Michael's Mixed Media Playroom

Horror on TV

2011-11-04T07:11:00.007-04:00

For me, horror works best on TV in an anthology format, like Twilight Zone, Thriller, or Night Gallery. I'm not a big fan of hour-long dramas of any stripe, but I did enjoy several seasons of The X-Files, which for me worked best when it was almost like an anthology show, with Mulder and Scully investigating a new weird case each week, but then the background arc story stuff got too thick. I watched Supernatural for a few weeks, but it had the same background problems. This season, two new non-anthology horror shows have debuted and against my better judgment I sampled them.

American Horror Story, on FX, had promise, with one of the most traditional horror tropes at its center: the haunted house. A couple (Dylan McDermott and Connie Britton) move in to a house where people have either died under strange circumstances or been driven out by strange occurrences. Sure enough, there are ghosts, not just in the house but next door (the eccentric neighbor is Jessica Lange, seeming a stone's throw away from her Big Edie character in Grey Gardens). Dylan and Connie have moved in order to put the past behind them: she had a miscarriage, he had an affair, and their daughter is a cutter. But of course, things just get worse in the haunted house.

Each episode has a story that gets resolved, but the arc story is clearly more important, and there are some interesting plotlines set up. Lange's mentally disabled daughter has a disturbing tendency to 1) pop up in McDermott's house uninvited and 2) predict that people will die in the house. There is also a man in a leather fetish suit who has sex with Britton and gets her pregnant (she thinks it was her husband, but we know it wasn't). A disfigured former tenant of the house (Denis O'Hare, pictured with McDermott) shows up from time to time, trying to tell McDermott to get out of the house. But there is also the very tedious story of the messed-up daughter and her messed-up boyfriend (who might be one of the ghosts). There are R-rated obscenities, and almost R-rated nudity (Mr. McDermott is in damned good shape at 40), and a dark look and brutal tone which seem borrowed from movies like Saw.

Despite the promise, it failed to hook me after two episodes. The arc story lines are many, and like lots of arc-story shows, there's the feeling that either things won't get explained, or when they do, they'll seem stupid. None of the characters is sympathetic; in fact, I was kind of rooting for Jessica Lange to get rid of the whole bunch. Perhaps its biggest failing is the most obvious: why the hell are these people going to stay in this house for a full 13-week season? Next post: Grimm.

Connections or the Lack Thereof, Part 2

2011-09-18T16:12:00.005-04:00

Wow, it's been almost two months since I wrote Part 1. Time flies whether you're having fun or not. Anyway, the other book pop culture book I read was Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY and the Lost Story of 1970 by David Browne. For this baby-boomer who was coming of age in the early 70's, this was a fun read. I owned 3 of the 4 albums under discussion in the book: Let it Be, Bridge Over Troubled Water, and Deja Vu (I've never owned a James Taylor album even though I liked his early music). The author does a nice job writing about the circumstances of each album's recording, release, and reception. Most of the material about Let It Be was old hat to this Beatle fan, and as I recently read Shakey, a biography of Neil Young, the CSNY material was familiar to me. Most of the new information I gained was about James Taylor: I didn't know he lived with Joni Mitchell for a spell--I suspect a list of her lovers would read like a Who's Who of 70s California rock--and though I knew he was hooked on heroin in his youth, I didn't know he was on and off of it for so long.

The disappointing part of the book comes in connection with the subtitle, and the "connection or the lack thereof" of my blog entry title. Browne begins by saying that 1970 has gotten a bad rap in pop culture history, that years like 1967 (the Summer of Sgt. Pepper) or 1969 (Woodstock) are considered more important, but that 1970 truly marked the end of an era and the beginning of another. He points out that 1970 was the year of the last albums by the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel, and the first albums by CSNY and James Taylor, but never explains the significance of this. It's not like the last/first dichotomy really works--there was a previous CSN album, and Young only made a couple of albums with the group; there was also an earlier James Taylor album but it didn't make the charts. And Paul Simon continued to be a force in pop music at least through the 90s.

I like that Browne does make some fun if insubstantial connections, such as that 1970 started with Paul McCartney attending a Crosby Stills Nash & Young concert, and that James Taylor's first album was on the Beatles' label Apple, but ultimately the connections don't hold up, and certainly there is no real argument made about the cultural importance of 1970. Browne is also inconsistent about discussing the music: he does a nice job with Taylor and some of the songs on Bridge Over Troubled Water, but not much with the other two groups. Still, he did do his homework, and this was fun to read from a nostalgia viewpoint. He also sent me back to the music of these artists, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Connections or the Lack Thereof, Part 1

2011-07-28T08:20:00.006-04:00

Two pop culture books I’ve read recently take group of artists bound by genre and time, and try to make overarching connections among them. Neither book is really successful at fulfilling its thesis, but both are interesting reads. The first, Shock Value by Jason Zinoman, is about the filmmakers behind what he dubs the “New Horror” movement of the late 60s and early 70s. He correctly points to Hitchcock’s Psycho as the seed for the more graphic horror films that came later, and he gives a lot of attention to all the right people--George Romero, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, Dan O’Bannon--and gives interesting anecdotes about the making and reception of films like Night of the Living Dead, The Last House on the Left and Halloween, but the most interesting thing he does is start with two movies not often grouped with the other grisly thrillers: Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets.

Zinoman argues that Rosemary’s Baby was the first modern mainstream horror hit, making a big pop culture splash (and a lot of money) and marking the end of the career of 60s schlock filmmaker William Castle, who produced the movie and wanted to direct it until Paramount nixed that idea. (A Castle Rosemary’s Baby would almost certainly have been cheap-looking, had some chintzy gimmick--like a man dressed as Satan running up and down the aisles in the theater--and had a blonde, big-breasted screamer as Rosemary.)

Targets, a B-film co-produced by Roger Corman, who was a more successful Castle, was one of the last films of Boris Karloff, who plays a washed-up horror movie star lamenting that the horrors of the real world have surpassed all the old movie monsters. Though not a hit, it’s a good movie that is still worth watching, and Zinoman argues that it was the first to have a “monster” that wasn’t explained; in this case, an average young man who goes on a shooting spree for no discernible reason. He is ultimately defeated but his rationale is never given. The author draws a line from Targets’ shooter to Michael Myers in the first Halloween, an “empty space” at the center of the movie. In both cases, we are given just enough information to make guesses at each killer’s motives, but we are left not knowing for sure.

Coverage of the actual “New Horror” films is predictable but interesting and highly readable. Most of the directors were rather bookish and academic, and weren’t looking to become horror specialists, but got penned in to the genre after their first big hits. Zinoman spends an inordinate amount of time on Dan O’Bannon, a rather cranky writer who, after making Dark Star, a B-sci-fi spoof with John Carpenter, went on to write the first draft of Alien. He was frequently in a lot of stomach pain due to Crohn’s disease, which inspired the infamous stomach birthing scene with John Hurt. But after that, O’Bannon seemed unable to work well with others and he never had the career that some had predicted for him. O’Bannon and Carpenter had a major falling-out and O’Bannon spews a lot of bile aimed at Carpenter, who is never defended in the book’s pages.

I wish Zinoman had been able to make his larger connecting arguments with more force. He’s good about the films and the people, but not so good about looking beyond, at popular culture and the tenor of the times. I like that he considers Jaws a horror film, and that he includes Brian DePalma as one of the seminal horror directors of the 70s (even though only Carrie is probably, by definition, a real horror movie). Definitely a good addition to the bookshelf of any movie buff. Next post, a book about the music of 1970.

The magic of Lord Dunsany

2011-06-15T21:45:00.006-04:00

I think of myself as having been a fantasy fiction fan in my youth, but really I was more in love with the idea of fantasy. Starting with Ray Bradbury when I was about 11 years old, I immersed myself in, to give it a more inclusive name, speculative fiction, which pretty much covers fantasy, science fiction, and anything that takes place in a world that isn’t quite ours. Bradbury is generally thought of as a sci-fi writer, but really most of his work is fantasy, with scientific concerns only secondary to his poetic explorations of nostalgia, childhood, and social issues. The Mars of The Martian Chronicles is much more like an earthly fantasy world than, let’s say, the harder action/sci-fi Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

But when I started reading traditional fantasy, I realized I wasn’t really such a big fan. In high school, the perfect time to discover Tolkien, I read The Hobbit twice, but could not get more than about 150 pages into the first of the Lord of the Rings book (and I tried three times). I dipped my toes in sword and sorcery, Tarzan, fairy world books, and spiritual fantasy (George MacDonald, CS Lewis) but never really took to any of those genres like I thought I should. Now, with the preponderance of trilogies and wizard children and the like, most things labeled "fantasy" don’t appeal to me at all--except for Lovecraft and his kind, whose writings are more horror than fantasy.

However, while reading a new book called Electric Eden, about the quasi-psychedelic folk-rock movement in the England in the 60s, I came across a reference to Lord Dunsany, a fantasy writer of the first half of the 20th century (pictured). I went down to the basement and, sure enough, there was a old Ballantine paperback of one of his novels, The Charwoman’s Daughter, which I'd bought used many years ago and never cracked open. I did so that night and am quite glad I did.

Despite the dragons on the cover of the paperback, the world of The Charwoman’s Daughter is not too far removed from the real world; it's set in Spain during a time referred to as "the Golden Age." The Lord of the Tower and Rocky Forest has come upon hard times and is trying to arrange a good marriage for his daughter despite having no money in her dowry, so he sends his son Ramon Alonzo to be tutored by a old magician who lives deep in the woods, alone except for an old cleaning lady, the charwoman of the title. The father, who did a favor for the magician many years ago, hopes the magician will teach the boy the art of alchemy so he can create some gold for the daughter's dowry.

At first, the magician seems kindly, but soon Ramon Alonzo discovers that the price for such learning is his shadow. The charwoman sold her shadow to the magician in her youth and has regretted it ever since; she is shunned for not casting a shadow (the townsfolk assume she has struck some kind of demonic deal) so she hasn’t left the magician's house for years. Despite the warning, Ramon agrees to give the magician his shadow and comes to regret it. Out of a sense of chivalry, he vows to get the charwoman's shadow back, and ideally his as well.

This is not a fantasy novel full of swords or magical creatures, though the magic of the magician is indeed real; there is a strange and evocative scene in which the magician communes with the various shadows he has taken over the years, sending them into deep space to faraway planets. The magical world is vague and mysterious; there are imps in the background, and a love potion plays an important role in the last half of the book. The spell this book casts is largely through language. As in an epic poem, there are certain almost incantatory phrases used throughout; the magician's secret room in which he keeps the box of shadows is always referred to as "the room that was sacred to magic." There is a character known as the Duke of Shadow Valley (almost sounds like a superhero). There is some beautiful writing: twilight is described as "the hour when Earth has most reverence, the hour when her mystery reaches out and touches the hearts of her children." A romantic relationship develops between the young Ramon and the old charwoman which is predictable (if you know your fairy tales) but still satisfying. And the last few pages, which involve the fate of the magician, and the Golden Age itself, are almost hallucinatorily beautiful.

In short, this is the fantasy novel that I was hoping to find in my youth, that might have kept me a fan of the genre for a long time. I’m hoping to spend much of the summer in the company of Lord Dunsany.

Neil makes Noise

2011-05-24T17:46:00.012-04:00

Reporting back finally on the May 3rd trip to Cincinnati to see Neil Young in a solo concert. In this case, solo did not mean laid-back and quiet. Young is touring behind his latest album Le Noise, which is also solo, using only guitars (usually electric) treated with studio effects by producer Daniel Lanois, known for his work with U2 and Peter Gabriel. So though Young did dig back into his catalog for some gems ("Cinnamon Girl," "After the Gold Rush," "Cortez the Killer"), almost half of the show was comprised of songs from the new album. Lyrically, the new songs are nothing special--mushy but noisy love songs ("Walk With Me," "Sign of Love") and long confessional (and noisy) songs about his life and career ("Hitchiker," "Love and War"). But musically, they're interesting, or maybe I should say "sonically," as most of the interest comes from the layers of echo and feedback on each track.

In concert, Young achieved most of the atmospheric effects through volume--loud and noisy but not enough to call for earplugs--and feedback, though he opened the show with a fairly quiet set on acoustic guitar ("My, My, Hey, Hey," "Tell Me Why," "Helpless"). What surprised me most was how clear and strong Young's voice is. His vocal trademark is usually closer to whiny and fragile, but here, even at the age of 65, his voice sounded better than ever. Because Young has been know to be a bit of a contrarian in concert, deliberately withholding his big hits and playing lesser-known and unreleased stuff, I was pleasantly surprised to hear these three early songs. He then did an unreleased song, "You Never Call," which seemed to be Young complaining about a friend who had passed on who never calls from Heaven, followed by a batch of songs from Le Noise.

After every song or two, he would put down whatever instrument he was playing (guitar, harmonica) and meander about the stage to choose another instrument (piano, pump organ). It looked very casual and almost improvised, although apparently his set list never varied a bit during this tour. He performed a lovely new song called "Leia," about (I assume) his granddaughter, and did a sublime version of "After the Gold Rush" at the organ, which brought tears to my eyes. Another quiet moment was his piano version of "I Believe in You." The biggest surprise of the night was his protest-song hit from his CSNY days, "Ohio," appropriate not only because he was in Ohio but because the next day, May 4th, would be the 41st anniversary of the Kent State shootings, the subject of the song.

But the hardcore fans were probably happiest when he dragged out three rockers from the old days: "Cortez the Killer," "Down By the River," and my favorite, "Cinnamon Girl" (see the video below from a live show in New York a few years ago) and did them justice even without a backing band. People around us were yelling for "Old Man," but really, can a man who is now officially a senior citizen sing that song without seeming deluded? I looked around me and noticed how old everyone looked--the dressed-to-the-niners, the bleary-eyed hippies in their tie-dyed t-shirts--and then realized that most of these folks were my age (mid-50s) or younger. An unwanted epiphany that did not spoil a great show.

Neil, Neil, and I

2011-05-01T15:39:00.006-04:00

Over the past year, I've become good friends with a co-worker (or “bro-worker,” as he was dubbed by yet another co-worker); let’s call him Neil. We initially bonded over music; though our tastes were not especially similar (he likes punk and U2, I like 60s bubblegum and the Beatles), we found common ground with New Order. He turned me into a fan of Joy Divison and, well, he at least tolerates most of the bright glossy pop confections on my iPod. But we also discovered that we are both fans of Neil Young. So when we found out that Young was playing Cincinnati in May as part of his current solo tour, we made plans to go.

Neil Young has spent the last 40-some years flying high and low, in, around and through the pop culture radar, and he remains one of the few rock musicians from the 60s to sustain a viable career making new music and continuing to hit the album charts with relative frequency well into the 21st century--his latest album Le Noise hit the top 20 when it was released last fall.

One reason he's lasted this long may be his chameleon-like quality. Like Madonna (yes, I'm comparing Neil Young to Madonna), Young has re-invented his image and his music frequently, and in doing so brought new and younger fans into his circle. I imagine the average pop music listener thinks of Young as a folkie; he began his career in 1967 with folk-rock group Buffalo Springfield, his only top 10 hit was 1972’s "Heart of Gold," a folkie-strummer if you ever heard one, and most of his highest-charting albums (Harvest, Comes A Time, Harvest Moon) have a quiet folk-country vibe.

But most of his hardcore fans think of him as a rock & roller, pure and simple--though he's anything but pure and simple. From the beginning he was hard to pin down; his Buffalo Springfield songs were squarely in the pop-folk genre except for the suite-like 6-minute "Broken Arrow" with its almost avant-garde use of atmospheric sound (you can’t really dance--or even sway--to it) and the slow, slightly spooky "Expecting to Fly," with its opening and closing chords right out of the Beatles’ "Day in the Life" by way of Enya. On his second solo album he produced three lasting FM radio rock classics: "Cinnamon Girl," "Down By the River," and "Cowgirl in the Sand."

After Harvest and "Heart of Gold," Young produced three albums that have become known among fans as the Ditch Trilogy, because on the liner notes to his compilation album Decade, he says he took a detour out of the middle of the road and into the ditch. All three albums (Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and especially Tonight's the Night) are sloppy, almost primitive sounding--an early grunge style, maybe--and filled with performances which were largely alcohol-and-drug induced, and songs with depressing and defensive lyrics, some about the dark side of the drug world, triggered by the deaths of band member Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. These were not big sellers, but they cemented Young’s "street cred," so to speak, among his harder-rocking fans.

In 1979, he recovered commercially with Rust Never Sleeps, an album that is almost exactly 50% folkish acoustic songs and 50% noisy rockin'-out songs with his grungy band Crazy Horse. Probably if the average person knows any other Neil Young song besides "Heart of Gold," it’s "Hey, Hey, My, My" with the line, "It's better to burn out than to fade away," which became notorious after Kurt Cobain quoted it in his suicide note. Since then, he has recorded rockabilly, electronic music, more folk, more noisy rock, protest songs, love songs, and hit a late-career high in the mid-90s when he cut an album (Mirror Ball) with Pearl Jam. Of course, I guess since he’s still going strong in 2011, "late-career" is not the right phrase.

My friend Neil considers himself a diehard Neil Young fan, knowing obscure songs and lyrics (like "Last Trip to Tulsa": "Well I woke up in the morning/With an arrow through my nose/There was an Indian in the corner/Tryin' on my clothes") and having seen him in concert many times over the years. But I probably know more, "academically" speaking, about Young's career and personality--at least partly because I read the huge biography Shakey. Neil and I come at Neil Young from different sides of the 1977 career hinge Decade, a 3-LP set collected from the albums of his first ten years. My favorite Young albums are all pre-1980 (After the Gold Rush, Comes a Time, and Rust Never Sleeps); my friend Neil doesn't seem to think in terms of favorite albums, but he knows very little from Young's early days except what's on Decade, tends to like Young's long crazy songs such as "Tulsa," "Like a Hurricane," "Cowgirl in the Sand," and "Cortez the Killer," and he's a fan of the Kraftwerk-like electronic album Trans. So I imagine on our road trip to Cincy on Tuesday, we'll give each other crash courses on our areas of expertise. I'm looking forward to a long strange trip and will report back on the concert soon. (The video below is of "Sample and Hold," one of the Trans songs)

The Illumination

2011-04-21T21:25:00.006-04:00

The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier sold itself to me based on this plot description: one evening, all over the world, pain begins to emit light. A flesh wound, a cold sore, a headache, cancer; all physical pain manifests itself with light which, in the language of the book jacket, glitters, fluoresces, blazes. I knew this would not be science fiction, for the rest of the plot description makes clear that the book will tell the stories of six people who all experience various kinds of pain and who all have contact with a notebook that is a collection of daily love notes left by a husband for his wife.

This book is really a loosely-knit short story cycle, the kinds of stories you'd find in the New Yorker--that's not mean to be a compliment or an insult, just a description. Ultimately, it struck me that both the "Illumination" and the notebook were gimmicks in order to have a framework for otherwise unconnected narratives. Most of the individual stories are interesting, but I wound up being disappointed that the gimmicks didn't amount to much. The plot point of pain emitting light is not crucial to any of the stories; it adds some nice grace notes here and there, but very little is done with it. Is it science or God or something else entirely? One story, about a missionary, seems about to touch on the spiritual nature of the Illumination, but it goes nowhere.

The notebook with its single sentence love notes ("I love how quietly you speak when you're catching a cold"; "I love how you fumble for words when you're angry"; "I love the joke you told an Eli and Abby's wedding reception") winds up being more important to the characters. Each of the six characters takes possession of the book, reads from it, and wonders about its origin; one of the stories is about the man who wrote the notes, which his wife, now deceased, kept in the notebook. One story is about a writer, suffering from terrible mouth pains (ulcers, cancre sores, etc.) who draws inspiration from the notebook for a story she writes.

Even though I felt tricked and let down by the book, I thought most of the stories were worth reading. One is a little creepy: a photojournalist takes a picture of a high school girl cutting herself in public (perhaps to see the Illumination, though her reasons are not clear), winds up taking her in when her parents throw her out, and by the end of the story has joined her in her flesh-cutting activities. The story about the writer is the most interesting one, and it has the added bonus of a story-within-the-story that she writes about communicating with the dead.

The overwhelming feeling I got from the book was sadness. Perhaps because recently I've had to deal in relatively minor ways with the aches and pains of aging, I was touched by the descriptions of physical suffering here, but each character is also going through incredible emotional pain as well. Sometimes, as in the story the husband with the notebook, the tone almost becomes too much to bear. At other times, as with the missionary, it's difficult to pin down what the suffering is about. But rarely have I had a book leave me in such strange, ambiguous moods each time I put it down. Recommended for readers of, well, The New Yorker.

From a Whisper to a Scream

2011-04-16T07:38:00.010-04:00

Netflix streaming is a wonderful thing--on a whim, thousands of movies are available to watch at home, whenever you want. Hit movies, cult films, classics, and best of all, little oddities that you might never have searched out, but run across doing a random search on genres. While looking for a Friday night horror movie, I found this oddity from 1986, From a Whisper to a Scream, aka The Offspring. It's cheaply made, with an odd mix of actors who had all seen better days, but it's grotesquely quirky, and gets away with more blood and kink than a more polished big-studio film of the day would have.

It's an anthology film, set in the cursed town of Oldfield, Tennessee. The frame story has Vincent Price (in one of his last films, but still full of the old fire) telling a reporter four tales of horror set a various times in the past of the town. I have to use spoilers in summarizing the first story because it's just so freakin' weird: a nerdy old man (Clu Gulager) who lives with his sickly sister (who may have an incestuous bone or two in her body) falls in love with a co-worker, but when their first date goes badly, he strangles her, then has sex with her dead body. Nine months later (hint, hint), he goes even further off the deep end and kills his sister (while she's naked in the bathtub!). But something has crawled out of his ex-date's grave and comes looking for revenge. Yes, it's a killer baby born of a dead woman. Far-fetched doesn't even begin to cover it (either the baby or the fact that it took him nine months to kill his obnoxious sister) but the climax is compelling.

The second story, set in the 50's, has a wounded thug (Terry Kiser), on the run from some other thugs, escape into the swamps. He is found and nursed back to health by a black hermit (Harry Caesar) who has stayed alive for hundreds of years through the practice of voodoo. To save Kiser's life, Caesar endows him with eternal life, but when Kiser tries to double-cross Caesar, Kiser soon regrets his gift. The horrific ending is right out of an old EC horror comic--actually, all of these could have come from Tales from the Crypt or the Creepy and Eerie comics of the 1960s.

The next plot, a little more traditional, is set in the 30s and involves a group of carnival performers with Lovecraft’s Traveling Amusements, centering on a young man who can eat metal and glass, the non-freak show girl who loves him and wants him to leave the show, and the forceful woman with supernatural powers (Rosalind Cash) who runs the carnival and is loathe to let anyone go.

The last and best story, also the town's origin story, is set at the end of the Civil War and features a small group of union soldiers led by sadistic, cold-blooded Cameron Mitchell, who guns down one soldier (C.J. Cox) who wants to give up killing. They wind up at the mercy of bunch of Confederate orphans who are given orders by a mysterious figure called the Magistrate. Between these "Children of the Corn"-type kids, and the not-quite-dead Cox, you know the Yankees aren't long for this world.

Each story has its plotholes, but each also builds to a nicely gory climax, with the ending to the second story taking the cake for sheer horror. The acting is variable; Gulager is very good, I guess, but because his character is so creepy and rather unbelievable, you really really want him to die. I also liked Rosalind Cash (maybe best known as Charlton Heston's leading lady in The Omega Man) who does a lot through the force of her personality with a barely-sketched-out character. It was fun to see Terence Knox (the rapist doctor on St. Elsewhere) in a small role. For a low-budget film, the effects are effective--I jumped and yelped and turned away in disgust several times. At one point it was titled The Offspring. Recommended for fans of gory B-horror.

Out of hibernation

2011-03-23T14:06:00.007-04:00

Whoa! I haven't posted here since November. That would suggest a winter hibernation, and that's kinda what happened. During the busyness of the holidays, I was dealing with a cold, then 2 days after Christmas, I got a nasty stomach bug, followed promptly by the flu which it took me almost all of January to really get over. And then I sort of just forgot about this blog.

But I've still been consuming media products and I hope to get back in the swing of things this spring. First, let me get out of the way a bunch of movies I saw between December and now, at least the movies I can dismiss in just a few words, or just a "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" manner:

I'm Still Here, the Joaquin Phoenix mockumentary/hoax: Though I was prepared to hate this one as a product of an over-privileged celebrity, I enjoyed it. It's not exactly fun, but it's not painful and it's even a little thought-provoking at times. Phoenix does a nice job playing an asshole (that's meant as a compliment, I think). Pictured are Casey Affleck, who directed, Sean Combs, who contributed a nice cameo, and Phoenix.

Inception: Hated it. Interesting plot germ (fiddling with people's dreams), executed in a silly, heavy-handed fashion.

Devil: Handful of people in a stuck elevator, and one of them is a demon. OK, though I have since forgotten how it all came out.

Dinner for Schmucks: The dinner party scene is fun, the rest is painful, despite Paul Rudd and Steve Carrell.

Zombieland: Zombie apocalypse comedy; OK, with Woody Harrelson very good, and Bill Murray in a cameo that is almost worth sitting through the whole movie for.

Red: Thumbs down. Even Helen Mirren can't save everything.

Never Let Me Go: Clone romance drama; good acting especially from Carey Mulligan who is shaping up to be a fine actress. One problem: why don't the clones ever think of rebelling?

The Kids Are Alright: They get over the same-sex family thing quickly, and it becomes a fairly typical family melodrama about fidelity and weariness and interlopers. The script could have used some sharpening, but the acting all around was fine.

The Social Network: Loved it. Great story (not really about Facebook, but about people and relationships), solid acting (though between this and Zombieland, Jesse Eisenberg may be a bit of a one-noter), sharp dialogue, wonderful camerawork, and a great score that didn't exactly draw undue attention to itself, but excitingly propelled the movie forward. I haven't seen The King's Speech yet, but I was really pulling for this one to win the Oscar. Pictured are the handsomest men in the movie, Armie Hammer and Max Minghella

The (first) end of reason

2010-11-27T16:30:00.001-05:00

I admire the director Alejandro Amenábar for attempting something different with his film Agora. It's got all the trappings of an historical epic--a period setting, lots of extras, big-budget sets and costumes, British actors, philosophical debates, and violence. But the movie's weakest point, commercially, at least as far as American viewers, is that the balance between ideas and actions is weighted toward the "ideas" side. There are some action scenes, but none of them are exactly cry-for-freedom, Gladiator-type crowd-rousers; instead, they are all dark and tragic.

And then there are the ideas themselves. This is one of the few major motion pictures to dare to question the place of religion, any religion, and to come down on the side of rationality and reason, even as it seems to suggest that reason will usually lose out to the fundamentalist religion with the most adherents. On the surface, the movie is about Hypatia, a female teacher and scientist who lived in 4th century Alexandria, Egypt. Apparently, little is known about her, so the film fills in quite a few blanks (for example, positing that she was believer in a heliocentric view of the solar system), but the the real subject of the movie is the conflict of religions which swirled about her.

As the film beings, Roman Egypt is largely pagan, with the Christians kept down by the pagan authorities. We see Hypatia as a beloved teacher, and at least three of her male students have unrequited crushes on her. The religious battles (which Hypatia tries to stay out of) are taken to the streets, and soon the Christians get the upper hand and a large Christian mob raids the library at Alexandria, though Hypatia and her father, the curator of the library, manage to hide some of more important documents.

Fifteen years later, most of the pagans have converted to Christianity and the three men who loved Hypatia now hold important posts in either the church or the government. Now the battles brewing are between the Christians and the Jews, and sadly the rationality and questioning reasoning of Hypatia is no longer valued in the public arena (wait, this is set in the past, right?). Hypatia comes to a bad end, which is triggered when a church leader quotes from Paul about women belonging in submission to men, and that they should neither teach nor hold authority.

There is lots of dialogue and several plot strands to follow, but for the most part, they all remain clear and intriguing. The acting is fine, especially Rachel Weisz (far above) as Hypatia and Max Minghella (above) as a slave boy who takes a liking to her. The film cost $70 million and looks it--the use of CGI for backgrounds is subtle and well-done. The few times when it's not subtle, it is extremely cool: the camera swoops down from space and focuses in, Google-map style, on Alexandria. The message about religious intolerance is sadly timely still, and probably one reason why the film didn't do very well in the States (though it drew audiences in Europe); another reason is lack of big-name stars. There is also a certain lacking in character development; besides Hypatia, no one else becomes particularly interesting. But if you want a thoughtful entertainment with great production values, about a time in history which is not frequently examined in films (Hypatia's death and the destruction of the Library of Alexandria are marked by some historians as the beginning of the Dark Ages), this is right up your alley.

Alphabetical film festival: Witches and cowboys

2010-11-14T07:33:00.007-05:00

The Alphabetical Film Festival is taking us through three shelves worth of our favorite movies on DVD, but if I had to condense my choices to one shelf, these next two films would be on that shelf.

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT: I don’t need to say much about the content of this little indie film that, thanks mostly to a genius marketing campaign, became a bonafide cultural phenomenon in 1999. Three young people, out alone in the woods with video cameras researching the history of the Blair Witch, who supposedly was responsible for a series of murders many years ago, get lost and can’t find their way out the woods. Over the period of several days, they begin to think that they are being stalked by the witch or some supernatural beings, and one by one, they meet bad ends. Or so it seems--one of the film’s strengths is its use of ambiguity. We have no idea what happens to the three, except that we are told at the beginning of the film that none of them were ever seen again. This movie has almost no special effects (except for some wonderful and judicious use of sound effects), no blood or gore, no scary music, and yet it is one of the 2 or 3 scariest movies I’ve ever seen.

The old truism that what you don’t see is scarier than what you do see is borne out here, Tension builds slowly over the 80 minute running time, first based on the three characters becoming frustrated over not being able to find their way back to the car, then because they aren’t getting along, and finally because weird things start happening outside their tent at night, but they can find no one in the area. We never see the witch or any other people (or creatures). We never actually see anything bad happen to any of the three: one disappears in the night and never comes back; in the hair-raising finale, one guy is standing still in the corner of a room and the woman screams and drops her camera on the floor.

In summary, it doesn’t seem so scary, but when you live through their experience with them, and put together the pieces of the Blair Witch story, it comes together to become the scariest movie since the original Halloween. When we first saw the movie, I was relatively satisfied with the ambiguous ending, but admitted to Don that I didn't quite get the last shot, of Mike standing in the corner. Don reminded me of an earlier reference to the corner of the room and I suddenly got it, and I practically screamed out loud, “Oh my God, he was in the corner!” (You’ll have to see the movie to understand.) I had nightmares for weeks. The film’s style--shaky, handheld subjective camera--has influenced many other horror films (Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity). And while the grousing and cursing among the three grow a little tedious by the third or fourth viewing, the payoff of the last 15 minutes remains effective, time after time. This is the only movie I refuse to watch alone.

BLAZING SADDLES: This is the granddaddy of the nonsense comedy which makes little sense but exists to make fun of (and to make endless references to) popular culture, specifically other movie genres. The primary genre being satirized here is the western, and the film's plot can be boiled down to a traditional western story: some bad guys are trying to lay claim to a small town because they know the property will be worth something when the train comes through; the town's new sheriff, not trusted by the people, takes the lead in the fight against the villains and becomes the town's savior. But this plot is mocked and subverted at every possible turn (cliches upended, anachronisms rampant) to the point where the film collapses on itself and, at what should be the climax, the fourth wall (between the movie and the audience) is literally broken, and the characters are revealed to be actors rampaging through the Warner Bros. soundstages.

I’m sure academic analyses have been done on this film, and it does occupy an important spot in Hollywood history, paving the way for Airplane! (and many other Zucker brothers movies), Murder By Death, the movies of Steve Martin, Jim Carrey, and Adam Sandler, not to mention the rest of Mel Brooks’ ouvere. It’s also responsible for making the very act of pop culture referencing in movies universally accepted. But it’s still, over 30 years years later, also plain, wild fun. And even though the acting in comedies like these is not usually notable, here everyone is great; Madeline Kahn got a deserved Oscar nomination for doing a Marlene Dietrich riff, but Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder also manage to create characters we care about, and Harvey Korman makes a wonderfully buffoonish villain. I could spend paragraphs quoting great lines and describing great scenes (in the way of Monty Python fans), but I’ll just end my remembering the first time I saw this movie, in a theater during its initial run, when I literally fell out of my seat laughing at the campfire scene. Fart jokes are a dime a dozen now, but this was (as far as I know) the first in movie history and probably still the best.

Fear of Birds; or How Hitchcock taught me about modernism

2010-10-24T18:10:00.000-04:00

Alphabetical Film Festival: THE BIRDS: My mom took me to see this movie when it first came out in theaters, which would mean I was 7 years old at the time--this is the same mom who took me to see Bonnie & Clyde when I was 12, God bless her. Bonnie & Clyde traumatized me (I had nightmares for weeks) but The Birds helped teach me about an important element in the arts, and in real life, too, I suppose: ambiguity. At 7, I was already a big monster movie fan and I was used to traditional closure in those movies; as bad as the monsters and mad scientists were, they always got what they deserved at the end, usually death, and the forces of good/God won out. I was also used to having everything mysterious explained by the end. Even in movies like Dracula, where the supernatural was taken for granted, there were still explanations (a bite on the neck caused vampirism) and rules (Dracula could be fought with crosses and sunshine).

Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds was a bit different. First of all, the horror wasn't some spooky being in a cape hiding in the shadows; it came from the skies, in broad daylight, and from something one usually associates with nature and Disney cuteness: average everyday birds. The plot: a flirty, scandal-prone ingénue (Tippi Hedren) plays romantic games with a non-game playing average Joe (Rod Taylor). While they're chasing each other around Bodega Bay, a small coast town near San Francisco, something strange starts happening: common, everyday birds begin attacking people, adults and children, and in some cases, pecking them to death. The tightly knit community of Bodega Bay blames the trouble on the scandalous interloper Hedren, though Taylor, his neurotic mother (Jessica Tandy), and his ex-girlfriend (Suzanne Pleshette) all have enough problems to keep a couple of analysts busy.

The use of special effects, indeed any photographic effects beyond placing a camera in front of actors, is not among Hitchcock's strengths; the bird attacks work OK, though a different director might have made more of an effort to make them more realistic and more graphic. And they worked well enough that I have a vivid memory of screaming like a banshee a couple of years later when a bird dive-bombed me during a picnic in a woods; I was certain that I was going to get chased and pecked like the schoolkids in the movie. But the strength of the movie is the growing atmosphere of unsettled dread, mostly because of the constant possibility of more terror from the skies, but also because most of the characters are rather unlikable people--Taylor is the most sympathetic person here, but even he has a bit of a mother problem that keeps him, in today's lingo, from reaching his full potential as a modern man (he's good looking and nicely built, but doesn't seem like good husband or father material).

But onto the ambiguity (and inevitable SPOILERS): 1) we never find out why the birds are attacking--some apocalyptic man vs. nature message is toyed with now and again, but not seriously; and 2) the film ends with no closure; a sort of truce is reached as the furious flocks of birds that had Hedren, Taylor, and his family trapped in their house suddenly stop attacking and let them take the car and leave. The last shots, of the physically and mentally traumatized family members (pictured) making their way outside to the car and driving away as hundreds of birds are still menacingly massed, are unforgettable and truly shocking, not in a BOO!!-startled way, but in a "what the hell is happening?" way.

I remember being very confused at the age of 7, and asking my mom on the way out of the theater, "What really happened? How does it really end?" as though there had to be a secret, more traditional story and ending that I missed. Poor mom couldn't explain it, and still, over 40 years later, no one has. There is a famous theory that the birds attack to make Hedren, Taylor, and Tandy become better at their most important jobs, being a family to each other, but if I accept that, I have to accept Shyamalan's dreadful Signs, in which God sends aliens to lay waste to the earth just to teach Mel Gibson to be a better father.

I prefer to think that Hitchcock was on the cutting edge of movie modernism, following European directors like Antonioni and Godard in bringing ambiguous unclosed narratives to the local movie theater (and perhaps making the world safe for Bergman's Persona and Kubrick's 2001). I remember being every confused, and a little angry, that Hitchcock didn't explain everything away and punish the forces of evil, but I wanted to see it again anyway. And of course, eventually, I learned that, more often than not, issues of good and evil and morality have more in common with The Birds than Frankenstein or Dracula (or Casablanca, for that matter).

The Alphabetical Film Festival goes to the garden

2010-10-16T11:39:00.006-04:00

Wow, it's been over two weeks since I posted here, and even longer since I wrote about our ongoing project of watching our 3 shelves of DVD favorites in alphabetical order. In real life, we're up to the letter "F," but in blog life, I've only just started on the "B"s, so I'll try to plow through several in the next couple of weeks, not necessarily to catch up, but so I don't feel so much like a slacking slaggard.

BEING THERE: Usually, in the battle between films and literature, literature loses; very few books have been adapted to the screen without losing something major in translation (The Godfather, coming up when we get to the "F"s, is one of the few films that is considerably better than the book). This adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski's novel gets around the film/novel problem by becoming a somewhat different creature from the original. As I recall (and it's been over 30 years since I read the book), the novel is very short and reads almost like a fable: a gardener named Chance, who has been isolated in the mansion and grounds of his employer since he was a child, has to leave his comfortable home when his employer dies. All he knows about the world comes from his knowledge of gardening and from watching television. Because he speaks so simply, he is taken by others to be a genius, using metaphors (drawn from gardening and TV) to spout wisdom, and winds up becoming a national figure in business and politics, never really understanding why or how powerful he has the potential to become.

The book, which is about 120 pages in its mass market paperback edition, was turned into a movie with a running time of over two hours. Aside from having a very different (and to my mind, better) ending, I can't pinpoint the differences between the two, but the movie fleshes out the characters, or at least makes them feel fuller even if we don't know that much more about them. Of course, the movie has the advantage of having Peter Sellers as Chance. Though Sellers was not always a very subtle comic actor (see any given Pink Panther movie or Murder By Death), he gives a marvelously controlled performance here, delivering his dialogue without accent or affect, looking cosmically serene without seeming stupid.

An example of his wit (and Kosinski's) is the scene in which Shirley MacLaine is trying to seduce him in a bedroom while a TV is playing in the background. He basically ignores her pawing of him, saying simply, "I like to watch," meaning he'd rather watch TV than have sex. But she interprets him as a sexual voyeur, so she proceeds to masturbate in front of him. He ignores her, but she feels liberated and thinks she owes it all to Chance's wisdom. Because he is soft-spoken and has a dignified manner, people feel compelled to interpret his simplistic utterings. When asked by the President if the economy will recover, he begins talking about the garden and its cycle of seasons; the President looks mystified briefly, but then decides that he's recommending optimism, that as nature does, so does the economy.

Sellers and the clever script, with its implicit critique of mass media (still potent today in our world of reality TV and the level playing field that allows bloggers to speak their simple little minds with no credentials) make this movie a classic. MacLaine is good, as is Melvyn Douglas, in an Oscar-winning role as a dying presidential advisor. There is one great use of a pop song, Deodato's version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" as Chance leaves his mansion and heads out into the world for the first time. There is also a very amusing string of outtakes under the end credits showing Sellers struggling with a line involving the word "asshole," and prefiguring the now-universal appearance of such clips as extras on DVDs.

Walkers on the wild side

2010-09-26T16:56:00.007-04:00

Just finished a good book called Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell: The Dangerous Glitter of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed, by Dave Thompson. He covers the early years of the three musicians (late 60s-late 70s) when they worked together at various times and places and influenced an entire era of music. The well-researched book is ordered chronologically and bounces around among the three men, examining their friendships and their falling-outs, describing concerts and recording sessions in some detail, and follows to a slightly lesser degree their romances and drug adventures.

If you lived through this era and liked these musicians, you'll like this book, but I'm not sure it's the place to start for young'un newcomers to the 70's glitter rock era. To start with, Thompson doesn't stray far from these three and their immediate friends and entourages--a fair amount of space is given to the Velvet Underground (though I would have liked to hear a bit more about poor, tragic Nico, who is quoted frequently early on), Mott the Hoople, and Marc Bolan, but you'll get no larger musical context in which to situate the glitter/glam scene.

The subtitle hints at another problem with the book: the author's own prejudices creep in to the book too often for this to be considered a definitive, objective history. The word "dangerous" seems to be there for the sake of sensationalism: nowhere does he really make claims that they were dangerous to anyone except themselves and their loved ones. For better or worse, it's probably due to David Bowie that Reed and Pop got strong toeholds on the ladder to rock stardom as he produced or co-produced their biggest commercial successes (Reed's Transformer, and Pop's The Idiot and Lust for Life), but the author presents Bowie in a fairly bad light, as a fickle and inauthentic copier who never stayed interested in any one artist long enough to bring them to full fruition. He gives much more positive attention to Reed and Pop, though it sounds like just as many former friends dislike Reed as dislike Bowie. But I admit to be being titillated by all the gossipy and bitchy details of their interactions.

There's no arguing which one of the three is the biggest star: Bowie. But Pop was a major influence on the punk scene, not just his violent antics at concerts but his sparse and equally violent sound, dark lyrics, and rough-edged vocals (you can hear his influence in punk bands like Joy Division and Sex Pistols, and even in the current band Jet, whose big hit "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" sounds an awful lot like Pop's "Lust for Life"). Reed has arguably had the most marginal career of the three, remaining active but not particularly important or interesting except to fans of the New York avant-garde. Still, it's amazing how much Pop's vocals on Lust for Life sound like Lou Reed. Listen to "The Passenger" from the YouTube clip below and you'll swear you're hearing a Transformer outake (vocally if not instrumentally). Overall, a fascinating read about some fascinating musicians.

Princess of Mars; or, Love and hate and B-movies

2010-09-18T12:07:00.014-04:00

I still love movies, but I don't love current movies. My formative moviegoing years were in the 70's--late-high school, college, and after--and I was lucky enough to enjoy mainstream Hollywood films (both Jaws and Star Wars came out while I was in college) and older movies as well, which I grew to love in large part because I was able to see them on the big screen at revival houses on and near the Ohio State campus. Foreign and underground films were also part of my movie diet.

In fact, the two-year span of 1974-75 (senior year in high school, freshman year in college) was perhaps the most important stage in the development of my moviebuffhood: Jaws turned me into a drooling fanatic--I saw it 15 times the summer it came out, all in theaters (no home video back then); That's Entertainment brought a taste of old Hollywood back to theaters; Nashville, a precursor of the later indie film boom, came out that same summer, though I didn't catch up with it until a year later at a 2nd run theater; OSU-area theaters introduced me to classics (Casablanca, Maltese Falcon, Gone With the Wind, Duck Soup), foreign films (Juliet of the Spirits, Death in Venice, Swept Away), and fringe cinema (Flesh Gordon, Phantom of the Paradise, Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I saw during its initial mainstream release, before the midnight crowds turned it into a hit).

My love affair with mainstream Hollywood began going bad in the 90's; the fact that I had American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies on cable to turn to for older movies, which I began to find far more entertaining and thought-provoking than the current hits may have been a catalyst. Now I pretty much despise the state of current films. I see perhaps 7 or 8 movies during their first theatrical release; I do keep up with the others via DVD and cable, but I rarely get enthused about any of the hits. Only the B-film market seems to provide me with the charge I used to get from major studio productions.

Admittedly, B-movies are an acquired taste, and it was Turner Classic Movies' airing of the wonderful B-films of the 30s and 40s (mostly from Warner Brothers, but also RKO and Republic) that helped me appreciate them. These movies have lower budgets, cheaper production values, lesser stars, shorter running times, and weaker scripts, but when you understand that and have a few of them under your belt, you approach them on their level. You can still find good performances, artistic direction, and interesting stories--Detour (1945), one of the cheapest productions ever, is recognized today as a high-water mark for the film noir genre. Today, B-movies are mostly relegated to the home video or cable market. Some of my more enjoyable movie experiences of the past few years have been thanks to films which either never played in theaters or never got national theatrical distribution (Night Train, Kabluey, Ira & Abby).

Which brings me to Princess of Mars. This 2009 direct-to-DVD film, based on the first book in the "John Carter in Mars" series of pulp sci-fi novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, was apparently made to capitalize on a big-budget live-action Pixar film due in 2012 (not to mention a somewhat dubious claim made on the cover that this story inspired James Cameron's Avatar). The plot involves a soldier, John Carter, who during a moment of crisis, is mysteriously transported to the planet Mars where, because of the gravity, he has great strength and can leap great bounds, and has adventures with green four-armed Martians and the beautiful two-armed Princess Dejah Thoris.

Let me be perfectly clear: this is not a very good movie. In this version, Carter is a soldier in Afghansistan who is left for dead and transported via flash drive to a Mars-like planet. That could be clever, but the idea isn't developed beyond what is needed to get Carter to a planet called Mars 216. The acting is terrible: the stars are former underwear model and soap opera actor Antonio Sabato Jr. (as Carter) and former porn queen Traci Lords (the princess). Both have substantial career credits, but both are just plain bad. He seems to be constantly looking for his acting coach, not finding him, and just speaking the lines as written; she tries for emotions but the Botox gets in the way--that grimace on her face in the picture above is there for almost the entire movie. Despite Lords' presence, there is no sex appeal, and the chemistry between the leads is non-existent. Matt Lasky, as the Martian Tars Tarkas with only two arms, doesn't have to struggle with a 4-arm costume, but he does have to act with a heavy rubber mask with wobbly tusks. The best acting comes from Chacko Vadaketh in the villainous role of an Afghan drug dealer who also winds up on Mars 216. And the effects are sparse; some digital work, but mostly costumes and camera filters.

However, I knew what I was getting into so I had my expectations lowered considerably. I expected bad acting and got it in spades; in fact, Sabato and Lords are MST3K bad and therefore almost enjoyable. I expected bargain basement effects and got them, and was even pleasantly surprised at the effects that worked: the Martian landscape and skies, the giant airship (seen below), and even the cheap trick that goes back to the Superman serials of the 1940s of having Sabato leap up, followed by a cut to a cheap shot of a flying man-model, followed by a shot of Sabato landing with a thud.

What I liked about it for real: no snarky ironic tone to the dialogue, no comic-book humor, a fast-moving story arc, and a lovely lack of digital sheen. Yes, CGI can create marvelous effects and looks, but when overused or poorly used, they look just as fake as the FX of old. I am still interested in seeing what the Pixar folks come up with (I'm sure the Martians will have four arms), and it will be spectacular-looking on the big screen, and with Willem Defoe, James Purefoy and Ciaran Hinds attached to the project, the acting will surely be fine. But there is something light-on-its-feet about this version that is appealing, and I will miss that up against what will undoubtedly be the the dead seriousness of the Pixar version.

1970 Redux

2010-08-29T09:54:00.006-04:00

I lost track of Marc Cohn after his hit debut single "Walking in Memphis" which was, holy cow!, almost 20 years ago now. But he has sustained a choppy career over time and being the baby-boomer I am, I was interested in the concept of his album Listening Booth: 1970 in which he's covered several songs from that year. It's an interesting choice of material: some very big pop hits (Cat Stevens' "Wild World," Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed"), some lesser known songs (Simon & Garfunkel's "The Only Living Boy in New York," Grateful Dead's "New Speedway Boogie") and one of my favorite Motown hits of all time, Smokey Robinson's "The Tears of a Clown."

Cohn doesn't stretch much past his scruffy, modern-folky ways here, and many of the songs wind up being pleasant but uninteresting copies of the originals: "Wild World," the opener, is completely bland, perhaps because others have done more interesting versions, and Eric Clapton's "After Midnight" and CCR's "Long as I Can See the Light" are OK. The best of this batch is "Only Living Boy," which uses the same basic Paul Simon arrangement but the vocal is more laid-back than Simon's more emotional take.

Better are the songs with a bit of a spin to them. Badfinger's "No Matter What" is nicely done in a twangy country style as a duet with Aimee Mann; Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed" is relaxed but seems heartfelt; the only song on here with which I am unfamiliar is the Grateful Dead's "New Speedway Boogie," on which Cohn does a nice job.

The two best songs on here are duets. He sings Bread's "Make It With You," practically the definition of mainstream easy listening music, with India.Arie in a way that makes it sound almost like an current indie song. But my favorite is his take on Smokey Robinson's classic "The Tears of a Clown." That happens to be one of my favorite all-time pop songs, a noisy, chugging, upbeat R&B tune; Cohn slows it down a bit, takes away the horn arrangement, gives the chorus a bit of a delayed spin, and sings it like Elvis Costello--with some backing vocals from jazzyish Kristina Train. Overall, this might have made a better EP with 6 or 7 songs instead of the 12 here, but it's an interesting project, and one aimed right at the hearts and wallets of us baby boomers.

Below is a clip of Cohn performing "The Letter" from Listening Booth:

Alphabetical film festival: A into B

2010-08-20T07:09:00.007-04:00

AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME: Yes, I'm a little surprised and embarrassed that an Austin Powers movie is on my favorites shelf. The first one was clever in places, but seemed to be crammed with every joke that Mike Myers and company thought of, with no editing or crafting. The third one, Goldmember, felt tired. But this second Powers film, like the 3 Bears' porridges, is just right. You can tell they still left in lots of stuff that maybe should have been edited for a sprightlier pace--my single favorite joke in the movie, when Dr. Evil, spinning around in a chair, chants, "The power of Christ compels you" (an Exorcist reference), seems improvised. Some gags go on too long (like the shadows in the tent when Powers is bending over and it looks like Felicity is yanking all manner of things out of his ass). And now that I’ve seen it several times, I can sense a kind of slapdash feel to the production and editing.

But damned if the 12-year-old boy inside me still doesn't raise a ruckus when Fat Bastard comes on the scene with his shit jokes ("I got a turtlehead pokin' out" never gets old) and gross appearance and his unwarranted ego ("I'm dead sexy!"). Normally a character like this would make me tune out, but it's become a classic bit in my head, maybe because Meyers seems to get such joy out of doing the part. I also like Seth Green, the Alan Parsons Project joke, the swingin' 60s bachelor pad, and the perfect casting of Rob Lowe and Robert Wagner as the young and older Number Two--and the crowning joke might well be the deleted scene (present on the DVD) of Lowe and Wagner in bed together. In this case, the everything but the kitchen sink approach to humor actually works--the 2001 shot, the movie stopping dead for Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello to sing, the Jerry Springer opening. Myers may never make another movie I'll want to see, but I do have a soft spot for this one.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST: Like most academics, ex-academics, and would-be academics who actually enjoy overthinking their consumption of books and movies, I have a love/hate relationship with Walt Disney. The Disney studio is perhaps the most obvious pop-culture propaganda machine in the world, in terms of setting the bar for children’s behavior, gender roles, and middle-class family patterns. (I rush to note that Hollywood does this all the time, but for a long time, from the 50s through the 90s, Disney was best--and most obvious--at it because all of their product was aimed at two specific audiences: kids and their parents.) I like the craft of Disney movies, but am not always so happy with their content; though I have fond memories of Disney films from my youth, the only other one likely to be on the favorites shelf is Fantasia.

But this film, made at the peak of their 90s comeback, is sheer delight all the way through. It certainly helps that the propaganda messages are less retro than in earlier films. Belle, the Beauty of the title, is a relatively strong female figure who likes books, doesn't like the macho bullshit of her would-be suitor Gaston, and takes it upon herself (without even the help of mothers, fairies, or guardian angels) to save her father, who has been imprisoned by the Beast in his lonely castle. Instead of cute forest animals, the castle scenes are peopled by animate objects (a candlestick, a teacup, a dresser) whom we discover are people trapped as objects, put under the same spell as their master who was turned into a Beast for his unkindness to a witch.

But it's not the plot or characters so much as the musical score that makes this movie special. The music and lyrics, by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, feel as if they were written for a Broadway musical, not a kiddie matinee (and indeed the film has become a hit stage musical), with memorable melodies, clever lyrics, and songs that explicate character or move the action forward, which didn't happen much in the earlier animated Disney musicals. The "Gaston" number is especially witty: "No one hits like Gaston/Matches wits like Gaston/In a spitting match, nobody spits like Gaston (I'm especially good at expectorating!)" "Be Our Guest," the song that the castle’s furniture and objects sing to Belle, has become a sort of unofficial Disney theme, and the title song actually became a top 40 hit, but my favorite song from the movie is the opener, "Belle," which introduces the everyday life of the town and the character of Belle as a smart but frustrated person (among the mostly happy and funny lyrics, Belle repeats, "There must be more than this provincial life"). This was the first Disney film to incorporate some CGI in with the hand-drawn animation, but I must say on the big HD TV screen, it was a delight to see traditional animation style bursting with color and style. A charming movie that leaves me humming its songs for days afterward.

Baritones

2010-08-02T22:16:00.005-04:00

In the space of just a few days recently, I discovered the work of two rock singers who sounded alike to me, definitely not in style or genre, but in the pitch of their voices. My partner pointed out to me that both men sang in the baritone range, which is somewhat unusual for rock singers, who tend toward the tenor platform (even though, according to the Internet, most pop singers actually are baritones who sing higher than they should).

One is Ian Curtis of Joy Division, an influential punk band from the late 70s. Curtis and the band recorded two albums and an EP before he killed himself in 1980. The remaining members went on, in a different musical direction, to become the influential techno dance band New Order. Based on the studio recordings, Curtis couldn’t hold a tune in a bucket, but that’s not necessarily a prerequisite in the pop music world, let alone in the punk world. He had a deep, heavy, gloomy voice with shades of Jim Morrison which sounded just right for the (generally) gloomy music of the band--which went on to influence not just post-punk but goth, industrial, and techno music. Even in a relatively upbeat song ("Transmission") whose chorus goes "Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio," you had lines like "Eyes, dark gray lenses, frightened of the sun/... Left to blind destruction, waiting for our sight." His monotone baritone had the effect of flattening out all emotions to their sparsest, so dancing to the radio sounded like it would have the same effect as sitting in the dark, waiting for the apocalypse.

The other singer is Scott Walker, who had his biggest success in England as a member of the 60’s pop band The Walker Brothers. [Sidebar: his real name is Scott Engel, he was born in Ohio, the band members weren’t brothers, and no one in the band was actually named Walker.] Their best known hit here is probably "The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore," which has a strong Righteous Brothers vibe. In the late 60s, Walker, fed up with the fame game, became something of a recluse and produced a series of albums of increasing ... I was going to say "eccentricity," but that’s not quite right--he just went his own way, into what I might flippantly describe as "avant-garde easy listening" music, with heavily orchestrated background arrangements not too far from loung music, but lyrics that Sinatra wouldn’t have sung for all the wine and women in Las Vegas: gloomy ("In the unbroken darkness where emptiness empties alone"), abstract ("Play it cool and Saran Wrap all you can/like a 30 century man") and literary (on the almost legendary album Scott 4, a five-minute song which recaps the Bergman movie The Seventh Seal). His voice makes it sound less fey than someone like Marc Bolan would, or less icy than David Bowie would. He sounds like a lounge singer from Mars.

The musical styles of Curtis and Walker are completely opposite, as are their vocal qualities--Curtis' voice is jagged and shallow, Walker's is smooth and deep--but they both conjure up dark worlds of emotional upheaval, and it's not just the lyrics or the backing bands, but the rich shadings of their baritone voices.

Not directly related but interesting nevertheless is the story of how I happened upon these two singers. Both were recommended to me by work colleagues within a one-week period. The colleagues also recommended movies which I saw within the same week: the fictionalized biopic Control about Curtis and the documentary 30 Century Man about Walker, who continues making music further and further removed from the mainstream.

Alphabetical film festival: 2 "A" comedies

2010-07-25T09:03:00.013-04:00

ANIMAL CRACKERS: I grew up watching comedy teams like Abbott & Costello (I liked them, especially their horror movie spoofs), Laurel & Hardy (so-so, but a bit slow for my tastes), Martin & Lewis (didn't really get them), and the Three Stooges (never liked them at all), but it wasn't until I was in college that I saw a Marx Brothers movie and I fell in love with them. Animal Crackers, made in 1930, was out of circulation for many years due to rights issues, but in 1974 it was re-issued in theaters and that's when I saw it. I was practically alone in the theater, and usually comedies are more enjoyable with a big audience, but I laughed myself silly and immediately wanted more Marx. In those pre-home video days, that was easier said than done, but luckily between the re-release of Animal Crackers and Groucho's recent concert tour, the Marxes were back in the media spotlight, and I managed to see many of their films at revival houses and campus showings.

Though casual fans probably best know and like their later MGM movies (such as A Night at the Opera), I prefer their earlier Paramount comedies, which were more whimsically anarchic and relied much less on the MGM formula that always involved a bland romantic couple which the Marxes help out. There is a plot in Animal Crackers--a famous painting is stolen at a weekend house party and the Marxes help (and hinder) the investigation--but it is cheerfully subverted constantly with extended comedy bits that have no relation to any plot thread at all: Harpo and Chico playing a crazy bridge game, Chico pestering a rich guy whom he knew years ago as Abie the Fishman, Groucho as an explorer telling his audience that he shot an elephant in his pajamas (and how the elephant got in Groucho's pajamas, he'll never know). Chico's musical bit at the piano, in which he starts a piece with a plodding melody but can't ever get around to finishing it, is his best solo bit in any of the brothers' films

The three brothers rule the film; Zeppo, the straight-man brother, fades into the background, but Margaret Dumont as the rich and stuffy Mrs. Rittenhouse is memorable as Groucho's best straight "man" ever (and she's even better in their later film Duck Soup). This was theoretically a musical, and two songs from it, "Hurray for Captain Spaulding" and "Hello, I Must Be Going," remained identified with Groucho for the rest of his career. The ending is so strange and almost surreal, I couldn't believe it made it into a major studio film: with the mystery more or less solved and all the characters gathered in one room, Harpo, who has been chasing lovely young blondes all along, sprays knockout gas at everyone, positions himself next to a pretty girl, then sprays himself unconscious. It's a weird but lovely way to bring the manic proceedings to an end. Duck Soup is a shorter, tighter movie, and has more famous lines and bits, but I still think this is my favorite

AUNTIE MAME: Rosalind Russell plays the rich madcap Mame Dennis who alters her partying life when she becomes legal guardian of her late brother's son Patrick. Her friends think that Patrick, like so many other things in her life, will be just a temporary distraction or passing fad, but she devotes herself to the boy, trying to expand his horizons and make him a free-thinker. When he becomes engaged to a stuffy, stupid high-class college girl, she holds a party which exposes her and her parents as asses. The plot is important, but it is Russell's movie all the way and she makes the most of a wonderful character. Though there is no gay content (except for a oddly-highlighted lesbian couple in an early party scene), the film has a high camp factor, not in a bad-movie way, but in the exaggerated humor and the almost over-the-top personality of Mame Dennis. Russell knows just how far to go and when to ease up so she doesn't lose the human touch and become just a drag queen caricature.

The young Roger Smith (pictured above, best known as a private eye on TV's 77 Sunset Strip) is excellent as the college-age Dennis, Coral Browne is fine as a pompous actress who is Mame's best friend, and Peggy Cass steals all of her scenes as the naive Agnes Gooch who is hired to transcribe Mame's memoir ("I'm her *sponge*," she growls). The movie is long and deliberately stagy, with blackouts and fade-ups just as in a Broadway play, and oddly, the one time the film is opened up, when Mame visits a Southern plantation with her boyfriend (Forrest Tucker), it loses steam. Maybe Mame is such a creature of the "stage," turning her everyday life into a performance, that she suffocates when given too much "reality." Russell was nominated for an Oscar and should have won. This is one of my comfort movies that I can put on to banish the blues or to make a snowbound weekend more bearable.

Alphabetical film festival: Annie, and then...

2010-07-14T21:57:00.003-04:00

ANNIE HALL (1977): The archetypal Woody Allen movie, the one it still seems OK to like, the bridge from his “early funny” period to his “serious” movies. I don’t quite buy into that dichotomy as this one is both quite funny and fairly serious, as are many of his later movies, and it served as a model for the modern romantic comedy genre, at least up until the current crop of Seth Rogen-type, men-as-teenagers movies. In the main plotline, Woody woos, gets, and loses Diane Keaton (in a story that seems based on their real-life relationship), but almost as important as the comic love story are two other elements: the character study of the nebbishy hero (who would continue to be at the center of Allen’s films) and the romantic depiction of life in New York City (which would reach its peak in his next comedy, Manhattan).

Equally important is the style, which fractures time, not just in terms of narrative flashbacks and flashforwards, but in the way characters from the present actually go back in time to confront characters from the past: the adult Woody Allen sitting in his elementary school classroom, Diane Keaton’s mother (Coleen Dewhurst) in the 70’s chatting with Woody’s mom in the 40’s. Things that still make me laugh: Woody’s cocaine sneeze, the line from Janet Margolin about a headache as bad as Oswald’s in Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” the 9-year-old girl looking at the camera and saying “I’m into leather,” the surprise appearance of Marshall McLuhan. And the bittersweet ending is just right, though few of Allen’s imitators would dare to end their movies with the guy not getting the girl.

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (1945): The best film version yet of the Agatha Christie classic, also known as Ten Little Indians. The plot: 10 people are invited to a house party on an isolated island--they don’t know each other and don’t know the host, a Mr. U.N. Owen. But after dinner, when the host doesn’t show up, they learn that they have been brought together because the phantom host (U.N. Owen = Unknown) thinks that each one of them got away scot free with some crime or some other bad behavior which should have been punished. One by one, each is murdered in ways foretold by a “Ten little Indians” rhyme. Is one of the ten the killer? Will anyone survive?

Because it’s a Hollywood movie (and because it’s based on a play adapted from the novel), this ending has a couple of noble survivors and an ending that ties up all the loose ends, as opposed to the very interesting novel which has a much bleaker conclusion. But even with the bland ending, this is vintage whodunit territory filled with tricky plotpoints and mostly excellent performances, especially from old pros Walter Huston, Roland Young, Judith Anderson, and Barry Fitzgerald (who overacts much less than usual). This film is apparently in the public domain and hence there are several dicey versions out there, none of them “restored” in any meaningful sense of the word, but still this is one to search out, especially for mystery fans. The acting and writing are good enough that, even knowing how it ends doesn’t spoil return viewings.

Alphabetical film festival: All That Jazz

2010-07-08T12:12:00.008-04:00

ALL THAT JAZZ (1979): Broadway director and choreographer Bob Fosse only made five movies, but two of them are on my favorites list, Cabaret and this one. The critics are right that it's self-indulgent, but when a someone makes a movie about his own (fictionalized) life, self-indulgence should be expected, especially when he uses Fellini's indulgent 8-1/2 as a model. The main character, based on Fosse, is a director (Roy Scheider) who, while working on editing a movie and staging a new Broadway musical, has a heart attack and looks back on his womanizing life. The movie presents his memories as dialogues with a death figure (Jessica Lange, at left) and as musical numbers staged in his imagination.

This film was influential in a couple of ways. First, the rapid-fire editing was picked up by directors of music videos at the dawn of the MTV era--and Paula Abdul's "Cold Hearted" video is a direct homage to the "Take Off With Us" sequence in the movie. It was also, unfortunately, picked up by other directors and has become the default style for the movie musical, to the detriment of dance staged for film. (I liked Chicago and Moulin Rouge but the dance editing tends to make me cringe).

It also helped to set up another movie musical style, best exemplified by Chicago (originally a Fosse stage show). The classic movie musical had production numbers set in the "real" world with characters bursting out in song--Singin' in the Rain, West Side Story. Modern audiences supposedly find this unrealistic [well, duh, but they have no problem with Spider-Man and Darth Vader?] so now, thanks partly to All That Jazz, characters in musicals usually only sing when they're on a stage or fantasizing, even extending to the TV musical Glee.

The acting is solid, and I'm shocked that Leland Palmer, who is excellent as the director's wife, didn't go on to do more films. When I think of Fosse, I see Scheider, who inhabits the role perfectly. The ending is downbeat, but exhilarating in its audaciousness. This was the last movie I saw multiple times while it was playing in theaters. I was 23, out of college, and living on my own for the first time that winter of 1980, and as I didn't have a car (or any friends who lived nearby), I was stuck within walking distance of my apartment for entertainment. Luckily, there was a multiplex theater nearby, and when I discovered this movie, I went back to see it 10 or 12 times during the six weeks that it played (a couple of those times were later, at a second-run house after I got a car). Maybe I liked this movie so much because I had no life at the time, but it's held up over all these years, so I think there was more to my obsession than just having been a lonely gay guy dazzled by glitz and jazz hands.

Alphabetical film festival

2010-06-26T09:33:00.004-04:00

I decided to take advantage of some re-arranging of our basement to finally attempt to organize our DVD collection. The first thing I did was to take our favorite films and put them together upstairs. Now the problem is, what makes a DVD a "favorite"? For the purposes of our home furnishings, a favorite is a movie that we would like easy access to because we're likely to watch it often. There are movies I like and appreciate, like L'Avventura or The Bank Dick or The Scarlet Empress, that I'm glad we own because I'll want to see them again, but they're not ones I'd pull off the shelf with frequency.

It wasn't hard to pick 100 or so discs to put on three shelves upstairs (and, to be honest, most of these are my favorites--Don pretty much goes along with me when it comes to classic movie favorites, and I was kind enough to let him include films like Chicken Run and The Incredibles, movies I'd never choose to watch a second time, let alone 6 or 8 or 10 times, on these shelves). Then Don had a flash of inspiration: we should spend the next several months watching all our favorites in alphabetical order as they appear on the shelves.

Easy enough, it would seem. So we embarked on our little festival. As we made our way through "A," however, I realized there was a problem. Some films that we would certainly count as favorites are either part of a boxed set (such as the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers) and stored elsewhere or are shelved in our Horror Movies collection upstairs (Angel Heart). The solution is allowing ourselves, when we come to the end of a letter, to search through our other "holdings" to see if we've missed a movie that should be on our favorites shelves. We’re planning on making ourselves watch each movie in its turn; the only exception we’ll allow is if we’ve seen the movie already in the past 6 months or so. We’ve also decided that if we come to a film and don’t want to watch it, we’ll remove it from our favorites shelf.

So I’m going to try and write at least a little about each movie we watch over the next several months. I have a difficult time writing critically about movies that I have loved and that have been part of my movie-watching DNA for a long time, but here I can post at least a sentence or two, and wax poetic if I feel the need. If the films are not in strictest alphabetical order, it’s because we’ve backtracked to include those missing films from other shelves:

AIRPLANE!: Along with Blazing Saddles, the best of the self-referential Hollywood satires. Actually, this one isn’t so much a satire as a parody since it’s simply making fun of specific genre conventions (in this case, disaster films) rather than making any kind of pointed commentary about the genres (which Blazing Saddles does, but more on that in the B’s). The silly, scattershot jokes still hold up: the couple arguing over the loudspeakers about what goes on in the red and white zones, the soldier who thinks he’s Ethel Merman, the black jive talkers who have to be translated for the white stewardess. The running gags involving pilot Peter Graves and the little boy he takes a shine to (“Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”) are still funny but also a little shocking, and I don’t think they could get away with these lines in a movie made today. It’s great fun to see serious actors like Graves and Robert Stack and Leslie Nielsen make fun of their personas, though this became Neilsen’s stock in trade for the next 20 years. And whatever happened to the handsome and charismatic Robert Hays?

ALL ABOUT EVE: Still probably the wittiest Hollywood movie ever, with tons of quotable lines, though many don’t mean much without the context of the film behind them:

“Fasten your seat belts--it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

“You’re maudlin and full of self-pity--you’re magnificent!”

“She’s a girl of so many rare qualities.”

“The atmosphere is very Macbeth-ish...”

“You have a point; an idiotic one, but a point.”

“She looks like she might burn down a plantation” (said about Marilyn Monroe)

“Where is Princess Fire and Music?”

The story, about an aging actress who becomes the object of devious machinations by a novice actress who wants to take over her next stage role, remains interesting, largely because the characters are all so interesting. And while the writing is enormously rich, it’s the delivery by a great cast that really makes this worth watching over and over. Bette Davis is spectacular and remarkably watchable in every scene she’s in (which is most of them), Celeste Holm and Thelma Ritter are wonderful, and Anne Baxter and Gary Merrill are solid (though the less said about Hugh Marlowe as the playwright, the better), but the real secret weapon in the film for my money is George Sanders as the nasty but powerful drama critic Addison DeWitt. His every line reading drips with acid, he makes his stock character fully dimensional (a careful viewer will realize he’s not quite as evil as he’s made out to be by Davis and Merrill), and he and Baxter (pictured above) are absolutely thrilling in their climactic verbal battle in her New Haven hotel room. That scene is first-class acting and helped win Sanders a much-deserved Oscar for the film. I could watch this film once a month.

The End of Charlie Chan?

2010-06-12T15:24:00.007-04:00

The Charlie Chan series had something of a bad reputation for a while, not because they're bad movies (most of them are perfectly acceptable B-range detective films) but because the lead character, a Chinese police inspector who lives in Hawaii, was always played by an Anglo actor in "slant-eyed" makeup and with a heavy halting accent. Yes, to modern audiences, this can come off as uncomfortable at best and offensively racist at worst, and I understand why some people choose not to view these films. The fact is that in 30's and 40's Hollywood, an Asian actor would never have been cast in a lead role, so Chan would never have hit the big screen at all if a white actor hadn't played the part. And the movies did provide some jobs for Asian actors; Keye Luke and Victor Sen Yung got started by playing sons of Chan, and both went on to long acting careers. Though Chan's sons were usually buffoonish comic characters, they were also very modernized (and Americanized) characters, and their buffoonery was related not to their race but to their youthful age and inexperience. In several of the films of the 30's, Chan would sometimes be the victim of casual racism, and his character would always remain dignified and ultimately always got the upper hand over the racist.

Several years ago, Fox Movie Channel ran restored prints of many of the Chan films and caught some flack in the media for doing so. Eventually, however, all of the existing 23 Chan movies made by Fox from 1930 to 1942 (a couple of early ones are missing) would wind up on DVD in very nicely packaged boxed sets, all of which include interesting extras, including featurettes and commentaries. Warner Oland played Chan for most of the run until his death in 1938, after which Sidney Toler took over. In 1944, the series, with Toler still in the lead, went to poverty row studio Monogram with some drop in quality--though truth to tell, Fox had been producing the films on the cheap for several years, so over the entire run, the drop in quality seems gradual rather than sudden. A boxed set called The Charlie Chan Chanthology from MGM (which is now out of print) included 6 of the Monogram films. Before the series finally ended in 1949, 11 more followed with Toler, and after his death in 1947, Roland Winters. These have been difficult to run across, but now 4 of those films have been released in a set as a part of the TCM Spotlight series from Warner Home Video. The fact that it's called simply Charlie Chan Collection without a "Volume 1" subtitle appended doesn't give me hope that the rest of the Monogram films will wind up on DVD soon, but you never know. And though these films don't measure up to the best of the Fox Chans, two of them are actually quite enjoyable, and the other two are, if nothing else, interesting for completist fans.

Three of these films, all from 1946, feature Sidney Toler and all more or less follow the same simple formula: someone is threatened, someone is murdered, Chan takes on the case, often as a favor to the local police, and one of his sons winds up bumbling around playing detective and getting in trouble. All three films have a little something in them to make each stand out a bit. The best of the batch is Dark Alibi, in which Chan works to figure out how innocent men are being framed for bank robberies--it turns out that someone is expertly faking fingerprints left at the scene. Eventually there is a murder, some scenes in an atmospheric theatrical warehouse, and a well-shot truck chase at the climax. Mantan Moreland, one in a string of black actors who provided the stereotypical lazy and/or scared valet or driver or butler in many of the Chan films, plays Birmingham Brown; he is paired here with Ben Carter as his brother and the two do some nice double-talk scenes--and to his credit, Moreland grates on the nerves much less than Stepin Fetchit does in Charlie Chan in Egypt. The real highlight of the film is the very last shot in which Chan actually enters into the double-talk conversation, looks at the camera and says how nice it is to talk to people who understand him! Benson Fong is son Tommy Chan, and he is the least Americanized of the Chan sons, retaining more of an accent than any of the others who played sons.

Dangerous Money begins with a wonderfully atmospheric scene on a fogbound ocean liner as a Treasury agent, on the trail of some "hot money" and stolen art, is knifed to death on deck. Here we have a traditional situation in which the detective and the suspects are stuck together in a single isolated setting, which you would think would be good for the mystery plot, but really isn't. The suspects are a rather dismal lot, though there is a kinky little surprise near the end when one of the women is unmasked as a man in drag (it's not really be a surprise, but it's a fun moment nonetheless). The bumbling idiots this time around are Victor Sen Yung as Jimmy Chan and Willie Best as Chattanooga Brown, Chan's valet. There are fish in an ichthyology museum stuffed with stolen money and a mildly amusing scene in which Best fights a stuffed octopus (which reminded me of poor Bela Lugosi's more seriously intended octopus scene in Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster).

The Trap has another group of suspects in a isolated setting: a Malibu beach house where a group of chorus girls are staying with their bandleader, press agent, doctor, and wardrobe mistress, resting up before the next tour. Marcia is the much-disliked star of the show who at least two of the girls wouldn't mind seeing dead; she knows some secrets about the others that they don't want revealed. When Lois is found dead, strangled after doing some dirty work for Marcia, suspicion is placed on the Chinese and French girls (San Toy and Adelaide), since garroting is an exotic foreign method of murder. San Toy calls her boyfriend Jimmy Chan to help out, and Charile and Birmingham show up as well, just in time for Marcia's dead body to be found. The group of suspects is a little more colorful here than in Dangerous Money, and Yung and Moreland are about as tolerable as they were in the other films. Minerva Urecal plays the landlady, who comes off a little like a fat Mrs. Danvers (from Rebecca). Kirk Alyn, whose claim to fame is being the first actor to play a live-action Superman (in a 40's serial), is a cop. Supposedly, Toler was so sick with the intestinal cancer that killed him just a few months after shooting wrapped that he could barely stand up or deliver his lines, but any drop-off in Toler's acting as Chan had, in my eyes, been happening gradually during his tenure in the role, so I couldn't tell that he was appreciably worse here. In fact, this is overall one of the better Toler Monogram films, and along with Dark Alibi, a highlight of the set.

The last film in the box, The Chinese Ring (1947), is the first one with Roland Winters (at right) playing Chan. A Chinese princess visiting Chan at his house in San Francisco is killed via poison dart in Chan's study. As she's dying, she scrawls "Capt. K" on a piece of paper. Of course, there are two "Captain Ks" among the suspects, one of them played by Philip Ahn, a Korean-American actor who went on to play Master Kan on the TV show Kung Fu. Moreland and Yung are back, going through their sidekick paces to even less effect than usual. Winters, another Anglo actor, seems quite uncomfortable as Chan. When Toler took over for Oland, the change was barely noticeable as the two men's looks, make-up, builds, and voices weren't that different; here, Winters seems like he's playing a completely different character--and indeed, the plot is actually a remake of Mr. Wong in Chinatown, one in another Monogram series about a Chinese detective, played by Boris Karloff. This film, though worth watching for die-hard Chan fans, does not make me want to see any of the other Winters films.

The biggest surprise here is how stylish and well directed most of these films are, much more so than almost any other Monogram films, and even more than some of the later Fox films. The plots and actors are par for the course, but these films utilize better sets than usual and there are some interesting camera movements from time to time. Sadly, there are no extras at all, so this set can hardly be seen as a must-have for classic detective-film buffs (unlike the Fox sets), but the prints are mostly in excellent shape. Only a handful of Chan films remain unavailable on DVD, mostly with Roland Winters; for the sake of the series, it would be nice to have the rest, but this one could stand as a fitting epitaph if no more are forthcoming.

Retellings 2: "All this talk of blood and slaying has put me off my tea."

2010-06-08T13:56:00.006-04:00

Disney has done a retelling of a classic story that they themselves told over 50 years ago: Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. This might be the first time Disney has remade one of their own classic-era movies, though calling this a remake of their 1951 film is a bit of a stretch: the original was an animated musical, whereas this version, directed by Tim Burton, is not a musical and is only partly animated, using a mix of CGI and live action. Without rehashing too much of my recent review of two earlier Alice films, the challenge of adapting Carroll's work (most versions incorporate the original Wonderland story and its sequel Through the Looking Glass) is that there really is no traditional narrative arc. Alice's adventures are dreamlike, not logical, and don't exactly have rising and falling action or climaxes. Burton's version has some pluses, but stumbles in its use of a logical storyline with overused elements of quest and coming-of-age narratives.

In this version, set in the Victorian age in which Carroll's books are set, Alice is a teenage girl on the verge of womanhood; at a big summer lawn party, her simp of a boyfriend is set to propose publicly, but she's not ready for marriage. During the party, she sees a white rabbit in a waistcoat hopping through the shrubs and follows him down a rabbit hole to Wonderland (or Underland, as its inhabitants call it). The cleverest conceit here is that Alice has been here before, in half-remembered dreams from her childhood, and all the folks she runs into, from the Rabbit to the Caterpillar to the Mad Hatter, keep asking if she's the right Alice. Of course, she has to come to realize who she really is and embrace her destiny, which is to free the Wonderlanders from the tyranny of the Red Queen by fighting the monstrous Jabberwocky with the Vorpal Sword, as foretold by a magical manuscript.

The best part of the film is the first half-hour or so, before the narrative kicks in, when Burton is more or less directly adapting Carroll. The atmosphere is appropriately magical and a little creepy, and the characters are realized wonderfully, most of them acted by people in motion-capture outfits and produced on screen by a combination of live faces and CGI bodies. Best are Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar and Stephen Fry as The Cheshire Cat. Of the two name-above-the-title stars, Helena Bonham-Carter shines brightest as the whimsically wicked Queen; Johnny Depp, as the Hatter, seems to be acting (or overacting) in a whole different film, one in which he might have been good, but it's not this one. A little bit of Depp in an orange fright wig and crazy green eyes goes a long way, and by the end I had lost all interest in both Depp and the quest storyline. Anne Hathaway as the White Queen is supposed to be a "good guy," but she's actually rather creepy; ironically, an actor who has made a career out of creepy roles, Crispin Glover, is remarkably understated as Stayne, assistant to the Red Queen. Mia Wasikowski does a very nice job as Alice. Visually, Burton comes close to getting it right, but he needed a different screenplay. This is now in DVD from Disney, though not in 3D as it was exhibited theatrically.

Retellings 1: "When the wolfbane blooms"

2010-06-05T14:42:00.003-04:00

Two recent event movies have just been issued on DVD (one was a hit, one was not) and both are retellings of classic stories. The Wolfman continues Universal Studios' misguided attempts at revitalizing their horror franchises of the 30's and 40's, though this one gets marks for atmosphere and for sticking with the original storyline. Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr. in the 40's, Benico Del Toro here) returns to the family mansion on the moors after his brother is found dead and horribly mutilated. His father (Claude Rains then, Anthony Hopkins now) welcomes him with not quite fully open arms, and he gets involved with an old gypsy woman (in 1941, the wonderful Maria Ouspenskaya; in 2010, the very good Geraldine Chaplin) and an attractive young woman named Gwen (Evelyn Ankers/Emily Blunt, both of whom are stuck in thankless roles). Talbot winds up getting bitten by a wolfman and turns into one himself, with tragic consequences.

The biggest difference between the two versions, aside from the obvious upgrade in makeup and gore effects in the current film (and the new movie making "wolfman" one word rather than two), is the identity of the lycanthrope who gives Talbot the bite. [SPOILER] In the Chaney version, it's the gypsy woman's son, a relatively unimportant character played by Bela Lugosi; here, it's Talbot's father, which could have been an interesting twist if the screenplay had actually made either the son or father a rounded character. But that doesn't happen. I have never liked Del Toro, as I find him to be an mumbling, unattractive, uncharismatic block of wood, but at least here, he doesn't mumble. Hopkins is very good as usual; it seems as if he's operating at half-speed, but his half-speed is just dandy. (At least he's not just phoning it in, as Michael Caine and Sean Connery do sometimes.) Emily Blunt, who I like, is totally wasted.

There are two other good things here. One is the gray Gothic atmosphere--I'm kinda tired of all the color-leaching that's the craze these days, turning all action movies into gray-blue-white with occasional blood-red smudges across the screen, but it works here. The other is the wolfman makeup and effects in general. Especially effective is the way the beast runs, starting on two legs then crouching down to four. It's obviously CGI but it works. The DVD contains a longer unrated director's cut which is usually the occasion for harder-than-R-rated gore, but here, much of the missing footage is actually interesting backstory in the beginning which helps us understand the characters a bit more, and contains a nifty cameo by Max Von Sydow who is missing from the theatrical cut. Next time, Tim Burton's Alice.

Paperback (and hardback) writers

2010-05-31T12:30:00.011-04:00

There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of books written about the Beatles, individually and collectively: biographies, annotated discographies, musical criticism, and diary-style tomes that cover their every move every day of their seven-year reign over the pop music world. I have read probably 50 of these books, and I still own 27 of them (yes, this pack rat just counted them). Of that number, there are a handful that I consider essential. For their life stories, there's the 2004 Bob Spitz biography (which supersedes the much earlier, and very good but sanitized, Hunter Davies book). For reference, there's Neville Stannard's The Long and Winding Road: A History of the Beatles on Record and Mark Lewisohn's Beatles Recording Sessions (an exhaustive log of every session ever). The best book on their songs (interpretation, influences, etc.) is Tell Me Why by Tim Riley.

Until now, my favorite book about their career and their music in general was The Beatles Forever by Nicholas Schaffner. Though that is still a wonderful book (and lamentably out of print), I've found an even better one: Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America by Jonathan Gould. Though the book contains some general biographical information, it mostly focuses on the music and how it both influenced and was influenced by the larger culture. Without dissing anyone unduly or playing favorites (honestly, I can't tell if he prefers Lennon or McCartney, and no Beatle fan worth his or her salt is truly neutral), Gould discusses the songs, the recording processes, the performances, and the critical reception of the music.

Of course, much of the info here has been reported elsewhere, but this is the first time I've come away from a book about the Beatles with a strong overall sense of how the hell they did what they did: record twelve incredible albums over seven years and change the world. Gould makes their chronology crystal clear, especially the areas of cultural overlap: for instance, in 1967, as Sgt. Pepper was soaking into the culture, Brian Epstein died, leaving the Beatles to begin the aimless floundering that ultimately hastened the end of their collaboration: making the ill-considered Magical Mystery Tour movie, going to India for spiritual wisdom, starting the business disaster that was Apple Corps. Gould doesn't go overboard in assigning praise or blame to anyone, but it does seem clear that their decline as a group of people working together (if not necessarily as musicians) dates from the loss of Epstein as their manager; even though by mid-'67, he was mostly just staying out of their way, he was still a grounding force in their business lives.

I love reading Gould on the music. He spends a good twenty pages talking about the music on Sgt. Pepper, and then goes on to discuss the reception of the album by critics, other musicians, and the general public. He does this with each album and most of the singles and always has some new insight or tidbit; for example, that "Long Long Long" on the White Album is essentially Bob Dylan's album side-long "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" condensed to under four minutes. He spends three paragraphs on "Norwegian Wood" and more or less pooh-poohs the general wisdom that the song climaxes with the singer setting the apartment on fire (a reading I never really believed).

Despite the book's subtitle, Gould rarely separates England from America in his discussions of cultural reception, and in fact, the sections on politics and other current events of the day are the weakest parts of the book. Luckily, he always returns quickly to the Beatles and their music. While I don't agree with all of his critical judgments (he thinks a lot more of "Yellow Submarine"--the song, not the movie--than I do), I find his writing and his insights always interesting. This is not a new book, having been published in hardcover in 2007, but I just got around to it and I'm glad I didn't let it sit on the "unread" shelf any longer than I did.

Boondock Saints

2010-05-15T12:06:00.006-04:00

Back when I was teaching college freshmen writing, I would often assign a paper in which students had to write about a movie (a review, an overview of critical reception, genre analysis, etc.) and I noticed that every semester, at least a couple of the young men would pick Boondock Saints for their subject. I'd never heard of the movie, probably because it got a very small theatrical release here in the States, but it became a cult hit on DVD and the freshmen boys loved it. I found over the years that my tastes and my students' tastes rarely coincided: back in the 90's, a student told me that, based on my love of the Beatles, he thought I might like Michael Penn's debut album March, and I did, very much, but that was the exception that proved the rule. So despite the rave reviews from my classes, I didn't rush out to catch the movie. My impression was that it was a violent, low-budget vigilante flick that I wouldn't like.

Ten years later, the movie cropped up on IFC and I decided to give it a whirl, mostly because I had discovered I liked the two lead actors (Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus). Set in Boston, the film features Flanery and Reedus as working-class Irish brothers whose tangling with some Russian mob members results in a bloody aftermath (dead Russians in an alleyway). Just as the cops (led by a gay and very eccentric FBI agent, played with relish by Willem Dafoe, pictured above) are getting a citywide search for the killers into high gear, the two give themselves up. They plead self-defense (not entirely untrue) and get off, then decide to continue cleaning up their neighborhood while leading the cops on a merry chase. Dafoe slowly begins admiring the boys and near the end, even gives them explicit aid (by dressing up in scene-stealing drag). The narrative formula: we see the prelude to the killings, then the aftermath as the police collect evidence and Dafoe posits what he thinks happened, then we see the way the killings actually unfolded. The brothers, whose Catholic beliefs are important to the film, are joined by an Italian guy (David Della Rocco) who feels abused by his mob bosses, and there's an odd and not particularly well-thought-through subplot involving a legendary crime figure known as Il Duce (Billy Connolly, with almost no dialogue).

I think my students liked it for the violence, which is copious but not exactly record-breaking for a post-Tarentino crime film. I liked it for its style. The director, Troy Duffy, has a way with a camera and the film always looks good, even when the predictable slow-motion blood-letting starts. The script could be tighter--the plotting in the last half feels rushed and unfinished--but the characters are interesting and the acting is fine all around. Flanery and Reedus underplay nicely, balanced by Dafoe going gleefully over the top. The backstory to the production is soap-opera interesting, and after watching the movie, I suggest checking out the documentary Overnight about the rise and fall of the director; Duffy is undeniably a jackass, but one with talent, and Hollywood is presented as a place that will break all but the strongest or luckiest. I wish I could time travel and share my students' enthusiasm about this film with them.

Dark Shadows drinking game

2010-05-01T15:22:00.009-04:00

I'm old enough to remember Dark Shadows, the gothic soap opera from the 60's. Our local station ran it in the morning, and since I was in school, I could only see in the summertime, but eventually they put it on in the afternoon where it belonged. I loved horror movies so I loved Dark Shadows, but I also liked the characters: Barnabas, the somewhat too-friendly vampire (sometimes he was evil, but mostly he was just a misunderstood romantic hero); Angelique, the incredibly sexy witch; Quentin, the ghost who was also a warlock and a werewolf--because plotlines and characters would bounce back and forth in time, not to mention parallel universes, characters might have many incarnations (and actors might play a variety of characters--have fun sorting them all out over on Wikipedia).

Virtually the entire run of shows (almost five years worth) is available on DVD and we have been watching some of them recently. The problem of returning to something from your childhood after such a long time is amplified by the fact that soap operas are definitely not made to be watched one after another. In any given half-hour show, very little actually happens except that people talk, and talk and talk and talk, usually re-hashing the current plotpoints for viewers who might have missed a show or two. So you have to sit through a couple of hours worth of shows before anything of substance actually happens.

I realized that plowing through 2 or 3 hours of these shows might be more fun as a drinking game. For example, any time information is repeated in the same hour: "We can't find David!"; "I wonder where David is?"; "David is still missing"; "David's not in his room"; "Have you seen David?"

Actually, the "question" is the favored rhetorical device on the show, so drinking whenever a question is asked would be the quickest path to passing out: ""Where are the children?"; "What happened to Willy Loomis?"; "Mrs. Johnson saw a strange man, too?"; "Did you or did you not see a ghost at the top of the stairs?"; "Do you really want me to tell all of Collinwood what really happened to your husband?"

Any of the following sentences should be the occasion for at least a sip: "I don't know"; "I don't understand"; "I've already told you..."

When Dr. Hoffman pauses too long between words (as the actress Grayson Hall tries desperately to remember her lines): "I don't know what you're ... talking about"; "Barnabas Collins ... is ... (nervous facial twitch) ... upstairs."; "We've changed all their lives by ... being in 1840"

Each episode begins with brief narration to set the stage. Any of the following lines should be drunk to: "The dark night hides..."; "The daylight brings..."; "In parallel time,..."

Finally, have a drink every time that the matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Joan Bennett) is interrupted by someone while she's trying to get her paperwork done.

Curmudgeon's heart melted by indie rom-com

2010-04-23T12:28:00.009-04:00

It seems I'm always disappointed in movies these days, but over the past few weeks, I've been pleasantly surprised by three movies: Ira & Abby, The Boondock Saints, and Were the World Mine. The only thing they have in common is that they are non-studio independent films. First up is Ira & Abby, a delightful post-Woody Allen romantic comedy set in New York. Ira (Chris Messina) is a cute-nebbishy guy stuck in dissertation hell (i.e., he says he's working on his dissertation but he's not and will almost certainly never finish). His love life is in neutral as well; it's expected that he'll marry his long time girlfriend, even though they break up and get back together regularly. After his analyst suggests that he needs to make some changes in his life, he visits a gym, only half-inclined to join, but winds up falling for Abby (Jennifer Westfeldt), a charming, slightly scatterbrained membership salesperson at the gym--think Phoebe on Friends but smarter. The very afternoon they meet, they have sex in her office and she proposes marriage--think Dharma and Greg, but better.

The rest of the movie follows the course of their relationship from the wedding to the first fights to an annulment, to a reconciliation and remarriage, to the realization that they still don't really know each other all that well, and so on. The proceedings do have a Woody Allen feel and for me, that's a compliment (though Manhattan is not shot as magnificently as in Allen's movies, and the wit is not as pointed here). There are a few marginal sidekick characters, including a small bit from a pre-Mad Men Jon Hamm who you won't recognize, but the real supporting gems are the parents: Judith Light and Robert Klein as Ira's folks, both analysts, and Fred Willard and Frances Conroy as Abby's folks, more carefree people who do voice-over ad work. In fact, eventually the movie becomes almost as much about them as about the title pair, especially when Willard and Light embark on an unlikely affair.

All the actors are just wonderful, and though the writing (by co-star Westfeldt) and directing (by Robert Cary) are strong, the acting is the reason to watch this film. Messina (Julie's husband in Julie & Julia) is a perfect young 21st century Woody Allen-type, though much sexier and a just a bit less neurotic; Westfeldt brings a welcome seriousness and intelligence to her free spirit character. All four parents are quite good, though Light (seen above with Willard) is a real scene-stealer. Good supporting performances are given by a number of actors (including Jason Alexander) who play various analysts and counselors along the way, leading to a climactic scene in which all the therapists and patients gather in one big room. And I'm torn about whether or not to spoil the ending; I think I won't, except to say that the "message" about love and marriage isn't quite what you will expect. It's just a lovely, light, fun comedy that I recommend highly.

Odds and ends (3), with bonus George Clooney content

2010-04-18T20:18:00.006-04:00

Finally, a quick buzz through another handful of recent viewings:

A Serious Man: Not a Coen Brothers high (Blood Simple, Fargo) or a low (Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn't There), but an interesting middling effort. Set in 1967, the film follows the tribulations that beset a college professor (Michael Stuhlbarg, pictured with Alan Arkin): his wife is leaving him for an old friend, his son is getting ready for his Bar Mitzvah while getting in trouble for listening to the Jefferson Airplane in school and facing the wrath of a bully, his at-odds brother (Richard Kind) is staying on the couch while he sorts his life out (part of which seems to include a sexual attraction to men), and his sexy neighbor invades his dreams. Stuhlbarg is a Job figure, not understanding why he is suffering, and like Job he gets advice from three men, in this case, rabbis. Just as suddenly as things went awry, things get better, but as the last moments of the movie suggest, not for long. The performances are good and as with most Coen Brothers movies, it looks great, but honestly it just didn't stay with me long. One minor point: though clearly set in 1967, references are made to two albums (Santana's Abraxas and Creedence Clearwater's Cosmo's Factory) which didn't come out until 1970. This seems like an odd mistake for Coens to make, unless it means something--Abraxas was a mystic Gnostic figure and the comsos is the cosmos.

A Single Man: Another movie about a college professor beset by troubles; here, Colin Firth gives a superb Oscar-nominated performance as a gay man in the early 60's dealing with grief over the death of his younger lover a year earlier. The film is set on one day in his life as he attempts to put his life in order and commit suicide. However, the attentions of a sympathetic student, who may be in the process of coming out, make his change his mind. The ending, like that of A Serious Man, suggests that life may simply be a cosmic joke. The movie is good, but Firth's performance is outstanding.

The Informant!: True story of a whistle-blower (Matt Damon, who put on a real beer belly for the role) who isn't quite as noble as he appears. The tone is one of dark humor, and Damon is quite good as the strange layers of his character begin peeling off, but again, not a movie that stuck with me.

Bright Star: The real-life romance of John Keats and his muse Fanny Brawne; very much an old-fashioned Masterpiece Theater kind of film, and if that's what you're in the mood for, you'll like it. Ben Whishaw is very good as Keats, but no one else stands out.

Fantastic Mr. Fox: Quirky little stop-motion animation film about a fox who, despite trying to take care of his family and move up in the world, has a hard time fighting his natural urge to steal chickens, and gets in trouble for it. I had never seen a Wes Anderson film until now--most of his movies (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic) sound interesting but offputting. This was not offputting, but there's not much to it. Still, it's worth seeing for the animation, the look, and the ubiquitous George Clooney who does the voice of the title character.

Odds and ends (2), or George Clooney can do no wrong

2010-04-13T13:19:00.007-04:00

More catching up on winter viewing:

Up in the Air: An Oscar nominee and a success at the box office, this seems like a real oddity in today's movie marketplace: a movie that is so old-fashioned mainstream (and not ironically like Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven) that it's almost avant-garde. Now that I think about it, another thing that makes it avant-garde is that, despite a strong narrative and well-developed characters, it works mostly as a sustained mood piece. George Clooney plays a man whose job--getting hired by big companies to come in and fire long-time employees--keeps him on the road most of the year, and that's the way he likes it. When a nervous young employee (Anna Kendrick) proposes that the firings be done from the Tulsa home base via laptop, Clooney worries that his free-floating life of casual relationships and few responsibilities will change, so he takes her on the road to test her new method and to show her what firing in person is all about. As expected, both characters undergo change, but not necessarily how you think they will.

Clooney makes his character a likable, non-mysterious enigma; we never quite get under his skin, but we can feel how comfortable he is spending so much of his life in airplanes and having casual sex with similarly inclined women. Kendrick is unable to make her character stand out, but Vera Farmiga is very good as Clooney's current sex buddy. Clooney has become one our best actors, in the same unassuming way that Cary Grant and James Stewart did. He can take on a wide range of roles, make his characters fleshed-out and feel lived-in, and do it effortlessly--as opposed to Pacino or Nicholson who, good as they are, show the effort (and intend to, I think). This seems to be a mood piece because, even thought the narrative is not static--things happen, people change, emotions are expressed--the whole thing feels very calm, like a smooth cross-country flight; even though there may be a bit of turbulence, nothing mars the smoothness for long. I mean that here as a compliment.

The Men Who Stare at Goats: My other Clooney movie of the season, this one is not as good but Clooney shines anyway. Based loosely on a true story, this focuses on a reporter (Ewan McGregor) who discovers the existence of a small Army unit devoted to developing new-agey techniques, one of which is the ability to affect a living being with your mind--the men stare intently at goats and hope that they will drop dead. The previews made me think of the Coen Brothers doing Kurt Vonnegut, but the film lacks their off-kilter sensibility, despite the fact that the plot is rather off-kilter. Individual performances are solid, including the deadpan McGregor, Clooney as an intense acolyte of the founder of the unit, Jeff Bridges playing that founder in laid-back hippie mode, and Kevin Spacey as the military bad guy. It just doesn't come together; tone and mood are all over the place, even though a consistent tone would seem to be called for (see the Coen Brothers and Vonnegut). But Clooney, who carries much of the movie on his shoulders, is a joy to watch, as always.

Odds and ends (1)

2010-04-09T13:08:00.007-04:00

I've been lazy and haven't written much lately, and I have a big backlog of movies to catch up on, so I plan to buzz through most of them very quickly in the next few posts so I can spend more time and space later to write about three movies I have fallen in love with recently. Here are some I didn't love:

Inglourious Basterds: This Oscar nominee, set during WWII, was disappointing. I run hot and cold with Tarentino, and I was definitely cold on this one. The problem was that it felt like 2 different scripts, neither of which got the attention it needed. In the first and most publicized plot, Brad Pitt and a scrappy band of Allied (and mostly Jewish) soldiers go nutty killing Nazis and scalping them; the ones they let live get off with just a swastika carved in their foreheads. In the second, more interesting plot, a young Jewish woman whose entire family had been massacred by the Nazis plots revenge when high Nazi brass, including Hitler, decide to attend the premiere of a new propaganda film (starring a dashing Nazi hero played by Daniel Bruhl, pictured) at the theater she operates. For all the press that the first plot got, Pitt basically has a supporting role here--really, no one actor gets enough time to be a star. The theater story has the makings of a good Hitchcockian thriller, but with the exception of a strong sequence set in a basement cafe, the two storylines come together in a lackluster fashion.

An Education: This Oscar nominee, set in England during the early 60's, was equally disappointing. An Oxford-bound high school student (well played by Carey Mulligan) gets a different kind of education when she falls for an older man (well played by Peter Sarsgaard) who, though charming and successful on the surface, is a bit of a basterd (oops, I mean "bastard"). It's a rather boring coming-of-age story; I like that Sarsgaard isn't a total creep--more like a kid who never quite grew up--and that Mulligan doesn't seem horribly scarred by her experience, but there just isn't much heft to the story. The acting by the two principals (and by Alfred Molina as Mulligan's working-class father) is the main reason to see this bland melodrama.

Movies I haven't seen

2010-03-25T18:52:00.009-04:00

I'm a movie buff, with my comfort zone being the 1930's through the mid-80's--though I'm not crazy about the 50's and have only recently begun exploring that decade's offering. Therefore, I pride myself on having seen most of the canonical Hollywood works of those years, and many, many lesser films as well (the lesser films being what my other movie blog, Michael's Moviepalace, is all about). The last movie I remember seeing at a theater multiple times was Angel Heart (1987)--OK, yes, I did go back to the cinema to see Titanic and Phantom Menace 2 or 3 times each, for the spectacle of the big screen.

What I've found surprising lately are the movies I haven't seen that one might expect a film buff to have seen. Following is a list of 10 such movies (no particular order); some I've avoided because of genre, some because they just don't appeal to me, and some I want to see but just haven't gotten around to them yet.

1. The Shawshank Redemption: When I taught college English several years back, this was the movie my students couldn't believe I hadn't seen. I like Stephen King, I don't like prison movies, so it's a toss-up. I'll probably see it eventually.

2. Pretty Woman: I don't like Julia Roberts, and the more I heard about this Disneyfied whore story, the more I became opposed to seeing it. I really don't think I'm missing much

3. Shane: I'm not a fan of Westerns, though I have seen a handful of the biggies (like Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Good The Bad & The Ugly). This one was out of circulation for a while, but now that TCM airs it on occasion, I have no excuse--I guess I need to see this one. Other big Westerns I haven't seen include Red River, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Magnificent Seven.

4. Marty: I'm not a fan of kitchen sink realism, unless it's done by the Brits (Look Back in Anger, et al.). This one sounds just dreadful. I tried to watch The Catered Affair, another Ernest Borgnine movie written by Paddy Chayefsky, but gave up in the first half-hour.

5. Rebel Without a Cause: I've heard so much about this one, I feel like I've seen it.

6. An Affair to Remember (and the movie it was based on, Love Affair): I'm not a big fan of romances, especially 50's ones, and again, I feel like I've seen this one--I saw Sleepless in Seattle; doesn't that count for something?

7. Sergeant York: I like Gary Cooper in the 30's, not so much in the 40's. As with Shane, I imagine I'll see this eventually (TCM runs it every month, it seems) but I just can't get excited about it.

8. Ferris Bueller's Day Off: I keep seeing the same 10 minutes of this when I stumble across it on cable--where the principal comes to visit the supposedly sick Bueller at home. I like some other teen comedies of its time (Heathers, Clueless), so I'd probably like it.

9. Most of the Best Picture Oscar winners of the past few years: Million Dollar Baby, Crash, The Departed, Slumdog Millionaire. I just don't care.

10. Jerry Maguire: C'mon, I know the catchphrases ("Show me the money!" "You had me at hello"); isn't that enough?!

Disasters

2010-03-16T18:07:00.005-04:00

The mystical, new-agey theories about the end of the world coming in 2012 because that's when the Mayan calendar ends are total hogwash, but the old-school sci-fi buff in me can see a fun movie being made about these ideas. Sadly, 2012, which came out last year and is now on DVD, is most assuredly not that movie. It is about the end of the world, but the Mayan stuff which could have been made the screenplay interesting plays almost no part in the plot. What really happened, I think, is that Roland Emmerich (maker of better disaster films like Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow) decided to do a remake of the 50's movie When Worlds Collide, in which Earth is about to be destroyed by another planet, and when he found out that Stephen Sommers (director of the Mummy remake and the terrible piece of celluliod crap called Van Helsing) had the rights to that--due out in 2012 according to IMDb--he threw in the Mayan theories as a convienent plot device, though it is totally jettisoned after the first few minutes of the movie.

Instead, the damned thing becomes yet another in a string of dumb movies (too much money spent on effects, not enough on screenwriting) in which an apocalypse occurs just so a man can become a better father (Day After Tomorrow, the Spielberg War of the Worlds, the execrable Signs). Here, that man is John Cusack, sleepwalking through his part as a divorced dad--though he does manage sly delivery of a few humorous lines now and then. Amanda Peet as his ex-wife (do ya think she might still love him?) and Tom McCarthy as her new partner (do ya think he might sacrifice himself so the exes can get back together?) are OK.

Two actors work up some presence: Chiwetel Ejiofor as a scientist who tries to warn the governments that freakish sunspots were shooting powerful neurtrinos at the earth, which could cause the core to heat up, which could cause planetwide earthquakes and flooding; and Woody Harrelson as a crazy radio host who spouts conspiracy theories at the drop of a hat (and who, of course, happens to be right about the coming apocalypse). Eye candy is provided by the handsome Estonian actor Johann Urb (pictured) as a Russian pilot who helps get Cusack, et al., to the government arks which have been designed to allow a handful (several hundred thousand, actually) to survive. Yes, the effects are pretty spectacular, particularly the fall of the Christ the Redeemer staute in Brazil and the flooding of the Himalayas, but any goodwill such digital destruction might have built up was itself destroyed by what amounts to an "extra" interminable half-hour ending after Cusack's family gets to the ark that comes right out The Poseidon Adventure (and without the camp presence of Shelley Winters, that's not a good thing) and feels like it goes dragging on for three hours.

Speaking of disasters, the film of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, also out on DVD, is atrocious. I was too old for the book to have been a touchstone of my childhood, but I do like most of Sendak's books, and I hate that Hollywood has done to this one what they've done to Dr. Seuss: taken very short, wonderfully whimsical stories aimed directly at kids and turned them into long, lumbering, bloated grotesqueries aimed more at adults who wish they were kids. The wild things themselves look great, actual people in big animal suits with facial movements done by CGI, but it's not worth sitting through the boring story about poor Max having to deal with adult neurotics in his escapist fantasyland. Shame on you, Spike Jonze. (Dave Eggers, co-writer, has no shame.) One pleasure: hearing Tony Soprano's heavy, mouth-breather voice (yes, it really is James Gandolfini) coming out of a Wild Thing's mouth.

Alices in Wonderlands

2010-03-07T13:23:00.008-05:00

Tim Burton's take on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland opened Friday, and since I run hot and cold on Burton, I may or may not see it, but the director did make a couple of interesting points in an recent interview. First, that the Alice story (the original Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the sequel Through the Looking-Glass) is not strong on narrative. Despite providing fodder for many literary, film, and television adaptations, there is really no plot there, just an episodic account of Alice's strange trip meeting odd creatures and dealing with illogical thinking. Secondly, Burton says that there is no iconic film version out there, so he felt less pressure to live up to any other artist's vision. I think he's right: the Disney cartoon of 1951, despite giving us the lovely little ditty, "I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date...," is not especially memorable, and no other version I can think of has any claim to mass acceptance as THE Alice we all think of.

However, baby boomers who watched a lot of TV when they were young, like I did, may remember the 1933 Alice in Wonderland with great affection, as I do. The film has been mostly missing in action for the last 20 years or so, though I remember seeing it more than once on kiddie matinee TV shows in the early 60's. TCM ran the film once or twice several years ago, but it vanished down the rabbit hole again until last week when it was issued on video for the first time by Universal. The plot, such as it is: young Alice (Charlotte Henry), is frustrated with being kept inside on a snowy winter's day, so she falls asleep and dreams of an extended visit to the land on the other side of the mirror. She has silly and surreal encounters with strange creatures and wakes up all cozy back in her overstuffed armchair, with her kitten in her arms.

This movie may well have had an influence on THE WIZARD OF OZ six years later, not just in the trajectory of the plotline (it's not a big stretch from Alice to Dorothy), but in the fantasy sets, magical effects, and elaborate costumes. The impact of having so many guest stars is blunted because most of them are under so much makeup, they are unrecognizable. You certainly can't prove by me that it's really Cary Grant under the Mock Turtle outfit; he might have just dubbed in his weepy dialogue and odd song. The same thing goes for Richard Arlen as the Cheshire Cat, Charlie Ruggles as the March Hare, and even W. C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty. The most recognizable are Edward Everett Horton as the Mad Hatter and the wonderful Edna May Oliver as the Red Queen. As an adult who was watching largely to spot the stars, the film came off to me more like a revue of short and vaguely comic sketches that, more often than not, have no real punch line or payoff.

My favorite bits: Horton and Ruggles singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat," which would not have been out of place in a Monty Python episode; the Duchess' freaky baby (Billy Barty) who turns into a pig; and Polly Moran as the Dodo, reciting "dry" history in order to dry off a soaking wet Alice. Charlotte Henry as Alice is serviceable but nothing more; she seems far too unflappable given all the bizarre and chaotic transformations she is witness to throughout. The creepiest (but also funniest) thing in the movie is the talking leg of mutton at the climactic party.

Also out on DVD from Warner Home Video is a 1966 TV film done by Jonathan Miller for the BBC. Though not the most faithful or satisfying version, it makes for very interesting viewing. First, though the DVD cover is in color, the film itself is in black and white which would seem to work against the story's colorful characters and settings. In practice, however, this makes the film feel far less dated than it might have been if it had been shot in Day-Glo 60's color. Also, the actors playing the odd creatures are not put in fantastic make-up or costumes, but in Victorian dress. Overall, the entire production feels quite contemporary. Alice (Anne-Marie Mallik, pictured at the top of this post) is a teenage girl who falls asleep in a summery field and moves through her dream world unimpressed by her strange encounters; she spends most of the film as though she's about to slip into a sullen snit. In the beginning, it seems like this is going to be about Alice finding out some truths about herself (she wonders out loud, "Who am I?"), but we quickly come not to care about her in the least.

Star-spotting here is much easier to do: John Gielgud is the Mock Turtle (at right w/Alice), Wilfrid Brambell (Paul's grandfather in Hard Days' Night) is the White Rabbit, Peter Sellers is the King of Hearts, and Michael Radgrave is the Caterpillar. The Cheshire Cat, in what amounts to a cameo, is played by a cat. The most fun is provided by Peter Cook as a prancing Mad Hatter, who is more fun in the finale than in his Tea Party scene, which is too successful at attempting to reproduce the tedium of a snooty afternoon tea party. Also enjoyable is Leo McKern in drag as the Duchess with the pig baby; his scene is short but quite amusing. The score, which is also a plus, is by Ravi Shankar. The movie assumes that its audience is already quite familiar with the work, and of course we are, so the whole thing has a dreamy, impressionistic feel to it which works in its favor. Actually, I quite liked the film except for Alice, which is the fault of the director rather than the actress. The DVD also contains an entertaining commentary from Miller, an 8-minute silent version from 1903, and a biopic about the real-life Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Carroll's Alice, done by Dennis Potter for the BBC the year before. Both of these films make for interesting viewing for adults, but I don't know that today's kids will enjoy them.

War is a drug (and he needs to score)

2010-02-23T07:27:00.008-05:00

I can see why, in a relatively underwhelming year for award-worthy films, The Hurt Locker is getting lots of attention, but I was a bit disappointed in this Iraq war story which centers on Jeremy Renner (pictured above in full protective gear) as an Army soldier who is part of a bomb defusing squad. The acting is good, especially Renner who underplays magnificently, except in one barracks-wrestling scene in which he overplays equally well. The director, Kathryn Bigelow, handles the tension of the bomb defusing scenes nicely (though as with most movies which contain any action at all these days, I could have done with a little less of the constant camera jittering). The atmosphere of paranoia and a kind of forced camaraderie among the squad members are also nicely played.

For me, the problem is the narrative, or lack thereof. Renner joins the squad and immediately gets a reputation for taking daring risks and staying cool (some would say foolishly so). And that's pretty much it: he and his squad go on missions, risk their lives, blow off steam that night (or try to), and do the same thing the next day. There is a subplot in which Renner bonds with an Iraqi teenager and loses it when he finds the boy dead, having apparently been fitted out to be a human bomb--there is more to this story which I won't spoil here. However, we never get any sense of what makes Renner tick (no "bomb" pun intended): we know he's tightly wound and is a man of few words, and at the end, when he returns home to his wife and kid, he misses his job and signs up for another tour of duty.

The message of the movie, as such, is presented blatantly at the opening in a quote: "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug." Unfortunately, the rest of the movie never gets much beyond that simplistic (though undoubtedly true) phrase, aside from some facile comparisons between war and video games. Though I am not a big fan of action movies or video games or anything very adventurous, I am not immune to the visceral pleasures of such things; this movie, however, rarely got me into Renner's mindset, perhaps partly because the audience empathizes more with the other squad members (Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty, both very good though overshadowed by Renner) who are mystified and a little scared of Renner. Good stories show rather than tell, but ultimately, the movie doesn't really tell me or show me how war is a drug for Renner's character.

My iPod Top 40, part 4

2010-02-18T20:01:00.006-05:00

I've noticed that a lot of artists I really love, like David Bowie, Cat Stevens, Stevie Wonder, Blondie, Paul Simon, and Prince aren't on this list. Partly that's because I still pop full-length albums these folks into the CD player now and again, so I may not have as many songs by them on my iPod. Of course, another factor is that there are 2800 songs on my iPod. Here's the final 10, all of which had about the same amount of plays (between 22 and 20):

31. Valotte -- Julian Lennon: He sounded just like his late dad in this debut single; that fact combined with the solemn tone of the song makes this a sad listen, but like most of the other songs here, it's a great sing-along, even if lyrics are so personal that they don't make much sense--are he and his girlfriend breaking up or getting back together?

32. Watching Xanadu -- Mull Historical Society (a one-man band composed of Colin Macintyre, at right): A chimy, Spectoresque pop song; like "Valotte," rather impenetrable lyrically, but more concretely about heartbreak (though in the happiest way).

33. Elenore --The Turtles: This band had a great run of almost-bubblegum hits in the late 60's; I say "almost" because, although they are sonic cotton candy, the lyrics were usually a little sharper or more satirical than the average hit of the day. This one has some great lines: "Your looks intoxicate me/Even if your folks hate me"; and in the chorus, "You're my pride and joy, et cetera." Happy Together and She'd Rather Be With Me are just below my top 40.

34. Song on the Radio -- Al Stewart: His time in the white heat of the pop spotlight was short (1976-1980) but he produced good literate folk-pop, with the emphasis on pop radio production. Year of the Cat is his best known song, but my favorites both come from the album after that, Time Passages (the title song and this one).

35. Oh Girl -- The Chi-Lites: Smooth old-school soul harmonies in the service of an exquisite expression of heartbreak--one of the best cathartic sad songs I can sing along with.

36. Aja -- Steely Dan: Eight minutes or so of pop/jazz heaven which make my fingers and feet go crazy (so I have to be careful in the car). Also a damned great album.

37. I Can't Get Next to You -- The Temptations: When I've a beer or two in me (never while driving!), I sing all five parts, high, low, and otherwise, louder than anyone wants to hear. I *am* The Temptations! ("Never while driving" refers to the drinking part--I always sing all five parts alone in the car)

38. Take On Me -- A-Ha: Beautiful crystal-clear singing, perfect glossy pop production, sheer happiness.

39. Nathan Jones -- The Supremes: After Diana Ross left, it was mostly downhill for the Supremes, but this chunky slice of kiss-off to a man who's been gone too long ("The key that you're holding/Won't fit my door") with some pseudo-psychedelic phasing effects is fabulous. Bananarama's version may be more famous, but the original can't be beat. The sentiments here would be more forcefully echoed a few years later in "I Will Survive."

40. Hey Jude -- The Beatles: The ultimate Beatles sing-along, and one of the few rock songs that give me a happy memory of my father. He was definitely not a fan of rock & roll--his tastes ran toward Frank Sinatra and Dixieland--but in the late 60's, in his last year or so of Air Force duty, he was in Southeast Asia as a navigator of fueling planes and when getting some R&R at the local bars, he became very familiar with "Hey Jude" as, so he told me, every night, someone would eventually put it on the jukebox and everyone in the place would stop and sing along. The thought of my old man singing along woozily with the "Na-na-na-nas" at the end, along with the younger guys and the hookers, gives me pleasure, both perverse and familial.

Below, the Temptin' Tempts. Picture me three sheets to the wind.

My iPod Top 40, part 3

2010-02-17T16:30:00.005-05:00

21. 16 Military Wives -- The Decemberists (at left): One of the few current rock bands I follow, this is a rare example of social satire in modern-day pop music (not so much anti-war or anti-military, but anti-media), plus it's catchy as hell, with a rousing march cadence.

22. Don Juan's Reckless Daughter -- Joni Mitchell: Toward the end of Joni's pop chart reign in the late 70's, this long song about dichotomies (good/evil, air/earth, skin/feathers) is wonderfully structured, well sung, and contains some of the best lyric writing of her career: "What strange prizes these battles bring/These hectic joys, these weary blues/Puffed up and strutting when I think I win/Down and shaken when I think I lose." My favorite Joni song that's not on the Blue album.

23. I Should Have Known Better -- The Beatles: Don't know why this is here; it's average early Beatles pop. Maybe because it brings back good childhood memories, but almost any song off of their first couple of albums does that for me.

24. The Windmills of Your Mind -- Dusty Springfield: The kind of loungy middle-of-the-road song I used to disdain in my youth which I have now come to appreciate for songwriting craft and, in this case, for a killer arrangement--slow and sexy in the beginning, and suddenly fast and furious near the end.

25. Suzanne -- Noel Harrison (at right): Another great Leonard Cohen song that's been done by countless artists. I like Cohen's scratchy, full-of-longing version best, but this one, sung by Rex Harrison's son, was the closest it came to being an actual top 40 hit. It's watered down but enjoyable, and his vocal is easier for me to sing along with.

26. Cruel to Be Kind -- Nick Lowe: Nick is supposedly a pop genius, and I've tried to like him, but I just don't. Still, this is a gem, with energetic acoustic guitar strumming and a great vocal.

27. Listen to the Radio -- Sloan: Canadian pop band who should be huge in the States (and surely would have been in the late 80's) but aren't. From an wonderful album called Never Hear the End of It, made up of 30 short songs which mostly segue together quite nicely. This one is just long enough to stand alone.

28. Under Pressure -- Queen & David Bowie: This song is good enough to forgive for inspiring Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby." Great sing-along in the car.

29. Bang-Shang-A-Lang -- The Archies: The first Archies album was a seminal work for me, and I mean that. It was a Christmas present when I was 12 and I played it to death. It's filled with fabulously crafted bubblegum and Ron Dante, the lead singer, has the archetypal bubblegum voice, much smoother than Joey Levine of the Ohio Express. One of my very favorite bubblegum songs of all time, and to my ears, more fun than their bigger hit "Sugar, Sugar."

30. Photograph -- Ringo Starr: The one Ringo solo song that will live forever, co-written with George Harrison, a great pop song about remembering, sad but peppy.

Below, lovely Dusty and and her windmills.

My iPod Top 40, part 2

2010-02-16T11:21:00.005-05:00

More of what my iPod tells me are my most-played songs:

11. Rain -- The Beatles: A great sing-along, even if it does strain my voice and have a backward vocal section with which I can't sing along.

12. Hallelujah -- Rufus Wainwright: A fantastic Leonard Cohen song with one of the best opening lines in pop music: "Now I've heard there was a secret chord/That David played, and it pleased the Lord/But you don't really care for music, do you?" I also have versions by k.d. lang, Tim Buckley, Leonard Cohen, and a nice a capella version by the Freshman Fifteen. This too is a good "alone in the car" sing-along, with dramatic intensity and vocal reaching, though the a capella version is closer to my natural pitch.

13. Don't Give Up On Us, Baby -- David Soul (at left): Sorry, but I love it.

14. Nightswimming -- REM: Mysterious and beautiful, words which can describe so many REM songs.

15. That's The Way God Planned It -- Billy Preston: Preston's first pop hit, though not a big one, but it came out during my magical 13th summer of 1969, so it'll be with me until the day I die.

16. I'm Gonna Make You Mine -- Lou Christie: Bubblegum songs could get away with so much in the guise of being "just" teeny-bopper music. This one is peppy and cheery, but it's kind of about a stalker. Still, it's another one from the summer of '69, as is...

17. Love Child -- Diana Ross & the Supremes: Technically, this was a hit in the fall of '68, but I didn't discover it until the next summer, and it's one of the first records (aside from Beatles songs) I remember working out an elaborate lip-syncing routine to. My brother, my neighbor friends and I would sing and play air guitar to lots of songs, but I saved this one for the privacy of my own room, since lyrics like "I started school in a worn, torn dress that somebody threw out" weren't lyrics that junior high boys sang.

18. Burn Down the Mission -- Elton John: Dramatic, bombastic, with wicked piano pounding and cryptic lyrics that seemed like they meant something--that's the best of early Elton in a nutshell, and this is my all-time favorite of his next to "Rocket Man" (which I guess isn't in my top 20 because I hear it so much on oldies radio, I tend to skip it sometimes when it plays).

19. Classical Gas -- Mason Williams: My favorite pop instrumental.

20. Seasons -- Grace Slick: A very unusual song for Slick if you only know her from her work with Jefferson Airplane/Starship. It's primarily driven by an orchestra and a children's choir; it has a weird Russian lilt that always makes me think of Dr. Zhivago, and a fantastic speed-up finale. See below:

My iPod Top 40, part 1

2010-02-12T18:15:00.009-05:00

Within days of becoming a rabid fan of pop radio (back in 1969 when I was 13), I also became a collector of pop charts. Every trip to downtown Lazarus was an occasion to pick up the WCOL Hit Line, a printed list of that station's Top 30, and not long after that, I discovered that a little newsstand right in Grove City (the Columbus suburb where I lived) carried Billboard Magazine, which published the national music charts of record for the music industry. I couldn't afford to buy every weekly issue, but I bought as many as I could, and I still have a pile of at least a hundred in my mom's basement (even though it's unbecoming for an 50+ man to still use his mom's house as a storage facility). I also still have hundreds of WCOL charts from 1969 through about 1976, and they are cherished possessions. I was also a faithful listener of Casey Kasem's American Top 40, every Sunday morning after church.

Though I liked watching the rise and fall of the records I loved (and hated), what I really liked was seeing the names of records that weren't on the local charts. It always seemed that among those songs could be some fantastic overlooked pop gem that Columbus radio was keeping from my ears. To be honest, Columbus was actually a dream town for pop music. WCOL-AM was relatively adventurous back then and would often give odd little songs airplay after dark, even if the songs never actually made their chart, and later WNCI-FM would become even more interesting, with a top 50 list that always included some strange things. Lazarus would carry many more singles than WCOL played, so sometimes I'd buy a 45 that I'd never actually heard. One way or another, I wound up able to hear almost every song that made Billboard's Top 100.

Those days are long behind me--I gave up on current pop music sometime in grad school (mid-90's)--though I have never lost my fascination with music charts. You can ask some of my co-workers about my ongoing side project (in which I indulged at work at the reference desk when things were slow) of making my own singles charts for each year from the mid-60's to the mid-90's, in which I collated chart info from as many as 10 different online sources (trade publications, radio station playlists, and other lists that other chart fanatics had previously put together. Someday maybe I'll post some of those here.

But now, I have my own top 40. Not necessarily what I would pick as a carefully considered list of my favorite songs, or the ones I think are most important or influential, or even the ones that mean the most to me personally, but the ones that I've actually been listening to the most on my computer and iPod over the past couple of years. Some caveats: Many of these songs are here because they are on several playlists (based on genre or years or artists) that I have in heavy rotation; some are here because when they come on, I don't care enough to turn them off or skip to the next song; some are here because they put me in a certain mood in which I like to be; and I'm finding many to be here because they are fun and easy to sing along with. My list, with annotations, below and over the next few days.

1. Barbara Allen -- Art Garfunkel: This old folk ballad is about a young man who withers away and dies because the love of his life, Barbara Allen, was pissed off at him for dissing her at the tavern a few nights earlier. Then she dies. I hope there is more to the story than that, but I have yet to read any more interesting interpretation. This version is on Garfunkel's first solo album (from 1973), which I owned but never listened to much. I discovered it a few years ago and I enjoy both the weird storyline and Garfunkel's crystal-clear tone and emotional reading of the song. This is by far the most-played song on my iPod, I guess because it is on several different playlists (70's, folk, "Nightswimming," High School). Though I'm no Art Garfunkel vocally, when I put the melody down a notch, I can sing along pretty well.

2. Shine on Me -- The Wondermints: Wonderful glowing 21st century bubblegum; more about it here.

3. Alice Long -- Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart: Wonderful bubbly 1960's bubblegum, from two guys who wrote several Monkees songs. [At the top is a picture of the Bilboard Hot 100 from my birthday week in 1968, and if you click on it for the larger version, you can see this song perched at #34.] Speaking of the Monkees...

4. Daydream Believer -- The Monkees: One of the first 45's I ever bought.

5. Love is Blue -- Paul Mauriat: The epitome of Euro-easy listening lounge music

6. Blue Jay Way -- The Beatles: More here.

7. The Magic Garden -- Dusty Springfield: The first of two Jimmy Webb songs in the top 10; I whimsically came up with a entire genre of music named after this whimsical but intense song (see here).

8. The Girl's Song -- The Fifth Dimension: Another Jimmy Webb song; stupid title, but catchy as hell. I don't know why the Fifth didn't have a bigger hit with it.

9. Tomorrow Never Knows -- The Beatles: I don't sing along as much as yell or chant along.

10. Across the Universe -- Rufus Wainwright: I actually like the various Beatles versions of this song better (from a charity album, from Let It Be, from bootlegs, from the Let It Be remix album) but Rufus's vocals are strong and clear, and again, fun to sing along with.

More soon... Below, a YouTube slide show of "The Girl's Song"

God & Ricky Gervais

2010-02-03T22:20:00.005-05:00

To make his first film as writer and director (along with Matthew Robinson), Ricky Gervais seems to have made a pact with the devil, so to speak. The Invention of Lying has a brilliant and thought-provoking "indie film" premise but it comes wrapped up in mainstream Hollywood romantic comedy packaging, and that packaging ultimately overwhelms the interesting gift inside (yes, a tortured metaphor if ever I wrote one).
Gervais and Robinson have dreamed up a world in which the ability to lie never evolved. People never say what isn’t true and have no concept of lying, to the point where there apparently is no such thing as fiction—Gervais's character works at a film studio and all films are tedious historical documentaries. There is also, we eventually learn, no such thing as religion since no one has made up stories about gods or afterlives. As Gervais' mother lies dying in a hospital bed, horrified at the prospect that life is over, Gervais desperately tries to console her by telling her she’s going to a better place where everyone has a mansion and she’ll see all her old friends again. Mom dies with a smile on her face and the nurses who overheard his story spread the word about this afterlife, not realizing he made it up. Soon he has become a somewhat unwilling prophet, a combination of Moses and Jesus, improvising stories about a big man in the sky who has given him rules for living for the crowds who have come to his door.

This is a daring and refreshing premise for a movie: to take for granted that religions are not "true" in the rational historical sense. And it did provoke me to thinking: while I'm on Gervais's side and not a believer in any religion (I'd sooner believe in the Greek gods than the Holy Trinity), I also am not sure I'd say that every religious prophet is a "liar." If a person really believed that Jesus Christ died, was resurrected, and went to Heaven to save our souls, I wouldn't say that he is lying. Rather than believing something that isn't so, he is believing something that would seem to be against rational thinking, but that isn't necessarily a lie. More interesting is the idea that religions are fictions, told and believed for a variety of purposes, from social control to placating the sick and depressed, but this isn't explored at all in the film.

At any rate, this is bracing stuff for a while, and it's also funny to see people unable to tell even "white lies" for social convenience. Jennifer Garner, the woman Gervais is dating, tells him time and time again that he's too short and pudgy to be good genetic stock for her childbearing efforts. When he arrives for their first date, he says she seems distracted and she admits that she had been in the middle of masturbating, then goes off to finish before they leave for dinner--funny, it was always my experience that masturbating happened *after* dinner, when the date didn't go like you wanted it to. The centerpiece of the movie seems to be Gervais's delivery of his made-up "ten commandments," written out on two tablet-like pizza boxes; this plays out like an inspired bit of stand-up comedy and is indeed quite funny. But eventually, the triangle between Gervais, Garner, and the handsome but shallow Rob Lowe takes center stage and the movie winds up safely in romantic comedy territory.

Still, it's different for a Hollywood film. I'm not sure how I feel about Ricky Gervais. I liked his series Extras, but didn't love it. I liked The Office OK, but didn't keep watching it. He does the schlubby everyman bit well (an everyman who is often a bit of a jackass), but he will need to either grow beyond that or flesh it out a bit to sustain a movie career. I do recommend this film and give big points to Gervais for going where few others have gone before him.

Happiness is...

2010-01-24T17:07:00.008-05:00

When I was 10, I was a theater geek—in addition to acting in children's theater, I was reading Shakespeare and Edward Albee (didn’t quite "get" what was going on in Taming of the Shrew or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf), collecting the annual Best Plays book series, and listening to original cast albums of hit musicals. My other big passion was comics, and these two interests came crashing together in 1967 when I got the cast album of the off-Broadway hit You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, based on Charles Schulz's comic strip Peanuts. It went into high rotation on my record player, along with albums of The Music Man, Oliver, and Man of La Mancha (with the Beatles in there occasionally as well). The songs were as funny and inspired as the strip, the adult actors did a good job of sounding like kids, and the music was catchy, being both simple (the primary musical instrument in evidence was piano) and complex (the way multiple voices and melodies wind together in "Book Report"). It caught the tone of the strip as well, pitched between youthful happiness and adult melancholy: though the characters are children, they dealt with grown-up anxieties like loneliness, peer pressure, and love.

In 1985, the musical was adapted for television as an animated hour-long special on CBS. For the network, this certainly made sense since the first Peanuts TV show, A Charlie Brown Christmas, had became an instant classic, and several more shows followed. However, the TV shows were fully-developed half-hour narratives, whereas the musical really had no plot; it was a series of songs and sketches that followed Charlie, Linus, Lucy, Schroeder, and Snoopy through an average day. I saw the show on its initial airing and remember being disappointed. I suspect it was not a big hit because it hasn’t become a standard network rerun. Now it’s out on DVD from Warner Home Video for re-inspection.

I enjoyed it more than I expected to, but I can see why it hasn’t become a classic. First on the minus side is the aforementioned lack of narrative drive. In fact, the one segment that does build up some plot momentum, the baseball game, in which Charlie Brown writes a letter to a pen pal about participating in a championship game, is the weakest part of the show. Though the cartoon could show action that couldn’t be presented on stage, it doesn’t, so the game is “told” through Charlie's letters rather than shown. This refusal to use the full breadth of animation possibilities is a problem throughout. The couple times they do go fanciful, as in Lucy and Schroeder’s "Moonlight Sonata" number, work well.

The other big stumbling block is the use of children to voice the characters. I understand why they did this: kids were used in the other Peanuts cartoons, and certainly A Charlie Brown Christmas would not have been half as charming as it was if adults had done the voices. But here, having children sing a score intended for adult voices is a weakness. Jessie Lee Smith, as Lucy, does fine, but everyone else is just passable, and Kevin Brando as Charlie Brown can't hit the high notes at all, which caused me much cringing.

On the plus side, though the 48 minute show is forced to cut some of the stage material, the best songs remain, and they still work well. "Book Report," in which we see the kids each dealing in their own ways with having to write a book report on Peter Rabbit, is an absolutely charming number, and it's well-animated—I especially like the touch, fairly early in the digital era, of having Schroeder composing his report, in which he tries desperately to compare the boring Peter Rabbit story to the exciting exploits of Robin Hood, at a computer screen. We see him start sentences, then change his mind and delete them from the screen (indicated in the original score by a slashing sound, like a pencil against paper); then, we see the Robin Hood adventures animated in the style of a primitive video game. Snoopy doesn't speak out loud but he does have an interior speaking and singing voice, and his mellow song "Not Bad At All" is a highlight.

Other particularly enjoyable songs include Snoopy’s joyous ode to "Suppertime," the cheery march-type theme song, and the sweet "Happiness." In an unusual twist for Charlie Brown, he actually gets a couple of happy moments during the last two songs, though he still loses the baseball game, can't get the red-haired girl, and is the only kid at school who doesn’t get a single Valentine card. On balance, it's nice to have this available, but even better would be if a video recording surfaced of the original cast performance (which included Gary Burghoff and Bob Balaban) or the 1999 Broadway revival with Kristen Chenoweth and Roger Bart. The new DVD, available January 26th from Warner Home Video, has one short but disappointing featurette: no video or audio of any of the stage shows, no biographical material about the musical's author, Clark Gesner, and interviews with talking heads who seem to have done about 5 minutes worth of research on Wikipedia. Otherwise, the print on the disc is in very good shape.

Time, time, time, see what's become of me

2010-01-19T21:51:00.006-05:00

Time travel stories come in three varieties: in perhaps the most common kind, someone travels forward well into the future and sees wonders or horrors (H.G. Wells' The Time Machine). In the second kind, someone travels backward through time to some historical era and often tries to alter some event (stop Lincoln from being killed, for example), and inevitably one of the paradoxes of time-travel is dealt with: could we change history, or would our efforts be in vain?—Ray Bradbury’s short story "A Sound of Thunder" is an excellent example of this. The third kind involves travel that's not so far-flung, just a few years or months or even days into the past or future; this highlights another brain-numbing paradox of time-travel: what would happen if we met ourselves? The first example of this kind of story I ran across was David Gerrold's novel The Man Who Folded Himself.

Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes) is a low-budget Spanish film from 2007 which follows in the footsteps of the American indie film Primer (2004). Both are small scale sci-fi time travel movies which use virtually no special effects, but also need multiple viewings in order for the viewer to keep track of the various temporal comings and goings. However, having seen Primer, I was prepared to let go of the need to know exactly where, when, and why everyone is where they are, or why they should or shouldn’t be someplace.

Hector (Karra Elejalde) is relaxing in his backyard, scanning the woods with his binoculars, when he sees a nubile young woman taking her clothes off. With his wife off on an errand, he goes into the woods looking for the girl and finds instead a sinister figure with a bandaged head (above) wielding a pair of scissors and darting about in the trees. Hector takes refuge in a isolated research laboratory and runs into a handsome, bearded scientist (Nacho Vigalondo, at left) who tells Hector to hide inside a large pod-shaped device, which turns out to be a time machine which sends Hector an hour into the past, which means there are now two Hectors running around in the woods, and thus begins a frantic attempt on the part of Hector and the scientist to get Hector's life back into one timestream.

The rest of the movie doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, but if you go with the flow, it's interesting and sometimes tricky fun, though ultimately a shallow and somewhat depressing exercise in convoluted storytelling. If you've seen Primer, you'll figure out generally where this is heading. Vigalondo, who also wrote and directed, has a solid screen presence, but unfortunately Elejalde, his leading man, does not, and I found it difficult to care much what happened to him, or the two female characters who are basically just plot devices. Still, a diverting time travel fantasy which you should see before the big stupid inevitable Hollywood remake gets it totally wrong and turns it into a big-budget film with Bruce Willis and Christian Slater.

Not quite a buddy movie

2010-01-10T14:53:00.010-05:00

Humpday is an indie film about two old college friends who reunite after a few years apart: middle-class Ben is married and he and his wife are trying very hard to have a child; the unsettled bohemian Andrew, who fancies himself an artist, in town for a while, is invited to stay with Ben, and winds up shaking up Ben's life with a drunken proposal that the two of them enter a homemade porn movie contest by shooting the heterosexual friends having sex.

This sounds like fun, but it's not. It's a comedy in that it's not a tragedy and it's not terribly serious in tone, but it's also not very funny; there are very few jokes or punchlines here, and scenes that have potential to be humorous wind up being just uncomfortable. That's actually kind of admirable, I guess, but it's not very entertaining. I suppose in tone it's kin to the films of cringing discomfort made by Sacha Baron Cohen (I haven't seen Borat or Bruno and have no plans to do so).

Many critics believe that this plot took the modern buddy/ bromance movie to an awkward extreme, but that's not quite accurate. Ben and Andrew aren't really buddies anymore; in fact, they seem to barely know each other. It would have been more interesting to take two real friends, guys out of a Seth Rogen movie, and subject them to this quandary. These two guys have little intimate chemistry (unlike, say, Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law in Sherlock Holmes) and once they're sober, there seems to be no good reason for them to even think about going through with their plan, aside from Ben's weak reasoning that it's a chance for one last stab at something crazy.

Indie stalwart Mark Duplass (pictured) is very good as Ben; Joshua Leonard, one of the guys in The Blair Witch Project, is fine as the unlikeable Andrew. Ben's wife, played by Alycia Delmore, is also fine, and has perhaps the most memorable scene in the movie when Andrew lets their plan slip to her, thinking that Ben had already told her. Though the film had a written screenplay, much of the dialogue came out of improvisation, and I'm sorry but I'm through pretending that improv is arty and honest and all that; improvised acting makes my ass tired. Humpday was written by a woman (Lynn Shelton) and I give her points for heading into territory where few male filmmakers would probably tread without Jim Carrey or Will Farrell in tow, but it's still a disappointment.

A Brilliant Darkness

2010-01-06T10:35:00.011-05:00

It seems lately that even non-fiction books I enjoy I bitch about because they're badly written or badly structured or badly edited or not proofread at all. So I definitely want to write a short post about A Brilliant Darkness: The Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Ettore Majorana, the Troubled Genius of the Nuclear Age by João Magueijo. I don't know what possessed me to pick up the book as I have no affinity for physics and had never heard of Ettore Majorana, but I did and I'm happy to report this is that rare treat of a non-fiction book that is both very interesting and very well written.

In 1938, Majorana was a promising young nuclear physicist, ultimately seen as responsible for discovering the neutrino, who had spent several years off the radar due to depression or madness or just plain stubbornness. He was teaching at a university when he vanished, last seen on a ship to Naples. Some evidence suggests he may have been suicidal (and some of today's revisionist thinkers want him to have been upset over forecasting the terrible potential of nuclear power), but the last written communications from him indicate he had gotten past his darkest moments and was feeling more optimistic. In any case, he was never seen again, though he has had an Elvis-like afterlife, with sightings around the world and persistent reports that he dropped out and joined a monastery.

Most of the book consists of alternating chapters which focus on Majorana's life and on his physics (and the physics that came after him); try as I might, I couldn't grasp the science chapters, even with cute little illustrations of subatomic particles. But really, the narrative story of Majorana and of the author's interviews with various family members and conspiracy theorists is fascinating and crystal clear, and remarkably well-written. He stretches a bit to come to a thematically appropriate conclusion, but overall Magueijo, who is a physicist, is also a damned good writer (and, incidentally, quite good looking [see below], which is maybe why I picked the book up in the first place ;-). Whether you have a science background or not, I recommend this as a good read.

An Elementary New Year

2010-01-03T09:53:00.012-05:00

I am a fan of Sherlock Holmes, though not a fanatic. Mostly, I like the series of 14 movies made between 1939 and 1946 with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson. I've read perhaps a dozen of the original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, but I don't feel compelled to forge on through all 56 short stories or the 4 novels--in fact, I enjoy Holmes' homages and pastiches by other authors more than the Doyle originals. I more like the idea of Holmes that has been established in popular culture: the eccentric bachelor whose prodigious skills of observation and reasoning always lead him to solve the crime, sometimes going undercover, sometimes without even leaving his digs at 221-B Baker Street.

Over the New Years' holiday, we had a mini-marathon of Holmes movies (some on DVD, some courtesy Turner Classic Movies), virtually all ones I'd never seen before: 3 of the later Rathbones (Pearl of Death, Dressed to Kill, Pursuit to Algiers), one early British talkie (Sherlock's Holmes' Fatal Hour, with Arthur Wontner, who looks more like the original Holmes illustrations than any other filmed Holmes), and the new Hollywood blockbuster with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law.

I don't automatically object to tinkering with or updating Holmes and his world; after all, in the Rathbone movies, Watson is turned into a blundering, blustering fool, which he was not in the stories (his portrayal in Fatal Hour as a staunch assistant is much closer to how Doyle wrote him). Also, aside from the first two films in the series, Hound of the Baskervilles & The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the other twelve Rathbone stories are all updated to wartime England. When the previews for the new Sherlock Holmes made the character look like an action hero, I was intrigued--after all, the character does engage in the occasional fisticuffs in the stories and earlier films. But sadly the director, Guy Ritchie, goes beyond action hero to superhero, and Holmes' legacy is the worse for wear.

The plot of the new film has promise: Lord Blackwood, who has killed several young women in occult sacrifices, is caught by Holmes and Watson and put to death, but seems to return from the dead to finish his plans to use the dark arts to conquer England and the world. Downey, though far fitter than any other Holmes I've seen (I have missed Jeremy Brett's TV portrayals, which many fans like more than the Rathbone movies), is a little too eccentric for my taste. Yes, Holmes was an odd duck, but Ritchie has not bothered to tone down Downey's twitchy intensity, which actually worked well for him in making Iron Man stand out a bit from the superhero crowd. Still, Downey (above) is not the main problem. Neither is Jude Law (below) who is quite wonderful as Watson and even manages to subtly steal some scenes from Downey with his reaction shots.

The real problem is the use of the computer in the film's look and style. This is yet another movie with a grungy gray color-leached palette, lots of computer-generated fog and smoke, artificial fast- and slow-motion fight scenes, and wildly improbable and very artificial looking set pieces involving CGI structures and a vertigo-inducing swooping camera. None of these things is necessarily bad, used in moderation and for particular effects, but we get an overdose of them here, at the expense of dialogue and character. Downey and Law work well together, and there is an occasional good witty exchange, but fistfights, body blows, pistol shots, and concussions (and all the rollercoaster Dolbyized noise and vibrations that go with them) are the rule here, so for the climax to be climactic, Ritchie has to go all X-Men and Spider Man on us, and the last 15 minutes or so, set on the unfinished Tower Bridge, are just dreadful. The movie is also, in general, badly directed; many scenes look off-center or framed on the fly, with more attention paid to the fast editing of the action scenes than to coherent dialogue scenes.

The women, admittedly not a big part of the original Sherlock's world, get incredibly short shrift here: Rachel McAdams moseys through the thankless damsel-in-distress role of Irene Adler and Kelly Reilly, interesting looking though she is, has nothing to do as Watson's fiancee; we don't get to know her at all, though I was thankful that she was not presented as a hapless harpy, jealous of Watson's relationship with Holmes. Speaking of which, this may be the gayest Holmes ever; Holmes seems to physically want Watson every minute of the day (well, yeah, he's Jude Law!), and despite Adler's supposed romantic history with Holmes, the two have zero chemistry.

Still, I can't say I'm sorry to have seen this. There is fun in fits and starts, and the Satanist plot provides some good moments for Holmes' rational puncturing of supernatural baloney. Unfortunately, Ritchie cares too much for visual baloney. This isn't a movie I can imagine wanting to see a second time.

So very meta--

2009-12-31T14:22:00.005-05:00

One last surprise for the old year. Charlie Kaufman is a writer of TV shows and movies. I didn’t like Being John Malkovich, I didn’t like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and I hated Adaptation. The ideas behind all those movies are interesting but the films themselves are obnoxious and off-putting and full of decent actors doing bad work (and the dreadful Jim Carrey being dreadful). There were two reasons why I even made a stab at watching Synecdoche, New York; 1) Kaufman hadn’t directed any of the above films—this is his directing debut, so I figured he couldn't do any worse than Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry; 2) ever since my graduate school days, I've had a love/hate thing for works of postmodernism and metafiction. So I gave this a shot and to my almost horrified surprise, I liked it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is a schlubby struggling theater director (has Hoffman ever played a non-schlubby character?) who, after having a moderate success with a version of Death of a Salesman, decides to go whole hog on a huge theater project: staging his own ongoing life story, in a huge warehouse set the size of several city blocks, with actors playing the parts of himself, his loved ones, and friends. The unfinished project goes on for years, and eventually Hoffman casts actors to play the actors who are playing real people. His wife leaves him, his daughter grows up, his romantic life suffers, and he becomes paranoid about his health. Still, the show must go on.

The key for me to enjoying this movie was letting go of any ideas of reality or coherence right from the get go. The first scene depicts what seems to be an average day in Hoffman's life while working on "Salesman," but if you pay attention to background details, you see that months are flying by (from September to Halloween to Christmas and beyond) rather than minutes. Not only is time weird here but so are everyday events: his young daughter poops neon-green; years later, after his artist wife and daughter leave for Europe, the daughter's diary, hidden under her pillow, updates itself magically with entries on her experiences; the wife has a successful career creating paintings so small that they can only be seen through a magnifying glass; a young woman whom Hoffman begins dating lives in a house that is perpetually on fire. Rather than being a chore to keep track of, the later doubling and tripling of characters/actors becomes great fun.

Perhaps most surprisingly, amongst all these postmodern & metafictional shenanigans, I actually found a rather sad and almost profound core of feeling at the center of the film, though I can't really articulate what "message," if any, I took away from it all. I think it's probably allied to Samuel Beckett's "I can't go on; I'll go on" philosophy expressed in several of his works. You can feel the weight of Hoffman's problems, real, imagined, or exaggerated, pressing down on him and yet he continues to work (for 17 years!) on his "play." Hoffman is fantastic (not unusual), and the rest of the cast, including Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Dianne Weist, and Tom Noonan, are fine, though no one else is given enough "meat" as a character to challenge Hoffman. I suppose to truly unravel the plot mysteries, you would need to watch this several times, but I'm not sure I want to go back and break the spell of the first viewing.

2009 Catch-Up, part 2

2009-12-30T16:23:00.008-05:00

A few more notable movies I saw during the past year that I haven't already written up here:

Playing By Heart (1998)--Though over ten years old, this film still feels like an archetypal current-day indie movie: several narrative threads whose connections aren't clear until near the end; quirky characters; a mix of big-name actors, soon-to-be-famous actors, and actors who didn't go anywhere; and conflicting tones of comedy and melodrama. It also has a "newbie" element, in that the project feels very personal for the first-time director/writer (Willard Carroll, though technically this was his second film). The film follows the paths of several couples, some romantic, some not. Sean Connery and Gena Rowlands are an older couple dealing with his cancer diagnosis and with some unresolved past issues; fragile Gillian Anderson dates flippant Jon Stewart; Ellen Burstyn reconciles with her gay son (Jay Mohr) who is dying of AIDS; at the center is the strange on-again/off-again relationship between party girl Angelina Jolie and an attractive but chilly boy toy (Ryan Phillippe). Dennis Quaid also appears as a guy who pops into bars, chatting up strangers of both sexes with clearly made-up tales of his life. Though we don't see the connections until near the end, virtually everyone winds up together in a climactic wedding scene which, despite seeming inevitable, does come off as fairly clever. The performances are all over the map, with Jolie and Anderson faring the best. The comedy is never very effective (the cast members in the above publicity still look far happier there than they ever do in the movie) and the melodrama is often trite, but there is still something winning about this small-scale production.

Caché (2005; aka Hidden)--A comfortably upper-middle class French couple (Daneil Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) are terrorized by a stranger who constantly videotapes their comings and goings and leaves the tapes on their front porch--the above picture of the couple's neighborhood becomes very familiar to the viewer. The husband soon connects the threatening surveillance to a shameful secret from his boyhood involving an Algerian man who, as a boy, had been briefly adopted by his family. This is a fairly effective thinking person's thriller, using Hitchcockian tension to tell a story of suppressed guilt and politics. There's not a lot of action or violence (except for two short scenes which are quite shocking) and the long takes become a bit wearing, but overall this kept my interest, and its ambiguous ending works well.

Brick (2006)--A film noir homage set at a high school, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a drab loner who plays private eye when his ex-girlfriend vanishes and is later found dead. He goes through his paces as a downer Bogart and most of the noir cliches are present, including hard-boiled slang, violence, and a femme fatale, but it just doesn't come together. Gordon-Levitt is good, as is Lukas Haas as a kind of tall and skinny Sydney Greenstreet figure, but the other performances, the plotting, and the visual style are all forgettably bland. This probably sounded good on paper but it's not worth catching.

2009 Catch-Up, part 1

2009-12-26T13:44:00.011-05:00

I suddenly realized, as I scanned the magazine covers at the newsstand last week, that in addition to the usual year-end lists of favorite movies, music, etc., everyone is also making "Best of the Decade" lists as well. My consumption of popular culture these days is decidedly odd, skewed away from both the stuff at the top of the box-office or record charts, and the stuff that winds up being critical faves. I tend to watch and listen to the stuff that ends up in the vast middle, stuff that might make a small splash but then vanishes from the radar.

I don't know that I feel moved to do a decade-encompassing list or post, though I will probably make a year-end list soon. But as I looked over my movie and book journals, I noticed several works I found notable (for reasons both good and bad) that I haven't mentioned here yet, so I'm going to try and cover those very briefly over the next week.

Up (2009)--As a rule, I don't care for Pixar movies; as with the products of the Harry Potter machine, I can appreciate that they are well-made and even clever, and yes, they may be more than "just" kids' stories, but I find them uninteresting and uninvolving. This one, I enjoyed, mostly due to its visual style. An old man, under pressure to sell his property so high rises can be built, ties balloons to his house and floats away, along with a Boy Scout stowaway, to find an adventurer he had admired in his childhood who has been missing in South America for years. The plot is standard-issue moralizing about hero worship and fulfilling our dreams, but almost wordless opening sequence, which encapsulates the old man's life from childhood to the present day, is lovely, and the colorful balloons that fill the screen from time to time are delightful eye candy.

District 9 (2009)--Aliens who look like tall insects make an emergency landing on Earth, in South Africa, and are soon relegated to ghetto camps, despised and distrusted by humans. They can't seem to leave--it turns out they are working on producing fuel needed to get back home. A human, just as prejudiced as anyone else against the aliens, winds up wounded and slowly begins transforming into a human/alien hybrid. The authorities, who are doing grotesque experiments on sick and dying aliens, want to get hold of him and he throws his lot in with the aliens. A rather heavy-handed allegory for any number of intolerance atrocities (slavery, Nazism, apartheid). The digital creatures (actors in motion-capture outfits who are then erased out of the frame and replaced by CGI) are effective, and Sharlto Copley is very good as the human-alien. The production was relatively low-budget but doesn't look it.

The Invasion (2007)--Dreadful remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; despite the presence of Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, and Jeremy Northam, this movie barely kept me watching to the end, and 2 weeks later, I could barely recall a thing about it. Watch the 1956 and 1979 versions, both excellent, instead.

Whatever Works (2009)--Woody Allen just keeps on keepin' on, making variations on his earlier, more inspired movies, even if audience and critics don't follow. Here, Larry David (above) plays the Woody Allen character, an aging misanthrope whose life is changed when he falls for a very young girl (Evan Rachel Wood). Yeah, the pairing is a little creepy, even without knowing Allen's real-life situation with the almost 40-years younger Soon-Yi Previn, and there is absolutely nothing new here; even the gimmick of David talking directly to the camera is a re-heated Allen technique. But David makes a somewhat fresh substitute for an on-camera Allen, Wood and Patricia Clarkson are good, and the handsome Henry Cavill (below) is a treat.

Hamlet 2 (2008)--A high-school drama teacher who is about to lose his department stages a wildly irreverent musical version of Hamlet. The YouTube teaser for this, a production number called "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus," is great fun, but nothing else in the movie even comes close. Steve Coogan, a big comedy star in England, has done nothing for me in this or Tristam Shandy. I'm not sure where this goes wrong, but it sure does. Possibly of interest to Glee fans, as it seems like it might have inspired that show.

"We are your overlords"

2009-12-18T13:06:00.008-05:00

Though I can't call myself a Led Zeppelin fanatic, the band was important to the development of my musical tastes in my teenage years. "Whole Lotta Love" came out when I was 13, just after I hit puberty, and it was a revelation to this kid who had really just discovered rock and pop music that very summer. In the late 60's one could listen to the radio and hear The Archies, The Beatles, Sly & the Family Stone, and Led Zeppelin all in one half-hour--the kind of diversity that hasn't existed on commercial radio for years now. I liked all the bands I heard on top 40 radio, but my only real exposure to what would become "heavy metal" (or just "heavy" in the late 60's) would have been Steppenwolf and Cream. Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" changed everything: it was, to quote myself from an earlier blog post, "a strikingly strange piece of music for mass consumption: blues riffs, sexual references like 'backdoor man,' and that crazy explosive middle section." Not to mention that "every inch of my love" line, which was like hard-core porn to a freshly sexually-aware teenager who was pretty sure he was gay.

I tended to buy singles back then, but I knew the AM top 40 radio version of "Whole Lotta Love" was missing that orgasmic middle section (that you could only hear late at night or on the FM progressive rock station) so I bought the album. I never took to it as a whole, though I did like the beginning of side 2, with the triple-threat piledrivers "Heartbreaker," "Living Loving Maid," and "Ramble On," but I sure enough wore out "Whole Lotta Love." (Years later, I read that you could literally wash albums with warm soapy water, and Zeppelin II would be the first one I would subject to that treatment--I think it kinda helped...) I liked Zeppelins III and IV, though after that, they would mostly fall off my radar (with the exception of a handful of songs on Physical Graffiti).
Now I feel my own private Led Zeppelin renaissance happening in the wake of having read a new biography of the band, When Giants Walked the Earth by Mick Wall, a British rock journalist. This one is less sensationalistic than an earlier best-seller about the band, Hammer of the Gods, and manages to humanize the group a bit. Yes, they trashed hotel rooms, did loads of drugs, and had sex with oodles of groupies; yes, guitarist Jimmy Page was into "magick" and the writings of occultist Aleister Crowley (and even owned an occult bookstore in England for a time); yes, Robert Plant wore skintight jeans and thought a lot of himself; yes, John Bonham's death from too much alcohol seemed, like Keith Moon's end, predestined; and, yes, John Paul Jones was the quiet one, though he is on record as being unhappy that he wasn't asked to join up with Plant and Page for their 90's collaborations.

But like Papa John, the John Phillips autobiography, this book presents the cautionary aspects of their story (more money and more fame don't make you happier) and presents the sympathetic real people behind the legends. To me as a teenager, Plant and Page always seemed like dark gods who could do no wrong, but they've both had tragedy touch their lives (above and beyond the death of Bonham which brought an end to the band). Plant's 5-year-old son died suddenly of an infection while Plant was on tour in America, and a year later Plant was in a car accident which took him a year to recover from. Page, who everyone hailed as a musical genius, got wrapped up in heroin to the detriment of his health and creativity; though he's gone straight since then, he's never managed to even come close to getting out the Zeppelin shadow (unlike Plant who has had a major solo career which has hit a new peak in the last couple of years in his recordings with Allison Krauss). Instead Zeppelin is an albatross around his neck. Perhaps most interestingly, the role of their blustering and vicious manager Peter Grant is given full coverage here.

The book gets a bit weird in structure, bouncing back and forth in time, sometimes without sufficient clarity, and a few minor errors are problematic (Plant's Honeydrippers project came years after his first solo albums, not before; the album is called In Through the Out Door, not Outdoor). Wall completely fails at his strange fictitious interior monologue chapters, supposedly from the viewpoints of the individual members, but overall the book is a success, largely because he has interview all the living members of the band in recent years, so this is several notches above a slapdash bio pieced together from press releases and magazine interviews.

As for the title of my post, it comes from a line from one of my favorite Zeppelin songs, "The Immigrant Song." I never knew the lyrics except for the crystal-clear opening ("We come from the land of the ice and snow/From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow"); it turns out one of the most ominous-sounding lines, which I always took to be "We are yours, over and over," is actually the fabulous and truly ominous "We are your overlords." Below, that very song.

A worthwhile Christmas movie

2009-12-12T13:53:00.011-05:00

For as much as I love Christmas, I do not enjoy recent Christmas movies. The made-for-TV variety have mostly become romances which often have little to do with the holiday (except that some network exec thought that snow and Santas would make a good backdrop for an otherwise routine and forgettable love story), and the theatrical holiday movies, often about Santa Claus, are all about action and overkill. The new Disney/Jim Carrey Christmas Carol looks just dreadful.

I have found one little indie Christmas movie (from 2007, available on DVD) worth watching. It's called Noelle, and some online critics have issues with it because they believe it has a pro-life agenda. Honestly, a Christmas movie without some kind of moral or spiritual agenda isn't much of a Christmas movie, so that wouldn't automatically be a strike against it in my book. Though the movie does involve the issue of abortion, it is handled with restraint, and the pro-life lesson is not the only moral situation covered in the film.

Father Keene arrives in a Massachusettes seaside village a week before Christmas to make a decision about closing down the local parish. The congregation is small and aging, and the priest, Father Simeon, is a drunkard who says during a sermon that his church has become a mausoleum. Keene suggests that Simeon make one last stab at respectability, namely, a living creche to be held on Christmas Eve, which unfortunately will conflict with a traditional party thrown by a local town hotshot, Mrs. Worthington.

This gets Keene involved with Marjorie, a Worthington daughter, who is involved in an affair with Seth, a rich snob who, unbeknownst to anyone, is actually engaged to someone else. Marjorie seems unhappy and Keene wants her to be Mary in the nativity, but eventually it comes out that she is pregnant with Seth's baby and has been considering an abortion. This triggers a crisis of conscience within Keene (for reasons unknown to us until the end, though you'll figure out why early on) and he tries to get her to set her life in order.

Father Simeon's plotline is also important. He's not an old man; in fact, he and Keene were in seminary at the same time. Keene thinks Simeon has lost his calling, but Simeon throws that accusation back in Keene's face when the rather cold Keene admits he's not a "people person." For all of Simeon's faults, he does care about his parishoners; he's been secretly using church money to pay for an old fisherman's medical bills. All the story threads climax on Christmas Eve, and though the writer fudges some plot details, specifically how far along Marjorie's pregnancy is, the outcome is satisfying.

Keene is played by David Wall, a Robert Redford look-alike, who is also the director and writer, and I'm thinking he should have left one of those jobs to someone else. Kerry Wall (his real-life wife) is nicely understated as Marjorie; Sean Patrick Brennan as Simeon (pictured at left) is handsome and gets the worn-down feeling of his character right, but the less said about his acting, the better. Still, I like this movie if only because it's not a froufy romance or Santa Claus fantasy. It looks good--somewhat surprisingly, it was filmed on location in snowy Cape Cod, not Canada, which seems to be the go-to location for TV and movie locations these days. The title refers, I think, to a little girl whom Keene keeps seeing in misty visions all over town, and she's the main clue to the final outcome. The movie's serious tone (with some unobtrusive humor mostly involving the aging parishioners) is just right. As I said before, the moralizing, though central to the movie's action, is never heavy-handed (except for the one line of dialogue that Noelle has at the end of the film). I'd much rather watch this 4 or 5 more times than have to watch even 10 minutes of the new Jim Carrey Christmas monstrosity. [DVD]

A caveman walked into a cabin...

2009-12-08T12:35:00.014-05:00

Every so often, a disc will arrive from Netflix and I have no memory of putting it our queue (oh, what the hell, it's really my queue since Don rarely adds anything to it, though he is very good about watching the movies I pick). What has usually happened is that, in reading an online source, like a blog or the New York Times, I'll come across an interesting flick; I then immediately open a new tab, go to Netflix, add it to the queue, close the tab, and keep net-surfing. Then I forget about it until it shows up a couple months later. That seems to be what happened with The Man from Earth, a 2007 low-budget indie which is usually described as science fiction, though it's just as much a philosophical fantasy as sci-fi. After the disc sat around for a few weeks, I came close to returning it unwatched, but this vacation morning, I finally popped it in and was glad I did.

A college professor, John Oldman, is leaving his school after 10 years of climbing the academic ladder, getting tenure, and becoming next in line for chair. A handful of friends have gathered with him for one last evening at his rustic cabin in the woods--he's giving all his furniture to charity and is only taking a couple of pieces of luggage with him. His only reason for leaving is that he's restless, but when his friends press him, he finally takes them into his confidence and tells them his secret: he was born 14,000 years ago, in the late Stone Age, and has remained alive and healthy (and has never aged past 35) ever since. Whenever people start noticing that he hasn't aged, he picks up and leaves to begin a new life somewhere else.

For a time, his announcement creates a fun drawing-room diversion. One professor claims that, if the human body regenerated and detoxified itself perfectly, such a thing could be possible. Another wonders if John could be a vampire of sorts, drawing life force off of those around him. He claims to have met the Buddha and Van Gogh (and does in fact have a rare Van Gogh painting). But no one really takes him seriously until he makes another startling claim: he is Jesus Christ, or the man who was taken to be Christ, spreading Buddhist teachings in the Middle East; he survived the crucifixion (his body heals perfectly and doesn't scar) and has lived to see his teachings, via the New Testament and Christianity, somewhat distorted over the centuries.

This causes most of his friends to react in one of two ways: to assume he's gone mad (or showing signs of early Alzheimer's), or to get angry at him for carrying a intellectual joke too far. One character calls in a psychiatrist who, at one point, threatens to have John committed and even pulls a gun on him to get him to admit his story is an elaborate prank. A religious woman gets furious at John for his "blasphemy." John's girlfriend Sandy remains the most neutral but even she can't quite believe either possibility. Of course, there's a third option: he's exactly what he says he is.

This script was the last thing that science-fiction author Jerome Bixby (Twilight Zone, Star Trek) finished before he died. It's been done essentially as a stage play or an old-fashioned television play--a single set, all dialogue, little action, no special effects--so this will not be for all tastes. I enjoyed it, for its interesting premise and for the performances of two of the actors: Tony Todd (from the Candyman movies, pictured below) as the most open-minded of the friends, and David Lee Smith (pictured above) as the "caveman" professor. Smith reminds me of Mad Men's Jon Hamm, in looks, in the way he carries himself with a kind of weight-of-the-world heft, and in his intensity. Most of the other actors are OK (Ellen Crawford as the religious woman, William Katt as the prof who's sleeping with a student), but one, Richard Riehle, as the doc, is almost amateurishly over-the-top. Luckily, Smith has the lion's share of dialogue and he is up to the task of keeping the viewer's attention when the director is doing little to help.

Some of the problem is with the script. The characters are not always consistent; for example, Crawford is referred to as a "Biblical literalist" and goes the most bonkers at John's debunking of Christianity, yet she also says she doesn't believe in things like the Nativity (wouldn't that mean she's not a literalist?). Todd's character, who seems to be trying hardest to believe John's story, brings up out of the blue the possibility that John is a drug addict. And the climax, which involves a wild coincidence and the death of one of the characters, is disappointing. Some critics don't like the fact that the story doesn't end in ambiguity and instead gets resolved. I don't mind the resolution, but the way it's achieved is awkward.

At any rate, I do recommend seeking out this little gem if you're in an adventurous, thoughtful, anti-rollercoaster-movie mood. It's not much to look at (and the the late-night scenes in the last third are grainy and smudgy), but it's philosophical fun.

A 50's TV Christmas

2009-12-03T17:55:00.011-05:00

My mom picked up an early Christmas gift for me, an 8-DVD set of Christmas movies, cartoons, and TV programs. Called Holiday Family Collection, it features mostly material which is in the public domain, meaning that movie-wise, it's the same old tattered flicks you can buy for 5 bucks at a Wal-Mart holiday bin (the 1935 Scrooge, Beyond Tomorrow, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians). But the 4 discs with TV shows are worth having, if you like the holidays and don't mind mediocre prints of early television shows. There are Christmas episodes of relatively well-known shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, Ozzie & Harriet, and Red Skeleton, but what I'm enjoying are the shows that I'd never heard of, mostly from the late 40's and 50's. Who knew there was a Scarlet Pimpernel TV show with Marius Goring (the romantic lead in The Red Shoes)? Based on the vaguely Christmas-themed episode included here, it seems to have been a low-budget affair with lots of talk and little action, but as a novelty, it was fun to watch, and that's pretty much how it goes for the rest of the shows on the discs.

The most interesting thing I've watched so far is The Nativity, a 1952 hour-long episode of the Westinghouse Studio One anthology series. Notice I said "interesting," not "compelling" or "exciting" or "fun." It's an adaptation of the Nativity story put together from various mystery plays of the Middle Ages, presented in verse and intoned in a faux-Shakespearean spirit by a cast of slow-speaking, dreadfully serious actors, none of whom I recognized (there were no credits and the cast list on IMDb is woefully incomplete). The sets are shadowy and minimal, like I imagine an off-off-Broadway play would be like. The show was probably broadcast live; there are no noticeable dialogue flubs, but there are loud clunking sounds off-camera every so often--someone tripping, I presume.

The plotline is straightforward and traditional, with Mary and Joseph in a Bethlehem manger, angel visitations, three kings, four shepherds, and King Herod. Joseph has a whiny voice and Mary looks 30 if she's a day. A bright spotlight and echoey off-camera voice indicate the presence of an angel. The only real plot twist has the shepherds (three older guys, one younger "Gilligan" type) bringing humble gifts of their own to the Christ child. Most descriptions of this show online call it a musical, but the rhymed dialogue is spoken, not sung. The Robert Shaw Chorale does provide a more or less continuous flow of carols and hymns in the background, and they are well chosen to match the narrative. The writing is not the strong suit here (there are lines like "Kneel we down on knee" and "Heartily I pray with all my heart"), and neither is the acting. Actually, there is no strong suit; this isn't really very entertaining to a 21st century viewer, but I did stick with it, imagining I was a 50's TV viewer with only a couple of network choices available.

I also watched a half-hour 1949 production of Dickens' A Christmas Carol (oddly titled "The Christmas Carol"), narrated by Vincent Price. It hits most of the high spots of the story (the Cratchits, Marley, three ghosts, Christmas morning redemption) but given how much it has to cram into thirty minutes, it still drags along in the middle. The Ghost of Christmas Past (Nelson Leigh) is the most effective of the ghosts, despite being clad in pretty much just a sheet. Scrooge is played by Taylor Holmes, father of 30's leading man Phillips Holmes (pictured above with Leigh), and he's about the worst Scrooge I've ever seen--it's not that he's bad, but he commits the sin of making the character dull. His transformation at the end is OK, and I gave thanks that Tiny Tim's presence was kept to a minimum.

Lastly, I saw the Liberace Christmas show from 1953. It's a half-hour of Liberace mostly alone at his piano (complete with candelabra), playing and sometimes singing songs like "Sleigh Ride," "Jingle Bells," and "Silent Night." He's accompanied occasionally by strings, and the episode ends with his large family arriving, as through having come over the river and through the woods, and his brother George dressed as Santa Claus--see the picture at the top of the blog post. I mostly remember Liberace as a campy over-the-top schmaltzmeister, but here he plays it pretty straight (no pun intended) and the music is quite pleasant. He even gets all serious and tells the Christmas story. He introduces his mother, Frances, as his producer, and apparently she really was. There's a Thanksgiving episode included on the set which I haven't seen yet, but I hear it features a genuine Pueblo dancer performing to something called "Ritual Fire Dance," so I'll have to make room on my busy TV schedule this month to see it. I may report back later if anything else in the boxed set is worth noting, but I'm already happy I have it so I'll have some new holiday treats to indulge in this year.

A boring epiphanic glow

2009-11-30T13:13:00.016-05:00

I love the feeling of having an epiphany after watching a great movie. I even find I can get an epiphanic glow from a really bad movie. But this weekend, I had an epiphany from a lackluster movie. The problem is, I'm not sure what the epiphany was all about. (So I guess it wasn't really an epiphany after all, eh?)

In Management, Steve Zahn plays a cute nebbishy guy who works at his parents' motel in a small Arizona town. He's drifting through life with no focus, no friends, and seeming to take no real joy in his life, though he doesn't feel bad enough to change things. One day, a woman who sells art to corporations (Jennifer Aniston) stops at the motel for a couple of nights. Zahn is immediately smitten and tries some nervous flirtatious moves on her. At first, she's dismissive of him, but nicely rather than rudely. This, of course, encourages him. On the morning of her departure, she impulsively has a quickie with him in the laundry room, which encourages him even more. He takes off to find her and make her fall in love with him, and the rest of the movie charts their relationship's ups and downs. Two main obstacles: his immaturity and her boyfriend, an "ex-punk" entrepreneur (Woody Harrelson).

From that summary, and the presence of Aniston, you might assume that this is a glossy, brightly-colored mainstream Hollywood romantic-comedy confection that spent a week at #1 at the box-office and pulled in at least 50 million during its run. But it's not that kind of movie. The presence of Steve Zahn might make you think this is a little indie film that got good buzz and slowly built a following, winning awards and critical respect. But it's not that kind of movie, either. Who knows what the hell the presence of Woody Harrelson made you think.

Instead, it tries to be a cross between the two. The low-budget style is indie all the way, a "Little Miss Sunshine" wannabe. The screenplay, however, would have worked better with a big budget, and Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds as the leads. The problem is that the plot contortions are so outrageous that I just couldn't buy the sincere Aniston and Zahn engaging in this weird back-and-forth dance of attraction and repulsion. I expect an indie film to be either more realistic or way more bizarre than a mainstream film, and this falls awkwardly in the middle.

Aniston gives a good performance; like in her earlier indie film The Good Girl, she tamps down the bouncy glow and creates a character, or at least tries to. As with the movie itself, she winds up falling between a realistic, somewhat sad character and a plastic Hollywood heroine. A couple of reviews referred to her character as "high powered" and "upwardly mobile," but that's not right--she's actually just a glorified salesperson, and it seems pretty clear that any career moves will be lateral. Still, I had a hard time buying that she'd ever give in to Zahn, even for a zipless quickie.

Zahn is appealing as usual, though he's losing his carefree boyish looks, and seems a bit long in the tooth to be playing a rootless character who should be in his mid-to-late 20's rather than his mid-30's (Zahn's actually over 40, though he doesn't quite look it yet). I'm not saying someone in his 30's or even 40's couldn't be rootless and floundering, but the character details (still with his parents, having no life or interests outside of his thankless job) seem to skew younger. The character is a fan of Bad Company, but that's a vague plot point that goes nowhere, or more specifically is wasted on a dumb, predictable serenading scene. I much preferred Zahn in this year's B-thriller sleeper Night Train.

Harrelson seems to be acting in a completely different movie--that's meant to be a fairly neutral observation and that's all I have to say about him. James Hiroyuki Liao has some good moments as a Chinese version of Zahn; a young guy working and living with his parents, who much too quickly becomes Zahn's best buddy.

Back to my epiphany: I guess it has to do with the fact that the cross between Hollywood cotton-candy plotting and Pacific Northwest indie style doesn't work. This would have been a far more enjoyable movie had it come down squarely in one camp or the other: either let Aniston wear make-up and get a good but funny crying-jag scene (or something like that) or let Zahn turn out to be a chronic masturbator who ends up alone in his dad's basement. (The real ending is happy but far less interesting.)

Coming Around Again: Remakes and reinventions, Part 3

2009-11-19T15:48:00.005-05:00

Oh, Carly. How did I love thee? Let me count the ways: your voice (especially in its husky register), your melodies ("Let the River Run," with its rises, falls, and swells, would make a great national anthem), your lyrics ("I had some dreams/They were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee," from "You're So Vain; "Great ambition is all a dream/Let me drown my pride in the sea," from "Never Been Gone"), your accessible rich girl persona, and, gay as I am, your physical presence, especially on the covers of the 70's albums No Secrets and Playing Possum (see below). I kept buying your albums until the 90's when you fell off my radar, though I very much enjoyed your 2007 album of standards, Into White, which sounded like it was recorded among puffy clouds and twinkly stars (and I mean that as a compliment).

But, oh Carly, what you've done now... On your new album, Never Been Gone, you've taken some of the best-loved songs of your own back catalog and re-recorded them in new arrangements. This usually strikes me as a desperate marketing act (see Joni Mitchell), but the song selection was solid--in addition to the two songs quoted above, there's "Anticipation," "The Right Thing to Do," "Coming Around Again," and "Let the River Run"--so I bit. The first bad sign was the cover photo, a terrible close-up of you which I think you took with your cell phone. The second bad sign is the almost amateurish liner notes essay in which you tell us about the family and friends who helped you make the album; the third bad sign: it's been released on your son's own fledgling label.

There is some good news, Carly: a few of the re-arranged songs are just fine. The beautiful title song, a favorite of mine about escaping the hurlyburly of everyday life by going home to Martha's Vineyard, is arranged a little more loosely than the original but still sounds good; "Boys in the Trees" and "The Right Thing to Do" are just different enough from the originals to be interesting; "Coming Around Again" is burdened with some ill-advised improvisation near the end, but it's OK. The rest are a mixed bag, most of which aren't terrible but I can't imagine wanting to revisit them, either. "You're So Vain" is especially disappointing, with the wear and tear on your voice particularly noticeable here--oddly, it's in your lower voice that the problems arise; your higher notes sound fine to me. This is an album for die-hard Simon fans, and perhaps best obtained song by song on iTunes so the weak stuff can be avoided. I still love you, Carly, but next time, please, at the very least, get some pros to take pictures and do the art direction.

Coming Around Again: Remakes and reinventions, Part 2

2009-11-18T11:13:00.004-05:00

Back in the day (1983), the mini-series V was what they call water-cooler TV; that is, something that everybody was talking about the next morning. With the advent of DVRs, streaming video, and DVDs, meaning not all viewers are watching a show at the same time, I'm not sure there is such a thing anymore (except for American Idol and cult shows like Lost). But I vividly remember everyone at work chatting about the shocking scene during the first night of V when the human-looking alien ate a mouse (in my memory, it was the woman, Diana, but research seems to suggest that she actually ate a guinea pig and a male alien ate the mouse). There was also the very hot Marc Singer (who, as the original Beastmaster, was probably a first crush for lots of gay boys of the era) and huge spaceships floating in the air.

The mini-series spawned a full series the next year which I didn't watch. I decided to try out the new series, but gave up after two episodes. Of course, the effects are better--not just the floating spaceships, but the very cool interiors of the ships. Everything else, including acting and writing, is worse. The basic plot remains the same: one day, alien spaceships appear over several major world cities. The aliens, who look just like humans, announce that they are here in peace, seeking our help and offering us in return miracle medicines, an end to crime, and other utopian possibilities. We accept them wholeheartedly except for a small resistance group, and of course the resisters are right, as the aliens turn out to be lizard-like beings who want to take over the earth.

The chief spokesalien is Anna, a creepily sexy--or sexily creepy--woman (Morena Baccarin, looking very different than she did as the cosmic hooker Inara in Firefly) and she's very good. Scott Wolf seems very uncomfortable playing a news anchor whom Anna latches onto to make her message palatable to earthlings, though he quickly realizes something's not right with the whole situation. There's a mother-son pair who are central to the narrative: Elizabeth Mitchell (from Lost) is fine as the federal agent who doesn't trust the Visitors (hence the "V"), but Logan Huffman is dull as dishwater as her son who is swept up in the excitement and joins a group of young people recruited to spread pro-alien propaganda (read: Hitler youth). A ruggedly handsome priest (Joel Gretsch, pictured) is on board with the resistance, despite his superior's faith in the Visitors. We discover there are sleeper cells of aliens who have been on the planet for years, and some, including Morris Chestnut, have decided to resist the invasion, but at what price?

The "Hitler" and "resistance" references aren't far-fetched; the original series was created as a WWII resistance drama and became a sci-fi show, and I imagine the resistance aspect will become central here. However, I wasn't very taken with the first two episodes; the first was OK, but the second was slow-moving and predictable. And worst of all, there was no rodent-eating at all, just a couple of scenes of split-open human flesh showing lizard skin beneath. I don't see myself sticking with this, but if you hear of any good unnatural eating scenes, let me know.

Coming Around Again: Remakes and reinventions, Part 1

2009-11-17T14:44:00.004-05:00

The great 60's cult TV series The Prisoner has been "re-invented" for the new century. The original British series, from 1967, ran for 17 episodes and was notorious for its surreal tone, ambiguous situations, and lack of concrete closure (though many opinions about the show's meaning and ending are floating around out there in the Internet ether). Patrick McGoohan (pictured below) played a spy who left his agency, was gassed in his apartment, and woke up in an isolated place called simply the Village. Instead of a name he had a number (Number 6); his nemesis was the nominal leader of the Village (Number 2), usually played by a different actor in each episode; #6 would keep trying to escape the Village but no matter how far he got--and in one episode he seemed to get as far as London--he would always wind up back in the Village.

The new version, airing on AMC, is much less ambitious than the original: it's a 6-episode mini-series being presented over 3 nights, which kind of makes it feel like they don't really hold out much hope for a positive reception in the long run and are burning it off as a sweeps event. I've only seen the first 2 shows, but they don't seem terribly promising. Anyone who has seen the original will be making comparisons; unfair, perhaps, but inevitable. The bad news is that this show suffers in that realm. Jim Caviezel cuts a handsome sturdy figure as 6 (they don't use the word "number" in addressing each other), but he lacks McGoohan's charisma, or anti-charisma--in the show, he came across as rather cold, but you could tell there was lots of stuff boiling underneath. Ian McKellan, who has become almost as legendary a figure as Olivier or Gielgud, is the mysterious 2, though here he's been given almost too much background (a sick wife, a teenage son who seems to be being groomed to take over in his dad's footsteps). I like McKellan a lot--he made The Lord of the Rings worth sitting through--but so far, he hasn't had much to do, and what he's done has been forgettable.

The atmosphere is strange but not as surreal as in the original--in the 60's the setting was a seaside village with a bunch of quaint but strange looking small houses; here, it's in the middle of a desert with ordinary-looking A-frame houses and huge glimmering towers at the edge of the dunes. Caviezel is not a former spy, but an employee of some kind of multinational corporation. The character can remember some things from his past (most of the villagers have memory loss problems, having only rudimentary dream-like images of an outside world surfacing in dreams), and seems to be slowly regaining more memories as the show goes on. The supporting cast so far has been unremarkable except for Lennie James (the mysterious outsider in Jericho, pictured) as a friendly cab driver. Apparently the new series will end with all mysteries explained, something antithetical to the letter and spirit of the original. I'll keep watching for the heck of it, but I'm not feeling especially drawn into this.

Have a very dysfunctional Christmas

2009-11-12T14:15:00.010-05:00

While I was growing up, my mother was notoriously crazy about Christmas, a trait she passed on to me (so, no, November 12th is not too early to review a holiday book); however, my dad was an alcoholic, so I know a little something about dysfunctional holidays. Augusten Burroughs' new book, You Better Not Cry, is a collection of short essays about some of his more memorable Christmases, mostly of the dysfunctional type. I should point out that I have never read anything by Burroughs before, though I know two things about him: he writes, with dark humor and edginess, about his crazy family, and he's gay. So of course, I was expecting another David Sedaris. That may not be fair to Burroughs, but my expectations definitely affected my experience of reading this book.

These essays do in fact sound like stabs at Sedaris-like true stories, and most work well enough. The first three are written from the viewpoint of the author as a child and they make his family sound quaintly nutty rather than downright crazy; any of them could be adapted into a family TV special, though the title story, the funniest one in the book, is about little Augusten's conflation of Santa with Jesus and is perhaps a bit too edgy for prime-time--it ends with him kissing a wax Santa figure a little too enthusiastically and turns suddenly into a scene out of a George Romero movie.

The tone changes dramatically with the 4th story, in which an adult Burroughs, prone to alcoholic blackouts, wakes up in bed one morning with a naked Santa Claus, or more precisely an old man with "a small WWII-era erection" who wears a Santa suit. The two best stories follow: "Why Do You Reward Me Thus?" a beautifully written tale about the Christmas he spent in an alcoholic daze with a group of homeless people, and "The Best and Only Everything," equal parts wrenching and touching, about Christmases spent with an HIV-positive boyfriend. The last essay, a relatively happy though not necessarily funny story about his current partner, is closer in spirit to Sedaris' latest work but is the weakest tale in the book.

Still, I'm happy to have read this, and it makes me want to go read his first memoir, Running with Scissors, to help complete the picture I have Burroughs from these stories. Occasionally, especially early on when he's writing in the persona of his younger self, his writing seems a little too crafted, like he's set a goal to try and write a laugh-out-loud line every five paragraphs or so. Like Sedaris, he takes a winding, sidetracking route through his memories which sometimes works (the naked Santa) and sometimes doesn't--he begins "Claus and Effect" talking about a boy he knew whose birthday fell right after Christmas, but this feels like a tacked-on part of the story rather than being integral to it. Still, I gotta love a guy who can write a sentence like this about Hannukah: "I'd stop forcing the poor Jews to tart up their humble little temple dedication anniversary into some corn-fed whore of a holiday to compete with our super-slut, three-titted Christmas." Much as I love my multi-breasted holiday, I almost fell out of bed laughing.

Things that go bump (or just stand there and stare at you) in the night

2009-11-04T13:38:00.006-05:00

Paranormal Activity, according to the buzz, is the new Blair Witch Project: a scary movie made on a very low budget by non-Hollywood indie filmmakers which is supposed to make you scream and jump out of your seat using just a creepy mood and old-fashioned scare tactics with virtually no special effects. Both movies purport to be compilations of found footage, taken by amateurs who wind up the victims of some supernatural force. And both were cleverly marketed over the Internet and through film festival showings. I loved The Blair Witch Project, but was disappointed in Paranormal Activity, perhaps because my expectations were too high. But I also think that this new movie, while clearly inspired by the earlier film, didn't improve on it or do anything to fix its flaws.

A young unmarried suburban couple, Micah Sloat and Katie Featherstone (pictured in a rare light moment at right), have been bothered by strange bumps and sounds in the night and have bought a video camera which they set up in their bedroom, hoping to catch footage of whatever is causing the disturbances. At first, very little is captured on film, but soon, doors start slamming shut and sheets are being lifted up on their own. As we see more strange occurrences (some even in the daytime), we become privy to their deteriorating home life: she's pissed off that he's become obsessed with the camera, and he's pissed off that she hadn't told him that this kind of haunting has happened to her before.

And that's really about it. The visitations become a bit more graphic, though there is no gore and, as far as I could tell, almost no camera tricks until (possibly) the last minute of the film—the very last shot looks like it was CGI-enhanced. The creepiest stuff is the simplest; a couple of times, Katie gets up in the middle of the night and just stands there in the bedroom, stock still, for hours at a time, staring at her sleeping boyfriend. My biggest gasp came when a light flicks on downstairs (where no one is supposed to be). There is a loud bass rumble whenever the invisible force is present (shades of the Jaws theme music), but Micah and Katie don't seem to hear it, which leads me to believe that it was added in post-production.

The pluses: as I noted above, much hair-raising creepiness is produced with just old-fashioned atmosphere; the leads are not as irritating as some of the characters in Blair Witch Project (although Katie's whining starts to get a bit old); Micah looks good in a t-shirt. The minuses: there is no context (very little background for the characters is given) and no real narrative drive—once the basic story is established, events and characters don't develop or deepen. A ghost-hunter is brought in for a couple of scenes; he tells them it's a demon, not a ghost, that is responsible and gives them the name of a demonology expert, but nothing comes of that at all. There is no rhyme or reason for the ending; the film doesn't have a climax so much as a stopping point, as if the director said, we gotta stop this at 90 minutes no matter what. Its shortness is a plus, but I was left not caring about either character, and what little ambiguity is left at the end is uninteresting, unlike Blair Witch Project in which the ambiguous ending was genuinely startling and haunting.

It may not be fair to keep comparing this film to Blair Witch, but it brings on these comparisons itself: the found footage basis, the rough style of shooting, the ever-moving hand-held camera, lack of gore or effects, lack of background music, unknown actors whose real first names are used for their characters, and an ending that doesn’t explain things. For me, the biggest flaw in Blair Witch is the lack of a script; while that may have kept things fresh, it also led to long pointless stretches of people yelling and cursing at each other. This movie also seems to have been minimally scripted, and though the long pointless stretches aren't as long here, I wish we had gotten to know the characters better. For me, I guess it came down to expectations; it just didn’t match up to the buzz and reviews. Had I seen it opening night, or in a packed auditorium, my experience might have been different.

Vampire Hunter at the Office

2009-10-31T08:51:00.010-04:00

The Insatiable is another recent B-horror flick with a solid B-lead. The basic plot is simple and draws on traditional vampire lore, mixing in elements of the modern workplace comedy. A serial killer is terrorizing the town, ripping off the heads of its the victims. One night, a lonely office drone doofus (Sean Patrick Flanery) sees the "Head Ripper" at work; she's a vampire (Charlotte Ayanna) who puts the bite on her victims then rips their heads off to hide her tracks. Flanery does some online research and finds out that a paraplegic vampire hunter (Michael Biehn) lives in his apartment building; with his help, Flanery tracks her down but she's so beautiful, he can't bring himself to stake her, so instead he traps her in a steel cage in the basement of his building. He brings her rabbits to feed on, but she insists she needs human blood or she'll wither away and die. What's a lovestruck doofus to do?

Most of the vampire elements are all here: she sleeps in the day and has to be staked in the heart, though this one can be seen in mirrors (in a goofy scene involving a side view mirror which actually says "Vampires in the mirror are closer than they appear"). Ayanna is fine, the main requirement of the role being that she be sexy and exotic-looking. Flanery, who is in virtually every scene, carries the movie and does a nice job as a lonely loser, all twitches and grimaces with flinching looks at practically everyone he comes in contact with. The character feels quirky and real, and Flanery is rather brave in not making himself any more likable than he has to be; we have sympathy for him but he never becomes cuddly or cute, even though Flanery himself is both.

The scenes of Flanery at his flange manufacturing office are comic, sometimes painfully so, with Jon Huertas (one of the cops on TV's Castle) as a total jackass bully who rides Flanery about his wimpishness, his lack of a sex life, and even his name (Harry Balbo). We know he's going to come to no good end, and his exit from the film near the end is a great gory scene. Josh Hopkins (the ex-neighbor from Swingtown) is an office nice guy, and Boyd Kestner is a cop on the trail of the Head Ripper. The low budget hurts a bit, with the few CGI effects being rather disappointing, but the first scene of Ayanna feeding on a victim is very effective. The ending is predictable but satisfying.

BTW, we saw Paranormal Activity today. I'll write a full entry on it next week, but for now suffice to say that it's no Blair Witch Project. It has it moments, but it's a letdown.

Two evil bankers for Halloween

2009-10-29T18:18:00.011-04:00

I'll wrap up October here with a couple of Halloween-style scary flicks of recent vintage, both, in a nice touch for these tough times, involving bad-guy bankers. Drag Me to Hell got good reviews and has an old-fashioned horror movie plot: someone falls under a curse that will supposedly send her to Hell, and she has three days to break the curse. Alison Lohman plays a banker who evicts an old gypsy woman for not making her house payments. The gypsy (pictured) puts her under the aforementioned curse and horrible things start happening, though many of them wind up being in her mind. Her boyfriend (Justin Long) and an expert in the occult (Dileep Rao) try to help her, leading to what should be a climactic seance scene, but as with current Hollywood movies, there is at least one ending too many, and here, a final predictable "Carrie"-style twist that looks good but isn't very scary and doesn't really fit. I didn't like Lohman at all--there is no way her character shows enough backbone at any point in the film to be up for an important promotion at the bank--but the scare scenes work well enough, and the I did like the seance, especially the surprise appearance by a goat.

I seem to have developed a fondness for recent B-movie thrillers, both the kind that wind up going directly to video (see Night Train) and the kind that wind up on cable (see Kaw). Messengers 2: The Scarecrow sounds like a late-night Sci-Fi Channel offering (I'm boycotting the "SyFy" spelling for now), but it's actually a prequel to a theatrical horror film from a few years back. However, you don't need to know anything about that earlier film to enjoy this one. A struggling farmer (Norman Reedus) is about at the end of his rope and almost ready to consider giving up and selling the farm when he finds an old scarecrow in the barn. A neighbor encourages him to put it up, and sure enough, next day, the crows have all fallen dead and his corn is healthy. As his fortunes rise, people who stand in his way (including a banker about to foreclose) wind up dead. Reedus starts drinking, upsetting his good Christian wife, and it turns out, in a kind of "Wicker Man" twist, that the helpful neighbor and his young, slutty wife are pagans, and Reedus begins to realize that scarecrow may require a blood sacrifice to keep him and his farm going.

Reedus (at right), who I liked a lot in a small role in Cadillac Records and a bigger role in John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns in Showtime's Masters of Horror series, is a perfect B-lead, reminding me of someone like Tom Neal, star of the classic 40's B-noir Detour; handsome in a quirky way, soft-spoken, intense, and capable of giving resonance to a character, but also someone you know will never get to tackle a mainstream Hollywood lead role. He's good here, if maybe a little too low-key at times, considering what his character goes through. The mood is well sustained and the scarecrow manages to be creepy without looking ridiculous. I'd recommend this one as a Netflix rental, if not necessarily a purchase.

Baghead

2009-10-28T13:19:00.004-04:00

Baghead is a hard film to put in a slot: the one thing it's not is what it was marketed as: a horror film, though it does play with those conventions. It's kind of a romantic comedy, indie style and with very few laughs, and a meta-movie, or a movie about the making of movies. It's not quite a satire--that would cut too close to the filmmakers' skin--and according to Roger Ebert, it belongs to the genre known as "mumblecore," which is defined by Wikipedia as a film with "ultra-low budget production, focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors."

Four actors (2 guys and 2 gals) decide to get serious and make their own movie, so they go off to the woods for a weekend to isolate themselves and come up with a script. First they plan a romance movie, based perhaps on their own tangled romantic pasts, but eventually a startling vision of a man standing outside the cabin in the dark with a bag over his head gets stuck in their minds and they decide to use that as the basis for a horror film, Blair Witch style. The next day, however, the bagman vision seems to have become real and as tensions build (related not just to the mysterious figure but also to their personal relationships), they barricade themselves in the cabin that night, afraid that they have somehow conjured up a supernatural killer.

For a time, this works nicely, but it's clear all the way through that this will wind up not a horror movie, but a story about romantic relationships (and artistic creativity). The problem is that none of the four are particularly admirable; yes, I guess it's nice to have a movie with flawed characters rather than artificially nice and plastic people, but that leaves us no one to attach ourselves to or to care much about. The actors are fine: Ross Partridge (pictured) is the handsome guy with the girlfriend, as opposed to his buddy--Steve Zissis--the chunky guy desperate for a girlfriend. Elise Muller is the girl with whom Ross has had an on-again, off-again thing for some time, and Greta Gerwig is the woman who wants Ross but might settle for Steve. Many critics call this a spoof or parody, but it doesn't seem like that to me. Certainly the beginning and end feel like a string of in-jokes (poking fun at the indie film circuit) that I don't quite get, but as far as a Blair Witch spoof, while it uses that film as inspiration, it's never really making sport of it. Watchable and interesting, with at least a couple of creepy moments for an October night.

Great-Grandnephew of Dracula

2009-10-26T13:34:00.011-04:00

In addition to my traditional October dips into Lovecraft, Bradbury, and the Hammer and Universal horror movie classics, I have consumed a handful of newer horror specimens. First up is Dracula: The Un-Dead, a quasi-official sequel to the granddaddy of vampire tales, Bran Stoker's Dracula. It's co-written by Stoker's great-grandnephew, Dacre (pictured; not even a direct grandson: bad sign #1), who has no previous writing experience (bad sign #2), and Ian Holt, who claims to be a "screenwriter," (bad sign #3) though his only credit is a direct-to-video horror movie called Dr. Chopper (bad sign #4) with Costas Mandylor and a star-free supporting cast (bad sign #5).

There is some promise as we begin by picking up the stories of the main characters from the first book (Jonathan and Mina Harker, Dr. Seward, Van Helsing) several years later, 1912 to be exact, but by page 150, Dracula is still nowhere to be found (bad sign #6), and the main villain is Elizabeth Bathory, a historical figure who supposedly murdered hundreds of virgin girls and bathed in their blood to stay young. There have been books and movies with her as the lead, but when you're expecting THE Count Dracula, substitutions, even a strong, sexy, bloody lesbian, just won't do. The writing is incredibly pedestrian; Holt and Stoker don't even try to replicate Stoker's style (and let me just say I think the original book is on the boring side, but it does have atmosphere to burn). Instead they substitute Multiplex Movie Rollercoaster style instead, clearly aiming for a big screen adaptation--apparently Holt based his part of the book on an unfinished screenplay.

I read the book all the way through and it doesn't get better. They manage to bring in Jack the Ripper in a moderately clever way, beginning with a cop who is sure that Van Helsing is the Ripper because of how he chopped up the vampire Lucy, and a plotline about Mina Harker's past relationship with Dracula is interesting, but everything else is pretty sad sack or worse: 1) the writing remains terrible; 2) Dracula does indeed crop up under a different name, but he not only isn't the star of the book, he's turned into a good guy; in other words, just another boring brooding conflicted post-Anne Rice vampire; 3) almost everyone of interest dies, and not in interesting ways; 4) the last sentences of the book are a laugh-out-loud punch line, but I don't the authors intended them to be funny.

Don't bother. Wait for the inevitable over-budgeted, over-CGI'd piece of crap movie in a couple of years from now, more like the horrible Van Helsing movie with Hugh Jackman than Lugosi or Langella.

My rant on the death of bookstores

2009-10-21T12:39:00.003-04:00

A news story about the closing of the B. Dalton bookstore chain triggered varied emotions in me. Throughout the 80's, I worked in bookstores as a clerk, a buyer, and a manager, and later when I was in graduate school I continued clerking part-time through the mid-90's. Most of that time was spent in local independent stores, but for a few years, I worked for Pickwick Books, a discount chain which was a division of Dalton's, and when they went under, our store was transformed into a B. Dalton. Like most people who gravitate to working in bookstores, I loved books and reading, and at times, especially early on, it felt like I was getting paid to hang out in a place where I would be anyway and chat with regular customers who wanted my recommendations.

But like everything else, retail bookselling changed. For years, local stores co-existed with chains like Dalton's and Walden's, but when the megastores (Borders and Barnes & Noble) moved in, the landscape changed. Even while I was working part-time at a local indie, I would visit Borders frequently because they had so much stuff: the bestsellers of course, but also mid-range literary titles, small press and university press titles, and deep backlist. But soon Amazon.com and other online sellers began offering such a huge selection, even a big store like Borders was finding it hard to compete.

I tried for years to be loyal to my brick-and-mortar stores, but even the biggest stores now rarely have what I'm looking for, and I don't necessarily mean odd, esoteric titles either. Borders is the worst; there's a huge Borders near me and I can rarely find what I'm looking for, even when it's a relatively big title which has been featured in the New York Times Book Review. When their computers tell you they have the title, and even narrow in on the shelf it's supposed to be on, but I (a former bookstore clerk) can't find it, and then a clerk (often a sneering, hipper-than-thou type, which frankly I would have loved to have been back in my youth) can't find it, there's something wrong. This happened to me so often, I've finally skipped Borders almost altogether. Barnes & Noble is a little better, but I refuse to pay for their discount card and I get irritated when the clerks keep pressing me to get one.

I guess what I'm saying is that, except for specialty stores (mystery, SF, academic), maybe it's time to kiss the physical bookstore goodbye. Online is the way to go. Yes, I miss the activity of looking through books to find serendipitous surprises, and that's something that online bookselling will never be good at, but I'm always happy with my shopping experiences at Amazon. They have what I'm looking for, it's almost always discounted at least a bit off of the list price, and there are no clerks to sneer at me or babble at me about their discount card.

A wave chicane; or, the authority of the lyric sheet

2009-10-12T13:37:00.010-04:00

Back in the days of vinyl, one of the great joys of listening to an album was to read along with the lyric sheet. On the radio, the chorus to CCR's "Down on the Corner" might sound like "Well, Napoleon and the baby," but with the album's lyrics in front of you, it suddenly became clear that John Fogarty was singing, "Willy and the Poorboys are playin'." It wasn't always a physical "sheet"; sometimes they were printed on the actual record liner (a paper or plastic jacket in which the record was placed so the cardboard jacket wouldn't scratch it) or on the outside jacket. The fanciest albums might have a whole separate booklet with words and photos and, in the case of some Pink Floyd records, posters or decals. Nowadays, lyric booklets, if they exist, are small and the typeset even smaller, and I wonder how many of the dwindling number of consumers of the physical artifact that is the CD bother to read them anymore.

At any rate, the lyric sheet always seemed to be the ultimate authority for figuring out the words and perhaps figuring out what the song meant--not to mention knowing who played what, as band members and session musicians were often listed song by song with the lyrics. It never dawned on me to question the lyric sheet; after all, wasn't it official, right from the horse's mouth via the record company? On Sunday, "Can't Get It Out Of My Head" by Electric Light Orchestra came on my iPod for the upteenth time. It was their first top 40 hit, back in 1975, and though it doesn't get as much oldies airplay as songs like "Mr. Blue Sky" or "Don't Bring Me Down," it's still one of my favorites.

The first lines in the song, according to the lyric sheet that comes with the album Eldorado, are as follows: "Midnight on the water/I saw the ocean's daughter/Walking on a wave chicane/Staring as she called my name." I remember as a teenager wondering, what the hell is a '"wave chicane"? I looked it up in several dictionaries and never found it. I decided that it was some part of a wave and let it go--what else could it be, since the lyric sheet must be right. Plus, it kinda sounded mysteriously cool. On Sunday, however, I realized I was singing, "Walking on a wave she came..." That makes more sense, and "came" is a more precise rhyme for "name." But still, the official lyric sheet says, "chicane." Would the InterTubes be able to solve this dilemma for me?

The short answer is, no. Almost every day of my life lately, I am moved to mutter to myself, "Geez, I love the Internet." But it hasn't been much help here. Typically, the Internet is a wonderful place to find song lyrics, but one must always be on the watch for sloppy transcriptions, typos, or just plain wrong guesses that are posted as authoritative lyrics. Some sites say "wave chicane"; some say "on a wave she came"; one site says "wave's chicane." An entry about the song at the Jeff Lynne Song Database makes the dubious claim that a chicane is "the frothy tip of a cresting wave," which is kinda what I had decided when I was 18, but as I did some surface digging, I found no other source, authoritative or otherwise, that gives this definition. The most common meaning of the word ties it to "chicanery," which is "deception by artful subterfuge." I'm sure Lynne (pictured) didn't mean that the wave was being sneaky.

So where does that leave me? My universe is slipping its moorings; I can no longer automatically trust in the Lyric Sheet, and the Internet has let me down (though it is thanks to the Net that I know I'm not the only person in the world who has wondered about this lyric fragment). I suspect that Lynne is singing "on a wave she came," but part of me would like to believe that there is some strange arcanity to that line that will never be be made clear.

TWILIGHT ZONE at 50

2009-10-06T20:24:00.006-04:00

The New York Times Arts Beat blog ran a post on the 50th anniversary of The Twilight Zone, a show that was a seminal part of my mass media background. It was one of the first prime-time shows that wasn't for kids or wasn't a sitcom that I remember watching regularly. At the time (early to mid 60's, before my adolescence) it seemed part and parcel of my interest in scary movies, and I'm sure it had an influence on my developing reading tastes, which ran toward sci-fi and horror short stories. In college, my girlfriend and I bonded over a shared memory of the climactic line of dialogue from "To Serve Man," a line which has since become a cliche (though I won't spoil it here, just in case) but at the time, when we both recited it simultaneously, we screamed in mock fear and in joy at finding someone who knew such an arcane reference.

The blog post author, Dave Itzkoff, categorizes the episodes into three types: 1) The Classic Switcheroo, which is basically the surprise ending; 2) The Total Apocalypse, which is about the end of the world--and I would argue could include a common variation in which characters are in a world they don't understand, basically experiencing the end of the world they lived in before, as in "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" or "Stopover in a Quiet Town"; 3) The Inexplicably Supernatural, as in the famous Billy Mumy episode "It's a Good Life." Itzkoff includes a fourth category, shows which featured stars before they got famous (Robert Redford, William Shatner), but that's not a genre category--though certainly the ability to see such celebs is a plus for retrospective viewing.

What Itzkoff doesn't mention are the (what were at the time) mainstream liberal humanistic views which were usually expressed in a moral at the end of the story, sometimes quite explicitly, by the shows' creator, host, and writer Rod Serling. Messages about justice, tolerance and race relations were the most obvious ones; my favorite "message" show is probably "I Am the Night, Color Me Black," in which the sun does not come up in places where hatred or injustice seem to have gotten the upper hand (Dallas--mere months after JFK's assassination--and Vietnam are specifically mentioned). But it's not the feel-bad moral that makes the show memorable, it's the creepiness of the event (or non-event) itself, and usually the messages were well couched in such bizarre, supernatural tones that you didn't feel too much like you were being lectured at.

The very phrase "Twilight Zone" has become a pop culture marker; it's used in speeches, songs by Golden Earring, Manhattan Transfer, and 2 Unlimited reference it, and indeed the first few notes of the show's theme (dee-dee-dee-DEE-DEE-dee-dee-dee) have become pop culture shorthand for anything strange and creepy. Some shows were funny, and some were lackluster, but all were strange or at least a little off-kilter and usually the supernatural event in the show was not explained away rationally. After Twilight Zone came The Outer Limits, Night Gallery (also from Serling), Tales of the Unexpected, et al., but I think nothing has ever captured the public's imagination like the original. (Certainly a case could be made that Twilight Zone was heavily influenced by the earlier anthology show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but the Hitchcock stories, creepy as they were, were always about the real world).

The blog asked for people's favorite episodes, and I came up with a Top 10 which I'll buzz through here. The top 3 are ranked, but the rest are mostly equal:

1) "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street" (pictured above) in which a neighborhood tears itself apart when it fears it is under attack from space aliens.

2) "Stopover in a Quiet Town" in which a hungover couple (below) wake up Sunday morning in a strangely quiet small town.

3) "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up" which features a busful of travelers stuck in a diner; they soon come to believe that one of their number might be a Martian.

All three of these basically rely on a surprise ending, but the getting there is so fun, they can be watched over and over again. My other favorites:

"The After Hours" with Anne Francis as a shopper who discovers some strange goings-on on an abandoned floor in a department store.

"Eye of the Beholder" in which a deformed woman undergoes experimental surgery so she'll look like everyone else.

"Living Doll" with Telly Savalas as an abusive husband and father who gets his comeuppance from a talking doll--very creepy episode; just say "My name is Talky Tina..." to anyone who knows this episode and they'll get a chill (Tina is pictured above).

"Night of the Meek," a gentle Christmas fantasy with Art Carney as an alcoholic department store Santa who finds a magical gift bag.

"It's a Good Life" has a great performance by 7-year-old Billy Mumy as a kid with the power to get rid of troublesome people with a glance, by putting them "in the cornfield."

"The Fear" (pictured at left) is set at an isolated cabin where a woman and a sheriff are menaced by what might be a gigantic space monster.

I have to split my 10th place among 2, the aforementioned "I Am the Night, Color Me Black" and "To Serve Man."

Twilight Zone is the only TV series, aside from Friends (and, when Fox gets around to releasing the rest, The Mary Tyler Moore Show), that I own the entirety of on DVD, and it's worth it. I'm not sure what the younger generations feel about the show now, but I suspect many of the episodes would still work on a current audience. They certainly still work on me.

Fall TV?

2009-09-30T12:16:00.010-04:00

Stop me if I've said this before, but when I was young, publication of the Fall Preview issue of TV Guide was always a big deal for me. It used to (in the 60's and 70's) come out around Labor Day, which meant at the beginning of the school year, so it was a race as to which would come first--first day of classes or the Fall Preview issue. I would read it from cover to cover (which I did with every TV Guide anyway), marvel at the lovely, colorful photos that accompanied each new show's entry, and plan my fall TV schedule.

Compared to those days, I barely watch TV anymore, TV Guide is a spindly shadow of its former self, and I work all year round, so fall is not such a big deal anymore. There are only two new shows I'm even bothering to dip into. Glee, about the misadventures of the geeky members of a high school glee club, actually aired its first episode last spring and it sucked me in with its creative musical numbers, quirky characters, and campy aura. But already, two episodes into its fall run, it's feeling a little tired. My main problem: the campy bloom is off the rose; as a friend noted, it's becoming a lot like Desperate Housewives, a show which also started off as something fresh and strange and quickly drowned in typical soap opera histrionics. Both shows kinda want to be Twin Peaks, but become Dallas. I'll still watch Glee for a while, for the production numbers (the first week's peak was a version of Jazmine Sullivan's "Bust Your Windows") and for Jane Lynch, the funniest character-you-love-to-hate I've seen in a long time, but I can see that even she is gonna get stuck in a rut pretty soon as the glee club's super-nemesis.

The other show is FlashForward, which is like Lost, except the whole world is the island. One day, every person on the planet blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds and gets a vision of his or her life 6 months in the future. The blackouts cause lots of death and destruction (planes fall out of the sky, drivers hit each other, patients die during operations) and we follow a loosely-knit group of characters as they muddle through the event's aftermath and try to figure out what the flashes mean: did they see a future that is predetermined, or can their actions change what they saw?

The central character is Joseph Fiennes, an FBI agent who is assigned to figure out if the event was a terrorist attack of some sort. His wife, Sonya Walger, sees herself living with another man whom she doesn't recognize (though we see him at the end of the first episode). Fiennes' work partner, John Cho, is understandably upset that he saw nothing during the blackout: does that mean he'll be dead in six months? And so on. One thing I like is that the layout of the show isn't clear or predictable yet: each week, will they delve into different people's stories? Or will it center on this small group of characters? In other words, will it be a detective show or a soap opera? Or, wonder of wonders, will it be something, in the words of Monty Python, completely different? The production values are high, the acting is good (Broadway star Brian F. O'Byrne plays Fiennes AA sponsor), and the first episode was intriguing enough to make me come back for more.

The only other shows I'm still watching regularly are all clustered on Mondays: Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Castle, and with Don still watching Heroes, our DVR must remain in good working order. This week, we're dipping in and out of the latest Ken Burns' opus on PBS about the National Parks; it's beautiful and it makes me want to visit one of the parks, but as usual with Burns, it's too long and a bit too pretentious at times. Otherwise, it's just Jeopardy, Daily Show, Colbert, and Turner Classic Movies. I miss those Fall Preview days...

Covered

2009-09-22T14:10:00.005-04:00

Cover bands are fun to hear live, but when it comes to sitting down and listening to a cover version of a song, I have mixed feelings. Of course, one's experience of a cover (a recording of a song that was originally performed by someone else) is crucially dependent on whether or not one has heard the original version. Back in the late 60's when I managed a record store, I remember a record company rep being a little bit disgusted that he was selling so many copies of the 12" single of "Knock On Wood," a big disco hit by Amii Stewart, because he thought it was a total bastardization of the original by R&B singer Eddie Floyd. A just-out-of-college punk like me chuckled at him, because I had never heard the original (I was deeply steeped in pop music, but at the time, aside from Beatles and Beach Boys, my knowledge didn't go much farther back than 1969), so Stewart's version was the only one I knew, and it was fine by me. When I eventually did hear Floyd's original, I liked it and understood what the rep felt, but because the disco song was my first version, and I knew it in the context of the disco boom, I still liked it. I experienced them as two different songs and liked them both.

But certainly the sales rep's reaction is common when one knows an original, especially a beloved one, then hears a cover. I'm not sure what makes a successful cover version in my eyes. I want it to be different enough from the original so that there's a reason for recording it, but not too far off so I can still get a taste of the pleasure of the original. Perhaps the best covers are done in a completely different genre from the original; in addition to the discofied "Knock On Wood," I'm thinking of the R&B versions of "Sugar Sugar" (Wilson Pickett) and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" (Aretha Franklin), and more recently the gently country-twanged take on Dream Academy's "Life in a Northern Town" by Sugarland. My favorite Beatles covers are Candyflip's lightly hip-hop "Strawberry Fields Forever" and Oingo Boingo's rockin' "I Am the Walrus," a song one would not automatically assume would make a good cover. Then there are the covers that are basically cunning stunts (Pet Shop Boys with their medley of "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "Can't Take Eyes Off of You"), and those that feel like stunts but work remarkably well on their own (Tori Amos' "Smells Like Teen Spirit").

All this thinking comes about because of my recent purchase of two albums of covers, Under the Covers, Vols. 1 & 2, performed by Matthew Sweet (successful indie rocker from the early 90's) and Susanna Hoffs (formerly of the Bangles)--I bought them as entire albums from iTunes, but since I don't have any physical artifact, I have a hard time thinking I actually own the albums, but that's old man fodder for another blog post. The covers are largely quite faithful to the originals, but the duo manage to bring their own jangle-pop stamp to many of the songs. Half the fun here is the interesting selection of tunes; "Monday, Monday," "Warmth of the Sun," "Go All the Way," and "Hello It's Me" were all big mainstream hits and are actually, to my ears, some of the weakest songs here because Sweet and Hoffs seem to just be paying tribute to them and not adding much, though the performances are all more than respectable.

But it's in the lesser-known songs that the duo shine: Marmalade's 60's British hit "I See the Rain" (which I'd never heard before), Love's quirky "Alone Again Or" (their version doesn't seem that different but feels smoother and more fleshed-out), and a very good version of Eric Clapton's "Bell Bottom Blues," which succeeds largely because Hoffs takes the vocal lead rather than Sweet, giving it a slightly different gender spin. I like their vocal blend on the Beatles' "And Your Bird Can Sing," Sweet sounds a bit like an in-awe fanboy as he does Mott the Hoople's "All the Young Dudes," and they even tackle the pompous Yes song "I've Seen All Good People" and make it listenable.

Some of the above tunes are bonus tracks available only through iTunes. I'm linking to two videos, one a performance of "Cinnamon Girl," and below, a live acoustic take of "Rain" not on either album. If you're familiar with Matthew Sweet, you'll be shocked to see that he seems to have turned into Charlie Daniels. Two thumbs up for both albums (the first volume, of 60's songs, has the edge for me).

21st Century B-Movie

2009-09-15T11:37:00.014-04:00

It's kinda sad that there is no more theatrical outlet for B-movies these days: no double features, no (or darn few) drive-ins, no inner-city grindhouses. Nowadays, the equivalent of the B-movie is the made-for-TV movie or the straight-to-DVD release, which is usually a movie which was made for theatrical release but which never got sold to a distributor. These movies usually have the stink of failure about them by the time they get on the market, and I'm just as bad as any other film snob--I will rarely watch a straight-to-DVD movie, though I did have a positive experience a while back with Kabluey.

I'm glad I took a chance on Night Train, a recent DVD release of a theatrically orphaned movie which was filmed in Bulgaria in 2007. On Christmas Eve, a bedraggled man, popping pills and clutching a Christmas present, runs to catch a train, gets on, and promptly drops dead. The other two passengers in the car, an alcoholic salesman (Steve Zahn) and a young med school student (Leelee Sobieski), open the gift and find a small locked wooden box with what seem to be priceless gems inside. The conductor (Danny Glover) wants to lock the box up until they get to the next stop where they can report the death, but Zahn and Sobieski talk him into an elaborate scheme to get rid of the body and keep the treasure for themselves.

Glover, whom we assume will be the moral center of the story, gives in--he has a sick wife and plans to use his cut of the money to get her better care--and soon we're in Treasure of the Sierra Madre territory as greed and paranoia get the better of the characters. Disposing of the body proves to be a rather messy problem (a funny but graphic scene, and one that shows that Sobieski has what it takes to be the leader of the group), but when they think they're in the clear, who shows up at the next stop but a man who was supposed to meet the dead guy. The important cinematic references become The Maltese Falcon and Kiss Me Deadly. Just when our anti-heroes think they've taken care of him, the cops stop the train. Around this time, things take a turn for the Twilight Zone, and I'll give away no more of the plot except to say that the ending is both ambiguous and satisfying.

The first thing I liked about this movie is its look: virtually all of it is set on the train decked out with Christmas lights and decorations, giving most scenes a hazy red, green, or blue look that winds up being much creepier than you might think. Despite the limited setting, the active camerawork keeps the film energetic. All of the exterior shots of the train racing through snowy landscapes are done with CGI and look like it, but they're effective nonetheless.

I also liked the movie references. I can't give all of them away, but it's no spoiler to say that the dead guy's name is Cairo, the fat man looking for him is Gutman (both from Maltese Falcon), the salesman's name is Dobbs (Sierra Madre), and an old lady on the train is named Froy (Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes). The mix of noirish thriller, fantasy, and horror works well, and I like the twists and turns the plot takes near the end--not at all realistic, but catnip for movie buffs.

The acting is solid, with Zahn giving the best performance as the schlubby salesman; he gets the few comic lines in the movie and underplays them nicely. (I like that Zahn sometimes looks like a demented Robert Morse, as if his character in How to Succeed in Business had gotten laid off.) Glover does his usual sturdy, authoritative persona, and Sobieski is fine as the quirkiest character, who seems to have unplumbed depths. Richard O'Brien (Riff-Raff from Rocky Horror) has a surprising role. The characters are all underwritten, but this isn't a character-driven drama. Had this movie gotten out to theaters, it would likely have died a quick death, but perhaps it will find an audience on disc, though anyone renting this assuming it's an action quickie will be disappointed, and would probably be bothered by the mid-way turns to fantasy and horror. However, I highly recommend it.

Big men (and 2 crazy ladies)

2009-09-05T10:02:00.015-04:00

I'm going to do my best to catch up quickly on some recent viewing:

POLLOCK (2001): Ed Harris directed this biopic of abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock and stars as Pollock, the artist whose style of dripping and spattering paint on huge canvases led to the famous museum retort, "My kid could paint that!" Here he is presented as a disturbed man, certainly an alcoholic and possibly a manic-depressive, who was pretty much always risking alienating his friends and relatives (though his wife, played by Marcia Gay Harden, blames the brother for sending Pollock off on his jags). Solitary creative endeavors like writing and painting are notoriously difficult to dramatize, but Harris does a great job making Pollock's painting style visual and exciting, if not necessarily explicable. Harris is good portraying an unlikeable and generally unfathomable man, and Harden is even better as the wife who puts up with a lot but still manages to stand up for herself once in a while--she won an Oscar for this performance. It was interesting to see Bud Cort (of Harold & Maude) in a supporting role, looking exactly like S.Z. Sakall, the white-haired bumbler Carl from Casablanca.

LOVE IS THE DEVIL (1998): Another biopic of another unpleasant artist, Francis Bacon, played by Derek Jacobi. The focus here is on his relationship with a small-time thief, played by Daniel Craig. Jacobi catches Craig in the middle of robbing his flat, and the two wind up bed (a novel approach to seduction). Against the odds, they forge a relationship, physical and affectionate, though sadomasochistic, but when Jacobi begins to tire of Craig's neediness, things end badly. None of Bacon's artwork is shown in the film, but the director, John Maybury, makes many of the images in the film look like Bacon's thick, exaggerated, impressionist paintings. The most we ever understand about Bacon's inner life is when he is asked about expressing his feelings in his work, he replies, "Feelings? I prefer to show two men fucking." Not a particularly interesting film except for the visual style. Bonus: brief nude shot of Daniel Craig!

THE GREAT BUCK HOWARD (2009): John Malkovich plays a magician whose best years are behind him; when he hires a new personal assistant (Colin Hanks), he tries for a comeback. This dry comedy reminded me of the Peter O'Toole film My Favorite Year. In both films, a young man goes through a coming-of-age process, led by a somewhat overbearing entertainer. Though Malkovich is magnetic as Howard, this is really the story of the Hanks character who has just dropped out of law school, despite pressure from his father (played by his real-life father Tom) to stay in; he's adrift trying to find a future that interests him. Of course, there's a love interest, played by the fabulous Emily Blunt (the British secretary in The Devil Wears Prada); in fact, she really seems way too fabulous for Hanks, and that strains the credibility of that plotline. But overall, it's a fun movie (though almost too lightweight) with a couple of clever scenes (one involving an off-screen Jerry Springer). Steve Zahn and Debra Monk are good in supporting roles.

BIG MAN JAPAN (2007): A Japanese man with a superpower (he can grow into a giant, pictured above, with the help of electrocution) is called upon to fight odd creatures that threaten Tokyo, but finds that being a superhero is a thankless job in today's society. This movie has a clever idea and might have made a good short subject, but at almost two hours and with a deliberately slow, even plodding, pace, it's not worth sticking with. It plays out like a documentary, with cameras following Big Man Japan around as an average citizen and as a giant, watching as he barely gets the best of the monsters, who, when defeated, are beamed up into the sky--no explanation is ever given, though I assumed that the monsters were being let loose on purpose, as entertainment for the masses. (?) The effects (mostly CGI) are fine, and the finale is truly weird, but I can't recommend it.

GREY GARDENS (2009): The "2 crazy ladies" movie of my subject line, this is a fictionalized TV-movie remake of the 70's documentary about two relatives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis who became infamous for living in a wreck of a house which was on the verge of being condemned. The original film documented the daily lives of Little Edie Beale, then in her 50's, a larger-than-life character who loved playing to the camera, and Big Edie, her mother, a more retiring figure who spent most of the day in bed. This film recreates a couple of key scenes from the original, but mostly, it consists of flashbacks that show us how these two former socialites lost (or, more precisely, gave up) their privileged life. I like the original film quite a bit, and this one is almost as good. Drew Barrymore (pictured) does a fantastic job with the accent and mannerisms of Little Edie; some critics have said she doesn't plumb the depths of the character, but frankly in this case, I think the surface is the character; I don't mean to trivialize the real person, but I think her surface was basically an exaggerated version of what was beneath. Jessica Lange is very good as well; the burden of her old-age make-up in the later scenes gets in the way of a full-blooded performance, but she's quite fine as the younger Big Edie. I'm not sure what folks who haven't seen the original Grey Gardens will make of this, but I was impressed and hope that Barrymore gets an Emmy.

Obsession

2009-09-03T10:48:00.014-04:00

I think of myself as being as susceptible to winding up an obsessed fan as the average person. For example, I am a sucker for all things Beatles; imagine my distress when I discovered that the newly remastered "Beatles in Mono" boxed set was already sold out at Amazon, and the cheapest it seems to be available elsewhere is for around $400! I read books about the celebrities I like or admire, from Ernest Hemingway to Joni Mitchell. I have a Starbucks DIY tumbler with pictures of Jeremy Piven (at right) all over it. I have mini-posters of 2001 and Casablanca in my cubicle. And, of course, there are my idle crushes on people I only know through Facebook or Twitter (they're like my own private celebrities).

But really, I've realized over the years that I don't have the makings of a truly obsessive fan. I don't intend to pay $400 for the Beatles set; I don't buy new Joni Mitchell albums anymore, and I still haven't gotten around to reading "For Whom the Bell Tolls"; I have no desire to see Piven's latest movie, The Goods; I refused to buy the latest upgrade of Casablanca on DVD; I don't have it in me to become a danger to casual Internet contacts, or even to become much of a pest.

If I wasn't aware of all this before, I certainly am now after reading My Judy Garland Life by British author Susie Boyt. This odd, entertaining, but unsettling little book is part Garland biography and part memoir of Boyt's life. The author was born in 1969, just a few months before Garland's untimely death, and she discovered Garland via "Over the Rainbow"; since then, there's been no turning back. She calls the feeling she has for Garland "hero-worship," perhaps because she admires Garland for overcoming so many obstacles in her private life and giving joy to millions through her acting and singing, even if she was ultimately unable to survive in the face of her problems with drugs and personal relationships.

But to me, the feeling seems more like an overwhelming fixation on Garland. Boyt thinks about her all the time, imagining scenarios in which she could have become a part of Garland's life and helped her out by running her errands or making her dresses, nurturing activities that would have made her know she was loved. This extends to having similar feelings for Liza Minnelli--I half-understand that impulse, as even I root for Liza from afar, feeling oddly sorry for her as someone who could never quite get out from under the burden of being Judy's daughter. Early on, Boyt tells us she has a husband and a daughter, and a couple different jobs, including grief counselor, but if those passages were edited out of the book, I would assume she was a dreadfully lonely overweight loner who has no life except what she can imagine through the figure of Judy Garland. She also writes about her fellow fanatics, calling them "Judy-friends" (and remarkably only one of them is a gay man).

Boyt identifies with Judy in a number of ways: she wanted to be an entertainer but was constantly stymied in her attempts; she grew up in a single-parent household (though she did eventually have some contact with her father); she was put through incredible grief when her boyfriend was killed just before they were to be married. Her obsession with Garland seems to be a way to work through some of these problems, though to be honest, even though she shares a number of anecdotes about herself, they are disjointed and rather vague, and though the book is called a memoir, Boyt rarely comes into strong focus.

Most critics like this book, and some even mention its camp value, but for me, the total lack of camp value is the real problem with it. I kept waiting for some sense that Boyt knows how odd this obsession (or "hero-worship," as she calls it) is for an adult, but there's no distancing device used, no sense of irony or humor or high camp, not when she lovingly goes through Garland's make-up trunk, not when she imagines that ironing Judy's sheets might have made her feel more loved, not even when she contemplates stealing cigarette butts from Liza Minnelli's ashtray.

To her credit, there are bits of humor here and there, she does write a bit about the nature of obsession, and she includes an answer she got to a questionnaire about fan's feelings for Garland that said, "Your questions are really creepy"--and actually, they are. The anecdotes about Garland's life are interesting (best tidbit: that Judy could appear an emotional wreck with her audience clapping and weeping during an "Over the Rainbow" finale, but then whisper to little Liza, who came rushing onstage to comfort her mother, "Wanna send out for Chinese tonight?"), but overall the experience of reading this book is a little uncomfortable. I wound up feeling about Boyt like she felt about Judy; I'd like to pat her on the back and say, "Susie, things will be OK. Can Jeremy Piven and I fold your blankets for you?"

Even Better for Ted!

2009-08-27T18:42:00.013-04:00

I was shocked to discover the other day that one of my favorite current TV shows, Better Off Ted, was actually being renewed! The show debuted on ABC in the spring, ran for a few weeks with middling ratings, then was yanked during the May sweeps, never a good sign. The network brought it back to finish its run this summer and the ratings were dismal, so I had just assumed it was dead in the water, but several reliable sources note that it is returning with an 18-episode order in January, 2010.

The half-hour sitcom (my favorite TV genre, though one that gets little respect these days) is set at a huge conglomerate called Veridian Dynamics for whom money comes first, and worries about whether a product will cause mutations in babies come second (if at all). Ted (Jay Harrington) is a fairly sweet (but not sappy) single father who holds a high position in research and development. His boss, Veronica (Portia de Rossi) is a tightly wound company woman for whom lying and displacing blame is second nature. We discovered late in the season that the two had a brief, torrid office affair, and this is presumably why Ted is reluctant to open a new can of relationship worms with Linda (Andrea Anders, pictured), the new gal in the office, though there are certainly sparks between the two.

The situations these three get into are amusing, but the secret weapons of the show, for my money, are Phil (Jonathan Slavin) and Lem (Malcolm Barrett), the geeky researchers who, like the nerdy Sheldon and Leonard, read a little gay to me, though Phil is married and Lem dates women. It's through them that we are introduced to the crazy product schemes, such as beef without cows or an office chair designed for better productivity--it's so uncomfortably itchy, no one can sit in it for long. My favorite episode involved an error in the building's security system--it won't recognize black people, so white people have to follow the black employees around so they can get from room to room. In another episode, Phil and Lem invite Ted to their geeky Medieval battle club which meets in the basement once a week, and the cool, collected Ted begins to outgeek them all.

I admit I was drawn to the show by the handsome Harrington, who was about the only good thing in the American version of Coupling. He is sexy and funny, and his casual delivery (often directly to the camera) carries the show. I liked the wholesomely sexy Anders in the Friends spinoff Joey and she's just as charming here. De Rossi (at right) is fantastic, almost as good as she was in Arrested Development. The show seems to be done on a relatively cheap budget, but it always looks sharp. I admit I'd like a goofy guest star once in a while, and they probably don't have the money for that, but I'm quite happy that the show is getting a second chance. The first season is over, but it looks like the last few episodes are available for viewing on ABC's web site. Let's hope this breaks out as it deserves.

Jon Stewart is making my ass tired

2009-08-21T17:02:00.009-04:00

Much as I usually like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, I'm finding myself increasingly unable to watch the entire show these days. The reasons are threefold:

1) Jon seems to be coasting lately. It used to be funny when he'd be lackadaisical about messing up a bit or dragging a laugh line out too long or making an obscure joke that only the studio audience would get. Now he does all three things too often and/or for too long. I feel like my 14 minutes of comedy (30 minutes minus the ads and the usually tedious interview) has shrunk down to about 11.

2) The focus on Fox News and their crazy mob followers is depressing me no end. Yes, Stewart and his writers do a nice job of pointing out their craziness (signs at town hall meetings saying "Government, Keep Your Hands Off of Medicare!") and their hypocrisy (showing that the Fox commentators who fully back today's screaming health-care reform protesters railed against the screaming anti-war and anti-Bush protesters of a few years ago). But the sense that they are preaching to the converted has become smothering, and the narrow focus on the health-care "debate" to the exclusion of most any other kind of political or news satire is stretching my nerves thin.

3) We record The Daily Show and the Colbert Report together as a one-hour block, and as Colbert still seems to make me laugh, I am anxious to speed through Stewart to get to Colbert.

This makes me a little sad, but I'm hoping when the health care monolith either stands erect or crumbles to the ground, Jon and company will feel like they can move on.

PS: I don't know what the phrase, "makes my ass tired" really means or where it came from. My dad used it all the time, in a kind of frustrated, weary way, and I guess it just means that I'm tired of something, but, as ass-related humor always makes me laugh, I like using this phrase whenever I can.