The House Next Door

By Jeremiah Kipp

There’s a more adept portrayal of human suffering in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II than in all the lollygagging throughout John Krasinski’s timid adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Sally Potter’s iPhone-destined, fashion world monologue-a-thon Rage. Throughout Zombie’s slasher yarn, there's inevitably a close-up, as the killer comes crashing down upon his prey, where the victims' eyes drift heavenward and a brief, unspoken plea for mercy passes between them and monster. As they meet their doom, Zombie dwells on the mayhem in real time, each brutal pulverizing blow given resonance. You would think this example of pulpy shock cinema couldn’t hope to compare with the more supposedly contemplative American independent cinema, much less surpass the emotional, cinematic, and humanistic impact of a world where academic characters and fashion moguls gaze into the heart of darkness within their navels.

But indeed, I’d argue that Rob Zombie’s film is a more accurate representation of what it means to be a human being in our modern era, because we still feel dread, fear, pain and love. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, especially, is less about any of those emotions than it is about the assemblage of contemporary young actors digging their way into the literary monologues of Wallace. As a series of short stories—or sketches, really—there’s a sense of modern horror to the interviews, where disturbed individuals attempt to either justify, rationalize, or discuss their aberrant behavior through pop psychology keywords, self-help guru-speak, or just plain old American can-do spirit. They’re harrowing because the most sinister motives can be buried underneath layer after layer of doublethink to the point where the speaker might circle back around and feel terrified of themselves without comprehending why.

Wallace’s masterful prose doesn’t translate to cinematic language, and I doubt it would work in any context other than the page. (I hesitate to think what a filmmaker might do butchering Infinite Jest.) But John Krasinski’s movie adaptation is an excuse to enlist his friends and have them use tricks, tics, gestures, and mannerisms to the point where the performances jump beyond naturalism into a kind of phoniness best described as “actor-y.” They’re either doing too much or not enough. When reading the Wallace text, the dialogue seems pretty even-handed; when put into the mouths of actors there’s an unnecessary urge to jazz it up.

I became conscious of Ben Shenkman noodling around with his hands as stage business, or Julianne Nicholson primly concentrating on her inner monologue, or Chris Messina striving for a kind of “yeah, whatever” blasé version of selfishness that has become an indie film cliché, or Josh Charles earnestly attacking a monologue to a series of girls where he gets to “have fun” with different facial hairs and outfits. All the while I knew these were performers striving to “go for it” in a way that makes me wonder about the very techniques of young American actors.

Maybe it’s the director’s fault, but seeing so many bad performances all lined up in a row made me consider that few actors go for big, brave choices and raw, aggressive, messy human emotion, and that there's a similar fear of the Spalding Gray approach where one does as little as possible, as well as of the strange vibe we catch from actors working under the spell of David Lynch. I’m generalizing, perhaps, but these are the thoughts you have when you’re bored out of your mind, begging for mercy.

So many critics hated, hated, hated Brief Interviews with Hideous Men at Sundance and other festivals that I kind of wanted to root for it, to say, well, even if it was a mixed bag, at least Krasinski was adapting the work of one of our great modern literary giants. But, while suffering from boredom at his failed attempt, it got me thinking that there haven’t been any good adaptations of Herman Melville either, or Leo Tolstoy. Krasinski sets himself up to fail, but I couldn’t even feel that good about saying, “Well, at least you tried,” because he makes so many choices I found excruciating: A Greek chorus made up of two guys talking about the female psyche drift in and out of the pastiches; a powerful monologue by Frankie Faison about the humiliating life of his father (a restroom attendant) is intercut with images of the father as a young man standing in the latrine, proudly standing stock-still in his white ice cream suit, while a dialogue ensues between the father of the past and the boy of the present that folds time in the most obvious, theatrical way you could think of. Techniques like this make the audience feel so far ahead of the filmmaker, you’re wondering what stupid idea he’ll come up with next to open up Wallace's world.

A dialogue between two businessmen has them start in a coffee shop in real time, then they walk into the past where one of them discovers a weeping hippie girl, and as the teller of this story (Christopher Meloni) attempts to dig into his soul to tell his passive-aggressive friend how his heart was touched, we see Meloni doing that acting thing again, where he indicates to the audience that he really, really wanted to do good, wants to communicate this to his friend, but he just can’t, he can’t, and so he just says, “Then I fucked her!” The screenwriter has worked overtime to make a two character dialogue scene into a cinematic feast, placing the characters at various locales and telling the story in montage. And the director keeps the camera moving because that, too, is “cinematic.” And the actor works overtime to show us he’s really feeling something, goddamn it. The whole sequence is exemplary of how Brief Interviews is a conceptual flop.

As for Sally Potter’s Rage, it also has actors telling stories to the camera, all of them standing, one at a time, in front of multicolored screens. Judi Dench is a fashion critic, Steve Buscemi is a grizzled photographer, Jude Law is a cross-dresser, Bob Balaban is an impresario, John Leguizamo is a bodyguard and Eddie Izzard is a suit. The movie is supposedly being made on an intern’s camera phone and these actors embody characters eager to share their experiences about the bitter, hypocritical world of fashion. Does that sound remotely interesting to you? Not at all, I’ll bet, because you’re already way ahead of the movie—we know inherently that the fashion world is superficial, and having a gallery of famous personalities line up and preach to the art house converted is nobody’s idea of a good time.

Even the actors seem a little curious as to why they’re there. But the satire slips into ludicrous laugh-inducing ridiculousness when a series of off-screen accidents and murders start taking place, and the fashion world attitude towards real world death is, guess what, shallow! Misery has no context in Rage because the characters behave towards it in an inhuman way; Halloween II is more savage, more blunt, and dare I say more optimistic in its belief that lives, even those of dirtbag hicks and roadside strippers, are precious. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men wants to be a fearless, lethal depiction of men and women and their baggage, their lies, their ingrown hostilities, but it can’t match the terror of Halloween II, which imagines the loss of a daughter as akin to being struck down by lightning, or reveals the tangled web of familial neurosis in ways that are as upsetting now as they were during the era of Greek tragedy, where curses had meaning and analysis was a matter of moral life or death, as opposed to the safe haven of a moral gray zone where everyone, deep down, is full of shit. I don’t think David Foster Wallace believed that, I don’t even think Krasinski or Potter are going for that, but sadly that’s the miserable place in which they flail, and where their movies die.

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Jeremiah Kipp's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Filmmaker, Fangoria and other publications.

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House commenter and contributor Brendon Bouzard speaks from the heart about the Roman Polanski situation. An excerpt:

"As I saw from an e-mail this morning, and I see in this post on Jezebel, a bevy of major international and Hollywood filmmakers have signed various petitions in support of Roman Polanski, asking for the Swiss government to release him. The argument this petition seems to make is that Polanski is a great artist, and how dare they use his lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival to arrest him, and so and so forth.

"Many of the filmmakers who have signed this petition are people whose work I’ve greatly admired over the years – people like David Lynch, the Dardenne Brothers, Pedro Almodovar. It’s so difficult for me to reconcile the Lynch who made Mulholland Drive, a cinematic criticism of the way that Hollywood and the film industry mistreats and abuses women with the Lynch that would sign a petition like this. Or the Almodovar who made Volver, a film about the strength of women in the aftermath of sexual molestation. Or the Dardennes who have made such strongly moral films about crime and the need for absolution and repentance."

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"Link for the Day": Each day the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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By Zachary Wigon

[Loren Cass is now making it's way around the country. Click here for theater playdates. The film will be released on DVD November 24th, 2009. Click here to pre-order.]

“Glory be,” I thought to myself as I sat in the Cinema Village a few weeks ago. “Finally, a next-to-nothing budget American movie that actually looks like something. And is about something, too!” (There isn’t exactly a boatload of super-cheap indies these days getting theatrical distribution, let alone ones made by guys who own a tripod.) My wonderment was achieved despite the fact that I’d gone into the film, Loren Cass, with extremely high expectations: Nathan Lee referred to it as “overtly, ingeniously experimental in form,” a “tour de force of mood and milieu.”

Yet seeing the film was still shocking. In the wake of mumblecore—the most widely discussed young, independent filmmakers’ movement since that of the early '90s (Hal Hartley, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, Allison Anders, etc.)—watching Loren Cass is a little bit like getting punched in the face. In the pre-Recession aughts, there was something pleasant (and perhaps downright sedating) about the twee characters populating mumblecore films and the trivial problems that filled their lives. As young, privileged white Americans have been jolted back into something like a serious world, those films have lost their significance, appearing more like embalmed relics of a time when a whole lot less was at stake.

Loren Cass stands in marked contrast. It was written in 1997 and shot in 2004, but is timeless in scope. It is about three people living in St. Petersburg, Florida a year after that city’s 1997 race riots. The characters—a punk (Travis Maynard), a waitress (Kayla Tabish), and an auto mechanic (writer/director Chris Fuller, credited as “Lewis Brogan”)—mill around town with no place to go and nothing to do, aimlessly drifting in and out of their meaningless existences. One cannot imagine the characters of this film solving their problems with group hugs, or by playfully throwing toys at one another at work, or by having adorable romantic adventures after chance meetings in subway stations. They have had to live too long with the grim realities of American life to have a countenance that could support such things, realities that only a privileged few are able to avoid encountering.

Fuller has made a film about people who actually deserve your time and respect, and that, as I mentioned, actually looks like something. Combining a rock-steady tripod stillness with an eye for frontal geometric framing, Fuller and DP William Garcia’s work brings to mind the photography of Harry Callahan, the compositions of Chantal Akerman, and, in their depiction of desolate nowheres, the work of Gregory Crewdson. Not just settling for a serious aesthetic thrust, Loren Cass is deeply, profoundly about something. But rather than expound upon that any further, I’ll let Fuller do the talking himself.

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ZACHARY WIGON: A lot of people have compared your film to Gummo in its depiction of aimless young people with not a whole lot to do in a small town. But the comparison seems to narrow Loren Cass’s scope a bit. Where did the lives of the characters originate from?

CHRIS FULLER: From a variety of sources. There are a lot of things that are personal, culled from people around me. I would be leaning toward your take on things—it’s definitely got some broader subtext, in my opinion, than a film like Gummo does. I’ve got plenty of respect for those kinds of filmmakers and films, but I can definitely do without all the comparisons we’re getting to Harmony Korine and Gus Van Sant. I know they mean it as a compliment, but when the film keeps getting compared to Gummo, it’s something that people just sort of see and latch on to. The characters are a product of their environment, and vice-versa. The environment kind of manifests the internal lives of the characters.

ZW: When you went about constructing the storyline, was there something specific that you had in mind—a slice of life? Or how did your storyline come to be?

CF: Y’know, it’s sort of a slice of life kind of thing. It’s very subtext heavy. In a film like this, you’re not really portraying something that hasn’t been done before, but the way it’s portrayed is something that hasn’t been done before, and the way that it’s portrayed is something in tune with the heart of the film. As far as the superficial narrative goes, it’s sort of fragmented, but I also think there’s a more definitive narrative structure just under the surface. All of the events and all of the people are intertwined. Every object, event, person is connected in some way.

ZW: Indeed, it is really formally progressive. The audio soundscapes, in particular, were interesting, as was the way you used silence. One thing that struck me was that there’s such a high level of realism in the film, at first, but then it becomes more stylized when you realize how little dialogue there is, which is the most stylized element of the script. Was it a concerted decision to make a film with such a small amount of dialogue? How did you come to make that decision?

CF: Yeah, the script was always very short, light on dialogue. I wanted to do that for a variety of reasons. I wanted something that was grounded in reality, rough and real on the surface, but at the same time there’s a hand, a voice behind it, there are things going on beneath the surface, and it goes back and forth between those places. The lack of dialogue—to be honest, when I was working on the script, it felt more realistic. Around here, people don’t really talk to people that much, you know? A lot of dialogue in films is expositional, it definitely seems forced, the way people chatter and talk more than they really do. In this kind of environment, at least in my experience, people don’t really talk to each other. And when they do, they don’t have a whole hell of a lot to say. It’s more factual exchanges to get points across, get things moving in one direction. From a directing point of view, I really wanted to just tell the story in pictures.

ZW: It’s interesting how the film’s base realism is supplanted by all these more stylized moments—the Budd Dwyer thing, the bursting into flames shot, the soundscapes. Did that stylistic conception originate from any influences, films? Where did it come from?

CF: The influence thing is kind of a slippery slope. There was a time, back in high school, and then when I was trying the college thing, that I just wanted to see as many films as I could. But I believe that you can’t see something that you like without it affecting you, and kind of shaping the way you look at things. So it got to a point where I stopped trying to really watch many films. In a perfect world I would never watch movies, ever again. I love films, which is the reason why I do still watch some from time to time, but I wanted to stay away from the influence thing. So there’s nobody in particular from a filmmaking standpoint. The one person who I would reference, philosophically, would be Schopenhauer. I was reading a lot of Schopenhauer when I was working on this movie, and there’s all sorts of stuff about representation in the subtext. We weren’t just screwing around for a decade in the making of this film, there’s a lot of stuff built into it.

ZW: So the audio sequences—there was so much going on there. Were they an attempt at an interior monologue of the characters, or an attempt at an evocation of the world they lived in?

CF: I’d say both. It’s a bit of an internal monologue, but it’s never attributed to one character. I was trying to bring several characters, during a particular point in life, together in an accurate way. It seems abstract, but I think a lot of the things said can be ascribed to all the characters, or can be seen as referencing the plot. And sometimes they’re just about the feelings they evoke in the audience.

ZW: I could see certain people saying, “these characters are kept so distant from us, they never speak, I feel like I don’t know them at all,” but it seems like that is exactly the point, and the audio is what tries to fill us in on who they are.

CF: Right. And we got a lot of praise, and I’m very thankful for that, but whenever there’s criticism, a lot comes from the standpoint that people feel like they need to be sympathetic towards the characters. Who gives a shit? Who says you need to be sympathetic toward someone that you’re watching? It’s the subject of a film—it’s not you and it doesn’t have to be you in order for you to understand what it’s getting at. Everything doesn’t need to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, there’s plenty about this world that’s neither warm nor fuzzy.

ZW: In film school, I was taught that you have to make the audience care about the characters. But I feel like the people onscreen should be people whose lives are important, in one way or another, people who merit two hours of your time. A lot in film today is about pleasing the audience. Providing pleasure as opposed to educating.

CF: I’m in agreement. All of that shit, none of it ever really sat very well with me. Who gives a fuck how these people think films should be made? I always felt that it was better for me to spend that money on making my film than taking classes. That kind of mentality just leads to making boring movies, boring movies in the same way about the same shit that every motherfucker has for close to one hundred years. Who cares? It’s not interesting. I have a tremendous respect for filmmaking as an art, and it is, it’s high art. Movies can be whatever you want them to be. You take what you need for your material, and leave the rest. I dunno man, to hell with making films the way that people tell you they should be made. Approaching films from the standpoint that you have to care about characters—like, I dunno, like you’re dating them or something? I don’t understand that at all.

ZW: When was the film shot?

CF: It was shot in 2004. The script was really finished in 2001, and that’s when we started getting the financing together, and we shot in ’04.

ZW: It must be an amazing story—the journey from script to screen, distribution with Kino. Can you give me the basics?

CF: I was always into film, watching tons of them when I was younger. I was fifteen when I really buckled down and started working on the script. I thought, hey, in a year or two, we’ll be making the movie. I was actually working on it prior to that, but when I was fifteen, that’s when the bulk of it was written and it got finished. I kept tweaking it up until the last day of shooting though. When I was eighteen, we put the production company together, we started raising money. It took about three years to raise the money, and then we started filming in ’04. It was a fourteen day shoot, after all that prep and everything that’s happened since then. There was really no sleeping or eating. The sound mix was kind of a nightmare—that took a year and a half to finish the sound mix. We wanted it to be perfect. We started the festival submissions, and it took us a year, year and a half before we got into any festivals, just by submitting and re-submitting. How you position these things is important. We got to premiere in CineVegas, got a great review in Variety, and it’s played at twenty or so festivals since then. That went on for a couple years, and then we spent a solid year trying to get distributors to take a look at it. We came across Kino, they loved it and were willing to take the chance on it. They just released it in New York, and they’ve got a bunch of other release dates set up.

ZW: What’s next for you?

CF: Yeah, I was going to mention that, I feel like I’ve been a bit slow with my answers because I’ve been heavily working on my next script. I just got back from Los Angeles, got signed up with an agency, and so I’m developing two projects. I’m going to do things on a little bit of a larger scale, but still the way I want to do them. Can’t really get into what they’re about, but they’re two projects, one script I’m almost finished with, and hopefully I can put out some more information on them soon. And then I have some more stuff lined up for after that, so I’m not going anywhere.

ZW: Which agency?

CF: Creative Artists.

ZW: I’ve heard of them.

CF: Ha. It’s funny, cause a lot of people around here, they call it CCA or whatever, they don’t know what it is or give a shit. I met with a lot of people out in Los Angeles, and to be honest, I was pretty impressed. I was not expecting to have a meaningful conversation with very many people out there, but they really got the film, they point out details that no one else has pointed out, had some really insightful things to say. Go figure. So I was pretty impressed with them, and I’m eager to see how it pans out. They know the kind of films I want to do, and they’re still interested, so I’m excited about it.

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Zachary Wigon is a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. In addition to writing and directing short films and contributing to The House Next Door, he also writes film criticism for The Auteurs' Notebook.

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House contributor Jason Bellamy sends in today's link. It's to Plain Dealer journalist Connie Schultz's column about anonymous posting on the Internet—a ripe topic for discussion. Here's an excerpt:

"Anonymity on the Web offends most journalists I know, and not just because their own names go on everything they write. It breaks every rule newspapers have enforced for decades in letters to the editor, which require not only a name and a city of residence, but contact information to confirm authorship.

"Anonymous comments also alienate many thoughtful readers, who are the majority of people who read newspapers. When readers complain to me about ugly comments, I urge them to weigh in, but most balk. It's like trying to persuade your friends to visit a great tavern in a bad neighborhood: They want nothing to do with that side of town."

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"Link for the Day": Each day the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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By Kevin B. Lee, John Lichman and Vadim Rizov

[Originally posted on Current Movies, September 26th, 2009.]

INTRODUCTION

Hello Brooklyn!

Our second podcast looks at a film that has its international premiere at the New York Film Festival: Zhao Dayong's Ghost Town.

Split into three parts ("Voices;" "Recollection;" "Innocence") this doc explores culture and experiences of Zhiziluo, a town nestled among the mountains in Southern China. Yet you won't find a formal structure with narrator droning on about the town life.

Instead, Ghost Town begins with a stationary shot on a street. As one villager passes by, "Why are you filming this? This is boring."

There is something inherently fascinating about this structured, yet entirely unstructured glimpse of a culture and people who seem unsure whether they want to leave behind their way of life for the big cities, or simply deteriorate with their village.

Joining me is Vadim Rizov (IFC's "Indie Eye") and Kevin B. Lee (Also Like Life and Vice President of Programming and Education for DGenerateFilms.)

DISCLOSURE: Kevin has been on our House Next Door podcast in previous episodes and still hosts the original audio files. (JL)

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PODCAST


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Kevin B. Lee wears many hats.

John Lichman is the great and much-missed.

Vadim Rizov recently GreenCine'd.

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By Steven Boone

[Lebanon screens on 10/01/2009 at 9:30pm and on 10/02/2009 at 3pm. Click date/time links for ticket information.]

Samuel Maoz's Lebanon is a good old-fashioned Sam Fuller war picture, all capital letters and tight close-ups. There is not one narrative surprise in it, and it doesn't need any. Maoz is drawing on his experiences as an Israeli tank gunner during the first Lebanon war just as Fuller raided his World War II combat memories for the epic The Big Red One. But Lebanon is more on the scale of Fuller's Korean War cheapie The Steel Helmet, filling the screen mostly with soldiers' sweaty, greasy, bug-eyed faces in the moments before and after decisive violence. Maoz pushes for the ultimate in subjectivity, never letting his camera leave the tank interior. We are stuck in there, just like the shell-shocked crew whose superiors force them into hostile, bombed-out territory without a clear objective or sufficient support.

The real work for Maoz (besides dredging up personal traumas sublimated for three decades) is creating a sense of the tank as a living, ravenous organism. If the title weren't already taken by another lost tank patrol movie, you'd have to call this one The Beast. The first scene of the tank coming to life is a dazzling tour de force. Sound designer Alex Claude creates much of this beastly life with mechanical sounds that don’t just appear on the soundtrack but emerge from stillness, gather force, sputter, rage, climax and expire like a life cycle or, um, like sex. This dank tank, constantly spewing oil and slime when the action gets hot and heavy, seems to welcome an intense, if familiar, homoerotic reading. With all the verbal references to home and “mother,” it could also be taken as some kind of (somebody stop me) womb. Just tossing a bone to the signs-and-meanings crowd there.

Maoz's capital letters come in the form of POV shots through the tank's gun sights. With each jerky pan, tilt and magnification, the viewfinder clicks, whirrs and bloops. The bloops are devastating. They sound like the slate tone of a Nagra tape recorder and accompany jump cuts to closer or wider views of the hellish war tableaux. No zooms. The images just swap out like prime lenses mounted on a turret or an optometrist's phoropter. Each bleep introduces a startling new detail or panorama of civilian carnage and military anomie. It's reminiscent of Gaspar Noé's gunshot blast sound effect in I Stand Alone—except that it creates the opposite effect: Noé's shotgun sounds punctuate his hateful protagonist's astonishingly cruel declamations; Maoz's bloops are cries.

Given all the familiarity, none of these devices would be worth our investment if Moaz didn’t get the psychology right. Lebanon’s characters are high-definition wonders, from Moaz’s stand-in, the dangerously green gunner Shmulik, to the charismatic malcontent who should be in charge, to the asshole superior who insists on using illegal white phosphorous on civilians but later reveals his own fear and fragility. In a real beaut of a monologue, Shmulik recalls exploiting a female high-school teacher’s sympathy after his father’s funeral, using it as an opportunity to dry hump her. “That’s right, let it all out,” he recalls the teacher whispering in his ear as she held him close, unaware that he was letting it out, alright. That’s Fuller’s Law in practice: Stylize the war but draw the people in the finest detail, especially those emotions too dizzyingly contradictory, poetic and improbable to be anything but true.

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Steven Boone is a New York-based critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of Big Media Vandalism.

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By Simon Abrams

[Police, Adjective screens 09/28/2009 at 9:15pm and 09/29/2009 at 6pm. Click date/time links for ticket information.]

I can forgive Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective for its didacticism because it feels well-earned. Beginning as the Romanian answer to 24—a police procedural presented in "real-time," for the most part through long takes and even longer scenes—Porumboiu's film is very much an argument, but it's not, as one character suggests, a dialectical one. That would require a sustained, coherent position to counter the film's prevailing utilitarian statement, which is revealed in a protracted climax involving a sneering superior and a Romanian dictionary. (Resolved: When a judgment of one's own conscience comes into conflict with a judgment that maintains the status quo, the status quo wins.) It sounds as much fun as being hit continuously upside the head for 115 minutes by a rolled-up newspaper and then, to help you understand what it's all for, being whacked in the face several times by a rock-hard icepack.

The dual-nature of that blunt trauma is, however, a blessing in disguise. First, the director effectively numbs you into a trance. It's hard not to struggle while Porumboiu hypnotizes you with long take after long take, but he does it very effectively thanks to some tantalizing bait. We follow Cristi (Dragos Bucur), blue collar and flatfoot supreme, throughout his daily routine—trailing a bunch of kids believed to sell and consume some small amount of pot. Though it's unbelievable to think that an officer could only be responsible for one case at a time, Cristi devotes all his time on duty to trailing these kids, staking out where they'll go next, getting more information about their surroundings and preparing paperwork, of course.

The unnaturally elongated pace of these scenes don't force but rather allow your mind to wander, to explore the frame, only to discover that your lazy eye is, in its own time, latching onto what Porumboiu wants you to look at. The dreary post-industrial neighborhood Cristi tramps through is filmed with Porumboiu's instinctive, painterly skill: he consistently finds the best place to put his sedentary camera and cast a spell on you.

The lulls between Cristi's fits of speech and his actions effectively elicit the moral haze in which his routine envelops him. He refuses to bust a couple of kids for smoking pot because of a law that he's sure will change in a couple of years. But Cristi has to because the law is the law and he must abide by it since he's the tangible extension of that law. If you can't tell already, Porumboiu's view of the world (where grunts have to make all the big decisions, whether they know it or not) is very much an intellectual one. Porumboiu thankfully does not condescend to Cristi, making it clear to us that his confusion is not due to his low social class, but rather his extensive involvement in the case.

That experiential proximity we share with Cristi, our guide to this particular corner of Romanian New Wave purgatory, is thus the extent of his certainty, a gut reaction which is effectively squelched in the film's devastatingly deadpan finale. Like Cristi's reports—which are shown to the viewer in close-up as if they were documents of unimpeachable truth—it hammers out any doubt from Cristi's mind and ours with the grace of a bulldozer. The overt nature of the scene is a perfect example of why Porumboiu is the foremost miserablist of his New Wave colleagues. It lends Police, Adjective a complementary affinity to Kafka's style of bullishly grinding his characters into the ground with the absurdity of the police states that his stories comment on. It's a hard film to cozy up to, but one I look forward to rewatching.

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Simon Abrams writes about comics, books and movies for the Comics Journal, the L Magazine, the New York Press and Slant Magazine. Since last year, he's been obsessively keeping a film journal where he writes down something about every film he's seen.

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My thanks to John Lichman and Faisal-Azam Qureshi for this one:

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"Link for the Day": Each day the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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You tell me…

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"Link for the Day": Each day the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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By Kevin B. Lee

[Posted September 24th, 2009 on Moving Image Source. Click here for a transcript.]

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"A Revolution on Screen" is a two-part video essay coinciding with the 2009 New York Film Festival Masterworks series "(Re)Inventing China: A New Cinema for a New Society, 1949–1966." This series is the first major U.S. retrospective of the films made during the "Seventeen Years" period between the establishment of the People's Republic of China and the Cultural Revolution. Part 2 will be published next week.

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By Justine Elias

Magnificent desolation—Buzz Aldrin’s lyrical description of the moonscape, as seen from its lonesome surface—has inspired poets and artists. But to science-fiction filmmakers and writers, the phrase usually inspires terror. Travel to Mars, the stars, and beyond often risks a killer case of space madness. So it goes, screamingly, in Pandorum,’ a highly effective sci-fi thriller set during a 2174 mission to colonize a far-off, newly discovered Earth-like planet.

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To read the rest of the review at Boston.com, click here.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

Florescent lights. Combination locks. Clueless parents. Clueless teachers. Clueless friends. Paranoia. Alienation. Hormones. Zits.

These are but a few selling points of the NBC series Freaks and Geeks, which debuted September 25, 1999. Set at a white suburban high school circa 1981 and devised by men who knew the territory, creator Paul Feig and executive producer Judd Apatow, it was hailed by critics as one of that season’s freshest new series. It lingered in the basement of the Nielsen ratings for 18 episodes, less than a full season, until the network, which never really knew what to do with it, finally pulled the plug.

In retrospect, it seems a minor miracle that the series lasted as long as it did, since its stock in trade was honesty. And when the subject is adolescence, a period that grows rosy in the memory but sucks ass when you’re actually living through it, honesty isn’t much of a selling point. Mass audiences are only interested in reliving high school if it’s sentimentalized. The chance to revisit something remotely in the ballpark of the real thing is as appetizing as cafeteria food — and Freaks and Geeks was a weekly feast of teen awkwardness.

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To view the video essay on The L Magazine's website, click here. To read a transcript of the narration, click here.

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You see, here's the curse of abandoning Links for the Day. We miss the most recent Theme Song video from Goldentusk. Well, better four months late than never. Take it, John Connor:

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"Link for the Day": Each day the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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By Glenn Kenny, John Lichman, Vadim Rizov and Keith Uhlich

This should make THE FUTURIST! exceedingly happy (maybe some of the rest of you as well). Our man in L.A., John Lichman, is back East Coast-side for NYFF, so we've returned to the hallowed fount of classic rock and flowing liquor that is Grassroots Tavern. First conversation treads two kinds of Grass: Sweet- and Wild-. The podcasts are now being hosted at John's place of employ, Current Movies. We hope to have a downloadable mp3 file for you at some point (will be added here, if so). In the meantime, take a listen to the two-part opener, embedded below. And, remember, if you see us at the bar…well, shouldn't you know that by now?

Part 1



Part 2

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Glenn Kenny just wrote up Antichrist.

'Bout time John Lichman got his ass back East.

Vadim Rizov bylines every which way but loose, any which way he can.

Keith Uhlich is having a helluva week.

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Here are two videos currently making the rounds. Let's juxtapose:





Jim Emerson dissects further at Scanners.

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"Link for the Day": Each day the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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By Kenji Fujishima

[Published at The Wall Street Journal on September 21st, 2009.]

With the release of her latest film, Rage, which stars Jude Law, Steve Buscemi and Eddie Izzard, among others, British director Sally Potter is trying something no other filmmaker has yet attempted: She will be distributing a feature film for free on mobile phones.

Starting today, the monologue-heavy drama will be released gratis in seven parts, one part a day, through a free application for iPhones and iPods offered by Babelgum, a Web- and mobile-content platform. The only theatrical distribution planned for the film—which screened in competition at the Berlin Film Festival in February—is a red-carpet premiere at The Box theater in New York tonight, and the DVD will be released tomorrow.

A red-carpet premiere is also planned for Thursday, Sept. 24, in London, but with a major twist: both the premiere event and a Q&A session following the screening will be broadcast live in screens all across the U.K. and Ireland, as well as online. It will be interactive, as audience members from all over the world will be able to ask Potter and some of the actors questions through text messages and/or Skype.

The atypical release pattern for Rage befits the typically inventive Potter, whose last film, Yes, was a love story in which all the characters spoke in iambic pentameter. The Wall Street Journal spoke with Potter about her new film, the nature of its multi-platform release, and her thoughts on the future of cinema and new media.

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To read the interview at The Wall Street Journal, click here.

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Today's link will take you to Elusive Lucidity, where proprietor Zach Campbell gives his thoughts on Mad Men (having just finished the first season) in an entry titled "A Taste of Madison Avenue." Here's a sample:

"Who wouldn't, shouldn't grimace at this undignified gesture toward the enlightened viewer's very … enlightenment? 'Ah, they were so sexist, so myopic, so unhealthy, so milquetoast, so closeted, so repressed, so hypocritical, so lacking in self-awareness.' And in 50 years the popular art of tomorrow will no doubt disparage us in ways that are unfair and self-congratulatory. C'est la vie (in an idiocracy). For one thing: Mad Men is good, but it's not even close to Tashlin's critiques. It remains exquisitely tasteful, on the surface, and ultimately middlebrow. Therein lie a few of the problems."

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"Link for the Day": Each day the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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By Tom Stempel

COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: Flame & Citron, A Woman in Berlin, Inglourious Basterds, District 9, Sense and Sensibility, Mad Men, The Code, and Hollywood Under Siege (book), but first:

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FAN MAIL: There were a couple of comments that came in on US#30 after I had sent off #31, so let me respond to those now. “Manu” would like me to review a Hindi film or two. If I see one I want to write about, I certainly will. Keith gives me a lot of freedom to write about what I want to, which is one of the many reasons I love this gig. Olaf Barthel thought the problems with Public Enemies script were from the book. I have not read the book, but I think the script problems were more the doing of the screenwriters. After all, the job of the screenwriters is to make the book work as a screenplay. There is a great example of that later in this column.

On to #31. Craig thought we did not get a precise view of Summer in (500) Days of Summer because we are getting Tom’s view and he is an unreliable narrator. He may have a point, but I think it may just be the way the writers structured the script to give us a “true” insight into her at the end. “-bee” made a very good point that Leslie Mann in Funny People just does not have the “requisite charisma” to bring off the part. Since I whacked Apatow’s kids in the film, I have no trouble whacking his wife as well. “DS” responded to my “Be careful what you wish for” as to my eventually reviewing one of his scripts by noting that if I did review it, it would mean it had been made. And he looked forward to learning from my comments. He added, “I want to keep on learning,” which is exactly the attitude you have to bring to the table. For one of the great “keep on learning” stories, look up the anecdote from Nunnally Johnson at the end of the appendix in the third edition of my FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film.

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FLAME & CITRON (2008. Written by Lars Andersen and Ole Christian Madsen. 130 minutes by IMDb and Los Angeles Times count, 135 minutes by my count): Army of Shadows goes to Denmark.

Ole Christian Madsen, the director as well as a co-writer of this film, said in an interview in the Los Angeles Times that his film about two of the best known Danish resistance movement fighters in World War II was inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 classic Army of Shadows. Melville was one of the first filmmakers to look at the darker side of the resistance, and for his troubles his film was banned for years in France. What both filmmakers do is avoid the standard heroics of traditional resistance films and look at the queasy moral ground that was part of the fight, even by the good guys in the Good War. I found Army of Shadows both admirable and chilling, and in some ways Flame & Citron is even better. It is not as exciting as Paul Verhoeven’s 2006 film Black Book, but Verhoeven was dealing with people having to make complex moral decisions instantaneously. Flame & Citron takes its time to turn the screws on its characters, and us.

The film begins with newsreels of the Nazi invasion of Denmark in 1940, but with a particularly disquieting voiceover narration. It is not the Voice of God you might expect from a film set in the forties, but rather someone—and we don’t find out who for a while—whispering intimately to someone else. Only later do we learn the voice belongs to Bent, nicknamed Flame because of his red hair, and only at the end do we learn to whom he was, well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. The film proper starts in May 1944, so we get none of the glamor of the early years of the resistance. It has been going on for a while and while killing has become commonplace, it has also begun to exhaust Bent and his partner, Jorgen, nicknamed Citron. Here is the first surprise: they have not been killing Germans, but Danes who collaborated with the Germans. (In traditional resistance films, all the civilians were in the resistance and nobody collaborated. In Army of Shadows and this film that’s not true.) Now they get the word from their boss Winther to kill three Germans. The attempted killings do not go well, to put it politely. Bent, meanwhile, is attracted to a shadowy older woman, Ketty, even though it is not clear whom she works for. As the film progresses, a common question several characters ask other characters is, “Who do you work for?” Sometimes they get answers, sometimes not. Sometimes the answers are true, sometimes not. Sometimes the answers are only partially true, sometimes partially false. While the movie starts out a little slowly, it gets better as it goes along. Yes, there is a traditional shootout involving one of the men, but mostly the writers have given us a collection of great scenes. Late in the picture, Bent has a meeting with his father that gives us in a nutshell the reality of the Nazi occupation and how people dealt with it. Jorgen finds out he is losing his wife, since he has so little time when he can be with her, and the writers give us a great, unsettling scene where he ensures she will be taken care of properly. There is a scene in Stockholm in which the various leaders of Danish Intelligence and the Army try to work out what to do with Flame & Citron; it recalls the final scene between Feisal, Allenby and Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, and I cannot give it any higher praise.

As screenwriters, here is why you should do your research. The writers talked to the surviving members of the two men’s families, and looked through various archives. In a Stockholm archive they found a final detail about Ketty that gives us her final scene. The picture would be poorer without that scene.

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A WOMAN IN BERLIN (2008. Screenplay by Max Färberböck and co-writer Catharina Schuchmann, based on the book Anonyma-Eine Frau in Berlin by Anonyma. 131 minutes): Not exactly the feel-good movie of the summer.

The book Anonyma-Eine Frau in Berlin was published in Germany in 1959 to howls of outrage. The anonymous author wrote of her experiences at the end of World War II when the Russians captured Berlin. She and many of the women she knew were raped, multiple times, by various Russian soldiers. The story she tells is how she decided to be the one to choose who raped her, and how she formed various liaisons with Russian officers, ending up with a major. You can see why readers on both sides of the Iron Curtain would not have been happy. It is not surprising it took another fifty years for the book to make it to the screen. Max Färberböck , who also directed, was the writer and director ten years ago of Aimée & Jaguar, in which a German woman falls in love with a female Jewish resistance fighter in Berlin in 1943/44. So he is familiar with the territory.

The current film, like the earlier one, is based on a true story, which in this case gives it a very episodic structure. The writers use that very effectively at the beginning of the film to help capture the chaos of facing the Berliners as the Russian army arrives while the war is still on. We, like the women and old men, are kept off balance. This means the script depends more on individual scenes than a single through-line. The scenes are compelling, and not just because we have not seen much like it before. Billy Wilder’s 1948 film, A Foreign Affair, comes closest, but without the explicitness we get here. The writers here are more sympathetic to the German women than Wilder was three years after the end of the war.

After a long sequence that both sets up the situation and lets us know we as well as the women cannot escape, we begin to see how accommodations are made by everybody. Late in the first hour, “Anonyma,” as the heroine is listed in the cast, meets an old friend, Elke (played by Juliane Köhler, Aimée from the earlier film). Anonyma asks her simply, “How many times?” and Elke replies equally straightforwardly, “Four times.” The two women join others in Anonyma’s building for a, well, you can’t quite call it a party. A get-together, group therapy, whatever. They talk openly about their experiences with the Russian men, laughing about the men and even the experiences. Wilder never had a scene like this.

About 75-minutes into the film, the war ends, and we get a brilliant set-piece of the celebration of the Russians and the Germans. When you think of set-pieces in films, you tend to think of directors showing off (the crop duster sequence in North by Northwest), but here it is a writers’ set-piece, not unlike the laying out of the narrative elements in the first half hour of The Godfather. We get not only the variation of emotions the characters feel, but how those emotions change as the party and scene progress. Like Black Book and Flame & Citron, the scene and the film pull us into the moral complexities of human behavior in the desperate environment of war.

The major, whom Anonyma develops a kind of love for, is eventually sent away, possibly to Siberia, possibly worse, probably at least in part for his relationship with her. Her husband returns, and the difference in his look between an early flashback of him going off to war and how he looks now summarizes the damage war does even to those who manage somehow to survive. The writers have provided great opportunities for all the film’s actors.

The film is not perfect. There are scenes that go on too long, and it was made on what appears to be a limited budget. We are stuck on the street where Anonyma lives and the Russian army seems to hang out. It looks as though it might have been one of exterior street sets from The Pianist. It adds to the claustrophobia of the women’s situation, but when Anonyma does take a ride on a bicycle, she never seems to leave the street. Those are minor flaws.

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INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009. Written by Quentin Tarantino. 153 minutes): No, I am not going where you think I am.

You probably thought that since I love and admire Flame & Citron and A Woman in Berlin, particularly for their complex and subtle look at war and what it does to its participants, that I am about to rake Tarantino over the coals for making a silly, shallow, appeal-to-the-twelve-year-old fanboy movie. Like most people, I have a taste for a wide variety of movies. Tarantino is less interested, not to say not interested at all, in writing a subtle look at the morality of war. Like many American screenwriters, who are after all part of the American storytelling tradition, he wants to tell a tale. And as much or more than any other American screenwriter, he wants to tell off-the-wall, wildly entertaining stories. Americans do this better than screenwriters in most other cultures. It is part of our DNA. And different as Inglourious Basterds obviously is from the two films above, it is maybe not as different as you might think.

The opening scene could have come out of either of the two European films. SS Colonel Landa comes to a farm in occupied France and questions the owner about a Jewish family he has not been able to track down. The scene is slower and less obviously violent than the openings of the other two films. It is much more a suspense scene than an action scene, as are several of the scenes in Basterds. Tarantino has been saying in interviews that his film is more about dialogue than action. The dialogue is not the wild and crazy stuff that we expect from Tarantino, but it does tell us about the characters and the situation. Landa, a wonderful character beautifully played by Christoph Waltz, is a descendant of all those suave Nazis that showed up in films made during the war, and he takes his time talking to the farmer before guns get fired.

American Lt. Aldo Raine, whom we meet in the next “chapter,” talks completely differently. He is a redneck, part Native American from Tennessee, and he sounds like it. In US#16 I made the distinction between Brad Pitt the movie star and Brad Pitt the character actor. Boy, am I glad Pitt was smart enough to bring the character actor along, since Tarantino has given him a great character to play. Pitt delivers a marvelous performance, which has been a bit overshadowed by Waltz’s Landa. They are both terrific, and Tarantino has, more than in any of his previous scripts, made sure they do not talk alike.

I mentioned that there are great suspense scenes in this script. One is when Shosanna, the sole survivor of the farm scene and who now runs a movie theatre in Paris, is brought to a lunch with German army hero Frederick Zoller and Joseph Goebbels. Landa shows up in the middle of the scene. I think Tarantino took the cheap way out by letting us know before this that Shosanna was the survivor, since it probably would have been more dramatic just to throw in the quick flashback we do get in the middle of the scene. I always get my screenwriting students to write in reactions, and Tarantino has given Mélanie Laurent, who plays Shosanna, a great reaction at the end of the scene. I would also like to see the rest of the shot, since Tarantino and his editor Sally Menke seem to cut it short.

I am not spoiling anything at this point by letting you know the ending is VERY revisionist: Hitler and the German high command are killed in an explosion and fire at the movie theatre. Maybe it was that I knew that going into to see the film, but I found that Tarantino had set up and told his tall tale in such an entertaining way that I not only did not care that he had changed the course of history, I felt it did not have the impact for me that it might have had if I had not known. That’s a problem for writer when you come up with such a twist. Especially these days with tweets and such it is unlikely to remain a secret.

So if this is such a tall tale, how is it like those two European films? One of the problems I had with Tarantino’s earlier films is that he seemed unaware that violence hurt people. He took this, I suspect, from the kung fu movies he loved as a video store clerk where nobody seems to be hurt from all the damage done to them. As much as I loved Pulp Fiction, after the shootout in the street I kept thinking, “These guys have lost so much blood they should at least be in shock, if not dead.” I often said jokingly in the nineties that Tarantino should get shot in the foot so he would know the cost of the violence. In Basterds, for all the exuberant action, there are moments when we are aware of the emotional damage, such as Zoller’s reactions to the film of his real-life adventures. No, the film is not as good as others in dealing with this, but the fact that it is there gives at least a little substance to what is otherwise a rousing, American adventure film. Tarantino is maturing, but thank God not too much.

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DISTRICT 9 (2009. Written by Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell. 112 minutes): Killing three birds with one stone.

Not being a big fan of science fiction movies, CGI spectacles, or movies in which slimy things jump out and go boo, I usually end up seeing only one in each genre over the course of the year. District 9 combines all three in one film and throws in social comment and satire as well. And I loved it.

You may know the backstory of this one. Blomkamp was supposed to direct a big-budget version of Halo, but when the project fell apart, producer Peter Jackson asked if he wanted to do something else. Blomkamp suggested a feature based on a six-minute short he had made in 2005 called Alive in Joburg. Jackson agreed and Blomkamp and Tatchell came up with the current script. According to a joint interview with the writers in the August 14th issue of Creative Screenwriting Weekly, Blomkamp was interested in doing a science fiction movie in South Africa, while Tatchell focused on the characters.

A traditional problem with science fiction films is exposition, specifically setting up the world of the film. If a man on a horse with a gun rides over the hill, we know we are in a western until you tell us otherwise. But science fiction films have to establish the world we will be living in and the rules of that world. Star Wars does it by plunging us right into the action and letting us figure out what the rules are. The David Lynch film of Dune spent so much time setting up the world that a friend of mine kept mumbling “They’re only up to page 20,” “They’re only up to page 40.” What the writers do here is throw an enormous amount of exposition at us, but in a great variety of forms. Some of it seems to be television news coverage. Some of it seems to be talking heads from a documentary made after the events. All of this is broken up into very short bits, with snippets not only of information, but also of humor and character. When we first see Wikus, we think he must be a minor bit of comedy relief, which is a wonderful bit of writerly slight-of-hand. Look at the information and opinion we get from MANY people about him. All of that information comes together when we find out why he was selected to head the unit that will resettle the aliens.

Matt Maul and several of the folks who commented on his August 17th review of the film at HND felt the film lost their interest after the first half an hour or 40 minutes. I felt that by that point in the film we had gotten to know Wikus and I for one was rooting for him. Blomkamp and Tatchell have created a variety of problems Wikus has to deal with and then used them in inventive ways. He spritzes some fluid on his hand, and it begins to turn into an alien hand. Which on the one hand makes more people chase him for various reasons, but it also gives him a weapon or two or three. Matt and several people commenting on his review thought the film gives up the faux-documentary style and becomes more conventional. It does not give it up all together, but there are scenes done in a more conventional style, particularly those with the aliens, which I think makes them more sympathetic.

Part of the reason for the sense that the film loses something after the opening is that the opening uses the special effects brilliantly to suggest a much larger scale film than District 9 really is. One thing I LOVE about this film is that the SFX are ENTIRELY at the service of the content of the film: the story, the characters (especially of the aliens) and the ideas. One of the reasons I avoid movies like Transforming the Terminator into G.I. Joe is that the SFX spend a lot of time calling attention to themselves. Because Blomkamp as director is working on what for Hollywood would be a small budget (around $30 million), he does not have time and money to waste on what is not needed.

You can see why Peter Jackson, the director of the 1987 Bad Taste, would be willing to produce this. There is a lot of gore, but as with the SFX, it is only what is needed. The writers and the director do not wallow in it. And it is done humorously. Never underestimate the uses of humor, and by that I do not just mean wisecracks. Here the character humor and the political satire are a nice counterbalance to the action and gore. And the political satire is not heavy-handed. We can see that the aliens have been put into the same kind of slums that black people in South Africa have been put in. We don't need to be hit over the head with it.

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SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (1995. Screenplay by Emma Thompson, based on the novel by Jane Austen. 135 minutes): I think I was wrong about both Jane and Emma.

In writing about Clueless, the 1995 modern dress version of Austen’s Emma in the book Understanding Screenwriting, I admitted I had problems with Austen as a writer. I had loved the films made in the mid-nineties from her novels, but when I finally got around to reading Emma, “It cured me of being a Janeite forever. The woman is one of the wordiest writers in the English language, never using five words when she can use five hundred or a thousand. You have to wade through so much verbiage to get to the wit and the characters it is hardly worth the effort.” This summer I got around to reading Sense and Sensibility. It is a great airplane read, by the way. You have to concentrate on the language just hard enough to distract you from everything else on the plane. I liked it a lot better than Emma. It is wordy, and you still have to wade through a lot, but I began to appreciate what Janeites see in Austen. Reading the novel also made me appreciate even more than I already did Emma Thompson’s screenplay.

Austen’s novel is dramatic (she loved theatre), but she does not write in scenes. Thompson had to create a number of scenes out of Austen’s general descriptions. In Austen, Edward Ferrars is given no entrance; he just shows up at Norland. Look at his introductory scene in the film. Likewise, Austen’s wordiness extends to her dialogue scenes, which go on forever. I could only find one scene (Elinor telling Edward of Brandon’s offer of a parish) that uses much of Austen’s dialogue. And Edward’s great lines to Elinor at the end, “I have come with no expectation. Only to profess, now that I am at liberty to do so, that my heart is and always will be yours,” is nowhere to be found in Austen. Sometimes Jane needs a real screenwriter to help her out.

***
MAD MEN (2009. “Out of Town” episode written by Matthew Weiner. “Love Among the Ruins” episode written by Cathryn Humphris and Matthew Weiner. Epiosode “My Old Kentucky Home” written by Dhavi Waller and Matthew Weiner. Each episode 60 minutes): Oh joy. Oh rapture. It’s back.

I found it rather interesting to read the episode recap of “Out of Town” on the official AMC website for the show. It gets all the facts down and even makes the opening seem to me clearer than it did when I watched it, but it misses what makes Mad Men unique: the overtones, the nuances. By the way, the official website will also give you a cocktail guide, tell you how to have Mad Men parties, show you videos of the premier, and give you quizzes to take. It will not, however, give you either the writing or acting credits for the show. If I were the agent for the actress who played Shelly, the stewardess, I would be on to both AMC and IMDb about getting her on the cast lists (in fairness to IMDb, within a week, they did have Sunny Mabrey, who plays Shelly, up on the cast list).

Nuances. That’s why we love the show. Sterling Cooper has been taken over by a British firm and look at how that is dealt with in “Out of Town.” Look at the different ways Ken and Peter come into the office of Lane Pryce, the leading Brit. One sits, the other doesn’t; who knows what is the proper etiquette for the Brits? There are constantly little linguistic misunderstandings between the Brits and our guys. Hooker, the “secretary” to Pryce, keeps explaining that he is more than what the Americans mean by secretary, which leads to Joan’s withering “We know.” Which later leads Hooker, who is nicknamed by the female staff “Moneypenny,” to look baffled and to say about Sterling Cooper, “This place is a gynocracy.” You have to love a show in which even the idiots get off perceptive lines. Great writing is profligate with ideas, scenes, dialogue, characters, everything.

After both Pete and Ken have been separately told they are going to be head of accounts, they ride in an elevator and exchange small talk, but we know what each one is thinking. The same with Don seeing Sal in the hotel room, semi-dressed with the bellhop. And listen to the scene with Don and Sal on the plane back to New York. Yes, Don is talking about an idea for the ad campaign for London Fog (and do you think for a second the choice of that brand is coincidental?), but we and Sal know what he is really talking about when he says, “Limit your exposure.” And listen to Sal’s reaction to the mock-up of the ad. Yes, we are watching the sets, costumes, drinking habits, but Mad Men is also a great show to listen to.

In “Love Among the Ruins” I was particularly struck with how the writers are beginning to show the changes in society that the first two seasons have been setting up. Some of the SC guys are dealing with the plans to tear down the old Penn Station and put up the new Madison Square Garden. Roger’s daughter is getting married, and Roger notes the wedding is set for November 23rd. I was suspicious as soon as I heard that, and my suspicions were confirmed at the end of the scene where we see a copy of the invitation. Yep, November 23rd, 1963. Check your history books if you do know what that’s all about. When the younger guys screw up the Penn Station deal, Don steps in and convinces the head of the project that they just need to change the conversation about it in the public eye. And then the London office has Pryce tell Don that they want to drop the project all together. When Don then asks Pryce why the British company bought SC, he simply answers, “ I don’t know.”

The greatest change we are seeing is in Peggy, who is not only speaking up in meetings, but going out to a bar and picking up somebody to have sex with, just like the guys do. The AMC synopsis has her parting line as “This was fun,” but I got it in my notes as “That was fun,” which suggests her distance from the act. What did I say about it being a great show to listen to?

In “My Old Kentucky Home” Don is at a party (or is it Roger and Jane’s wedding?—the AMC synopsis says party, but there are hints that it is a wedding) at a country club. He is put off by Roger’s singing “My Old Kentucky Home” to Jane. In blackface. As the AMC synopsis says, “Don wanders off to an untended bar where he meets an older male wedding guest. Don prepares Old-Fashioneds while the two swap stories about their modest beginnings.” Yes, but that does not anywhere near capture the richness of the scene. The man, Connie, is a rock-ribbed Republican from New Mexico who still feels out of place. He talks about going by a mansion like the club as a kid in his small boat and hearing the parties. He now thinks it is less interesting on the inside. Don of course is used to being a fish out of water, but as we are constantly seeing, he may be the most adult person on the show. He and Connie may be the most together people at the party, able to see what is going on more clearly than the others. Perhaps in Don’s case, this comes from trying to create himself all these years. In 1991 I happened to meet Christ Cosner Sizemore. That name may not mean anything to you until I tell you that she was the real-life “Eve” of The Three Faces of Eve. She was by then a little dumpling of a grandmother, but she was also one of the most together people I have ever met. Well, I thought, she has had forty years of working on pulling herself together. What the Connie-Don scene does is showing us two men who have pulled themselves together. Self-made men.

***
THE CODE (2008. Written by Ted Humprey. 104 minutes): Leaving money on the table.

This was originally intended as a theatrical film, and it opened overseas in the first half of this year. Its title then was the infinitely better Thick as Thieves; The Code sounds like one of those bland titles the folks in marketing come up with. You just have to keep knocking those away as a batter hits foul balls until you get something you like. I will grant you that the title The Code does refer to one of the more interesting scenes in the middle of the jewelry store heist when the thieves are guessing at the safe’s code (you know the writer is doing it right when he has you on the edge of your seat while the actors are just reading numbers), but you have to have already seen the film. Like Raiders of the Lost Ark.

So it is a heist picture, and we have not had a good one since Inside Man in 2006. Humphrey’s script is not up to that, but it does give us the pleasures of the genre. There are a lot of twists, including one in the middle of the robbery that I was totally not expecting. The head of the two-man operation, Keith Ripley (a tip of the ski mask to Patricia Highsmith, perhaps), is a wonderful opportunity for Morgan Freeman to throw off that nobility he has been dragging around and show us his badasssss side. He's not as nasty as he was in Street Smart (1987), but is still not someone you would want to double cross. His partner, Gabby, is Antonio Banderas, and try to avoid thinking early in the film that he may be too long in the tooth for a character who seems to be the junior partner. Robert Forster also shows up to deliver what is probably the only Jules Dassin joke in the history of movies.

The reason I picked this one up on DVD is that the director, Mimi Leder, is a former student of mine. She made her bones directing episodes of LA Law, China Beach, and ER, the latter one winning her an Emmy. She moved into features with The Peacemaker (1997) and Deep Impact (1998), but after the failure of Pay It Forward in 2000, she went back to television. She has always handled both action and character well and she does so here.

The picture probably could have done O.K. if it had been released theatrically in this country, but it ended up going straight to DVD. We are probably going to be seeing more of this, since in the recession companies will not have as much money to open a film theatrically as they had in the past. As for The Code, when it was released in June, it became the first direct-to-DVD release ever to go to number one in the rentals for its week. Somebody left some money on the table, but it may have cost them too much to pick it up.

***
HOLLYWOOD UNDER SIEGE: MARTIN SCORSESE, THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT, AND THE CULTURE WARS (2008. Book by Thomas R. Lindlof. 394 pages): A tin ear.

Lindlof’s book is a fascinating look at the making of The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and the protests stirred up against it by the religious right. It does tell us enough near the beginning about the writing of the film to help explain why it was so awful. The first writer on the film was Paul Schrader and we get a few lines of dialogue from his script. The idea was to avoid the fancy literary style of most Biblical films, but the dialogue quoted is so everyday it becomes flat. Jay Cocks’s revisions did not help. The dialogue simply was not very believable in the Biblical context. Scorsese did not help matters by letting them sound like New York working class guys. He and Tom Pollock, the new head of the studio, had a long phone conversation about it. Pollock told Lindlof, “I was one of those who did not want Harvey Keitel as Judas. I thought the accents would be totally jarring and take you out of the movie. Marty had an idea that somehow this would show that the people who followed Jesus were the proletariat of the time, the common workingman. I said, ‘All right, Marty, I get it, but why do they have to talk like they’re the common workingmen from the Lower East Side? What’s wrong with just sort of straight-on American?’” Pollock, alas, decided not to push the issue. Too bad, because he was right. I have never seen the picture in full, but I caught about five minutes one night on cable and was so put off by Keitel’s accent I could not stand to watch any more of it. Scorsese does seem to have a tin ear about accents. How else do you explain him letting Michelle Pfeiffer, who can do very good accents, sound like a California surfer-girl in The Age of Innocence (1993)?

The heart of the book is about the controversy and protests when the film was released, and Lindlof has done a great job of researching both sides. So much so that he comes up with this interesting fact. While Universal made only about a $700,000 profit on the film, the man who made the most money off of the situation was Donald Wildmon, the head of the American Family Association. The AFA got $3.2 million in donations in 1988, the year of film, 30% more than the year before. Wildmon’s use of the film as a wedge issue to boost donations was quickly picked up by both the religious and political right. Thanks Marty.
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Tom Stempel is the author of several books on film. His most recent is Understanding Screenwriting: Learning From Good, Not-Quite-So Good, and Bad Screenplays.

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