Bianca Steele

Lemony Snicket on the Midwestern Novel

While I’m hung up writing something about Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, occasionally remembering that I have a couple of months of movies backlogged, including, now, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, here’s a quote relevant to both of those titles, from Daniel Handler in the New York Times Book Review this past Sunday:

“[C]alling a writer ‘Midwestern’ seems like a way to start up that familiar and imaginary battle between Plain Novels Full of People With Integrity and Dirty Fingernails versus Showoffy Books About People Having Martinis in Penthouses.”

That’s obviously relevant to Franzen, and also to Eugenides, both of whom offer up contrasts between humble men of the Midwest and more sophisticated Easterners, but also to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

(I’ve actually never read any Lemony Snicket.  I guess I should remedy that.)

Excursions Into Film History (March Films): Mean Streets

It’s a little hard for me to see, forty years after the fact, the importance of Mean Streets.  It was Martin Scorsese’s first major outing as a writer and director, and marks his appearance as a major star—he was recognized as such almost immediately.  From a film-historical point of view, Mean Streets illustrates several of what would become Scorsese’s hallmarks: the long tracking shots, the director’s cameos, the preoccupation with, well, mean streets.  It’s a terrific opportunity to see a very, very young Robert De Niro, and an equally young and callow Harvey Keitel.

But why has this movie been so loved, when an arguably “deeper” film like Papillon (released the same year) was so much less well received?  Mean Streets is by no means a really arty film, and it doesn’t draw on European or avant-garde from preceding decades.  I think I can detect, in the voiceover that accompanies the trailer for Mean Streets, a note of incredulity, almost asking whether this film really needed to be made, whether these kind of people really needed the validation of appearing in the place of heroes.

It is a very ordinary story, about a couple of ordinary guys.  They’re kind of doofuses, really, wandering around the streets at all hours of the night, drinking, overturning trash barrels, fistfighting, and generally acting as if they were twelve.  Charlie would like to own a restaurant, but right now he works for his uncle as a collector, taking protection money from other restaurant owners.  Johnny is still a ne’er-do-well.  They have two friends their own age, a bar owner and small-time loan shark.  They hang out in their friend’s bar and deal with the issues that walk in: Johnny’s debts and his inability to keep appointments, another friend’s trouble collecting on a bet with a bookmaker across town, an interloper in the bar who murders another customer.

Charlie’s uncle disapproves of Johnny and wants his nephew to have nothing to do with him or his family.  But their friendship dates to their childhood, and Charlie is loyal.  Plus, he's having a secret affairn with Johnny’s cousin.  She has epilepsy.  Charlie’s uncle believes this means she’s mentally ill, and there’s no way he’ll ever approve.  So the affair has to remain as secret as the fact that Charlie has been backing Johnny’s debts.

The film depicts contemporary New York, but it was based on Scorsese’s own experiences there, more than ten years earlier.  This may account for the uncertainty with which the social changes of the 1960s and early 1970s are depicted.  With a couple of prominent exceptions, the kids’ wardrobes could have been taken from a production of Guys and Dolls, and so could a lot of their dialogue.  Blacks, Jews, and hippies are nowhere to be seen (UPDATE: except in the form of Jewish hippie chicks looking for fun).  A couple of kids from the outer boroughs, or maybe Jersey, come by, looking for drugs, and outsmart Charlie’s two friends to the extent of getting ripped off for less than they were in store for.  There’s a crowd in the plaza outside of the church, for the Feast of San Gennaro, and presumably a lot of these people are tourists—the crowd gives a sense of the outside world pressing in on the Lower East Side tenement slum, trying to get a little for themselves of what it has to offer, maybe in a little while threatening to push out the kids who’d made their home there—but there’s not much sense that these kids perceive the gentrification of the Village as a threat to them or their way of life.  A rich guy wanders into their local bar, a gay man’s brought in one night by the gay bartender, but these threats are easily warded off by the combined bullishness of the guys the neighborhood belongs to.

The only threat they can’t ward off comes from within.  One of their own (Johnny) is a loser.  He keeps engaging in business transactions, asking his friends repeatedly to vouch for him, when he has no intention or ability to make good on those debts.  Charlie is his best friend and is drawn—at first by loyalty—to stand by his side.  Eventually, Johnny finds the means to blackmail Charlie.  He threatens to ruin his standing with the uncle who’s staking him, and ruin his prospects of owning a restaurant.

Charlie is on the verge of making it.  He’s about to get his restaurant—his uncle took it after the owner couldn’t make payments any longer.  He’s got a new wardrobe of crisp blue suits, white shirts, and red power ties, bought by his mother.   But when Johnny blackmails him, he doesn’t know what to do.  He drives around aimlessly and the two of them both end up dead, bleeding in the street.

The gunman is played by the director, riding around in the back seat of a loan shark’s car.  There are elements that lend this story more gravitas than you’d get in a simple story of what life is like on the mean streets of an ethnic slum.  Charlie sacrifices himself for his friend, for loyalty—in effect, to protect the people he grew up among—and the idea that he’s just thoughtful enough to do it consciously has been played up throughout the film.  He’s preoccupied with religion.  He insists that he believes a priest who, at a retreat, tells the same story about his personal experience, with a couple punished for having premarital sex, as another priest tells on another occasion.  He insists he still has faith despite the teasing of his friends.  He regularly wakes up in the morning, preoccupied by thoughts of sin and his inability to properly repent.

The very beginning of the movie benefits greatly from religious imagery, with Charlie in a church, lighting a candle—experimenting with feeling, for himself, the pain of being burned—and contemplating religious paintings—which the filmgoer sees from Charlie’s perspective.  Here are the kind of lush visuals we later came to expect from Scorsese.  The next scene introduces the Scorsese tracking shot, following Charlie from a point just behind his back, as he glides around his friend’s bar.  The silhouette of Harvey Keitel’s back remains motionless, centered on the screen, as the character’s surroundings move around and past him.  The shot suggests the character’s cool, his self-absorption, his local importance, and also intoxication: we’ll see a similar shot later, in a scene that ends with Charlie passed out in the storeroom.  But the attention to visual style isn’t carried through consistently, and later scenes are reminiscent of TV cop shows.

So Mean Streets appears to be two different films.  On the one hand, it’s an expose of life in the slums, where the bad kids are heading for an early grave, and the good kids are too often pulled down by their own good intentions.  On the other, it’s a sensitive meditation on friendship, community, religion, and self-sacrifice.  I don’t think the two themes are particularly well integrated.  Also, the movie is kind of long, and the lion’s share of it holds together poorly.  There’s not much to like about the characters (and I say this as someone who found something to like in the characters in Less Than Zero).  But as a first attempt, it’s admirable.  See it to see where Scorsese started out, to see De Niro and Keitel near the beginnings of their careers, and what was considered a “celebrated” film in a year in which The Sting, The Exorcist, and American Graffiti all took home awards.

April Movies Already: Papillon

I just saw Papillon (1973), and I have a lot to say, and it’s already written, so I’m going to post on it now.

March movies, still coming up, will include From To Rome with Love, Mean Streets (also 1973), Rock of Ages, and Friends with Benefits.

Papillon is a prison-break movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.  (Cameos or small roles are taken by Vic Tayback, Bill Mumy, Victor Jory, Gregory Sierra, and Don Gordon.)  McQueen plays “Papillon,” a thief who claims that he was framed for murder.  Hoffman is Dega, the perpetrator of a counterfeit war bond scheme.  Both have been sentenced to prison labor in the West Indies, after which sentence they’ll become indentured laborers, and after which time they’ll be free, to live in French Guiana though not to return to France.  Papillon is a thug who promises to protect Dega in return for cash, to pay for bribes and boats, in what any filmgoer will recognize, way before the fact, are entirely futile attempts to escape.

I realized while watching this movie that it’s an important movie.  It’s aware of its place in the history of cinema and the history of its own times, and it moves both forward.  In this film by a director of the pre-film school era, when this kind of intertextualism would really take off, there are allusions to Kubrick flicks like A Clockwork Orange and 2001 (even, it seemed, to The Shining, which didn’t appear until 1980!), to The Ten Commandments, even to Kafka and Waiting for Godot.  (There’s something of interest for fans of A.S. Byatt’s novella “Morpho Eugenia,” too.)  The cinematography morphs from straight war- or prison-movie grunge at the beginning, to a groovy Technicolor dream by the end.  I assume that it is, in large part, the screenplay, co-written by Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple, Jr., from the popular memoir of an escaped French prisoner, that makes the movie so interesting—though, as I suggested above, the direction, by Franklin J. Schaffner, who’d recently done the Coppola-scripted Patton and earlier in his career directed high-middlebrow drama series for television, makes a contribution, too. 

Moreover, I can easily see this style of writing potentially having been influential among much younger artists who saw Papillon at an impressionable age.  For me, knowing who the writer is affects how I interpret the work.  To the extent that Dalton Trumbo’s Papillon is an allegory of the Vietnam War, for example, it’s not a personal expression of the emotions felt by an American grunt, filtered through the elements of art.  Rather, it’s an explanation by an older man of the universal elements of the Vietnam experience, perhaps for the benefit of a younger one.  Similarly, it interests me to know that the end of the film, after fourteen years have passed, and Dega and Papillon are old friends, hanging out together and making plans mostly because there’s nothing else to do, is the work of a man who’s fifty-three years old; where it seems to be a comment on the ending of 2001, it interests me to know that Kubrick was only forty when that film was produced.  I’m not sure the writing here makes a good role model for younger writers and filmmakers (at least for those who aren’t themselves Communists, as Trumbo had been, making his view of life informed by a very specific set of circumstances and institutions, like his understanding of art).  But it is what was being done at the time, and it could serve as a useful example of how to meld deep themes and larger concerns with the elements of a straightforward entertainment.

On the minus side, about halfway through the film, there are obvious visual elements of what’s still recognizable as a kind of Prisoner theme.  Unfortunately, I’m just about the right age that this hits me like bell bottoms, horizontally-striped velour tops, denim short-shorts on men, and long sideburns and love beads on middle-aged men with pot bellies.  Out of this world movies or TV shows are fine, but way-out stuff in straight media, just as a pretense of being “cool,” is somehow not.  At this point, I began asking myself whether this was a very different kind of movie from what I had expected, or whether the director had become caught up in a trend and lost control of the film.  But I can’t actually say it’s done badly.  At a couple of other moments, similar problems threaten to rear their head—for instance, where the story of two men trying to do a difficult job (wrestle an alligator) becomes, apparently inadvertently, comic—and it’s to the movie’s credit that I wondered whether a more serious theme had always been inherent in those Abbott and Costello movies, not whether the filmmakers had suffered a lapse in taste.

In fact, critical opinion in 1973 was pretty much negative on this film.  Roger Ebert panned it.  Victor Vincent Canby, of the Times, was respectful but ultimately couldn’t buy it all.  More recently, bloggers and younger critics seem divided.  Steve McQueen’s performance here is referred to as his best.  (Dustin Hoffman’s is described as a rehash of his Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy, with some justice.)  Film buffs and film students seem to like it, while many others don’t.

What nails this film’s importance, for me, in fact, is just that nearly everybody today who sees it knows, instantly, what the theme is, the subtext.  Yet this is not, and never was, what the film is “about.”  You could argue that this blatancy doesn’t actually make the film good, that even at the time it was obvious that Papillon was trafficking in clichés, that at best the movie is of historical importance, as illustrating one of the many ways a common preoccupation of the early 1970s could have been interpreted.  The bait-and-switch that allows viewers to think they’re watching a prison escape movie with traditional overtones that might appeal to older veterans, then jolts them with a new-wave-y second half of dubious continuity, could be viewed as artful . . . or not.  I think it’s the viewer’s choice, here.  If Papillon were a novel, we could call it “postmodern,” but it doesn’t feel like the right label in this case.  Would we think the film was better if it did?

UPDATE: Kael's blurb for Papillon, in 1001 Nights at the Movies, is diametrically wrong in just the right way to explain why Ebert is (somewhat more mildly) wrong.  Reinforcing my feeling that the contemporary critics got this one wrong.

February Movies

UPDATED to fix actor information for Dinner for Schmucks.

The Tempest: The Shakespeare play, with Helen Mirren playing the usually male role of Prospero, the magician-duke exiled with his daughter.  Ben Whishaw plays Ariel (usually, though not completely, nude), Djimon Hounsou plays Caliban (made up as half albino, half mud-man).  Russell Baker Brand, Alfred Molina, David Straithairn, Alan Cumming, and Chris Cooper are also in the cast.  It seemed to me to be a reasonably good interpretation of Shakespeare.  It was generally easy to tell what was going on and what was being said. 

Making Prospero a woman permitted a kind of intimacy between her and her supernatural servants (Ariel as air and light, Caliban as the earth), which might have been awkward otherwise, and also made her manipulation of her daughter a little less cringeworthy than it usually is.  It also added a little extra awkwardness to her manipulation of Ferdinand, as her daughter’s suitor—she’s preparing him for entry into her very female world, not for entry into the world of adult men, as a male Prospero could have been claiming to do.  The interpretation is very much that her magic, as much as her brother’s jealousy of her position, has alienated her from the social world, and that at the end she’s giving over attempts to exert power over other’s actions, not just Faustian attempts to peer into the unknown.  I’ve never seen this play performed, so I don’t know how much of this is usual in productions of it.

Farewell (French, with a good deal of Russian and some English): This movie is based on the true story of a French intelligence operation in the USSR, in the early 1980s.  An engineer with a French firm, working in Moscow, is tapped to pass information from a senior official in the KGB to the French.  He’s reluctant at first, his East German-born wife even more so, then he goes along.  The movie was reasonably entertaining, and it was interesting to see the French view of history, around the time Mitterand was elected, during Reagan’s first term as president.  A scene with a senior CIA agent explaining, to senior Washington officials’ apparent surprise, how the KGB runs agents in just about every institution of Russian society, seemed to me to be a little naïve, as did the jumps back and forth between French desire to be a big player on the world stage, and the French engineer’s feeling that he’d gotten caught by a game played specifically by the Americans.  Willem Dafoe plays the CIA agent, Fred Ward plays Reagan.  The two major roles, the engineer and the KGB officer, are apparently played by well-known directors of French films (neither of whom I'd heard of before, but that means little).

Dinner for Schmucks:  This movie is based on a French film, which, from what I can see on YouTube, had a very different feel.  A stock analyst finagles his way into almost but not quite getting a more prestigious broker’s job.  To seal the deal, he has to make a good impression at his boss’s “special” dinner.  He has to bring a guest who is, as his coworkers describe it, “remarkable”; but when they give examples, he realizes he’s supposed to bring a loser.  He struggles with the idea, but meets someone he thinks is the perfect candidate, and changes his mind.  His girlfriend, who works at an art gallery, is offended by the idea and leaves him.  This is his big dilemma: he wants to make lots of money to impress her and her art-gallery friends, but she prefers someone with morals.  Then his chosen “schmuck” intervenes and makes matters worse.

Of course, by the end of the film, he realizes that these “losers” are better people than his boss.

The movie wanders back and forth between slapstick, cringe comedy, and clever stuff that’s probably, however, basically filler.  The loser who keeps annoying the straight guy is a well-trodden path, and Steve Carell does it well.  Russell Brand (Yikes!) Jemaine Clement is funny and horrifying as the girlfriend’s client, who’s about to take her to San Francisco for her first big museum show.  Paul Rudd, whose roles sometimes don’t work for me, is good here, as the cool guy who doesn’t deserve to have an annoying person making his life miserable, in a slightly older version of the type (he has a bad back).  The “schmucks” at the dinner party, including a ventriloquist who claims his dummy is his wife, a woman who communes with the spirits of dead birds, and a blind fencer, are also amusing (and their shticks aren’t run into the ground as much as they could have been).  So it’s a basically competent comedy.

But such a bland movie really cries out for some cult-stud over-analysis: The Carell character’s “remarkable” hobby is to stuff found dead mice (as in taxidermy), dress them, and shoot pictures of them in dioramas of his own making.  The camera lingers lovingly over these, as if they were dream sequences in a Wes Anderson movie.  Brand's Clement’s character, on the other hand, is a real artist.  He has gallery shows and people buy his works.  What his works are, are wall-sized photographs of himself in various, usually vulgar, costumes, poses, and settings—like himself dressed as a satyr in gross, hairy jodhpurs.  He’s as impossible as the mouse-artist is.  The film fairly begs for the viewer to compare the two, especially at the end, where they go off together in a “this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship” moment.  But that’s impossible, because the entire movie, until this set-up heartwarming moment, has been about rich versus poor, successful versus unsuccessful, and the certainty that these two characters are on opposite sides of the divide.

The film also begs the user to compare the “remarkable losers”—an assortment of artistes who wouldn’t be out of place in a movie about Greenwich Village in the 1980s—with the analysts whom the Rudd character yearns to surpass.  Perhaps, in rejecting the executive suite, he’s reclaiming his allegiance to his longtime colleagues.  But we don’t see those colleagues again (we don’t see any office space at all, after the first fifteen minutes).  Whatever critique of Wall Street might have been implied in the movie’s first scenes, by the second act what’s at stake isn’t whether Wall Street values are right or wrong, only whether the guys on top in this particular firm are incompetent jerks.  So in the end, the movie shares their condemnation both of the lowly analysts and of the annoying, tasteless artists.

Though of course that’s reading a lot into what is almost certainly simply basically competent commercial filmmaking, going for a series of focus-grouped checkoffs and not for any unified artistic vision, to which in all likelihood a very large number of people contributed ideas and improvements.

(My brother really ought to see it, if he hasn’t already.)

X-Men: First Class:  I sort of liked the first X-Men movie but I can’t recommend this one.  I guess I had gotten the idea that Xavier and Eric (Magneto) meet at Oxford, and that the movie was going to show the psychological origins of the X-Men versions both of their selves and both of their rivalry, but I didn’t get what I expected.  There’s hardly anything about the beginning of their friendship.  We’re not shown any real reason for them to bond; it seems they bond just because they’re both there, and the only people in the room who are one another’s equal.  There’s not really anything here about origins at all, not of the individuals.  Even as a graduate student, Xavier/Dr. X is already committed to defending the status quo and its institutions.  Similarly, Eric/Magneto is determined on revenge from the very beginning of the story.  The movie gets the institutions started—it brings the X-Men together, shows them to the rest of the world for the first time, and shows how they split into two factions—and that may be enough for true fans.  It does have a really excellent supervillain, played by Kevin Bacon, with muttonchop sideburns and speaking German. 

Freude! Freude!: On not-reviewing the new Die Hard movie.

I may or may not get around to seeing the new Die Hard movie—I saw the last one, but I think I missed the third—but I thought it was interesting that two different movie critics decided to write about it without actually really reviewing it.  In Slate, Eric Lichtenfeld writes about the tag line, instead, and at the Tor blog, Ryan Britt publishes a predictive review he wrote before he actually saw the actual film, with notes interspersed showing what he’d gotten wrong.

I had already thought about reviewing the trailer.  (This is the version I saw in the movie theater.  There are others, but it looks like they all use the same music, in one form or another.)  Because it’s a really good trailer.  And it’s good in part for the reasons Lichtenfeld gives, for why the tag line is so memorable.  Or rather, if the tag line (you know, “Yippee-ki-yay, m-f-”—I think only the first part in fact appears in the trailer) weren’t so memorable, the trailer wouldn’t work as well as it does.  The tag line, as it appears in the trailer, is the moment of recognition, the moment when the viewer realizes that this is a trailer for a new Die Hard.  (Which is exciting, for reasons explored in the Lichtenfeld and Britt pieces, even though the viewer also knows it’s not likely a new Die Hard is necessary, or that it’s any good.)

What I liked was the way the music parallels that moment of recognition.  If your knowledge of classical music is at about the same level as mine, so that you’re familiar with a lot of great works but on intimate terms with at most a few of them, you knew from the opening bars of the trailer’s score that you knew this music from somewhere, but you couldn’t quite place it. It’s pretty good, though.  Then you see Bruce Willis, and you begin to wonder, but you’re still not sure.  Then he pumps a semi-automatic and says “Yippee-ki-yay,” and you’re certain.  And the score hits full bloom with the Ode to Joy, backgrounding the facades of majestic old European buildings, and you remember that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was the hallmark of the Die Hard movies, and you know exactly where you are. 

Why the Ninth was chosen for this movie is something that escapes you, as it happens.  This is the point at which you start to question the whole lingering Cold War theme of the new sequel, and your questioning casts a shadow back to your enjoyment of the earlier one, such as it was (you were never really a fan of helicopter chases).  Of course the question, “Is this really a hero for our time?”, was one that was proposed already by the previous sequel, in which McClane’s daughter begins to take over for him, and Justin Long’s nerdy guy teaches him about cyberwar.  And so why is McClane’s son not only CIA, but CIA in Russia?  Is the answer that we actually do still need McClane, unreconstructed?  One hopes not.

Anyway, about a week ago I heard a really good recording of the Ninth, the Berlin Symphony conducted by Claudio Abbado, with a big tympani sound, real stringy strings, and a big, Russian-sounding men’s chorus.  We’ve gotten used, I think, to the sound of Bernstein at the Brandenburg Gate, heavy on the joy, light on Romantic drama, the Sturm und the Drang.  I like the Abbado better than the recording of the Ninth I already have, Dohnanyi and the Cleveland Symphony. 

January Movies

Moneyball: Manager of a baseball team, with limited budget, puts together a winning team by focusing not on a player’s ability to play the whole game, but on his ability to do one thing well—get results in a way that counts—all worked out by computers.  Not bad, though I can’t say I cared about it much.  It’s based on a book by Michael Lewis, but obviously had to be stripped down to a single story.  It wasn’t so obvious that a “composite” character, a very young stats expert who’d been educated in Yale’s economics department, had to be made up for Jonah Hill.  The human interest becomes aging . . . or maybe specifically aging in a very youth-oriented career like baseball, where everybody except the very best hits a point where he just can’t keep up, and the very best get old eventually . . . or maybe overcoming the bias in nature and society against aging (like other defects) through science and careful management . . . or something.  At one point the script was in the hands of Aaron Sorkin, and it shows in the main character’s sense of victimhood, especially at the beginning, and in the way getting sports right is made to stand in for beating all the forces of economic injustice and stupidity.

Sorkin really ought to be left to be an auteur, and to direct his own writing.  I can’t say I loved Studio 60 or The Newsroom (the first episode, which I saw when it had been put up for free online), but they were better than the commercial hash that’s been made of the script he started with here.

Crazy, Stupid, Love: A fine comedy, not quite a date movie (the main characters are too old, and it’s mostly too depressing).  When it works, it’s good, but it doesn’t quite work, kind of a lot of the time.  The first part of the movie is too invested in the idea that the Steve Carell character is a schlub (at most he’s ordinary), and in what it would take to make him into a womanizer with exquisite taste (a kind of taste that would only work in a few cities on either Coast), for the inevitable reversal towards the end of the movie to be reasonable.  It’s not entirely “realistic,” as opposed to “poetic,” in the sense that a lot of mileage is gotten out of scenes like a guy standing in the rain, staring into space, for minutes at the time, with no discussion or explanation later of what he was thinking about.  A different kind of movie would talk it to death.

I was disturbed a few days after I saw Crazy, Stupid, Love, when I saw what I thought was a picture of Emma Stone, the ingénue of the picture, and it turned out to be Kate Middleton.  Whether you think that’s weird will probably depend on whether or not you think Ryan Gosling looks a little like Prince William. Why would anyone do that intentionally?  I have no idea.

Lincoln, a film by Steven Spielberg, from a screenplay by Tony Kushner

The movie follows Abraham Lincoln and the men he’s deputized as they attempt to pass a Constitutional amendment banning slavery.  (The Constitution as originally ratified didn’t explicitly permit slavery but didn’t prohibit it either, and implicitly made it legal, by admitting the states in which it was incorporated into law.)  Obviously it is worth watching.  Whether it’s fatally flawed by its treatment of race and its depiction of slavery as an issue that primarily concerns white men, I don’t know.  I tend to have low standards when it comes to how politically complete and accurate historical films should be.  You can read other people’s writing on this topic and make your own decision.

The film is directed, as everybody knows, by Steven Spielberg, from a script by Tony Kushner.  It’s supposed to follow Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, about the political rivals who got together within Lincoln’s presidential administration, but apparently draws on only four pages in the middle of that book.  Several other historians are credited as consultants, as well, some of whose contributions (like those of James McPherson) seem fairly obvious.  The rivals who play such large roles in Goodwin’s book do all make appearances here, and in important positions, but they don’t necessarily get large amounts of screen time.  And one of the big revelations of her book was that Lincoln suffered from dejection and spent a lot of time reading his Bible, neither of which fact makes any appearance onscreen in Spielberg’s film at all.

Tony Kushner has worked with Spielberg before, on Munich, which he co-wrote with Eric Roth, but he’s best known for the two-part play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.  Angels in America uses techniques that in a novel might be called magical realism to explore AIDS and the history of Jewish and homosexual life in the United States.  On the one hand, Roy Cohn, a historical figure, former deputy to Richard Nixon and persecutor of the Rosenbergs, and a closeted gay man, is dying of AIDS.  On the other, Prior Walter, a true-blue WASP, is coming to grips with his recent diagnosis.  In between are Joe Pitt, a Mormon lawyer and disciple of Cohn; Louis Ironson, who leaves Prior because he’s unable to deal with illness, and then takes up with Joe; and Belize, Prior’s friend and Roy Cohn’s nurse.  The conceit of the angel is that God has, literally, absconded, leaving a gaggle of angels (in the tradition of Milton and Blake) unable to cope, unable to perform their usual bureaucratic functions.  The angel America brings a revelation to Prior, in his illness, telling him to stop trying to change the world.  He refuses it.

Theater is often inaccessible, and large-scale visual effects can be expensive to produce.  Except for the HBO version of his play (directed by Mike Nichols from a script by the playwright), Kushner’s brand of magic has been hard to find.  Lincoln, especially near the beginning, evokes some of the same magic Kushner brings to the theater.  This is interesting, because there is probably no movie director who is less theatrical—in the sense of being theater-like, play-like—than Steven Spielberg.  No one leaves a Spielberg movie saying, “That was okay, but it was really too much like a play.”  No one is leaving Lincoln saying this, either.  But it’s nice that the Kushner sense of visionariness, which is much more personal and cerebral than Spielberg’s sense of magic, made its way onto the screen, at least a little bit.

This is probably the first digital Civil War film.  The crudeness of everything was emphasized: the shaggy hats, the obviously homemade uniforms, the sense that everything the government and army were using had been jerrybuilt for the purpose a very short time ago.  High-ranking army officers tip their chairs back on two legs, in a way I learned from the books I read as a kid was considered a sign of uncouthness.  The President drinks from a tin cup.  You know that when you watch a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, you’re going to get a good story and a good visual experience, and Lincoln does not disappoint.

I didn’t think Daniel Day-Lewis looked like Lincoln, and this bothered me, probably more than it should have.  He was not nearly gaunt enough.  Spielberg plays this as if the infamous presidential super-accelerated aging process, always especially noted in regard to Abraham Lincoln, applied only to the last month of his presidency.  In fact, though, Lincoln was gaunt throughout his life.  Day-Lewis looks well-fed and self-satisfied.  He doesn’t look like Lincoln—he looks like Arthur Miller, or better, like Leonard Bernstein.  But really, who he looks like is Daniel Day-Lewis.  He looks like a movie star.  It can be annoying when a historical movie casts the main character with so much regard for personal likeness that acting ability is disregarded, but reworking a historical drama so that the central personage can fit some kind of charismatic ideal tends to be a bad sign.

Day-Lewis is surrounded by a bevy of stars and well-known performers who are more or less character actors, or what passes these days for character actors: Tommy Lee Jones (who is good but whose character is excessively marked by, alternately, his hick accent and diction and the viewer’s remembering that he graduated from Harvard), David Straithairn (in other words, Edward R. Murrow), Sally Field (Norma Rae), Jared Harris (the Brit accountant on Mad Men, playing Ulysses S. Grant).  They circle around the President, pursuing their own agendas, but always deferring to him.  At times, not always obvious times, the film recalls Walt Whitman’s idolization of Lincoln, in poems like “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” an elegy written in the wake of the President’s death.  They, in turn, are surrounded by a mass of little-known actors who look like ordinary people, real Americans, even nineteenth-century Americans—whose motives tend to be more petty, who aren’t very interested in big ideas or in political movements, and who have to be persuaded one way or another to link up their personal destinies to the cause of Abolition.

I can’t help but compare this vision of how political change is made with Kushner’s own account, in an essay published with Angels in America, of how little is ever accomplished by one person alone, how any accomplishment worth anything is always a group effort:

“The fiction that artistic labor happens in isolation, and that individual talents are the sole provenance of artistic accomplishment, is politically, ideologically charged and, in my case at least, repudiated by the facts. . . .  The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction.”

I can only half-reconcile this essay with what I saw on the screen in Lincoln.

The movie was marred, for me, by Spielberg’s usual crude, mechanistic use of Christian imagery, which he makes use of as if it were something he had to have, to please the crowds, as much as music by John Williams or big sweeping panoramas.  When Thaddeus Stevens pretends he doesn’t believe all races were created equal, but only that there should be equality before the law (something that apparently did not really happen), solely in order to win votes, his opponent has to jump up and use the word “deny.”  The moment this happens, you just know it’s going to happen three times.  Otherwise, how could there be a parallel between Stephens and Peter's denying Christ after the latter’s arrest?  But this parallel does nothing.  There’s no reason for it: no reason why this particular character should be compared with Peter, and no reason why this particular point of the story of Lincoln should be linked to Peter’s threefold denial of his friend and his God.  It’s there to say something about The Universality of Myth, yada yada yada, this is a Christian country, where gospel stories are shared by all of whatsoever creed, so a story is made more resonant and “deeper” if it’s associated with Christian narratives.

I said that nobody is going to leave the theater after watching Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, saying, “That was too much like a play,” but actually, there is one play it is very much like: the 1967 musical, 1776 (made in 1972 into a film—badly butchered, incidentally, in the broadcast television/VHS version), about the proposal and ratification of the Declaration of Independence.  Even more than Lincoln, 1776 focused on the wheeling and dealing needed to get a legislature to take action: in the case of 1776, to persuade the delegations of all thirteen colonies to the Continental Congress—at a time when New England, New York, and New Jersey were the ongoing sites of battle, but many still hoped for reconciliation—to agree to declare their independence from Great Britain.  There are a number of parallels.  The plots of both Lincoln and 1776 are in large part stories about persuading legislatures to vote a certain way.  The sharp-tongued Thaddeus Stevens is mocked by his Southern colleagues in the same way as the “obnoxious and disliked” John Adams.  The debate over the morality of slavery is portrayed as an essential element in the legislative process, in both cases, as (according to 1776) Jefferson edits his draft of the Declaration to remove language condemning the Atlantic slave trade, as the price of securing the agreement of the South, and as (in a musical number that can be viscerally upsetting if done right) Adams is reminded that Massachusetts is home to the ships’ captains who carry on that trade and bring back the profits that follow upon it. 

And the question whether this is really the last legislation needed, ever, on this and related questions, arises in both.  There’s a sense in which the characters naturally feel something like, “This is the one big fight.  All we have to do is get this piece of legislation passed, and we’ll already have achieved our goal.”  In the case of the Thirteenth Amendment, viewers certainly know that a long subsequent struggle was needed, and that the struggle still is incomplete.  Any sense, which a viewer might feel on leaving the theater, that the story is over and won, is clearly illusory.  In 1776, this is signaled more within the story, as the elation of having the Declaration in large part accepted is punctured, as delegates make specific objections to the text—not least to its mentions of slavery—and it is watered down.  In Lincoln, though it isn’t always in the foreground, when it is, it makes the story feel very ironic.

If Lincoln makes a specific political point, one that’s relevant to our own times, beyond "racism is bad," I’m not sure I could say what it is.  But it’s a pretty good movie, and it’s almost certainly going to be a staple of high school history classes for many years to come. 

I Have Never Liked "Les Miz"

In the New Yorker’s blog, movie critic David Denby has a piece on the new film version of the musical version of Victor Hugo’s bloated nineteenth-century French novel, Les Misérables.  Denby says he hasn’t seen the stage version, but from what he writes, all its flaws are carried over nearly in full to the cinematic one (and with a few more added, which I can’t speak to, since I haven’t seen it yet).  The show has been so ridiculously popular for nearly thirty years that it’s nice to see someone who feels about it the same way I do.

Denby writes:

It’s terrible; it’s dreadful. Overbearing, pretentious, madly repetitive. . . . I couldn’t help wondering what in the world had happened to the taste of my countrymen—the Americans (Americans!) who created and loved almost all the greatest musicals ever made.

And:

The music is juvenile stuff—tonic-dominant, without harmonic richness or surprise. Listen to any score by Richard Rodgers or Leonard Bernstein or Fritz Loewe if you want to hear genuine melodic invention. I was so upset by the banality of the music that I felt like hiring a hall and staging a nationalist rally. “My fellow-countrymen, we are the people of Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin! Cole Porter and George Gershwin, Frank Loesser and Burton Lane! We taught the world what popular melody was! What rhythmic inventiveness was! Let us unite to overthrow the banality of these French hacks!” (And the British hacks, too, for that matter.) Alas, the hall is filled with people weeping over “Les Mis.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Les Miz (as it’s called, for short) just isn’t a “musical.”  It’s a spectacular.  The show’s creators, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, are from France—not a country that had given us a large number of Broadway shows.  (The same writers went on to create Miss Saigon.)  It was adapted for the London stage before being brought to New York.  At the time, Broadway was struggling, and the traditional style of musical play was having difficulty finding producers and audiences.  Into the vacuum spilled new large-scale productions from London, often by Cameron Mackintosh, and eventually corporatized productions, often by Disney.  The British shows, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, were not in the American-music tradition.  Webber began by writing rock operas, from the standpoint of which the American songbook appeared musically old-fashioned, but which were themselves old-fashioned in form, more like operettas than like the American form that had grown from the operetta.  It helps a little, in appreciating Les Misérables, to recognize that it is definitely not a Broadway musical, but more in the operetta tradition.

I saw Les Miz onstage in the late 1980s.  I didn’t like it.  Like David Denby, I thought the only number that seemed a real musical number was “Master of the House,” performed by an innkeeper and his familiars.  It had a bouncy tune, it had dancing, it had characters who seemed to be having fun.  It was reminiscent of some of the songs in the 1960 English musical Oliver!  The rest of the show is ballads and musically formless spectacles, both of which are okay in small doses, but not enough to sustain a Broadway-style musical.  The plot alternates between the pathos of a young orphaned girl and the pathos of revolutionary students at the barricades of a revolt that’s never clearly defined.  In my memory, the students lose, very badly, and in my memory, they’re also joined by a small boy who is shot by the government forces.  I may have made him up, though, conflating the baggage carriers in Henry V with Fantine, the tiny waifish girl on the theatrical posters and the cover of my Signet paperback.  The rest of the plot, as everyone knows, is The Fugitive, more or less, with Jean Valjean as Harrison Ford, and Inspector Javert as Tommy Lee Jones.  And for my money, the South Park movie (Bigger, Longer, and Uncut), though unwatchable in parts, is worth the price of admission just for the parody of Les Misérables, in the song “La Resistance Lives On.”

However, for the past few years I’ve been listening to XM Radio’s Broadway channel in my car, and they fairly often play songs from Les Miz.  Obviously, these were recordings of the casts from the stage versions.  At first, I would change the station whenever these came on, but over time, the show’s biggest hits started to grow on me: rousing ensemble numbers like “Do You Hear the People Sing?” and “Red and Black,” fairly typical musical numbers like “At the End of the Day” and the comic “Lovely Ladies,” and even (to a lesser extent) the ballad, “A Little Fall of Rain.”

On the same channel I’d hear songs from Miss Saigon, and although these really aren’t as good, I began to hear the way melodic lines, vocal types, and plot elements echoed back and forth between these plays and, especially, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s.  So there’s a comparison to be made between “The Heat is on in Saigon,” where the virginal hero wanders through the fleshpots of the city, and “The Temple,” where Jesus reacts badly to the moneylenders and other merchants in the temple at Jerusalem.  Schönberg-Boublil gained by the comparison.  Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s attitude toward “superstars,” and the degree to which they distinguished between Jesus Christ and Evita Peron, was never very clear.  Miss Saigon made more sense than those plays, even if it was not as good as them, theatrically or musically.

But when I saw the full set of trailers for the film, I remembered how painful the show really was to watch.  Three minutes of a rousing ensemble number, or six, is one thing.  Moment after moment of emotional “peak” is another.  It’s not usual for a Broadway number to be especially intense, emotionally.  This may be why they seem silly to many people these days.  It may also be why the songs from Les Miz sounded better on the radio.  The repetition of motifs was overbearing, the orchestration was overbearing, and every moment seemed designed to evoke strong emotion (which I knew, from my memory of the show, would eventuate in pity for the very piteous ends suffered by almost all the main characters).  “Castle on a Cloud,” sung onstage by a small girl, can sound sweet and honest, and out of context, not very kitschy at all.  But the film version (featured on the trailer) is intensified until it sounds like something from a horror movie.

And “Master of the House,” for me, has aged poorly.  I saw the play on tour, at Boston’s Colonial Theater.  The acoustics at the Colonial were terrible every time I saw a play there.  Spoken or sung, you were lucky if you could hear five words in a row.  Amplification still seemed new at the time, and it didn’t seem to work well.  (This was one reason I was willing to assume the show was better than I’d thought after I saw it in person: the fact that it sounded terrible, muddy, and unmusical might not actually have been the composers’ fault at all.)  I had no idea what most of the lyrics even were, beyond the much clearer tags like “master of the house, ruler of the inn.”  Then I heard it on the radio, with the London cast.  The innkeeper was clearly the butt of the song, a grasping letch whom all the lodgers hated, and his wife was Patsy from AbFab.  The number turned out to belong to the cruder kind of BBC comedy.  I don’t look forward at all to seeing it done by Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen, two Brits who I expect to perform it in a similar way.

December Movies

Casino Jack: It’s probably possible to make a good movie about a corrupt lobbyist, or about a character much like Jack Abramoff, but this isn’t it.  It was nice to see Kevin Spacey on screen again, and that’s the only really good thing that can be said about this movie.  If you want to see it, you probably know most of the facts already, and then it’s unlikely you would want to sit through two-plus hours of straight-up narration of the facts.  If you followed this story in the news as it was coming out, you experienced a narrative much more dramatic than the one in this film.

The movie follows Abramoff and his sidekick as they overreach and meet with their downfall.  The inclusion of so many different deals was probably supposed to add to the sense that they were overreaching, but instead it makes the movie feel like a bad documentary.  The decision to focus on Abramoff’s relationship with a mobbed-up mattress salesman, played by the also recently underused Jon Lovitz, in his purchase of a mobbed-up Miami gambling operation, for his own profit, seems like a lame attempt to juice up a boring movie.  The fact is that this was actually what brought Abramoff to the attention of authorities.  Underplayed in the movie—if this part was actually true, and not a compression (and again, if it was a compression, it was a dramatically misguided one)—is the stupidity of Abramoff’s extending himself financially and morally on so many fronts at once.  Especially combined with his obsession with movies, especially, as documented in the press, gangster movies, it suggests some kind of personality disorder.

You do see a glimpse of an aggressive, even potentially violent, Jack Abramoff when he body-checks his best friend on the racquetball court.  Spacey underplays this, making Abramoff a play-it-cool kind of guy with an aging jock’s physique, whose thoughts sometimes get away from him.  But in reality Abramoff was pudgy, with a scraggly beard.  He might have been better played, physically, by Jeffrey R. Smith, the actor who plays Grover Norquist in this movie. 

Again, if you watch this movie, you probably already know what a lobbyist is.  Spacey tells us, for good measure, in voiceover, in the first minutes of the film: without people like him, he says, people like Tom DeLay wouldn’t know whether to vote up or down on a bill that raises taxes for corporations.  Which is a little simplistic, but to say that without lobbyists members of Congress and their staffs wouldn’t know what bills to write, to benefit specific people who think their taxes are too high, would be too complicated for this movie.  Isn’t the rise of people like DeLay a sign that lobbyists like Abramoff are close to putting themselves out of business?  

There are reminders here and there, throughout the film, of the importance of money in the world of its characters.  Abramoff’s mistake was to think he could buy the friendship and loyalty of important people—but only in part.  He seems equally to have thought that he could buy off the fates, by surrounding himself with the physical trappings of success, and by contributing to the community in ways he couldn’t afford.  If he were the hero, the movie would be about his corruption at the hands of Washington.  The movie can’t suggest the reverse, but it might have been more interesting if it did.

Contagion: I’ve never been an enormous fan of Steven Soderbergh’s.  I don’t think there’s anything he’s done that I’ve really, really liked.  (Sex, Lies, and Videotape seemed good enough, I guess, and I’ve never seen Traffic.)  This one had enough stars to be another Airport.  Too many stars, and too many plot strands, for the movie to be very interesting as a story.  Lots of damsels in distress.  It was a good documentary, I suppose, and it puts a scare into you from the very first moment.  In fact, in the dictionary, next to manipulative, they should put the poster for this movie (and the soundtrack for Les Misérables).  About forty-five minutes in, when it turned into The Road, it got interesting, but then it became a generic disaster problem-solving movie again.  Matt Damon was fine, Jennifer Ehle was wonderful as always, but the best thing in the movie was Jude Law’s bandy-legged walk.  None of their performances added up to much, really, though; the real stars of this movie are The Virus and Our Interconnected Modern World.  But after too many indie films that I’m probably too old for these days, it’s good to see a “normal” movie.

Cedar Rapids: This was pretty good.  The plot involves a small-town salesman who suddenly is picked to attend a big industry conference in Cedar Rapids.  The story is about the hypocrisy that results when religion and business meet, but it’s really a movie about what happens to an ordinary guy in an extreme situation.  It’s to the movie’s credit that it doesn’t excessively overpower the characters with silliness.  Ed Helms doesn’t get the Saturday Night Live star treatment; instead, he’s paired with veteran actors like Stephen Root, John C. Reilly, and Kurtwood Smith.  There’s one party scene too many: these were presumably supposed to build to a crescendo of horror, of a kind, but they feel like filler.  On the other hand, partying is just what these people would do in this kind of situation.  “These guys are dopes . . . but they’re our dopes,” is the moral, more or less, assuming there is one.

Skyfall (James Bond): It was very beautiful.  The opening credits were real Bond opening credits, psychedelia and all—if probably a little darker and less Bond-worshiping than they usually are.  The film makes London look almost sunny.  It opens in the very Bondish locale of Turkey and ends in remote Scotland, passing through China and a deserted city that I took at first for Dubrovnik or Beirut.  The director, Sam Mendes, took some criticism that in my opinion amounted to “this movie is too much like a Batman flick.”  You see the reflection in this movie of memes you’ve already seen in others: in The Godfather, in Batman, maybe in Waltzing with Bashir, and I could go on.  But that’s how movies are made these days.  They draw quite overtly on the same social energies that motivate other movies.  They borrow, in the same way Shakespeare did.

The plot revolves mostly around M, who may be losing her grip, and who’s being eased out in favor of younger blood.  She’s brought to testify before a parliamentary committee, in the course of which she quotes from the one piece of British poetry most likely to be confused with a speech in an Ayn Rand novel.  This sequence, cutting back and forth between M in the committee room and the respective pursuits of the villain and Bond as they race toward her, is probably more complex than most Bond films, which are old-fashioned and which, on second or third viewing, begin to seem kind of boring.

The pre-credits sequence, by placing Bond at the mercy of M and of a young, unnamed black female agent, suggests a question of gender: are the interests of men and women the same?  Do they see what’s at stake for someone like James Bond in the same way?  The first two of the Craig Bond films tended to pity him.  This one emphasizes the inability of women, those with desk jobs, and especially Members of Parliament to understand the lives of those who are taken out from “the shadows” in order to protect those who continue to live there.  And is it an accident that Ralph Fiennes’ Minister wears suspenders, like a Wall Street banker?

Gattaca: I watched this, for the second time, while I was wrapping presents.  I still think it’s an intriguing premise that didn’t turn out very well, but it’s hard to see how anyone thought the improbabilities weren’t so impossible they needed to be excised.  No society that could lengthen a man’s legs by a full two inches, in a way that caused no lasting pain or weakness and was impossible to detect, could really, reasonably, draw a distinction, well into adulthood, between those born with perfect vision and those who’d undergone surgery to correct myopia.

Martha Marcy May Marlene: Also pretty good.  It’s hard to explain what it’s about, exactly, though the reviews described it pretty accurately.  Another movie about people in extreme situations, more open-ended and arty than Cedar Rapids, and suspenseful rather than humorous, it lacks the kind of Hollywood-style backstory that explains in detail who these people are, what they want, how they got to where we see them now.  We get the bare bones: a girl in trouble, a newly married couple, two sisters with a history of difficulty between them.  The situation—a young girl trying to fit into a commune or cult of some kind, on the one hand, and a woman trying to handle her disturbed younger sister, on the other, with hints and intimations of crucial facts, yet to be revealed—suggests the more sensational kind of blockbuster—which is without question not what this movie is.

Lincoln: This deserves a post to itself.

November Movies

Ides of March: About what it takes to succeed in politics.  The movie revolves around a series of moral dilemmas, focusing on the education—or failure of education—of the main character, played by Ryan Gosling, a thirtyish senior campaign operative.  His loyalty rotates between two potential mentors, his boss (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a rival (Paul Giammatti), the state governor whose Presidential race he’s supporting (George Clooney, also the director), and the hope of making a difference in the world.  He also has a relationship with a young woman, a situation that causes him to question what his commitment really should be, and how deep it should be.  The film was engaging, though the characters were not especially interesting.  Their characters were mostly telegraphed, and even the major characters largely weren’t given more than very basic reasons for their actions.  They weren’t, as the jargon goes, “motivated.”  They did what they did, and it was up to the viewer to decide whether their “true” reasons were sympathetic, devious, or something else.  This works, in context.  The viewer is put in a position similar to that of the other characters in the film, without a reason to interpret things in one way rather than another.  And the characterization was appropriate for these people, who don’t necessarily expect to have to persuade other people to see things the way they do, and to add extra words to what they say, to make sure they are understood.

Life During Wartime: This is the most recent film by the not especially prolific Gen-X indie director, Tod Solondz.  It follows a family of three sisters, all originally from New Jersey, one now living in a Florida suburb with her slightly broken family, one in Hollywood, and one still in New Jersey, in a relationship that’s falling apart.  It includes several of the themes of Solondz’s other films: cruelty, child abuse, and growing up.  I liked it better than his previous film, Happiness (which also followed a group of sisters, also New Jerseyites, in part transplanted to Florida), and less than Welcome to the Dollhouse (though it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that movie).  In Happiness, nobody suffered except the audience.  It was extremely cruel.  The characters were cruel to one another: the film offered no sympathy to any of them, so the effect was of a kind of reveling in their cruelty.  Some of the characters were outright evil, and the film offered no objective point of view from which they could be either judged or grieved for.  Life During Wartime is not so hard-edged, and offers a little more than monsters behaving monstrously to one another, and to the occasional (presumed) innocent who wanders into their field of view.  The characters’ lives were more aimless and pitiable, in this film, than despicable, and the changes of scene between New Jersey, Florida, Hollywood, and Oregon were well-played.  Overall, I liked Life During Wartime better than the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, to which it’s similar, although the Coens’ film is a better one.

Both The Ides of March and Life During Wartime were clearly shot in digital, and use the flat, blah lighting of digital film to good effect, maybe to the extent of doing something innovative with it.  This effect, especially on faces, has been really noticeable to me lately, and pretty annoying.  Is it an attempt to hide the flaws that would show up in closeup, with the new high-resolution televisions and digital recordings?  Could it be just an artifact of the transferal of the video to the now only medium-res DVD format, and its display on a television designed to display pictures at a higher resolution?

Flashdance: I saw a few minutes of this movie on television.  I’d seen it in the movies when it came out, when I was in high school (and wore my hair the same way Jennifer Beals does in the picture).  It is pretty ridiculous, and it made me think of Pretty Woman, which came out a little while later, and which has almost the same plot.  In Flashdance, a working-class woman falls in love with a wealthy man, and vice versa, and they have problems getting together because of the chip on her shoulder, as well as his difficulty understanding where she’s coming from.  But it seems like this wasn’t enough for this kind of Hollywood picture: she had to be not only a factory worker, but a welder; and she had to be not only working class but extremely crude (and the willowy Jennifer Beals seems hardly the ideal person to portray a foul-mouthed welder); and she had to be not only crude but a stripper.  Well: not a stripper, a dancer—or at least, she’s trying to class things up at the place where she works.  And then she had to not only be smart and warm and funny, a good catch for any man, but she had to have a dream: to get out of the strip club, to get off of the factory floor, and to join—at the age of, apparently, thirty—a school of classical ballet.  And her boyfriend had to be not only from a slightly better background, but the owner of the company she works for.  Just as in Pretty Woman, the Julia Roberts character couldn’t be just a club girl or a co-ed from Hofstra, and her boyfriend couldn’t be just a stockbroker or Yalie, she had to be a hooker and he had to be an arbitrageur.  (To be fair, Mystic Pizza and Desperately Seeking Susan had already done the other plots, though on a smaller scale.  These movies Hollywoodized those indie films, but rather than making them more universal, they made the characters actually less easy for most viewers to identify with.)

Her audition for the company is a hoot.  She does the same kind of dancing she does on the floor of the club.  She wears jazz shoes and a sweater to the audition.  The committee watching her is bored, until they see how terrific she is at what she does.  But for the entire film, she has been practicing and practicing her ballet, and you get every sense that she knows perfectly well what an audition for a ballet company should be.  Watching it again twenty-five years later, it looks even worse, because it seems to be making fun of the new style of dancing—the combination of modern, jazz, and cheerleading that you’d now see a dance team doing—that was becoming prominent on Broadway and elsewhere at the time.  That kind of dancing may be perfectly fine in its context, but unfortunately, there’s no way to make this movie’s “I’m going to show them I’m just as good as they are” theme work as a general defense of dance that isn’t ballet.  Especially when the scene after the audition has her running into the arms of her classy boyfriend, ready to continue proving she’s good enough for that kind of life.  The failure of the audition scene, and the gratuitous extremity of the whole idea that she’s both a welder and a dancer, is just too incongruous.

The Living Daylights: I saw a few minutes of this on television, too.  I also saw it in the movies when it first came out.  And a very quick web search tells me that I’m far from the only person to say, “who knew Jon Hamm used to play James Bond?”  It isn’t only his face, or his facial mannerisms.  It’s even the way he holds himself.  As if Hamm had modeled himself on Timothy Dalton’s performance.

October Movies

October was a busy month.  We didn’t have too much trouble with Sandy: a bunch of branches, a downed tree, some damage to the fence.  Though today I found, on the ground in the backyard, what I’m guessing is the leatherized carcass of a squirrel that died in the crook of a tree some time ago and got blown out of the tree last week.  It wasn't a great month for movies: the front of my Netflix queue was overloaded with what I'd happened to pick at the same time, instead of what I most wanted to see.  There's something to be said for interspersing the movies that, in anticipation, look like "meh," with the others, but less to be said for pushing, say, Contagion months out just because there are a lot of "meh"s to get through.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy:  This was okay, in an “interesting though extremely unexciting,” not a “good story, stupid premise” kind of way.  I don’t know the novel or the earlier TV adaptation: if there was more to it than the basic detective story, one man on a mission to find out, “Who is the mole?”, it wasn’t in this movie.  A lot of it was two men at a time sitting in rooms, talking, for long periods of time.  Not a lot of time was wasted with explanations.  In the end, it was about the futility of the Cold War and of the modern way of life, as you’d expect from Le Carré.

Hesher: The plot, if you can believe it: apparently evil, long-haired druggy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) moves into the house of a family that’s been in mourning for the past several weeks and can’t seem to pull itself out of it, and they don’t do anything about it.  The picture went screwy about halfway through the movie, and rather than try to clean it, we gave up on this one.  I managed to watch the last track, which suggested that the director might have been trying to go for some kind of allegory here.  This is the logical conclusion of all those movies about loser druggies who get their friends into trouble but are really good people—except that Hesher isn’t good people.  He’s not entirely unappealing, from a distance, if you’re not opposed on principle to guys who have long hair and listen to hardcore music and drive black vans.  But he’s not actually a friendly or interesting long-haired hardcore listener.  This movie suggests that was interesting about those other films wasn’t, in fact, the underlying niceness of these superficially out-of-it people, but their inability to care about what happens to others.  If you like to watch movies about undersized high school kids being bullied, you’ll like this.

Poetry (in Korean): A lyrical meditation, on death, aging, loss of innocence, love and sex, nature and culture.  That means “slow-moving.”  I found it engrossing, but because of the language difference, I’m not sure I got all of it.  The story follows a woman in her sixties as she deals with health issues, the rebelliousness of her grandson, whom she’s raising, and the mystery of a young girl’s suicide, as she attempts to find an outlet in writing poetry.

There’s nothing good in her life, it seems, except poetry.  Her grandson is sullen and bosses her around, and he’s gotten into some serious trouble at school that he won’t even discuss with her.  It isn’t clear whether she’s only recently become disconnected from things—at the beginning of the film, we see her discussing with a doctor what sound like neurological problems—or whether her medical problems are only now bringing to light a malaise she’s had accumulating for some time.  She enrolls in the eponymous poetry class immediately after leaving the doctor’s, and after walking past a scene outside the hospital, involving a mother, hysterical over her young daughter’s suicide.  She works as a maid, a home care worker for a rich, elderly man who seems to have had a stroke.

There was an obvious parallel between the older woman facing the end of her life, and her inability to understand how people today think, and the younger girl, the suicide, confronted with the sad realities of the world.  There were obvious contrasts drawn between male and female, rich and poor, the city and the country.  I’m not entirely sure the film didn’t, ultimately, romanticize death as a fairly reasonable escape from an unjust world, or dwell on suffering merely to be able to feel sorry for people unlike us.

Whether it did depends on the poetry discussed and recited—in voiceover at the end of the film, and at restaurant poetry readings situated throughout it—which I didn’t fully comprehend.  I’m not opposed in the slightest to foreign films, or to watching movies with subtitles.  But I can’t honestly say I was able to experience the movie as a whole.  Subtitles are usually very crudely written.  And the final sequence of the film, with the woman’s final poem read aloud over a series of images the viewer has already seen, largely because of the subtitles, required a visual split of attention that made it difficult to follow.  I could just about watch the film while reading the subtitles, but it was impossible for me to experience the words deeply.  Even if I could have paid attention to all of it at the same time, it seems unlikely that all the poetry of the original came across in the translation.

Stir of Echoes: This is a ghost story that came out about the same time as The Sixth Sense, and coincidentally, it has a lot in common with that movie.  I remember hearing a review of both films on NPR that named Stir of Echoes distinctly better, more indicative of “a heart.”  I’ve been waiting to see it since then, and got my chance when it was on cable for my Halloween-night vaguely scary movie viewing.  The movie is based on a novel by noted science-fiction writer Richard Matheson.

It’s set in a working-class Chicago neighborhood.  Kevin Bacon plays a guy who’d like to get out (picture Ren from Footloose ten years on), married to a wife who’s happy there, though she seems to come from better things (played by Kathryn Erbe, who’s now on Breaking Bad).  His young son, it turns out, sees dead people—or at least one dead person—their house, a rental they’ve only recently moved into, is haunted.  Tom Witsky (the Bacon character) is hypnotized, by his college-educated sister-in-law (played by Illeana Douglas), and suddenly he begins seeing things, too.  No scarier than The Sixth Sense, this film finds something more for the ghosts to do than just be symbols of lost love.  It’s not exactly an exciting thriller, and the echoes of The Shining, down to the characters’ race, may be a little too exact, but a well-made film.

September DVDs

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.  About half of this was pretty good, not amazing but better than I'd expected from the reviews, though with a long stretch in the middle that was frankly kind of boring.  Wall Street was one of the first movies I saw after I graduated from college, and I had forgotten some things.  I don’t know whether Stone was as into the paranoid style as he later became, but if he was, at the time I didn’t notice it.  He’s really playing with the idea of leverage and self-dealing and so on.  Lots of Oedipal drama.  Is it accidental how much Josh Brolin resembles Oliver Stone?  The film tries to load a lot of significance on the financial shenanigans themselves (i.e., not just the characters’ motivations, like greed and ambition), which I wasn’t convinced by.  But there were the beautiful, beautiful shots of New York architecture.

Inside Job: a documentary about the 2008 financial crisis and the takeover of the US (and world) economy by finance: This was better than I expected, less sleep-inducing by far than the middle swath of Money Never Sleeps.  At one point towards the end, it came down a little too hard on the Obama administration for my taste.  “It’s a Wall Street government” is a severe exaggeration.  While the logic behind the administration’s selection of Geithner, Summers, et al., for high-ranking positions, seems inexplicable, it also isn’t obvious what the alternative is supposed to be.  The harshness of the rest I agreed about.  There was a clear explanation of derivatives, and of credit-default swaps.  I thought to myself, finally, I’ll understand how credit-default swaps make sense.  That isn’t quite how it turned out.  Much focus in the film on how it was claimed that they were reducing risk, by increasing risk, which is obviously impossible.

I chose both IJ and MNS because Netflix suggested one to me after I’d selected the other, and I never went back and groomed my list.  I learned a lot from IJ, but to be honest, I’m tired of all financial crisis, all the time.  Surely there’s something else to be politically engaged about. 

Unstoppable: A pretty good train movie.  One of the last films by the late Tony Scott, one of several films he made with Denzel Washington.  And almost exactly the same movie as The Taking of Pelham 123, which he remade immediately before he filmed Unstoppable.  As I said, not bad—but the human-interest elements struck me as a little odd.  Did I hear correctly when one of the older engineers complained that the new, very young conductor was “union” and had gotten his job because he belonged to a family that was very, very influential in the company?  That the older guys were non-union, and were angry that the corporation was pushing them out in favor of guys who were younger, because those younger guys belonged to the union?  And why would the engineers be in a rivalry with the conductors, anyway?  But I liked the ponytailed cracker technician who saved the day, pretty much.  I assume this was, if anything, a comment on the efficiency of pencil-necks vis-à-vis enormous, beer-guzzling doofuses, rather than something having to do with generational or geographical difference.

How Do You Know:  Wow.  In anticipation, an airplane movie; in retrospect, not even.  This was almost interesting, in an abstract history-of-film kind of way, for two reasons:  First, the dialogue at times seemed to strain for a kind of Nora Ephron-like quality that the film couldn’t sustain.  It’s not fair to put this on the actors (though this is probably what most people think when they watch actors who’ve been put into this kind of situation).  Someone should have thought these things through (and it’s the director’s responsibility, in the end).  You need some kind of serious set-up before an audience will believe a woman taking an hour-long bus ride to the apartment of a near stranger, just so she can charge her phone.  You need some kind of set-up to explain why she takes her not-yet-charged cell phone off of the power cord when it rings, so she can humorously lose the connection.  You really can’t convince an audience that a National League pitcher is allowed to have bangs that fall into his eyes.  Second: These characters were so shallow, and their lives were so privileged, that it almost seemed to be an intentional satire, taking to extremes the unsaid realities behind many films that try to make their characters seem, as much as possible, to be ordinary.  They lived in fabulous apartments in fabulous buildings.  They hung out with fabulous people at fabulous restaurants.  They didn’t do much with their days (at least that we see).  All they seemed to do was make plans to go out at night.  I can’t think of any movie where the characters were so strenuously shallow (granted that my movie-viewing isn’t exhaustive), since Less Than Zero.  And that was based explicitly on a Bret Easton Ellis novel.  I don’t think this was the intention here.

Where Is Lucius Fox’s Army of Off-the-Books Engineers and Metalworkers? Or: The Geography of Gotham.

I guess he builds them all with his own hands, just like Bruce Wayne built the first batsuit.

SPOILERS FOLLOW.  Seriously, do not read further if you don’t want to know.

 

Limitless: a film about a pharmaceutical McGuffin

Limitless: This belongs with John Holbo’s “metaphysical McGuffins,” plot points that may be based in science fiction but don't really need to be science fiction to make sense.  What if there was a pill that could make anybody who took it “the best they could be”?  What if you could never be sure who around you was taking such a pill and who was clean?  The pill’s effect has no obvious analogue to any real-life substance: at one moment, it mimics Prozac; at another, Ritalin; at yet another, LSD or cocaine.  Or maybe it’s simply Type A Personality in a bottle.  The question whether the person who takes it is really, after the fact, brilliant, or whether he’s a fraud, is never really explored—and it doesn’t it seem to matter, when the effects are the same, either way.

If you happened across such a drug, and you started using it (for what were more or less good ideas at the time), could you successfully use it to make the world a better place?  Would the temptation eventually get to you, and pull you into the evils you started out trying to transform?  Would “the system” be too strong for even your chemically enhanced self to break out of it?  Would just the fact that you were using a drug turn you into a kind of high-IQ Patrick Bateman?

These questions don’t really matter for the fun, which involves an original bunch of bad guys and a new-style regular-guy superhero who gets into some original situations trying to outwit them.  There seem to be a few plot holes, and the ending may be too ambiguous for all but the most diehard indie-film fans.  Is the message that drugs are OK?  Or, arguably, not much better, is the message that even Prozac and coffee can turn you into a junkie?  Given the choice between Limitless and, say, The Adjustment Bureau—another movie, a more mainstream one, about a regular guy elevated suddenly to the heights of ability and influence—or Pi—a much weirder movie with something of a similar feel—I think Limitless had the more interesting premise and the more engaging story.  Admittedly, The Adjustment Bureau had angels, making sure everything worked out in the end.

The movie was directed by  Neil Burger (who also directed the very well received The Illusionist) based on a book by the Irish novelist Alan Glynn (original title: The Dark Fields).  The screenplay is by Leslie Dixon, who’s previously written several woman-centered way-out but not quite science-fiction movies like the remakes of The Thomas Crown Affair and The Parent Trap: ordinary people on amazing adventures, people out of place.  The lighting seems a little off, with the backgrounds shot beautifully but the people at mid-range a little flat, as if they’d been filmed in a studio (and maybe they were), but the effects of the drug and of its wearing off are signaled visually in a very appealing way.

The trailers on the DVD were all for medievalist action movies from the same studio, like The Season of the Witch, Immortals, and The Warrior’s Way.  This caused no little apprehension about what was to follow, but that turned out to be actually misleading.

UPDATE: I learned from the review in the Philadelphia Inquirer that although the film is set in Manhattan, many of the exteriors were shot in Philadelphia.

Why I’m glad I don’t subscribe to HBO (UPDATED)

Because I’d be tempted to watch the new Aaron Sorkin series, The Newsroom.  I kind of liked The West Wing, though towards the end I was watching in the hope they’d bring Mary-Louise Parker’s character back, and Josh post-Leo’s chastising/anointing of him as a successor was becoming slightly annoying.  I even enjoyed Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, though Emily Nussbaum has it about right when she calls that show “horrible and fascinating.”  And I enjoyed The Social Network, regardless of its mistakes.

But, on the other hand, the preview-reviews of Newsroom seem to be converging on the show as middlebrow and excessively self-important, and these adjectives seem all too likely to be accurate.  Are we really being treated to a rewriting of Broadcast News in which the Albert Brooks character—the real journalist—has disappeared, and we’re actually supposed to take William Hurt’s airhead of a pretty-boy anchorman seriously as a commentator on politics and world events?  I’m pretty sure that’s not how the flashforward at the end of that movie has things turning out.  On the other hand, I was talking with a friend about the movie, which I’d seen shortly after I’d graduated from college (in 1987).  When I asked him why he thought Holly Hunter’s character (Jane Craig, the newsroom producer) cried for no apparent reason, at several times throughout the show, he didn’t hesitate.  It was because she was on the wrong track and deep down she knew it.

I didn’t look up Sorkin’s Wikipedia page until after I’d finished my post on The Social Network.  That was when I found out that the people whom Eisenberg’s dialogue in that movie most reminded me of had not only gone to the same high school Sorkin did (Scarsdale), just a couple of years after he graduated, but like him, had participated in the school’s drama program.  So, for me, that dialogue didn’t register as “Asperger’s” or “computer geek” but—especially in the character’s willingness to say those things straight to a woman’s face—the kind of suedo-intellectual, pseudo-Sartrean self-described “brutal honesty” not uncommon among undergraduates of all varieties.

One of those people was the man who told me he had Jane Craig down cold.  I never actually, as it turned out, spent much time around entertainment-industry people (which might explain his uniqueness), but of all the people I’ve ever known with some pretention to know a little bit about film, theater, or television (which he’d studied in university), he had absolutely the worst taste.  Middlebrow?  That’s probably a good word for it.  He gushed over the moral sophistication of Enemy Mine.  He gushed, similarly, over The Company of Wolves.  His hero was Stephen Spielberg, who made money because he made movies people like.  I don’t know how much more middlebrow you can get than that.  Like Sorkin, apparently (see the piece by David Haglund in Slate), he thought of himself as high-minded without being high-brow—unless you can be highbrow and at the same time mouth the moral pieties that will make the majority feel good about themselves.

Anyway, now everything Sorkin touches will remind me of him, and that’s not what anyone wants.

Writing in the Atlantic, on the other hand, Alyssa Rosenberg seems to complain that Sorkin is not middlebrow enough.  (Nussbaum makes a similar complaint.)  She goes beyond my friend’s worship of the market with its razzle-dazzle valuelessness to a kind of deep populism that redefines “what will make money” as “what is really good.”  Sorkin makes fun of cable news, with its partisan polarization, but according to Rosenberg this is what most people like, and they have good reasons to do so.  Sorkin, therefore, is explicitly making fun of his own audience, insulting them to their faces.  I tend to think Rosenberg is tying herself up in knots to make her argument here, because Sorkin most likely not only isn’t making fun of the vision of the world she alludes to, but in fact has probably never actually heard of it.  If she’s right, however, then maybe Sorkin isn’t so middlebrow after all—or maybe Rosenberg has touched on the possibility of a kind of art that eludes all our categorizations so far.

In her review, Nussbaum complains, in part, that the female characters, and their interactions with the men, are stereotyped and vaguely offensive.  She has a point; the same thing over and over again would quickly become tiresome.  If the stories are good, though, it sometimes is actually possible to ignore what gender the characters are, and how they treat their significant others in the mandatory romantic subplots needed to make sure the show has enough “adult” content, and pay attention to something different for a change.

UPDATE:  HBO has decided to do an end-run around my cancellation of their service by making the first episode of the series available online for free.  Oh, well.  Anyway, this article by NPR blogger Linda Holmes is also very good (she says the first episode is easily the best of the four that have been distributed to critics).  So, shall I download the episode to my iPod Classic?