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.
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