga (no two ways: he should start). But it's the West's matchups that excite me more; all four first round series should be entertaining. But where's the link, RWK? Well, to be fair, the only link I'm gonna give you is the link to Free Darko. Why? Because they always do fun stuff around the playoffs. And, lo, I may be helping out with that later in the week from a specifically cinephilistic slant. That picture above is how Ziller sees D-Wade's year graph-style. The quote below is from FD head-honcho, Shoals, on why this new graph was developed.
["Guys, the Z was slick and all, but try and explain it to me as an actual graph. When we tried to get at what we thought the "z" showed, it quickly stopped being a "z". And believe you me, we tried. Someday, we'll show you the 3-D sketch I did on TuxPaint that included a axis plotting "likelihood of stat to be linked to stats before and after it." That, with height and purity, was kind of a Z. Sort of. But impossible to comprehend, and that aspect was really arbitrary, even if "determination" vs. "determination of positional purity" sounded cool."]
Quote of the Day:
—Stephen Jesse Jackson
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): From The Big Picture's Holy Week set. This is the easiest to look at. The rest... are harder.
Clip of the Day: Lars Von Trier decides the day after Easter is the day to premiere the trailer for his next film, Anti Christ. Me? Not exactly sold, but piqued nonetheless.
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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 to todd@vanderwerff.us.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Migrating Forms "All Access" Pass Giveaway
Migrating Forms, nee the New York Underground Film Festival, begins Wednesday, 4/15 and runs through Sunday, 4/19. The festival is offering one (1) "All Access" pass to the third person to email info@migratingforms.org with the subject line "HND giveaway".
For anyone unaware, Migrating Forms will continue in the tradition of NYUFF, presenting a yearly showcase of new experimental film and video from around the world.
Check out the complete program at migratingforms.org and the festival trailer here.
Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style, Pt. 5: The Prologue to The Royal Tenenbaums (annotated)
By Matt Zoller Seitz
[Part 5 of the Moving Image Source documentary series "Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style" runs the seven-minute prologue to Anderson's third feature, The Royal Tenenbaums, with onscreen annotations -- some drawing on information from previous chapters in the series, others somewhat random and personal. Part 1 of the series, on Bill Melendez, Orson Welles and Francois Truffaut is here. Part 2, on Scorsese, Richard Lester and Mike Nichols, here. Part 3 (on Harold and Maude director Hal Ashby) is here; Part 4 (on Anderson's affinity for J.D. Salinger) is here. By visiting the Moving Image Source website, you can read the series in transcript form or watch the documentaries by clicking on the "video" button in the right-hand column of the page.]
To watch the video, click here. Read more!
“You can’t leave”: An interview with Ondi Timoner
By Melissa Tuckman
Ondi Timoner is fascinated by troubled men of extraordinary insight; she calls them "delusional visionaries.” Her new documentary, We Live in Public, which closed New Directors/New Films Sunday, April 5th, follows Josh Harris, the tech pioneer who founded one of the first Internet marketing companies, and more or less invented streaming video. Harris channeled much of his fortune into unsavory social experiments, which anticipated an important cultural shift: the indecorous forfeiture of privacy involved in everything from reality television to Twitter.
Harris’s first experiment, “Quiet: We Live in Public,” placed a hundred creative-types in a basement on lower Broadway, equipped with sleeping pods, an interrogation room, and a gun range. Food, booze, and drugs were free; no one was allowed to leave; and everything was documented on film. Camera operators roamed the compound constantly, recording even the showers and the toilets. After police broke up “Quiet,” Harris and his girlfriend moved into an apartment outfitted with dozens of web-cams. For months, they broadcast every moment of their own lives online; the stunt only ended when the couple broke up, and Harris was forced to declare bankruptcy. At the time, Harris’s exploits looked like little more than bad art, symptoms of a decadent period in downtown culture. But in her documentary, Timoner contends that they served as inspired “metaphors,” warnings about how Internet exhibitionism would corrode personal autonomy.
In many ways, Harris resembles Anton Newcombe, the lead singer of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the focus of Timoner's 2004 film DiG!. Newcombe was also a little too ahead of the curve; he was playing self-consciously retro psychedelic music in the 1990s, slightly before it was fashionable. And like Harris, he combined grandiose ambition with a craving for destruction (there's not very much space between the "Quiet" bunker and the BJM heroin den). These men are gifted, but also deranged, and so obliviously self-obsessed that they can seem stupid. They exert power over fans and followers by organizing group experiences of intense, almost mystical collectivity; tellingly, Timoner's 2007 project Join Us was about an evangelical cult leader. Timoner portrays these men with a complicated compassion, observing their oversize wills, their sociopathic amorality, and their suffering. They recruit her to tell their stories, but only because she lets them. "It's like I'm their Leni Riefenstahl," she admits.
That comparison is significant. Timoner’s documentaries are a bit propagandistic; she doesn't engage viewers so much as direct them. Because her movies cover long spans of time, she relies on narrative voiceovers, which often become intrusive, telling us not only what is happening but what to think. We Live in Public brims with thrilling montages and potent music. At certain moments it can feel like Triumph of the Will set to "Moonage Daydream."
But Timoner also shares Riefenstahl's instinct for documenting cultural convulsions. We Live in Public, Join Us, and DiG! go a long way toward chronicling the millennial era, and the various ways people tried to escape and to connect.
MELISSA TUCKMAN: Before you became interested in film, you were working on a record. What kind of music did you make?
ONDI TIMONER: I played guitar, and I wrote a record when I was sixteen called Goodbye America. It was about farms closing down—I wrote a lot of political songs because I hadn’t really been in love yet.
MT: When you were a senior at Yale, you would hand in short films in place of papers. Do you remember what any of those were about?
OT: I remember what all of them were about. That’s why I started making films instead of writing papers: because it’s the papers you forget about. You don’t share them with anybody. And I realized that with a camera I could travel into any world. I could ask any question, and most of the time people would answer it because I had a camera in my hand. That’s actually a really weird parallel with the bunker in We Live in Public. On a mass level, that way that people acted with cameras made me uncomfortable, and made me feel like people were just submitting themselves. But on a personal level, when I first picked up a camera in 1992, I didn’t feel like people were giving up their privacy or their freedom.
MT: Where did you get the resources to make those films?
OT: There was a public access station called Citizens Television that opened up in New Haven. And they said, You can make whatever you want, as long as we get to show it. And then they would give me three or four hours on their Shuttle system if I signed up for it. It was not an Avid—let’s put it that way.
Then I made the movie that won the Yale Film Prize [Voices From Inside Time]. It was for a class called “Transgressive Women in American Culture,” about women breaking rules. I took it specifically because I wanted to figure out why women in prison were portrayed as these crazy, mauling butch-dykes, these he-men. I used my status as a student and went and started filming women in prison.
I met a woman there whose life and case blew me away, who had saved all these other women, named Bonnie Jean Foreshaw. And I swore to her that if I could I would try to make a film about her, try to get her out. She had been railroaded to jail years before I hit the scene, with a less-than-one-day trial. It was just a classic miscarriage of justice.
Every interview led to five more, and it really became an investigation. Everybody else graduated, and I stayed in New Haven, making the film with my then-boyfriend, brother, and professor, with the constitution open on the floor and our phone being tapped by Connecticut police because we were so deep in. It just got dirtier and dirtier.
MT: That movie became The Nature of the Beast?
OT: Yeah, I finished it. But nobody was watching documentaries at the time. It goes on PBS, it wins some awards, it went to a few festivals. And then nothing happened. She was still in jail. I thought, I have to get this to the two million housewives who are going to write letters and get her out of jail, to turn it into a movie-of-the-week. So I moved to L.A.
I ended up getting a job working for Spielberg, for Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. I thought it was going to be to interview Holocaust survivors; I was totally down for that. It turned out it was going to be, like, coordinating locations with a headset somewhere in central Florida. So I resigned. I stayed in L.A. and pursued turning The Nature of the Beast into a movie-of-the-week.
It was going so badly. Queen Latifah was going to play the lead; it was going to be a package at a major talent agency. They put this executive producer on it that apparently just needed something for her flagging career, and she didn’t give two shits about this woman or the case. The story was already incredibly dramatic, but everyone wanted to tweak it and make it gross. This woman had trusted me with her life rights.
I started wondering, Can I maintain my integrity and still reach a mass audience? How can I get these stories out there without them being totally perverted and distorted?
My theory was that my doc wasn’t reaching people because it was retrospective, and it was too educational to be entertaining. Documentaries up until then never unfolded over time. I thought, what’s different between a doc and a narrative? Why are people running to the theaters to see scripted features, and not docs? And the one thing I could figure out was that people don’t know what’s going to happen next when they’re watching a dramatic film. I set out to make my next movie unfold over time. I was going to choose some lives to film and capture the serendipity of life. My goal was, Do not get up and go to the fridge. You can’t leave; you can’t stop watching the movie. That’s the level it has to be at. That’s why DiG! was born, and it was ahead of its time for that.
MT: That method also reminds me of some documentaries from the sixties, like Don’t Look Back and the Maysles’ movies. There’s a developing narrative that you’re capturing as it happens, rather than trying to reconstruct the past.
OT: It’s verité, which I believe in totally. To me, Don’t Look Back is really the one film that has that feel, that you’re right there, that you don’t know what’s going to happen next. It’s like, God, what is he going to say to this journalist? Now he’s pounding on the piano? Dylan’s such an incredible subject. I really hope D.A. Pennebaker is going to come see the premiere of my movie.
But there weren’t any films like that at the time that I was alive. Somehow it was just not being done. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy because I was going into documentaries.
MT: How much time were you planning to devote to DiG!?
OT: I think if you film over a long period of time, time provides the greatest narrative. I didn’t set out to make a seven year film. I thought I was going to film ten bands, these little dysfunctional families, to look at the collision between art and commerce.
The irony of it is DiG! would have been an MTV series. But there were too many cigarettes and curse words in the film for MTV. MTV ripped it off, actually—they ripped off my thing before DiG! called The Cut. The same thing happened with VH1. The executive there saw an early cut of DiG!, because I was working on a show called Sound Effects there at the time. Two weeks later I come back from being on the road, shooting Sound Effects like a faithful employee of VH1. I’m standing in the cafeteria at Viacom and I hear about Bands on the Run, about bands fighting with each other across the country. It was the last time I worked for any of those corporations.
At this point I’m desensitized to ideas being ripped off, because you can’t actually replace the real thing. You can’t cast reality. It’s bullshit.
MT: Television producers seem to have a storyline conceived before anything begins. You have years of messy footage, and you have to work out an overarching narrative. Does that happen mostly during the editing process?
OT: I’m thinking about it the whole time. I have to know what moments to hit. And I have had to become more economical. DiG! was 2,500 hours of footage, and most of that was from the first four years. By the time I started editing, I realized, Oh my God, not only am I going to be here for years, but I can’t find anybody to help me because there’s no way I can possibly translate all this footage to them! So I was stuck. I was holding the bag. And then I thought, Well I may as well stick with the story since I’m editing. So I’d film every six months, seven months, something like that. That’s one thing you have to have is that instinct, to know when to film.
MT: Were you afraid you’d miss something?
OT: I knew I would, and you have to make your peace with that, too. You’ve got to realize that ultimately you’re telling a story. You’ve got to serve the story. Maintaining my integrity, to me, does not mean that what happens in a scene on a certain day doesn’t have parts from something I shot a year later, to supplement it. I can compress time and space, as far as I’m concerned, to tell the story.
I do that with We Live in Public also. The fishing trip that comes after the bunker was really a whole other project that Josh was doing called Tuna Heaven. But in the movie it’s just a fishing trip where he meets his love. He had actually met her earlier, but there was no way in the movie to bring the love interest in earlier. Films are like organisms, and they have their own life. They have a form they want to take.
With We Live in Public, I had never had a more clear vision of what a film should be. Thank God, because I had so much footage and so little time. I knew the film had to happen right now. I knew that it was really prescient for right this second, that it’s now the tipping point where the virtual world is really taking over. And I was lucky enough to have a great team of people come around me, so we could move through the footage fast. But still, I didn’t see all the footage. I had to make peace with the fact that I wasn’t going to see all the footage. And that what ended up on the screen had to serve the script.
MT: So you worked from a script this time?
OT: I never write a script in advance, but I did write a great deal of what this film is, and collaborated with others who have additional writing credit.
MT: We occasionally noticed your presence in DiG!, but Courtney Taylor [of the Dandy Warhols] did the voiceovers. How did you decide to do your own first-person narration for We Live in Public?
OT: It was really a weird departure for me. It was a process of elimination. I don’t really believe in omniscient narration. At least, so far for my films haven’t found that omniscient narration works very well. First I tried Josh, and it sucked. I tried Jason Calicanis, which was like the DiG! formula; you know, the best friend, the guy who made it. It didn’t work; he just wasn’t there for all of it with Josh. And then, it was like, Who’s going to narrate? What the heck? I think it was just kind of a group consensus, like, why don’t you try it? And what became really cool was that I was always available. I walked out of my house with croaky voice into the studio and laid down and did a voiceover every day until I got it right.
[Ondi takes a call on her iPhone.]
That was my mother. We just played the Sarasota Film Festival, where the population was like seventy years old, seventy five. I was worried that these people were just going to be terrified by the film. But they really were moved by it. They really got it.
MT: Older people probably understand the disruption better. They could be more alarmed by how the Internet has altered social interaction.
OT: Yeah, but our movie doesn’t start in green pastures with little house on the prairie. It starts with the Jesus and Mary Chain.
Like I do with every film that I do, We Live in Public tells the story of a microcosm, of a small story that’s also a huge story. So it’s the story of Josh Harris, and it’s the story of all of us at the same time. And there are two trajectories.
MT: What were you planning to do with all the footage from “Quiet”? Did you have an agreement with Josh about what it would be used for?
OT: I was going to make a movie about the bunker, but Josh took all the footage. Josh stole the masters. He didn’t like the way he looked. I was finishing the film in 2001, and went to Sundance to raise money for DiG!. I got back and my loft was empty in New York; he had taken all the tapes.
And then I won Sundance in 2004, and I was on the second page of The New York Times or whatever, and he wrote me an email, saying, Any interest in finishing the film? And I said no. Then a few months later he basically said, I’ll give you fifty percent of the film, I’ll send you all the masters. You’ll have complete creative control—that was the most important part. I said, OK, fine. He was thrilled. He was like, ok, she’s my saving shit.
And then I made Join Us!, because Bush won the election in ’04, and I didn’t see any relevance. The bunker was less relevant than ever.
I didn’t know what We Live in Public was about until I saw the first Facebook status update. I was like, You’re driving down the freeway? Who cares? But people did.
MT: You’ve described We Live in Public as a “cautionary tale.” But I noticed that you’re on Twitter, and on MySpace and Facebook.
I don’t check MySpace at all. I cannot possibly keep up with the virtual world. I want it all forwarded to one place. But it’s good for connecting. It’s not good for, like, staying sane. Not all your friends on Facebook are really your friends. I don’t think the lingo’s accurate, and I think for new generations it can be confusing. It’s not a risk to me to be on Facebook, but I’m not putting pictures of my child up there, either. And he’s pretty cute.
MT: You’ve immersed yourself in some pretty horrifying and decadent environments, like the heroin house in DiG! and the bunker in We Live in Public. Does having a camera insulate you from these surroundings? Did you ever feel in danger?
OT: Join Us was the most dangerous, a truly dangerous film. I was at the cult leader’s house for dinner, and I would call my mother and say, if you don’t hear from me in the next three hours, send the police. He controlled these people’s lives, and if he had continued, they would have all done a mass suicide together. If he had asked them to kill themselves they would have, and he had them beating their children since they were born, to beat the demons out of them. And I could never tell if he was on to me or not.
MT: Were you pretending to be more sympathetic than you actually felt?
OT: I wasn’t pretending. I told him I wanted to talk to him about his book, and we just talked and talked and talked. And we worked our way around to what pastors should do and what role they should take in the raising of children. He had just overstepped his pastor bounds, and exploited his congregation. He felt that what he was doing was right. He’s like a grandfather. He’s like the father figure none of these congregants had ever had.
MT: Charisma can take you a long way.
OT: Mind control is incredibly interesting. For me, it’s as much about the believer. It’s as much about the people in Josh Harris’s bunker. What we’re missing, that we’re trying to fill in our lives. Anton had fifty to a hundred members pass through his band; in that film I focused more on other things, but I was fascinated by that aspect, how people followed him.
There’s something very sweet about us wanting to connect with each other, too. It’s a very human instinct to not want to be alone. From the moment the umbilical cord is cut we don’t want to be alone anymore. It goes a step further with fame: we see fame and celebrity as being happy and never being alone. Now we put ourselves out there on the Internet to try to get attention, anything that will make us feel better.
MT: Josh and Anton both created environments where everything was shared, where there wasn’t privacy or loneliness.
OT: Yeah, it’s like the sixties. That’s what the sixties stood for. You didn’t have to be alone; you could be on a commune. You’d all be hanging out together all the time.
MT: Did Josh remind you of Anton?
OT: No. I never really put the two together until I was in the editing process with Josh.
They’re both extremely prolific in a lot of ways. And they’re both extremely amoral when it comes to human lives around them. In Josh’s case he’ll admit it. When it comes to his art, humans are pawns. Like in the bunker, if something had gone wrong, I don’t know how bad he would have felt. It was really about the art for him.
MT: Do you consider Josh a friend?
OT: No.
MT: What about Courtney?
OT: No. I did at certain points. And I love every single one of them, by the way. Love. Like I cannot personally make a film about someone I don’t love. I have to access compassion and have to access true love, and find the real human connection there, or I can’t do them justice. Especially megalomaniac, tough men, who I seem to attract somehow. Josh asked me to do this film. And Anton said, I’m taking over your documentary; forget those other bands. And I think I’ve done them justice. But I was doing it for the story. I wasn’t a fan; it was about the story.
Melissa Tuckman blogs at Melitism.
A Film of Few Words: Hunger
By Jason Bellamy
Margaret Thatcher isn’t a flesh-and-blood character in Hunger, and yet she delivers what is perhaps the film’s most significant piece of dialogue. Not that she has much competition. Save for a 20-minute stretch that is nothing but words, words, words, this 96-minute film is nearly void of expository conversation. That’s why Thatcher’s words, crackling into the drama over a radio, make such a profound impact. In the debut feature of director Steve McQueen (no relation to the King of Cool), nothing is careless. Thus, comments from the prime minister that would be mere historical context in another film, here make for biting commentary. Says Thatcher: “There is no such thing as political murder, political bombing or political violence. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing and criminal violence.” In Hunger, the line between political and criminal action is nearly indecipherable.
That seems to be the point. Hunger is, by the end, the story of IRA activist Bobby Sands’ 1981 hunger strike, which ended with his death after 66 days of starvation. But more than that, Hunger is a documentation of Maze prison in Belfast in the days leading up to and through Sands’ fatal protest. In fact, Sands doesn’t enter the film until after the 30-minute mark. Until then, McQueen reveals Maze to be a place of routine and wretchedness. Day after day, the IRA prisoners smear the walls of their cells with feces. Day after day, the prisoners flood the corridor outside their cells with urine. Day after day, a Maze worker comes through the corridor and sweeps the urine back into the inmates’ cells. And on any given day, the prisoners are removed from their cells to be beaten and otherwise debased. This, Hunger suggests, is the cost of both fighting the system and trying to protect it. Political protest leads to criminal action, which leads to political imprisonment, which leads to criminal inhumanity—from guards and inmates alike.
To read the rest of the review at The Cooler, click here. Read more!
Links for the Day (April 14th, 2009)
1. Want to see how frenetic editing can nearly ruin a powerful story? Check out this clip from Britain's Got Talent, where an unassuming and rather homely woman gets the chance to live out her dream. This all ends more or less as you'd expect, but once she starts to sing, the editing just goes NUTS, trying to make the moment too stunning for its own good. Say what you will about American Idol, but that show never does anything as frantic as this.
["47-year-old Susan Boyle wows the judges with her performance in the auditions for Britain's Got Talent, singing 'I Dreamed a Dream' from Les Miserables."]
2. Man Before the Fall: An Advance Review of Sci Fi's Caprica. The pilot for Caprica is starting to get buzz from those who've seen legal screeners (like your friendly local Televisionary linked above) and those who've found it through less legal means. It'll be out for sale next week, and the Televisionary likes what he sees.
["Set before The Fall, the plot of Caprica might be a foregone conclusion: we know that, like Rome, this society will be obliterated in fifty years' time by the nuclear holocaust unleashed by the Cylons. However, that's part and parcel of the dark beauty that the series offers, as it holds up a ticking clock to the depravities and excesses of a society on the brink of annihilation. It's only a matter of time before these privileged individuals self-destruct, erased by the instruments of their own making: a slave race of robots, designed to serve their every whim, who rise up and massacre their masters."]
3. Absence Excuses in TV. More TV stuff. Jaime J. Weinman has a post on how shows like How I Met Your Mother, currently dealing with TWO pregnancies, deal with unavoidable absences from their actors.
["Writing around a temporarily absent character — due to childbirth, illness or a movie — is always tricky. Sometimes a show will just do what HIMYM did tonight and do one scene in advance (or after the rest of the episode is filmed) with the person who’s going to be away, so he or she will at least be in the episode. When Bob Newhart had it in his contract that he could have several weeks off in his final season of The Bob Newhart Show, the writers did episodes that were all about Emily, and Bob was seen only on the phone, talking to Emily about what he was doing at his “psychologist’s conference” or whatever it was supposed to be. That’s a very common and easy-to-spot solution: have the characters say that Missing Person is out of town, or at a conference, and then at some point in the episode he calls in; cut to Missing Person at a pay phone (or, today, cell phone) asking how things are going without him."]
4. William Hurt Cast in Ridley Scott's Robin Hood. With Hurt joining a cast that also includes Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Vanessa Redgrave and now Max Von Sydow, /film tries to figure out just what Scott's going for with this project.
["William Hurt has joined the cast of Ridley Scott’s untitled Robin Hood film. Hurt will play the Earl of Pembroke, William Marshall, a man who served four kings: Henry II, Richard the Lionheart, John and Henry III. Marshall was a servant to the Plantagenet kings, who grew to become one of the most powerful men in Europe. Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, called Marshall the “greatest knight that ever lived.” The film is set to be a retelling of the classic story, set in a more historically accurate setting than previous adaptations."]
5. Wolf Fang. Blogger Justin McLachlan has a conversation about life, God and the meaning of things with a drug addict in Muncie, Ind. Surprisingly moving.
["Wolf Fang was surprised that I didn't have any reefer to sell him. Apparently, sitting on a wall along that particular street in Muncie meant I should've been a drug dealer. I wasn't aware of the lucrative drug trade in Muncie or my poor wall-choosing skills, but I was more surprised Wolf Fang hadn't yet killed me. Disappointing a hocked-up weed smoker who fancied himself Wolf Fang seemed less safe than a stroll through Tijuana after dark."]
Quote of the Day:
—Gene Robinson (also via Justin McLachlan)
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): A recent cover by The Economist.
Clip of the Day: A short examines one day in the life of a garbage dump community of Managua, Nicaragua.
Day of Light from Love Light & Melody on Vimeo.
"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.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Breaking Bad Mondays: Season 2, Ep. 6, "Peekaboo"
By Todd VanDerWerff
“Peekaboo,” the sixth episode of Breaking Bad’s second season, written by J. Roberts and series creator Vince Gilligan and directed by Peter Medak, asks a question that’s been hovering around the periphery of the series since it began and asks it fairly directly. Who is Walter White (Bryan Cranston), really? And who is Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) deep down? Has Walter’s recent turn into criminality and his attempts to take all of this on on his own sprung from necessity or from a deep-seeded part of himself that he finally allowed to be unleashed by the specter of his own death? And, similarly, how much of the sense we get that Jesse doesn’t really have the stomach for this line of work beyond being a low-level dealer is accurate? “Peekaboo” juxtaposes the two getting caught in two very different but equally perilous situations and uses that to suggest that while Jesse’s been dealing drugs for years, Walter is the one who has the true criminal instinct.
Let’s start with Jesse, who goes to retrieve the money and drugs stolen from him last week by the scary-looking woman and her knife-wielding boyfriend. Given the address of the two by his dealer pal (who spells street “streat”), he heads on over to a big, rambling house that feels like something left over from a William Faulkner short story or Grey Gardens, if either took a left turn into hardcore, drug-induced poverty. Jesse knocks on the door, then flattens himself against the wall, and he begins rehearsing the line he’s going to use to get back his cash: “Where’s my money, bitch?” He says it over and over and over, both trying different inflections for the line and seemingly psyching himself up to draw a gun on someone.
It’s a telling little sequence in the episode, I think, both showing us those in between moments we don’t see in other crime dramas, the ones that Breaking Bad specializes in, and showing us how Jesse, to a real degree, is having to convince himself he’s the badass he needs to be to become a drug kingpin and is largely failing at that task so far. Breaking Bad, to a real degree, is about people trying on new identities to try and discover their true inner selves (weirdly, AMC's other drama series, Mad Men, ALSO boasts this as a major theme), and the bigger of a criminal Jesse tries to be, the more it seems that he really would be happier in a low-level data entry job as his father says he would. Then, he could coast along, sleep with his landlady and eat all the pretzels he wanted. Jesse wants to be something more than what he is, but there’s also something inside of himself that is perhaps too gentle to really make anything of himself, especially in Albuquerque’s criminal underbelly.
“Peekaboo” chooses to demonstrate this through Jesse’s reactions to two different people. One of these is a nicely understated comic beat, and the other treads a little too much in the territory of cliché. The first is when Jesse is standing on that porch, ready to point his gun at whoever should come to the door. As he’s waiting, he suddenly looks over to see a post officer approaching, bearing her load of mail to deliver to the house. She cheerily greets him and asks him to move away from the mailbox, which he is blocking, then strikes up a short conversation with him about how nice the weather is. These are the normal pleasantries of everyday life, and as Jesse slowly relaxes into them, realizing that he’s not going to get busted by someone popping out of the house, he seems much more at ease than when he was rehearsing his badassery. Granted, dealing with the post officer is nowhere near accosting two junkies to give him back the money they took from him, but Jesse, almost in spite of himself, has a warm and open nature, and it’s that nature that comes through as he talks to the almost preternaturally cheerful post officer. The encounter between the two is short, though, and Jesse has to break a window to enter the house in search of the cash he’s after.
It’s inside the house that I think the series missteps ever-so-slightly. Breaking Bad is good at showing the human cost of the drug trade in Albuquerque, of taking us inside the haunted lives and dank dens of the city’s anonymous junkies. It’s never really felt the need to overstate these points, trusting us to realize just how badly Walt’s ultra-high quality meth is damaging these people’s lives. Yeah, they made the choice to take those drugs in the first place, but it was also Walt’s decision to use his skills to make their lives even worse. We don’t need to have any single character stand up and declaim about how drugs are bad – not even DEA agent Hank (Dean Norris), who might have reason to and might actually do so in character – because the show trusts us to grasp that as a simple fact of life.
Tonight, though, Jesse entered that house, and he ran into a little kid, whose parents were so high on meth and heroin that they simply didn’t have time to properly care for the boy. Obviously there are kids like this out there and they’re one of the saddest stories of the cost of the drug trade, but bringing in a kid like this feels a little too much like Breaking Bad stacking the deck, as though it’s putting its finger down on the scales a little too fully. I’d rather the show actually BE aware of the human cost of what Walt and Jesse are doing rather than try to gloss over these unpleasantries (as lesser series about similar subjects do), but it almost feels like stacking the deck to have the good-hearted Jesse run into an adorable, seemingly mute Dickensian ragamuffin with a terrible rash, a runny nose he never wipes, dirt all over his skin and a habit for watching the Cutlery Corner (which was actually one of the subjects of one of my first pieces here at the House years ago) on TV over and over. Scratch that. That’s not stacking the deck. That’s removing every card that’s not a face card.
The kid works better as a device for Jesse to react to than an actual character. When Jesse loses his nerve for what he’s doing because he doesn’t want to threaten the kid’s parents in front of him or because he’s so concerned with the boy that he gets distracted long enough to take a whack to the head that knocks him out. When he’s fleeing the house at episode’s end, he also takes just a little time out to make sure that the kid will be rescued by someone by carrying him out to the porch where the soon-to-arrive police officers will find him when they get there. If the little boy is a little too on-the-nose as a symbol of the COST OF DRUGS, he works fairly well as an example of how Jesse is not quite hard enough to be the drug kingpin he dreams of being, though the show also seems to suggest that Jesse could leave this essentially outwardly interested nature that exists within himself behind if he keeps with the path he’s on long enough. He’s legitimately threatening when he’s waving his gun around and forcing the two junkies to tell him what he wants to know. It’s only the kid that’s able to break this spell, and there won’t always be a kid.
Before moving on to Walt, we may as well pause and acknowledge the great work by David Ury and Dale Dickey as Spooge and his woman, as well as production designer Robb Wilson King’s work at capturing the hellish home they and their child lived in. Medak’s camera captured the way the two holed themselves away from the world, light filtering in through covered windows, creating a landscape swathed in shadow, and King’s set dressing was filled with odds and ends, the kinds of things that would collect around the edges of a life at the margins of society. Ury and Dickey took two parts that were probably a bit overwritten on the page and turned them into believable human beings, two people who had been together so long that they had forgotten to be apart, even though the cycle of destruction they were in was going to take them both down.
If Jesse’s tendency to see too much of the world around him threatens to make him a rather inefficient criminal, Walt’s general inability to get over perceived slights and his deep bitterness are beginning to suggest that even if Walt wasn’t always a criminal, he always had a temperament that would allow him to succeed as one. During a long scene early in the episode, where Walt returns to his old teaching job for the first time in a long time, we see him lecture at length on carbon, the element that unites all living things by being the chemical basis for our very existence. While this at first seems like it might be a return to the more sensitive and holistic Walt of the series’ first couple of episodes, the speech quickly turns bitter, as Walt informs his students that the man who invented synthetic diamonds, instrumental in so much technology, was rewarded with only a $10 savings bond. 
There have always been hints in the series that Walt was a frustrated genius who let his bitterness calcify and turn into a rage he kept deeply bottled up, but Breaking Bad is really pushing this button now, impressively allowing Cranston’s work to turn very, very dark (especially when one considers that his Emmy win is probably the most responsible thing for the show’s ratings surge and the work he’s doing now, while compelling, is probably not friendly enough to win Emmys).
The episode focuses on Gretchen (Jessica Hecht) returning to Walt’s life and being surprised when Skyler (Anna Gunn) thanks her for paying for the experimental treatment that Walt began in season one. As you may recall, Gretchen, a former lover of Walt’s, and her husband offered to cover the treatment from their millions and millions of dollars, but Walt turned them down and decided to pay for the treatment from the cash he could make from his meth production. Now under the gun for his lies when Gretchen calls him on them, he first begs her to help him in his lie, then lets the slights of many years ago come out in a torrent of bile. He’s angry at her and her husband for “cheating him” and cutting him out of their company. She’s angry at him for abandoning her in their relationship, leaving midway through a Fourth of July celebration with her family. As his anger rises, she finally says (rather sanctimoniously) that she feels sorry for him, and all he can manage is a “Fuck you.” It’s a perfectly pitched little scene, suggesting so much of the two’s history while never quite laying it all on too thickly.
I’m less certain about the later scenes in this storyline, where Gretchen decides to call Skyler and tell her that she and her husband will no longer be covering Walt’s treatment. On the one hand, it allows Skyler and Walt to draw closer together, especially when Walt is able to tell a relatively simple lie (the economy has wiped the other couple out) and have Skyler completely buy it. The scene where Walt realizes that Skyler has bought his lie and that he can use that lie to draw the two of them closer together (he sidles up and says, “We’ll get through this”) is an absolutely perfect scene of a man more fully embracing something monstrous inside of him. But, on the other hand, I’m just not sure Gretchen would do that, though I suppose it’s possible she just wants to wash her hands of the situation as easily as possible and doesn’t want to hurt Skyler further (we really have no idea of these two’s relationship).
There’s another scene in “Peekaboo” that’s important to understanding Breaking Bad as a whole. Spooge is explaining to Jesse how he came to be in possession of an ATM machine, which he boosted from a convenience store. Since he just took it and the money all goes back to giant banks, it’s a victimless crime, he says. But as he says that, the camera takes a tour of the destruction involved in taking the machine, ending on the blank face of a murdered clerk, his blood spilled on the floor. Breaking Bad knows that wherever there’s crime, there’s someone being hurt. Jesse seems to realize that at times, but the series is increasingly suggesting that Walt really does not.
Some other thoughts:
House contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark and co-host of the podcast TV on the Internet. His writing also appears at The AV Club.
Understanding Screenwriting #23
By Tom Stempel
COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: ER, Duplicity, Coraline, Sin Nombre, Tokyo Sonata, Pictures at a Revolution, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice, but first:
FAN MAIL: For reasons that are too complicated to go into, I ended up not having comments in US#22 on comments on US#21, so here are a couple.
I may have given some people the wrong idea that I thought Sunshine Cleaning was better than Little Miss Sunshine. I don’t think it is, primarily because of the problems with the ending I mentioned. Joel thought that Little Miss Sunshine was just as dark as Sunshine Cleaning. I think it has its dark moments, but I think the overall tone of Sunshine Cleaning is darker. Tone seems to be a theme in this edition of this column, as you will see. I would agree with Adam's witty equation: Sunshine Cleaning = In Her Shoes + CSI.
On US#22, Anonymous raised the question about the supernatural element of Saving Grace. I agree with him that those scenes seem unnecessary, but I read somewhere they are part of series creator Nancy Miller’s plan. I will deal with this a little more in the next column after the half-season ending episode.
ER (2009. Episode “And In The End…” written by John Wells. 120 minutes): Not great, but hugely satisfying.
This series finale episode will probably not go down in TV history as one of the great series finales. It is not as spectacular as the ending of Newhart, which is one of the few “It was all a dream” endings ever that actually works. In that one, Bob Hartley, from Newhart’s earlier The Bob Newhart Show, wakes up in bed with his wife Emily saying he had a weird dream about running a Vermont inn, i.e., Newhart. Nor is it as surreal as the ending of St. Elsewhere, where the entire series was shown to have been completely in the mind of Dr. Westphall’s autistic son. What Wells does is do a lot of different things very, very well.
Since this is an episode about endings, it is not surprising that there are two major deaths among the patients. A pregnant woman is brought in and, after a troubled delivery of twins, she bleeds out and ultimately cannot be saved. In a more extended death scene, we get the death of Mrs. Manning, whom we first met when she was brought in in the “Old Times” episode. She has come back in with her husband Paul, who hopes against hope to save her. As I mentioned in US#21 when writing about that episode, we do indeed see Ernest Borgnine as Paul again, and again Borgnine delivers the goods as he watches his wife die. ER has always been realistically ruthless about killing off patients, more so than any other hospital show. The show has also been good about putting together episodes that have internal thematic connections, although they have never taken it as far as St. Elsewhere did. Here the deaths connect with the fact that we are seeing these characters and this location and this institution for the last time—excluding syndication, DVD’s, YouTube and any other delivery systems to be invented in the future, of course.
Wells also makes connections for us with other episodes in the series. Early in the teaser, Lydia, a nurse, wakes up Archie, just as she did Dr. Greene in the pilot film, and the scene is shot the same way, not surprising since this episode’s director, Rod Holcomb, directed the pilot. The death of the mother recalls one of the series’ most devastating episodes, “Love’s Labor Lost” from the first season. The crew waiting at the end for the ambulances to arrive recalls the end of the first act of another Season One episode “Blizzard.” There are others, I am sure, some of them probably unrecognizable to anyone other than Wells himself. Combined, they give us a sense of the texture of the show.
Connections with characters are also crucial to this episode. Many of the characters, and not just the stars, are people we have known and lived with for 15 years. ER, while groundbreaking in several ways, followed the pattern established in the 1970s landmark series Police Story. When that series began, Joseph Wambaugh, ex-cop and novelist and the co-creator as the series, told the writers to “Play the emotional jeopardy, not the physical jeopardy.” Ed Waters, a writer and later story consultant on Police Story, said that this was later expressed as “The cop works on the case, the case works on the cop.” In police and medical shows before Police Story, the professionals went about their business untouched emotionally by what they did. That was not true in Police Story or the shows that followed in its wake: Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, NYPD Blue and many others. ER followed in that pattern and we have been through the wringer with the characters. Sam is still an active duty nurse, and she handles the death of Paul’s wife. Paul has been talking about how devoted he has been to his wife. His daughter shows up and tells Sam, out of earshot of her father, that her mother was hell on wheels and she does not completely understand how her father could have been so devoted to her. Sam calls her mother, with whom we have seen she has a similarly unhappy relationship. We do not need to see the mother, since the writing and Amy Madigan’s performance several episodes ago was enough to stick in our mind.
Wells brings on other characters from the past. Carter’s separated wife arrives, and it may or may not be a happy reunion. Wells writes a nice little scene between Benton and Corday, who once had a brief fling. They are a bit awkward and tentative and there is no way this is going to be a happy reunion. Two of Wells’s less interesting returns are Susan Lewis and Kerry Weaver, to whom he does not give a lot to do in this episode. Weaver was a great character: prickly, difficult, but not completely unsympathetic. Laura Innes, who played her, did a masterful job of straddling the line between likeable and unlikeable with the character, and it is too bad she was not given more to do in this episode.
Wells uses two other interesting characters, one we have seen since the beginning of the series and one we are only just introduced to in this episode. The first one is Rachel Greene, Mark Greene’s daughter. We saw her in the pilot and off and on throughout the series. She has been played by two actresses, Yvonee Zima from 1994 to 2000 and by Hallee Hirsh from 2001 to 2009. Here she shows up as a group of possible medical students touring the ER. Holcomb’s direction, presumably from suggestions in the script, just lets us catch a couple of glimpses of her, so we say to ourselves, “Wait a minute. Isn’t that Rachel?” Eventually it is revealed that she is and she talks to the staff, people she has known since she was a child. At the end of the episode, she is talking with the nurses and word comes in that eight patients from an explosion at a power station are on their way in. A young doctor says to Rachel, “You want to be an ER doc? This is the fun part.” Rachel joins them in the loading area to wait for the ambulances. The patients arrive and the crew goes into action. Carter is giving a set of scrubs and joins in. As he passes Rachel, he says, “Dr. Greene. Coming?” and Rachel, even though she is not even a med student yet, joins them going into the ER. A circle is at least partially closed.
Just as Wells and Holcomb are subtle about reintroducing Rachel, they give us another young doctor floating around in the early scenes. We eventually realize it is Alexis Bledel, the former Rory Gilmore of The Gilmore Girls. Rory did not go to medical school and the character we have here is Dr. Julia Wise, whom we have never seen before. She is involved in the treatment of the pregnant woman and watches the situation turn to shit with Bledel’s gorgeously expressive eyes. We can see the case working on her the way we saw the case work on Dr. Greene in “Love’s Labor Lost.” Dr. Wise will eventually grow into being a great…wait a minute, the series is over.
One of the great strengths of ER has been, more than almost any other television series, its openness to the real world. So many television shows exist in hermetically sealed universes. ER did not. Perhaps it was the central location of the series, but the show always made you aware that there was a real world out there, somewhere. Patients would come in and go out. Patients, like Paul’s wife, would return. And die. “Love’s Labor Lost” would make women aware of a potential medical problem in pregnancy. Doctors and nurses would leave and come back. Doctors and nurses and patients would leave and not come back. The world would go on. Dr. Wise will become a good doctor.
DUPLICITY (2009. Written by Tony Gilroy. 125 minutes): Duplicitous fun, for a while.
As I suspected when I saw the trailer for this one (see US#19), it’s a lot more fun than The International. Clive Owen smiles, laughs, seduces and has great chemistry with Julia Roberts. Julia Roberts smiles, laughs, seduces, and has great chemistry with Clive Owen. And Gilroy has written a script that really takes advantage of the starpower he has. Ray and Claire are spies, working for MI-6 and the CIA, respectively. They meet, go to bed, and she steals secrets from him all before the wildly funny opening credit sequence. We know Gilroy is writing in the major key of fun and games with spies and con men. They then end up working for two major cosmetic firms and run a con on them both. We get a lot of the mechanics of the con, which Gilroy keeps very clear, not always an easy task. If you are an adult and paying attention, you can follow it, even though Gilroy does several nice bits of jumping back in time. And Gilroy writes some wonderful supporting characters for such actors as Paul Giamatti, Tom Wilkinson, Denis O’Hare, and Kathleen Chalfont. Yes, the same Kathleen Chalfont who starred in Wit on stage in New York. You write good parts, you get good actors.
Gilroy, as you may remember from Michael Clayton, is nothing is not ambitious. So he writes a relationship piece here as well, dealing with whether Ray and Claire can trust each other. Can spies trust anybody, especially those they love? The tone here is minor key, especially in comparison to the rest of the film. The problem with the script is that with the particular twist ending Gilroy uses, the film closes very much in the minor key of the relationship story. It doesn’t seem quite enough for what has gone on before. He could have used it to set up a sequel, but that does not appear to have been on his mind.
CORALINE (2009. Screenplay by Henry Selick, based on the book by Neil Gaiman. 100 minutes): Writing for animation, or, where’s Walt Disney when you need him?
There is a reason that Walt Disney was the only animator of his time to make a successful, continuing shift from short cartoons to feature-length animated films. He knew the importance of story and characters. If you compare any of the Disney cartoons of the thirties to those turned out by other studios, his all have solid story lines. The others are collections of gags. The reason that DreamWorks Animation and Pixar have had continuing success in feature-length animation is because they have Jeffrey (EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD IN THE FUTURE IS GOING TO BE IN 3-D) Katzenberg and John Lassiter, respectively, in charge. Both of them have a strong sense of story and push the people they work with in that direction.
Henry Selick is a whiz at stop-motion animation, as seen in The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996). Story, alas, is not his strong suit. Coraline takes FOREVER to get going. The girl and her mom and dad move into an old house out in the country, divided up into apartments. It is a long time before Coraline goes through the secret door and finds a “nicer” version of her mom and dad. Then, after she realizes they are not “nicer,” she has to collect several items to manage her safe return. The rules of that game are not clear. I thought she had to collect the eyeballs of the three ghost children, but it appears that each round ball contains both eyes, which does not make a lot of sense. Then when Coraline has escaped from the word behind the door, the film goes on for another ten minutes, including introducing a character we have only vaguely heard about before, and then not showing us what Coraline is going to tell her. Why bother?
As you may gather from my parenthetical jab at Katzenberg, I am not quite as devoted to 3-D as he is. The 3-D in Coraline is well-used and Selick has obviously thought about it a lot, but I am not convinced it is essential to the story. I do have to admire Selick the director for not throwing a lot of stuff in our faces. Stay through the credits, because there is a lovely use of objects floating out over the audience at the end.
SIN NOMBRE (2009. Written by Cary Fukunaga. 96 minutes): We’ve traveled this road before, and in better company.
Sin Nombre is not exactly the first film to show Latin Americans coming across Mexico to the United States. El Norte (1983), written by Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, is still the classic in the field, and I think the 2004 film Maria Full of Grace, written by Joshua Marston, is the best of them all. After doing several years worth of research on people who work as “mules” bringing drugs to the U.S., Marston focused his script on one woman, Maria. He provided her with a lot of different motivations to get into that line of work, and then a lot of reactions to what happens to her.
Fukunaga, who also spent time researching people riding the freight trains up Mexico to the border, has not created any character as interesting as Maria. The girl in the film is Sayra and in spite of how the IMDb describes the plot, she really has no particular desire to go north. Her father, who has been living in the U.S., was deported to Honduras. He now wants to take her with him and his brother back to the states. She goes reluctantly, and we get very little of her reactions to what is going on. Then, an hour into the picture, she does something really stupid. She gets off the train and leaves her father. And almost every action she takes after that is more stupid than the last.
She gets off the train because of Casper. He is a member of a gang in Mexico who ends up killing the leader of his own gang for killing his girlfriend. Needless to say, the gang puts out a hit on him, and gang members, as well as gangs related to his gang, track him down. Casper is first established as the cliché of the sensitive tough guy, but we get very little of him beyond that. And the gang members all seem the same. That may be sociologically true, but dramatically it is not very interesting to watch. Casper and Sayra sort of develop a friendship, but you would be hard put to call it a romance, which is why her behavior makes no sense.
In Maria Full of Grace, Marston, who also directed, had the advantage of a great performance from Catalina Sandino Moreno as Maria, but Fukunaga either does not have the acting talent available to him, or simply does not know how to direct them. If he’d written better parts…
TOKYO SONATA (2008. Written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Max Mannix, and Sachiko Tanaka. 119 minutes): Another one goes off the rails.
Sasaki is a Japanese salaryman who loses his job. Because it would undermine his authority in his house if it were known he was jobless, he doesn’t tell his wife and two sons. He tries to get work, but he spends most of his days at a field where a lot of other men in his position spend their days. At 45 minutes into the film, his wife happens to spot him at the field, but she doesn’t confront him. Meanwhile the eldest son, Takashi, decides to join a (fictional) unit of the American army to go fight in Iraq. Kenji, the youngest son, takes piano lessons without telling his parents because he knows his dad would refuse to give him permission. So far we are in a Japanese equivalent of The Bicycle Thief: a low-key, neorealist, look at contemporary Japan.
Eighty minutes into the film the family’s house is robbed and the robber takes the wife hostage. She sort of decides to go along with robber. She sees Sasaki in his job as a janitor at a mall when she stops to buy food for her and the robber, and Sasaki runs away from her. He runs into the street and appears to be hit by a van, which leaves him lying in the gutter. Kenji meanwhile tries to protect a friend from getting beaten by the friend's father. It is like the writers have suddenly gone off the deep end in the way the characters have. Screenwriting instructors are generally so busy talking about structure they never get around to tone. The tone in Tokyo Sonata shifts so drastically at the robbery that we seem to be in a totally different film. Yes, you maybe could defend it on intellectual terms: it represents the rage going on underneath the placid exteriors of the characters. This is something Japanese horror movies and anime use very effectively, but the actions here really come from others in this sequence, not from the family members. In terms of THIS film, it is merely disruptive. The fact that when they all return home, they behave as though nothing had happened does not help, either.
PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION: FIVE MOVIES AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW HOLLYWOOD (2008. Book by Mark Harris. 477 pages): Imagine: mentioning screenwriters.
Harris’s book, which is now out in paperback, uses the five films nominated for Best Picture of 1967 as a way to examine the changes that were taking place in Hollywood at the time. It is a great, simple idea, and Harris does it more than justice. He seems to have talked to almost everybody who worked on the five films. He follows the development of each of them from the first idea through to the night of the Academy Awards (and his collection of comments from people who were at the Oscars will give you a great inside look at what it is like to be there as a nominee).
Harris is also one of the younger generation of writers about film who actually mention screenwriters and the writing process. Some of that may come from his being married to playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Munich), but there are a growing number of film historians who deal with the screenwriting aspects of films they write about. Sam Staggs, in his books about All About Eve, Sunset Blvd., A Streetcar Named Desire, and Imitation of Life, always goes into detail on the development of the story and script. Jennifer Smyth, in her monumental Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane, a look at thirties historical films, writes as much about writers as directors.
So in Harris’s book we get not only the development of Bonnie and Clyde, which has been written about before, but the writing of The Graduate, which included not only the two credited writers, but two others you may not have known about. William Rose, who wrote Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, turns out not to be quite as liberal in matters of race as you might think from the film. Most fascinating of all is Harris’s looking at Stirling Silliphant’s papers dealing with his ideas of In the Heat of the Night. None of the pictures (the fifth was Doctor Doolittle, and nothing could help it) would have been as good as they were without the development processes he shows you.
Harris’s book is remarkably error-free for a book of its size and scope, but there is one howler I must call him on. Talking about another 1967 film, The Dirty Dozen, he mentions that the first drafts were written by the “seventy-year-old” Nunnally Johnson, and that director Robert Aldrich thought Johnson’s script “would have made a very good, acceptable 1945 war picture. But I don’t think that a good 1945 war picture is a good 1967 war picture.” Aldrich brought in Lukas Heller to make it a 1967 war picture. Harris obviously saw this as part of the generational change he was writing about: the old making way for the new.
Having read the novel, Nunnally’s script, and seen the final results, I have to tell you that Nunnally’s script would have made more of a 1967 picture than the film was. This in spite of the fact that he was sixty-six, not seventy, when he wrote it (he turned seventy later in 1967, after the release of the film). In E.M. Nathanson’s novel, the author gets into the heads of the assorted criminals that make up the “dozen.” By the end of the novel that have all convinced themselves they have become heroes, although it is clear they have not. Movies cannot get into the heads of the characters the way novels do. What Nunnally did was show that in the attack on the chateau, which is only a minor afterthought in the novel, the “dozen” are just as criminally inclined as they were before. For example, early in the film, Franko (John Cassavettes) attempts to kill Major Reisman. In Johnson’s script he tries again at the chateau. That was dropped in Heller’s script and the film. It is only the army report in Johnson’s script that makes them out to be heroes. In the film they become conventional war movie heroes. Johnson’s script is much more anti-authoritarian than the film. The film suggests the army was right to try to turn them into heroes. Most of the ironies of Johnson’s script have been eliminated in the film.
You would think Mark Harris would know better than to take a director’s word in an issue involving a writer.
THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY (2008. Episode “Pilot,” screenplay by Richard Curtis & Anthony Minghella, based on the novel by Alexander McCall Smith. 110 minutes): A new P.I. joins the team.
We’re not in New York. We’re not in L.A. We’re in Botswana. Look it up.
This is the two hour pilot for the new HBO series, and I was shocked, I tell you, to see the TV rating come up at the beginning and NOT have it warn us of sex, violence, language. This on the network of Tony !&!!@#^! Soprano and Samantha #%^* Jones and Al %$^@!!*^ Swearengen. Who’da thunk it?
The lack of foul language and explicit sex and explicit violence is a wonderful relief. Here the detective setting up her own agency is Precious Ramotswe. She’s not an ex-cop, just somebody who is very observant. While even the women cops in the American shows are tough as nails, Mma Ramotswe is just a genuinely nice person who wants to help. So her clients discuss their problems over a very civilized cup of tea. Precious does get a secretary, since this is a pilot for the series. The secretary, who never tires of telling us she got 97% on her typing final, is a bit of a prig and a nice counterpoint to Precious (although I worry for the physical well being of the always wonderful Anika Noni Rose; she has developed a funny, awkward walk for the character that may require physical therapy when the series ends). The pilot also establishes a male garage owner who can help Previous out, and a gay hairdresser who works next door. The latter may be a cliché, but at least the writers avoided the obvious: Precious is a large black woman, but they did not give her a skinny white sassy friend.
The tone is very different from American shows. Not only is Precious’s manner quieter than most American P.I.s, but the stories (the pilot involves three cases) are obviously told, very much in the tradition of both African griots (storytellers) and African cinema. We are looking at them from the outside, as opposed to being sucked into the story. Precious does perform the western function of bringing us into the stories, but the stories of the cases have that exaggeration typical of African storytelling. This may not work over the long run for American audiences, since it may make the stories seem unrealistic. In the pilot, the story of the straying husband became slapstick comedy while the missing child story was done in a more melodramatic way. That all may have been part of the planning for the pilot, to let the audiences know there will be several different kinds of stories and storytelling in the series.
THE LIBRARIAN: THE CURSE OF THE JUDAS CHALICE (2008. Screenplay by Marco Schnabel, based on characters created by David Titcher. 90 minutes): He’s back!
Readers may remember from US#14 that in December I watched the first two Librarian films on DVD. This one had just been broadcast but I had missed it. I thought after the first two I would give this a watch some afternoon I had free, so I did.
The first two films were very much outdoor adventure movies in the King Solomon’s Mines/Indiana Jones tradition, but this spends most of its time indoors. Flynn, our hero, has gone off to New Orleans on vacation after having a meltdown. He gets involved with a bunch of baddies who are looking for the Judas Chalice, since it will bring vampires back to life and they can rule the world, etc. His female partner this time is Simone Renoir, a French singer. She is, at least for a while, a more conventional romantic foil for Flynn, which makes her a little less interesting than the women in the first two. In one way I am glad I did not get to see this one until now, since Simone is played by Stana Katic from Castle, and it is nice to see her doing something different. She does no eye-rolling here, but a little lower-lip biting, which becomes weird when we find out she is…a vampire.
Noah Wyle is more at home in the romantic adventure genre that he was in the first two, but Flynn is still something of a klutz, although the filmmakers cannot seem to settle on how much of a klutz. In the opening sequence he is neatly dressed in a tuxedo, then sneezes when he drinks some not-quite-real champagne. Fine, but then he immediately turns out to be an excellent swordsman in a duel with one of the baddies. In a museum. With a lot of people there for an auction. With guards. Who don’t try to stop the duel. Even when it threatens to destroy what we think is a valuable painting. The film barely recovers from the idiocies of that scene. It is not up to the first two.
Tom Stempel is the author of several books on film. His most recent is Understanding Screenwriting: Learning From Good, Not-Quite-So Good, and Bad Scre