Aging Disgracefully

October 27, 2007

Update...And Someone Please Kill Me

I have just finished a project that has consumed the past few weeks for me: an NIH R01 grant proposal. Jeez, these things are getting hard to do. The technical proposal isn't the problem: its all of the other stuff (15 pages on Human Subjects?!?!?!).

In other news, I am asking some faithful reader to kill me. This week I made the colossal error of watching Hotel Chevalier on iTunes. This short by Wes Anderson starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman is supposed to serve as a kind of prequel to his new film, The Darjeeling Limited. The short is garnering rave reviews. I'm not really sure why. Yes, it is interesting. But Oscar worthy (as some critics have suggested)?? I am convinced that the main reason it has proven so popular with the peasants is that is contains Natalie Portman's first nude scene (for those drawn to such things, I can report that it is a big snooze not worth the effort it takes to download the thing). I'll probably go see The Darjeeling Limited as well, but based on what I've seen and read of it, I am, in the wake of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, beginning to wonder if Anderson's whole game plan is to keep making Rushmore and The Royal Tenanbaums over and over (just spliced and diced a little differently each time).

Anyway, back to killing me: there is a song in Hotel Chevalier which I just cannot get out of my head: Peter Sarstedt's Where Do You Go To (My Lovely). Please kill me and make the insipid voice stop. This has happened once before (with Abba's Dancing Queen) and the nightmare only ended then when the Good Rabbi staged an intervention to force me back onto drugs.

Posted by dag at 10:11 AM | Comments (1)

September 24, 2007

The War

Yesterday evening, the wife and I settled in to watch the first episode of Ken Burns' The War. I have to admit that I have a very mixed history with Ken Burns. I really enjoyed The Civil War. It was a moving, profound experience (albeit in pop history). It was also one of my first media adventures with my eventual wife, and through our discussions of it we learned a great deal about the commonality of our values, private and civic. On the other hand I found Jazz to be a rather emotionally detached exploration that taught me little about jazz beyond the Coltrane scene (which I already knew fairly well). And Baseball managed the difficult trick of being duller than the actual sport itself.

Yet I was nonetheless quite excited. The initial reviews of The War were overwhelmingly positive, and WWII is a subject of great interest to me. It is thus with some surprise that tonight I join the few voices in the wilderness (eg here) giving The War (or, at least in my case, the first episode of it) a surprisingly tepid thumbs up. I'm afraid the first episode fell well short of the mark established by The Civil War.

I just couldn't engage myself in the experience. Certainly the first episode was in no sense emotionally sterile. From the former GI's description of the feral savagery of Japanese troops at Guadalcanal to a Japanese-American woman's tearful, heartfelt recollection of being ostracized in her own land, the sparks flew. And yet somehow the whole seemed disappointingly less than the sum of its parts.

I've been trying all day to figure out what went wrong, and I think that perhaps the best way to get a handle on the problem is to talk about where the series deviates from the successful model of The Civil War. To begin with, The Civil War offered the perfect balance between people's history (i.e. the kind of first person stories that offer emotional immediacy and a sense of boots-on-the-ground experience) and the reflections of professional historians (who provide some idea of the larger sweep, structure and meaning of events). The larger story of the Civil War was thus very effectively wired into the lives of the individual's who experienced it. Each element enriched and reinforced the other, and also made clearer to us the role of that war in our lives today. Through the little stories, we achieved a far better appreciation for the big one.

By contrast, the first episode of The War leans far too heavily in the direction of people's history. It seemed to offer a bunch of essentially disconnected personal stories, interesting in and of themselves but with little connection to the larger sweep of history or our own lives. And, frankly, this kind of thing has already been done at least as effectively, for instance in the episode of HBO's Band of Brothers where we heard from the actual paratroopers themselves. We certainly get very little sense of the causes of the war (even in the most cursory way), the issues at stake or the world the various combatants sought to build. We were continuously reminded that Nazism and Imperial Japanese blood lust were bad, but learned little about what they represented and thus, for instance, the really definitive elements of the alternative we offered the world. He should have found his Shelby Foote for this one.

Second, while The Civil War deftly traced the personal journey of people like Elisha Hunt Rhodes and Sam Watkins through the war, in the process lending some kind of structure and continuity to the personal history side of things, it is already obvious that Burns' "four cities" construct in The War is sort of clunky and constricting. It simply pushes the idea of structure to the point where it becomes an unwieldy yoke. There will be too many continuous narrative streams for a clear, uncluttered presentation. Finally, the individuals interviewed from each city are not sufficiently connected to make the construct worthwhile. Their stories aren't really interwoven. Is the geographical coincidence of two people being from Waterbury enough to hold this device together?

Third, where the music of The Civil War was pitch perfect and delivered maximum emotional impact, I found that of The War to be sort of sterile and unmoving. I can't quite put my foot on it, but it just did not seem to hit (what I think was) the desired mood at every moment. It lacks a certain haunting quality that this template for a documentary requires.

Fourth, The Civil War told the story from both sides of the conflict. I suspect that in this Burns, the consummate sly cheerleader for the American experience, would argue privately that both sides of the Civil War were American. Who cares what former SS Stormtroopers or Japanese kamikazes think? While this may seem reasonable at first glance, the problem is that ignoring them leaves a great deal on the table in terms of what the war meant. Like it or not, men sometimes fight with all of their heart for the worst causes. Our Japanese and German opponents put up the most stunning kind of resistance. Understanding why is important, if for no other reason than the fact that it impacted us. In a larger sense, however, the over-arching point of the US war effort was the idea that, to channel Tennyson, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. We fought this war to transform their world as much as our own. Understanding what that meant, and the legacy of that effort for those at the business end of it, is crucial to wrapping ourselves around the ultimate legacy of that war, and how it should inform our values and choices today. If the war was just about us, then it probably wasn't worth fighting, much less remembering.

To be sure, The War is a cut above (far above) the typical offering in the intellectual desert of contemporary television, and it is concerned with an important topic. While it falls short of a fairly tough mark, it is still decent and interesting. For that reason alone I'll probably see it through to the end. But I already doubt I'll get the DVD or remember any of the people in it the way that Elisha Hunt Rhodes or Sam Watkins remain fresh in my mind, fifteen years after The Civil War.

Posted by dag at 7:01 PM | Comments (3)

April 24, 2007

The Tudors and the End of that Other Dynasty

I haven't posted much in a while. Partly things are crazy at work. Among other things, the sudden illness of a colleague and mentor has thrust me into the position of teaching his rather technically demanding graduate econometrics course. However, a lot of other things have been happening on the work front. On the home front, I now lose two hours per week on Sunday evenings to the final episodes of HBO's The Sopranos and the opening episodes of Showtime's The Tudors.

Let's start with an ending. I have to confess that I am getting sort of tired of Tony Soprano and his two families. Aside from the truly exasperatingly long gaps between seasons, the endless selfishness of these people does wear on you after a while. How many more people will have to die to sustain Carmela and Tony's little slice of heaven (a question I may soon be asking about Henry VIII and his whopping slice of England, but more on that below)? This is not the poignant plea of some naive innocent: I realize that the success of The Sopranos turns in large part on the exactness of the predatory, navel-gazing subculture of the Mafia as a metaphor for an increasingly competitive and less communal America. Nonetheless, how much interest can you sustain for a group of characters that, when push comes to shove, are nothing but violent and greedy? That may be a lot of what life is about, but I don't need cable subscription to see it.

The show has always been well written, up to and including the first three episodes of this season. However, virtually every other aspect of the structure of The Sopranos has begun to sag with time. The increasingly disjoint and pointlessly meandering quality of the episode plots has worn a tad thin. There have been too many episodes with a promising dramatic premise that simply went nowhere. Aside from these all-to-numerous plot cul-de-sacs, it would seem that most of the characters have also reached a point of diminishing returns. They have more or less been set within their increasingly static (by this point, the right word would perhaps be ossified) and, eventually, uninteresting identities for several seasons. Taken as a whole, it simply is not as good a show as in its first few seasons, when there was a clearer (if satisfyingly complex) series of plot lines and a more defined dramatic and personal arc to the characters.

By contrast, The Tudors is at the very beginning of its dramatic product cycle. It opens late in the marriage of Henry VIII (played ably by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) to Catherine of Aragon (Maria Doyle Kennedy). Henry is a arrogant and immature playboy with little grasp of his larger responsibilities or his own mortality. To the extent that he focuses at all on his kingly duties, it is the part about siring an heir. For the most part, he focuses on bastard children whose claim to the throne would be tenuous at best (having long ago abandoned Catherine's bed out of exasperation over her inability to produce a boy). Implicitly, the fault for his lack of a male heir lies in his mind with the women with whom he slept. The notion of a common denominator apparently had not been developed as of Henry's time (when one considers the enormous number of women he slept with against the narrow range of legitimate and illegitimate offspring resulting, one must conclude Henry had some kind of fertility problem). Looking at Doyle Kennedy, my own solution would have been to try harder with her. Much, much harder.

The Tudors is certainly beautifully photographed and worth watching on that basis alone. The cast is brilliant, and turns in superb performances (as I explain below, one problem with Rhys-Meyers Henry VIII is the he may be just a bit too spot on). The Tudors is well written and, compared with HBO's period drama Rome, hews closer to the historical record (though, as noted below, this may not be a relative strength). Finally, I have to admit that the opening theme music is beautiful, and difficult to get out of one's head (watch the YouTube clip below).

Against these strengths, The Tudors is ultimately slightly unsatisfying, and certainly compares unfavorably to the recently concluded Rome. To begin with, there is no real emotional connection to the larger context (in a number of respects) that its various characters inhabit. This is a serious problem for any historical drama wishing to engage anyone beyond the soap opera crowd.

"You think you know a story, but you only know how it ends; to get to the heart of a story you have to go back to the beginning" Rhys-Meyers' Henry VIII purrs in the course of the opening credits. But from the very first episode, this silly line shows up a serious problem with Showtime's tale of Henry VIII: it doesn't start from the beginning. On the most obvious level, for a series called "The Tudors" to make a respectable showing of starting from the beginning, one would at a minimum open with Henry Tudor's climb to power (and think of the plot intrigue the waning days of the Wars of the Roses might have offered!). Indeed, it doesn't even take us to beginning of Henry VIII's story: we meet him long into his marriage within Catherine of Aragon, and the deeper fault lines extending from his past are alluded to only in passing, in a fashion that does not effectively integrate them into his present psyche ("I am being punished for marrying my brother's wife" and "I am squandering all of my father's hard work!" are about the extent of it). Perhaps this is true to history, and there was little else to Henry VIII. But does he then really merit a historical drama of this sort?

More importantly, at the dramatic level The Tudors essentially fails to complete the wiring connecting the private emotional struggles of its characters to the larger tensions of their time. Henry VIII lived at a moment when the medieval world was truly beginning to come undone institutionally (the jousting could be viewed as the 16th century frat boy's appeal to a simpler time) and the religious order that had guided the West through the Dark Ages was beginning to falter politically and religiously. These developments would help to sow the seeds of the upheavals of the coming centuries, ruptures that would, among other things, lead to the French, American and Industrial Revolutions. There is little if any attempt to place the story within this larger context, and the few forays made in this direction are clumsy and have a knock-on sort of feel (as with Henry's exchanges with Martin Luther).

By contrast, Rome was, in a fairly unconcious (ie with minimal overt pre-amble), smooth and convincing fashion able to root its characters in their chaotic age, making the story far richer for being far messier. Titus Pullo, Lucius Vorenus, Atia of the Julii, etc. lived at an electric and unsettling moment of history: an ancient Republic that had been largely stable and incredibly successful by many measures was coming unglued. An increasingly fractious Senate was simply unable to meet the evolving needs of an emerging world power whose cultural diversification was challenging old and strongly-felt notions of identity. The Senate no longer served the broader needs of Rome, but instead with time had increasingly embraced its aristocratic foundations (rendering Rome a more and more narrow oligarchy). Ordinary Romans no longer had a stake in dysfunctional Republican institutions, and instead were coming to identify with charismatic strong-men such as Caesar and Pompey the Great who effectively circumvented traditional Republican channels to appeal directly to the masses.

Clearly, one world (the Republic) was ending while a new one (the more executive Imperial society) was emerging. We were watching Pullo, Vorenus, Cicerco and all try to find their bearings in a landscape so fractured by economic, political and social upheaval that the old and sure pathways on which their fathers had depended were no longer evident. In short, their private tribulations were effectively framed within, and psychologically enriched (to the benefit of the audience) by, the struggle to find their way in a frightening and confusing new world.

The Tudors also fall's short of Rome's standard in terms of finding some emotional common ground with modern day America. In part, this may simply reflect historical reality: modern America, particularly in its messy problems and expansive ambitions, might more closely resemble Caesar's Rome than Tudor England. There was an immediacy to the trials and tribulations of the characters in Rome in part because the problems confronting their society were so similar. The series opened with a controversial foreign war in Gaul that the militarily determined Caesar had essentially waged with no clear mandate from the Senate. Roman society was terrified about the loss of identity in an increasingly multicultural world (as the poor of the world flocked to her bright lights) and the hollowing of traditional economic arrangements (as, for instance, peasants were displaced from the land and hordes of slaves were brought to Italy from the conquered territories). And more and more citizens from all levels of society were wondering if her corrupt and cumbersome democratic institutions could meet any of these challenges. At the private level, they also fretted about the erosion of mos maiorum and the fabric of Roman culture (at one point, Kevin McKidd's Lucius Vorenus suggests angrily and mournfully that "such failure to respect the Gods is what has brought us to this sad pass"). Sound by analogy like any modern society you know?

Tudor England was a different story. Or maybe it wasn't. In any case Showtime doesn't attempt to make a persuasive case either way. The messiness and fundamental fault lines and upheavals of Tudor England are relegated to the sidelines in a series that spends most of its time focusing on the interpersonal struggles of the elite few within the ornate and insulated walls of places like Hampton Court, and little in the bustling streets of London. You don't meet characters drawn from the larger social context, and hence feel little connection to it. I think that you need a Titus Pullo or Lucius Vorenus as a vehicle for allowing the upheavals of everyday society to spill into the manicured gardens of the elite. Ironically enough, the presence of these commoners somehow made the conflicts between the elite seem like something more than an exceptionally violent round of the usual cursus honorum. Without them, Rome would likely have devolved into Dallas or Dynasty in period dress.

Unfortunately, The Tudors has pretty much gone that route from the outset. It is a story of superficial court intrigue, but little else. For instance, the historical Henry VIIIs constant fear of renewed civil war was probably a central motivation for many of his otherwise baffling personal choices, but because the series did not first embrace the waning days of the Wars of the Roses, we have little sense of this and the attempts to implant such an awareness by the writers seem clumsy and emotionally unconvincing. To offer this more complete picture, the producers of The Tudors might have studied the way that Rome deftly maneuvered the story across long intervals of time (the first season feels as if it took place over perhaps a year while covering a historical story that actually took place across eight years).

The Tudors also suffers by comparison for its lack of really compelling female characters. So far, Henry's sister Margaret, wife Catherine and Anne Boleyn have occupied the most dramatic real-estate. Unfortunately, none of them holds a candle to the ladies of Rome, particularly the politically and sexually fierce Atia of the Julii, a fictional character based on a very effective amalgamation of the real-life Atia Balba Caesonia (the chaste but ambitious Roman matron who nonetheless questioned the political career of her son Octavian) and Fulvia Bambaliae (Mark Antony's wife, and the Lady MacBeth of her age), and her coldly calculating antagonist Servilia. Atia is probably the only woman, real or fictional, that I have ever encountered who could have wholly and truly seduced me while at the same time scaring the ever-living shit out of me. Unfortunately, none of the women of The Tudors so resonates with me or, I suspect, other viewers. Why, for instance, did the writers decide to stick to the conventional (though no longer universally accepted by historians) "Catherine of Aragon as pious victim" characterization? I wanna see Doyle Kennedy show what she's made of: with her dark beauty matched by those dark and severe period dresses I know there has to be the possibility of an Atia of the Julii in their somewhere!

Indeed, The Tudors does not even develop many of its male characters particularly well, and instead rests more or less wholly on Rhys-Meyers' immature narcissist of a monarch. That, I suspect, is simply too narrow a foundation on which to build such a series.

Finally, by hewing more closely to the historical record (at least so far), The Tudors strangely offers the less persuasive historical story on a dramatic level. We are fascinated by times of Julius Caesar and the Tudors. How many play, stories, novels and movies have taken those eras as their settings? They represent ideal moments for story-telling because they were inhabited by larger-than-life characters just sufficiently filled in by the historical record to render them real but still sufficiently shrouded in the mysts of time to create rich scope for poetic license. It would seem that Rome took much better advantage of this opportunity than The Tudors. By bollixing the details in such a creatively useful fashion, Rome probably did a far better job capturing the emotional essence of her moment within the artistic constraints of the small screen.

Posted by dag at 7:52 AM

April 8, 2007

The Shepherd We Shall Not Want

Last night the wife and I watched "The Good Shepherd". A review will be coming shortly, but for now I wanted to mention one particularly memorable line from "The Good Shepherd", a film which dwells extensively on the WASPy and elitist culture of the CIA in its early decades. Matt Damon portrays the central character, CIA operator Edward Bell Wilson, a careful, taciturn, stoic (in the way that only certain privileged types can be) Yale Skull and Bonesman and product of a "respectable" family in a sense that now seems so terribly anachronistic (in Caesar's time he surely would have been counted among the optimates). At one point in his long and sordid career in defense of Brooks Brothers and all it stands for he is trying to enlist the help of a Mafia boss (Joe Pesce). The boss remarks "The Irish have their homeland. Us Italians have our families and our church; the Jews their traditions- hell even the niggers have their music; so what do you people [ie WASPs] have?”

Wilson’s unflinching answer: “We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”

Posted by dag at 8:08 PM

March 4, 2007

Remembering Heathers

Recently I've been reflecting a lot on the Rat Race, that great Wheel to which we keep tying ourselves ever more tightly. In exploring alternative views on the subject, I ran into this old gem from the movie Heathers:

real life sucks losers dry. You want to fuck with the eagles, you have to learn to fly.

Which of course made me think of Winona Ryder. There was a time in my life when she epitomized everything I could ever want in a Goddess. She gave me one my first KT Tunstall moments: suddenly I saw that Helen of Troy may really have been worth it. It at least seemed conceptually possible to me.

Back then I dreamed of doing all kinds of things with/to Winona, most of which violated some or all of the Blue Laws of some or all states. I'm talking about the kinds of acts that require the sort of tough, high viscosity lubricants they use in NASCAR.

What happened (to her or me)??? She's a washed up junkie who shoplifts and I have opinions about different Andalusian amontillados.

I'm really not sure which of us has fallen further. Oh Winona, would but that we could have back just one faint glimmer of that time...

Posted by dag at 11:33 PM

December 14, 2006

Frasier

For some time, I have been meaning to get back to movie reviews, and perhaps branch out a bit into television (for instance, I just watched a stunning performance of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) on Discovery HD). At the top of my list is to write reviews of several series. I had a short list together: The Sopranos, Seinfeld, Southpark and, to break this chain of alliteration, Frasier.

Frasier is perhaps my favorite sitcom of all time. It delivered a wittiness, elegance and sophistication virtually unmatched elsewhere on the sitcom landscape. To see why it is such an important show, watch one of the poorer episodes of Frasier and then one of the best of Everybody Loves Raymond or Will and Grace. Even Friends, enormously popular and, I have to admit, on occasion funny, seemed hollow and trite against Frasier's wit, energy and really engaging core characters.

Well, though I was going to review Frasier, it would seem that a review I found the other day pretty much captures most of my thinking anyway:

Living with Frasier
5.17.2004Tim Grierson

(available at http://www.knotmag.com/?article=1309)

Saying goodbye to a favorite TV show usually means dealing with a painful separation from beloved characters who have become family. And while that cliché holds true for Frasier, in my case that separation runs even deeper. I'm going to miss its sophisticated, melancholy view of the world. I'm going to mourn the absence of intelligence and clever humor. But, most specifically, I'm gonna miss that apartment.

While I know nothing of interior design, I consider the abode of Frasier Crane and his father to be just about perfect, a soothing mixture of class and refined hipness. And yet for all its modernist taste, well-placed art, and spaciousness, there was a sadness forever present in those rooms.

The apartment encapsulated all that was great about Frasier. Smart, cultured, and yet touched by an inevitable loneliness and melancholy that one cannot avoid in the modern world, the show's 11-year run elegantly walked the line between laughter and more somber sentiments. That it sometimes floundered when attempting that balance warrants a sad nod of the head and nothing more. Lapses and all, Frasier effectively pillared the joy of civilized living while devilishly mocking and lamenting its considerable pitfalls.

In other publications, you can read all about the delightful mismatch of gruff, masculine father and fey, neurotic, intelligent sons. But while Martin's loving, sometimes contentious relationship with Frasier and Niles formed the foundation of the show's humor, what really gave the sitcom energy was how the three men represented variations of well-meaning adulthood. Excluding when their writers occasionally failed them, forcing them to dip into stupidity to get a yuck, the three spoke smartly, experienced complicated emotions, and dealt with a nagging sense of emptiness.

For Martin, the most levelheaded of the Cranes, a deceased wife and a bum hip (from a gunshot wound in his days on the force) sent him to a diminished life of television, a cute dog, and a live-in nanny. For Niles, at least before the show listed toward disaster and paired him with Daphne, a loveless marriage inspires a hopeless, poignant crush on his dad's caregiver. Meanwhile, Frasier, returning to his hometown after a divorce and a loss of purpose, adores culture, art, philosophy, and whatever other elitist interests that will separate him from the riff-raff around him.

All three Cranes, more often than not, were single, clinging to his own hobbies as distractions from loneliness. Because Frasier eschewed the typical family-comedy trappings -- Mom, Dad, kids in school, wacky neighbor -- its grownup appeal was obvious. The sitcom's upscale bachelorhood hinted at a more suave version of your own life where people deliver erudite putdowns and dine at the best restaurants. But because Frasier's characters didn't conform to societal norms, they struggled with the difficulties of the road less traveled. Much like its terrific predecessor, Cheers, Frasier by and large featured unsatisfied, unmarried adults. (The folks who married were even worse off.) And not counting the risqué HBO comedies, television didn't sympathize with this untraditional mainstream world better than on Frasier.

Free of adolescent life lessons and marital discourse, the sitcom emulated Niles and Frasier's impeccable, worldly haughtiness -- chapter titles between scenes, high-minded slapstick, literary references, a love of British-style hijinks. By its very design, Frasier offered an intellectual oasis for its viewers, which was similar to the one the Crane boys wanted for themselves from the outside world. And while most observers have noted that the show flattered its viewers by assuming they were thoughtful adults, what has been lost in the eulogies is that Frasier actually served as a cautionary tale for the cut-off, intellectual life. Here was a sitcom that catered to a more affluent, urbane crowd and then reminded its audience again and again not to be too proud of itself.

This comeuppance for pretentiousness most often occurred whenever Frasier or Niles felt too confident in their smarts or breeding, only to be felled by bad timing, hubris, or their own painful insecurities. Until the show started running on fumes, Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce's perfect renditions of brotherly condescension embodied the snooty, distinguished life we all secretly envy. Which of us doesn't want to seem cultured and brilliant but, at the same time, doesn't fear the ribbing that would occur from our jejune peers? Frasier expertly sucked us in by appealing to that wish fulfillment of being the brightest bulb while never missing a chance to knock the Cranes off their pedestal. But by surrounding Frasier with so many low-watt fools -- one of the show's consistent disappointments was its inability to expand the characters' universe in interesting ways after the first few seasons -- we couldn't help but turn our allegiance to these adorably unmanly brothers. Plus, there was always John Mahoney's Martin, a bewildered man's man who nonetheless loved his sons despite his inability to quite fathom them.

In truth, Frasier consistently swung our sympathies back and forth between Martin and his sons. While their dad was an unassuming, simplistic older man, Frasier and Niles sought out the big questions of life and wanted to live as richly and deeply as possible. But while they were judgmental and arrogant and petty, their father was thoroughly decent, kind, unselfish, and immersed in common sense, something his egghead boys would never possess. This shifting audience loyalty made the whole family understandable and intriguing; all three men held the keys to a happy life but only if they were together. On Cheers, Frasier was the easy comic foil, the stuffed shirt, once Shelley Long's Diane left the picture. But on his own show, we really looked at the world of all those assumed stuffed shirt's out there: rich, droll, exciting, isolated. Creators Peter Casey, David Lee, and the late David Angell sought to humanize that world and make it universal, but they never forgot that it wasn't necessarily better than anyone else's.

The show's teeter-totter of pathos and comedy worked best in its funniest episodes when a suddenly serious, heartfelt moment would flow organically from the laughs. As the show ran down, Frasier struggled to be whimsical and dramatic, disturbing the show's delicate equilibrium. But when it really hummed, the show (like Frasier's apartment) delivered a stylish, inviting, cordial environment for us to unwind, a haven from an insensitive, base society we must endure. I won't embarrass myself by divulging just how much I wished I lived in that apartment, in that world of Frasier. But I am grateful that the show never stopped reminding me that it was far greater that I live in the messy, awful real world I know too well.

Posted by dag at 9:10 AM | Comments (0)

October 25, 2006

A Fistful of Classics

Recently, the Good Rabbi alerted me to a new anthology of 50 years of classic films from Janus (there is another article about it here).

Posted by dag at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)

October 22, 2006

Girl with a Pearl Earring

After seeing this film, I turned to the NY Times to seek another critical reaction and pretty much got what I expected: a stark affirmation of my decision to ignore their film criticism. Times reviewer Elvis Mitchell begins with the statement "At the start of ''Girl With a Pearl Earring,'' Griet (Scarlett Johansson) is shown peeling an onion, an image as metaphor rarely seen outside first-semester filmmaking classes." God, what tired cynicism. Much closer to the mark is Ebert's first two sentences on the subject: "'Girl With a Pearl Earring" is a quiet movie, shaken from time to time by ripples of emotional turbulence far beneath the surface. It is about things not said, opportunities not taken, potentials not realized, lips unkissed."

"Girl with a Pearl Earring" tells the story of the girl who is the subject of a famous Vermeer of the same name. Dire economic straits force this upstanding Protestant girl into the Catholic, and thus somewhat dysfunctional, house of Vermeer (if this were a popular blog, I would at this point remind you that I was raised Catholic and then suggest where you could stick your accusations of an anti-Catholic agenda, but this isn't a popular blog and so I need not concern myself with the prospect of hundreds of angry comments). While she is quickly, and predictably, absorbed by the heavy domestic chores beholden upon a maid in mid-17th century Amsterdam (I'm no art history person, but I think, and got the idea from the film, that Vermeer was active at some point in the 17th century urban Netherlands, and hence this is just a guess based upon those assumptions), Griet also begins her initiation into Vermeer's world. It begins innocently enough as Griet is assigned to clean Vermeer's studio (a mysterious place for the Vermeer family, as well as the household staff). Colin Firth plays a distracted, introspective and frankly somewhat morose Vermeer. He may have only marginal consciousness of the everyday life of his household, but he immediately recognizes Griet's artistic sensitivity. In short order, she inspires one work and becomes the specific subject of another while Vermeer helps her refine her artistic awareness. In this she probably fills a deep need for the emotionally isolated Vermeer. His mother-in-law is a crass (if admittedly practical) manager who sees Vermeer's work as little more than a trade, while his nuclear family is made up of a wife whose only real sources of sensitivity revolve around her insecurities and an ever growing brood of kids who take after mother.

There is a clear, if repressed, attraction between Griet and Vermeer (there is another man in Griet's life, a young suitor named Pieter whose place in the narrative framework is a bit unclear to me). The film is built around this repressed longing and common search for artistic epiphany, and I felt that it carries it off convincingly. The film is also beautifully shot (so much so that there are several scenes which leave you with some plausible appreciation of the visual stimuli that inspired Vermeer) and accompanied by a very beautiful classically inspired soundtrack. However, I don't think that the point of the film is to make us party to the secrets of Vermeer's genius, or to offer an explanation of the identity of the girl with the pearl earring (I somehow recall once being told that the real-life model's identity is lost to history). Rather, the film simply tells a story, of a tortured genius and a bright but intellectually unrealized servant girl, who each possess a certain capacity for understanding that those around them do not appear to share but that they recognize in each other. And, in this setting of intellectual isolation, an intense if sublimated emotional bond emerges.

Posted by dag at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)

September 2, 2006

DVD Suggestion

Yesterday I rummaged through the DVD collection looking from something out of the way and discovered, somewhat to my surprise (I must have forgotten), that some time ago I bought and never opened Chariots of Fire. Well, on a dark, cool and brooding post-Ernesto day that seemed to capture the handle for the backdrop of so many of its scenes, I opened up Chariots of Fire and fired up the DVD player. I had forgotten what a tremendous film it is. A review will be coming very soon.

Post-script: Let me also recommend Friends with Money. I enjoyed it as much as Walking and Talking, and will produce a review of both in short order.

Posted by dag at 8:54 AM | Comments (0)

August 6, 2006

The Story of a Man Who Could Only Count to Number One

Time for a lighter note.

I like to think of myself as a sophisticated man of arts and letters, with equally sophisticated, upmarket tastes in everything from books (current reading: Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Humna) to music (currently listening to Pieter Wispelway and Dejan Lazic's Beethoven: Complete Sonatas and Variations) to booze (how many other households have Poir William on hand, for god's sake???).

It is therefore very hard to admit this, but ... I liked Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. In fact, I like a lot of Will Ferrell's stuff. His time on SNL nearly (emphasis on nearly) rescued the show. His character Professor Klarvin was easily the funniest one on SNL in a good decade and a half (I remember one skit involving the lecherous professor and his wife in a hot tub with the guest host-I think it might have been Drew Barrymore-that reduced my wife and I nearly to tears). His Blue Oyster Cult/Don't Fear the Reaper/"We need more cowbell!" skit with Cristopher Walken may have been the single funniest piece on SNL in years. And, needless to say, his "Frank the Tank" in Old School was probably the most memorable, and now iconic, character in the film.

Bearing such gushing enthusiasm (Will Ferrell really speaks to, no, understands my inner 13 year old) in mind, I have to give an unqualified thumbs up for Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which I saw yesterday. As brilliant a comic study of a certain type of man and a certain moment in time as Anchorman, its opening 20 minutes had me laughing harder than I have since...well, Anchorman. As funny as Ferrell is, he finds his comic match in Sasha Baron Cohen, as a fey and gay French F1 racer invading Ricky Bobby's NASCAR turf. Every time Cohen said "Ricky Bobby" in the film I laughed until it hurt. It was that funny a delivery. It never got old.

Or maybe I was somehow regressing.

Anyway, from the previews, I learned that I have something to look forward to: Baron Cohen is making a Borat movie.

Posted by dag at 9:56 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2006

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Today I had to do some pretty tedious stuff, and so I ran a film on the laptop DVD player as I worked. Unfortunately, I chose a pretty poor candidate for background noise.

The writer Yukio Mishima was one of the most complex, enigmatic (OK, OK: incredibly odd) figures to emerge onto the post-WWII Japanese literary scene. His spectacular death in 1970 (he commmitted ritual suicide after seizing, with the assistance of soldiers from his private army, a Japanese Army barracks, in the process taking a General hostage, in a failed attempt to instigate a military coup to restore the Emperor to power in order to restore in turn samurai values to an increasingly spiritually vapid consumer society-and if you had to read that several times to take it all in, so did the Japanese at the time) is a key moment in the pop history of modern Japan. In some sense, one could speculate that Mishima was eventually torn apart by the tensions created by the inner battle between the parts of his soul that belonged to sensei and k (a la Soseki's Kokoro). He certainly believed that his life was a work of art (and got many others to buy into that notion), and it isn't clear that the real goal of his final mission was the ostensible objective.

"Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" chronicles Mishima's life in a novel fashion (one that merits your attention even if you are not particularly interested in Mishima himself). It involves the effective intermingling of three types of scenes: those drawn from Mishima's final day (in standard color); his memories of various crucial phases of his life (in black and white); enactments of key segments of some of his novels to illustrate the crucial tensions of that particular phase of his life (shot in brilliant color, with set designs involving beautiful and somehow stark (maybe minimalist would be better way of putting it?) aesthetic schemes). An unforgettable movie, both for its artistic achievement as well as its effective look into the soul of a tortured modern man. The soundtrack by Phillip Glass is very nice and really helps to set mood.

Posted by dag at 4:16 PM

July 6, 2006

Welcome to Mooseport

Last night the wife and I stayed in to watch Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions, a weighty piece that I think I will review at some point in the future (along with The Decline of the American of the American Empire, stocked with many of the characters revisited 20 years on in The Barbarian Invasions). After that, we watched Welcome to Mooseport, which I dispense with now.

This is an intensely irritating film because it is not very good despite a very promising premise. It opens with Monroe Cole (Gene Hackman), the newly retired President of the United States, returning to his summer home in sleepy Mooseport, Maine (he isn't going home to his former full-time residence in Baltimore because his ex-wife (the "Wicked Witch of the West Wing") got it in the divorce settlement). She wants him to sell the Mooseport residence so she can get her half of the proceeds. Cole, cruising into retirement after a wildly successful administration (he had 85% (!) approval ratings at the end), is less keen on selling (flush with lucrative speaking and book deal offers, one presumes that his resistance is mainly fueled by spite). Shortly after his arrival (with two duly sycophantic civilian assistants and several morally retarded Secret Service agents), he is approached by town elders to take on the role of mayor (the long serving local mayor had recently passed on). Cole, flush with hubris and probably somewhat attracted to the notion of a small fiefdom in some quiet corner of the world, agrees. (An added bonus is that the move would frustrate his ex-wife's legal maneuvers to sell off the estate.) However, shortly after committing his prestige to the race, Cole is disappointed to find that he is not, in fact, running unopposed: his plumber and local handyman, Handy Harrison (Ray Romano), has entered the race as well. Cole, who is a protective steward of his own reputation, fears both withdrawing (he might seem to be running from a fight) and remaining in the race (the David versus Goliath element of this setup is not lost on him). He decides to remain in the race and, as it heats up, what should have been an easy path to a cozy sinecure turns into a humiliating and crazy campaign (one which has attracted national media attention) in which Cole finds himself rapidly depleting the Elder Statesman capital that he brought with him to Mooseport. Even his financial future is placed in jeopardy (as his reputation plummets, so do the speaker fees and book advances). This is gauged in an amusing subplot in which an increasingly despondent Japanese architect is forced to progressively scale back his designs for the Cole Presidential Library from absurdly pompous and imperial beginnings. Cole eventually recognizes his enormous folly, but by then is essentially tied to a wheel of fire.

The basic setup is thus promising as a comic character study of an accomplished leader, driven more by hubris than the principals that originally guided him into public life, who falls into the nightmare of a humiliating political Waterloo largely of his own making. It is also fertile ground for a satire about modern political professionals (Rip Torn makes an appearance as an apparent send-off of Karl Rove), forged in the sophisticated and cynical world of national politics but unable to find traction in such a guileless small town (Ebert appropriately makes the analogy to a professional poker player utterly vexed by reckless amateur play). Their tactics amount to employing heavy artillery against a microbe. Even then, the Hollywood ending is obvious (as Cole emerges with a renewed sense of a better self lost long ago in the opium den of power and adulation), but with Hackman at the wheel it would nonetheless have had all of the makings of a great, great ride. Certainly, even this promising framework has elements of the ridiculous from the outset (a President gets divorced in office and finishes as strongly as Cole? Not in George Bush's America). But these are relatively benign flights of fantasy and we feel comfortable granting some degree of license.

Unfortunately, this interesting premise is almost completely derailed. First, the film insists on providing Romano equal billing. Handy's story is spectacularly uninteresting: the mild mannered local dolt who cannot recognize less than subtle hints from his long suffering girlfriend that the time has come to settle down. Cole brings a unique and interesting angle to the story, but there is nothing sufficiently compelling about Handy to match to it. However, I think that Romano fails at even this conventional character. He simply isn't funny, and takes no chances. In the scenes where he goes head to head with Hackman, the match is so lopsided that it is embarrassing. Had the film makers insisted on splitting the narrative thread between Cole and Handy (and consulted me), I might have urged them to go with someone who might take more comic chances (for instance, Will Farrell) or introduce a bit more edge (Vince Vaughn comes to mind). Second, the film makers seemed not to have understood that the real comic dynamism should have come from the Greek tragi-comedy of Cole's personal descent from lofty heights. Instead, they insist on introducing many hackneyed elements (why does every goddamn small town in a comedy have to be inhabited essentially solely by eccentrics?) that go nowhere and seem to have been included only because the inertia of Hollywood convention suggests that they should be and unnecessary physical comedy that simply does not work. For instance, the scene where Romano's Handy finally proposes (I'm giving nothing away here: it is an ending that you can see 100 miles off) is filled with several attempts at physical comedy that are awkward and pointless. They are, like many of Romano's other attempts at physical comedy, actually painful to watch. Finally, the film attempts, totally unsuccessfully, to introduce a certain comic duality between Handy and Cole. For instance, one of the funnier undercurrents of the film involves Cole's rocky relationship with an assistant (Fred Savage). After one collosal screw-up, Cole exiles Savage's character out of his line of sight. The scene is an amusing send-up of the inner court life of the Imperial Presidency (Cole's chemistry with his assistant has the same sort of out-there edginess that courses through the relationships of the hilarious Fox TV show Arrested Development). The film attempts to introduce a parallel involving Handy and his dumb assistant, but Handy simply does not have Cole's presence of imperial authority and thus cannot hold up the analogy (for that matter, the sycophantic and snotty but incompetent Beltway operator Savage is far funnier than Handy's conventionally dumb jerk off assistant). This is a terrible film because it should have been great.

Posted by dag at 1:21 PM

June 12, 2006

Hero

'Hero' is set in Central China in the 3rd century BC (I refuse to say 'BCE'). At the time, the Chinese polity was divided into 6 warring states, and the film opens with Nameless (Jet Li) arriving at the court of the Emperor of Qin. The Emperor of Qin, pursued by assassins for years, is trying to conquer and unite the other 5 states. Nameless is a mysterious citizen of Qin returning to recount to the Emperor the story of his defeat of the three most threatening assassins: Broken Sword (Tony Leung), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) and Sky (Donnie Yen). The setup thus loosely follows the old and famous story of the Emperor and the Assasin. Before entering the Imperial throne hall, Nameless is reminded to remain 100 paces from the Emperor-or else.

Nameless knew meddle of his foes, and so developed a strategy of divide and conquer that would exploit the tension between erstwhile lovers Broken Sword and Flying Snow. Through flashbacks we watch as the plot evolves. At the conclusion of each phase of the adventure, he is invited to move closer to the Emperor. When he is within 10 paces, the Emperor finally grows suspicious of Nameless, and suggests an alternative theory regarding the fate of Broken Sword, Flying Snow and Sky. The movie thus has a Rashomon-type setup: a mystery within a mystery. Or, as people have said of me, a question wrapped within an enigma wrapped within a blimp.

I am told that 'Hero' is the most expensive film ever made in China and was intended in part to outdo 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.' To be sure, it does contain spectacular fight scenes and beautiful cinematography. Two scenes in particular stand out in my mind. Early in the film we find Sky playing Go in a courtyard in the midst of a gentle rain. He is confronted by Nameless, presenting himself as a minor Qin official determined to arrest him. Thus begins a fight scene that achieves genuine elegance, as Sky and Nameless fly through raindrops which burst on contact with them as if forming jewels. Moreover, the game of Go sets the backdrop for the fascinating unfolding of the combat within Nameless and Sky's minds, as with master chess players anticipating the course of the game. The entire scene is, with great effect, set to the mournful tunes of an old musician.

The other is a flight scene between Flying Snow and Moon (Zhang Ziyi), a student of Broken Sword, among falling fall leaves. Both women wear flowing garments with bright autumnal colors that, with their flowing hair, mesh perfectly with the peaceful beauty of the falling leaves. That's no small accomplishment: achieving such a sense of peace and grace in the midst of a fight scene. One other such example that readily comes to mind is the fight scene across the peaks of gently swaying bamboo in 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.' The color transition as one of the combatants finally falls is gorgeous.

Unfortunately, the film, while well worth seeing (I'll even probably go so far as to add it to my DVD library), falls short of 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' for at least two reasons. First, the Rashomon-type setup somehow prevents any sort of emotional genuineness to the story or the characters. 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' may have involved an equally silly premise, and yet the relationships within, particularly between Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun Fat's characters, were emotionally convincing and interesting in ways that those in 'Hero' were not, at least to me. We cared about Fat and Yeoh's characters, and that allowed us to buy into the ludicrous plot. This is the key to all great martial arts films: they may be superficially absurd in terms of plot premise and the physical possibilities of life that they allow, but they are usually actually quite genuine in terms of their emotional core. In this sense they are sort of akin to the myths of old.* The lack of emotional traction in 'Hero' is then compounded by its very heavy handed political message. I'm really surprised that critics in the US largely have not picked up on this. The ultimate point of the film seems to be that Chinese unity is an end that justifies virtually any means, which would seem to me in the context to actually have more to do with the situation between the contemporary mainland and Taiwan than any serious historical assessment of the Qin Emperor's dreams of unification. As a result, the film ultimately develops more as a story about the varied conclusions of its characters regarding the geopolitical circumstances (remember that to 3rd century BC Chinese the 6 Kingdoms were, effectively, the whole world in the same sense that, to the Greeks, the Peloponnesian war was a world war) within which they found themselve than the potentially far more interesting relationships between the characters themselves. I would have preferred if art had not been sullied by crude propaganda.

*An important other category of martial arts films is the deliberate satire. "Brotherhood of the Wolf" is a brilliant example of this strain of the genre.

Posted by dag at 3:11 PM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2006

Who Says That Yale Is Selective?

Yesterday our copy of "The New World" on DVD arrived from Amazon. I haven't watched it yet, but for a few scenes (if only to gauge what it would look like on that great love of my life-ahem, aside from my wife-that flatscreen Samsung 40" LCD piece of electronic art in our living room). The closing scene, in which Pocahantas appears among the carefully ordered gardens of Stewart England after death and re-animated by her playful, natural erstwhile self, was stunning.

Unfortunately, the feeling didn't last. This morning, while searching for some odd feature of the DVD, I came across this review of the movie from the Yale Daily News. The authors opening and essential bone of contention is that this movie, un-Disneyfied and more visual than verbal as it is, was a miss on those grounds alone. That's really interesting.

I somehow thought Yale was selective in its admissions. Was I wrong?

Posted by dag at 11:48 AM | Comments (1)

The Doors

Last night I had difficulty falling asleep. I was unable to successfully tranquilize myself with whiskey and so watched a little TV, leaving me with yet another film immediate enough in my mind to review.

Fortunately, the whiskey left me with exactly the right sort of vibe for what I found. "The Doors" is Oliver Stone's film tracing the career of the Sixties band the Doors, with a special emphasis on the star-crossed lead singer Jim Morrison. I've always liked their music ('The End' and 'People are Strange' were staples of my angst ridden teenage years). What I like about the movie, however, is its unwillingness to dishonestly uphold some romantic image of Jim Morrison (played with eery effectiveness by Val Kilmer). On some level, Morrison was simply a narcissistic jerk with delusions of literary grandeur (his poetry was crap; to the extent that it ever worked it was only when paired with his voice and the hypnotic music of the Doors) who was proven wrong in his belief in his own immortality. Stone does an excellent job drawing you into the hypnotic abandon of the hedonistic Pop culture wave that the Doors rode to the top. Think of this movie as a more artistically accomplished version of the VH1 program Behind the Music. The movie is well conceived and executed. If it falls short of being a completely absorbing piece of film the director and cast cannot be blamed: in the end the problem lies with the real life Doors and their retinue, who fell short of being completely worthwhile subjects.

Posted by dag at 10:47 AM

May 6, 2006

The Unavoidable Mr. Ripley

In the past, including the very recent past, I have exhorted all of you to see Ripley's Game, out on DVD now but never theatrically released in the US. I have argued that the failure to release it theatrically deserves to rank among the greatest blunders in Hollywood history (quite an achievement) and that this was not only a decent film that deserved a passing glance, but a tremendous one that deserves a serious look. Lest you think that this is irrational exuberance on my part, no less a luminary than Roger Ebert has now named it to his highly selective list of the best films of all time.

Posted by dag at 2:16 PM | Comments (1)

April 9, 2006

Ripley the Unavoidable

At Medmusing's suggestion, I post the following excerpt from a recent email exchange:

I have already reviewed The Talented Mr. Ripley and
Ripley's Game:
http://aging-disgracefully.com/blog/archives/2005/10/the_ripley_seri.html
http://aging-disgracefully.com/blog/archives/2005/10/ripleys_game_1.html
I would love to hear your reaction to either review.

There is another current Ripley film. I think that it is based on either
The Boy Who Followed Ripley or Ripley Under Ground. Barry Pepper plays
Ripley.

I have heard rumors that Kelsey Grammar may play Ripley, most likely in
a film adaptation of Ripley Under Water. That sort of makes sense, since
the novels are marked by an increasingly wry sense of humor as they move
along and in any case Ripley can be viewed as a sort of murderous
Frasier Crane.

I was prompted to order the books, and make the post, after re-watching
Ripley's Game the othe night. That was such a well done film. On my new
big flatscreen LCD it was so beautiful. I particularly love the scene
set to"The Host of the Seraphim" (normally I detest "contemporary
classical", but this is an exception), where the contrast between the
world of chaos, nastiness and violence in a preceding secene is so
effectively contrasted with the serene elegance of Ripley's domestic
life as he walks into his house in the rain. What a stunning choice of
music for that scene. (In case you are unfamiliar with "The Host of the
Seraphim", I threw the mp3 file into
http://www.aging-disgracefully.com/enoch/).
That movie was so well done, and so few Americans know of it. How could
Fine Line be so stupid as to not theatrically release it???

Posted by dag at 7:42 PM | Comments (0)

February 21, 2006

Donnie Darko

Oooh, I know: I'll give you a movie review that has been waiting in the wings.

Donnie [to Frank the giant bunny]: Why are you always wearing that bunny suit?

Frank: Why are you always wearing that man suit?

An eery, somewhat unnerving film, it received unfairly harsh treatment from critics who generally (and inappropriately) insisted on judging it within the context of the more popular "Mulholland Drive." I think the better fit (if one exists) for comparison purposes is "Jacob's Ladder." Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal, in a brilliant performance) is a teenage boy who suffers from some unspecified but clearly worrisome psychological condition (paranoid schizophrenia?). One night in early October 1988, two startling events occur. First, he is called from his bed to the lawn outside of his home to receive instructions from a 6ft tall rabbit named Frank. Second, the engine of a commercial jet (or so the authorities surmise: its source cannot be located) crashes into Donnie's empty bedroom. The rabbit is a recurring figure, and from him Donnie learns two things. First, the end of the world will occur on Halloween night, 1988. Second, it is possible to travel through time. The second revelation resonates even more deeply with Donnie when he learns from his physics teacher that a former teacher at his school (now an old, eccentric neighbor known to local kids as 'Grandma Death' who spends her days visiting her mailbox, looking for a letter that never arrives) wrote a book on the subject, The Philosophy of Time Travel. The film is set in suburbia of the late Eighties (Donnie is from my generational and socioeconomic cohort; I have to say that the film convincingly recreates the look and feel of that time and place). It does an extraordinarily good job at making the ordinary somehow unsettling. Against the backdrop of Donnie's accelerating insanity, the movie also brings into question the logical consistency of our conventional norms of sanity as well as the uniqueness of Donnie's private hell (for instance, we indirectly sense the tortured inner world of a chubby, unpopular Asian girl who secretly loves Donnie). This is a complex, disorienting film, the conclusion of which is open to interpretation. However, it is essentially successful at drawing us into the hellish experience of a delusional person. Even time becomes warped in this setup. Its' authenticity partly stems from an insistence on avoiding the normal Hollywood conventions. For instance, Donnie is not, in the great film tradition of dark and troubled characters, a lonely outcast. His family and at least two girls love him, even as they struggle to understand the demons that threaten to destroy him. Indeed, he is actually sort of popular. In closing, I would also like to mention the incredibly effective use of Eighties pop music in establishing the mood. Examples: the emotional force of the ending, whatever it meant, is somehow amplified by Gary Jules haunting re-make of "Mad World"; the disorienting quality of a scene where Donnie's hallucinations begin to overwhelm him is rendered far more powerful by use of the song "Under the Milky Way." I'm not sure what this movie meant, if anything, but it is nonetheless a great, and pretty original, ride.

Posted by dag at 10:30 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2006

Matoaka, we hardly knew yee...

Last night I saw Terrence Malick's The New World, which essentially revolves around the life (indeed the stunning personal journey) of Matoaka/Rebecca Rolfe* (better known to us by her nickname Pocahontas) following the founding of Jamestown, Viriginia in 1607. This is a stunningly beautiful film, and while there are within it many parallels to Malick's earlier work (for example, any number of shots, scenes, visual metaphors, etc. reminded me of elements of The Thin Red Line), in no other sense does it rest on tired moviemaking convention. The photography (not only of the comparatively pristine natural paradise that was 1607 Virginia, but also of the dirty streets and ordered, expansive gardens of Stewart England) is mesmerizing. It is the stuff we have come to expect from Terrence Malick.

The acting is of the highest caliber. I was surprised at Colin Farrell's effective performance as a rather shifty and jaded John Smith completely awestruck by this innocent but intelligent, self-possessed and beautiful child of nature and her seemingly pristine world. He loves her in the most instinctive way (the emotional connection between Smith and Pocahontas is convincing, and gives the film all of its compelling energy through the lengthy but beautiful phase covering Smith's captivity in Pocahontas's village), and yet he knows that he and all that he represents will be the death of this pure beauty's primeval paradise. In one of the most tender moments of the film, she visits him at the Jamestown fort in winter, and plaintively asks why her lover had not come for her. The enormous sadness in Smith's eyes betrays both the devastation at having to separate himself from her and her beautiful village (returning to the disgusting and harsh fort, which serves as both crude military protection and prison) and a terrible sense of foreboding for her and her world. He knows that his love can only endanger her. In another scene, Smith marvels at the possibilities of this virgin land, but always with the same hint of sadness: he knows too well that men cut from his cloth will manage to screw up paradise.

Christian Bale turns in an earnest interpretation of John Rolfe as the kind of man who, while unable to turn back the clock and save the world Pocahontas came from, can offer her a loving and honest shelter from the terrible upheavals that await. Christopher Plummer...well, never mind: the quality of his work goes without saying.

And, finally, we have the absolutely wonderful and refreshing newcomer Q'orianka Kilcher, as Pochantas. She proves herself to be a tremendous natural actress (the expression she wears as she learns that John Smith has died at sea is one that I will not soon forget). The interesting thing about her face (she is pictured below) is that, as with Penelope Cruz, she really does not have a single beautiful feature (at least in a conventional sense), and yet the whole is somehow wonderfully greater than the sum of its parts, creating a beauty for the ages. Her physical language is exactly in tune with the rythm of the character, as a playful natural spirit is gradually worn down by life. She never loses her sense of herself, but a certain spark, energy,... does somehow, sadly, disappear with time. This makes all the more effective and engaging the closing scene, as we see the recently deceased Rebecca Rolfe dancing freely and with the lightness, grace, energy and synergy with nature that we had witnessed in the young Matoaka.

Pocahontas is a character who simply will not fade from our imagination. Though the actual historical person is largely lost to the time fog and our notion of her has certainly been influenced by a considerable degree of romanticization in the centuries since she died, it would seem fair to suspect, from what first-person records and recollections of her that we have, that she was one of those rare people with the capacity to awaken something in those who encountered her (the sort that creates their own brilliant energy and then bestows it on others), and after she had gone they were never quite the same. That she did this at such an awful turning point of history is probably only further testimony to the power of her spirit. Kilcher simply inhabits this image of Pocahontas. She leaves the kind of impression on us that the historical person apparently did on Rolfe and others.

I think the key to this film is the discipline with which Malick remembers that to those whose story is being told (as opposed to us, the viewers, who know the old and sordid history of what followed), these really were new worlds. He captures that truth at every level of the film. In fact, he manages the difficult trick of capturing a moment of curious innocence, and getting us to buy into it, without trying to lull us into abandoning our sense of foreboding about what is to come. To be sure, this movie has irritating aspects (for some reason the opening credits seemed almost as long as your typical closing credits, which in the context-ie having already sat through interminable previews for other films-somewhat vexed me), and if you did not like films such as The Thin Red Line, I doubt you will care for this one. And it has its genuine `structural' (for lack of a better word) mis-steps. For instance, the film loses some of its rythm in the phase set in the fort during Jamestown's first, and most precarious, winter. The whole idea of 'the Fort as Harsh Prison to Contrast with the Freeness of Pocahontas's Sylvan Paradise' is overplayed, and it takes the film a little while to recover its level of emotional engagement. Aside from screwing up the pace of the film, this interlude is also unneccesary: this is really the story of Matoaka/Pocahontas/Rebecca Rolfe, not John Smith. As with films like The Thin Red Line, Malick sometimes has problems maintaining narrative focus.

Nonetheless, as with the The Thin Red Line (a beautiful, elegiac meditation on the horrific violation of another primeval paradise during the battle of Guadalcanal), The New World is a stunning masterpiece. I still need to reflect on it more before writing a full review, but it is inconceivable (especially the way that things have been going in Hollywood) to me that The New World will be displaced from my Ten Best list for the year.

*Interestingly, however, I can't recall Kilcher's character every actually being referred to by a name until she becomes Rebecca Rolfe, symbolically joining the West in the process. And maybe that's half the point: Malick feels that names are one step away from boundaries, limitations, property, and he perhaps feels that that is not what her world was like before we came.

Posted by dag at 12:47 PM | Comments (1)

January 10, 2006

Not Just Movies: Real Film

After reading the NY Times review of this year's porn industry awards, it seems increasingly clear to me that, as we near Oscar season, a likely Best Picture candidate is separating itself from the rest of the pack: "Camp Cuddly Pines Power Tool Massacre", a searing post-Modernist, neo-New Wave statement about the contemporary human condition starring, of course, Stormy Daniels.

The really interesting thing is that the porn video/film industry apparently now grosses about half of what the big Hollywood studios do at the box office. Well, why not? After all, both generally offer thin plot lines, ridiculous dialogue, one-dimensional characters, etc. But somehow the camera work seems much more intriguing on the porn side of the thing. Of course, my concern here is strictly with the art.

Posted by dag at 3:11 PM | Comments (1)

December 13, 2005

Sideways

Originally posted December 2, 2004.

Last night I had a 2002 Byron Pinot Noir (Santa Maria valley). Byron, an erstwhile small independent, was bought out by Mondavi in the Nineties. I have heard that, for several years thereafter, their run was rather unimpressive (I wasn't drinking Byron back then). On opening, I didn't like the immediate bouqet-it was actually somehow unpleasant. However, the wine really opened up with in the glass aeration, and I picked up ripe cherry, plum, something like cinammon. Similar themes emerged on actually drinking. My wife noted a growing hint of spiciness as it aired further. Oddly enough, on the palate it somehow reminded me of a lighter version of some amarones I've had. The finish was not particularly long or strong. Overall, a nice choice-but wait a few minutes while the air helps it to sort itself out and come alive. I tried it with my beautiful new Riedel bordeaux glasses. I recommend these without hesitation or qualification. They are gorgeous and the glass engineering by Riedel is paying big dividends in terms of drinking experience.

Drinking Byron got me thinking about the movie "Sideways", which I saw last week. "Sideways", a wonderful film, is the the latest creation of Alexander Payne ("About Schmidt", "Election", "Citizen Ruth"). Based on what was an obscure novel of the same name by Rex Pickett, its success is surprising given its rather conventional framing. It essentially relies on three well-worn (OK: tired) plot devices: the road trip adventure; the odd couple; the last bash before marriage. Miles (Paul Giamatti) is a depressed divorcee and failed novelist teaching middle school English in San Diego. An intellectual beleagured by what he views as a disappointing life, he speaks with precision only about wine, a subject which has provided a unique and dependable place of sanctuary in a life otherwise overtaken by steadily deepening emotional scars from unrelenting (and unrewarded) struggle and regretabble decisions. Obviously, wine also provides one hell of a buzz, which can often come in quite handy when you are as morose and disappointed as Miles.

Miles certainly isn't conventionally endearing, by looks or personality, but he is sympathethic, perhaps especially to men. Miles is at a place in life that many thoughtful men have occupied at one juncture or another. Beneath his brooding, occasional pettiness and periodic flashes of anger, one senses a deeper decency and hopefulness, however tenuous the latter may be. He mourns for his lost marriage to Victoria. It quickly becomes apparent that blame is fairly evenly shared with his former wife: she had a tendancy to resort to demeaning him, and he responded with the ultimate passive-aggressive gesture, an affair. But Miles is a sensitive person for whom hard emotional calculus does not come easily and, even two years after divorce, he finds himself unable to let go.

He likens himself to the Pinot Noir grape. Pinot Noir is fragile. In fact, in some respects it is the delicate tropical fish of elite reds. It only grows under restrictive conditions, only with great care, only in certain "tucked away corners of the world." As Miles points out, it's not a survivor, like Cabernet Sauvignon (a weed by comparison, at least in terms of its vigor). Pinot rarely reveals its full potential and brilliance, but when it does he believes (and here I totally agree with him) that it is essentially without compare.

His friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is, at least superficially, less sentimental. In a week he will marry Christina, and the film revolves around a road trip to the Santa Ynez wine country, best man Miles' gift to Jack. Miles envisions a week of good food, golf, great wine-a send off in style. Plagued by fear and doubt about his looming marriage, Jack is focused on the easy reassurance of relatively anonymous sex, the nastier the better.

From the outset it is clear that Miles and Jack are the ultimate odd couple: the aloof, depressed, physically unremarkable, cultured, subdued, stubborn, cautious, reticent author and intellectual alongside a gregarious, buffed, crass, horny, mercurial, optimistic, decidedly un-intellectual washed up actor still possessed of a laid back surfer dude kind of rugged handsomeness. All they really have in common is the experience of being freshman roomates at San Diego State University at least two decades earlier. And yet the relationship is oddly convincing. For each the other is one of those friends (we've all had them) that one simply cannot justify: the fundamentals of personality would clearly seem to suggest total incompatability, and yet they have somehow become an essential, inevitable element of the fabric of each other's life. Each is to a certain degree utterly vexed by the other and yet, in spite of this (or because of it?), there is a real of affection and loyalty that binds them.

The acting, of course, helps make Miles and Jack more convincing. Giamatti solidifies in this film a reputation built on earlier work such as "American Splendor" (in which he played the genuinely weird Harvey Pekar). Haden Church is the bigger surprise. He shows real comic talent and, at the moments where we begin to feel like we might be breaking through the facade of Jack, range. It's clear that he spent far too long in the wilderness of "Wings" and the "George of the Jungle" series (no matter how much the latter delighted my wife's nephews when they were still little children).

The road trip begins in Buellton* (kind of an anchor town for the Santa Barbara/Santa Ynez wine country), where they settle into a vaguely run down windmill-themed Day's Inn. On their first night in town, they eat at the Hitching Post, a local restaraunt with a vaguely steak house kind of feel but excellent food and a highly regarded house pinot. (The Hitching Post is a real establishment; most of those featured in the film are.) The Hitching Post has been, well, a sort of base of operations and field office for Miles on his frequent excursions to the Santa Ynez wine country. There Jack and Miles spot Maya (Virginia Madsen, a veteran Eighties blondshell who, like Haden Church, demonstrates that she deserves a second look for serious roles), a waitress. Miles already knows Maya. He is on friendly, if hesitant and awkward, terms with her. The awkwardness stems from a genuine, though deeply repressed, attraction between the two. Jack, who at least exceeds Miles in sexual acuity, immediately picks up on Maya's attraction to Miles and urges him to close the deal. Miles, in full retreat from the world (as opposed to the fundamentally contented Jack's temporary pre-wedding panic), is not receptive to the idea.

What Miles does not realize (or maybe he does) is that Jack is determined to see each of them get laid before the trip is out. He is convinced that he needs to do something to shake his friend out of his steady downward emotional spiral. And who could think of something better than cheap and wild sex with beautiful women to get the job done? Well, certainly not Jack.

This is a key to Jack's effectivness as a character: we cannot totally dismiss him because his concern for his depressed friend is not an affectation. He cares about Miles, and is genuinely worried about him. After meeting Stephanie (Sandra Oh, who brilliantly portrays Stephanie as a hyper-sexual libertine hiding deeper emotional vulnerability), a pour girl at a winery Jack and Miles visit on the second day, Jack is able to sweet talk his own and the reluctant Miles' way into a double date with Maya and Stephanie. So begins a long, wine soaked dinner that eventually staggers along back to Stephanie's house (an avante garde dump in the bohemian California canyon tradition). Jack and Stephanie immediately dispense with their clothes, while Miles and Maya begin a quieter, slower, more romantic process. As the week progresses, Maya begins to awaken something long dormant in Miles. However, on the cusp of happiness, Miles becomes trapped under the collapsing edifice of Jack's lies. Their adventures begin to spin out of control, with real comedy and tragedy. (Before the week is out you'll learn why it is not a good idea to run naked through a field filled with angry ostriches.) Still, we sense (and hope) that Miles will find redemption.

The winespeak in the film is hilarious ("this is quaffable, but hardly transcendant") but at the same time well informed. In fact, I was pleasantly surpised by how assuredly the film handled the often thorny and contentious topic of wine. To be sure, there were a few slip ups. At one point Miles is stunned to learn that Stephanie has a Richebourg, which actually doesn't tell us that much. I was stunned only when we see that the bottle is in fact a Romanee-Conti Richebourg!

"Sideways" is funny, sad, tender and genuine. It is probably at the top of my ten best list for the year.

*There is actually an intervening detour to visit Miles' mom, an event which serves to deepen our understanding of his heavy baggage.

Posted by dag at 9:09 AM | Comments (1)

November 8, 2005

Film Reviews

While I'm in the film review groove, let me admit that I have no idea whether my reviews are really of any value to anyone. But I truly believe that movies are, for better or worse, the particular art form that will be associated with our age, and I am always looking for new experiences in film. I will certainly entertain reader requests for reviews of specific films. In the coming year I was considering reviews of the following (these were pseudo-randomly drawn from a list of about 500 favorite films I have seen or re-seen in the past 5 or so years):
1. Krzysztof Kieslowski's Red, White and Blue trilogy
2. A reposting, and perhaps with it an editorial re-appraisal, of an old review of Sideways
3. Lost in Translation
4. The Year of Living Dangerously
5. Yi Yi (from Taiwan)
6. Crimes and Misdemeanors
7. The Dreamlife of Angels
8. Look at Me
9. The Motorcycle Diaries, Four Days in September and The Crying Game (I'll make the connection in the review)
10. The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
11. The Ice Storm
12. In the Mood for Love
13. Shattered Glass
14. Short Cuts
15. Shadow of the Vampire
16. Irma Vep
17. The Decline and Fall of the American Empire and The Barbarian Invasions
18. Rushmore and The Royal Tennanbaums
19. The Sweet Hereafter
20. Tampopo
21. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
22. Mostly Martha
23. Looking for Richard
24. Full Metal Jacket (perhaps with a review of the new film Jarhead, based on Anthony Swofford's unforgettable memoir (of the same name) of coming of age in the brutal world of the Marine sniper)
25. The Wedding Banquet

I don't know if I will get through all of these. It works out to about 2 per month. I may make substitutions, if I get good requests. I'm not planning to review any films I disliked, but I may post a few past write ups of stinkers (such as Welcome to Mooseport), if only to provide readers (all 1 of you) with some examples of what I don't like in film.

I also may do some reviews of television. Admittedly, TV these days is a wasteland. But I thought I might begin with one bright spot on the otherwise dismal sit com scene, the unpopular but brilliant Arrested Development. I might also review those old war horses, South Park and The Simpsons. Finally, as the DVDs of its many seasons begin to become available and it settles into a strong and comfortable syndication, I thought I might review what was, in my view, on many levels one of the finest sitcoms of the past 30 years: Frasier.

And let me offer a TV prediction. Coming soon, we will all be treated to a season of Survivor: New Orleans.

Posted by dag at 7:59 PM | Comments (3)

After Life

OK, OK, I'm a jackass: it turns out that Bai Ling and the rest of them on VH1's But Can They Sing? are humiliating themselves for charity. The exposure they get by doing so has nothing to do with it.

Believe me about that. You can trust me. I'm not like the others: I'm your friend.

By way of apology and compensation, let me offer you a review of something truly worth seeing:

If you were allowed, following your death, to take with you just one memory of your life on this earth, what would it be? And what is it about that memory that makes it so important to you?

These simple questions are the central motivation for Hirokazu Kore-Eda's After Life. The basic plot mechanism is very straightforward. After you die you are sent for a week to a way-station between this earth and an eternal existence somewhere else (the sweet hereafter, I guess). At this way-station, counselors help you review your life on earth to select the one memory that you will take with you for eternity. Once you have selected your memory, it is carefully re-created on film and played for you in a theater from which you will not be re-emerging. After Life follows the life of the way-station over one week.

There are essentially two 'strata' of characters in the film: the counselors and the newly expired. The latter come to the table from a variety of ages and backgrounds. We are confronted by one middle aged man who led an essentially miserable life (and, he suggests, even if he had lived much longer it is unlikely that things would have improved). Another involves a man essentially dissatisfied with what he views as a life of mediocre choices, who then discovers a surprising link with one of the counselors that forces a complete re-appraisal on his part. When one thirty-something woman describes the impact of becoming a mother, her humanity becomes so real to us that we genuinely mourn her. A teenage girl who died in the midst of the Teen Idol/Hello Kitty phase of her life wants to retain a memory of the superficial thrill of visiting Tokyo Disneyworld. This is at once a commentary both of the innocent dreams of childhood and the enormous tragedy of a death so young, before one has ever really been able to develop a more comprehensive sense of the deeper corners of life. Which is not to say that her choice is inappropriate: she is a very real person to us,* and is entitled to her reasons for making the choice she did. Perhaps if she had died 20 years later she still would have made the same choice: the tragedy is in the perspective from which she had to choose (having experienced so little of this life) rather than the choice made.

The counselors are people who could not themselves choose a memory and hence were left behind to advise others about selecting theirs (it turns out that Murphy's law, like that of gravity, holds even at this way station after death). And we learn very little about them in any detailed sense (with one exception, which I will not discuss here because I don't want to ruin the moment for those who have not seen the film). However, they are enormously interesting. One in particular caught my attention: a twenty-something girl (Erika Oda). There is something at once quite fresh and, at the same time, hauntingly sad about her. She forms a special bond with the teenage girl. Perhaps she was old enough at her own death to understand how much this girl had lost, how much she would never experience? That would be terrible: the teenage girl was, at the least, young enough to benefit from the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. I think that Oda's character, slightly older, understood all too well how young she herself was when she lost her life. Maybe her refusal to make a choice is a sort of silent protest againt a life that she knows simply was not long and full enough to offer adequate options. I hope to see Oda in film again: with her ordinary (but, to be sure, pleasing) looks but genuineness, depth and emotional maturity, she is a refreshing break from the vapid sex kittens that too often dominate the Japanese (and, yes, American) film landscape.

Moving beyond the specific memory chosen, this film ponders what is really at the core of our memories. Is it an image? A sound? Smell? What is it about our memories of a cherished moment that makes them so dear to us? As we all know, memory is not, in many respects, a faithful servant. So why are our memories so important to us? Do they even need to be faithful, in the sense of being accurate in the details? Or is the real point to preserve the emotional essence of that cherished moment, and what it contributes to our sense of identity?

One of the dead is an aviator who wishes to remember the peace he felt cruising at altitude among the clouds. The staff's recreation has the feel of a second grade play: the props, however intensely and conscientiously crafted, look fake and amateurish (these people clearly don't come from Pixar Animation). And yet the aviator is taken back to that perfect moment by their efforts. And that may be the point: details aren't important. What is important is that the filmic re-creation provide the stimulus to awaken the emotional core of a memory since, to those doing the remembering, all of the small details are lost in any case. It may be far more important to remember how we felt than what actually happened.

This is an astonishingly accomplished film which, along with his earlier work Maborosi, places Kore-Eda among the ranks of the great humanist filmakers. If I ever built a list of the 50 films every young adult should see, this one would be on it. Following my first viewing of this film, I thought about what memory I would choose, if compelled to do so and based on my life to date. I made my choice and, in doing so, was probably forced to answer by revealed preference some basic questions that I, like most people, had spent most of my time avoiding. It was actually amazing how easy, and liberating, the decision was. I'm sure that my memory is far from faithful to actual historical details: what I am left with is an enduring core image, and all of the emotions that are bound up with it. When this hazy movie plays in my mind, I don't even think of what was said, or not said, at that moment, or what kind of clothing I was wearing, or what music was playing, etc. Instead this idealized image simply returns me to a time when I felt differently, dreamed differently, and believed that the world held more promise than has ever been the case since. The strangest thing of all is that years later I still think that, however my life unfolds, I am highly unlikely ever to change my mind.

* Some of the dead in the film are not actors, but ordinary people. Their insights are unscripted and based on their real lives.

Posted by dag at 7:51 PM

November 2, 2005

The Blair Witch Project

A few months ago I saw "The Blair Witch Project" on television. It had been several years since I had seen this masterful film. Shot on a shoe-string budget with amateur actors, it tells the story of three young university students on a field-trip to a small Maryland town to research the legend of a witch (the Blair Witch) by way of a documentary (their work appears to be in the vein of the "capture the disappearing oral history of the local cultural scene-stories, legends, etc. before they are paved over by Walmart" vein of documentary filmmaking). The Witch has a long and creepy legend extending back roughly to colonial times. After an initial scouting of the nearby town (Burkittsville), the three head into the woods reputed to be haunted by the Blair Witch in order to visit several landmarks that feature prominently in that legend. Once there, they become increasingly disoriented (at one point, one of them proclaims with exasperation and a hint of terror that it should not be possible to get lost on the over-developed East Coast) and terrified by rapidly accelerating, creepy signals emanating mysteriously from the depths of those woods. The film is essentially successful not at scaring us personally but at making us believe in the growing terror of the students as their faith in a modern, rational (scientifically explainable) world is shaken by those ominous signals from a mysterious natural world. It succeeded at evoking this kind of response for several reasons:

1. At the time of release it was backed by an innovative web campaign that established the backdrop for the movie. The Blair Witch is, after all, an invented legend. Unless you have some way to implant it in the popular consciousness (in much the same fashion as an urban legend), the film will seem merely confusing. Alternatively, the web campaign helped to maintain the tempo for suspense in the film: it allowed the film makers to avoid having it bogged down by the need to convey many details in order to establish the legend. The web campaign had already more or less done that.

2. Although this web-based marketing of the film was novel (relying as it did on a comparatively new popular medium for the time), it cleverly tapped into very well-worn grooves of the American and, more broadly, Western European collective memory: dark and creepy woods (think of the setting of many of the tales of the Brothers Grimm for example); the old witch legends (a very rich local tradition in North Eastern and Mid-Atlantic areas that were settled at the time of the 17th century witch hysterias); etc. It carefully and convincingly crafted in its full richness the sort of historical tapestry that undergirds many of the haunting traditions of the East coast: the filmmakers seemed to understand that it is not enough just to say that such and such happened in 1689. One must also create the feel of the time being recalled, as in through old photos that seem as if they were drawn from the Ken Burns Collection at PBS, colonial period woodblock prints, a suitably old and mysterious early account of the witch (the sole remaining copy of which is in the hands of an obscure "private collector"), etc. On a more subtle psychological level, it tapped into old and largely subconcious cultural associations, for instance by the witch's Irish ancestry (which, in the context, implicitly and ominously hints at the ancient Celtic/Druidic tradition of dark and mysterious natural magic). As the events surrounding the witch tradition move closer to the modern era, they take on a better documented feel (in the manner that modern recordkeeping demands) but still leave an uneasy sense of an unseen hand guiding events.

3. The film was shot in the dead of winter, but before snow had fallen. This gave the woods a vaguely lifeless and menacing feel. A sense of death pervades the place. Use of amateur camcorders adds to this: the natural lighting is too strong and thus creates that slight overexposure to which camcorders are prone, in some sense robbing the sun of its emotional warming quality and instead rendering it a vehicle for highlighting the lifeless harshness of the woods.

4. The filmmakers understood well that we have two types of fears: those that are taught to us (uhh, cyanide is bad, mmmmmmkay?) and those that are more deeply bred into our bones: strange sounds in the woods at night (the creepy sounds of cracking stones are a master stroke); strange, elemental and unnerving stick figures that the three find hanging from trees in a clearing; etc. Those stick figures are particularly terrifying for their simplicity and the fact that they are left dangling from the trees. They would have been far less scary if they were on the ground or more elaborately crafted. For instance, if they were more elaborate they might evoke a more sarcastic approach ("well, someone has too much time on their hands"). In some sense, this highlights the knife-edge that often separates terror from comedy. As I write this, I am also reminded of my two bull dogs, who are each willing to take on another dog three to four times their weight in close combat but lose all of their courage and strength in the face of a garden hose, most likely because its shape triggers an ancient and deep instinctive fear of snakes (they possess little meat and lots of potential risk, and so are better left alone). But we humans are also ultimately children of nature, and on some level, no matter how deeply buried, these sort of primeval instincts operate just as strongly within us.

5. The viewer never actually sees the witch. If we did see it we would be able to intellectualize it, no matter how hideous it looked. Fox News would begin trying to figure out its party affiliation (how long could the Republicans pass up the chance to tap into such a powerful and malevolent force, leading of course to Witchgate?). The US government would scramble either Delta Force, the Ghostbusters or both (well, why not? What's worth doing is worth doing right) to deal with it. Of course, in the aftermath of the disastrous Delta campaign (they eventually got the Witch but not before, in an initial raid, accidentally burning down Baltimore, which various intelligence assets, fresh from their brilliant work in Iraq, had mistakenly identified as the great forest in which the Witch dwelled), Ridley Scott would inevitably take on the film adaptation of Mark Bowden's best selling novel Broomstick Down...OK, I'll stop now.

You can trust me. I'm your friend.

No, wait: far more terrifying than Delta Force, first they would send the IRS to figure out whether the Witch owed back taxes and if it qualified for the alternative minimum tax. We would begin to suspect the Witch, and not Dow Chemical Corporation, in the gradual disappearance of the northern reticulated spotted chipmunk from those woods-Sorry, as usual I just couldn't help myself.

The point is that by keeping the witch off camera, we are never really given a chance to find traction for the most rational synapses of our brain: we are left with no material to work with, and that amplifies the terror tremendously. The key here is that nature (or rather the dark elements of nature, as embodied in the Witch) remains mysterious: it is a strange, unknown (as well as un-knowable) and possibly malevolent force. In this, "The Blair Witch Project" reminds me of the early films of Peter Weir, such as "Picnic at Hanging Rock".

The Blair Witch Project is, for any reasonable viewer (ie any viewer who does not want to use their reflections on the viewing experience as a platform for hollow declarations of machismo), a convincing experience: we would be terrified were we in the shoes of those three young people.

Posted by dag at 7:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 29, 2005

Ripley's Game

Skipping a few volumes of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novel series, Ripley's Game is the sequel to Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley. This time around Liliana Cavani is at the helm, and John Malkovich provides us with an older and more assured Ripley than Matt Damon's portrait of a young man still discovering his inner sociopath. "I lack your conscience, and when I was younger that bothered me. It no longer does" Malkovich's Ripley explains at one point.

I have introduced some buzzwords (Malkovich, Ripley,...) and some of you must be struggling to remember the theatrical release of this film. Don't bother: it didn't have one. In a colossal blunder, Fine Line and New Line never released Ripley's Game in the US, and instead sent it straight to DVD. If you want a truly refreshing DVD experience (in terms of a great film coming out of left field), rent this one.

This Ripley installment is very different from Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley. First, suspense is far less important to the rhythm of the film. To be sure Ripley's Game does have its suspenseful moments. But maintaining a central suspenseful tension requires the director to have far more control over the tempo than Cavani enjoyed: this film is set to the beat of Malkovich. At some points you feel it trying to speed up or slow down, but Malkovich wills it to surrender to his timing. And this is wholly appropriate: Ripley as a character is front and center this time. He is an older, more complete and interesting killer (as opposed to Matt Damon's appropriately played work-in-progress). He, and not an ensemble cast or the dynamic provided by suspense, should be at the center. Second, this film, set in the winter months in the Veneto and Berlin, is far darker. This extends even to the clothing. There is none of the feeling of youthful insouciance that lulled the viewer into dropping their guard in the first half (set in the sun drenched, carefree Bay of Naples) of the first film: this is a heavier and more explicitly adult film, populated from the outset by people way past the point of diminishing expectations in their lives.

The film opens in Berlin with a scene in which Ripley, in full form, figuratively kills two birds with one stone. One of them is Reeves (Ray Winstone), his associate with whom he quickly parts ways (after cheating him out of a cool several million). Reeves is a crude and stupid understudy, and it is clear that Ripley feels that his "finishing school" cannot help a man like him. The film then fast-forwards three years to find Ripley comfortably ensconced in an elegant mansion in the Veneto, living comfortably (indeed, elegantly) off of his (considerable) ill gotten gains with his harpsichord playing Italian wife (the truly gorgeous Chiara Caselli). In short, Ripley is living the sort of life in Northern Italy* that suits his rather classical, up-market tastes with a beautiful wife who complements him culturally. But one also senses that Ripley is slightly bored with such an unchallenging existence.

We quickly meet Jonathan Trevani (Dougray Scott), a vaguely snotty local English ex-pat picture framer who lives a quiet existence with his wife and child. On a lark, Jonathan invites Ripley to a small party at his far more modest home. However, when Ripley arrives (with, of course, the nicest bottle of Amarone), he finds Jonathan insulting him in front of other guests. After a tense exchange with Jonathan, Ripley returns home to discover Reeves in his kitchen behaving like a caveman. After Ripley, who clearly regrets his earlier failure to literally kill Reeves, brings focus to the discussion ("Are you going to tell me what you want or is some truffling pig going to find your body in a few weeks?"), Reeves explains that he needs help: he has some business competitors that need "de-regulating" and Ripley seems ideal for the job. Ripley suggests that perhaps this set-up is better suited to a neophyte. The next day he suggests Jonathan, who Ripley has learned is dying of cancer and terribly worried for the welfare of the family he leaves behind (insecurity brought on by resentment of Ripley's wealth may have played some role in Jonathan's poor behavior at the party). To increase the pressure on Jonathan, Ripley throws in $50,000 of his own. Jonathan eventually gives in, but in the hands of the incompetent Reeves, the scheme, along with Jonathan's welfare, begins to fall apart.

It isn't really clear why Ripley steered Reeves toward Jonathan. Was he trying to obliterate Jonathan's illusions of moral superiority? Was it simple and crude revenge for an insult? Was he trying to help Jonathan (after all, the money was desperately needed by the Trevani family)? Malkovich's Ripley is a sufficiently complex character that all of these motives may have played an important role in his thinking.

As the film progresses, and Jonathan becomes trapped and imperiled by Reeve's idiotic scheming, Ripley decides to take action. I will say no more about the plot, because this film is, to be sure, a suspense, regardless of the comparative importance of other dimensions of it. But Ripley's actions as the film progresses hardly represent the path of least resistance for himself (ie that set of actions which most easily insures his own welfare). At the same time, this is still a purposeful Ripley at the top of his game. Malkovich thus offers us a complex portrait of a vicious and self-preserving master operator suddenly seized of...is it guilt for having placed the hapless Jonathan in these circumstances? Is it pity for Jonathan and his family? Is it sheer boredom? Or is it all of these things, with perhaps just a dash of something much deeper?

However, despite Malkovich's commanding presence, the film is actually as much about Jonathan Trevani as Tom Ripley. I once wrote that "Ripley is our anti-hero Hero because he speaks to our darkest resentments, needs, urges and capabilities" and that "on some darker level most of us actually identify with him." However, in some sense these statements come too easily: we can maintain this dark delight at a safe distance. It is someone else, someone with a reassuring oddness to him, acting out on these dark urges. This is, after all, a singular character. We may revel in his depravity, but we aren't forced to actually consider seriously our own inner Ripley. This film closes that distance and forces us to ask a harder question: to what extent do we each indeed have one? How many of us, if pressed by circumstance, are actually capable of behaving the way that Ripley does when he is pressed? Ripley is certainly a sociopath, but not a malignant one in the sense of his ruthlessness reflecting gratuitous malice: he commits no more violence than necessary to achieve his goals, chief among them being self-preservation. But is the difference between ourselves and him really a question of degree, rather than fundamental difference? For example, how many of us are capable of ruthless violence if our family was threatened? Or, pushing it further, their financial security? Certainly Jonathan Trevani could not, at the end, answer these questions as smugly as he once might have.

Ripley's Game is an outstanding, and largely obscure, gem.

*It is an interesting commentary on the shifting sands of American fantasies of life in Europe that the book is set in rural France, whereas the movie-made decades afterward in our own era-is set in Northern Italy.

Posted by dag at 3:45 PM

October 28, 2005

The Talented Mr. Ripley

The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ripley's Game are the most recent films based on the Ripley novels of Patricia Highsmith (and, indeed, both are based on a novel of the series of the same name). (I have heard of another recent installment with Barry Pepper as Ripley, but have not yet had a chance to track it down, and there have been at least two earlier films that I am aware of that were inspired by Ripley: Plein Soleil (1960) and The American Friend (1977).) The sequence of novels behind this growing franchise is The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley's Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980) and Ripley Under Water (1991).

The critic Julian Symons once wrote in the NYTimes ""The feeling of menace behind most Highsmith novels, the sense that ideas and attitudes alien to the reasonable everyday ordering of society are being suggested, has made many readers uneasy. One closes most of her books -- and her equally powerful and chilling short stories -- with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had imagined." True enough. But I've always thought that a key part of the rather remarkable popularity of Ripley is that on some darker level most of us actually identify with him.

So, with that in mind, maybe I'll discuss both of these recent 'Ripley' films, beginning with this review of The Talented Mr. Ripley, which stars Matt Damon as a young Tom Ripley still coming into his own in terms of his sense of himself and his capabilities. The film opens with a young Ripley, bereft of any real prospects but already the brilliant improviser, giving a rooftop piano concert in the place of an injured friend (who does have prospects, as well as entree into the upper crust 1950s Manhattan society attending the concert). By an absurd misunderstanding, Tom is able to ingratiate himself with the Greenleafs, a WASPY, New York-Old Money kind of couple. Of course, Tom is quick enough to recognize and capitalize upon that misunderstanding. The next day, Mr. Greenleaf proposes that Tom travel to Italy to track down and return with his wayward son, Dickie (Jude Law). Tom agrees and is off to Italy, where he quickly establishes a friendship with Dickie and his fiancee Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), and other members of their social set, including Freddy (Philipp Seymour Hoffman).

Dickie is one of those Golden Boys who draws people in with his own brilliant sunlight. He has money, looks, a sort of seductivity and charisma, and then there's the beautiful life in the Italy of the late Fifties to which he seems an inevitable part, at least if you were a super-priveleged American expat twenty-something of the time who wished to take in Italy while avoiding all of the unpleasantries of interaction with actual Italians (you see, they preferred the idea of Italy). Most of all, Tom wishes that he could have the possibilities afforded by Dickie's life, or rather his station in life. On the other hand, from very early on, one senses a certain degree of tension for Tom: Dickie, played brilliantly by Law, is, beneath his flawless gold and bronze exterior a loathsome, self-absorbed and spoiled misanthrope. In fact, Dickie's nasty judgementalism may be part of his appeal: people are desperate to secure the approval of this beautiful narcissist. And Marge is really a gold digger (how else could she so easily excuse Dickie's nasty character, which she cannot deny?).

Interestingly, music becomes a source of tension: Dickie is wild for jazz, but Tom is only feigning interest to keep Dickie's favor. This becomes more difficult with the arrival of Freddy, a man who lives on a steady diet of good wine, good times and Jazz, and immediately senses that which Dickie and Marge have failed to pick up on: Tom does not belong in their world. Not because he doesn't have their brains (he's smarter than any of them), looks (Hoffman versus Damon is a no brainer), talent (for instance, Dickie butchers the jazz Sax and Freddie buys records, but otherwise neither has anything approaching Tom's skill with the piano), etc. What Tom lacks is the easy self-assurance that growing up with true priviledge provides. These people are the ultimate elitists: as with being famous for being famous, the are elite simply for being elite. Thus begins the slow unraveling of Tom's relationship with Dickie, and with it his dream of living in Dickie's orbit.

I won't give away more of the film. First of all, it becomes too complicated to track. But, second, it is also a suspense of the finest order, and thus to say more would be a crime. The Talented Mr. Ripley is basically about the dream of inhabiting someone else's life, a dark instinct that I think many of us have felt at one time or another. Tom is an absolute sociopath who is so comfortable with deception that lies are actually easier for him to manage than the truth. And yet, throughout the film, when we feel heightened anxiety or anticipation, it is with the idea that Tom might be caught. As bad as he is, we can identify with him: a man of certain talents and virtues (whatever his flaws) locked out of a world handed on a silver platter to the wholly undeserving likes of Dickie. Certainly he is smarter, more aware of others and far more artistically and culturally savvy than the boorish Dickie and his crowd. Thus begins a pattern that I think traces out through the saga of Ripley: Ripley is our anti-hero Hero because he speaks to our darkest resentments, needs, urges and capabilities.

Italy is very much a character in the film. The backdrop it provides very effectively helps to set the mood. The early scenes on the sun drenched Amalfi coast are practically set in the hue of Dickie, and his seductive power becomes very believable in that warming light. In later scenes, as the action moves north, one senses a progressive darkening of the mood that the scenery underscores well.

Matt Damon was a perfect choice for Tom. He approaches every moment with a sort of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed boy-next-door kind of freshness and eagerness that somehow served instead to very effectively highlight his underlying evil (I found him a far more convincing sociopath than Anthony Hopkin's Lechter). I also found very convincing the notion that this is a young Ripley, still uncertain of and discovering his skills and capabilities. Jude Law is tremendous, and effectively pulls off an astonishing maneuver: from our vantage point Dickie's severe character flaws are so unavoidable that we aren't seduced by him, and yet Law convinces us that others, in his more immediate orbit in the film, would be. Everyone revolves around Dickie, we believe it, and that provides us with some genuine sympathy for the resentment that Tom probably feels regarding the unjustness of their relative stations in life. And his deception of and violence toward those in Dickie's circle also seems well deserved (at one point, a rich heiress explains to Tom "I'm a rich kid who hates money"). And Hoffman (no surprise here: Hoffman is one of the most underrated actors on the scene today) hits exactly the right note: he simultaneously worships Dickie (imparting a certain insecurity to Freddy) but otherwise shares his supreme sense of assurance and entitlement. And his unease with Ripley is from the outset subtle but clear.

This is a great, if unsettling, film.

Posted by dag at 11:13 AM

October 27, 2005

New Blog

After a great deal of careful thinking, I have decided to bring back Aging Disgracefully.

I needed a hiatus, and have decided that Aging Disgracefully needs a new focus. Out with the current events, politics and economics: I want a refuge from all of that. I think I will now focus more on the whole lifetsyle of a disgracefully aging gentleman. Initially, the last incarnation of Aging Disgraceully had achieved some balance between its various focus areas, but somehow I drifted away from that as time passed. Therefore, I want to re-focus more specifically on the key elements that make my daily life work (and not work). As part of this, I have added a new section (My Growing-and Alarming-Attraction to Pottery Barn) to document the ongoing saga that has been our new home, including my frightening forays into my metrosexual side as I make decisions about things like interior decoration (not that there's anything wrong with that). In the next few weeks my new posts will be mingled with old ones that seemed particularly relevant to the new focus.

Though this is just the latest incarnation of Aging Disgracefully, it still it feels like a new beginning. Once again, I'm moved to quote verse:

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
"Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;"
Desires compos'd, affections ever ev'n,
Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heav'n.
Grace shines around her with serenest beams,
And whisp'ring angels prompt her golden dreams.
For her th' unfading rose of Eden blooms,
And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes,
For her the Spouse prepares the bridal ring,
For her white virgins hymeneals sing,
To sounds of heav'nly harps she dies away,
And melts in visions of eternal day.

-Alexander Pope

Posted by dag at 8:05 PM