Go-Go-Rama

Middlemarch (1994)

2012-02-18T21:02:00.002-05:00

After reading George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch, I decided to watch the BBC miniseries, released in 1994. The series was a huge hit in England, where it launched a Middlemarch craze, propelling the book to number on the best seller lists, and the filming location became a tourist site. In six parts, and a little over six hours, the series is quite faithful to the book.

I won't go to great lengths to recap the plot, as it is in my review of the book. Though six hours, it trims the novel to something of its bare bones. It was fascinating to see actors take the role I had imagined in my mind. Most interesting to me was seeing Casaubon, the pedantic scholar, played by Patrick Malahide as a somewhat cadaverous introvert (he looks a little like Riff-Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show). It's a wonder he was part of society at all, given the actor's displaying a repulsion to contact with other people.

The other performers seemed right--Juliet Aubrey, who won a BAFTA award for Best Actress, is perfect as Dorothea, who burns to good with her life, but ultimately finds failure. The same is said for David Hodge as Lydgate. In fact, the crushing of these two characters is more keen in the film than in the book. Failure is a strong word--Dorothea ends up marrying her true love, Ladislaw (played smolderingly by Rufus Sewell), while Hodge finds a kind of peace with his wife Rosamund (Trevyn McDowell), but both have their ultimate ambitions unfulfilled. After reading the book I was left with an uplifted spirit, since it ends with the union of Fred Vincy (Jonathan Firth) and Mary Garth (Rachel Power, perfectly cast).

There are other terrific performances: veteran Shakespearean actor Michael Hordern makes a very cranky Featherstone (it was his last television role), and Robert Hardy brings out the ditheriness in Uncle Brooke. Peter Jeffery manages to bring out the full humanity in the otherwise villainous Bulstrode, and John Savident makes a properly repulsive Raffles, with what I hope are dental prosthetics of a ghastly kind.

Overall I found the series dutiful but soggy--it has a kind of decorum that kept it from really plumbing emotional depths. The direction by Anthony Page was reverent but sedate, the screenplay by Andrew Davies witty but tempered. I liked how the gossips of the town acted as kind of a chorus, but the ending felt curiously anticlimactic. The ending of the book is seen by many as unhappy but realistic, more complex than the usual endings of the day. The series uses the same words as the novel: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Real Steel

2012-02-17T14:40:00.000-05:00

Real Steel, directed by Shawn Levy, was nominated for a Best Visual Effects Oscar, and that's a deserving honor. The rest of the film, though, is an amiable but not very original tale that will be familiar to most sentient beings. It's a lot of Rocky, The Champ, and a bit of The Iron Giant.

In the near future, human boxing has been replaced by battling robots. As explained by the star, Hugh Jackman, it's because people lusted after the violence that humans couldn't provide. This strikes me as a dubious premise, given that mixed martial arts seems to have done just the trick.

In any event, Jackman plays a roguish character who used to be a boxer, but now operates boxing robots. He is highly irresponsible, heavily in debt and impetuous to the point of us wondering how he even manages to make it through the day alive. After his robot is destroyed at a state fair, where he also loses a $20,000 bet, he's told that his ex-girlfriend has died, leaving him custody of an 11-year-old son who he seems to have never seen.

That boy, Dakota Goyo, has been staying with a rich aunt and uncle. Jackman, sniffing cash, agrees to let the uncle have custody for a large cash settlement, but first will take the boy on for the summer. Goyo, who sees through Jackman immediately, is disgusted, but the kid loves robot boxing, and along with Jackman's buddy, Evangeline Lilly, gets involved when Jackman buys a new robot.

Eventually Goyo, while on a raid of a junkyard, finds an old robot, one that is obsolete and used for sparring. Somehow, and this is not completely explained to my satisfaction, the robot, "Atom," understands what Goyo is telling him. This, and a component called "shadow response," in which the robot can mimic it's controller's physical actions, allows him to get a chance at the championship, against a much larger, much more technologically advanced robot called Zeus.

All of the boxing film cliches are here, mostly from Rocky and The Champ, as the father and son grow to love each other, brought together by a hunk of metal. Though it's entirely predictable and doesn't aim very high, it therefore doesn't have far to fall, and I didn't hate it. Jackman is a good screen presence, and though Goyo can be annoying, he didn't ruin the film for me.

The special effects are terrific--at no time did I question that these were really robots fighting, when I'm sure they were all digitally created and the actors were performing in front of green screens. There already are robots designed to fight each other--the BattleBots. I don't think the technology for these things is that far away. If they can replace the savage spectacle of two people put in a ring pummeling each other until one is knocked out, I'm all for it.

Oscar 2011: Best Supporting Actor

2012-02-16T13:16:00.000-05:00

One thing seems sure about the race for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor: a record will be set for the oldest Oscar-winner in any acting category. The current record holder is Jessica Tandy, who was 80 years old when she won for Driving Miss Daisy, but the two leaders in this race are both 82.

The prohibitive favorite is Christopher Plummer, playing a man coming out as gay in his 70s in Beginners. Plummer has steamrolled through the precursors, and in some ways this is a surprise. Beginners was a little-seen indie from the summer, and while Plummer has been a well-respected actor for many years, he has been more noted for his stage work than his films. His most famous film role, by a large margin, is as Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, over 45 years ago.

If there's a sentimental choice, it might be Max von Sydow as the mysterious mute man who aids the young boy in his quest in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Von Sydow deserves an honorary Oscar for his body of work, especially for his work with Ingmar Bergman (so does Liv Ullman). Perhaps that will earn him a few extra votes for his work here, which is rich and expressive despite his lack of dialogue. There is a history of mute characters winning Oscars, most notably Jane Wyman for Johnny Belinda and John Mills for Ryan's Daughter, as well as Marlee Matlin as a deaf person in Children of a Lesser God.

Actor who play real people do well in Oscar races, and Kenneth Branagh is a delight as Sir Laurence Olivier in My Week with Marilyn, though it would seem unlikely that the role has the kind of oomph required to win. Similarly, Jonah Hill, as the sabrematician who helps change baseball in Moneyball, lacks the kind of big scene that wins an award. Perhaps Hill's change of pace from comedy to drama impressed voters, otherwise it's a sound but not a flashy performance.

It's a tough call, but I think my vote would go for Nick Nolte as the recovering alcoholic, trainer, and father of two mixed martial arts fighters in Warrior. Nolte's work in his golden years just gets better and better, and his work in the last ten years or so, including Affliction, The Good Thief, and Warrior is so stripped down and raw that it almost aches to watch him. He has a few big scenes in the film and kills in each one, and when he falls off the wagon, quoting from Moby-Dick, it's devastating.

Will win: Christopher Plummer
Could win: Max von Sydow
Should win: Nick Nolte
Should have been nominated: Kevin Spacey, Margin Call

A Separation

2012-02-15T15:28:00.002-05:00

For the last couple of years I've seen ironically titled films on Valentine's Day. Last year was Kiss Me Deadly, this year, A Separation, an Iranian film by Asghar Farhadi that is nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay.

Given the title, and what little I knew about the film going in, I thought it was about the dissolution of a marriage, but it's much, much more than that. The plot, which grows more intricate and intriguing as the film goes on, starts with a couple's separation, but it's not the Iranian Scenes From a Marriage. Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Maadi) are before a judge, who is deciding whether they have grounds for divorce. The only disagreement is that Hatami wants to emigrate, due to an unspoken "situation" (presumably the political climate, but given the nation's draconian censorship laws, we fill this in ourselves). Nader wants to stay to care of his father, who has Alzheimer's.

The judge refuses their petition, but Hatami leaves to stay with her parents. This means Nader must hire a caregiver for his father. He hires a woman from well outside the city, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a devout Muslim who takes the job to help her family's economic situation. Her husband, a hot-tempered fellow (Shahab Hosseini), who is out of work. However, she has taken the job without gaining his permission, which is against custom.

This sets off a series of events that will lead to a boiling cauldron of lies, slippery morals, and faith. I do not want to reveal anything more than that, as I had no idea what was going to happen and this is the best way to see the movie. Suffice it to say that we can't be sure who is telling the truth and what is being concealed, even from those we can presume to be honest.

Because this film is from a deeply religious country, the laws of religion are noted, but if this were to take place in any other country it would still be fascinating, for different reasons. At the core is a basic human trait--the urge to lie to save one's skin, or the skin of a family member. Loyalty is tested repeatedly throughout the film, with different results. It's easy to put yourself in each character's skin and think if you would do any different.

But since this film is from Iran, a country we might be at war with any day now, it provides an interesting glimpse into that culture. It is somewhat westernized, at least for the upper-middle-class Simin and Nader. But the traditions of patriarchy and the Muslim medieval treatment of women is still in force. The fact that Bayat wears a chador will come into play. I was also interested to see the Iranian justice system at work--it looks like the American DMV, with a judge sitting at a simple table in a small room.

The performances by the four principles are all first rate, as is a juvenile performance by Farhadi's daughter, Sarina, as a girl torn between her warring parents, which will lead to the film's final, gripping, scene. I found the most interesting performance to be by Bayat, as the devout woman who primary motive at any one time shifts between loyalty to God and to her husband.

A Separation starts slowly, but builds to climax that is as powerful as anything I've seen all year. I'm not sure if it will win the Oscar (there is a Holocaust film in the mix), but I doubt any of the four competitors could be any better.

My grade for A Separation: A

Rio

2012-02-14T09:20:00.002-05:00

Rio, directed by Carlos Saldanha, is a bright, colorful animated film that, at the heart, is more about motion than story. It may keep young viewers occupied, but I found it routine and a bit of a bore.

One thing the film has going for it is its exotic location--Rio during Carnaval. We begin in the rain forest, as a variety of birds are captured by poachers. A baby bird, not yet able to fly, is trapped. He ends up on a truck owned by an exotic pet store, but falls loose in the snows of Minnesota, where he is rescued and adopted by a young girl.

That girl grows up to be a bookstore owner, and she and Blu, as he is named, are the best of friends. One day a Brazilian ornithologist stops by, telling the girl that her bird is the last male blue macaw on the planet, and he would like to take him back to Rio to breed with the only known female.

Once in Brazil, Blue (voiced as a typical nebbish by Jesse Eisenberg) meets Jewel (Anne Hathaway). He's not exactly a Romeo, and discover their differences--she's used to the freedom of the jungle, he's happy with his cage. Then they are stolen by smugglers, and try to escape as they constantly bicker, while Blue's owners tracks him down.

Technically speaking the film is very well done, with lots of speed and motion, particularly when the birds fly. Blu can't, but of course we all know he will when the chips are down. There are also a multitude of supporting characters, both for comic effect (Tracy Morgan as a bulldog), and villainy, such as a cockatoo with an English accent.

But the film doesn't have the substance of the best of Pixar, and is pretty disposable. It certainly doesn't suck, but will be washed out of my memory in a few days. It was nominated for an Oscar for best song; one of the composers is the legendary Brazilian musician Sergio Mendes.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Play)

2012-02-13T16:21:00.003-05:00

"What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?--I wish I knew. Just staying on, I guess, as long as she can," says Maggie "the Cat" Pollitt in Tennessee Williams' 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. As I continue my year-long look at Williams' work, I read this play for the first time last night. I have seen the film version, which Williams hated, but due to the restricted time period, played down the homosexual aspects.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a simmering cauldron of sex, lies, and recriminations. It takes place on one night in the bedroom/sitting room of Brick and Maggie. He is a washed up football player, and most recently a sports announcer. The early morning of the play he was out, drunk, on the high school athletic field, and broke his ankle trying to run the hurdles. Now he hobbles around on a crutch, continually drinking.

The occasion is the birthday party for Brick's father, Big Daddy, the biggest cotton grower on the Mississippi delta. Big Daddy is larger-than-life force. He has been to the doctor, who has given him a clean bill of health, but the truth, known to Brick, Maggie, and Brick's brother Gooper and sister-in-law, Mae, is that Big Daddy has inoperable cancer.

Over the course of the play we will learn that Brick will not sleep with Maggie, despite her enticements. Gooper, who has five children with shrill Mae, is the elder son, but is unliked by Big Daddy, who would like to leave his estate to Brick. The mother, Big Mama, has been emotionally abused for forty years by Big Daddy, but she chooses to overlook it.

The lurking secret of the play is that Brick is drinking heavily since the suicide of his football buddy, Skipper. Maggie suspected a relationship that was closer than friendship--she voiced this to Skipper, who slept with her to prove his heterosexuality. The suspicion is that Brick spurned Skipper, which caused his suicide. The film doesn't contain any mention of this at all, but it's spelled out in the play, in a confrontation between Brick and Big Daddy that is built around the word "mendacity." "You think so, too? You think so, too! You think me an' Skipper did, did, did!--sodomy!--together?...You think we did dirty things between us, Skipper an'--me, is that what you think of Skipper?"

To further amplify this, it is discussed that the two previous owners were long-time bachelors who shared a bed. Clearly, this could not be mentioned in a film from 1958.

The film, on the page, seems a cacophony, as often there are many characters on stage at the same time, buzzing around, including Gooper and Mae's obnoxious children. Sex is ever present--Maggie says, "You know, if I thought you would never, never, never make love to me again--I would go downstairs to the kitchen and pick out the longest and sharpest knife I could find and stick it straight into my heart." Big Daddy, in his conversation with Brick, mentions that until recently he had still slept with his wife, despite his general contempt for her. But breeding, as seen with Gooper and Mae, is portrayed in a negative light--there is not sentimental view of family going on here.

Death is also an ever-present theme. In addition to Skipper's suicide, there is Big Daddy's mortality, which he is clearly not ready for: "Ignorance--of mortality--is a comfort. A man don't have that comfort, he's the only living thing that conceives of death, that knows what it is. The others go without knowing which is the way that anything living should go, go without knowing, without any knowledge of it, and yet a pig squeals, but a man sometimes, he can keep a tight mouth about it."

The three main characters of Brick, Big Daddy, and Maggie are sharply drawn. Brick, of course, literally has a crutch--he is often separated from it and has to beg for it. At the end of the play, Maggie, in an attempt to get him to impregnate her, throws it out the window. As the title character, Maggie is the most sympathetic character. Williams, who writes voluminous stage directions, indicates that she is "the only one there who is conscious of and amused by the grotesque."

Williams rewrote the play a few times. The American Library edition of Williams' plays contain both third acts--the original does not have Big Daddy return to the stage in that act, but director Elia Kazan thought it best. The original production starred the recently departed Ben Gazzara as Brick, Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie, and Burl Ives as Big Daddy, who would reprise the role in the film.

Williams, in another long stage direction, writes, "The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man's psychological problem. I'm trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy flickering, evanescent--fiercely charged!--interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in ones own character to himself."

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was Williams' personal favorite of his plays. I don't find it as moving as The Glass Menagerie or as powerful as A Streetcar Named Desire, but it certainly packs a wallop. I'd like to see it on the stage to fully absorb it's effects.

Donovan

2012-02-12T11:30:00.001-05:00

Once again this year I'm going to take a look at some of the artists who were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Starting chronologically, I turn to Donovan, the Scottish troubadour who was instrumental in creating the flower power, psychedelic sound.

I picked up a copy of Donovan's greatest hits, in which, from a vantage point of some thirty or so years, he wrote a few liner notes. Born in 1946, he first achieved stardom in 1965, when he was part of the British folk scene. His earliest hits, "Colours" and "Catch the Wind," are very much in the style of Bob Dylan, who of course was influenced by Woody Guthrie and Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Donovan's vocals, though, seem a conscious aping of Dylan's nasal drone.

But in 1966 he hit it big with the album Sunshine Superman, which included the eponymous single, a mixture of hippie radiance and pop culture references to comic book heroes. This is the Donovan that everyone remembers today, and he had a string of hits until 1970 that today are like a whiff of patchouli.

It's hard to say what my favorite song of his is. There is, of course, "Mellow Yellow," which he wrote after the rumor swirled that smoking banana skins could get you high. The lyric, "Electrical banana, is going to be a sudden craze, electrical banana, is bound to be the very next phase" seems a nice capsule of the hippie ethos. Then there is "Atlantis," which begins with a spoken word section about how the continent of Atlantis was the precursor to all the great civilizations, or "There Is a Mountain," a "Zen ditty" that includes the koan-like lyric, "First there was a mountain then there was no mountain then there is."

Other Donovan hits were "The Hurdy Gurdy Man," which was written in India and was influenced by transcendental meditation and was written for Jimi Hendrix. He didn't play on it, but three future Led Zeppelin members, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham did (Bonham's drums are particularly effective). It's interesting that this song was used so effectively in the film Zodiac, which would seem to be about as far away from the principles of TM as possible.

In that vein, I very much like "The Season of the Witch," which seems intentionally to be spooky, and the unspeakably pretty "Jennifer Juniper," which is so delicate it feels like it wouldn't survive a stiff breeze. And what to make of the catchy "Epistle to Dippy":

"Look on yonder misty mountain
See the young monk meditating rhododendron forest
Over dusty years, I ask you
What's it been like being you?"

Donovan tells us that, "Whatever you think this song is about, it probably is."

Donovan also experiment with different styles of rock. "Epistle to Dippy" was an early example of Indian-flavored raga-rock, which George Harrison would embrace. With the Jeff Beck group, he also record "Barabajagal," and an early reggae song, "Riki Tiki Tavi."

Donovan's career was pretty much over after 1970, and he became seen as an artifact of hippie-dippie culture. He still performs, though, and is connected to another Rock and Roll Hall of Fame entry this year, the Red Hot Chili Peppers--his daughter, Ione Skye, was at one time an inamorata of their front man, Anthony Kiedis, and was on the cover of their album, Mother's Milk.

Oscar 2011: Best Supporting Actress

2012-02-11T14:10:00.005-05:00

Octavia Spencer

Over the next two weeks until the Oscar ceremony I will take a look at each of the "major" categories and analyze who I think will win and why, plus some other pontificating. I start with the easiest contest to call, Best Supporting Actress.

The runaway favorite is Octavia Spencer, who played the sassy maid Mnnie in The Help. It's the kind of showy part the Academy loves, in a popular film, and Spencer has won all the precursor awards. It is very possible that there will be two black women who will Oscars in acting this year, a first. It will then be true that of the seven women who will have won Oscars (Hattie McDaniel, Whoopi Goldberg, Halle Berry, Jennifer Hudson, Monique, and then Spencer and Viola Davis), three of them will have played maids, and another two were characters on welfare. I guess this is progress--remember that McDaniel said she's rather play a maid than be one.

If for some strange reason Spencer doesn't win, who would it be? My guess is Melissa McCarthy, as the blunt force of nature in Bridesmaids. A lot of people who write about this sort of thing complain that broad comic performances are almost never honored--Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda and Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou or the only two I can come up with off the top of my head--so perhaps this would be a chance for that to addressed. But it's an unlikely outcome.

The other three nominees are in the "happy to be nominated" category. Only an absolute sweep by The Artist could get Berenice Bejo, who played the star who made the transition to sound pictures, Peppy Miller. Bejo was fine in the role, but I didn't see anything award-worthy about it. Jessica Chastain made about a zillion films this year. I didn't see them all, but I did see four of them, and Chastain, as the flibbertigibbet Southern woman in The Help, was, to me, her weakest performance, behind roles in The Tree of Life, The Debt, and Take Shelter. But The Help was the most popular of these films, and Chastain does some scenery-chewing, so there it is. She won't win. If there was an award for quantity, as the New York Critics can be, she'd win that.

Perhaps with the least chance is Janet McTeer, as a woman pretending to be a man in Albert Nobbs. The film is dishwater dull, except when McTeer is on the screen. She creates a very realized and interesting character, and to see her a few weeks later in full feminine dress in The Woman in Black only made her performance that more amazing for me. She doesn't stand a ghost of a chance, but I'd vote for her.

Will win: Octavia Spencer
Could win: Melissa McCarthy
Should win: Janet McTeer
Should have been nominated: Shailene Woodley, The Descendants

Anonymous

2012-02-10T21:41:00.003-05:00

When Anonymous was released in theaters last fall, I avoided it for two reasons: one, director Roland Emmerich is a hack of the highest order. I've never seen a movie of his that I liked. Second, the subject matter, conjecture that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone else, is ludicrous, the literary version of the Flat Earth Society. However, the film did receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Costumes (by Lisy Christl), and though I don't usually watch a movie because of the clothes, I figured I would give it a chance.

It wasn't half bad. As to the history, I'll let others more knowledgeable speak for me, such as this article by Stephen Marche that does a complete take down of the argument. I'll add some other problems that Marche doesn't mention, concerning the character of Ben Jonson: Jonson was much younger than Shakespeare, and did not have a hit play until 1598, almost ten years after Shakespeare had started writing. In the film, Jonson is an established playwright when Henry V (not Shakespeare's first production) was staged.

The idea that Shakespeare did not write his plays is old, but the film supports the Oxfordian view, which started in the 1920s. The theory is that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays and used Shakespeare, a dumb actor, as his front. This theory seems to stem from the most arrogant of positions--that genius can not spring from anywhere but good breeding and education, but of course this has proved wrong over and over through history.

However, this is a movie, not a history (for Emmerich's other history-butchering film, check out 10,000 B.C.). If one views it as a fantasy, it's a decent film. De Vere is played beautifully by Rhys Ifans as a nobleman who burns for literature but is denied that by his station. To further push history askew, De Vere is seen having an affair with Queen Elizabeth (played as a young woman by Joely Richardson, and an older woman by Richardson's mother, Vanessa Redgrave). There's nothing I found on the 'Net to support this theory, nor is there anything to suggest, as the film does, that Elizabeth, the "Virgin Queen," had three (!) bastard children, including Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex, which, if true, gives the film The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn, some interesting subtext.

Shakespearean scholars must have really hated this film for portraying their guy as a barely literate oaf, but it was kind of funny. The only harm this film can really do is if some person sees it and believes it is true. The next thing you'll know people will believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

If a Tree Falls

2012-02-09T16:01:00.002-05:00

The second of the current nominees for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature which is now available on DVD is If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, and it's a terrific, and most importantly, even-handed look at the radical environmental group. For the likely viewers--liberal tree-huggers like me--the journey taken on viewing it is fascinating, and all viewers may be both more enlightened and confused after watching.

The story is framed around Daniel McGowan, who was arrested by the F.B.I. and accused of committing arson, for which he freely confessed. He was part of the Earth Liberation Front, a group that was formed in the 1990s, mostly out of Eugene, Oregon, that was frustrated by the lack of progress in derailing corporate interests in cutting down old growth forests. They decided to hit the companies where it hurt most--the pocketbook--and did so by committing property damage by arson. They struck a ranger station, a lumber mill, an SUV dealership, and condominium development under construction. No one was ever killed or injured in their actions.

They were nevertheless considered a domestic terror organization, and were hunted down by the U.S. Attorney's office. It look a long time--the E.L.F. was fastidious about not leaving clues, and had a network where many members didn't know who the other members were. It was only when Jacob Ferguson, who was a heroin addict, became an informant that the dominoes fell.

There are a few words that have nebulous definitions that are considered here. One is environmentalist. Everyone interviewed in the film, from the owner of the lumber mill to McGowan to the law enforcement assigned to track him down, consider themselves environmentalists. One interviewee says that he doesn't have a problem with the cutting down of trees--where would we get wood, after all--but has a problem when 95 percent of the forests have been cut down, and would like to preserve the last five percent. The lumber mill owner says that by law, he has to plant six trees for every one he cuts down. But when one sees a tree that is likely over 500 years old cut down, one can't help feeling sad.

The other word is terrorist. A key to McGowan's plea bargain becomes whether he is considered a terrorist, which will earn him a ticket to the super-maximum security wing of a federal prison. Does terrorism require the injury of others? Is burning down an empty building the same as flying airplanes into buildings full of thousands of people? A cop acknowledges the dictum, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," but he is sworn to uphold the law.

Early in the film, liberal viewers such as myself will see the E.L.F. as Robin Hood-like figures, and will delight in their success, such as their burning down a slaughterhouse where wild horses are butchered, putting them permanently out of business. This is especially true in contrast to the barbarity of some policemen, who liberally use pepper spray on peaceful protestors. But then the E.L.F. try to pull off two arsons on the same night. One is at the office of a professor at the University of Washington, and the other is at a tree farm, where the E.L.F. have been led to believe genetic research has been going on. The fire at the university spreads to a library, while the information about the tree farm was faulty. Both backfired in public relations terms, and our view of the arsonists starts to sour, much as the cause among themselves starts to waver.

If a Tree Falls was directed by Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman, and they have worked wonders in getting to speak with the principals, all of whom are given a fair chance to speak their minds. This is not a Michael Moore-style film; the filmmakers are not behind the E.L.F., nor necessarily against them in principle. Perhaps the most telling statement is made by U.S. Attorney Kirk Engdall, who says that, driven by curiosity, he sought to find out the motives of the arsonists he was investigating, and grew to understand them, if not forgive their crimes. It's a testament to the filmmaker's level approach, and to the problem that we face--preserving the Earth's resources, while still enjoying their benefits.

The Sense of an Ending

2012-02-08T16:33:00.000-05:00

"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but--mainly--to ourselves."

I've read one other book by Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, which is an examination of attitudes about death. In his novel The Sense of an Ending, which won the U.K.'s Mann Booker Prize, Barnes is interested in memory, and how time changes it.

The narrator is Tony Webster. In the first half of the book he is a schoolboy: "Yes, of course we were pretentious--what else is youth for? We used terms like 'Welteschauung' and 'Sturm und Drang,' enjoyed saying 'That's philosophically self-evident,' and assured one another that the imagination's first duty was to be transgressive."

Into Tony's small circle of friends is admitted Adrian, a new boy who fits into the group but also manages to stand outside it. Tony also gets a girlfriend, Veronica, who is a bit of a snob and a prig. They end up ending badly, and Tony goes off to college. He hears from Adrian, who tells him that he is seeing Veronica, and he hopes that's okay. It is Tony's recollection, some 40 years later, that the had no problem with it. Sometime later he hears that Adrian has killed himself.

"It had seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with terminal illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamorous one in the fury of disappointed love (see: Great Literature). None of these categories had applied in the case of Robson's squalidly mediocre action. Nor did any of them apply to Adrian.

In the second half of the book, Tony is retired, divorced, and a grandfather. He hears from a solicitor that Veronica's mother, whom he only met once, has died and left him a small sum of money, plus another surprising item. That item is currently in Veronica's possession, so he reconnects with her in an attempt to get it back, and also, he must admit, because he is once again in her thrall (though when he discusses her with his ex-wife, she refers to her, through Tony's description of her, as the "fruitcake.") Veronica agrees to meet him, and they have enigmatic exchanges, that leads to Tony having to confront something ugly he did from his past.

Most of the book's slim pages are filled with Barnes, as Tony, ruminating on the nature of history, time and memory. Though much of it has an epigrammatic quality, I found it lyrical and engaging. We get Bartlett's stuff like: "History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated," or, "When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young, erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young."

This book can only have been written by a person of mature years; Barnes just turned 66. This is the type of work that comes from living a life in which memory plays tricks, and recollections of actions we are not proud of get buried, but then can surface again after a hard rain. It's a lovely, quick read, but also full of profound insight, which is philosophically self-evident.

The Woman in Black

2012-02-07T13:53:00.000-05:00

I love me a good ghost story, and the great ones that have put on film can be counted on one hand. Usually the set up is terrific, only to peter out with a weak conclusion. The Woman in Black follows that structure, but the beginning is so good that I am willing to forgive the somewhat rote ending.

To be sure, the film is full of every haunted house cliche you've ever seen, but writer Jane Goldman and director James Watkins seem to be saying, "We're going to use these cliches and do them right," and they do. The whole enterprise looks and sounds spot on. I give special props to the production designers, sound designers, and cinematographer (Tim Maurice-Jones), who have made this look and sound so perfect.

The film stars Daniel Radcliffe, his first film post-Hogwarts, as an attorney in Edwardian London who is still grieving his wife's death during childbirth. He's been so out of it that his firm has lost patience with him, and gives one last chance to shape up. Like Jonathan Harker in Dracula, he's sent to a spooky house to go over paperwork, this time following the death of a widow.

When he arrives in the village in the fens of England, he finds almost every one inhospitable. A local businessman, (Ciaran Hinds), shows him kindness, as he's a forward thinker, not caught up with superstition (he has the village's only motorcar). Everyone else gives him the stink eye, and the local attorney he's to work with urges him to leave town. But Radcliffe doesn't want to botch the job (this plot point also serves to reinforce why he doesn't leave town after most of us would have been frightened out of our wits) and goes to Eel Marsh House, which is one of the creepiest houses you'll ever see. Whoever found this house deserves kudos.

We get the usual false scares (not a cat this time, but a bird) and creaking doors, but soon things aren't right. If you've seen enough of these films, you know to look in the background for things that move that shouldn't, or to keep a look out for reflections in mirrors. We get all that, and it's a gas. Radcliffe sees a woman dressed in black, standing out in the house's graveyard, an arresting image. He learns that she is likely the spirit of a troubled young woman who hung herself after her son, who was taken away from her by her sister and husband, died in an accident. He was entombed in the mud that separates the house from the mainland.

Whenever the woman in black is seen, a child in the village dies. Turns out that the woman has the power to tell children to jump out windows or head into the sea, and she's keen on revenge. Hinds' son died this way, and his wife (Janet McTeer) has never gotten over it. Radcliffe figures if he reunites the woman with her boy (whose body was never found), she'll stop killing, and he and Hinds, like the opposite of Burke and Hare, set to put things right, especially before Racliffe's small son arrives.

Once a ghost story gets into the mechanics of who is doing the haunting and why, it usually bogs down, as does The Woman in Black, but it still maintains a high concentration of dread. The scene where Radcliffe sets the boy's body out and winds up all his toys, luring the mother to appear, is top-notch.

The film is from Hammer Film Productions, who made some of the greatest horror films ever made, went moribund in the '80s, but has been resurrected. I hope this film makes enough money to continue it's good work in the genre, because many recent films have given horror a very bad name.

My grade for The Woman in Black: B.

Blackout

2012-02-06T16:06:00.000-05:00

Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Connie Willis' Blackout is yet another science fiction novel that has left me disappointed, but for different reasons. This one, though set in the future, takes place mostly in the past, specifically 1940, but a promising idea gets bogged down in minutiae, and then doesn't wrap up before the end of the novel.

The book begins in Oxford in 2060. Time travel has been invented, and historians routinely travel back to observe history first-hand. This is not the first book Willis has written about time travel, so not all the rules are clearly spelled out, but I grasped that those traveling back in time could not, by the rules of the system, change events. However, one character spends a lot of time worrying about just that, which made me wonder how it could be a rule. There is also talk about divergence points--those places in time in which momentous events happen--supposedly historians could not be present at them, but again, the rules aren't clear.

The book follows three such historians: Merope is back and working as a maid in a country house that took in evacuated children during the Battle of Britain; Michael went back masquerading as an American reporter during the evacuation of troops from Dunkirk; and Polly is observing the blitz by getting a job as a shopgirl. They each have thoroughly studied the records of the time, so know when certain bombs will drop, etc. However, Michael and Polly both experience "slippage," that is they arrive not in the exact date and time in which they will think they appear. All three also have trouble with their "drops"--the portals they go back and through to their current time. If the drop is seen by a person from that era, a "contemp," it will not open.

Though each of them went to different times during 1940, they will each have trouble getting back home, and one waits the whole book for their inevitable meeting. Along the way they will experience the quotidian parts of life that are interesting to historians, but maybe not to the casual reader. I found it all a bit of a slog, as they struggled with catching buses, or trying to figure out where a "retrieval team" would be--they are the persons that ordinarily would come after them should they be slow to report in.

The book ends telling us the exciting conclusion will be in the next book, All Clear, which I knew when I started but doesn't lessen the frustration that I will have to read another tedious book to get the answers. Willis' style of writing is a gee-whiz, juvenile, and not for a minute did I believe these were actual historians. One of them asks, I kid you not, "When was Pearl Harbor?" I know they're British, but for goodness' sake, how could anyone get a history degree and honestly ask that question?

Hell and Back Again

2012-02-05T13:23:00.000-05:00

After the Oscar nominations are announced, I like to see all the nominated pictures that I haven't seen yet (although I'll skip the Transformers). In the Best Documentary Feature category, I hadn't seen any of the nominees, so I start with Hell and Back Again, directed by Danfung Dennis. I haven't seen any of the other films that may have been "snubbed," but I am mystified why this did get nominated.

There have been many films about the problems that combat soldiers have had readjusting to American life, from The Best Years of Our Lives to Coming Home to The Hurt Locker. This one focuses on a marine, Nathan Harris, who has returned home after being severely wounded (as far as I could tell, his hometown or even state is never identified, but by the accents I guess it was the South). There is no voiceover narration or talking head footage--it's all observation, from Harris in Afghanistan to his rehabilitation at home.

I don't mean to pick on Harris, who I thank for his service, but he's not especially compelling. In fact, the only time he comes to some kind of vividness is when he's playing with his guns. If this were a narrative film, following Chekhov's rule, Harris would have shot himself or someone else; instead we look on alarmed as he mimics Russian roulette, while his wife watches, smiling.

His wife, Ashley, is another problem with the movie. She's seen only as an appendage, dutifully helping him. I would have liked to know more about her, but we only her voice an opinion once in the movie, when Harris isn't there, to a pharmacist, describing his rage.

The scenes in Afghanistan, in which Dennis appears to be embedded with Harris' company, bullets whizzing around, are not particularly great, either--we've seen this before. Most of the action in Afghanistan consists of American soldiers negotiating with locals over their losses, and Harris doesn't even take part. I am at a loss to explain how these scenes have anything to do with Harris back in the U.S.A.

I do appreciate the plight Harris is in. Editor Fiona Otway makes some indelible cuts, such as going from marines working their way through a village, guns poised, to the recreation of that in the video game Call of Duty, which Harris plays at home. Harris, frustrated at a lack of parking spaces at Wal-Mart, wishes aloud that he was back in the desert, where he says things were simpler. Me--I'd rather deal with a lack of parking than getting shot at, but it's a testament to the psychological damage these guys go through that he would even voice such a thing. Harris, recovering from a gunshot to the hip which will likely leave him with a permanent limp, wants to return to action.

Hesher

2012-02-04T10:33:00.000-05:00

I end Natalie Portman 2011 week with Hesher, which is basically a retelling of Mary Poppins, except instead of an English nanny, Mary is a sociopathic metalhead drifter.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, one of my favorite actors, is the title role, and he goes to town, relishing the chance to play against type. Hesher (who goes by only one name) has no real backstory, which lends him a kind of magic persona. He does have some vivid tattoos, including a giant fist flipping the bird on his back.

The other major character is a boy played by Devin Brochu. His mother has recently died in a car accident, and the family is wallowing in grief. His father, Rainn Wilson, can barely get off the coach. His kindly grandmother (Piper Laurie, whom I didn't recognize) has cancer. Brochu is full of anger, and after his dad sells the totaled car in which his mother died, he is determined to get it back.

He accidentally finds Hesher living in an abandoned house. After inadvertently alerting the police to Hesher's presence there, the long-haired imp of the perverse moves in with Brochu's family. Wilson is so numb with depression that he says nothing in objection to this, which gnawed at me as a real plot problem.

Of course, even though Hesher commits wanton acts of violence and destruction, he teaches the family lessons on how to move on with their lives. Though the script, written by Spencer Susser, who also directs, is not sentimental, it was still straining at the joints trying to make these points. A speech by Hesher at the end of the film, comparing the death of a loved one to a missing testicle, is a jaw-dropper, and not in a good way.

Portman shows up as a mousy cashier who rescues Brochu from a bully. He develops a crush on her, and the two become good friends as they both are down on their luck. Portman was an executive producer of the film, which certainly accounts for her presence, but there's no way someone who looks like her is going to be that pathetic. She can't play homely and alone. Nice try, but no.

Hesher has it's interesting moments, and I can recommend it on certain levels. Gordon-Levitt is a hoot, and though for much of the film felt like a suicide note, it has dark humor that I responded to. As a kid who experienced some bullying, I've always liked characters who were sort of protectors of the meek, whether they be the robot from Lost in Space, Adam Baldwin in My Bodyguard, and now Hesher.

Your Highness

2012-02-03T13:32:00.000-05:00

I suppose Natalie Portman doing Your Highness is like the prom queen in high school making a point of dropping by the nerd table in study hall to show that she gets along with everybody. The nerds get excited, but she may feel embarrassed.

Your Highness is a parody of sword-and-sorcerer films that recalls the work of Mel Brooks. There's one big difference--this is one isn't funny. Mostly the laughs are structured to come from medieval characters using modern swear words, but "motherfucker" isn't a very funny swear word. There are also a lot of penis jokes, and there's a scene of a minotaur with a massive erection waving around.

The film was directed by David Gordon Green, and is there a more bizarre career turn than his? He started as an indie darling, but his work has gotten increasing puerile. I mean, I liked the first two-thirds of Pineapple Express, but liked very little of this, and I see he has further damaged his reputation by doing The Sitter.

The film was co-written by and stars Danny McBride. Somewhere along the line, McBride got the erroneous notion that he was funny. I suppose it's too late, but I wish there could be some kind of intervention to get him into a new line of work, like accounting. He plays the dissolute brother of a prince (James Franco, also slumming) that is a great hero. Franco and McBride go on a quest to rescue Franco's fiancee (Zooey Deschanel) from an evil wizard (Justin Theroux). Along the way they meet Portman, and they all team up together.

I didn't laugh once at this film--I don't even think I smiled. More often I grimaced. This is the work of a seventh-grade mentality that has just discovered sex. Not only are there no laughs, but when it tries to play it straight as an adventure it falls woefully short.

Portman's presence got me to see this film. I'll give you this one, Natalie, but please, no more. Stick with the popular crowd.

Middlemarch

2012-02-02T15:31:00.000-05:00

Middlemarch, written by George Eliot (nee Mary Ann Evans), was published in 1872, and is thought by some to be the greatest novel written in the English language. I wouldn't go that far--the Victorian style is too ornate for me, and there passages that go by where I realize none of what I have been reading has sunk in (this is confirmed by reading plot summaries, where I realize I have missed chunks of it). But there is plenty in this very long book that sings, as Eliot chronicles a small English town, and the follies of those that live in it.

The title refers to that town, in the Midlands, from 1830-32. There are dozens of characters, but mostly it concerns three relationships. Dorothea Brooke, an idealistic girl of 19, spurns the attention of a rich lord, Sir James Chettam, who lives in the estate next door, and marries Edward Casaubon, a minister and scholar, who is more than twice her age. Chettam calls him a "dried bookworm," but Dorothea believes in his work and her altruism. Her more material sister, Celia, is aghast at this union, but finally admits, "Dear me, Dorothea, I suppose it would be right for you to be fond of a man whom you accepted for a husband."

Meanwhile, a new doctor in town, Tertius Lydgate, something of a reformer in terms of medicine, becomes the apple of the eye of Rosamund Vincy, a beauty and the mayor's daughter. She sets her cap at him and before he really knows what happening, they are married.

Rosamund's hapless brother Fred is in love with Mary Garth, but she will not have him if he persists on going into the church as a profession. Another man, a minister named Farebrother, is also in love with her, and there's an awkward scene in which Fred, who has cost Mary's family a great deal of money by defaulting on a loan, asks Farebrother to intercede for him to win Mary.

The two marriages end up rather badly. Casaubon turns out to be a dried bookworm indeed, and a honeymoon in Rome quickly sours Dorothea on her grand aspirations. Casaubon begins to suspect that a cousin of his, Will Ladislaw, is in love with his life, and he becomes disenchanted as well. "Poor Mr. Casaubon! This suffering was the harder to bear because it seemed like a betrayal: the young creature who had worshipped him with perfect trust had quickly turned into the critical wife; and early instances of criticism and resentment had made an impression which no tenderness and submission afterwards could remove."

Lydgate soon realizes that Rosamund has imagined a far more glamorous life that he can provide for, and he goes quickly into debt. When he tries to tell her that they need to scale back, she goes behind his back and thwarts his efforts, even writing to a rich relation to borrow money. The two soon hate each other, which seems all the more sharp become Eliot had painted such a happy, spritely courtship. This may not be a book for anyone contemplating marriage.

There are many other plot threads, such as when an old miser, Featherstone, is on his deathbed. He has crafted two wills, and has asked his serving girl, Mary Garth, to get them so he can burn the one he doesn't want carried out. She refuses, though and, horrified, Featherstone dies before he can destroy the will (this unwittingly costs Fred a fortune).

There's also the story of Mr. Bulstrode, the banker, who controls the finances in town. He has a secret, and when a rascal named Raffles shows up, threatening to tell all, Bulstrode ends up indirectly killing him, and implicates Lydgate at the same time.

The novel was subtitled a "Study of Provincial Life," creates a world, and it is especially apt that the novel is named after the town, for it is front and center. Eliot does not glorify provincial life--there are sections that perhaps too closely describe the tedium of everyday life, such as the wrangling around the hiring of a curate for the new hospital. But for those who disparage the town, such as when Lydgate says, "'I have not yet been pained by finding any excessive talent in Middlemarch,'" she also points out, "But I have noticed that one always believes one's town to be more stupid than any other. I have made up my mind to take Middlemarch as it comes, and shall be obliged if the town will take me in the same way. I have certainly found some charms in it which are much greater than I had expected."

Eliot can be both mordantly funny: "He was loud, robust, and was sometimes spoken of as being 'given to indulgence'--chiefly in swearing, drinking, and beating his wife,'" and philosophical: "He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?" And then there are similes worthy of Raymond Chandler: "his rank penetrated them as if it had been an odor."

It is coincidental that I read this while also reading Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, for Middlemarch is one of the best examples of that genre. Though two marriages come to bad ends, there is still hope in Eliot's world: "Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic--the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common."

The Other Woman

2012-02-01T15:06:00.000-05:00

Natalie Portman was one of the executive producers of 2011's The Other Woman, and on the surface it's easy to see what appealed to her about the role. Instead of the pixieish waif she usually plays, the character of Emilia Greenleaf is consistently unpleasant. It's also a film about grief, hinging on the death of a baby, which is always something I wince at, whether in a film or a book, because it's like a writer bringing out the heavy guns when a pea shooter will do.

Written and directed by Don Roos, based on a novel by Ayelet Waldman, Portman's character is the second wife of an attorney, Scott Cohen. They met at the law firm they both work at, though he was married to an obstetrician, Lisa Kudrow. Cohen has an eight-year-old son, Charlie Tahan, who Portman doesn't know to how to get along with. She is sensitive to being labeled as a homewrecker.

The main plot thread, though, is that Portman and Cohen had a baby, which died after three days. We don't really know what Portman was like before the baby was born--we only see her lusting after Cohen. Thus our view of her is colored as she behaves abysmally to everyone--husband, stepson, mother, father--and it's excused by her grief. But, as Cohen tells her, the child's death is not an excuse for to hurt others. He says this at the end of the film--I wish he had said it before.

The film is overcooked, and so is Portman's character. She may have appreciated getting a juicy part, but she dominates the film and is unpleasant to spend time with. Kudrow has the unfortunate task of playing the woman scorned, and thus a bitch on wheels. She does something kind for Portman at the end, but it still seems somehow nasty.

There's very little about this film that feels authentic. Tahan is a fine juvenile actor, and expresses what is probably normal confusion about his situation, but the rest of it is just mush. The film was first premiered at Toronto in September 2009, but sat on the shelf until February 2011, no doubt released to take advantage of Portman's spotlight winning the Academy Award.

The Marriage Plot

2012-01-31T14:28:00.000-05:00

Having read and enjoyed Jeffrey Eugenides first two novels, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, I was looking forward to his latest, The Marriage Plot, and it starts strongly, right in an area that clicks for me--college students, circa 1982. The story focuses on three graduating seniors from Brown and the love triangle they form, and how they seek to find their way after graduation.

The woman in the apex of the triangle is the beautiful Madeline Hanna. She adores Victorian novels, and in particular those that hinge on the marriage plot: "In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sangs of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely."

Of course Eugenides will craft something of his own marriage plot, which becomes undone. Manna is in love with Leonard Bankhead, a moody scientist, and after graduation they will live on Cape Cod while he has a research fellowship, studying the reproduction of yeast. But Leonard has depression, and Madeline suborns herself to become his caretaker.

Meanwhile, Mitchell Grammaticus, a religious studies major from Michigan, is in love with Hanna. He had his chance, when visiting her parents house during Thanksgiving break, but didn't make his move. The two then went on to have an on-again off-again platonic relationship, though Mitchell never lost hope that he would one day marry Madeline. "Madeline thought to herself, as she'd thought many times before, that Mitchell was the kind of smart, sane, parent-pleasing boy she should fall in love with and marry. That she would never fall in love with Mitchell and marry him, precisely because of this eligibility, was yet another indication, in a morning teeming with them, of just how screwed up she was in matters of the heart."

Mitchell, after graduation, goes with his friend Larry to Europe, and then on to India. Mitchell struggles to find his spiritual identity, and while volunteering for Mother Teresa, discovers that he can't quite hack it. He entertains thoughts of going to divinity school, but is devastated when he receives a letter from Madeline.

The Marriage Plot has some of the elements of the unrequited romantic yearning of a college student, but written through the many years of filtration that come afterward. I think most men can feel for Mitchell, as many of us have been in that situation, realizing we are perfect for a girl, but she doesn't love us anyway. Eugenides gets the college experience down perfectly, from the unspoken rules of mating: "In the sexual hierarchy of college, freshman males ranked at the very bottom," to the empty feeling on graduation day: "The problem was that Madeline, for the first time in her life, wanted no part of it. She wasn't proud of herself. She was in no mood to celebrate. She'd lost faith in the significance of the day and what the day represented."

The trouble with the book is that as it goes along, it bogs down on certain aspects that I didn't find all that interesting, especially Leonard's mental state. He becomes to the novel what he is to Madeline--an anchor. We get a lot of talk about his medication and his manic behavior while trying to self-reduce them. The stuff is well-written, particularly a scene in which he scares a teenager in a taffy shop, but it also seemed familiar. I really don't yearn to read more books about the clinically depressed.

Mitchell's time in Europe and India are more interesting, but things also get bogged down there, too, as you just want to slap him. I did find some insights interesting, such as: "The worst thing about religion was religious people," and his attitude about hippies: "Mitchell had always thought he'd been born too late to be a hippie. But he was wrong. Here it was 1983, and India was full of them. As far as Mitchell was concerned, the sixties were an Anglo-American phenomenon. It didn't seem right that continental Europeans, who had produced no decent rock music of their own, should be allowed to fall under its sway, to frug, to form communes, to sing Pink Floyd lyrics in heavily accented voices. That the Swedes and Germans he met in India were still wearing love beads in the eighties only confirmed Mitchell's prejudice that their participation in the sixties had been imitative at best."

I recommend The Marriage Plot, but with reservations. The writing is crisp and lovely and often heartbreaking, but the characters may not be people you want to hang out with. If I was this way after college, I apologize to all who knew me.

Other Desert Cities

2012-01-30T13:28:00.000-05:00

Other Desert Cities is the third play I've seen by Jon Robin Baitz; I've also seen The Substance of Fire and The End of the Day, but I couldn't tell you much about them (other than that one of the actors in The Substance of Fire was Sarah Jessica Parker, and after the show I saw her using the pay phone in the lobby--that's how long ago that was).

Much of the critical response to Baitz' new play, which is now running at the Booth Theater on Broadway under the direction of Joe Mantello, is a sort of "it's about time"--this is the major play that puts Baitz in the big time. And indeed, Other Desert Cities is a spectacular work, plumbing the depths of not only the dynamics of a certain kind of American family, but also resonating with anyone who has ever winced at some wrong-headed statement (or Facebook posting) made by a family member about politics.

"Families get terrorized by their weakest member," says Polly Wyeth (Stockard Channing), and this play proves it so, although who is the weakest member? Polly wouldn't say herself. She and her husband, Lyman (Stacey Keach), are old guard Hollywood, modeling themselves after the Reagans. He was an actor, later a politician, while she was a screenwriter who became a steely politician's wife. Lyman says of her, "She's the only woman to have faced down Nancy Reagan, Betsy Bloomingdale, and Mrs. Annenberg at the same lunch and reduced them all to tears."

The time is 2004, Christmas Eve. The setting is the Wyeth's home in Palm Springs, California. The Wyeth's adult children are visiting. They are Trip (Justin Kirk), a seemingly-happy-go-lucky TV producer. He makes a hit reality show that uses washed up stars as jury members for real trials. Given his upbringing, he's slumming, but he says, "People need to laugh today. It's all so serious and goddamn, you know, horrible out there. We could all get anthraxed any minute--people need a laugh!"

Then there's Brooke (Rachel Griffiths), his older sister. She's a writer, living in Sag Harbor. Her parents wished she lived closer, and mention that the house next door is for sale. "I think living on the East Coast has given you the impression that sarcasm is alluring and charming. It is not. Sarcasm is the purview of teenagers and homosexuals," says Polly.

Despite good-natured bickering about culture, "It's all or nothing with your generation. Either vegans or meth addicts or both at the same time," and politics--the war in Iraq is a subject to be avoided, things are cheerful. Brooke has a new book, Trip's show is going well, and Polly's sister, Silda (Judith Light) is drying out after falling off the wagon. She was Polly's former writing partner, and a kind of larger than life character, who enters a room and proclaims, "You know what happens when you don't drink? You dream. I hate dreams. I have more Nazi dreams than Elie Wiesel. What does that say about, always being chased by the SS?"

There's also good news that Brooke, who had written one novel, has finished and sold her second book. This is big stuff, considering that a few years earlier she had a nervous breakdown. But the big first act plot point is that the book is a memoir. It seems that she had an older brother, who during the Vietnam War ran with a radical group that planted a bomb at a recruiting station, killing someone. He later committed suicide, and that has haunted her ever since. She blames her parents for pushing him away in his time of need.

The remainder of the play is the back and forth as Polly is outraged by this. Lyman, at first, prefers to stay out of the fray, but later, when he learns that in just a few months an excerpt will appear in The New Yorker, implores his daughter to wait until they are dead to publish. A big reveal will occur in the second act which changes the color of everything, including what Brooke had thought of her parents all these years.

Other Desert Cities has a lot of balls in the air. Baitz, who I assume is a liberal, doesn't disguise his contempt for the kind of Republican that the Wyeths are--Nancy Reagan is a kind of Satanic presence in the play. Brooke had assumed that because her brother Henry's radicalism reflected badly on her parents' standing in the Republican community, they spurned his efforts to get help. Silda, an old-fashioned liberal, who helped Brooke right the book, much to Polly's horror, agrees with that view: "The zealots who have taken over your party and marinated it in intolerance. You guys let it happen. You are incapable of speaking out, even while finding fault with it in private. And you live in that complicity every day. A war in which so many people are dying in the desert, thousands of miles away. Because it's a war declared by a man whose father is someone with whom you occasionally dine, you keep silent. That is what true believers do. That, that's what your daughter has written."

Other Desert Cities is a wonderful play, and it surprised me in a few ways. I found the characters sharply drawn, but at times they said things that don't conform to what we might expect. Polly is so tough that she is willing to sever contact with Brooke over this. Channing, a marvelous stage presence, invests her role with so much resolve that one can't help feel a little frightened of her. Keach's performance is the leveler, an oak of a man, firm in conviction, but softer than this wife, but even he is not ready to forgive his daughter for a breach of trust.

At times the play falls into typical dramaturgical problems. Since the characters all know the past, exposition becomes clumsy, especially when the audience must be ladled information about Henry. I also struggled with the ages of the actors. When I learned that Henry's incident took place during the Vietnam War (at first I thought it must be during the Iraq War), I had to adjust--clearly Brooke must be in her mid-40s, while Trip is much younger (indeed, the script says he is ten years younger), though Griffiths and Kirk are roughly the same age--it isn't often that an actress will hear she looks too young for the part.

Griffiths has a tough part to play. She's pretty much a pill--she clings to her book, even after her parents' protest (I would never write about my parents while they were alive). But Griffiths also makes it plain that this death is the dominant feature in her psyche, and that she must address it, come what may. Kirk plays a character much like his role of Andy on Weeds--a sybarite and something of comic relief, though he has a speech that lays out his hidden pain.

As I thought about the play later it occurred to me that Mantello has divided the stage in twain. For most of the action, Polly and Lyman stay stage left, while Brooke, Trip, and Silda remain stage right. Of course, to the audience, this is reversed--the leftists are to our left, while the conservatives are to our right. Not only is there a political schism, but also a family schism. When Trip is asked whether he supports Brooke or not, he is in his parents' domain, but he takes a centrist view, and thus retreats upstage, in the direct center of the set.

The other major character, as the title may suggest, is the desert. Palm Springs is an enclave that the Wyeth's are hiding in--Trip points out that they don't even get to L.A. much. It's a place where one can get lost staring out the window at the desert, perhaps secure in being protected from the world at large, both by geographic isolation and the knowledge that there probably isn't a Democrat for miles. An accidental death has the ring of stature--a woman is run over by a garbage truck, but on Bob Hope Drive. But, as Silda says, "Palm Springs isn't a refuge, it's King Tut's Tomb.The whole town is filled with mummies with tans."

Albert Nobbs

2012-01-29T13:51:00.000-05:00

Nominated for three Academy Awards, Albert Nobbs is a gentle, almost ephemeral film about gender identity. I don't think it goes nearly far enough, though, other than scratch the surface of a significant issue--just what makes us the gender that we are?

Set in turn of the century Dublin, the film concerns the title character, a waiter at a hotel. Nobbs seems to think about only two things--his duties, and the money he's saving under the floorboards, in the hope of one day opening a tobacco shop.

Nobbs keeps to himself. He gets along with the other staff, but it seems they don't know anything about him. His age is impossible to guess. When a housepainter, Hubert Page, is hired to do some work, the owner (Pauline Collins), tells Nobbs he is to share his bed with Mr. Page. This horrifies Nobbs.

It would have been interesting to view this film through a different prism. As it is, everyone who sees it will know that Nobbs is played by a woman, Glenn Close, and that Mr. Page is played by Janet McTeer (both are Oscar nominees). Thus there is no Crying Game surprise--early on McTeer sees that Nobbs is a woman. In order to calm fears that McTeer will tell her secret, McTeer, spectacularly, reveals that she shares the same secret. What if the film had unknown actors, and we didn't know what Nobbs was hiding? That would have been a different movie, and perhaps a better one.

McTeer is a revelation to Nobbs in more ways than one. Not only does she learn that she's not the only person living this kind of lie, but McTeer is happily married--to a woman, a feminized woman. Nobbs, with new purpose, seeks to court a maid at the hotel (Mia Wasikowska). But Wasikowska is sleeping with a handyman (Aaron Johnson), who urges her to exploit Nobbs for gifts. We know that Nobbs is headed for heartbreak.

This is a fairly interesting story, based on a novella by George Moore and with a script by Close and John Banville (Close was so involved she even co-wrote the closing song). It is directed lovingly but gingerly by Rodrigo Garcia. I found, though, that it didn't really grab my attention, and I fear the problem is in the central character. Close is quite good, expressing the character with a minimum of expression--after all, she has been a waiter since the age of 14, trained to react, and not speak unless to spoken to. Close's characterization is all observation and waiting.

But I couldn't help but wonder, is Nobbs some kind of simpleton? She is seen counting her money, speaking aloud, confronting things as if they were difficult equations. When she courts Wasikowska, asking her to marry him, is there any reason that a different outcome could have been expected? There is very little background to the character--an orphan, masquerading as a boy to get a job, and then being trapped in that charade for the rest of one's days--but I couldn't tell what made the character tick. Maybe all there was was what we see.

McTeer, on the other hand, has a wider berth, and I found to be a more moving characterization, even in her brief scenes. She's also more convincing as a man. It is a testament to both performances how, late in the film, when they don more traditional female garb, that both looked like men in drag.

I found Albert Nobbs worthwhile, but just barely. See it for the performances, but don't go expecting to be knocked out or provoked in thought.

My grade for Albert Nobbs: C+.

No Strings Attached

2012-01-28T09:50:00.000-05:00

Ricky Gervais, during the recent Golden Globes telecast, introduced presenter Natalie Portman with a joke about how she wasn't nominated for anything this year because she had a baby. That isn't precisely true, as Portman actually had four releases during the calendar year. It was just that none of them were particularly well received. I yield to no one in my enchantment with Portman, so I will take a look at those four films here over the coming week.

In No Strings Attached, Portman shows a gift for comedy, even if she can't completely keep afloat another film that signifies the sorry state of romantic comedy these days. She plays an intern that has the hots for an old acquaintance (Ashton Kutcher). She's commitmentphobic, so they arrange to have sex without the accompanying relationship tropes. Of course, this will go wrong, and love will triumph after all.

I liked the first half or so of the film. I haven't seen Kutcher in much, but he has a likable casualness. He's wasting his career on low-level stuff like this, though. There are also several notable actors in supporting roles. Kevin Kline is Kutcher's dad, a TV star who has stolen his son's girlfriend (Ophelia Lovibond). Portman has roommates who are also appealing actors--Greta Gerwig and Mindy Kaling--but neither are given much to do.

Instead we get a lot of smirking, smutty jokes. The writer, Elizabeth Meriweather, seems like a child who has just discovered words like "penis," and realizes she can get away with them, so they are repeated with impunity. This replaces character development. The film was directed with no particular distinction by Ivan Reitman.

I appreciate Portman's attempt to spread her wings a bit, and urge her to try comedy more often, but choose a better script.

Pulphead

2012-01-27T18:45:00.000-05:00

John Jeremiah Sullivan's collection of magazine pieces, titled Pulphead, is a bit of a marvel. It is a kind of journalism that may bother some--in almost all instances, Sullivan is an "I" in the pieces--he takes an active part, whether he is writing about caves or pop stars. But as I write this blog in exactly the same way, I can't very well criticize him for it. I think this style works when the person writing is interesting, and Sullivan certainly is (whether I'm interesting I'll leave you, dear reader, to judge). How can anyone dislike someone who clarifies the pronunciation of the name "Jan" by distinguishing, "Jan as in Jan Van Eyck, not Jan as in Brady."

Sullivan was born in Louisville, and grew up in southern Indiana, which makes him a southerner, and thus his work bears that stamp. As he points out, the South has given birth to many geniuses, but it's not known for its sophistication. But his parents went to the vividly named Transylvania State College in Kentucky and he went to the University of the South, where he spent some time working for a local writing legend, then in his 90s, which is the topic of one of his essays. "The South...I loved it as only one who will always be outside it can. Merely to hear the word Faulkner at night brought gusty emotions."

Sullivan, for lack of a better word, is a pop culture critic. About half of his pieces are about music: a visit to a Christian rock festival, exegeses of Michael Jackson and Axl Rose, an interview with reggae star Bunny Wailer ("It had long been a dream of mine to meet Bunny Wailer--a pipe dream, sometimes a literal one in the sense that I dreamed it while holding a pipe") and old blues musicians. The opening essay is on the Christian rock festival, a mini-masterpiece that has him attending alone (first he tries to recruit kids on the Internet, and is mistaken for a perv) but meets some guys from West Virginia. I knew I was in capable hands early on, when he describes the RV he rented: "The interior smelled of spoiled vacations and amateur porn shoots wrapped in motel shower curtains left in the sun. I was physically halted at the threshold for a moment. Jesus had never been in this RV."

With these essays he at times turns a gimlet eye on his subject, but more at the culture in general. In an essay on Real World cast members, he writes, "People hate these shows, but their hatred smacks of denial. It's all there, all the old American grotesques, the test-tube babies of Whitman and Poe, a great gauntlet of doubtless eyes, big mouths spewing fantastic catchphrase fountains of impenetrable self-justification, muttering dark prayers, calling on God to strike down those who would fuck with their money, their cash, and always knowing, always preaching."

Other essays fly far afield. There's one about an oddball Kentucky naturalist who rubbed elbows with Audubon, Constantine Rafinesque. There's another about caves in Tennessee with glyphs on them created hundreds of years ago by Indians. Sullivan visits an evacuation center after Hurricane Katrina, and Tea Party rally.

He also writes personally. There's an essay about when his brother was nearly killed (technically, he was dead for a short time) by electrocution, and about when his family's house was rented for use by the TV show One Tree Hill (people still drive by and take pictures).

But the strangest essay, "The Violence of the Lambs," is one about the trending upwards of animal attacks. Sullivan notes that all kinds of species, from chimps to beavers to chickens, have increased their attacks on human beings. He notes the statistical anomaly of Steve Irwin being killed by sting ray's jab to his heart, which had never been known in human history before, only for it to happen again a few months later. This is the province of crackpots, so Sullivan pulls the rug out on us by creating an expert out of whole cloth, though he swears that all the animal attack incidents, such as chimps learning to use sticks as tools, are true. What's the explanation? It seems that evolution happens quicker when the Earth is warmer, another reason to despair against global warming.

"What this means is the we picked a bad time to have all the animals enraged at us, since just at the moment when their disposition might be expected to turn, they happen to be evolving like crazy." Wasn't this the plot of an M. Night Shamalyan movie?

Wings

2012-01-26T15:42:00.000-05:00

Longtime readers of this blog will recall when I worked my way through the films that have won the Best Picture Oscar (at 1957, I started, once a year, to go through all the nominees for Best Picture). I had to skip the very first film that won the honor, Wings, because it was not on DVD. That has changed, and the film has been released on a startling pristine disc.

I did see Wings once before, years ago on Turner Classic Movies, but I was glad to see it again. For an 84-year-old film, it really holds up well, and is a smashing entertainment. Sure, some of the acting is of the silent, melodramatic style, but that has to be taken in context. Director William Wellman, who would go on to make many great films over the next thirty years, gave Wings a look that has transcended time.

The story is a tribute to the World War I flying aces. The war was still fresh in everyone's minds, though no film had been made about the war in the air. Logistics was a major problem--usually miniatures were used. Wellman, who was a flying ace, did something that today (mostly due to insurance problems) couldn't or wouldn't be done--he bolted cameras to the planes and had his lead actors fly those planes, thus giving the viewer a thrilling sense of being in the air.

The plot itself is kind of hoary, even for 1927. Two young men from the same small town enlist in the Air Corps. Jack (Charles "Buddy" Rogers) and Dave (Richard Arlen) are from different sides of the tracks. Rogers is a working class kid, who builds hot rods, while Arlen is a rich kid. They are both in love with Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston), though she is in love with Dave. Rogers' next door neighbor, Mary Preston (Clara Bow), is in love with Jack, though he sees her as only a friend.

The boys both go off to war, and Wings is at its best during the dogfight scenes. The film was shot near San Antonio, Texas, and the U.S. Army donated about 15 million dollars worth of men and equipment to the making of the film. Wellman would wait for days for the sky to be cloudy, realizing that without the clouds there was no perspective. Watching those plays circle through the clouds is pretty amazing, even today (of course it would all be CGI today). There were a few "special effects"--flames hand-tinted (in color) were added to the film negative.

Rogers and Arlen are at first rivals, but bond to become great friends. Bow goes over as a nurse, and there's a long scene where she tries to get a drunken Rogers away from a French floozy so he won't be arrested for failing to end his leave. As this was pre-code, there's kind of a racy scene when Bow undresses behind a screen. Bow, at the time, was by far the biggest female star in the world--the original "It" girl.

The film's tragic ending, while melodramatic (and a shade homoerotic, given today's standards) is nail-bitingingly exciting. Wellman, over the course of his career, would use the closeup to great effect, and he certainly does so here, especially when one friend sees the other, lying in a bloody heap. There are also some other nifty shots: when Arlen and Robson are on a swing, Wellman has mounted a camera on the swing, so the viewer goes back and forth a few times (and could get vertigo). There's also a great shot that zooms in on a dolly on Rogers in the Parisian nightclub, which goes over several tables until it's close on his face.

The photography was done by Harry Perry. He is responsible for about 90 percent of the aerial stuff, though several cameramen were used. Yeoman work was also turned in by the stunt pilots. There are some spectacular crashes, including when a Fokker slams into a house. Seen in a film today that would mean nothing, as one would assume it's all computer generated, but back then it was an actual plane and an actual house.

A few other notes of trivia--early in the film look for a short scene featuring a very young Gary Cooper. Also, Wings is the only silent film to win Best Picture, although that may end in a matter of weeks if The Artist wins. Of course, The Artist is not a true silent picture, as it does have a soundtrack.

I highly recommend film lovers check out this disc--it's also in Blu-Ray. It's a great part of cinema history, and also a damn fine film.

Entourage

2012-01-25T15:03:00.000-05:00

Entourage ran for eight seasons on HBO, but until recently I hadn't seen one episode. I've now seen the first season, and after initially feeling like it was a waste of time, I have to admit it grew on me.

Produced by Mark Wahlberg, it's loosely based on his experiences as a young movie star in Hollywood. Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier), a kid from Queens, has hit it big and has put three of his buddies from home on the payroll. Kevin Connolly is his unofficial manager, the sensible one, who used to be the manager of a pizzeria; Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) is the simpleton, who doesn't really do much of anything but enjoy the perks of his friendship and stay stupid things, which leads to the invariable "Shut the fuck up, Turtle;" and Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon), Vince's older brother, who once had a decent acting career but now can't get arrested, serves as the cook.

In the first few episodes, I kind of hated these guys, who drove around in a hummer from party to party, oblivious to anything but their own hedonism. Turtle, the most obnoxious of them, has no inner conflict. When told that he wouldn't get laid without Vince, he responds, "Do I give a fuck?" These guys live in their own bubble, separated from reality, spending money like it was water, wafting in a cloud of cannabis and pussy.

But they kind of grew on me. I especially like Dillon as the failed star, who sees his younger brother far eclipse him in stardom. He is a sweet guy, but you can see the terror in his eyes as he realizes he's just a hanger-on, not the star. I've met guys like this--I once met a guy who had bit parts in movies but walked around in a leather jacket like he was a megastar. I have no doubt that this is the way things are.

The other major character in the show is Vince's manager, played with ferocity by Jeremy Piven. Supposedly modeled on Ari Emanuel (Rahm's brother) he's a force of nature, the kind of character that is seen a lot in TV and movies and seems improbable, but is apparently dead on. He's got a gifted vocabulary, and would cut out his mother's heart if it helped his client.

The first season covers the period from when Vince's new film has come out to him choosing his next film, which turns out to be an indie. What's a little disconcerting is that we don't see Vince doing any work. Grenier plays him as a kind of zen figure, never angry, just bobbing along on life's lucky current. He moves from woman to woman the way most of us dream of when we were teenagers (or still do).

The show also features cameos by a variety of performers, ranging from Sarah Silverman to Larry David to Scarlett Johannson. Val Kilmer is pretty funny as a pot grower, while Gary Busey plays himself to great effect.

I'd like to think this is an accurate view of life at the top in Hollywood, though it makes me fucking envious that it's not me. I think I'll take a look at future seasons.

Oscar 2011: Extremely Safe & Incredibly Nostalgic

2012-01-24T15:48:00.001-05:00

After the Oscar nominations are announced, there's a temptation to try figure out what it all means, usually to no avail. I do think, though, that there are some things that resonate with this group of nominations, the 84th in Academy history.

At first blush, it would seem that studios trumped indies, or at least edgy indies. The biggest acting snubs, based on expectations (which often just feed on each in an ouroboros) were for Michael Fassbender for Shame, Tilda Swinton for We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Albert Brooks for Drive. All totaled, those three films got only one nomination (Drive, for Sound Editing). But, on the other hand, some categories were fragrantly fresh. In Best Actor, there were the expected heavyweights, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, but instead of Fassbender, and also instead of Leonardo DiCaprio (for J. Edgar), who had picked up a SAG and Golden Globe nomination, Demian Bichir, from the little-seen A Better Life, scored a nod. Another, milder surprise was that Gary Oldman, a longtime standout performer, got a nomination for his skillful underplaying in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. For those who always say that these things are predictable and boring, I submit this category in disagreement.

There were plenty of nonsurprises, though, especially in the Actress categories. Meryl Streep extended her record of acting nominations to 17. She has sat through more losses, though, than any other performer. Everyone keeps waiting for her to win her third Oscar--she might do it this year (though I think not).

In the Best Picture category, the rules changed so that anywhere from five to 10 films could get nominated. The requirement was that a film had to get five percent of the first place votes. Nine films made the cut. Most had predicted seven or eight, so I think the party crashers are The Tree of Life, which was a big favorite on critics list but not to the general public (I loved it, but admittedly there are a lot of WTF? moments), and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which didn't get a sniff from the Globes or the guilds, and has a below 50 rating on Metacritic. That it made it in may be a testimony to the power of Scott Rudin, or perhaps to its 9/11 subject matter (though this did not help United 93 or World Trade Center).

Extremely Loud is a bit of a throwback--it veers toward the sentimental, but not to the mawkish (at least I thought so). Many of the films in the nonette have a nostalgic bent. The Artist and Hugo are both tributes to silent films, while War Horse is consciously modeled on epics from the '40s and '50s. Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's return to this category, is about the notion that somehow the past is better than the present, while The Help deals with a difficult time period in a nonthreatening, Oprah Book Club kind of way. The only film from this group that feels modern to me is Moneyball, but even that has some tried and true sports cliches.

Some other ruminations on the nominations: As far as music goes, John Williams received his 46th and 47th (!) nominations, scoring twice in Best Original Score. The Best Song category is a joke--a list of eligible songs are listened to by the branch, who then score them on a 1-to-10 rating. Any song that rates 8.5 are higher can be nominated, but if none of them do the top two are nominated by default. It's entirely possible that the two songs, one from The Muppets and the other from Rio, did not score higher than 8.5. This category should be ashbinned.

Brad Pitt could end up with three nominations. He's nominated for acting and producing for Moneyball, and, pending a decision by the Academy, could be one of the producers for The Tree of Life (only three producers can receive nominations for Best Picture from any one film). Pitt could be only the third person to get two nominations in Best Picture in the same year (following Francis Coppola and Scott Rudin).

From now until Oscar night I will focus on the top six categories and my thoughts and predictions, but until then I can say what winner will earn the biggest whoop of delight from me--Mark Bridges, nominated for Best Costumes for The Artist, was a classmate of mine in the theater department at SUNY-Stony Brook with me. We appeared in a few plays together, including Romeo and Juliet (he was Mercutio, I was Benvolio). He was a good actor, but obviously a better costume designer. Go Mark!

A Better Life

2012-01-23T16:43:00.000-05:00

When the Screen Actors' Guild nominations were announced, the surprise was that Demian Bechir (excellent as Fidel Castro in Steven Soderbergh's Che) was nominated for Best Actor for his work in A Better Life. I dutifully have caught up with it on DVD, and it's a terrific, unshowy job in a unshowy film that speaks volumes about the lives of undocumented aliens in the U.S.

Directed by Chris Weitz, whose career has followed an interesting path (who could imagine a small, intense film like this one could be made by the man who did both American Pie and a Twilight movie?), the film is firstly impressive in its integrity. This film is about Mexican immigrants who work as day laborers and their daily struggles, but instead of the typical Hollywood solution--making the protagonist a white character who works on their behalf--Weitz chooses to tell the story from the ground up.

Bechir stars as a undocumented worker living in Los Angeles. He has it better than most, as another gardener has taken him on as a steady assistant, so he doesn't have to line up in parking lots waiting for a possible job. He has a small house, and a 14-year-old son who goes to school and is already losing his Spanish. His boss urges Bechir to buy his truck (thus buying his business), so he borrows the money from his sister. But on the first day of his new, better life, his truck is stolen.

This plot twist gives the film a template that follows Vittoria De Sica's Bicycle Thief, but that film was told in a completely different style and didn't have the added element of the character not only seeking his means of work, but also understanding than any misstep (he doesn't have a driver's license, for example) will mean his deportation.

After watching the film I felt like I could understand how these people lived. Julian's life is also fraught, as he is close to the age of being seduced by vicious gangs (he dates a girl who is in the family of these freakishly tattooed and muscled men, who know they will not live long). While attending a traditional Mexican radio, he scoffs at the sombreros and mariachi songs, but never do we feel that the connection between father and son has been broken.

This is a fine film, perhaps the best narrative film I've seen on a very complicated issue.

Poetry

2012-01-22T13:35:00.000-05:00

Poetry, a film by Lee Chang-Dong, first entered my radar space when its lead actress, Yoon Jeong-hee, won the Best Actress award bestowed by the L.A. Film Critics. I can confirm that it's a magnificent performance in a poignant but not mawkish film.

Yoon plays a 66-year-old woman who lives a quiet life, working part-time as a health-care assistant for an elderly man who has had a stroke. She lives with her grandson, a sullen boy who instantly inspires the viewer to want to slap him. He is rude to her, but she bears this with a kind of resigned grace.

The film begins with Yoon visiting a doctor. Her arm is tingling, but more ominously, she has begun to forget words, like electricity and wallet. Still maintaining a positive attitude, she enrolls in a poetry class. The teacher asks his students to take notes on what they see, their only assignment being to write one poem before the end of the term.

Framing this is the tragic story of a young girl who has committed suicide. I hesitate to explain how this ties in with Yoon's story, but it will, turning her life upside down, and challenging her sunny optimism about life.

Poetry proceeds at a leisurely pace, much like the flowing river that is the beginning and ending shots of the film. It deals with the creative process--why can people sometimes feel the poem inside them, but not write it--but it also addresses a kind of heartbreak, the kind that can create poetic inspiration.

Yoon is a major star in South Korea, but hadn't appeared in a film since 1994. She gives her character a kind of child-like innocence. In one key scene she goes to meet the mother of the young suicide victim, but can't speak of that, and instead talks poetically about an avocado that has fallen to the ground. Later, when she meets the mother again, who now understands why Yoon came to visit her, they exchange just the slightest look of understanding.

I have long had a blind spot when it comes to poetry. I have trouble reading it, my eyes not wanting to follow the form. I couldn't tell you why one poem is better than another. Though this film didn't answer all of my questions, it did give me some insights into the motivation of those who love it, and those who write it.

Oscar 2011 Predictions, Final

2012-01-21T16:55:00.000-05:00

The Oscar nominations will be announced bright and early on Tuesday morning, so here's my last two cents on who will be nominated. I expect a few surprises, but most of these picks fall in line with a consensus that has built after the guilds and Golden Globes have made their picks. As a reminder, these are my predictions and do not factor in whether I liked the films or not.

BEST PICTURE

The Artist
The Descendants
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
War Horse

I'm going to go with eight nominations, although it could be anywhere from five to ten. If it's five, The Artist, The Descendants, The Help, Hugo and Midnight in Paris figure to be in. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was aided immensely by David Fincher being nominated for Best Director by the DGA. To be nominated, a film must receive five percent of the first place votes cast. Moneyball I have in by a thread.

If the category goes to ten, add The Tree of Life, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, or Bridesmaids.
\
BEST DIRECTOR

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Martin Scorsese, Hugo
Tate Taylor, The Help

It would be boring to just parrot the DGA nominees, so I'll substitute Taylor for Fincher. It will be interesting to see if Terence Malick gets any love for The Tree of Life, and if he can get nominated here without the film being nominated for Best Picture, which hasn't happened yet since the Best Picture category expanded from five nominees.

BEST ACTOR

George Clooney, The Descendants
Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar
Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Michael Fassbender, Shame
Brad Pitt, Moneyball

Clooney, Dujardin, and Pitt are locks. DiCaprio doesn't belong here, but seems to have enough star power and enough good will to get by. The remaining spot should go to a man named Michael--Fassbender or Shannon, for Take Shelter. Gary Oldman for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is also a possibility, but slight.

BEST ACTRESS

Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs
Viola Davis, The Help
Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn

The consensus is, and I agree, that there are six women chasing five spots. The last spot will either go to Swinton, or to Rooney Mara for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. If anyone else gets in it will be a surprise.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn
Albert Brooks, Drive
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Nick Nolte, Warrior
Christopher Plummer, Beginners

The most wide open category, there are another half-dozen or so actors who could gain a spot here, most likely Max von Sydow for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Berenice Bejo, The Artist
Jessica Chastain, The Help
Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
Octavia Spencer, The Help
Shailene Woodley, The Descendants

As with Actress, this category is six women chasing five spots, but only Bejo, Chastain, and Spencer are locks. Janet McTeer, for Albert Nobbs, is the other possibility. McCarthy received a SAG nomination but not a Golden Globe, while the opposite was true for Woodley. McTeer received both, which means I should have her here, but for some reason I don't. Just a hunch.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

The Artist
Bridesmaids
Margin Call
Midnight in Paris
Win Win

Lots of room for other films here, including A Separation, 50/50, Beginners, Take Shelter, Tree of Life or Melancholia. The screenwriters branch is frequently the most adventurous.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

The Descendants
The Help
Hugo
Moneyball
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

If The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has a big day it could be here, too, but I'll go with the more complex Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to get the fifth spot.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Footnote, Israel
In Darkness, Poland
Monsieur Lazhar, Canada
Pina, Germany
A Separation, Iran

The Academy makes this easier, by winnowing it down to nine semifinalists. Don't know much about these films. Poland's is about the Holocaust, so that should be in. Pina has the distinct possibility of being nominated for both Best Foreign Language and Best Documentary, which has never happened before.

BEST ANIMATED FILM

The Adventures of Tintin
Cars 2
Puss 'n Boots
Rango
Rio

Ludicrously, the Academy will allow for five nominees in this category, because of the number of releases. Pixar, even in an off year, may get in, and though Rio kind of came and went it did get decent box office. But a relatively unknown film could knock one of them off and sneak in here.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Bill Cunningham New York
Buck
Paradise Lost 3
Pina
Project Nim

This is a real crap shoot. I could be wrong on all five, though they are taken from a semifinalist list of 15.

Find out Tuesday morning how I did!

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

2012-01-20T19:37:00.000-05:00

The word problematic is thrown around quite a bit, but here's a movie that it really describes. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is an often moving film that deals with grief and closure, but is also often at arm's length, because of a protagonist that I think few of us can identify with, or even tolerate for more than five minutes at a time.

The ads say this is not a 9/11 movie, but it sures seems like it to me. Tom Hanks plays the world's greatest dad (really, he never gets mad?), a jeweler who enjoys sending his son on "reconnaissance missions" that require maps and clues. They are currently working on finding New York's missing sixth borough (you would think Hanks wouldn't lead his kid so astray on geography) when "the worst day" happens, and Hanks is killed in the Towers.

The boy, Oskar, played by Thomas Horn, spends a moody year before he can even go in his father's closet, which is untouched. He finds a key, and, seeking to keep a connection to his father that is waning, endeavors to find what that key unlocks. A child who was tested for Asperger's, Horn notes that the name "Black" is written on the outside of the envelope that contains the key. He sets about contacting every person named Black in the five boroughs of New York. It's a good thing I wasn't around, because I would have been the asshole that said, "What if they live in Jersey?"

Soon Horn is joined on his expedition by a mysterious lodger in his grandmother's apartment, an old man (Max von Sydow), who does not speak, but has the words "Yes" and "No" tattooed on the palms of his hand, which is a nifty convenience. Von Sydow is such a good actor that at times I forgot he was mute, as you can read his thoughts in his expressions. Though he is a very fine performer, the character seems to exist only to get Horn over his fear of public transportation and bridges.

As I sit hear a few hours later, it's easy for me to pick apart this movie. For one, what American would name their kid Oskar? (this made me think of the main character with the same name in The Tin Drum, which is not who I should have been thinking of). The people Horn meets, most of them kind, seem like a Benetton ad (how many Chinese people people would have the surname Black?) But while I was watching it I was affected, mostly because director Stephen Daldry has managed to convince me that I was inside Oskar's head, and how overstimulated he could be by events swirling around him.

But do I want to spend two hours in the company of a kid like this? Horn, for his part, does a fine job (I was interested to read he was discovered after winning $30,000 on the Jeopardy kids tournament) but the character is so full of tics (such as carrying a tambourine to calm him down) that it made me edgy. He is also not warm and cuddly--he is extremely cruel to his mother (Sandra Bullock, in one of the better performances I've seen her give). The film was based on novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, and perhaps being inside the head of a mildly autistic boy works better on the page--I haven't read the book, but I did read The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time, which is another book narrated by an autistic person. When you actually have to experience the mania of this child you feel like you're trapped in a Chuck-E Cheese on a Saturday afternoon.

Daldry is a great craftsman, but as with The Reader, he isn't a particularly great director when it comes to sympathetic characters. He and his editor, Claire Simpson, have made a technically brilliant film. The opening shots of silhouetted figures falling is unnervingly gripping. However, the score by Alexandre Desplat is incessant and overbearing.

The events of 9/11 will continue to be the stuff of movies, I suppose. I think this film does not make the mistake of treating that event as an excuse for a child to find himself, which would be insulting. I had feared a mawkish film, which we do not get. But there is a kind of near-magic realism that gives that day a fairy-tale quality, which could be offensive to some, but could also be an approach that makes it easier for others to cope. Again, this is all problematic.

My grade for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: B.

Mysteries of Lisbon

2012-01-19T18:18:00.000-05:00

Raul Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon was on several end-of-year best lists, and I expected some sort of avant-garde European film, but instead it was sumptuous, old fashioned film based on a nineteenth-century Portuguese novel that recalls the work of Dickens or Eliot. It's a beast--over four hours long, so I watched it in two parts. I found it enjoyable, if a little dry

The story, which takes place in Lisbon and France during what appears to be the early part of the nineteenth century, is an interconnecting web of characters, most of whom center around an orphan living in a church school. The boy is closely watched over by the priest (Adriano Luz), who finally tells the boy about his parentage. This is the first of many flashbacks, which are novelistically rendered: a character sits in a chair and tells the story, while it is acted out for us.

Many characters reappear in the narrative under different identities, especially a hired killer (Ricardo Pireira), who calls himself "knife-eater." He had been hired to kill the boy by the mother's father, who did not wish his daughter's reputation to be ruined. That killer is bought off by Luz while posing as a gypsy. Luz also has two backstories: one, told him to by his father, whom he didn't know was his father, and another about his time in Napoleon's army.

The story is dense, so attention should be paid. I find a few loose ends still dangling, even after nearly four and a half hours. But Ruiz's camera work is exemplary. He frequently makes use of long shots, often through windows, which gives the viewer a sense of being a voyeur. One such shot is extremely playful, as we watch, through the window of a carriage, as one character attempts to shoot another, only for that character to be chased by the man he obviously just missed.

Though there are many coincidences, Ruiz does not employ a sentimental style. One character, who at the beginning of the film is rich, ends up a blind beggar, but no heartstrings are pulled at. Another character, a poor man, simply says, "What is normal for us is notorious tragedy for the nobility."

Sleeping Beauty

2012-01-18T13:42:00.000-05:00

Sleeping Beauty is one of those films that, while being erotic, tries to make you feel guilty about being turned on. Now, I admit that my sexual interests are pretty fucking catholic (small "c" catholic, natch). I've read some reviews that say this film isn't erotic at all, but if you're going to make a film with Emily Browning spending half of the film naked, you're going to turn me on.

Director and screenwriter Julia Leigh, I think, has made a film about female objectification. But, let's face it, almost every movie ever made that has women in it is about female objectification. In this one, Browning plays a college student who is hard up for money. She has several odd jobs, including doing some hooking. We do see her attend college classes, so it's hard to know when she has time to sleep.

She answers an ad in the student paper and takes a job serving rich geezers while wearing lingerie. She's new, so she doesn't show everything, although the other girls wear bizarre outfits that expose their breasts, and some squat immobile, their asses in the air, like pieces of furniture. Her new boss, the sophisticated Rachel Blake, tells her there is a great chance for promotion, and that she will never be penetrated. "Your vagina is your temple," she tells Browning.

She ends up doing gigs where she is drugged and lays on a bed while some old goat does who knows what to her. They are told not to penetrate her, but we really don't know what they're doing. One dignified old gent, after summarizing a short story while Blake patiently listens, climbs into bed with her. Another calls her a bitch and gives her a cigarette burn behind the ear. A third carries her as if he's rescuing her from drowning, but then drops her.

I have heard of men having a fetish for sleeping women, and there are videos that feature it, with actresses pretending to be asleep while men fiddle with them. But I don't think that's there's enough men that would spend that much money to make it a viable business. So what Leigh has done is not make something realistic buy metaphorical--men want their women docile and silent. That seems like an awfully angry attitude to have, especially in 2010, when this film was made. Intimacy with a woman who can not respond is only one tick away from necrophilia--at least in this case the body is warm and breathing. This is a creepy film, but not a particularly profound one.

I have to give Browning credit--it's a brave performance, what with being tossed around by naked old men. She doesn't have much of a character to play. We can assume she hates herself, but there's not much else to go on--she has roommates who hate her, and an unseen alcoholic mother, but otherwise she's an enigma. She has a relationship of some kind with a sickly man, but the full nature of that relationship is inscrutable.

Sleeping Beauty would make for a good discussion in a women's studies course, but is not all that interesting to watch, except for those who have fantasies about pixie-ish Australian redheads.

The Last Werewolf

2012-01-17T16:54:00.000-05:00

The supernatural is hot these days in almost all media: books, TV, film; from the ridiculous (Twilight) to the sublime (True Blood). You wouldn't think a book about a werewolf could possibly break any new ground, or rise above it's pulp antecedents, but Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf, which puts on a literary spin on a popular genre, managed to do just that. It's terrific.

Duncan observes most of the laws that were filtered through folklore by Curt Siodmak, who wrote the Universal film The Wolfman, which created most of the familiar tropes of the genre. Sure enough, Duncan's werewolf changes at the full moon, can be defeated by silver, and becomes a werewolf by being bitten by another werewolf. Duncan adds a few elemental details, though, as if anticipating our "wait, buts," the curse requires the werewolf to eat human flesh, so no cheating by eating, say, a moose, and living to about 400 years, but looking the same age as when they were first turned.

Our protagonist and narrator is Jacob Marlowe, who was bitten by a werewolf in Wales in the 1830s. It's now modern times, and he's the last of his kind, as a worldwide anti-occult organization has tracked down and killed all the others. He's resigned to his fate, tired of living the life that is shared with his "brother," who supplies the hunger. He's tired of being on the run, and tired of being lonely, as he has sex with prostitutes whom he pointedly does not personally like.

Marlowe is a great companion--urbane and witty, and with a conscience: he has killed many people, but has taken his vast fortune and tried to do good for people. He also points out, "Two nights ago I'd eaten a forty-three-year-old hedge fun specialist. I've been in a phase of taking the ones no one wants."

Marlowe is on fairly good terms with one of his hunters, Ellis, but the one who wants to kill him is a fellow named Grainer: "Forty years ago I killed and ate Grainer's father. Grainer was ten at the time. There's always someone's father, someone's mother, someone's wife, someone's son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems."

A few plot points I won't spoil, such as the climax of Marlowe's flashback to what happened after he turned (he was married to a beautiful American woman) or the major plot twist that happens halfway through the book. Suffice it to say that the title may be misleading.

The book is very erudite, but also viscerally bloody. A few of Marlowe's kills are described in anatomical detail, and one of them has the added frisson of the TV show America's Next Top Model on in the background. Oh, and there are also vampires, and as we have been led to believe, werewolves and vampires don't like each other. In direct contradiction with Stephenie Meyers' vampire laws, Duncan's bloodsuckers can't have sex, which is why they envy the werewolf.

The Last Werewolf is the werewolf novel for the literary minded. I think the generic horror fan would enjoy it, too, although it does get a bit existential here and there and drop literary references. But most of it is thrilling stuff. Here, on describing the first time Marlowe transforms into a wolf: "A breeze stirred the honeysuckle, the hairs on my ears and delirious wet snout. My scrotum twitched and my breath passed hot over my tongue. My anus was tenderly alert. I pictured my human self jumping the twenty feet, felt the shock of smashed ankles and slivered shins--then the new power like an inkling of depravity. I leaped from the window and bounded into the moonlight."

The Iron Lady

2012-01-16T22:29:00.000-05:00

Though I lived through her tenure as British Prime Minister, I don't know enough about British history to know what The Iron Lady does or does not get right. I do know that Margaret Thatcher was and is despised by liberals, and celebrated by conservatives (I remember George Will, one year in the '80s, declaring that she was his choice for person of the year).

Let's just grant that I'm not the kind of person that would be nostalgic for Margaret Thatcher. Therefore, I will try to limit my remarks to this film, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, to its cinematic value only. My first response is: why?

The script is written in a familiar biographic form--the remembrances of an old person. Thatcher, played by Meryl Streep, is first seen as if she were some typical woman buying milk at the corner store. Then she is seen having breakfast with her husband, Jim Broadbent. But everything is not as it seems, as indicated by the brief glimpse of a guard with a machine gun in the hallway. Thatcher is indeed a baroness, who slipped out to buy milk against the wishes of her staff, and her husband is dead. In her encroaching dementia, though, he stays with her.

Throughout the two or so days we spend with the elder Thatcher, her life flashes before her. Daughter of a grocer, who was also a mayor, she goes to Oxford, enters the man's world of politics, and after losing at least one election, gets elected to Parliament in 1959. She marries Dennis Thatcher, and decides to run for party leader. She becomes Prime Minister, and with her conservative, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps philosophy, slashes the budget, wages war on Argentina, enrages unions, and finally gets so bossy that she's pushed out.

As I walked out of the theater, I wondered, what was the point of this film? It seems to have no particular point of view. It does seem to try to bend over backwards to show us she was a loving wife and mother, but even Hitler had a girlfriend--that she seemed to have a normal home life doesn't excuse anything. Later Lloyd, along with screenwriter Abi Morgan, show us how she was not beloved by all of her people, but aside from her belief that people with problems should fix it themselves, and not look to the government, there's little of her political philosophy on hand. There's a bit of her struggle as a woman in man's world, by showing her in a sea of men in suits, the "lady member's room" in the House of Commons basically a closet with an ironing board, but Thatcher wasn't exactly Germaine Greer. I remember people, perhaps her critics, saying she was successful as a woman in politics because she thought just like a man.

So the film shows us Thatcher in her dotage, hallucinating her dead husband, who was a bit of a wag (at one point, he spoils the mystery she's reading) and shows us the highlights of her life. One critic, I'm sorry that I can't remember who, compared the film to Billy Joel's song "We Didn't Start the Fire"--"war in the Falklands!" There's the obligatory scene showing her hotel room being bombed by the IRA, but there's nothing in the script that tells us how she felt about that or what she thought of the Irish situation. It's just a slide show.

As for Meryl Streep, she's uncanny in how she can inhabit a character. She's got the plummy British nuance of her voice down. The makeup focuses on her teeth, which is a bit distracting, but I think that's because we know what Streep looks like, and therefore know exactly what is real and what is not. If an unknown actress had played the part the makeup wouldn't have been an issue. I think I detected some leftover voice mannerisms from Streep's portrayal of Julia Child, though.

The Iron Lady is competently made and acted, but I'm at a loss as to what it was supposed to make me think and feel. Sympathy? Admiration? Don't judge too hastily? I don't know. It certainly didn't change my mind about Thatcher--I doubt it will for anyone, supporter and critic alike.

My grade for The Iron Lady: C-.

The Tempest (2010)

2012-01-15T14:27:00.001-05:00

Finally, finally, a DVD edition of The Tempest, which was released in late 2010, has been issued. It was the last Oscar-nominated film from that year I hadn't seen (it was nominated for Best Costumes). I can't say too much about the costumes, by Sandy Powell, There are so many period film released in a year that it's beyond me which ones are better than others, costume-wise, because of I'm not a costume guy.

I am a Shakespeare guy, though, so this was a must-see no matter the costumes. As I wrote about a stage production some years ago, The Tempest is unique among the Bard's plays for being presumably his last play, it's unity of time, place and action, and touching on the new world. Julie Taymor's adaptation, which is lean and (mostly) without the kind of visual gimmickry that Taymor's work is known for, has decidedly an emphasis on the new world.

She has done two things that might annoy the purist: she has cast a woman, Helen Mirren, as Prospero, here called Prospera, which was written as a male character. I have seen this done before, and it can be accomplished with very little textual adjustment, and somehow makes a world of sense, increasing the bond between parent and child, and the injustice she received at the hands of her brother. Secondly, Taymor has cast an African man, Djimon Hounsou, as Caliban, which fits the modern notion of him representing the oppressed indigenous population of the new world. As I noted in my earlier posting, critics such as Harold Bloom are dismayed at this interpretation--by 1611, when Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, the slave trade wasn't that long in existing, nor, I imagine, was there any sense of exploitation of native peoples.

Yet there is much talk of freedom in The Tempest. Prospera, exiled with her baby daughter by her scheming brother, who took over the Duchy of Milan from her, was marooned on an island. She honed her craft in magic, becoming powerful. She has two slaves on the island--Caliban, the deformed offspring of a witch, and a spirit Ariel, whom she rescues from imprisonment. Both want their freedom keenly, but Ariel works for his, while Caliban conspires to kill her. This certainly seems ready-made for an application to colonialism, whether is historically correct or not.

As for the adaptation, I found it excellent. Mirren, a terrific actress, holds the film together magnificently. The shipwrecked are represented by an eclectic group of American and British actors, some Taymor regulars. As Antonio, Chris Cooper; as Sebastian, Alan Cumming; as Gonzalo, Tom Conti; and as the King of Naples, David Straithairn. For comic relief there is Alfred Molina as the drunkard Stephano, who teams with Caliban and imagines himself kind of the island. The gutsiest casting is Russell Brand as the clown Trinculo, and it's damn near perfect casting. Brand's persona fits the role well, and if he's not as golden-throated as John Gielgud, well, the role doesn't call for it.

Ben Whishaw, looking like David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust days, is Ariel, and it's here where Taymor uses her palette of visual effects. I don't think Whishaw is actually in any of the shots he appears in--it's all superimposed. His only colleague may have been a green screen. But it all makes perfect sense.

As the young lovers, Felicity Jones, my new crush object, makes a winsome Miranda, while Reeve Carney makes a matinee idol Ferdinand (I see, by simple Googling, that his connection to Taymor is that he stars as Spider-Man in the Broadway musical).

Filmed in Hawaii, The Tempest captures the beauty and wildness of an island setting, but Taymor never allows the language to play second fiddle. This play has some of Shakespeare's most beautiful, heart-aching lines; perhaps best remembered are these:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Warrior

2012-01-14T12:37:00.000-05:00

Warrior, directed by Gavin O'Connor, is an example of a film that, though an absolute cliche-fest from beginning to end, is so well done that one almost embraces the cliches, as if they were long-lost friends. Not only that, but since this film has two protagonists, the cliches are doubled, and since the film is about brothers, we not only get sports-movie cliches, but the thing gets Biblical on us.

I resisted this film when it was in theaters, despite good reviews, because I can't stand the notion that something like mixed martial arts exists. I was a boxing fan when I was a kid, but that sport, savage as it can be, seems like afternoon tea compared to MMA, which seems to have few rules, and puts its competitors in cages, like animals. You would think human civilization would have advanced since the gladiatorial days, but you'd be wrong.

So, my personal distaste for the sport aside, one can't deny that it's popular now, certainly more popular than boxing (try and find someone who can name any of the heavyweight boxing champions, I dare you). Of course, years ago, maybe even only ten years ago, this would have been a boxing film.

The core of the film is two brothers and their father. First we meet Tom (Tom Hardy), mysteriously appearing on his father's (Nick Nolte) doorstep. Nolte was an abusive drunk, but is now sober and churchgoing. Hardy had left with his mother as a teen, and now carries her name. He is not there to forgive, but wants his father to train him, as he did in his high school wrestling days. He wants to enter a competition called "Sparta," which will pit, in a bracket-style tournament, the best MMA fighter in the world.

The other, elder brother is Brendan (Joel Edgerton), who stayed with his father, mostly because he had a serious girlfriend (Jennifer Morrison), who he married and had two little girls with. He has left behind fighting and become a high school physics teacher, but financial trouble has him fight in a match in a strip-club parking lot. This gets him suspended from school, so he seeks out his old trainer to earn money. Through a series of fortuitous events, Edgerton finds himself in Sparta, as well.

Of course the two will end up fighting for the championship--that was in the trailer. But of course each will have an obstacle or two to overcome--there's the undefeated Russian, and the grudge match between Hardy and the guy he pummeled in a sparring match. And of course each will deal with their father, whom neither can forgive, though Nolte wants that so desperately. Of course Hardy's reasons for entering the contest and earning the five million dollar prize are selfless, and are uncovered in layers.

But if this film is as predictable as Mussolini's trains, it does keep you guessing as to what will happen in the final match. As a putative screenwriter, I had my own thoughts on who must win, and was right, though how the script takes us there is poignant. There's also some interesting subtlety that I'm sure many won't pick up on--after the match (I'm not telling who wins), there are fierce whispers between the promoters, indicating, at least to me, that the prize money will be split.

Of course, when you pile up the cliches, things are bound to get soggy. The film overreaches in some of its cultural pretensions, such as Nolte listening to Moby-Dick on audiotape, or the use of Beethoven's Ode to Joy in the score. And is it really popular in such a sport that a guy who was mediocre as a professional, then returns to fighting years later, could just waltz into a championship that has only 16 participants? Are the pickings that slim?

But these thoughts are easily banished with the sheer enjoyability of the project. Warrior may not be Rocky, but it's close.

Colonel Roosevelt

2012-01-13T16:18:00.000-05:00

I haven't read the first two volumes of Edmund Morris' trilogy on the life of Theodore Roosevelt, but I did read, last year, Douglas Brinkley's The Wilderness Warrior, which covered Roosevelt's life from birth to the end of his presidency. Morris' final volume in his definitive study of one of the most interesting men ever to occupy the White House conveniently picks up after his presidency ended.

The book begins with a prologue describing the Colonel (as he preferred to be addressed, dating back to his Rough-Rider days) on a hunting trip to Africa. He then tours Europe as the most famous of Americans, coincidentally there when Edward VIII dies. He attends the funeral, and is fawned over by royalty. "Confound these kings; will they never let me alone?"

Then, being thoroughly disappointed in his had-picked successor to the presidency, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt "throws his hat in the ring" (he coined the phrase) and goes after the nomination for the Republican Party in 1912. Morris vividly recreates one of the most fascinating election years in American history, as Roosevelt, spurned by the party faithful, breaks away and starts his own party, the Progressives, symbolized by the Bull Moose. Roosevelt manages to come in second, ahead of Taft, despite garnering sympathy by being shot in the chest in Milwaukee. Famously, his written speech slowed down the bullet, a speech he insisted on giving, even though he was bleeding.

The winner of the election was Woodrow Wilson, and Roosevelt would spend much of the remainder of his life railing against him. Mostly it was about Wilson's reluctance to fight back against Mexico, then for his dogged neutrality during the European war that would become known as World War I. Roosevelt was stunned by German atrocities in Belgium, then it was the Lusitania torpedoed by a German U-boat. But Wilson, following his own professorial reasoning, did not commit troops to the war, which drove Roosevelt crazy. In fact, Roosevelt was ready to assemble a volunteer troop of his own. He had a thirst for dying gloriously in battle.

But before the war Roosevelt had an adventure in South America, exploring the River of Doubt, and determining whether it linked with the Amazon. This was really roughing it, and along with the election race, Morris makes it come alive: "Clearing skies and baking heat. Rapids, rapids, rapids. Portages too numerous to count. Rare fish dinners, but still no meat. Evasive tapirs. Grilled parrots and toucans. Monkey stew. Palm cabbage. Wild pineapples. Fatty Brazil nuts. Disappearance of fifteen food tins. Three weeks or rations left. Oxford Book of French Verse. Mountains crowding in. Men hit with fever, dysentery. Malcontents multiply, Daily chapter-writing."

Roosevelt and his son Kermit would emerge from this trek emaciated, the father suffering a bad leg wound. He would recover enough to be a constant fly in Wilson's ointment. When the 1916 election came around, Roosevelt played Hamlet, and professed not to be interested, but then was hurt when the Republican spurned him for Charles Evans Hughes, who lost a squeaker to Wilson. Following the election, the U.S. finally entered the war, and Roosevelt was stung again when the Defense department refused his offer of starting a volunteer regiment, saying he wasn't experienced enough.

Roosevelt's four sons all went, though. Ted, Jr. and Archie were wounded, but the youngest, Quentin, who joined the air corps, was killed over France. It was a blow that the Colonel could not recover from. As Morris puts it. "what made this loss so devastating to him was the truth it conveyed; that death in battle was no more glamorous than death in an abattoir. Under some much-trodden turf in France, Quentin lay as cold as steer fallen off a hook. Look now, in your ignorance, on the face of death, the boy had written in one of his attempts at fiction. The words seemed to admonish a father who had always romanticized war."

Roosevelt was a figure from a different age that has no parallel today. He was bellicose, but he was also progressive--Wall Street was glad to be rid of his presidency. He favored women's suffrage, but mocked pacifists in terms that equated them with women. But he was certainly an expansively brilliant man. He knew about birds and poetry, and befriended and rescued the career of Edward Arlington Robinson, whose lines Morris uses as his epigraphs for each chapter.

With the excitement of the 1912 race and the South America trip, some of the rest seems dull, but Morris in there, swinging. There are two chapters concerning libel trials, with Roosevelt a plaintiff in one and a defendant in the other. It was also surprising to learn that Roosevelt's financial situation was not taken for granted--he needed to work, and did so as a writer, publishing several books (shortly after his death his complete works would equal 24 volumes) and magazine and newspaper articles.

Morris, who worked more than 30 years on this project, oozes knowledge of the man through every sentence. I liked this passage about his Oyster Bay home, Sagamore Hill: "Never elegant--it was too darkly paneled, too cluttered, with horns protruding from the walls and flattened animals snarling underfoot--it had gone through its comfortable and luxurious phases and begun to be shabby. Between faded oriental rugs, the hall floorboards were parted from the pounding of hobnail boots. Foundation cracks ran around the hall mantel. Years of creosote deposits had darkened the cannonballs that lay like testicles at the base of two penile, brass-sleeved shell cartridges serving as andirons in the hearth."

Morris mentions that his first volume was published in 1979, so I can only imagine how he felt as he wrote of Roosevelt's death. As 1919 began, the Colonel was primed to be the favorite for the Republican nomination in 1920; after all, he was only 60. But as a sickly young boy, told he would not live long, Roosevelt told his doctors he would live life vigorously until he was 60. It was time for the reckoning. The illnesses he had struggled through all his life, the bullet wound to the chest, the trials in South America, and Quentin's death, slowed him for good on January 6th of that year. As Morris puts it, "In a more sophisticated era of professional diagnosis, a review of his medical history would indicate that 'the cause of death was myocardial infarction, secondary to chronic atherosclerosis with possible acute coronary occlusion.'

"If so, he could be said in more ways than one to have died of a broken heart."

The Parent Trap

2012-01-12T15:16:00.000-05:00

Another big hit of 1961 was Disney's The Parent Trap, a fairly charming family comedy that has an interesting subtext--divorce. In 1961, divorce wasn't all that common, but "broken home" was becoming part of the vernacular. In this film, divorce is seen as regrettable and simply a mistake in judgment, something that can be corrected by the determination of children.

Hayley Mills has a dual role as twins. In a plot form that is as old as Plautus, the twin girls, who were separated as babies and don't know of each other's existence, meet at a summer camp. Initially they are hostile to each other, playing a series of pranks. They are punished by being sent to live in a cabin together, where they figure out they are sisters. Susan's father (Brian Keith), lives on a ranch in California, while Sharon lives with her mother (Maureen O'Hara) as part of the upper crust in Boston.

The girls conspire to switch places so they can get to know the parent they've missed. When Sharon discovers that her father is going to marry a young woman (Joanna Barnes), the twins realize they must work to break that up and get their parents back together. Much of this takes place on a camping trip, where the sleek and sophisticated Barnes is undermined by both nature and the twins.

This all seems familiar (like I said, the plot is an old one, used again by Shakespeare), and the film has many sequels and a remake that gave Lindsay Lohan her film debut. But it's easy to take, and even touching at several moments, especially when the girls are reunited with their absent parents. But there is little mention of how cruel it was to not only separate them, but to deny them the knowledge of the other's existence.

The film is written and directed broadly by David Swift. The special effects, allowing Mills to be on screen with herself, looks good--initially much more use of a body double was to be used, but Walt Disney liked the way the split screen looked and that the film reconfigured to allow more use of it.

Blue Hawaii

2012-01-11T13:46:00.000-05:00

Blue Hawaii was one of the top box-office earners of 1961. Believe it or not, this is the first Elvis Presley movie I've ever seen. I'm not a big Elvis guy--I certainly respect his place in rock and roll history, but I don't own any of his music. I certainly don't dislike his music, but his movies don't have a great reputation. According to Little Steven Van Zandt and my friend Lora, who is a big Elvis fan, Kid Creole is the only good movie he made.

Blue Hawaii certainly is not any good, but it's pleasant enough and not aggressively awful. Elvis plays a Hawaii kid who is back from the army. He just wants to surf and hang out with his Hawaiian native friends, and his girlfriend (Joan Blackman), who is half-Hawaiian. His parents, though, including his Southern belle mother (Angela Lansbury, in a way-over-the-top performance) want him to go work for the family's pineapple business.

A compromise is struck by Elvis getting a job as a tour guide. He's assigned a pretty young schoolteacher and four of her charges. Sit-com like plot situations arise, along with several songs, including "Can't Help Falling in Love," one of Elvis' loveliest recordings. It's stupid but innocuous. At first I was uncomfortable with native Hawaiians being depicted as kind of mythical beings, like the way Irishmen are frequently depicted as being like leprechauns. But I found, as the film went on, that the film was respectful of Hawaiian culture.

A few weird things: the script, by Hal Kanter, was nominated for a Writer's Guild Award. Granted, the category was for Best Written American Musical, but please. The film was directed by Norman Taurog, who still holds the record for the youngest to ever win an Oscar for Best Director.

In the unpleasant category, Jenny Maxwell, who plays one of the teen girls, died in 1981 when she and her husband were shot to death during a supposed botched robbery.

The Children's Hour

2012-01-10T13:27:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, happily, a movie exceeds my expectations. In watching the major films of 1961, I turn to The Children's Hour, based on the play by Lillian Hellman and directed by William Wyler. I expected a soggy spectacle like Peyton Place, but instead it was surprisingly tough and moving.

Set in a girl's boarding school, the film covers two themes: gossip and Lesbianism. Hellman's play, written in 1934, was certainly ahead of its time, but when made into a film in 1936 all elements of the love that dare not speak its name were removed, instead changed to a heterosexual scandal, and retitled These Three.

But this confronts homosexuality head on, and not in namby-pamby way. So many films about McCarthyism and the blacklist, for example, deal with people who are wrongly accused of being a communist. Why not make one about an actual communist--after all, there's nothing illegal about that, just as there's nothing wrong with being a Lesbian.

The setting is a boarding school just started by two enterprising young women, Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. Friends from school, they own and operate the school, with MacLaine's dotty actress aunt (Miriam Hopkins, who incidentally starred in These Three) as a teacher. Hepburn is engaged to marry a doctor, James Garner, which makes MacLaine jealous. Immediately my gaydar was activated, but I was waiting to see whether the film would actually state that MacLaine was a Lesbian.

A troublesome girl, Karen Balkin, decides to get back at her teachers by exaggerating things she heard and saw and tells her patrician grandmother (Fay Bainter, who was Oscar-nominated) her suspicions. Soon the entire school has lost all its pupils. When Hepburn and MacLaine find out the rumor and its source, they and Garner confront Bainter, but Balkin blackmails a schoolmate (Veronica Cartwright, who would later be eaten in Alien) into backing up her story.

Hepburn and MacLaine become outcasts, losing a slander suit (which was entirely off-screen) when Hopkins, who could have cleared things up, refused to respond to a summons, citing a "moral obligation to the theater."

I found almost all of this gripping, and at times difficult to bear, as gossip and innuendo ruin these women's lives. But the film kept challenging the audience, with a key scene late in the film in which MacLaine admits that she loves Hepburn in the manner of which she has been accused. One can see in MacLaine's brilliant performance the horror that closeted homosexuals, or those who can't come to grips with their sexuality, go through.

All of the acting is superb. I've never seen Garner so good. Usually he's playing some casual role that he made famous with Maverick and Rockford, but this role requires depth of feeling and he nails it, particularly a scene in which Hepburn lets him confront his doubts about whether she's telling the truth. And then, my god, Hepburn's face during the climactic moment of the film--absolute genius of expression.

Wyler's direction is also superb. I spent several moments appreciating how he used closeup and deep focus to frame two or more people in a shot. Watching this film was like taking a master class in composition.

Thankfully in fifty years we've progressed, but not nearly enough, not when a serious contender for the Republican nomination for president is an unrepentant homophobe. We've still got a long way to go.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians

2012-01-09T12:56:00.000-05:00

One Hundred and One Dalmatians was the highest-grossing film of 1961, with an impressive take of 60 million (which would be roughly 450 million today). I was interested to read that it followed Sleeping Beauty in the Disney canon, which was a big money-loser, and stirred talk of closing down the animation department. Ub Iwerks, though, developed a method of using Xerox photography, thus the inking process was eliminated, and Dalmatians could be made for half the cost.

If I had seen the film before yesterday, it is lost to the mists of time. I do know that our family was indirectly influenced by it. We got our first dog in 1965, when I was four, and apparently my parents got a dalmatian because I wanted a spotted dog. The popularity of dalmatians as a breed went through the roof after this film (never a good thing, as overbreeding takes place), so perhaps our dear sweet Betsy, who was more black than white, came to me as a result of this film.

Although One Hundred and One Dalmatians can't be considered top tier Disney, as would Pinocchio or Bambi or parts of Fantasia, or even the renaissance the studio experienced in the late 1980s-early '90s. But it is thoroughly charming, and the animators magically capture the cuteness of a puppy. As Charles Schulz wrote, "Happiness is a warm puppy," and this film has that in spades.

Based on book by Dodie Smith, the film is thoroughly British, set in London. A dalmatian named Pongo has a human "pet," a composer named Roger. They live in quiet bachelorhood, but Pongo is determined to get them both a mate. He spots a promising match with a lovely young girl walking a lovely young dalmatian, and through canine shenanigans we cut to the wedding. Roger's new wife is Anita, Pongo's is Perdita.

Perdy, as Pongo calls her, is soon pregnant, but cowers upon visits by Anita's school chum, Cruella da Vil. Cruella, in a bit of prescience, is depicted as evil by primarily two traits--she smokes, and she loves fur. This film may have inspired a generation of PETA members. She wants to buy the puppies to make a dalmatian-skin coat, but when Perdy has 15 puppies, Roger refuses to sell. So Cruella's loutish henchman, Jasper and Horace, dognap the puppies.

My favorite part of the film is the imagining of a primitive but effective "twilight bark," a chain of communication existing throughout the land. It reminded me of the sequence of signal fires in The Return of the King. Pongo barks out his alert, a Great Dane passes it along to a Scottish terrier, and so on, until it reaches the countryside, where a mutt called Colonel, in a parody of British World War II films, organizes a rescue. By now Cruella has acquired 99 dalmatian puppies, watched over by her doltish thugs, and when they escape, it's good versus bad as the dogs makes their way across a snowy landscape.

In this era, animated films typically did not have above-the-line voice talent. Only the sharpest trivia experts for example, know who voiced Snow White. The only star in this film was Rod Taylor as Pongo, a fairly substantial star at the time (he would appear in Hitchcock's The Birds two years later). But credit should be given to Betty Lou Gerson, who voiced Cruella da Vil.

The Art of Fielding

2012-01-08T17:31:00.000-05:00

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach, is an interesting hybrid--a mixture of the old-fashioned baseball story, such as Ring Lardner's Alibi Ike, with the contemporary campus novel, of which there are many (since so many literary novelists teach for a living). The result is a lovely work, if not at times overly precious.

The book is set at the fictional Westish College, on the shore of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. The characters are mostly on the baseball team. Mike Schwartz is the burly captain and catcher, and when, at an American Legion game, he spots a weak-hitting but brilliant-fielding shortstop, Henry Skrimshander: "Putting Henry at shortstop--it was like taking a painting that had been shoved in a closet and hanging it in the ideal spot. You instantly forgot what the room had looked like before. By the fourth inning he was directing the other fielders, waving them left or right, correcting their tactical miscues."

Mike convinces Henry to come to Westish from his home in South Dakota, and a few years later, they have put together a great team. Henry's bible is "The Art of Fielding," by his hero, Aparacio Rodriguez (also fictitious, but certainly an amalgam of Luis Aparicio and Ozzie Smith). Through a strict training regimen, Mike has turned Henry into a good hitter, and scouts are hovering, telling him he'll be the first shortstop taken in the draft.

Meanwhile, the other thread of the novel involves the college's president, Guert Affenfelt. He was a Westish alum, and discovered, in the dingy library archives, that Herman Melville once visited there, giving the school some cache. A Melville statue now sits on the campus, facing the lake, and the team is renamed the harpooners. Two things are going on with Guert: his daughter, Pella, has returned after a bad marriage, and Geurt is in love with a male student, Owen Dunne, who is Henry's teammate.

A book like this is deceptively brilliant because it seems so easily written. Nothing is strained--each sentence flows beautifully, without gilding. It's not exactly Hemingway-esque, but neither is it Melville-esque. At one point, Guert reads Chekhov to Owen, and that's what it seems like to me--these characters are like Chekhov's, constantly searching, futilely, for happiness.

Owen, who is gay, is on the team, but is openly so, and this is not a story like The Dreyfus Affair or Take Me Out--he announces he's gay to the coach when he tries out, and nothing more is spoken about it. Instead, the baseball story is one of the mysteriously sudden inability to perform. Henry, who has tied the record for error-free games in college baseball, throws wildly one day and hits Owen in the head while he's sitting in the dugout. He's ultimately okay, but Henry is not, and like Steve Blass, Chuck Knoblauch, and Steve Sax, it gets into his head. Suddenly he is unable to throw.

All of this builds toward the Division III three college championship game, and I won't say more than that. Harbach, who obviously knows his literature, also knows his baseball, and when I read a novel about baseball that doesn't raise my hackles about something inconsistent or wrong, then that's a real compliment. There's a love triangle between Mike, Henry and Pella that is a bit sudsy, but the nonbaseball conclusion, in which a story from Ralph Waldo Emerson's life is replicated, is not as realistic as the baseball, but moving none the less.

Harbach slips into the overly precious with some of his character's names. Skrimshander and Affenfelt are odd but feasible, but Sooty Kim, Quentin Quisp, Adam Starblind and Craig Suitcase? I could see the Starblind as a nod to Melville, but Quisp is a serial, and who has ever heard anyone named Suitcase? These names aren't even worthy of Thomas Pynchon.

Baseball fans and bookworms frequently intersect in a Venn diagram, and that's no different here. To wit: "But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric--not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Better versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn't storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football. You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?"

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

2012-01-07T19:22:00.000-05:00

I won't pretend that I understood everything that happened in Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I think I got most of it, but let's face it, the novel by John Le Carre (which I have not read) was once made into a seven-part series for the BBC. Clearly a two-hour film adaptation is going to leave stuff out and go at a freight-train pace. But though I longed to grab my fellow theater-goers as they left the theater to have a group debrief, I found the artistry of the film so impressive, and the conclusion so pulse-pounding that it made up for any fogginess on my part.

Set in 1973, during the Cold War, the film concerns the top brass of British Intelligence, known as "the circus." The head of the organization, known only as "Control" (John Hurt), sends an agent to Hungary on a tip that information regarding a highly-placed Soviet double agent, or mole, is available. That mission goes disastrously awry, and Hurt is forced into retirement, along with one of his top agents, George Smiley (Gary Oldman). But when evidence of the mole reaches the ministry, Oldman is brought out of retirement to track him down. It is one of four men, each given a code name of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, or Poor Man (Smiley, once considered one of the suspects, was labeled "Spy.")

So what we have is not a whodunit, but a whoisit, with the same level of sophistication of the best Agatha Christie mystery. We are led down certain alleys--in fact, the clues point to one particular man so blatantly at first I knew it couldn't be him--but the result was a surprise to me, so if you haven't read the book or seen the miniseries, don't let anyone dare spoil it for you.

But, my goodness, this film is dense. At least 10 percent of it went by me in a blur. I'll take the blame for much of that, but there are some things I'm left wondering about. I'll bring up a few, without spoilers: one character, after changing identities, is teaching school (he has a favorite student who looks like a young Roger Ebert). How did Oldman track him down? Also, at a momentous Christmas party, Oldman sees two people in a romantic embrace. Who were they? I have my suspicions, but I don't believe this was revealed.

Alfredson's direction is crisp and efficient (along with his editor, Dino Jonsäter), while the script by Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O'Connor works wonders with what must have been an insane assignment. The cast is full of familiar British actors: Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds and Colin Firth are three of the suspected moles, while Benedict Cumberbatch (what a great British name) and Tom Hardy are both terrific as part of team Oldman. I was surprised not to see Michael Fassbender, and then I read he was going to be in it but I had to drop out because of a conflict, and was replaced by Hardy. As for Oldman, it's hard to believe this is the same actor who became well known for playing Sid Vicious. He's so good as a wizened veteran of the intelligence wars that I completely forgot who I was watching. He has several great scenes--I think the best is when he tells about his one meeting with "Karla," the Russian master spy. It seems that Karla absconded with Oldman's lighter, which of course will be seen before the film is over.

I highly recommend Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but I also recommend seeing it a second time. I will certainly do so, when it's on DVD, so I can watch with subtitles and a pause and rewind button.

My grade for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: A-.

Friday Night Lights

2012-01-06T15:07:00.000-05:00

I'd heard some good things about Friday Night Lights, an NBC show that was still running as of recently (I know the lead, Kyle Chandler, just won an Emmy), but I had never seen an episode of it before this fall. An interest in Minka Kelly prompted me to take a look at the first season, all 22 episodes.

Based on the film, directed by Peter Berg, which in turn was based on a nonfiction book by Buzz Bissinger, the TV series has a great framework for a show, and in some respects is frighteningly penetrating about its glimpses into its character lives. But, ultimately, over 22 episodes my interest started to flag, as I realized it was headed into daytime drama material, which usually doesn't occur to a good show until its third or fourth season. After five seasons of this stuff, I can't imagine how sudsy it might have gotten, and I don't want to know.

The best thing about Friday Night Lights is how it captures something that is ultimately very sad: the obsession a small town in Texas has for its high school football team. I've never lived in a small Texas town (I did live in Houston for a while), but I can imagine that the show gets this right, as everyone lives and dies with every move the team makes. The kids are made into stars and have too much pressure on them (signs with their name and number are posted in front of their houses). I can also imagine this is because in places like the fictional Dillon, Texas, there's nothing else to do.

The show, created by Berg, is also innovative in its camera work. A handheld camera is used, and actors were not instructed to hit marks--instead, they were free to move improvisationally, so as to give it an overall effect of a documentary. This lent an immediacy to the action that I found very interesting, even not noticing after it a while.

The season followed the Dillon Panthers and their new coach (Chandler) through their season, in which they overcome several obstacles to make it to the state championship. In the opening game, the star quarterback (Scott Porter), is injured, and is paralyzed below the waist. The insecurity-riddled backup (Zack Gilford), takes his place, and also falls in love with the coach's daughter (Aimee Teegarden). Porter's girlfriend (Minka Kelly), a cheerleader, is tested by the injury, and ends up fooling around with the team's bad boy (Taylor Kitsch).

There are also issues with steroids, the recruitment of a Katrina-refugee, bipolar disorder, estranged fathers and sons, younger men with older women, an unexpected pregnancy, an attempted rape, a student beaten up by a football player, etc. Like I said, strictly daytime drama stuff. It's handled intelligently, but after a while I just was rolling my eyes.

And then there's the football. Almost every episode revolves around a game. Sports in movies and television are almost never handled in a realistic fashion, but Friday Night Lights gets most of it right. The problem I had with it is how many games can one team play that are won on the last play from scrimmage? Not even the Cardiac Cards of the late '70s had that many. And the plays that the Panthers win on defy logic--in one game, with 13 seconds to go, in their own territory, they call a pitchout to their great running back (Gaius Charles). I'm sorry--I don't care how great a running back you have, you've got to be throwing the ball down field with only 13 seconds left. Of course, Charles takes it in for the win.

Chandler is very good as the coach who is obsessed with football but also is a loving family man, and Connie Britton (who I believe is the only cast member left over from the movie) is effective as his long-suffering wife. Most of the high school kids are played by actors who are too old for the part--a common TV problem. Adrianne Palicki, as the school's hot mama/slut, looks nothing like any girl I went to high school with. I think the most moving portrayal, though, is by Brad Leland, who plays the primary booster for the team, a car dealership owner who is just too involved with football than is right. He's something of an asshole, but as his life falls apart, you can't help but feel sorry for him. It's a very good performance.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

2012-01-05T15:32:00.000-05:00

I've seen Blake Edwards' Breakfast at Tiffany's, a big hit of 1961, at least three times, and each time I like it less. Watching it yesterday I could barely get through it. After history and repeat viewings the only thing that really stands out is Audrey Hepburn's iconic performance as Holly Golightly, but the rest comes across as mush.

Part of my problem is knowing how they changed Truman Capote's novel. I've never read it, but I know enough about it (an episode of Seinfeld hinges on the differences between novel and movie). Now, it's very rare for a movie to be true to the source material, but this adaptation, by George Axelrod, misses the boat entirely. Golightly is supposed to be, as Capote writes, an "American geisha." She is pointedly not a prostitute, but more of a golddigger--going out with rich men and getting expensive gifts in return (this is typified by being handed $50 for going to tip the powder room attendant). She is a woman who escaped a life of being a teen bride to a much older man in rural Texas, changing her name from Lula Mae Barnes. Now she lives in a nice apartment on the Upper East Side of New York, having almost no permanent possessions--even her cat is unnamed, and to make herself happy she longingly looks in the window at Tiffany's.

The film does fine by that, but where it errs is in the leading man, played blandly by George Peppard. The narrator and friend of Holly in the book is gay, so to have the two form a romance and a sappy Hollywood ending, hugging in the rain with a soaked cat in between them, rankles. Axelrod goes further and makes Peppard a struggling writer but also a kept man--the character played by Patricia Neal, a wealthy decorator, sleeping with Peppard and then leaving money on the dresser, was invented for the movie.

And I just can't get with the tone of some these late 50s, early 60s madcap comedies. There's a party scene at Hepburn's full of oddball types, such as Martin Balsam playing a Hollywood agent, that just don't track with me. In a way it reminded me of a smaller scale Auntie Mame, a film I hated. I don't hate Breakfast at Tiffany's, mostly because of Hepburn's performance, but it bugs me.

Of course, Breakfast at Tiffany's biggest sin is the performance by Mickey Rooney as Hepburn's upstairs neighbor, a Japanese photographer. It is a blatantly offensive stereotypical caricature, with Rooney wearing false teeth, squinty eyes, and a yellowed face that seems straight out of a World War II movie. He's not funny, and it reminds me of that Gilligan's Island episode where they come across the Japanese soldier that doesn't know the war is over. It's really that terrible.

Breakfast at Tiffany's, though it doesn't hold up well, still has charm, most of it provided by Hepburn, and also by the indelible song "Moon River," written by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini, that won the Oscar that year for Best Song. But while watching the movie this time I noted just how often that song can be heard. But when Hepburn finds that cat, and the music swells, one can't help but feel the heartstrings tug, even if just a little.

The Battle of Princeton

2012-01-04T15:47:00.000-05:00

Washington leading the troops at Princeton

After the surprise attack on Hessian troops at Trenton on Christmas night, 1776, George Washington recrossed the Delaware into Pennsylvania and plotted what to do next. The British troops under Cornwallis came down from New York to fill the vacuum. Washington then went back into New Jersey, and was faced with a decision. He ended up winning a skirmish at Assunpink Creek, and then rolled the dice and took a back roads approach toward Princeton. The two armies met there on January 3, 1777.

I live only about five miles from Princeton Battlefield State Park, and drive by it all the time, as it is bisected by a fairly busy road. I've wandered around it a few times, but decided to make another visit on the 235th anniversary of the battle, which in many ways was a turning point of the war, as it was one of Washington's greatest victories and convinced many, including the French, that the Americans could actually win the war.

As usual, I came across a closed visitor's center, which is the Thomas Clark house, which was built in 1772 and ended up serving as a field hospital. It is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, but you think it would have been open on the anniversary of the battle. As a dedicated Democrat, I blame Chris Christie.

It was a cold day, but I took a walk of the park from end to end. The actual park itself doesn't encompass the entire field of battle, which extended all the way to the campus of Princeton University. Legend has it that a battery, led by Alexander Hamilton, pelted Nassau Hall (being used as British headquarters) with cannonballs, one of them crashing through a wall and decapitating a portrait of George III on the other side. There is still an indentation in the wall from cannon fire in the Hall's bricks today.

The Princeton Battle Monument

Also, the route Washington took from Trenton to Princeton is marked with stone obelisks. Much of the route is today Quakerbridge Road, through the town known today as Lawrenceville. I stopped at one near the Updike Farm, not far from Stony Brook Bridge, which Washington tried to destroy, but in retrospect, it was okay that he failed, because the bridge still exists and is in heavy use for automobile traffic.

The most notable feature of the battlefield was, until 2000, the Mercer Oak. Legend also has it that General Hugh Mercer, one of the Americans, was lain under this tree after being wounded. He died of his wounds nine days later in Clark House. The tree finally gave way in 2000, but an acorn from the original tree was planted to grow a new one, which is now about twenty feet high.

Finally, there is a monument to the battle that stands before Princeton Borough Hall, which was dedicated in 1922. President Warren Harding attended the dedication.

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

2012-01-03T10:40:00.000-05:00

Warren Beatty's second film of 1961 was The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and it almost derailed his career. Based on a novella by Tennessee Williams, and directed by acclaimed stage director Jose Quintero, the film did not receive good reviews, and Beatty was so disheartened that he thought about quitting acting.

I found it to be fairly interesting, if only because it is typical Williams. Once again he has made the stand-in for himself a woman steeped in loneliness. She is Karen Stone (Vivien Leigh), an actress who, after a disastrous turn as Rosalind in As You Like It (her straight-talking friend, Coral Browne, tells her the only problem is that she's too old for the part), gives up acting and heads to Rome on a vacation with her husband. He dies of a heart attack on the plane, but she stays in Rome and makes it her home.

We then see a kind of seamy underbelly of the social set in that city. A noblewoman of some sort (she calls herself a Contessa), played by Lotte Lenya, serves as a kind of pimp, arranging beautiful young men with lonely American widows, splitting whatever baubles they received fifty-fifty. One of her stable is Paolo, played by Beatty, but Leigh sees right through it and has no interest. Beatty persists, and eventually the two form a real relationship, and much to his dismay, he falls in love with her.

Meanwhile, there is a mysterious young man of the streets who constantly follows Leigh. We never really know who he is, but after her relationship with Beatty has a sudden and sorrowful end, she reaches out to the young stalker, in an act that can be seen as overly romantic or subtly suicidal.

Perhaps the critics of 1961 were shocked by such a casual view of gigolos, but today this doesn't seem so shocking, and I was intrigued by the characters, particularly Leigh, Beatty, and Lenye. The latter is really something of a shark in couture, and Lenya was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Beatty, while convincing no one he's Italian, at least had the laziness of a gigolo down, and when he turns on Leigh it is shocking and forceful. But this is Leigh's picture, and the great actress, who had recently gone through a divorce with Laurence Olivier, is wonderful as a woman determined to have a relationship with a younger man on her terms.

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is well worth the time for Williams' fans and anyone else interested in a well-done character study.

Splendor in the Grass

2012-01-02T15:33:00.000-05:00

This may be the only movie I know that is about blue balls. Written originally for the screen by playwright William Inge (he won an Oscar for it) and directed by Elia Kazan, Splendor in the Grass takes place in Kansas in the late 1920s. Deanie (Natalie Wood) and Bud (Warren Beatty, in his big screen debut) are hot and heavy sweethearts, but she won't put out, listening to her mother's advice that nice girls wait for marriage. She gives her one of those speeches that sends shivers down the spine of feminists--men like sex more than women do, so wives just have to lay back and do their duty to have children.

Beatty goes to his father, a rough-and-tumble oil man (Pat Hingle). He discreetly indicates that Beatty might find himself another kind of girl to satisfy that particular itch. Beatty ends up having a fling with the high school slut, Wood finds about it, and ends up having a nervous breakdown.

Maybe things were like that in small-town America in those days, but I just couldn't get behind this movie. There seems to be no middle ground. Although I think Inge and Kazan are not saying that nice girls should remain virgins until marriage, it sure comes across that way. Consider the character of Beatty's older sister (Barbara Loden), a flapper who has run off to Chicago to get married, had an abortion, and then was brought kicking and screaming back home, where she runs loose and promiscuous, destined to die in an car accident. The film takes such a hard line view on the small-mindedness of middle America that it comes off as didactic, and I don't believe all small towns were so limited in their imagination.

A few subplots hold interest--the relationship between Beatty and his father is complex. Hingle, a self-made man, wants Beatty to go to Yale, but the son just wants to ranch. When the stock market crash occurs (savvy viewers will be waiting for it too happen), Hingle is ruined, so it's interesting to see what he does.

But on the whole I found this film overacted, lugubrious, and heavy-handed. Wood was nominated for an Oscar, probably because she got some key "crazy" scenes, but I don't think the film has anything interesting or insightful to say about mental illness. It was a star-making role for Beatty, who in just a few short years would be one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.

Annie Hall

2012-01-01T14:47:00.000-05:00

My favorite movie, for about thirty plus years now, has been Annie Hall. For the record, these are my ten favorite movies, in alphabetical order: Annie Hall, Casablanca, A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather, The Graduate, Hannah and Her Sisters, A Hard Day's Night, The Maltese Falcon, and Manhattan. I would not argue that these are the greatest films ever made (although I would certainly submit that Casablanca and The Godfather are right there), nor would I disagree that Annie Hall is not Woody Allen's greatest achievement, as Hannah and Her Sisters or Crimes and Misdemeanors are much more emotionally complex. But it is my favorite movie of his, and since Woody Allen is my own personal movie god, it is my favorite film of all time.

To my recollection, the first Allen film I saw was a double feature of Take the Money and Run and The Front (which he starred in but did not write or direct). The former is perhaps his purest comedy, a gag machine that just doesn't quit, and the movie that most people are referring to when they talk about his "early funny movies" (that and maybe Sleeper or Bananas). My indoctrination into the cult of Allen came through his prose. When I was about 15 I was browsing one day in my local bookstore (the Little Professor on Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, Michigan) and was attracted to the bright yellow cover of Without Feathers, his collection of "casuals" published in the New Yorker. I was hooked. His surreal humor so synced with my own that I treated that book like a Bible. I still have it, though it his held together with masking tape.

All during high school I copied his style in my creative writing, and became known as being such an Allen fan than I was tapped by the high school drama club to direct his play Don't Drink the Water and thus I was on my way as a theater geek. But it was Annie Hall that pushed me into the status of cinema geek.

Ironically, I didn't see Annie Hall in its initial theater run. I didn't go to too many movies in those days without my parents. The movie came out in March, 1977, just after we had moved to New Jersey from Michigan. Thus I didn't see it until it premiered on HBO in March, 1978. After the first time I watched it, I was transfixed. I watched it every time it was on HBO--perhaps a dozen times that month. I have seen it at least twenty times since then, most recently last night. I have seen it on a big screen a few times, once or twice in college, and once at a theater in Greenwich Village that ran a double feature with Manhattan, surely the most blissful three hours I could possibly spend in a movie theater. In those days before VCRs, I even set up my cassette recorder in front of the TV set and audio taped the movie, so I could listen to it every time I wanted.

So what is that I respond to so much about the movie? Well, it's amazingly fucking funny. Almost every line is a laugh line, opening and closing with old Catskills jokes. There are also moments of sublime surrealism in some of his jokes. I think the best sequence starts with Alvy Singer's (Allen, of course) date with Rolling Stone reporter Shelley Duvall. She asks him if he caught the Dylan concert. He responds, "I couldn't make it that night. My raccoon had hepatitis." The joke is then pushed when Duvall asks, "You have a raccoon?" and Allen wiggles his fingers and says, "A few." Then, cut to them in bed, and Duvall tells him as a lover he is "Kafkaesque." She also apologizes for taking so long to finish. He replies, "I think too much of a burden is placed on the orgasm." She thinks he's quoting someone, and asks, "Who said that?" He says, "I think it was Leopold and Loeb."

He's then called away to Annie (Diane Keaton), from whom he is separated. She is having a crisis because there is a spider in her bathroom. He finds a copy of National Review and asks, annoyed, why she didn't get William F. Buckley to kill the spider. Then, finding black soap on her sink, wonders if she's joining a minstrel show.

In addition to the unrelenting humor, Annie Hall marks Allen's maturation as a fillmaker. Much of the credit goes to editor Ralph Rosenblum and cinematographer Gordon Willis, who would enjoy a long collaboration with Allen. To start with, the film is told non-linearly, bouncing from Alvy's Brooklyn boyhood, growing up underneath the Coney Island roller coaster, to his early days as a comedian, through his first two marriages, to the complete A to Z relationship with Annie. The film also has some extremely long takes--the average length of a take in the film is 14.5 seconds, compared to the average 4.5 seconds. With that knowledge, I watched the movie last night with an eye out for that. Consider the first narrative scene, with Alvy and his friend Rob (Tony Roberts), walking down the street. They start in extreme long shot, almost invisible to the eye, but slowly walk forward, as Alvy lists subtle acts of anti-Semitism he's experienced, until they are in full frame.

Then there's the scene in which Alvy's obsession with the Kennedy assassination interferes with his sex life with first wife Carol Kane. I had never noticed before, but that scene, perhaps two minutes long, is in one long take, and ends with the camera zooming in on Alvy, who talks to the audience.

Allen frequently breaks the fourth wall in the film--he starts and ends the film by doing it, and even does it during the context of actual scenes, such as when he turns to the audience and asks them to clear up a disagreement with Annie. This brings the viewer into a more intimate mode with the character. There are also other unusual aspects of the film. In a scene in a movie line, an annoying man claims he knows all about Marshall McLuhan, so Allen produces McLuhan himself from behind a poster to refute him. Allen uses split screen, animation, subtitles to reflect what characters are thinking, and a technique used by Ingmar Bergman in Wild Strawberries by having characters visit themselves in past situations. I think the best use of this is when Allen recalls his penchant for kissing girls in first grade, despite a little girl's declaration that even Freud spoke of a latency period. Allen represents himself in two ways--himself as a young boy, and himself as adult, seated at his old school desk. The scene ends brilliantly with Allen wondering what his old schoolmates are doing today, and the child actors stand and recite: "I used to be a heroin addict, now I'm a methodone addict," or "I'm into leather."

Above all Annie Hall is a romance, and one that belongs to Diane Keaton. Although Allen and Keaton were previously an item, this is not autobiography, though Keaton's real last name is Hall (and she did have a Jew-hating Grammy Hall). Keaton has repeatedly said that she never uttered the phrase "la-de-da" until Allen wrote it for her. The film was originally called Anhedonia, a psychological condition that prevents the sufferer from experiencing pleasure, but the choice of calling it after Keaton's character indicates how strongly she carries the picture. She is a fully-developed character, not an idealized version of a girlfriend, and its her endearing awkwardness that grows into self-confidence, while Alvy Singer does not grow, that is the spine of the film. Allen's decision to just train the camera on her and let her sing "Seems Like Old Times" is something of a tribute to her as an actress. Of course, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress (the film won Best Picture, Allen won Best Director, and he and co-writer Marshall Brickman won for Best Original Screenplay).

I've held this picture in high esteem for so long it feels like a part of me. On one of my first trips to New York City while I was in college I made a pilgrimage to the site of the last shot, which happens to be on Columbus Avenue and 63rd Street, across from Lincoln Center (at the time a restaurant called O'Neal's Balloon was there; that's where Alvy and Annie have their last goodbye). I can tell you about the soon-to-be-famous actors who were in the movie, such as Christopher Walken as Annie's weird brother, Jeff Goldblum as an L.A. guy who has forgotten his mantra, and, very briefly, Sigourney Weaver as Alvy's date when he runs into Annie and her date, going to see The Sorrow and the Pity. I've also, as I've become more educated, understood more of the jokes--it took me a while to figure out what Alvy's second wife meant when she said she had a headache "Like Oswald in Ghosts"--that required understanding the plays of Henrik Ibsen.

Though Annie Hall isn't as visually stunning as Manhattan or Hannah and Her Sisters, it has its moments, especially a scene at twilight, with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background, when Alvy and Annie first declare their love for each other. Allen says that love isn't a strong enough word: "I lurve you, I loave you, I luff you." I feel the same about this movie.

Let's Hear It for 2012!

2011-12-31T20:24:00.000-05:00

2011 was a mixed bag for me. I got a job, then I lost it, and the process of losing it drove me to a psychiatrist's couch and the wonders of pharmaceuticals. But I lucked out and had a job in my back pocket, a lucrative gig I could do it at home for only a few hours a day, which sustained me during the summer and fall. But then that dried up, so the work is now less than a trickle. So I continue to collect unemployment, but I had to file a new claim, and though it was approved I have a phone appointment with them on Wednesday, about which I have no idea. I have been doubling my anxiety medication in preparation for that call.

I also turned 50 in 2011, which is pretty fucking old. I'm older now than three of my grandparents were when I was born. I'm older than the United States president, if only by a few months. If actuarial tables are correct, I'm deep into the second half of my life. I've lived more life since graduating college than I did before. I was born before color TV, before the calculator (remember adding machines?) and I remember when Pong was cutting edge technology.

Though I'm closer to death than birth, and though I have no job prospects on the horizon, I'm optimistic about 2012. Why? Love. Yes, I am in love, and she loves me, too. It's a very cinematic story really. I met a girl 16 years ago on a chat line, of all places. We hit it off, but she lived in Las Vegas and I lived in New Jersey, and since I was working for Penthouse, I wasn't about to quit. She had no interest in coming here, so she ended up getting married to someone else. But we stayed friends all that time, and we stuck together through thick and thin.

Now she's divorced, and we're going to give it a go. There are many complications--she has two adopted kids of different races, and they are special needs. We're still separated by a continent, but that will change. We've gone back and forth on who will move, but right now it's me moving there, which is pretty exciting, since I've had a thing about Vegas since even before I met her. I wrote a screenplay about Area 51, and am currently writing (though am stuck) on a novel that takes place in Vegas. Maybe by living there I can finish it. The unemployment rate in Las Vegas is the worst in the country, but since when I have done things logically?

This is all very tentative, but I'm of the attitude that fuck it, I'm going to do it. We'll need money--she's getting a pretty large divorce settlement from her ex-husband's rich family, so that will make things easier. I may even go back to school--UNLV has has a master's program in creative writing. Of course I won't like the heat, and culture in Las Vegas means Celine Dion and Cirque du Soleil. But, at 50, I think it's a good time to reinvent myself. Maybe I'll get a tattoo, learn to ride a motorcycle, or learn how to play poker and go pro. Well, probably not, because I suck at card games. But, as they say, unlucky at cards, lucky in love.

Happy new year to all my readers. I'm able to see where you all are from. I get readers from places as disparate as Macedonia to Malaysia to Bolivia. I have a hunch you don't stay here for long--my number one post is on porn star Kagney Linn Karter, and I imagine you guys who find it are looking for a picture much more risque than the one I posted. But even if you're only here for a few seconds, thanks for visiting, and I hope you come back. I started this blog on a whim almost six years ago, and it's become kind of an obsession for me. I'll keep doing it, as long as I have the mental faculty to do so.

West Side Story

2011-12-30T19:39:00.000-05:00

West Side Story was the winner of the Best Picture Oscar for 1961; in fact it won 10 Oscars out of 11 nominations. As good as The Hustler was, I can't say that I wouldn't have voted for West Side Story--it was an innovative feast for the senses, and really hasn't been duplicated as a film that effectively told a story through music and dance.

The film, of course, was based on the Broadway musical, an updating of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Set in a part of New York City that no longer exists (it was razed to build Lincoln Center), the story concerns rival gangs, the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. In the midst of the tension between the two gangs, Tony, a former gang member, falls in love with Maria, the sister of the Sharks' leader. Tragedy ensues.

The play was conceived by Jerome Robbins, who enlisted Leonard Bernstein to write the score, Stephen Sondheim to write the lyrics, and Arthur Laurents to write the libretto. Bernstein was after changing the nature of the Broadway musical--up until then, most musicals were lighthearted romantic comedies. His music, almost operatic in nature, combined with Robbins' balletic choreography to create something new in American musical theater. In my opinion, which is not an audacious one, Bernstein wrote the greatest score ever for a Broadway musical.

For the film, Robert Wise was hired to direct. Robbins would choreograph, but eventually became co-director. He was so demanding, and insisted on so many takes, that he was eventually fired, but kept the credit; when he and Wise won the Oscar for Best Director (the first co-directors to do; since then only the Brothers Coen have done it) neither thanked the other. Robbins also won a special Oscar for his choreography.

The film has many attributes, Bernstein's score included, but I noticed that when articles appeared on the film's 50th anniversary this October, the encomiums were written by dance critics. In the documentary that accompanies the DVD, it is notable that Sondheim says that on the surface, West Side Story is about racial prejudice, but really it's about the theater, and how to tell a story using dance.

I've known some people who could never get West Side Story. The prologue, one of the most thrillingly brilliant segments in any American movie, focuses on Russ Tamblyn as Riff, snapping his fingers along with his gang. The only sequence that was actually shot in New York, the scene shows the rivalry with the Sharks, who fight with balletic moves. I remember a kid I knew who couldn't get past the fact that gangbangers would never dance like that. True, and the dancers in the film don't look all that tough--their dancers, after all. But the movement is just breathtaking, and if you can just sit back and let that scene wash over you, the rest will come easy.

And there's so many other great numbers, both personal and intimate, such as "Maria," and "Tonight," sung by Tony and Maria on the fire escape, to the production numbers such as "America" and "Cool," or "Quintet," one of the most amazing pieces of music ever written for the American stage, when the Jets and Sharks are heading for their rumble, Anita (Rita Moreno) is readying for her date with Bernardo (George Chakiris), and Tony and Maria reprise "Tonight," to the heartbreaking "Somewhere."

I've learned all sorts of interesting trivia about the film--I did know that Marni Nixon's voice was dubbed in for Wood, who did record for the film, but her voice wasn't deemed good enough. The same fate befell Richard Beymer as Tony. Some of the actors up for Tony included Warren Beatty (who was currently dating Wood), but it was Elvis Presley the producers wanted. Colonel Tom Parker turned them down, insisting that he didn't want Elvis depicted as a gang member. Auditioning for Maria were Audrey Hepburn, who withdrew because of pregnancy, and Valerie Harper, who would go on to play TV's Rhoda. It is a shame, though, that more Latino actors were not used--Moreno was the only one. She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, and Chakiris, a Greek-American, was the Best Supporting Actor winner.

The film certainly seems dated in some respects. Juvenile delinquency was a problem in the 1950s, but I doubt these characters would scare any current gang members. Use of terms like "daddy-o" give it a quaint feeling. But there is some trenchant sociology going on. Consider the character of Anybody's, a tomboy trying to join the gang, only to be rejected because she was a girl. That she is called "anybody's" suggest things the film leaves to the imagination.

And consider the wonderful number "Gee, Officer Krupke," the only pure comic number in the film. Sondheim, in his inimitable way, uses jokes to highlight the deadly cycle that impoverished children went through--being handed from judge to psychologist to social worker. Finally the Jets, in song, sum it up as "We're no good, we're no good!"

Musicals enjoyed a long life in Hollywood, and though they've had a bit of a revival in recent years, their days of glory are over. West Side Story was the apotheosis of that period.

Judgment at Nuremberg

2011-12-29T17:15:00.000-05:00

Another nominee for Best Picture in 1961 was Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg. A three-hour courtroom drama, it was one of the first films to take on the subject of Nazi genocide in a Hollywood film, and at a sensitive time, since West Germany was a key ally in the Cold War at the time, and the United States did not wish to alienate them by dragging up old memories.

The origins of the film were a teleplay by Abby Mann that ran on Playhouse 90, and starred unknown actor Maximilian Schell as the defense attorney. After seeing the show, Spencer Tracy wanted to do it, and got Kramer to direct. Kramer, well known for making socially conscious films like The Defiant Ones and Inherit the Wind, was a natural for this uncompromising look at an extraordinary time in history.

Instead of dramatizing the more sensational first trial, which tried big names like Goering, Mann concentrated on a less well-known trial of judges, reasoning that these men, who knew the law, were more fascinating defendants. They were tried for sentencing innocent people to concentration camps, and sterilizing people for political purposes.

Tracy starred as the chief judge of a three-man tribunal. Schell reprised his role as the defense attorney, and earned an Oscar for Best Actor (Tracy was nominated). A large cast of famous actors included Richard Widmark as the prosecuting attorney, Marlene Dietrich as a German woman and widow of an executed German officer who befriends Tracy, Burt Lancaster as one of the defendants, and in glorified cameos, Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland as witnesses for the prosecution. Both Clift and Garland also earned Oscar nominations.

The star of this film, though, is Mann's script, which also won an Oscar and deservedly so. It's not a flag-waving damnation of the German people, considering both sides quite eloquently. Schell's defense is multi-pronged: the judges involved were carrying out the law for the good of their country; they didn't make the law. In a big speech toward the end he also points out that there is plenty of room for assigning blame, from the Vatican, who signed an accord with Hitler in 1933, to American industrialists, who profited by supplying Germany with the mechanisms of their horror. Mann, in an interview on the DVD, cites the villain of the film as patriotism, an audacious thing to say, but one that has a lot of truth in it. So many atrocities have been committed in the name of patriotism that it backs Oscar Wilde's quote: "Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."

Mann also turns the tables more than once. Widmark makes a passionate speech against forced sterilization, to which Schell responds by quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote a decision that upheld sterilization of the mentally incompetent. Mann didn't go the full route when discussing a case that involved the sexual relationship between Aryans and non-Aryans; he could have had Schell point out that the exact same laws existed against miscegenation at the time in the U.S.

The film has all the earmarks of live television, with a limited set, and almost every character gets a big speech. But they are all knocked out of the park. I'm not sure if Lancaster's speech, in which he announces his guilt, was better than Tracy's reading of the decision, or Schell's previously mentioned speech. Clift and Garland are also quite good in their brief roles, as the former, his once matinee idols look damaged by a car crash, squirms on the stand as he testifies about being sterilized, or the latter, her days as America's sweetheart behind her, portraying an unglamorous woman who was jailed for supposing to have a relationship with an elderly Jewish man.

In addition to the big stars in the cast, there are a few notable film debuts: Werner Klemperer, who would end up starring as Col. Klink in Hogan's Heroes, played the nastiest defendant, and William Shatner was the judge's assistant.

In some of the supplemental material, it states that actual films of the concentration camps were shown to the public for the first time in this film. I don't believe that that's true--The Stranger, from 1946, beat it by 11 years.

War Horse

2011-12-28T21:08:00.000-05:00

I'm going to begin my review of War Horse by taking the unusual tack of quoting another critic, A.O. Scott of the New York Times: "You may find yourself resisting this sentimental pageant of early-20th-century rural English life, replete with verdant fields, muddy tweeds and damp turnips, but my strong advice is to surrender. Allow your sped-up, modern, movie-going metabolism...to calm down a bit. Suppress your instinctive impatience, quiet the snarky voice in your head and allow yourself to recall, or perhaps to discover, the deep pleasures of sincerity."

Fair enough. I interpret Scott's plea as a call to check my cynicism at the door, and try as I might, I couldn't do it. To be sure, the film, which can only have been the work of Steven Spielberg, is an impressive production, but I just felt too manipulated to soak in what others may enjoy. This film may be the litmus test of the year. I don't begrudge others who may find themselves weeping at the end, but my tear ducts remained dry.

As one of its stars, Emily Watson, termed it, the film is "Black Beauty goes to war." For those who somehow made it through childhood without reading Black Beauty, that's the story that is told from the point of view of a horse, who moves from owner to owner, good and bad. War Horse adds the element of World War I, as our horse in question, Joey, moves from English to French to German owners, emotionally touching everyone he comes in contact with. Horse lovers will respond to this more than others, I suspect, but it's a tricky move, because the central character--the horse--isn't really a character, he's a creature that others respond to. It's hard to feel like one is in the shoes of a horse, not only because they are nailed on. We get used to one of his owners, then we move on, and the film becomes a series of herks and jerks that is inevitably leading to a reunion with his original owner.

That original owner is Albie Narracott (Jeremy Irvine). His father (Peter Mullan), in a fit of exaggerated pride, spends much too much on the horse while at an auction looking for a plough horse. Joey, as Irvine names him, is a thoroughbred, not made for farm work. Watson, as Irvine's mother, is outraged, as Mullan has spent the rent in a foolish gesture. Irvine must train the horse to plough the field to get the necessary crops for the rent, so the first half hour of the film is all about whether a horse can plough.

Things pick up when war is declared, and Mullan sells Joey to the army. Irvine is aghast, but his new owner (Tom Hiddleston), a captain, assures him he will take care of him. But in an ill-thought cavalry charge, Joey ends up in German hands. He is tended to by a soulful young German soldier (David Kross), and then ends up at a French farm, beloved by a little girl and her grandfather (Niels Arestrup). I last saw Arestrup as a vicious criminal in A Prophet, so to see him as kindly grandfather was jarring.

And so it goes for Joey, until he ends up tangled in barbed wire in the no-man's land between British and German lines. In the best scene of the film, a British and German soldier call off the hostilities long enough to free him, Spielberg's admittedly unsubtle way of telling us that war is bad and we're all horse-loving brothers under the skin. While the message is trite, the filmmaking is superb.

And there are times when the genius of Spielberg, despite his over-reliance on sentimentality, shines through. I'm thinking specifically of an execution that is shot through the slowly revolving blades of a windmill, or a pulse-pounding tracking shot that follows Joey racing through the war trenches. And the final shot, photographed by Janusz Kaminski against a setting sun that recalls the end of the first act of Gone With the Wind, is over the top in emotional manipulation, but is beautiful to behold.

At this stage of his career Spielberg may be in an impossible situation with jaded viewers like me. He's proved everything he could ever possibly prove, so to expect him to continually re-invent himself is probably futile. This is the stuff he does best, and as far as that goes War Horse is quintessential Spielberg. It doesn't have the wonder of E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the depiction of war is not as uncompromising as Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan. But, as he has been quoted, he wanted to make a movie that could have been made 50 years ago, and he and Kaminski studied the films of John Ford to try to achieve that. But, as Orson Welles said of Ford, whom he considered the great master of film, "Sentimentality was his vice." The same can certainly be said of Spielberg. But for those lean toward the sentimental, War Horse will prove to be a richly rewarding experience.

My grade for War Horse: B-.

London Boulevard

2011-12-27T16:47:00.000-05:00

Sticking with Keira Knightley, which I would love to do, I turn to London Boulevard, a 2010 British film that never was released in the U.S. It was written and directed by William Monahan, the screenwriter of The Departed, in his directorial debut.

Though the film has a lot of familiar elements, I admired its style and Colin Farrell's cold-blooded performance as a hoodlum just out of prison. As usual in the movies, he wants to go straight, but is drawn back into the underworld by his friend Ben Chaplin, who gets him work collecting for a loan shark. Meanwhile, he gets a chance at a job providing security for a reclusive movie star (Knightley).

Eventually the big boss, Ray Winstone (another fine performance), wants Farrell to move up in the organization, but Farrell says thanks but no thanks. Winstone ends up murdering someone in Farrell's presence to make him an accessory, but Farrell runs afoul of him and, as Bugs Bunny used to say, "This means war."

Knightley's role is almost a glorified cameo. She, of course, falls in love with Farrell. Far more interesting is David Thewlis as Knightley's personal assistant, who takes to a life of crime with brio. "How do you feel about guns?" Farrell asks him. Thewlis responds, "I'm a trained actor. I can feel anything about anything."

Shot in grimy muted colors by Chris Menges, London Boulevard fits right in with recent British crime films like Harry Brown or even all the way back to The Long Good Friday. It's not a great picture, but I enjoyed it (helped by the subtitles that Comcast On Demand thoughtfully provides).

A Dangerous Method

2011-12-26T19:24:00.000-05:00

I don't know if I've had a more confounding cinema experience this year than I did watching A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg's film about Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and the woman who came between them. I'll bet that psychologists everywhere will flock to it, arguing about it like ballet dancers did about Black Swan last year, but for those of who can barely keep straight the differences between id, ego, and superego, this film is about as interesting as a graduate seminar, even if it does not one but two scenes of a topless Keira Knightley getting spanked.

The script, written by Christopher Hampton and based on his play The Talking Cure, focuses on the true story of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), a Swiss acolyte of Freud's, treating a Russian girl (Knightley), who has hysterical fits. What's interesting about this early sequence is how well she is treated--this is no Snake Pit. Jung uses Freud's new-fangled psychoanalysis, talking out what makes her go into seizure-like fits, and traces it back to her relationship with her father, who beat her, but also made her excited.

Eventually Jung meets Freud (Viggo Mortensen), and the two form a collegial relationship, despite Freud considering Jung a bit of a kook with references to mysticism and shamanism. This sort of comes out of nowhere in the script, as except for one scene in which Jung proclaims he anticipated the sound of a heater crackling, we don't get a sense of him as anything but a straight-laced gentleman. That is, until he succumbs to Knightley's charms and indulges her fantasies of being beaten.

But this makes the film kinkier than it sounds. At several points I wondered if this was a movie at all--instead it just seems like random scenes cut together without any regard for pacing or story. Cronenberg indulges in some transitions I find to be violations of unwritten rules--he has two characters talking in a scene, then cuts to the same two characters, discussing something else, in a different place, without us having any sense of how much time has passed, or the resolution of the previous scene. There's also a lot of talk about Freud's fixation on sex, with a few droll lines by Jung about how everything with Freud comes back to sex (I was reminded of the line in the TV show M*A*S*H, when Dr. Sidney Freeman says, "Sex is why we eat, sex is why we go to the bathroom, sex is why we have children.")

Of the acting trio, there are mixed results. Fassbender has been in a million films this year, and though I haven't seen Shame yet, I'm betting that his performance as Jung is the dullest of the year. He shows little indication of why he's doing what he's doing--he violates a sacrosanct rule by sleeping with a patient, but aside from a slightly wrinkled brow, doesn't seem to suffer much for it. Knightley has an impossible task--her early scenes she has to go full crazy, thrusting her jaw out like she's turning into a werewolf. I give her marks for giving it the old college try, and certainly some insane do act like that, but I couldn't help but see the acting. She's much better when she's recovered and studying to be a psychiatrist on her own, debating with Freud over the sexual drive destroying the ego.

Mortensen stealthily steals the show, although I had trouble buying him as Freud, given the little I know about him. There's a nicely done scene of he and Jung exchanging letters, ending their friendship. Even more vivid in this otherwise dry film is Vincent Cassel as a psychiatrist who has been institutionalized for not believing in repressing anything. When he escapes by jumping over a wall, I wanted to go with him.

I couldn't help but find A Dangerous Method dull and talky, and was sneaking peeks at my watch often. My grade: C-.

The Guns of Navarone

2011-12-25T08:46:00.000-05:00

Also nominated for Best Picture in 1961, The Guns of Navarone is a classic example of several tropes in Hollywood. It's a war picture, with faceless Germans the enemy; it's an adventure story, with a clearly delineated journey that must be accomplished by the heroes; and, most vividly, it's perhaps the best example of the mission story, where a small team of disparate people must unite to take down a greater evil.

I don't know if, before yesterday, I had ever seen this film straight through, but I certainly remember seeing pieces of it on the 4:30 movie. It's the kind of movie that inspires scenarios for boys playing with army men or G.I. Joes. During World War II, a band of six soldiers are assigned to sabotage a pair of large guns that block access to a channel through the Aegean Sea. Of course the team is from all nations and types--the British career soldier (Anthony Quayle), the chemistry professor who happens to be an expert in explosives (David Niven), the American mountain-climbing expert (Gregory Peck), the Greek colonel (Anthony Quinn), the technician (Stanley Baker), and the cold-blooded killer (James Darren).

Not only were the characters of certain types, but so were the actors. Peck, Niven, and Quinn were movie stars, but Quayle was a classically trained stage actor, and Darren was a teen idol pop star. The movie seemed designed to have something for everyone, and was a huge hit.

Looking at it yesterday, it isn't all that, at least not anymore. To its credit, it's not all gung-ho--there is a pointed speech by Niven about not caring anymore about the outcome of the war. There will be more wars, he says, why not just let the world blow itself to bits. But it does lean on the ludicrous at times. There's a scene in which they are all captured (dealing with the one German who is given a soul) and escape rather easily. But this type of film doesn't rely on making sense, it's all about last-second escapes and nick-of-time explosions.

On the good side of the ledger, the characters are sharply drawn, and Niven, in particular, is excellent. It might have been this film, or maybe it was The Pink Panther, but when I was in my early teens David Niven was one of my favorite movie stars. I went so far as to read both of his memoirs. What can I say, I was a weird kid. Anyway, there's a gripping scene, late in the film, in which Niven discovers there's a traitor in their midst, and his method of working out who it is is terrific. Credit here must also go to the screenwriter (as well as the producer) Carl Foreman and director J. Lee Thompson.

The film won an Oscar for Best Special Effects, but in this modern era they look a little cheesy. The rear projection is painfully obvious. But that doesn't lessen the overall effect--a scene in which they land the boat on the island of Navarone in a pulsing storm is still well done. But the destruction of the mountaintop housing the guns is really bad--it reminds me of the destruction of the castle in The Bride of Frankenstein, but not as good.

The Artist

2011-12-24T12:08:00.000-05:00

The Artist is a lot of fun, but is it a great film, as judged by the many critic's awards it's been winning? Opinions will differ. I consider it more a pastiche, or a valentine, for the silent film-era, and is about as deep as a strip of celluloid. It's richly entertaining, but made of gossamer.

We've been reading how unlikely it must have seemed that a French, black and white, silent film would score with audiences. Well, since it's silent, it's Frenchness doesn't matter at all, and it isn't truly a silent film at all, in that there is synchronized sound and special use of voices and sound effects where needed. Surely it will mean more to those who recognize the tips of the hat to the films A Star Is Born, Singin' in the Rain, and even Citizen Kane (look for a dinner table scene that is almost a perfect match from that film).

The story is wafer-thin: Jean Dujardin is George Valentin (only one letter away from the great silent film star, Valentino) a huge silent film star. At his latest premiere, he meets cute Berenice Bejo, who is an extra. They have a spark of kismet, but Dujardin is married to the sour Penelope Ann Miller. She hates him--why we don't know, since he is never less than charming--to the point where she defaces every image of him she can find. Maybe he's more devoted to his Jack Russell terrier, who performs with him. An R-rated version of this film might have been interesting.

Anyway, Bejo gets a job as an extra on Dujardin's latest film, and during a dancing scene they fall in love, although it is unrequited. She slips into his dressing room and caresses his overcoat, a bit lifted from Frank Borzage's Seventh Heaven, but still lovingly done. The tide is about to turn, though, as studio boss John Goodman shows Dujardin the new-fangled "talkie" technology. Dujardin is adamant that people don't want to see him speak, and so as silent films fade, so does his stardom, while Bejo becomes a big star.

Written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist is clever and looks great. The very first title card is "I won't talk!," and the closing bit of dialogue, well, I won't spoil that. The aspect ratio is the old-fashioned 1:33, and the camera speed, while not the common 16 fps of silent days, is 22 fps, off a bit from the modern 24 fps. I read an article where Hazanavicius points out that if nothing else, those two frames per second cuts eight percent of the running time. The photography, by Guillaume Schiffman, is magnificent, as is the music score by Ludovic Bource, and the costumes, by Mark Bridges (who was a college classmate of mine).

The performances by Dujardin and Bejo are also a joy. Dujardin, as a man of the past, favors the mugging style of silent films, while Bejo has the additional level of playing a woman who acts in talkies while being in a silent film, but she's terrific. But Uggie, as the Jack Russell, steals the show, especially in a great scene worthy of Rin Tin Tin when he retrieves a bewildered policeman.

For those who thinks an old movie is early Spielberg, the charms of The Artist may well be lost, but those who remember watching the black and white classics on the midnight movie should feel a glow of nostalgia. The production design captures the glamor of the era, down to the gaudy Hollywood mansions to the movie magazines. I liked The Artist a great deal, but it just isn't deep or substantial enough to warrant "best of the year" accolades. It's a novelty, albeit an expertly done one.

My grade for The Artist: B+

Fanny

2011-12-23T10:17:00.001-05:00

It's time for my fifth annual look at films from fifty years ago, by focusing on those that were nominated for Oscars. A few years ago I wrote on The Hustler, which was one of the five nominated films for Best Picture in 1961.

Another was Fanny, directed by Joshua Logan. You often hear, especially from older film fans like me, that "they don't make them like that anymore." Well, this is not always a wistful comment. They don't make movies like Fanny anymore, and thank god. This is one of those bloated, overly-colored saturated spectacles that you can imagine your grandmother dressing up to go see.

Set in Marseilles, the film concerns the love story between a young daughter of a fishmonger (Leslie Caron) and a bartender (Horst Buchholz). He longs to go to sea, but after spending one eventful night with Caron, knocks her up. He doesn't know that, though, and heads out on a scientific exploration. Caron, left pregnant and unmarried, decides to marry the rich merchant who has always been an admirer of hers (Maurice Chevalier), who is decades older. He knows of her situation, but accepts the child as his own.

Eventually Buchholz comes back on leave, and due to some basic knowledge of math deduces the boy is really his. There's some tension, but not much, as Chevalier worries that Caron will leave him for her true love. I had stopped caring long before this point.

Though tough and gritty films like The Hustler could crack the nominations in those days, movies like Fanny still somehow enthralled the voters. The film is very lush and has vibrant costumes and sets, but lordy is it a chore to sit through. Like Gigi from three years earlier, which actually won the Best Picture Oscar, it has an overload of Gallic whimsy. I can only be grateful that this film, which was based on a Broadway musical, removed all of the songs, which would have made it longer.

Charles Boyer, who plays Buchholz's father, was nominated for Best Actor. He does do some nice work.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (U.S. Version)

2011-12-22T12:37:00.000-05:00

Anyone who has seen the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, as I have, is naturally going to compare it to that film, if not the book both are based on (I have not read the novel, though I did read the second in the series). To get the comparisons out of the way, David Fincher's U.S. version, written by Steve Zaillian, is a better film, with less interest in fidelity to the novel, although it is pretty faithful, instead opting for an overall feeling of gloom and despair, somewhat akin to Fincher's approach in Zodiac and Se7en. The faults in the film, as with the Swedish version, rest with the source author, Stieg Larsson.

To quickly sum up, a journalist who has been convicted of libel (Daniel Craig), is summoned to a privately-owned island in the north of Sweden. A patriarch of a very rich family, Christopher Plummer, asks him to look into the disappearance of his niece some 40 years earlier. Plummer's family is a gaggle of Nazis and other reprobates, and the whole thing has a kind of "locked door" quality to it, as there is only one way off the island and it was blocked by a traffic accident when the girl vanished.

Meanwhile, we meet Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), by now one of the most celebrated characters in contemporary pop literature. A computer genius with a troubled background, she has a face full of hardware, a body covered in ink, is sexually ambiguous, and isn't trained in the social niceties. She investigates Craig's background for Plummer's lawyer, and then goes about dealing with her new legal guardian, who rapes her viciously. Her revenge is appropriately vicious in turn.

Eventually, of course, Craig and Mara team up, and I think they had better chemistry in this film. For one thing, the characterization of Mikael Blomkvist, as played by Craig, makes him much less of a lady's man than he is in Larsson's books. Salander is also less of a super-woman. There's no inkling in this film that she has martial arts training--when her backpack is stolen in the subway, she retrieves it not like some sort of Jet Li in a Mohawk, but more like a very pissed off teenager. But, Zaillian sticks with the mistake of having the two become intimate. There's just no reason for this, and it threw both films off their axis. The relationship would have been far more poignant if the attraction between them would have been more avuncular and unacted upon.

The film is over two and a half hours long but seems to go too fast in spots, as the mystery is pieced together rather quickly, to the effect of it being almost beside the point. My memory is fuzzy, but I don't recall in the other film Blomkvist having a teenage daughter, who here clues him on the solution of a particular puzzle that rapidly unlocks everything else. Instead, Fincher is more concerned with mood, and the scenes that take place on the island reminded me of Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf, which had similar characters that were part monster. The opening credits, like something out of a Bond film, had scenes of a dripping oily substance on body parts, set to Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," cuing us in for a macabre evening.

I enjoyed this film, and often it found it pulse-pounding, but it has some problems that are unfixable. The denouement, involving Mara helping Craig get revenge on the man who set him up, seems to go on forever. As stated, some of this is Larsson's uninspired writing--does every villain really explain everything to the investigator before he tries to kill him? But the acting is good--Mara, while not outshining Noomi Repace, does strike me as a more vulnerable figure, and is difficult to take your eyes off of. It is a bit hypocritical, though, for a movie about cruelty to women to have Mara frequently undressed.

My grade for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: B.

Washington

2011-12-21T19:11:00.002-05:00

"He ranks as the most famously elusive figure in American history, a remote, enigmatic personage more revered than truly loved. He seems to lack the folksy appeal of Abraham Lincoln, the robust vigor of a Teddy Roosevelt, or the charming finesse of Franklin Roosevelt. In fact, George Washington has receded so much in our collective memory that he has become an impossibly stiff and inflexible figure, composed of too much marble to be quite human." So writes Ron Chernow in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the indispensable man of the founding of America, whose command of the Continental Army led the colonies to victory in the American Revolution and then, as first president, ensured that the fledgling republic held together. Chernow has written a doorstop of a book--over 800 pages--but they are all a delight to read, and I was gratified to be awash in facts about perhaps the most famous American who has ever lived.

Chernow provides a cradle to grave study of the man, touching on his Virginia boyhood, conscious of males in his family having a habit of dying early. But it was through those deaths, and his fortuitous marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis, that provided him a fortune. Before that, though, he was a frontiersman and an able soldier, participating in the French and Indian War. In fact, that he did not receive a commission from the British Army (colonial soldiers were routinely looked down upon) first began to nettle Washington about the British. That, and his difficulty in dealing with British merchants. It could be sad that bad customer service provoked Washington to desire independence.

Washington was chosen as commander of the army because he had the most military experience--I was surprised to learn that John Hancock wanted the gig. But no matter how often I read about the war, I can't wrap my mind around how the Americans won, as Chernow vividly points out how the army was ill-fed, underpaid, and ill-clothed. Washington lost more battles than he won. Imagine the scene after Washington fled from Long Island (with the help of a thick fog), but then was routed by the British in Harlem. Chernow writes: "The man of consummate self-control surrendered to his emotions. Fuming, he flung his hat to the ground and shouted, 'Are these the men with which I am to defend America!' According to another account, he swore, 'Good God! Have I got such troops as these?'"

But Washington, when he did win, did so brilliantly, as in his surprise attack on Trenton after crossing the Delaware, and the subsequent Battle of Princeton. No less a person than Frederick the Great wrote, "The achievements of Washington and his little band of compatriots between the 25th of December and the 4th of January, a space of 10 days, were the most brilliant of any recorded in the annals of military achievements."

What's clear is that the United States of America would not exist in its present form without the help of the French, particularly their navy, which kept Cornwallis from retreating from Yorktown. The antipathy for the French, though, came almost immediately. Memories are short.

Washington was then chosen as the president of the constitutional convention, after which he became the first president of the United States. His primary attribute was the ability to listen and absorb the opinions of others before deliberating and making a decision. He had no interest in becoming a monarch, and feared that the country would lean that way. That didn't stop his critics, most notoriously the son of Benjamin Franklin, who ran a newspaper called the Aurora, from criticizing him mercilessly, claiming that Washington was monarchical. Chernow bends over backwards to disprove that notion.

Washington knew that everything he did as chief executive was establishing precedent. He actually wanted to resign in his first term after two years--his health was failing already, and he almost died more than once. But many feared that he was the glue holding everything together. He dithered about running for a second term, and regretted it almost at once. He was criticized for picking the site of the new capital so close to his home at Mount Vernon, and his cabinet was like a nest of vipers, with Hamilton and Jefferson at each other's throats, and John Adams, his vice president, providing more carping than help. It is to be noted that Adams, Jefferson and James Madison come in for a lot of criticism from Chernow.

Washington's second term was pretty much misery for him. In addition to cabinet squabbles, there was the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania (Washington actually led an army ready to put down those who did not wish to pay taxes), and the treaty John Jay forged with Britain, which Francophiles like Jefferson excoriated. It was with great relief that he left the presidency after two terms. But Chernow enumerates the triumph of Washington's tenure: "Washington's catalog of accomplishments was simply breathtaking. He had restored America's credit and assumed state debt; created a bank, a mint, a coast guard, a customs service, and a diplomatic corps; introduced the first accounting, tax, and budgetary procedures; maintained peace at home and abroad; inaugurated a navy, bolstered the army, and shored up coastal defenses and infrastructure; proved that the country could regulate commerce and negotiate binding treaties; protected frontier settlers, subdued Indian uprisings, and established law and order amid rebellion, scrupulously adhering all the while to the letter of the Constitution...Most of all he had shown a disbelieving world that republican government could prosper without being spineless or disorderly or reverting to authoritarian rule. In surrendering the the presidency after two terms and overseeing a smooth transition of power, Washington had demonstrated that the president was merely the servant of the people."

There is a lot to savor about this book, but I think the personality of Washington that Chernow paints is the best. To start with, he had a horrible mother, a woman who thought nothing of her son's accomplishments and only of herself. Chernow wryly puts it, "With more to brag about than any other mother in American history, she took no evident pride in her son's accomplishments." Perhaps because of this, Washington rarely displayed emotion. He did not like to be touched, and frequently employed an icy stare. One could judge how one stood with him by the salutation of his letters, which were either "Sir," "Dear Sir," or "My Dear Sir," which were, in ascending order, his warmth toward his subject.

But Washington loved the theater, he loved the company of pretty ladies (Chernow includes Washington's flirtation with Sally Fairfax, although seems to think that nothing untoward took place) and had a droll sense of humor. Once, before a battle, Anthony Wayne said to him, "I'll storm hell, sir, if you'll make the plans." To which Washington retorted dryly, "Better try Stony Point first, general." Apparently he also liked dirty jokes--J.P. Morgan purchased some of his letters and had them burned, citing them as "smutty."

He was also extremely generous, although his finances were always precarious. He and Martha had no children of their own, and her two children surviving at the time of their marriage died young, but he doted on his step-grandchildren, and took in all sorts of nieces and nephews. He could also be a rank sentimentalist, as Chernow magnificently describes in his tearful farewell address to his officers at Fraunces Tavern, and his equally lachrymose farewell address as president.

Of course, as with many of the founding fathers, there is the devilish issue of slavery. Washington owned hundreds of slaves, and though he treated them more kindly than others did--he would not break up slave families, and at one point stopped selling them altogether, he did not free them until after his death. This was a major deal at the time, but one can't help but feel it was too little, too late. When a slave escaped, he and Martha couldn't understand why a slave that was so well treated would want to leave, an odd thing for a man who fought a war for freedom to think. Chernow puts it thusly: "He privately made no secret of his disdain for the institution, but neither did he have the courage to broadcast his views or act on them publicly. After endorsing abolition, he shunted direct action onto other shoulders." He did, however, allow blacks to serve in the Continental Army; from six to 12 percent of his army was black.

This book is a treasure trove of history and psychology. If you didn't know Washington as anything more than marble man before, you'll feel like you know him intimately after reading it. There are too many delicious facts to chew on, but I'll end with one of my favorites, when Chernow writes about Washington out hunting: "A month earlier, he recorded that he had killed five mallards and five bald eagles in one day--a curious triumph for the Father of His Country."

A Place in the Sun

2011-12-20T18:39:00.000-05:00

Back in April, when Elizabeth Taylor died, I endeavored to see a few of her films that I hadn't seen before, such as National Velvet and Reflections in a Golden Eye. A Place in the Sun was also one of those films, but it had the ominous "Very Long Wait" tag on it in my Netflix queue. I left it there, sitting at the top of my queue, and after eight months it finally came. I can only imagine that Netflix had only one copy, and it was gathering dust on some guy's coffee table.

The film was celebrated in its day. It won six Oscars, including one for director George Stevens. That year, 1951, was a weird year for Oscar, because A Streetcar Named Desire won a bunch of other awards, but the Best Picture winner was An American in Paris.

The picture viewed through the prism of today is admirable but dated, dancing around the subjects of unwed pregnancy and abortion, and with a feckless protagonist. It did mark the beginning of Taylor's stardom as an adult, as she was only seventeen when cast in the role.

Based on Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy, A Place in the Sun would seem to be about the class distinctions in American society that were probably stronger in the 1920s than in the 1950s. Stevens updated the novel to contemporary times, which undercuts a bit the separation--after World War II, it was more likely a man could rise from poverty to riches, especially if he's related to it. The main character is George Eastman, played by Montgomery Clift. He is a poor relation to the owner of a company that makes swimsuits. He arrives and his uncle gives him a menial job. Against company rules, he begins dating Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters), a somewhat plain and unsophisticated woman.

Winters becomes pregnant, and in a scene rife with unspoken intent, sees a doctor about an abortion. Meanwhile, Clift has been dazzled by society girl Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor). In one of Stevens' less than subtle touches, the word "Vickers," presumably on a hotel owned by her family, shines brightly through the window of his rented room. The room also has a print of Millais' painting "Ophelia," another bit of foreshadowing (to add to that, whenever a character says they don't know how to swim, there might as well be a doom-like music sting).

Clift falls in love with Taylor, and she likewise with him. But what to do about Winters? When she tracks him down to Taylor's lake home, threatening to tell all unless he marries her, he decides he's going to kill her by taking her out in a rowboat by drowning her. He lacks nerve, but when Winters nervously stands up in the boat, she capsizes it and drowns. Clift swims to shore and goes back to Taylor, but his plan wasn't exactly a brilliant one, and district attorney Raymond Burr figures it out right quick.

The last quarter of the film is a trial that doesn't have much fireworks, other than Clift squirming on the stand, telling the truth, however far-fetched it sounds.

Though A Place in the Sun is a perfectly acceptable melodrama, especially for 1951, it has a hole in its center, and that's Clift. He doesn't give a bad performance; he just doesn't have much to play. The character lacks an interior life--he seems to genuinely love Winters, and then genuinely loves Taylor. His murderous intentions come from panic more than any diabolical malevolence. Because he's such a blank, it's hard to understand why Taylor is in love with him, other than that he's one of the most gorgeous men ever to make a movie. Winters' attraction is more understandable--she's a nobody, and he's related to the boss, and his rise to management is something of a hope for her future, even if it means losing their jobs if their relationship becomes open.

I found it interesting during the brief documentary on the DVD that Winters was a surprise choice for the role, because she was known as something of a sexpot. The irony is in she would go on to specialize in blowsy, victimized women, especially in He Ran All the Way, The Night of the Hunter, and Lolita.

Wild Child

2011-12-19T19:50:00.000-05:00

I'm a long time admirer of the short stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle (not so much of his novels). They frequently pop up in periodicals I read, such as The New Yorker and Playboy, and have a mordant sense of humor I respond to. His stories are all what I would consider "high concept," in that they are heavily plotted and center around a vividly expressed idea. His latest collection, Wild Child, contains some of that, but many of these works are more ambitious than his usual "ripped from the headlines" looks at the follies of mankind.

As the title might suggest, many of the stories concern the battle between man and nature, with nature always winning. "La Conchita" concerns a man trying to deliver a liver for transplant to a waiting operating room but it is waylaid by a mudslide. "Question 62" is a lovely story paralleling the experiences of two sisters--one who looks up from her gardening to see an escaped tiger, while the other falls into a relationship with a man trying to pass a law allowing the killing of feral cats.

In a similar vein is "Anacapa," about a fishing expedition in the Channel Islands, and "Sin Dolor," about a Mexican boy who cannot feel pain, and ends up exploited by his father. "Ash Monday" concerns the fears of wildfires in California exurbia, and "Thirteen Hundred Rats" is about a man who gets a pet snake, but when it comes time to feed it, ends up with an unnatural empathy for the rat purchased as food.

Off the beaten path for Boyle are "Three Quarters of the Way to Hell," which details the recording of a Christmas novelty song in New York in the 1950s, alternating between a washed-up Italian crooner and a bruised female singer. The title story is a novella about the Wild Child of Aveyron, the subject of Truffaut's film L'Enfant Sauvage, about a feral boy found in the French woods in Napoleonic France and the attempts to civilize him.

My favorite stories are more typical of Boyle. "The Unfortunate Mother of Aquiles Maldonado" is one of those ripped from the headlines stories, clearly inspired by the events involving baseball pitcher Uegeth Urbina, whose mother was kidnapped in Venezuela. "Bulletproof" centers around the debate over the teaching of evolution in schools, and the brilliant "The Lie" is something of a horror story about a man who wants to get out of work so badly that he tells one whopping lie after another. Of course he will be found out, but as we await the inevitable we are sucked into this man's despair, spiraling down the drain with him.

Meek's Cutoff

2011-12-18T19:42:00.000-05:00

Kelly Reichardt's previous two films, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, would be charitably called deliberate, and uncharitably, slow. Meek's Cutoff does not see a change of style, although it is a period piece, and for all intents and purposes is in the wide category called the Western. But it's on a very small scale, concerning itself with only nine characters, and has less to do with the American West than with a struggle against nature and the instincts of survival.

Three couples, one with a child, are making their way west on the Oregon Trail in 1845. They have hired a frontiersman, the title character, to guide them. But he does not inspire confidence, especially after he takes them off the main trail and into the Great Basin, the large desert of Utah and Nevada. Soon the settlers find themselves short on water, and Meek doesn't seem to have a clue what to do, especially after they come across the Great Salt Lake, which has abundant but useless water.

This occupies the first third of the film, and I was getting more than a little restless. The old metaphor, "like watching grass grow" came to mind. But things get interesting when a lone Indian is captured by Meek and the de facto leader of the settlers (Will Patton). Meek is all for killing him, but Patton reasons that he would know where water is, so they trade him a blanket for his knowledge. The Indian, though, knows no English, and none of them speak his language (another delinquency of Meek's) so they follow him, not knowing what he is leading them to.

I found this all very intriguing, as the setters, namely Patton and his wife (the great Michelle Williams) seem to trust their own humanity over Meek's warnings. One of the other women (Zoe Kazan), becomes hysterical in her fear of the Indian, and her husband (Paul Dano) vacillates between the two emotions.

But here's the thing--Reichardt leaves us hanging. I won't go too far in describing the ending, but it reminded me of John Sayles' Limbo, in that an audience member is likely to watch the screen go dark and the credits roll with an "Aaah!" I admire the artistic nature of the choice, but damn it I wanted a real ending.

As I watched the film, I realized I recognized the voice of who played Meek (he's covered in shaggy hair and beard) and only learned it was Bruce Greenwood at the end. Also in the cast was English actress Shirley Henderson, probably best known to American audiences as Moaning Myrtle in the Harry Potter series.

Reichardt is a minimalist filmmaker, and with that comes good things and not so good things. I believe only natural light is used, which gives the night scenes an extra feeling of danger, and as I said, her editing (she is also the editor) is deliberate. For example, when Williams first sees the Indian she fires two warning shots to draw the men back to camp. We see her as she loads a single-shot rifle, fire it, then load a second shot, and fire it, too. I would guess that most directors wouldn't include the entire loading sequence in the scene, for better or worse.

Washington Crossing the Delaware

2011-12-17T11:05:00.000-05:00

As stated previously, I'm reading a massive biography of George Washington, and since I'm pretty close to ground zero for many of his campaigns during the Revolution, I thought I'd do something of a tour. Some of the sites I have already visited, but armed with some new knowledge, I thought I'd pay them another visit.

Last week I ventured east to Monmouth Battlefield, where Washington chased the British across New Jersey and caught up with them at a place called Monmouth Courthouse. This battle took place in June, 1777, and though it was technically a draw, it was a win for Washington in that it forced the British to retreat. It also hardened him against one of his generals, Charles Lee, who did not attack as ordered, prompting Washington to flip his lid. Lee, who was something of a burr in Washington's saddle, eventually was court martialed for his blunder.

When I arrived at the battlefield, which is now in the town of Manalapan, I found, to my dismay, that the visitor's center will be closed for about a year due to renovation. I took a short stroll, but there didn't seem to be anything of a marked trail, and without some assistance, there really wasn't much to do.

Yesterday I headed west to Washington Crossing State Park. Actually, there are two parks: one on the New Jersey side, and one on the Pennsylvania. On December 25, 1776, Washington's army made a nighttime crossing of icy waters of the Delaware river. They then made an arduous march of nine miles through a winter storm to attack Hessian troops at Trenton. Almost every American schoolchild has some grasp of the basics of this event, especially because of the existence of Emanuel Luetze's iconic painting, seen above, that captured the moment some seventy-five years after it took place.

As usual, the truth of the situation is more interesting. The logistics of the crossing were complex, given it was done at night. Two other crossings, meant to support Washington from the south, were scratched. He still managed to surprise the Hessians and rout them, although they were not drunk, as legend has it. In fact, they had some notion that an attack might come.

Per my luck with these things, the New Jersey park's visitor center was closed for no apparent reason. Fortunately I have been there before, so no great loss. I took a walk down to the shore of the river itself, as it wasn't too cold. Today a bridge handles car traffic where Washington's men rowed across, though as bridges go it's not too advanced; it's so narrow I crossed it once and clipped the side of it with my sideview mirror, sending the glass to the inky depths of the river.

The crossing site, as viewed from New Jersey.

The Pennsylvania side isn't as large a park, and, you guessed it, the visitor's center was closed for restoration.

Following the battle of Trenton, Washington marched north to take on the British at Princeton. That park is just a few miles from where I live, and I drive through it often. I'll put up a post about it in the coming days, hopefully, if weather permits, on the actual anniversary of the battle.

Young Adult

2011-12-16T19:45:00.000-05:00

As an admirer of both Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody (I was one of the few to like Jennifer's Body), I was extremely disappointed with Young Adult, ninety minutes spent with one of the most unpleasant characters to shoulder a film in recent memory. But it isn't that she's unpleasant that's the problem--there is nothing inherently wrong with having a protagonist that the audience doesn't like, if she's in talented hands--but the character here is unpleasant and uninteresting.

Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a writer of young adult novels, which Cody has an abiding passion for (she was signed to write a movie on the Sweet Valley High series). As the film opens, we see that she is a sad and lonely person, as she lives in a messy but chic apartment, has meaningless sex, and her only companion is a lapdog. When she gets an email that her ex-boyfriend has just had a baby, she gets the absurd notion that if she goes back to her podunk hometown she can win him back, and thus will solve all her problems.

This seemed a lot like the Julia Roberts film My Best Friend's Wedding, and that, believe it or not, was a much better picture, with Roberts at least informing her role with a zany questful nature. Theron, in this film, is a tissue of psychoses, and at no point in this film will anyone be rooting for her. I will give Cody credit for the audacity of allowing her character to have a breakthrough, but then having another character, in a big speech, reinforce her insanity and send her off in a haze of delirium. I wonder what Cody's intention was for us to think about as we put on our coats--that people who live in small towns really are fat and dumb, and that living in a big city is better, even if we are mentally ill?

Theron's ex-beau is played dully by Patrick Wilson, who is oblivious to her intentions. Her confidante is Patton Oswalt, who might have been the subject of a better movie. He was viciously beaten in high school by jocks who thought he was gay. He now hobbles around on a crutch, makes his own bourbon, and paints comic book hero miniatures. Roberts sidekick in My Best Friend's Wedding was the gay Rupert Everett, and while Oswalt's character is not gay, he might as well be. Cody makes a big mistake by allowing these characters to sleep together.

I really don't think there's anything I liked about this film. Reitman's films are known for their over-reliance on qurkly direction, (he really goes wild in Thank You For Not Smoking and Juno) that I have enjoyed, but here his heart doesn't seem in it, and he lets the script just play out. That is a mistake, for this script isn't particularly witty (I think I laughed once, but I forget at what) or emotionally resonant. The attempt to have Theron's work in progress, about a high school girl who is so popular (she has the yearbook dedicated to her, even though there was another student who died) is band-aided on and laughably amateurish.

Theron gives a technically fine performance, and manages to look beautiful and off-putting at the same time, but I don't think any actress could have made this work.

My grade for Young Adult: D+

Cemetery Junction

2011-12-15T16:36:00.000-05:00

After enjoying Felicity Jones so much in Like Crazy, I checked out her other major film performance, in 2010's Cemetery Junction, a British film that was not released stateside. Directed and written by mirth-makers Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, I was surprised to find that it is not a comedy, per se, but instead an earnest coming of age story set in 1973 in a depressing part of England.

Though Cemetery Junction is based in the British miserabilist style, it has a much more colorful and bouncier attitude. It focuses on three friends just page college age: Christian Cooke, who has just landed a job selling life insurance; Tom Hughes, a factory worker who fits the classic "angry young man" portrait; and Jack Doolan, as a half-wit social misfit who can't talk to girls and has adorned himself with the world's worst tattoo. Cooke serves as our protagonist, as he wants to better himself, and is inspired by his boss (Ralph Fiennes), who made it out of the very neighborhood he lives in.

There's been all sorts of movies like this, about young guys who long to shed the dust of home towns but can't leave, while one guy makes it out (he is invariably the stand-in for the movie's writer or director). I think mostly of I Vitteloni, but there are also films like American Graffiti and Diner. Cemetery Junction is no where in their league, unfortunately, as it too simple a tale, too black and white and not enough gray. The three characters each have arcs, but they're predictable and just a bit hackneyed, especially Hughes' relationship with his father, whom of course he misunderstands until a friendly policeman sets him straight, and Doolan's flirtation with a homely waitress.

The one spark the film has is, naturally, Gervais as Cooke's blue collar dad. His dialogue, especially banter with his aged mother, is very funny and gives the film a boost. Both are casually racist but have wicked senses of humor. Cooke doesn't seem genetically or spiritually capable of springing from Gervais' loins, but that's a sin that many movies commit these days.

As for Jones, she has a small role as Fiennes' daughter. She's engaged to Fiennes' supercilious underling, Matthew Goode, and realizes, of course, that she is on the road to turning into her mother (Emily Watson), who has had any joy of life snuffed out by the domineering Fiennes. In a well-done scene, Cooke goes to the annual awards banquet for the insurance company, and realizes that a job selling insurance, though it may come with an office and a nicer house, can be just as soul-crushing as a job in a machine shop.

The film also has period music, which is kind of slapped in, but makes for some good jokes. Hughes sneers at Cooke playing Vaughn Williams on his turntable, saying he shouldn't play music by poofs. Then, he adds, "How about putting on some Elton John?"

Sullivan's Travels

2011-12-14T19:42:00.000-05:00

One of the greatest comedies of all time, Sullivan's Travels was released 70 years ago this month. Despite that ripe old age, the film still makes me laugh, and is still relevant.

Written and directed by Preston Sturges, who revolutionized the American movie comedy, it tells the story of a film director (Joel McCrea), who though rich and famous from making light comedies (like Ants in Your Pants 1939), longs to make movies of gravitas and social commentary. His studio handlers don't want to hear that--his most recent film, a serious drama, died in Pittsburgh.

Sullivan: What do they know in Pittsburgh?

LeBrand: They know what they like!

Sullivan: If they knew what they liked, they wouldn't live in Pittsburgh!

Sullivan wants to make a movie about poverty in America, called O Brother, Where Art Thou? (yes, that's where the Coens got that title). The studio bosses convince him that he, who grew up privileged, kind of like Mitt Romney, hasn't suffered enough to make such a picture. That backfires, though, when Sullivan announces he's going to incognito as a tramp, with only ten cents in his pocket, to find out what suffering is about.

The genius of Sturges' script is that it succeeds on two levels: first, it is a tribute to comedy, as Sullivan eventually learns that people living in hard times sometimes need to laugh to forget about their troubles. Comedy has always played second fiddle to drama in many people's minds, even among those who make it. Woody Allen has always said that he wished he were a tragedian, and that those who make drama are sitting at the grown-up's table. Secondly, though, it also reinforces the division between the haves and have-nots in America; while ninnies in Hollywood lounge around pools, others are barely making it in shantytowns.

The tone shifts from comedy to melodrama often, and at times not easily, but I think that's the point. The first half hour is flat-out screwball, as Sullivan sets out in old clothes, but the studio has arranged for an entourage to follow him in a bus. When he tries to make a break for it, we get some well done slapstick with the bus racing after him, the inhabitants tossed about (with some wince-inducing laughs earned from a Stepin Fetchit-style black cook).

Late the film shifts to a sweet romance, as Sullivan meets a struggling actress (Veronica Lake), who teams up with him on his trip. Lake, who is one of my favorite of the old movie stars, was just a teenager when she made this film, her first starring role. She was unusually beautiful, but apparently difficult. McCrea passed on making another movie with her, citing "Life is too short to make another movie with Veronica Lake." Read up on her to hear a typically sad story of failed romance, alcoholism, and madness that ended much too soon at age 51.

The film's final third dispenses with comedy altogether. Through a series of unfortunate events, Sullivan ends up arrested and imprisoned to a chain gang. He can't prove who he is, and everyone back in Hollywood thinks he is dead. It is when, as a member of the chain gang, that he attends a movie at the local black church (this expansive view of African-Americans almost makes up for the cook). When he sees how the Mickey Mouse cartoon brings a little life into the grim lives of the prisoners, he changes his tune. The closing line is "There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan."

Now, the film doesn't always work. For one thing, the cartoon isn't that funny. It would have been nice if Sturges had gotten the rights to a Chaplin, Keaton, or Laurel and Hardy movie. I've never, even when I was a kid, laughed my assed off at a Disney cartoon. And though the film is incredibly audacious for 1941, it still seems to hold back, and can lean toward the corny and sentimental (at one point McCrea says, as if in defense, "What's wrong with Capra?").

But these are minor quibbles. The film is so rich, and Sturges such a good writer, that it continues to dazzle. The performances are good down to the minor, with several familiar faces, such as Franklin Pangborn, William Demarest (as a press agent, who's given to say things like, "It will put Shakespeare back with the shipping news"), and two drolly brilliant turns by Robert Greig and Eric Blore as Sullivan's British butler and valet. Greig gives a memorable speech about how those who are poor know all about being poor, and only the morbidly rich would find it a glamorous topic.

The movie also is chock full of marvelous whimsy, such as the lines: "What about gin rummy?" "I never touch the stuff." Or this exchange, early in the film:

Sullivan: I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions. Stark realism. The problems that confront the average man!
LeBrand: But with a little sex in it.
Sullivan: A little, but I don't want to stress it. I want this picture to be a document. I want to hold a mirror up to life. I want this to be a picture of dignity! A true canvas of the suffering of humanity!
LeBrand: But with a little sex in it.
Sullivan: [reluctantly] With a little sex in it.

The DVD from Criterion includes a documentary on Sturges. He was the first screenwriter to make the leap from writer to director, and at one time in the mid-40s he was the highest paid producer/director/writer in Hollywood. His success ended quickly, though. He also made some other outstanding comedies. The ones I've seen are The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story. His great rival as a maker of comedies in those days was Ernst Lubitsch, and Sturges gets an inside joke in when Lake, not knowing Sullivan is a director, and thinking he's a hobo, jokingly asks him for a letter of introduction to Lubitsch.

Jack London

2011-12-13T16:19:00.000-05:00

If you're a fan of the writing of Jack London, you might be interested in a film about him, as he lived much of the things he wrote about it. And for about an hour, this 1943 film comes fairly close to truth about his early life. But in the final third, it completely comes off the rails and ends up as propaganda against the Japanese.

London, who was one of the first Americans to become rich as a writer of fiction, was born in San Francisco and grew up on the waterfront of Oakland. In his early days he was an oyster poacher and then a sailor. After a brief stint at Berkeley, he went to the Yukon to try to strike it rich in the gold rush. The film gets all that, although it gives it a kind of boy-adventure haze.

After that, though, it departs from reality. It has him going off to the Boer War to be a war correspondent, which never happened. Although it showcases his marriage to Charmian Kittredge (Susan Hayward), probably since it is her book that the film is based on, it ignores his first marriage. It is also largely ignores his socialism and interest in unions and the poor.

Instead, the last third focuses on his experiences as a war correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War. One poster for the film features the inflammatory tag line "He was the first prisoner of the Japs!" The Japanese are depicted in purely racist overtones, with one prescient captain revealing to London the nation's long-term plans of conquering England and the U.S. Certainly the Japanese have blood on their hands when it comes to war atrocities, but I wouldn't expect a film about Jack London to end up as boo-hiss movie about the evils of Japan.

Starring as London is the completely charmless Michael O'Shea, who I can't say I've ever seen in a film. It was directed by Alfred Santell, who has a long history from silents to the late '40s, but as far as I can tell this is his only film on DVD. Kids, if you have to do a report on Jack London, do some reading, don't base it on this. You'll flunk.

The Killing

2011-12-12T17:00:00.000-05:00

Stanley Kubrick tried almost every genre during his career (except for the Western) and in The Killing he takes on film noir. The resulting film is something of an exercise in style, and though it's a crackerjack entertainment it has something of a hollow ring to it, as if Kubrick had decided he was going to make a noir from all the pieces typically associated it, without making one organically.

Released in 1956, just as the noir style was dying down, The Killing, based on a novel called Clean Break (the title chosen for the film is indicative of Kubrick's homage--it could be the title of almost every noir ever made) is a heist movie. I love heist movies, and The Killing gets it all. The lead guy is a career criminal who wants to make one last score before retirement, and each of the team has their own reason for taking part. Of course, there's also the fatal slip up by the chain's weakest link.

The target is a race track. Sterling Hayden plays the criminal, who wants to rob the day's receipts. He has enlisted an accountant (Jay C. Flippen) who provides the money, Elisha Cook as a ticket-window cashier, Joe Sawyer as the race track bartender, Ted de Corsia as a cop in deep to a loan shark, a professional wrestler (Kola Kwariani) and a marksman (Timothy Carey). Everything is planned down to the last second, but when weak-willed Cook blabs the plan to impress his wife (Marie Windsor), she in turn blabs to her love (Vince Edwards).

The Killing is full of noir stylistic flourishes, especially the use of light and shadow. The thieves make their plan at a table lit by a solitary hanging lamp from above, so when Hayden leans back, he's completely in shadow. Kubrick uses tracking shots often, especially in Hayden's railroad apartment, so that when a camera moves from room to room the camera follows him, even going through walls.

There's also a lovely ending, which prefigures the end of such films as Ocean's 11 and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and Hayden's last line, "Nah, what difference does it make?" is a perfect example of noir ennui. In fact, though the screenplay was written by Kubrick, the dialogue was written by Jim Thompson, who wrote a number of pulp classics. We get a lot of zippy patter, such as when Hayden tells Windsor, "You've got a dollar sign where your heart should be."

The cast, including Hayden, Windsor and Cook, made a lot of noirs over the years. Hayden starred in the best heist movie ever made, The Asphalt Jungle, so to see him here is to remind one of that film. But this film is full of great faces, the kind that seem to be sculpted out of raw meat.

In many of Kubrick's subsequent exercises in genre, he would transcend the genre and take it a new level. He doesn't quite do that in The Killing, but it's an still above average thriller.

Like Crazy

2011-12-11T19:01:00.000-05:00

Like Crazy is a film that is an odd hybrid of young romance and a cautionary tale about crossing the U.S. Immigration Service. It's a slight film, constructed out of gossamer, but just when my interest would flag I would find something interesting about the performance of Felicity Jones, who makes quite a splash in her first lead role.

Jones (with a name that would make a great Bond girl) plays Anna, a British student in college in Los Angeles. She is smitten with a teaching assistant (Anton Yelchin), and leaves him a note on his car. This seems a bit of a male fantasy (the film was written by two men, Drake Doremus, the director, and Ben York Jones)--that a beautiful girl would make a grand, slightly nutty play for a guy like that.

Yelchin, naturally, takes the bait and the two fall in love, but after graduation Jones' student visa expires. The plan is for her to go back to England for the summer and then return on a work visa. Impetuously and colossally stupidly, she decides to stay. When she goes home for a wedding and tries to get back into the country, they deny her and put her on a plane back to England. What will these two young lovers do?

From the accounts I've heard (I saw Jones in an appearance on David Letterman), the dialogue in Like Crazy was improvised, and it seems that way, as much of it is banal. It does ring true, though, especially the awkward moments, such as their first date and whenever they've reunited after a long absence. But in the film's middle section, when they are separated by an eight-hour time time difference and start to drift apart, it's hard to sympathize with them, because they were so dim. Yelchin even gives Jones a bracelet with the word "Patience" inscribed on it, but this gesture goes unheeded.

Nevertheless, Jones' performance is so charismatic that she kept pulling me back in. Part of this, no doubt, is because I'm a male, but beyond her physical appeal is a subtle range of acting that is most impressive. Her expression in the airport, when she's told she will not be allowed to leave the building and be put on a plane straightaway to the U.K., is such a display of devastating sadness that it's breathtaking. Compared to Jones, Yelchin comes off as a kind of non-entity; it's her film.

Aside from my mash note to Jones, there's not too much to shout about Like Crazy. It does capture some of the problems of the long-distance relationship (I should know, I specialize in them). The two end up with other people (Yelchin with Jennifer Lawrence, in an almost silent part). I would like the problem of choosing between Jones and Lawrence, though Yelchin is in torment.

Like Crazy is a nice film that may remind one of one's youthful romantic adventures, but other than Jones' performance, I will have forgotten most of it by tomorrow.

My grade for Like Crazy: C+

Cold Fish

2011-12-10T16:14:00.000-05:00

This one's a doozy. Starting out in the vein of a Coen Brothers film, Cold Fish, directed by Shion Sono, ends up like a high-toned version of Hostel. Though the film is too long and the ending is unnecessarily bleak, there are a lot of good things about it.

At the center of the film is a mild-mannered, to put it mildly, tropical fish store owner named Shamoto. He lives in quiet desperation with a teenage daughter and a pretty second wife (the first wife died). When the daughter is picked up for shoplifting, a customer, Murata, steps in and gets her off.

He is the owner of a bigger tropical fish store, and bends over backwards to be friendly to this family. They, in gratitude and out of Japanese tradition, feel they owe him a great deal, so they accede to his wishes and let the daughter go work for him, and live with him. He has a whole staff of teenage girls, overseen by his sexy and slightly Lady MacBeth-ish wife.

At the half-hour mark I still didn't know where the movie was going, and am reluctant to say anymore, so stop now if you want to see this film with completely fresh eyes. I did know, from what little I had read about it, that it was about a serial killer, and we don't know for sure what's going on until about an hour in. There are a lot of little clues along the way, but Sono has a devilish time laying out the story for us.

After we learn who the psychopath is, Cold Fish switches to a different type of film, a black comedy with a high blood count. There's dismemberment, someone stabbed in the throat with a ballpoint pen, another person bludgeoned with a television set. Human remains are fed to fish, bones are burned, and the climax sees two people wrestling in viscera. I found this to be ghoulish (and kinky--there's some good old-fashioned adult sexuality on display) fun but not as interesting as the first hour, as the fish store owners engage in a kind of personality imprisonment. The ending sees the oppressed become the oppressor, and also some disturbing scenes of female submission that seem a little too gleeful. This is definitely not a first-date movie.

The acting is good and subtle in the first half, but kind of goes off the rails in the second. But it's a stylish, interesting-looking film, and worth checking out for those into Asian horror films.

Oscar 2011 Predictions, Round 1

2011-12-09T14:49:00.002-05:00

Shailene Woodley

With the Golden Globe nominations announced next week, plus a slew of critics awards, it's time to try to get ahead of the curve of Oscar prognostication, but this year I gleefully throw up my hands and declare I know nothing. This year, at least in the all-important Best Picture category, is unusually fluid. I have no clue what the favorite to win is. Usually it's down to only a few films by now, but there's a wide variety of possibilities this year. Here goes nothing:

Best Picture

Locks: The Descendants, The Artist

Safe Bets: The Help; Midnight in Paris, Hugo, War Horse

Also Possible: Moneyball, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I'm really stretching the definition of "Lock," since it wouldn't unduly shock me if either of those two were left out. But I'm pretty sure the nominees, however many there are, will come from this list. The one film that could play spoiler is The Tree of Life. Incredibly Close has not had many screenings, so no one knows if its any good, but if it's even half-way decent it has all the earmarks of Oscar bait.

Best Actor:

Locks: George Clooney (The Descendants), Brad Pitt (Moneyball)

Safe Bets: Jean Dujardin (The Artist), Michael Fassbender (Shame)

Also possible: Woody Harrelson (Rampart), Gary Oldman (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Michael Shannon, (Take Shelter), Ryan Gosling (Drive or The Ides of March).

If I'm right there are four actors pretty much set, with the fifth slot wide open, though I think Oldman is the frontrunner for it at this point.

Best Actress:

Locks: Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Viola Davis (The Help)

Safe Bets: Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs), Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn)

Also Possible: Charline Theron (Young Adult), Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene), Rooney Mara (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Tilda Swinton (We Have to Talk About Kevin), Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia)

It's not often the Best Actress category is this deep. My guess at this point is that Theron will get the fifth slot, so the entire category will be previous nominees.

Best Director:

Locks: Alexander Payne (The Descendants) Martin Scorsese (Hugo)

Safe Bets: Michael Hazavinicius (The Artist), Steven Spielberg (War Horse)

Also possible: Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris), Terence Malick (The Tree of Life), Tate Taylor (The Help), David Fincher (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Bennett Miller (Moneyball), Stephen Daldry (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

Director goes the way of picture, as since the Best Picture category was expanded (admittedly a small sample size) no director has been nominated without his/her picture also nominated. That could change with Malick, who would seem to be more of a director's darling than the average Academy member. But I'm going to guess Allen in the fifth slot.

Best Supporting Actor:

Locks: None

Safe Bets: Albert Brooks (Drive), Christopher Plummer (Beginners), Max Von Sydow (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), Kenneth Branagh (My Week With Marilyn), Ben Kingsley (Hugo)

Also possible: Patton Oswalt (Young Adult), Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Ides of March)

This is a gloriously jumbled category, with no clear favorites at the moment. I wouldn't be surprised if the eventual winner isn't even listed here.

Best Supporting Actress:

Locks: Octavia Spencer (The Help), Shailene Woodley (The Descendants)

Safe Bets: Jessica Chastain (The Help or Take Shelter), Berenice Bejo (The Artist)

Also possible: Vanessa Redgrave, (Coriolanus), Carey Mulligan (Shame), Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids)

The first four I'm pretty sure about, while the fifth is wide open and subject to a surprise.

Please note these are not my personal preferences. I will have a new slate of predictions before the nominations are announced in late January.

The Films of Jean Vigo

2011-12-08T16:10:00.000-05:00

Jean Vigo made only one feature film, another that was about forty minutes long, and two documentary shorts. Nonetheless, he is considered one of the most important directors in French cinema, and inspired no less than New Wave directors Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer.

Criterion has put out a two-disc set of his entire oeuvre. His four films fit on one disc, and the other contains a 1964 documentary, as well as a conversation between Rohmer and Truffaut from 1968. (Both were television programs--what great TV the French had!)

Vigo was born in 1905. His father was an anarchist, who died (possibly murdered) in prison. His first film, from 1930, is a 27-minute long silent documentary called À propos de Nice, which shows the sights of that seaside city. Vigo breaks it into sections, at first showing the idle rich, stuffed into their beach chairs like curing hams, and then the workers and poor of the city. He also displays some interesting camera tricks, such as an attractive woman seated in a beach chair. The film dissolves so that she is wearing one outfit after another, from a fur coat to a sun dress to finally nothing at all.

His next film was a commissioned documentary Taris, a kind of how-to-swim instructional film featuring the French swimming champion. It's the kind of thing we saw in schools when we were kids, though Vigo again allows his creativity to seep in. He shot it in a pool that had portholes in the side, so he didn't have to use underwater cameras. A shot at the end has Taris, again in dissolve, go from bathing suit to topcoat and derby, and he appears to walk across the water.

The most important of Vigo's films are his two narratives: Zéro de conduite, from 1933, and L'Atalante, from 1934. The former is something of a tribute to his father, as well as autobiographical, as it deals with the horrid life of boys in a boarding school. This film nakedly inspired Truffaut, who borrowed a scene from it, when a teacher leads a group of boys through the city, and the boys take off on their own without the teacher noticing.

Zéro de conduite, above all, is a masterpiece of style. The editing is crude, prefiguring Jean-Luc Godard by thirty years, and full of rebellion. The boys, who are looked after by a couple of cretinous housemasters, revolt, and in a brilliantly rendered scene in slow-motion, lead a procession out of their dormitory, holding aloft one boy on a chair while feathers from exploded pillows drift around them.

Also, believe it or not, I thought quite a bit about National Lampoon's Animal House while watching this film, and would love to ask John Landis if he had it in mind. Not only is there a food fight, but the climax is at a school celebration, attended by dignitaries (some of them are represented by garish mannequins, while the headmaster is a midget with a Smith Brothers beard). I also imagine that Martin Scorsese knows this film well. One of the boys in the film, who tells the headmaster that he is full of shit, is named Rene Tabard, the same name given the film professor in Scorsese's film Hugo.

Zéro de conduite was banned by the French government for several years, so in an attempt to revive his carer, he took on an existing script which turned about to be his masterpiece, and last film, L'Atalante, from 1934. The simple story of a couple on their honeymoon on a canal barge, L'Atalante is again full of stylistic flourishes that makes the rather banal plot into something more universal and timeless.

Jean Daste and Dita Parlo are the newlyweds. She's a provincial girl who has never left her village; he's the skipper of a barge called the L'Atalante. The opening scenes are drolly comic, as the pair walk directly from the church to the boat, with the wedding party following behind, dourly, as if they were in a funeral procession.

The first mate is Pere Jules, (Michel Simon), an old sailor who has been around the world. He is a lumpen, vulgar sort with a homely mug and a fondness for cats. Initially there is a tension between him and the skipper's new wife, but they warm to each other, and in a tremendously rich scene, he shows her his curios from his travels, including a puppet from Venezuela. He then shows her his tattoos, which he says keep him warm.

Daste reacts angrily to this, even though there is no real chance at romance between the two of them. Later, they will go into Paris and she will be enamored by a street peddler, whom Daste angrily knocks through a window. Parlo, feeling lonely, bored, and unwanted, leaves the barge and heads into Paris, where she is robbed and looks for work. Daste is devastated, and after an undefined period of comatose behavior, including being called onto the carpet by the shipping company boss, Simon goes into Paris to try to find Parlo.

L'Atalante was not a hit with theater owners, and was butchered and retitled by the studio. Vigo, who had shot the film during one of the coldest winters on record, was gravely ill, and could do nothing. He died shortly thereafter, at the age of 29, and over the years L'Atalante has had several different versions. A new print was released in 1990 to some fanfare, and I saw that one in New York City. I wondered what all the fuss was about, but to be fair, I was suffering from a wicked ear infection at the time.

The film was restored once again in 2002, and that is the print that is on the Criterion edition. It has regularly made the decennial poll put out by Sight and Sound magazine--it's highest ranking was in 1992, when it was chosen the sixth-best film of all time.

I certainly wouldn't put it that high, but it in an enchanting film, with a wonderful, big-hearted performance by Simon, as well as lovely photography by Boris Kaufman (who would go on to shoot On the Waterfront). I watched it twice in the last few days (once with a commentary by Michael Temple, author of a book about Vigo) and it's pieces of the film that stay with me, such as when Parlo, still in her white wedding gown, walks slowly along the length of the barge in twilight, looking like an apparition, or the scene when Daste jumps into the water, told by Parlo that when one looks into water one sees the love of their life.

Vigo's untimely early death certainly robbed the world of a major talent--it's something of the equivalent of the death of Buddy Holly to rock and roll. For those interested in the history of world cinema, his two later films are must viewing.

27 Wagons Full of Cotton

2011-12-07T14:59:00.000-05:00

I've been lax about my survey of the works of Tennessee Williams during this centennial year of his birth. I was slowed down by reading, here and there, the one-act plays collected in 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. But now I've caught up.

Each of these one-acts, except for one, is set in the usual Williams locale--New Orleans and environs or Mississippi (the other is set in Manhattan). Most were written in the 40s, but a few in the 50s, including one written for community theater. Although some of them are comic in tone, they all pinpoint the loneliness and despair that is essential to Williams. A few of them were made into movies.

The title play, about a Sicilian cotton gin owner who gets his revenge on a man who burns him out, was made into the very controversial film Baby Doll. The play is less interested in the Lolita-like innocence of its heroine, and more on the economics and crime of the situation, as the bumptious southerner is seen with sloshing gas cans just before the Sicilian's place catches on fire. The film, quite successfully, dragged out the dance of amour between the Sicilian and Flora (called Baby Doll in the film).

My favorite of the collection is The Lady of Larkspur Lotion, about a woman, plying her trade in a boardinghouse, and the landlady who has had enough and is trying to kick her out. What elevates the play to a comic sophistication is the character called "The Writer," who is clearly Williams himself. He has a tour de force monologue near the end of the play which includes: "Suppose that I live in this world of pitiful fiction! What satisfaction can it give you, good woman, to tear it to pieces, to crush it--to call it a lie? I tell you this--now listen! There are no lies but the lies that are stuffed in the mouth by the hard-knuckled hand of need, the cold iron fist of necessity, Mrs. Wire! So I am a liar, yes! But your world is built on a lie, your world is a hideous fabrications of lies!"

The Last of My Solid Gold Watches is something of a precursor of Death of a Salesman, concerning a shoe salesman (based on Williams' father) who is near the end of line, mocked and ridiculed by a younger salesman. Portrait of a Madonna is an early version of the character of Blanche Dubois, a fading belle with delusions of a molester in next room of her rented flat. In fact, Williams saw Jessica Tandy perform this role and decided she would play Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway.

Auto-Da-Fe is a creepy play about a mother and son. Williams includes in his stage directions: "Mother and son are both fanatics and their speech has something of the quality of poetic or religious incantation." The son, who works in the post office, has confiscated an obscene photograph in the mail, but he has not turned it in. Instead it seems to have triggered something in him.

Lord Byron's Love Letter is set in New Orleans. A woman and her grandmother have, in their possession, a letter from the great poet to a woman he met in Greece. A couple of bourgeoisie tourists come to see it, and the old woman hides from them, but can't help but shout out things to her granddaughter. It becomes apparent that the letter was written to the old lady. This Property is Condemned is only a few pages long, but was expanded into a feature-length film, an early effort from Sidney Pollack, starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford. Neither of the characters they played are in the one-act, which is instead about a young girl walking along railroad tracks, telling a boy about her deceased sister.

The plays from the 50s are Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen, and is set in Manhattan. It is in a dingy room and the only two characters are a man and a woman, who seem to be locked in some cycle of despair. A better is Something Unspoken, with two female characters. One is a spinster of about sixty, who is waiting to hear if she has been elected to the highest position in the Daughters of the Confederacy. The catch is, she will only accept the position if she is elected unanimously. The other character is her secretary, a widow, who has been with her for 15 years and has put up with a lot. There is a delicious dark comic quality to it.

In an essay titled "Something Wild..." Williams has visited a community theater, and seeing distinguished men and woman in their business finery, longs for his days in the community theater of his youth, the Mummers in St. Louis. As he says, quite correctly: "In my opinion art is a kind of anarchy, and the theater is a province of art...Now, there is no virtue, per se, in not going to the barber. And I don't suppose there is any particular virtue in girls having runs in their stockings. Yet one feels a kind of nostalgia for that sort of disorderliness now and then."

Lord Love a Duck

2011-12-06T13:29:00.000-05:00

An oddity of 1960s pop culture, Lord Love a Duck is a black comedy that satirizes many elements of that culture, particularly teenage beach movies. Directed by George Axelrod, it's anarchic style was too much for 1966 audiences, and it flopped. It's interesting, but not very good, and far too ambitious for its own good.

Roddy McDowall stars as high school senior Alan Musgrave (that McDowall was 37 at the time may have been Axelrod's attempt to instantly alienate the audience). McDowall is the smartest kid in school, but is also something of a mythic figure, calling himself "Mollymauk," a kind of bird (with requisite squawks and flapping of arms).

For unstated reasons, he decides to serve as a sort of guardian angel for Barbara Ann Greene (Tuesday Weld), a typical high school girl. McDowall works to grant her wishes, whether it's to get enough cashmere sweaters to join a club, go on a trip to the beach, or get married to a college student (Martin West), despite the protests of her future mother-in-law (Ruth Gordon). When Weld wants to be do a screen test to be a movie star for a producer of bikini movies (Martin Gabel), McDowall tries to kill West, with increasingly bizarre results.

Lord Love a Duck isn't concerned much with structure, nor with aesthetics. It's shot in black and white, but a kind of dingy black and white that reminds one of stag films. There's plenty of girls in bikinis for the raincoat crowd, and Weld looks great, but the larger point of the thing remains elusive, other than that everything is stupid. There are some pointed shots at education--Harvey Korman is the boobish principal, and there are jokes about education reforms--Botany is now called "Plant Skills for Life." But then there is just plain weirdness, such as a scene between Weld and her dad (Martin Showalter), in which she orgiastically tries on sweaters while intoning their gimmicky colors ("Periwinkle Pussycat") while Showalter leers at her like the Tex Avery wolf.

Axelrod wrote the stage plays The Seven-Year Itch and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and the screenplays for Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Manchurian Candidate. Lord Love a Duck was his directorial debut. He only directed one other film.

Solar

2011-12-05T09:45:00.000-05:00

So many novels depict the emotional unraveling of writers (certainly based on them following the dictum "write what you know") that it was refreshing to read Ian McEwan's Solar, which chronicles the downward spiral of a Nobel Prize winner in physics. McEwan, that rara avis in the book world--a popular literary novelist--has created a man who is both comically hapless and pathetically tragic, as he may have the secret to the global warming crisis if he can only stay out of his own way.

"He belonged to that class of men--vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever--who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women. Or he believed he was, and thinking seemed to make it so. And it helped that some women believed he was a genius in need of rescue. But the Michael Beard of this time was a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic, stricken. His fifth marriage was disintegrating, and he should have known how to behave, how to take the long view, how to take blame."

So begins the tale of Michael Beard, British Nobel laureate, who is consumed with how to keep his fifth wife. Though he is a chronic adulterer, he's stunned by his wife's decision to use that knowledge and begin her own affair with a loutish handyman, which sends Beard into a tailspin that has him faking having a girlfriend of his own.

This is Beard in 2000--the book contains three parts, visiting him again in 2005 and 2009. The first part includes a lively comic interlude where he visits the Arctic Circle, being chased by a polar bear and thinking he has frozen his penis off. A polar bear rug will then play a part in a darkly tragic sequence that I dare not spoil here, but will come back to haunt Beard as he is poised, in the last part, to perhaps solving the energy crisis and reversing global warming.

This is third McEwan novel I've read, and if it's not as richly conceived as Atonement or as white-knuckled as Saturday, it has its charms. Beard is a masterful creation, arrogant and insecure, a roly-poly cocksman. McEwan seems to have done a lot of research in the science involved, and can't disguise his belief, through his protagonist, that global warming is real and man-made.

I did, though, at times become exasperated with Beard and had to read this is smaller chunks than I might have otherwise, as he wears a reader out. Clues are dropped about his eventual downfall, and there's grim humor in it but not much pleasure.

But McEwan is a master stylist. Consider this passage, with Beard circling a London airport, late for a speech: "He was gazing east, through a great rim of ginger grime--it could have been detached from an unwashed bathtub and suspended in the air. He was looking past the City, down the bulging, widening Thames, past oil and gas storage tanks toward the brown flatlands of Kent and Essex and the scene of his childhood and the outsized hospital where his mother had died, not long after she told him of her secret life, and beyond, the open jaw of the tidal estuary and the North Sea, an unwrinkled nursery blue in the February sunshine."

My Week With Marilyn

2011-12-04T14:18:00.000-05:00

Marilyn Monroe is perhaps the most written about and iconic of film stars that have come out of the Hollywood system. Many have tried to explain her appeal, from Norman Mailer to Elton John. But I think her appeal is largely unexplainable, and relies on something within each of her fans that is hard to define. I found it interesting, for example, that when I worked with centerfold models many considered her an idol, despite the fact that she largely lived her exploited by men and died at an early age.

The latest attempt to dig beneath the surface of Monroe is Simon Curtis' My Week With Marilyn, and like so many films about out-sized personalities, it takes the annoying tack of viewing her through the eyes of someone completely bland and uninteresting. This has been done with famous personalities ranging from Idi Amin to Tolstoy (I guess James McAvoy was too old for this role) and ends up being about the stick figure in the center.

In this case, we follow Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a young fellow from an aristocratic family who loves the movies. He uses some connections to get a job as Third Assistant Director (basically a gofer) with Laurence Olivier's production of The Prince and the Showgirl, which co-stars the legendary British actor with the American sensation, Monroe.

I was very much enchanted by the first third of this film, as it depicted what must be the excitement and glamor of behind the scenes at a movie, especially involving such big stars. Kenneth Branagh is Olivier, and while it could have been a simple impersonation (albeit a dead-on one), he gives Sir Larry a full character, tormented by his own insecurities. Julia Ormond plays his wife, Vivian Leigh, aware that she is too old for the part, and also aware that Olivier has cast Monroe with the hope of seducing her. That idea goes right out the window, though, when Monroe finally arrives, complete with an acting coach (Zoe Wanamaker) and full of the Stanislavski method, which Olivier abhors. Thrown in with Monroe's tardiness, and Olivier would rather strangle her then sleep with her.

Redmayne then becomes Monroe's confidante, much like a comfort dog. When she asks him, during one of her stupors, whose side he's on, he tells her "Yours." It is here that the movie starts curdling, become more lugubrious and solipsistic. I don't know Colin Clark and certainly wouldn't call him a liar (the screenplay, by Adrian Hodges, is based on his diary), but the movie comes off more as bragging than anything else. "Did I ever tell you about when I skinny-dipped with Marilyn Monroe?"

The film does feature an outstanding performance by Michelle Williams as Monroe, but interestingly, it's not a complete one. She is perfect as the offstage Monroe, the women with the breathy voice, the morbid fragility, almost no self-esteem, and one that needs the approval of powerful men (at this point in her life she was newly wed to Arthur Miller, sourly played by Dougray Scott). When Monroe finds Miller's notebook, presumably of his early ideas for his play After the Fall, she realizes he's writing about her, and is understandably destroyed. Williams also captures the innate intelligence and humor of Monroe, such as during a press conference and when she basks in the admiration of employees at Windsor Castle. She whispers to Redmayne, "Shall I be her?" and then does her shtick, suggesting that she is firmly aware of the differences between Norma Jean Baker and Marilyn Monroe.

However, I don't think Williams captures the complete magic of Monroe. We are constantly told by others in the cast what a luminous film star she is (in one perceptive comment, Redmayne points out that Olivier is a classic actor who wants to be a film star, and that Monroe is a film star that wants to be a classic actress), but frankly I don't think Williams captures Monroe's singular appeal. I don't chide her for it; it may be beyond any actress, like asking someone to play piano trumpet like Miles Davis. Nevertheless, one who has seen Monroe's films can substitute one's own recollections of Monroe's screen persona to fill in the cracks.

Redmayne also has an impossible job. He has to be interesting enough to care about, but not too interesting to overshadow the stars around him. He ends up erring on the former, a cypher with a puppy-dog naivete about the film business and Monroe's intentions toward him. To attempt to round him out, he's given an aborted romance with wardrobe girl Emma Watson (finally released from Hogwarts). She's understandably annoyed at being tossed aside for his ardor for Monroe, but let's face it: When you have a chance, no matter how far-fetched, at Marilyn Monroe, you take it.

My grade for My Week With Marilyn (a bad title, by the way, since the filming takes much more than a week): B-.

The Best American Short Stories 2011

2011-12-03T15:49:00.000-05:00

This year's volume of Best American Short Stories, edited by Geraldine Brooks, offers the usual eclectic fare, in stories ranging from comic to tragic, and located in such far-flung places as Ireland, Nigeria, Jerusalem and Rome. They range from the starkly realistic to the fantastic. All of them are interesting, but of course I liked some much better than others. I will say that I found none of them out-and-out bad.

I also found the opening essays interesting, both by Brooks and series editor Heidi Pitlor, who writes about the typical story: "Disaffected child protagonist (I'll call him Wally), in the face of parents' recent divorce, finds solace as well as self-awareness in nonconformist flute teacher (I'll call her Ms. Note). The voice in the story would be quirky but not overly oddball, and the story might be told in the present tense, using a first-person point of view. The setting would be Wally's house and Ms. Note's living room--and maybe this living room would double as a dining room and bedroom, and maybe Ms. Note would have recently lost her job as a chef, and maybe Wally's father had several food allergies, which had always secretly irked Wall's mother. The ending would suggest resolution but hint at its opposite...In my five years on this job, I have been lucky to work alongside guest editors with extraordinarily diverse backgrounds and tastes. Still, nearly all of them have been surprised a the enormous number of stories that share at least some facets of Wally's."

I think the word best describing what Pitlor notes is "preciousness," which I can think any discerning reader can sniff out at a hundred paces. It's a tricky business to be interesting without being precious, and most of the stories here manage to do that.

My favorite stories are those that strive more toward the humdrum: "Housewifely Arts," by Megan Mayhew Bergman, about a woman trying to track down her late mother's parrot, "The Dungeon Master," by Sam Lipsyte, about some high school kids and role-playing games, "La Vita Nuova," by Allegra Goodman, that concerns the life of a young woman as she gets over a break-up, "Property," by Elizabeth McCracken, about a man and his landlady, "Bridge Under Water," by Tom Bissell, about a honeymoon in Rome gone bad, and my favorite story of the collection, "Soldier of Fortune," about a teenage boy and the crush he has on the girl that lives across the street.

For those who like their fiction with a bit more experimentation, there's Steven Millhauser's "Phantoms," told in journalistic first-person plural, about a town that is over run with apparitions; Richard Powers' "To the Measures Fall," in second person, about how an obscure second-hand book can haunt a person through their whole adult life; Caitlin Horrocks' "The Sleep," about a town where people have decided to literally hibernate; or the sci-fi "Escape from Spiderhead," from the imaginative George Saunders, in which prisoners are tested with various chemicals that make them fall in love.

In Geraldine Brooks' introduction, she gives the prospective short story writers some rules:

1. Enuf adultery eds. Too many stories about the wrong cock in the wrong cunt/anus/armpit/Airedale.
2. Eros does not equal thanatos necessarily. Not all love stories have to have bleak outcomes.
3. Foreign countries exist.
4. There's a war on. The war in Afghanistan, in the year it became America's longest, appeared as a brief aside in only two of one hundred and twenty stories.
5. Consider the following: Caravaggio's Conversion of Saint Paul, Handel's Messiah, Martin Luther King. Female genital mutilation, military-funeral picketers, abortion-doctor assassins. So why, if religion turns up in a story, is it generally only there as a foil for humor?
6. Not that I want to discourage humor. There's so little. Why, writers, so haggard and so woebegone..."La belle dame sans levity that thee in thrall, and no mirth rings."

Hugo

2011-12-02T12:33:00.000-05:00

Martin Scorsese's desire to make a film that his preteen daughter could see has resulted in a minor classic, and though it may not rank up there with Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, or Goodfellas, Hugo explores an aspect of Scorsese that I suspect was lingering there along--the celebration of movies as a receptacle of dreams.

Hugo is a family film, yes. It has some slapstick, a Dickensian villain (or, more properly, and no pun intended, a Hugoian villain), mysterious adventure, cute dogs, and has many scenes of wonder. But beyond that, for those who are armed with the knowledge, Hugo is a valentine to the early days of cinema, and specifically to Georges Melies, who made over 500 films but within a decade was largely forgotten.

Set in the 1920s in Montparnasse Station in Paris, the title character is an orphan who lives inside the station, or more specifically, in the walls and clocktowers. His father (Jude Law) was a horologist, but after dying in a fire Hugo is left to the care of his dissolute uncle (Ray Winstone), who is employed as the clock keeper in the station. Left alone, Hugo scratches out a living by stealing food, all the while working on an unfinished project he and his father were involved in--an automaton.

Hugo has to avoid the eye of the Station Inspector (Sasha Baron Cohen), who has a brace on one leg and uses a Doberman Pinscher to chase down orphans. Cohen's character bears certain resemblances to Inspector Javert, of Les Miserables, who becomes consumed by capturing his quarry. Hugo also has a run-in with a toy store operator (Ben Kingsley), who catches him stealing and confiscates his father's notebook. Kingsley recognizes something in the book, and reacts crossly whenever he sees Hugo.

Kingsley's goddaughter, Chloe Grace Moretz, teams up with Hugo, eager to have adventures. Together the two discover the truth about her godfather he is the celebrated filmmaker, Georges Melies, but he has no interest in reliving his past.

Films about filmmaking are common, even when they're ostensibly about something else. And film critics tend to like these films. Whether the general public will embrace Hugo, I have no idea, but I think it has plenty to offer. For one thing, the production design, by Dante Ferrati, is breathtaking, as he creates the inner walls of the station as some sort of mechanical wonderland. Secondly, the universal appeal of a story of a plucky orphan boy, which goes back centuries, is rendered with aplomb by Scorsese and his screenwriter, John Logan. It is interesting to think that this a film that might have appealed to Steven Spielberg, and one wonders how it slipped by him. But Spielberg, one imagines, would have gone too far, and ladled the sentiment on in layers, while Scorsese and Logan stick with the story, and let the audience make their own conclusions. I do think it's the only Scorsese film that's ever brought a tear to my eye.

For those who know a thing or two about silent films, or Paris in the '20s, Hugo is a goldmine. There are not only references to Melies' films, most especially A Trip to the Moon, but also the Lumiere Brothers Arrival of a Train at a Station, Harold Lloyd's Safety Last, and the automaton, who figures so prominently in the story, has a resemblance to the creature in Metropolis that can't be coincidental.

In addition to plaudits for Scorsese, Logan, and Ferreti, I must congratulate Robert Richardson for his photography, Sandy Powell for her costumes, and the entire cast for their performances. It is a mark of Scorsese's humanism that he gives his villain, Cohen, humanity, and Kingsley is absolutely wonderful as Melies. Moretz, who is already something of a wunderkind in film, is enchanting, but Asa Butterfield, as Hugo, gives a solid performance in a role that requires him to carry the film. The film is also rife with Harry Potter alumni: Helen McCrory is Kingsley's wife, and Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths are part of a parallel series of plots that depict the daily life of those who work in the station.

Hugo isn't perfect. At times the film drags, and a scene involving a professor of cinema (Michael Stuhlbarg) piles on the exposition. It's necessary for those who have never heard of Melies, who I'm sure are 99.9 percent of the audience, but it plays kind of deadly. There's also a bizarre inconsistency of accents. The children have British accents, but others have sort of French accents, and Cohen's seems Germanic.

But those concerns are largely ignorable, as the sense of magic and wonder will stick with me for a long time. The film will bear repeat viewings, as there are sorts of things to spot--I think I saw James Joyce and Salvador Dali in the station, and unless I miss my guess, Johnny Depp (who is one of the producers) has a cameo as the guitarist Django Reinhardt.

My grade for Hugo: A-.

The River Why

2011-12-01T10:04:00.000-05:00

The River Why is less a movie than a testament to the spirituality of fishing. In a sense, it's a stripped down version of A River Runs Through It, with much less scope and reduced conflict. Anyone into fishing should like it, the rest, like me, may find themselves snoozing.

Zach Gilford stars as a young man who has grown up fishing. His father, William Hurt, who uses Isaak Walton's The Compleat Angler as others use a Bible, is a stuffed shirt. He's the kind of guy who wears a tie while fly fishing. His mother, Kathleen Quinlan, is a Mammy Yokum type who prefers using bait to fish--she's disparaging referred to as a "worm plunker."

We are led to believe that Gilford's parents have constant arguments about what is the better method of fishing, and these cause him to leave home and hole up in a cabin in the woods. You would think they would have agreed to disagree a long time ago. Nevertheless, Gilford lives an idyllic existence, doing nothing but fishing and making lures, which he sells to a local shop (presumably this is how he makes his living).

He later meets the sylph-like Amber Heard, a beautiful girl who shares his passion for fishing. She has a unique form of fishing--once the creature takes the bite, she tosses the pole in the water and dives in and swims after it. I'm guessing this wouldn't work if one hooked a marlin.

There's really very little going on here, plot-wise. Gilford and Heard fall into a romance without much fuss (at first she's annoyed that he was spying on her while skinny-dipping, but that passes). I'm guessing the novel this is based on goes much deeper into the character's connection with the land, and the life lessons he learns.

The film was directed by Matthew Leutwyler, who captures some pretty pictures along Oregon rivers. After seeing it, though, I'm no more likely to stand in frigid water to my waist, casting a line.

The Lincoln Lawyer (Film)

2011-11-30T12:56:00.000-05:00

Way back in the early stages of this blog, I reviewed Michael Connelly's novel The Lincoln Lawyer. I've just gotten around to seeing the film version from earlier this year, and I thought it was terrific. Michael McConaughey, after years adrift in films wear he acted more with his shirtless torso than anything else, gives a performance that reminds us of his dazzling debut in A Time to Kill.

McConaughey is Michael "Mickey" Haller, a defense attorney who operates out of the back of his Lincoln sedan. He specializes in guilty clients, and is in fact leery of taking on the innocent, for fear they will be judged guilty. But he takes on a high profile client, a rich real estate agent played by Ryan Phillipe, who is charged with assault with a deadly weapon on a prostitute.

The movie ends being a cat and mouse game between McConaughey and Phillipe, who the former realizes is not only guilty, but also guilty of another crime that was wrongly tagged on one of the McConaughey's previous clients. The courtrooms scenes are good, although the prosecutor (Josh Lucas) violates the sacred rule of asking questions he doesn't know the answer to.

The supporting cast is full of terrific actors like William H. Macy, Michael Pena, John Leguizamo, and Marisa Tomei, McConaughey's ex-wife. Frankly I would liked to see her in a role that called her to do more than alternate with admiring gazes at McConaughey, but she's always a nice presence to see in a movie.

The script, by John Romano, and direction, by Brad Furman (a check reveals his earliest credits were as personal assistant to Julia Roberts) are first-rate. As I said about the book, legal thrillers are often a dime a dozen, so when a good one comes along it should be celebrated. The Lincoln Lawyer is a good one.

The Descendants

2011-11-29T16:50:00.000-05:00

After watching The Descendants I had the feeling like I do when I've eaten something that is palatable but seems to be missing a key ingredient, an ingredient that I can't quite place. The film is well directed, intelligently written, and superbly acted, and perhaps best of all has a profound sense of place, but, as the annoying guy in the movie line said of the latest Fellini film in Annie Hall, it didn't hit me on a gut level.

I'm a big fan of writer/director Alexander Payne--Election and Sideways are two of my favorite films of the last fifteen years. The Descendants is more in line with the film of his I liked least, About Schmidt, in that it leans toward the sentimental. Payne does better when he casts a gimlet eye on his protagonist.

Here the protagonist is Matt King, played by George Clooney. He is directly descended from Hawaiian royalty and one of the first white families to inhabit the islands. A successful attorney, he is the trustee in charge of a large parcel of oceanfront land that the whole family has decided to sell to the high bidder, who will turn it into a resort community.

That is Clooney's less pressing concern, though. His wife is in a coma from a boating accident. He is dealing with a troubled 10-year-old daughter (Amara Miller), and a 17-year-old daughter in a private school (Shailene Woodley) who had some sort of beef with her mother. Early on Clooney finds out the disagreement was over his now comatose wife's philandering.

Most of the film deals with Clooney tracking down the man who was sleeping with his wife. He turns out to be Matthew Lillard, who I remember mostly for playing the obnoxious kid in a series of bad teen films. Here he's a real estate agent, and has a connection with the land sale. Will Clooney exact his revenge by blocking the sale?

I have a feeling that what appealed most to Payne about this project, which is adapted from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings (the script was co-written by Payne with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash) is the sense of place. Hawaii is certainly a distinct place in America, which few of us have visited for more than a week at a time. The opening scenes, of poverty and despair on the streets of Hawaii, include a voiceover by Clooney wondering at the sanity of people who tell him he lives in paradise. From the film you can get the sense of how life goes a little slower there--shoes are optional, and baseball caps and flowered shirts are formal wear. As Clooney says, "Very important people look like bums and stunt men."

Beyond that, The Descendants also has a keen sense of betrayal, as Clooney and Woodley are both forced to be angry with a woman who can not defend herself. Clooney calls himself the "backup parent," and seems at a loss how to deal with his kids. Woodley, who is sensational as a teenager burning with rage, bonds with her father over finding Lillard, as if they were on some kind of father-daughter scavenger hunt. The family that sleuths together, stays together, I guess.

But other parts of The Descendants fell flat for me. I didn't understand the presence of Woodley's boyfriend, Nick Krause, who seems to be channeling Spiccoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. A subplot involving Robert Forster as Clooney's tough father-in-law also didn't work. I did like a late appearance by Judy Greer, who gives the film a lift.

On the face of it, The Descendants is a good movie, it just isn't great. I think I was supposed to care more about these people than I did. Clooney, who shows more vulnerability than he ever has before, and may pick up an Oscar for his effortm (have we ever seen Clooney cry before?) is riveting, but I couldn't feel myself in his shoes. Maybe that's because he's hardly ever wearing them.

My grade for The Descendants: B+

J! E! T! S! Jets! Jets! Jets!

2011-11-28T15:34:00.000-05:00

My friend Bob won a silent auction at a community theater he's involved in and had two tickets to yesterday's Buffalo Bills-New York Jets game, and invited me to come along. I gladly did so, having not seen an NFL game for more than 40 years.

I like the NFL very much, though it's a distant second to baseball in my eyes. Going to games is problematic, given the cost and selectivity--many teams have notoriously long waiting lists for season tickets, and places in line are passed down in wills. Plus, I've always thought football is a better game to watch on television.

But I wasn't about to turn down the chance to go. I had no rooting interest in the game. I root for the Detroit Lions, one of the few teams who have never been to a Super Bowl, and have never won a championship in my lifetime. I'm fairly neutral about the New York Teams (I'm also fairly close to Philadelphia, and there are a lot of Eagle fans around). I find Jets' coach Rex Ryan to be obnoxious, but while sitting in a sea of people wearing green Jets jerseys it was easy not to make waves and politely root the Jets on.

It was a great game, with many lead changes. The game really turned on a penalty. The Bills Steve Johnson caught a touchdown pass that put the Bills up 14-7 just before the half. He got a little carried away in his touchdown celebration. First he mocked the Jets' Plaxico Burress by miming shooting himself in the leg, and then flopped to the ground with his arms spread like airplane wings. He was flagged for excessive celebration, which was tacked on during the kickoff. The Bills kicker then mangled an attempt at a squib kick, booting it off of an up man for the kickoff return team, who recovered it for great field position. The Jets were able to drive it in for a touchdown.

The Bills managed to regain the lead, 24-21, but the Jets drove down the field with a few key catches by Dustin Keller. They got the winning score with just over a minute left. But the Bills had time, and managed to drive down the field. But then Johnson, who can't have had a good trip back to Buffalo, dropped what might have been a touchdown, and then Bills quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick missed two times on throws to the end zone, the last one as time expired.

The last NFL game I went to was in October of 1971. I know the date because it was the same day that the Pirates beat the Orioles in game seven of the 1971 World Series. It was so long ago that the stadium (the Astrodome) and one team (the Houston Oilers) don't exist anymore. The Lions beat the Oilers that day, 31-7. I also have a faint memory of my dad taking me to an Eagles-Redskins game in what must have been the late '60s. It was back at old Franklin Field.

Due to the low sampling, yesterday's game now qualifies as the best NFL game I've ever been to.

The Cherry Orchard (Classic Stage Company)

2011-11-27T22:34:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing my third production of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, and I believe it is the best. Produced by the Classic Stage Company, and directed by Andrei Belgrader, it takes Chekhov's sweeping language and characterization and renders it in simple, heartbreaking, and intimate terms.

I originally wrote about the play here. To briefly summarize, the story concerns a once aristocratic Russian family who are now in danger of losing their estate, which includes a famous cherry orchard. Lyuba (Dianne Wiest), who fled Russia with her daughter Anna (Katherine Waterston) after her seven-year-old son drowned, has returned from living in Paris with a lover who stole all her money. Her brother, Gayev (Daniel Davis), a distracted man who is given to making impassioned speeches to bookcases and playing imaginary games of billiards, is no help. The only person in the extended household who has any sense of the future is Lopakhin (John Turturro), who grew up as a boy on the estate, the son of a serf. He has now built a fortune, and urges the family to lease lots on the estate to summer tourists. This, however, would necessitate chopping down the cherry orchard.

There are also the requisite romantic entanglements of Chekhov: Varya (Juliet Rylance), Lyuba's older daughter, is in love with Lopakhin, who won't propose, because he really hasn't gotten over a crush on Lyuba. Anna is in love with Trofimov, a perpetual student who is something of an early Bolshevik, who makes announcements like "we are above love." Dunyasha, a serving girl (Elizabeth Waterston), is in love with the cruel footman Yasha (Slate Holmgren), even though she has been proposed to by the perpetually clumsy Epikhodov (Michael Urie).

The play rings with a sense of loss. The characters of Lyubov and Gayev, though in their fifties, are child-like, which Chekhov reinforces with the opening scene, set in a nursery. They continue to spend money, even when they don't have any to spare. The world is changing around them, but they ignore the signs, and Lopakhin's advice, until it is too late.

Belgrader has done a lovely job of incorporating the play into the small space. The play is in three-quarter round, on a floor level with the first row of the audience, and only a few feet away. Several times those in the front row had to pull in their feet as actors went by. Swatches of dialogue that are heavy in exposition are often delivered as asides to the audience, and Charlotta, the governess, breaks the fourth wall definitively by interacting with the audience. This gives a fresh take to the material, and gave this viewer the impression I was somehow involved with the situation.

The actors are all exquisite. Wiest, with a winsome expression and lilting voice, perfectly captures the woman-child of Lyubov, and Turturro, though perhaps a bit old for the part, brims with rage and shame. The play has a climax of a sort when he buys the orchard at auction, and as I wrote in my previous post, the scene in which he announces this at a party is my favorite. Turturro, given a great scene to play, knocks it out of the park, giddy with drink and triumph, but at the same time realizing he is destroying the dreams of those whom he loves. He dances around the stage in traditional Russian folk style, and then pulls apart a seat cushion, the feathers cascading around him.

The supporting players are no less brilliant. Alvin Epstein, a giant in American theater (he was in the original Waiting for Godot), makes an excellent Firs, the ancient manservant who rued the day the serfs were ever freed. Davis, who is probably best known as Fran Drescher's foil during the run of the The Nanny, makes a particularly sad and ennobled Gayev.

This production, for those who will be in New York the next few weeks, is well worth the effort to see.

Black Listed

2011-11-26T09:01:00.002-05:00

Driving home from Gettysburg after a fine Thanksgiving I listened to an early Neko Case album, Black Listed, from 2002. It further cemented my lofty opinion of Case as my favorite female vocalist, but it's hard to determine whether she's a better singer or songwriter. Let's call it a tie.

This is a glorious record. Case is often described as alt-country, though she's been getting away from that lately, but here the country sounds are more discernible. The lyrics, though, aren't the usual Grand Ol' Opry fare. The opening track, "Things That Scare Me," sets the tone: "Fluorescent lights engage like birds frying on a wire/Same birds that followed me to school when I was young/Were they trying to tell me something?/Were they telling me to run?"

This is followed by the excellent "Deep Red Bells," in which Case's voice soars with sonic intensity, and ends with: "Does your soul cast about like an old paper bag? Past empty lots and early graves of those like you who've lost their way/Murdered on the Interstate/While the red bells rang like thunder?" The next song, "Lady Pilot," ends with the line, "We've got a lady pilot, she's not afraid to die." Perhaps you don't want to listen to that song on an airplane.

The musicality of Case's work is also enduring. "Stinging Velvet" is an old-fashioned honky-tonk song, complete with steel guitar, while "Blacklisted" is in a minor key, and could have been sung by Johnny Cash (it's about a train). In one of two songs she didn't write, "Look for Me (I'll Be Around)," Case brings to remind a torch singer, leaning against a piano in a pool of light. "Outro for Bees" is a beautiful number that is only her voice, a piano, a pump organ, and a cello.

It's hard to pick a favorite song on the album. In addition to the above there's "Pretty Girls," which seems to be set in the emergency room of a hospital: "The TV is blaring and angry, as if you don't know why you're here/Those who walk without sin are so hungry/Don't let the wolves in, pretty girls." "I Wish I Was the Moon" is a heartbreaking song of loneliness.

I have one Neko Case album of all new material to go before I've caught up (not counting her work with The New Pornographers).