Musings From the Movie Man

movie review: The Hangover: Part II

2012-01-11T15:36:00.000-08:00

Forgive me for splitting hairs, but if I can begin this review with setting one distinction straight: Those who complain that The Hangover Part II is "more of the same" are simply foolish; of course it's more of the same, it's what we bargain for when we decide to watch a sequel. Those who complain that The Hangover Part II is too similar to its predecessor have a legitimate complaint.

Interestingly, the common, and perfectly reasonable, assumption that Part II was rushed into production because of the runaway success of The Hangover is incorrect; development of the sequel started months before The Hangover was even released. But regardless of whether or not Part II was as rushed as people are assuming, it does lack something that the first film had, and I'll get to what that "something" is in a minute. First, let's do a brief recap of the storyline:

The first film introduced us to our main characters -- hapless whiner Stu (Ed Helms), level-headed everyman Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Alan, played by Zach Galifinakis with a mixture of naivete, stupidity, sympathetic vulnerability, and enough "wackiness" to border on outright insanity. The three of them went off to Las Vegas, and had such a crazy bachelor party that they woke up with no memory of the night before -- and missing Doug (Justin Bartha), the bachelor. The rest of the movie details their attempts to figure out what had happened the night before, so that they could find out what happened to Doug and get him to the wedding in time.

Part II takes a longer time to get there, but ends up being an identical storyline: Alan, Doug, Phil, and Stu reunite for a bachelor party in an exciting location, and the same three again wake up with no memory of the wild night before, and again have to search an exciting, infamously sinful, city for the missing fourth person. The extremely minor variation: This time, Doug is almost immediately established as safe and sound at the hotel, and the missing reveler who Alan, Phil, and Stu have to find is Teddy, Stu's soon-to-be brother-in-law.

The first Hangover is, in my opinion -- and in the opinion of many others -- one of the funniest movies ever made. If I had to use only one word to describe the first movie's brilliant screenplay, it would be "inspiration." The set-up has been done before. (Subtract the missing bachelor, and you have the exact same story idea as the under-rated Dude, Where's my Car?) But by plugging three normal guys (if you can call Alan "normal") into what is basically a "private eye" adventure, writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore found a way to peel the plot twists and surprises away like the layers of an onion. Simply put, an often overlooked fact is that The Hangover succeeds as a mystery story, but we are constantly distracted from that fact because the dialogue is so damn funny.

And it's that inspired dialogue that's missing from The Hangover Part II. Whereas nearly every line of The Hangover packed a comical punch, you'd be hard challenged to find a quotable line in Part II. It's not bad writing, not by any means; the dialogue still sounds natural, and goes a long way of establishing new characters' personality, while maintaining consistency of characters we met in the last film. But it's just too functional to be funny. The writers try so hard to duplicate the comic success of the first film that even the characters are sometimes aware they have to go through the paces; they remember, of course, the events from the first film, and so they go through the same routine: blame Alan, check the roof, check their pockets for clues, etc. At one point, Phil even says, "you know the drill." I guess it's a nice touch that the writers are at least acknowledging the repetition, rather than insulting the audience by hoping we won't notice. But still, the inspiration is gone.

That's not to say that this is a bad film. There are still plenty of laughs, both in the surprises the heroes encounter, and also in Alan's pure bizarreness. And the "missing person" mystery concocted by writers Scot Armstrong, Craig Mazin, and Todd Phillips (who also directed both films) is just as well written as the mystery in the previous movie. Bradley Cooper is once again excellent as everyman Phil, who, in both movies, just wants to chill out, but is constantly forced into a leadership role because somebody has to keep a check on Alan's randomness and Stu's growing panic.

I hear another sequel is in the writing stage. This may cause some people, even fans of the first two films, to groan, but I'm looking forward to revisiting these characters. But I'm also glad to hear that the writer wants to stray from the formula of the first two films. I'd be interested to see how Alan, Phil, and Stu deal with a new set of circumstances. Bottom line: I liked The Hangover Part II. The first movie was great, the second one, pretty good. No more, no less.

book review: 11/22/63

2011-12-20T16:21:00.000-08:00

Stephen King has written good books, bad books, and even some great books (and yes, I mean Great Books, I think he will one day be spoken in the same breath as Fitzgerald and Hemingway) but regardless of whether or not any one of his particular books has been good, they have all been consistently original. That's why I was dismayed to find out about the concept behind his latest novel, 11/22/63, about a man who travels back in time to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I have no idea how many books or Internet stories have already been written about this, but they surely number in the dozens, if not the hundreds.

And as for TV and movies, I could think of three examples right off the top of my head: the excellent Quantum Leap episode "Lee Harvey Oswald" (in which our hero Sam repeatedly leaps into the body of Oswald, but still seems unable to prevent Oswald's destiny), the respected by pretty much impossible to find TV movie Running Against Time, and the truly awful alternative history movie Timequest, which pretty much uses the time travel adventure and assassination story as a prologue, and then settles into a terribly written present-day story set in the alternate reality caused by JFK's survival. In short, the usually original King has settled onto a story idea that has already been tackled multiple times.

But let me tell you something, I'm glad I didn't allow my initial dismay to dissuade me from reading the book, because 11/22/63 is an excellent novel.

The main character is Jake Epping, an English professor who discovers a time portal in the walk-in pantry of his buddy's local diner. No explanation for this time portal is ever presented; it seems to be an anomalous, but natural phenomenon. Stepping into the pantry, one is transported back in time to 11:58 A.M. on September 9, 1958. Always the exact same spot, always the exact same instant in time. You can change the past if you're able and willing, but if you go back to the future, and then make another journey through the pantry, then it's an "instant reset," erasing all of the changes you made during your previous journey through time. No matter how much time you spend in the past -- whether it's seconds, minutes, hours, or even years, your return to the present time is always exactly two minutes after you left.

With me so far? Jake can go back in time and have five years to figure out how to prevent the assassination, but if his plan hinges on waiting for the actual moment of truth, that means having to make a life for himself in the past for five years, because every time he tries to go back and forth between the present and back to the past, he'll always end up back in 1958 -- and any changes he may have made during each previous trip will be erased, meaning he has to start from scratch every single time. This may sound like it could get redundant for the reader, but Jake's a smart guy and figures the rules out pretty quickly, preventing the reader from having to sit through too many "do-overs."

Meanwhile, as Jake adjusts to life in the late fifties/ early sixties -- no cell phones or Internet, but a more innocent time, with cheap prices and delicious food -- he has plenty to keep both him and the reader occupied, since he embarks on side-missions while waiting for 11/22/63. These side missions are exciting stories in their own right, and never feel like King is just killing time while Jake waits to find a way to prevent the assassination from taking place.

I do have one nitpick. King loves to make all of his stories connect, and 11/22/63 is no exception, as one of the side-missions takes place in Derry, Maine -- the fictional town that was the setting for King's excellent supernatural novel It. Why did King choose Derry? I suppose because it's just a familiar setting for him, which is fine. But when Jake meets two of the main characters from It, the scene feels like a cheap, contrived TV crossover. You know the kind, in which Bill Cosby's doctor turns out to be the Ted Danson character from Danson's show, but nothing funny, insightful, or useful comes out of their meeting, and it becomes clear that the cameo exists merely for the sake of cross-promotion. That's the feeling I got here too. Yes, it's sort of fun to see these characters interacting, but once you realize there's no point to it, the scene becomes almost annoying more than entertaining. Now this may seem like a silly thing to nitpick, since it's only one brief scene in a long novel, but, oddly, King keeps referring back to it, as Jake repeatedly recalls his meeting with Bev and Richie for no reason other than for King to say, "hey, remember when he met those characters from the other novel, wasn't that fun, wasn't that a delight?"

But that really is a small nitpick, worth mentioning, but not worth changing my opinion about the book as a whole. Let me tell you, this book has everything you need for a good read. The action is exciting, the dialogue is natural-sounding, the main character and his friends are likable, the villains are dangerous, and the best thing about a novel whose premise relies on the suspension of disbelief is that Jake and his thoughts are so believable that you are sucked in to his world. Aside from the silly It crossover (which really is a small matter), 11/22/63 is an excellent, compelling, and plain old fun book.

retro movie review: Asylum

2011-11-20T20:22:00.000-08:00

I first heard of the horror anthology film Asylum while reading the Halloween issue of The Onion's non-satirical entertainment section, "The A.V. Club." The Onion was interviewing filmmaker Edgar Wright about his favorite horror movies, and his description of Asylum was so intriguing, I had to Netflix the movie as soon as I got home.

The set-up: Robert Powell stars as Doctor Martin, a young psychiatrist who travels to a remote mental hospital to interview for the newly vacant job as head of operations. Dr. Martin immediately clashes with the interim head psychiatrist conducting the interview, Dr. Rutherford, when the idealistic Martin advocates continued treatment while the cynical Rutherford insists that the patients there are "incurably insane" and can only be imprisoned, but never effectively treated.

Rutherford, who hints that he is about to retire, reveals that he has no interest to head operations at the asylum, and only inherited the role because the previous head of operations, Dr. Starr, has himself gone insane, developed an entirely new personality, and become a patient at his own asylum. Rutherford tells Dr. Martin that if he can figure out which of the patients is the former head of operations, the job is his for the taking. As Dr. Martin interviews the patients one by one, they each tell Dr. Martin how they came to be viewed as "insane" and thus imprisoned in an asylum. Each of their stories are told in flashback sequences based on short stories by screenwriter Robert Bloch (he of Psycho fame).

As with many (but not all) anthologies, the quality and even the style of Asylum varies with each story. I don't want to give away any endings, but I will, briefly, describe the basic plot concepts of each story:

The first story, "Frozen Fear," stars Barbara Perkins and Richard Todd as two lovers conspiring to murder Todd's wife. Because the outcome of such a murder is predictable to anyone who has ever seen a horror movie, whether you enjoy this particular tale depends not so much on the "twist" ending, but instead on how much suspense director Roy Ward Baker can milk out of the situation -- and the answer to that question is probably different for every viewer. My guess is that most viewers my age and younger would be bored by the slow pace, while older or more patient viewers, who are more used to films that take their time to build suspense, might enjoy this segment more. Call it "horror for the Matlock crowd." You might also want to think of this segment as a morality tale -- if you can consider "don't murder your wife" as a morality lesson that isn't already obvious.

The second segment, the misleadingly titled "The Weird Tailor," is easily the best of the four, and stars Barry Morse in a brilliant performance a million miles removed from his familiar role as Lt. Gerard in The Fugitive. Morse stars as Bruno, a German immigrant tailor whose business is failing despite his talents and good reputation. Broke, behind on his rent, and about to be evicted, Bruno seems to get the answer to all his prayers when he is approached by Smith, played with class and dignity by the late, great Peter Cushing. Mr. Smith has a "special order" for Bruno, and although the tailor is bewildered by Mr. Smith's mysterious specifications for exactly how the suit should be made, the oddity of it all seems harmless enough, and besides, Mr. Smith is willing to pay a lot of money.

As with "Frozen Fear," the final twist of "The Weird Tailor" is a bit predictable, but there are some minor surprises along the way, and both Cushing and Morse are at the top of their craft. Director Baker pays much more attention to atmosphere in this segment than in the others, as if the talented thespians in front of the camera inspired him to bring his A-game; although the events presumably take place in modern day (since the frame story takes place in modern day, and Bruno is currently one of the patients at the asylum), the setting has a kind of timeless quality that could take place now, or in the 70s, or in the 20s, for that matter.

"Lucy Comes to Stay" is by far the blandest of all four tales, a 70s soap opera that will challenge your ability to stay away from the fast forward button. Charlotte Rampling stars as a former mental patient who returns home to be cared for by her brother, only to immediately reunite with her best friend, the "bad influence" Lucy. Until the final few moments of this segment, Lucy's "bad influence" behavior is so tame that you'll spend much of the segment wondering what the big deal is. The ending is done pretty well, although it's really not worth the journey.

The final segment, "Mannikins of Horror,", which is intertwined with the framing story, benefits from the presence of the always effective Herbert Lom, but is hindered by Bloch's genre intentions, which are all over the map. Despite an intelligent and intriguing opening, in which Dr. Byron and Dr. Martin discuss the relationship between philosophy and psychiatry, the story quickly deteriorates into an unintentionally silly melding of fantasy, gore, horror, and Frankensteinian science fiction.

So, as I said, uneven. Would I recommend this film? I'd answer with a cautious yes, but a yes nonetheless. Some of the stories may struggle with pacing and predictability, but the great thing about anthology films that you can skip past the boring parts without missing any important plot points about the better segments. With that in mind, the "Weird Tailor" segment stands on its own as an atmospheric, well-crafted, old-fashioned horror tale, and the frame story (notwithstanding its connection to the dreadful "Mannikins of Horror") has an intriguing premise, interesting characters, and a satisfying ending. This may not be the kind of movie you'll want to watch with a bunch of your friends on a Saturday night, but it's perfect for a dark and rainy afternoon.

movie review: The Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" Scandal

2011-11-20T16:31:00.000-08:00

John Ross

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles terrified audiences with a radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds that was so realistic that people mistook it for an actual news story. Believing that Martians really were invading, people panicked. Highways were clogged with fleeting motorists. Stores were looted. And some people disappeared for days after fleeing into the wilderness to hide from the Martians, inadvertently cutting themselves off from the very sources that could have revealed to them that the whole thing was a hoax.

All of the above is not only a true story, but also one that should fascinate anyone interested in this particular time period, the general history of mass media, or the career of Orson Welles himself. Documentarian John Ross is one such person who is fascinated by the story, but his fascination, and therefore his film about the subject, is remarkably unfocused. Ross serves as the documentary’s director, narrator, producer, and writer, so his is really the sole creative voice behind the film. As a result, there’s no one to check his own obsessions.

The film's biggest problem is that it goes off on so many tangents. Some of these tangents are appropriate. Others are not. For example, The War of the Worlds is science fiction, so Ross starts talking about the history of cinematic science fiction – but then he gets distracted and spends an inordinate amount of time talking about Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. After a while, it becomes clear that Ross likes Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and was just looking for an excuse to start talking about them.

And if that excuse seems thin, here’s an even thinner one: Ross mentions, more or less in passing, that people were “horrified” by the events depicted in The War of the Worlds – a segue that exists for no reason other than to serve as a transition into a brief discussion of the history of horror films. And this in turn segues into a discussion of the movie Nosferatu. But what the heck does Nosferatu have to do with The War of the Worlds? And what do Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, each of whom get an entire section of the film have to do with The War of the Worlds? Answer: Nothing. Ross doesn’t even try to make much of a connection.

Another, much more relevant tangent is Ross’s discussion of Orson Welles’s life and career. Ross discusses Welles’s childhood, his stage production of Macbeth, Citizen Kane and the resulting feud with William Randolph Hearst, and Welles’s gradual decline as a Hollywood presence. In fact, Ross delves so deeply into the life and career of Welles that Welles often becomes the primary subject. At least this tangent provides an appropriate, relevant context to the War of the Worlds broadcast, but if this is Ross's intention, why does Ross's bio of Welles pay so very little attention to Welles's radio career? Ross easily spends more time on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon than he devotes to Welles's non- War of the Worlds radio productions.

I think the answer to this question is that Ross clearly thinks of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast in cinematic terms. This is a unique and potentially intriguing approach, but Ross never bothers to explain the reasoning behind this interpretation; I'm not even sure if Ross himself is aware of the fact that he's treating a radio broadcast more like a movie than like an entirely different type of art form.

There's even an auteurist quality to Ross's cinematic approach to radio criticism; the Auteur Theory states that, despite the necessarily collaborative nature of filmmaking, the director of a movie is the film's primary author. Along these lines, Ross devotes plenty of time to the life and career of director Orson Welles, but pays distressingly little attention to the writers. Very little attention to the writers. H.G. Wells, who wrote the novel that The War of the Worlds is based on, gets only a parenthetical, passing reference, while Howard Koch, who brilliantly adapted the novel into a faux news broadcast, isn't mention at all! Considering how much time Ross devotes to completely irrelevant topics, it seems a gross oversight to overlook the writers so completely.

Ross even fails as a narrator, alternately delivering the exposition with a flat monotone, and a false exuberance that is often staggeringly inappropriate. The most blatant example of Ross's failure to grasp the significance of his own narration: a cheerful voice declaring, "the Nazis had just invaded Czechoslovakia!"

This is not to say that the movie is all bad. The subject matter, even when presented in such a flawed manner, is a truly interesting story, and Ross deserves credit for so expertly editing together stock footage to make a series of unrelated clips appear to tell a visual story of people listening and reacting to the Welles broadcast.

But this movie simply fails to satisfy because of so many unanswered questions -- questions not about The War of the Worlds, but about this documentary itself. Why narrate the movie yourself, if you don't seem to understand the implication behind your own words? Why praise the writing without mentioning the actual writers? Why treat a radio broadcast like a movie? And most of all, why devote so much time to subjects so completely unrelated to the movie's central topic? I personally find a frustrating irony in the fact that Welles -- one of the greatest filmmakers, and one of the greatest narrators, of all time, is the subject of a film made by a man who clearly doesn't have the slightest knowledge of how to narrate or make films.

Better to See Pitch Black Than Ultraviolet

2011-11-10T01:42:00.000-08:00

I just watched a sci-fi action double feature. Both movies are set at indeterminate points in the future, and, oddly, both movies feature titles that indicate they can't really be seen; "pitch black" is the absence of all light, while "ultraviolet" is a color beyond the visible spectrum.

Still, if you must watch a movie based on a state of light that can't be seen -- a dilemma I'm sure happens to us all on occasion -- I whole-heartedly suggest Pitch Black over Ultraviolet.

Director/ writer David N. Twohy's Pitch Black -- a blend of action, horror, and science fiction -- tells the story of a sleeper ship that crash-lands on a distant planet. The survivors of the crash at first think that they are on a planet completely devoid of life, but they soon discover that a human settlement was once here, not too long ago. But where did all of the settlers go?

To their dismay, they find out. Terrible, horrifying creatures live under the planet's surface. These creatures fear and are hurt by daylight (I know how you feel, little guys!) but come safety of the nightfall, they swarm the planet's surface, to devour all other life -- which now includes our hapless shipwreckees.

At first, all the passengers look for leadership from the sole surviving crew member, the reluctant first officer (now captain) Carolyn Fry (Radha Mitchell). However, as it becomes apparent that the creatures only live and attack in the dark, leadership gradually shifts to Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel), who has the helpful ability to see in the dark. The only problem with this arrangement: Riddick is a sociopathic convict who has the potential to, at any time, turn on the very people who need to trust him with their lives.

This is a very good movie. The astronomy and related sciences surely don't hold up under scrutiny (the planet is so close to its neighboring body that the gravitational stress would surely make it unlivable) but the story is entertaining enough.

It's interesting to note how many horror movies make stabs at thoughtful discussions about belief in God. Some of these movies -- exorcist movies, for example -- even make belief in God a part of the plot. But other horror movies take a stab at it too, from Taste the Blood of Dracula to Dusk Till Dawn. Pitch Black is no exception, and I like how the movie -- without making a big deal about it -- lets God's spokesman be a Muslim for a change, instead of the stereotypical Christian bugging the protagonist about whether or not he's found Jesus.

I do have one nitpick about the movie. Please don't let it dissuade you from seeing the movie, as it has very little bearing on whether or not this is a decent flick.

Here's the nitpick: There's a lot of talk about the planet's unique astronomy. Specifically, it has three suns, so it almost never experiences nightfall. Investigating at the abandoned settlement, the shipwreck survivors find a planetarium that reveals that, once every 21 years, the suns line up, and are blocked by the larger neighboring planet in a tri-solar eclipse. The event plunges the entire planet into roughly twelve hours of darkness (although, just at the crucial moment when they are planning their strategy to escape from the night creatures, everyone inconveniently forgets how long the night lasts, since it didn't seem important when they were first learning it).

Okay, here's my question: Why bother with all this stuff about three suns, almost eternal daytime, and solar eclipses, if none of it turns out to be relevant? Why not just say, "the creatures come out at night," and be done with it? Maybe I missed something, but the astronomy, for all the talk that went into it, never seemed important to the fact that it's night time, and now it's dangerous.

Still, this is a good little action flick. The characters are interesting, the dialogue intelligent, the action exciting, the horror scary. The tone of the film was reminiscent of one of the science fiction greats, Ridley Scott's Alien.

Then I watched Ultraviolet, and my good mood immediately faded.

First problem, right off the bat: too much exposition. Voice-over narration fills the first several minutes -- quite simply too long -- describing the fictional world of the movie and its main character. Within this one, extended monologue, the voice of Violet (Milla Jovovich) redundantly describes the future as "a world you might not understand" not once, but twice. (She later repeats this claim a third time in the epilogue's narration as well.) The primary thing to remember from all of this talk is that an epidemic of vampirism (or, more specifically, a disease that mimics vampirism) has swept the land, and there is now a power struggle between humans and vampires that is in danger of turning into all-out war.

We then meet Violet face to face. In an extended action sequence, Violet breaks into a high-tech facility, steals an alleged "briefcase" which actually has no resemblance to an actual briefcase (but, you see, it's a science fiction briefcase), breaks back out of the facility, killing dozens of guards in the process, and then engages in a chase scene as she escapes on a motorcycle that can travel on vertical surfaces as easily as horizontal surfaces.

So, to review: We've got the break-in, the fight over the briefcase, the escape, and the chase scene. That's, by my count, four action scenes back to back, and yet despite the mountain of exposition that had preceded all of this, we don't yet know what's going on, who anyone is, or why we should care about what's happening on the screen. This is an increasing problem with action films today: Filmmakers are so eager to wow audiences from the git-go, that they forget to first make us care about the people in the scene. Without any context to go on, I really don't give a damn if they catch Violet or not.

When the movie finally takes a moment to rest, and stop bludgeoning us over the head with action, action, ACTION!, Violet pauses to have a holographic conversation with her boss and lover Nerva, who had sent her to steal the briefcase in the first place. Nerva informs her that the briefcase's contents include a bomb which she can somehow activate without opening the case, and instructs her to detonate the bomb if it looks like the original owners might succeed in re-obtaining it from Violet. Violet objects to detonating the bomb, because, she argues, "there's no reason for all of those humans" in the blast radius to die. Okay, except, just a few minutes ago, Violet's voice-over narration explained that she "hates humans and is determined to kill as many as I can -- to kill them all." And now, just a few minutes later, she's objecting to killing humans? It's bad enough that director/ writer Kurt Wimmer clearly wasn't expecting his audience to pay attention -- but apparently he wasn't paying attention to his own movie either!

I won't get too much into the rest of the plot, which somehow manages to be convoluted and simplistic at the same time. Suffice it to say that Violet, despite her claimed hatred for humanity, finds herself having to protect a young human boy from both the human and vampire factions in the war; something about the boy's blood being able to cure all vampires, or kill all vampires, or kill all humans (the script keeps changing which it is). Rather than delve into the intricacies of plot, let's explore some random observations about the movie:

1. In the future, characters can change their appearance at will. Eye color, hair color, clothing color, even clothing style, changes before your eyes. The movie never explains what kind of technology this is. Holographic technology? Some kind of mind-over-matter telepathic projection device? Who knows. I do wonder, however, why people in the future change their appearance so often? I mean, I can understand that, if changing your outfit was as simple as thinking about it, then it would happen all the time, but I noticed that people tend to change their clothes, hair, etc. especially when they are about to go into battle. Even taking into account how easy changing clothes may be, if a bunch of people were about to try to kill you, and you knew it, would you really take a moment to say to yourself, "hm, I think I might look better in red in this light"?

2. Another example of improbable technology: Combatants can generate guns and swords out of thin air, just by thinking about it -- perhaps an extension of that whole "magically changed my clothes, so why not my arsenal?" technology. Question: If you can instantly generate an automatic weapon in your hands -- as characters repeatedly do in this film -- why do people so often fight with swords? I mean, I know sword fights look cool in a movie, but if people were trying to kill you, and you had the choice between a sword and an automatic weapon, which would you choose pretty much every time?

3. Every shot in this movie looks extremely artificial and two-dimensional. The budget for the movie is clearly a high one, so the special effects team, with today's movie technology, clearly had the option to make everything look realistic. But they chose to make it look like a video game. Now, because the opening credits include a lot of comic book covers (to establish the tone of the movie) one might be tempted to say, "no, dumb-bell, it's supposed to look like a comic book!" Except it doesn't. It looks like a video game. But why?

4. The actors are good. In a movie that depends so little on actor performance, that doesn't mean much, but I guess it's worth something. The under-appreciated but always reliable William Fichtner is likable in a supporting role, and Nick Chinlund is effective as the villainous dictator, "Vice-Cardinal" Daxus. But why is Daxus's title "Vice-Cardinal" when his role has nothing to do with religion? And why does Daxus have to wear those silly nose-plugs? I know, I know, the exposition established that people in the future are terrified of disease. But still. Come on. He looks ridiculous.

5. Why are so many cops and soldiers trained as ninjas? Ninja cops? Why? Because they can magically generate swords? But see point #2.

6. Violet's a vampire. I get that. And in this movie, vampires don't have any of the traditional vampire weaknesses against sunlight, garlic, etc. So Violet's like a female version of Blade. I understand, I really do. But then what's her super-power? Clearly she has one, as she is capable of defeating lots of enemies -- and I do mean lots of enemies -- single-handedly, regardless of whether they're human or vampiric. How good is she at fighting? Example: Daxus gloats that he is protected by 700 soldiers. That's right, seven hundred. Violet defeats them all by fighting with her magically generated guns and swords. They have magically generated guns and swords too. But she wins. Her one against their 700. That's seven hundred. Kinda makes the Bride defeating the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill seem realistic in comparison.

Now, I took a moment to imagine myself as one of the Vice-Cardinal's guards. I'm in a vast army of bodyguards. An army of 700 bodyguards. I have just seen this one woman single-handedly wipe out 650 of my comrades. What in God's name is going to motivate me to rush at her with a sword? Is the 651st guy really thinking, "well, she got lucky with those first 650, but I'll get her for sure!"

I don't care how much Daxus is paying his men, I think after seeing Violet kill the first two or three hundred, the rest might want to suddenly go home sick that day.

7. SPOILER: Of course, after Violet defeats Daxus's army without breaking a sweat, Daxus himself -- an administrator -- turns out to be a better fighter than his army of 700 highly trained soldiers. Because, yeah, if I had a choice between the U.S. Army and a CEO to kill an armed criminal, I'd wanna call the CEO?

8. SPOILER: At least the climactic battle between Daxus and Violet treats us to the delight of seeing them fight in the dark, with flaming swords. Why not flaming swords? I mean, if you're going to have a sword fight in the dark, you need some light, right? Best to somehow light the blades on fire, rather than turn on the light switch.

I am not making this up.

My Milwaukee Misadventures

2011-11-02T06:41:00.000-07:00

1. The first interesting aspect of my Milwaukee trip happens before I even get there. I’m sitting at the gate, waiting for my plane, and, frankly, I really have to go to the bathroom. But there’s no one there to watch my stuff, and I sure don’t want to gather it all with me and then try to find someplace to put it down in the bathroom. On the floor? No thank you.

My first concern is that if I leave it there, my stuff might not be there when I come back. But I look around and think, “alright, I know I have no way of knowing this for sure, but these all seem like decent people with honest faces. I think I can trust them.”

I’m not sure what part of me was making this decision – my instincts, my naiveté, or maybe just my urge to justify what I want to do. I mean, sure, everyone says you’re not supposed to leave your stuff alone at the airport, but we’re only talking a couple of moments here. What’s the worst that could happen?

The very instant that this thought – “what’s the worst that could happen?” – goes through my head, an old man sitting across from me says to me, excuse me, do you know whose stuff that is?” as he points to the chair next to mine.

“I don’t know the guy,” I say, “but I’d recognize him if I saw him.”

I look around, but the guy who had been sitting next to me is nowhere to be found.

“He was here a few minutes ago,” I add.

“He’s been gone for a while,” the old man observed. “Excuse me,” he says to a nearby airport employee, “but somebody left a whole bunch of stuff just lying around here, and it looks like it’s attached to some wires!”

I’m about to point out that the wires are just the guy’s headphones – I saw him listening to his iPod earlier – but the airport people are already in action.

“Don’t worry, folks, we’ll take care of it.”

“We better call T.S.A.”

Next thing I know, the gate is swarming with police officers and TSA agents. Then I spot the guy who owned the stuff in the first place.

“There he is!” I say, trying to calm everybody down. “He’s right over there!”

One of the airport people tells the guy that he’s not allowed to leave his stuff unattended, and warns him that in another moment, it would have been confiscated by security.
As if on cue, the automated message that has been repeating itself all day again announces over the p.a., “do not leave your luggage unattended.”

The old man hears this, looks at me, and gestures at the guy next to me, as if to say, “can you believe this guy?”

I gesture back as if to say, “I know, right?”

2. Despite the fact that my doctor and I both consider me of “average” build, I seem to be remarkably thinner than the average airplane passenger. So I don’t take up much room in my seat. Still, the asshole next to me – who isn’t fat, but who has broad shoulders – keeps elbowing me in the side. Each time, I skooch over a little bit to my right, without even realizing it, until I suddenly notice that I’ve managed to squish myself against the wall of the airplane – and the idiot next to me is still elbowing me in the side. What the fuck?!?

3. No matter where you are in the country, the first things you notice when looking out the window as your plane descends are landscape features – land/water barriers, large clusters of trees, mountainous ripples, that kind of thing. The second thing you always notice is farm land. The third thing is baseball diamonds. Trust me on this. It happens with every single plane ride, no exceptions. So here we are, descending, and I’m seeing landscapes, farm land, farm land, and more farm land. But where are the baseball diamonds?

“What the hell does Milwaukee have against baseball?” I think with sincere anger, which is sort of a weird reaction, considering that I don’t give a damn about baseball myself. I guess it’s just human nature that once you get used to a pattern, you’re honestly disturbed when that pattern is disrupted. Anyway, I guess I was just impatient, because the next thing I saw: a whole cluster of baseball diamonds. I’m not sure, but I probably had a big grin on my face.

The last thing we fly over before actually landing at the airport: an office building with a truly large parking lot. I notice that, despite the fact that it’s a weekday, not a single car is in this gigantic office parking lot.

“That’s odd,” I think to myself. I don’t dwell on it at the time, although this moment will prove significant as the weekend goes on.

4. At first, I really like our hotel room. I find it charming, although it’s difficult to explain why. Sure, it’s a little chilly, and the view isn’t that great, but I like something about it.

As time goes on, we realize that the hotel ain’t so great. The carpet is buckled. The coffee pot doesn’t work and looks dirty. The television power button has to be pressed several times for it to work. The thermostat insists it’s 80 degrees, even though it’s freezing. The towel racks are crooked and look like they’re about to fall off. Even the elevator indicator lights don’t work, which is more disconcerting than you’d think. Maybe because, just the previous day, I had watched an episode of Homicide, in which Giardello muses, “watching lights in an elevator is one of life’s simple, unspoken pleasures. You can monitor your progress. In an elevator, you always know when you’re going somewhere!”

Not at the Ramada City Center.

5. Friday night in a new city, time to go out on the town!

The problem is, the town is already out. And it’s apparently not coming back. According to the map, we’re in the center of downtown, so where is everybody? Where are the bars, movie theaters, restaurants, stores, video rental outlets, etc.? We search for hours, and find very, very few places of interest – and all of those places of interest are closed. In the early to mid evening. On a Friday night.

We stumble upon the theater district, where we find four theaters right next to each other, back to back, each one bigger and with more glamorous architecture than the last. But they’re all closed too.

“Maybe everything’s closed for Halloween,” Shu-Chuan suggests, even though Halloween is still a few days away.

“That’s not how Halloween works,” I tell her.

We later retreat to the hotel restaurant, where the food is bland. I mean everything is tasteless, even the root beer. But it’s the only place we could find that’s open.

“Hey, what is there to do in Milwaukee?” I ask the waitress.

“You want something to do in Milwaukee?” she repeats, as if it’s the strangest question ever asked by anybody ever. “Ummm . . .”

“Nevermind,” I eventually say, as we can tell that trying to think of something to do in Milwaukee is short-circuiting her brain.

On our way back to our room, we stop in the lobby to pick up a Milwaukee travel brochure, hoping to get some ideas. Among the suggestions are theaters that we’ve already found to be closed, and festivals that ended a few months ago. Not much else.

That night, as Shu-Chuan is in the shower, I look out the window, watching the traffic from our lovely view of the parking lot and street intersection beyond. The traffic is very light – as it should be, considering the late hour – but oddly steady.

“It’s weird,” I point out to Shu-Chuan. “Even this late at night, there’s constant traffic. But nothing in this damn town is open. So where are they going?”

I think about it and then add, “Maybe they’re going to New York.”

6. Call me crazy, but I’m actually starting to enjoy these sociology lectures! One man discusses Chinese religious discourse, noting the simultaneous fall of Marxism and rise of Confucianism in standard religious conversations in China. Another guy claims to have discovered that whether you believe in life after death directly affects your physical health. Still another guy – talk about narrowing your field of specialization! – reveals his findings while researching the religious beliefs of Chinese immigrants in the town of Turin, Italy. Interestingly, he discovered that most Chinese Turinians claim to be “too busy” for religion in their daily lives, but actually do practice various forms of religion every day. How to explain this discrepancy? Partially because the Chinese immigrants and the Italian researchers interviewing them have completely different concepts of what is religious and what is sacred. And, most intriguingly to me, even those Chinese immigrants who later agreed that they are religious, explained that they had initially denied it because they felt the desire to fit into the Italian concept of the Chinese as a productive, secular people.

7. Saturday night – another boring, lonely weekend night in Milwaukee. Even the buildings we pass are boring. Until my visit to Milwaukee, I never realized how colorful cityscapes are in the northeast. Our buildings are a delightful mixture of brown wood, grey stone, red brick, and multi-colored billboards and signs. In Milwaukee, every damn building is the exact same shade of dull tan.

Okay, I shouldn’t complain too much about the boredom, because truth be told, Shu-Chuan and I are enjoying each other’s company a great deal. But the city is beyond boring, it’s abandoned to the point of outright creepiness. Here’s perhaps the weirdest thing of all: the city is host to over 500,000 people, at least according to Wikipedia, but the reason it feels so empty is because it was clearly designed to hold, not thousands, but millions of people.

Everywhere we go in our vain search for something to do, we find hotels, easily more than a dozen hotels, each one enormous. I have never seen hotels this size in Stamford or New York. But add up all the people we saw throughout the entire extended weekend (not counting the people at the sociologists’ convention) and they might, just might fill up one of those hotel floors.

Similarly, the downtown area has dozens of parking lots. Great, enormous, multi-storied parking lots. And not a single car in any of them. Add up all the cars we saw throughout the weekend, and they might fill one level of one of those parking lots.

The most interesting thing we found was a staircase in a courtyard by the Frontier Airlines building. After climbing these stairs for a few steps, you find yourself at the top, and nothing is there except for a single, pathetic, tiny apple tree, withering in the cold wind. We started calling these stairs “the Milwaukee Stairs,” as the embodiment of all things Milwaukee, because, like the city they’re in, they lead nowhere. Case in point: I’m here explaining that the most interesting thing about the whole city is a staircase that leads nowhere.

8. Jim Beckford – President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Shu-Chuan’s mentor, and a really cool guy. He’s charming, intelligent, humorous, and thoroughly friendly. If I was a woman and three decades older, I’d probably fall in love with this guy.

9. At the airport with Shu-Chuan and her two colleagues. We’re walking at a slow but steady pace, weighed down by our luggage. A TSA agent shoves past us, shouting at us, “walk, people, walk, goddammit!!” That was uncalled for.

10. On the plane home, again at the window seat. A flight attendant offers us drinks, and the guy on the aisle seat immediately spills his coffee everywhere. For some reason, we’re all in a good mood, and the three of us, as well as the flight attendant, start joking about it much more than it’s worth. But the whole time, I’m thinking, “I’m glad it was him and not me, because I’d feel like an idiot.” Then I spill my ginger ale everywhere, apparently not learning from the cautionary tale of The Man in the Aisle Seat who Spilled his Coffee. “Wait a minute!” says the woman in between us, trying to wrap her head around the fact that she’s surrounded by morons.

11. Home. Remember when all the passengers used to clap at the end of every flight? Whatever happened to that little tradition? When did people stop doing that?

Nic Cage Neo-Noir

2011-10-02T14:43:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I watched two film noirs starring Nicolas Cage, and what an interesting double bill it was.

First up, Red Rock West, directed by John Dahl and written by Dahl and his brother, Rick. Cage stars as Michael Williams, a down-on-his-luck man who ain't got nothin' but the shirt on his back and the wheels on the road. As the movie begins, he has just driven all the way from the Tex/Mex border to Red Rock, a town so deep in the middle of nowhere, it's barely evolved from its origins in the Old West. Mike is there for a job in construction that a buddy had promised him, but when Mike refuses to lie on the application about his mildly bad leg, he soon learns that he's made his long trip for nothing. Mike ventures into town, where he meets Wayne Brown, a bartender who mistakes Mike for Lyle, a man he has hired sight unseen. Desperate for cash, Mike pretends to be Lyle so that he can take the job -- only to discover that the job is to murder Wayne's wife.

If you think I've given too much away, relax; all of that happens in the first ten minutes of the film. The conventions of film noir require lots of double-crosses and plot twists, and there are two ways such a formula can go: either it uses its twists as random curve-balls to throw at the viewer, or, if it's written well, it's fair with how it twists the plot, earning each development with an undeniable internal logic.

Red Rock West definitely fits into the latter category. If you like good writing, this is a joy to watch. Mike is an everyman, just dumb enough to keep getting in trouble, but just smart enough to consistently think himself out of his problems. Of course, the plot requires Mike to deal with a situation that's already awkward, complicated, and dangerous even before the real hitman shows up. (And if you think that's giving something away, come on, how could you think for even a second that he wouldn't turn up? Don't you know anything about movies?)

The second film I watched was as awful as Red Rock West is delightful. Deadfall stars Michael Biehn as Joe Dolan, a con artist who works with a a group of fellow con-men led by his old man, Mike Dolan (James Coburn). The story is set in motion when, in the opening scene, a con goes bad and Joe accidentally shoots his old man dead. Dolan, Sr.'s dying words are like a quest and a riddle wrapped into one: He tells Joe to find "the cake" that Mike's brother took from him. This is news to Joe, who didn't even know Mike had a brother, and also a rather confusing dying wish, since Joe has no idea what his old man means by the phrase "the cake."

Still, when a co-worker advises Joe to leave town for a while, Joe decides to seek out his uncle and solve the mystery. His uncle, "Big" Lou Dolan, turns out to be his old man's identical twin, who earns his living as a loan shark. Before he knows it, Joe finds himself working for his uncle, often paired with Lou's employee, Eddie (Nicolas Cage). Also before he knows it, Joe finds himself in a love triangle with Eddie and Eddie's girlfriend, Diane.

Deadfall spectacularly fails in pretty much every way that Red Rock West succeeds. I'm talking acting, casting, pacing, and writing.

First, let's talk about the acting. At some point while watching Red Rock West, I remember thinking that it was really a Nicolas Cage movie for people who don't like Nicolas Cage. Cage can be guilty of over-acting at times, it's true, but I think he gets a bum rap, and is a better actor than most people give him credit for. In comedy terms, Red Rock West basically casts him as a straight man, whose job is to react to the crazy characters all around him. Cage finds the perfect note for his everyman character; the performance is at once credible, nuanced, and almost under-stated.

Compare that to his performance as Eddie in Deadfall, a performance that is the epitome of exactly why some people hate, hate, hate Nicolas Cage. Ladies and gentlemen, I myself don't hate, hate, hate Nicolas Cage, but I certainly hate, hate hated him in Deadfall. Over-acting doesn't even begin to describe what's going on here. Odd body movements, weird speaking cadences, and a pointlessly nasal voice are just some of the bizarre quirks Cage brings to the character. The performance is so bad that I've since learned that Deadfall has a cult status among people who like movies that are "so bad that it's good," and these fans invariably cite Cage's acting as the draw. I've never been one of those people. To me, if a movie is bad, it's just bad. And hoo boy, does Cage stink up the place in Deadfall.

Michael Biehn does better as Joe Dolan, although Biehn's reading of the voice-over narration is as emotionally flat as a reluctant high schooler forced to read in English class. I can't tell if Biehn just sucks at reading narration, or if he was reacting to the diction, which is also strictly high school level.

Deadfall surrounds Biehn and Cage with pointless star cameos. Charlie Sheen, Peter Fonda, and Mickey Dolenz (of the Monkees) are some of these familiar faces, and I wonder if director/producer/writer Christopher Coppola cast all of these people because he was trying to distract the audience from the movie's dreadfully slow pace and thoroughly uninteresting characters. The central mystery (what, exactly, is "the cake" that Mike wanted Joe to find?) has the potential to be intriguing, but it isn't long before we stop caring, especially when you cringe every time Cage and his terrible performance appear on screen, which is, unfortunately, a lot.

Compare this to the delightful mystery at the center of Red Rock West, which keeps you spell-bound despite a general lack of star power. The only real "name actors" in the film are Cage, the late, great J.T. Walsh (as the bartender who mistakes Cage's character for the mysterious Lyle), and Dennis Hopper (as a man who gives Cage's character a ride in his car, and ends up getting involved in the story -- in what ways, I'll never tell!).

Bottom line: Watch Red Rock West. Pay attention to every second. Thank me later for the recommendation. And, by all means, for the love of God, stay away from Deadfall. Unless, of course, you like movies that are "so bad they're good." In that case, my friend, I cannot help you.

Movie Review: The Company Men

2011-08-18T02:45:00.000-07:00

The Company Men is a painfully good movie, and if that sentence seems odd to you, let me start out by saying that I mean it as a compliment. I'll happily explain, but first, let's get some plot description out of the way.

As the movie opens, Robert "Bobby" Walker, Jr. (Ben Affleck) arrives at work. He's a junior executive at GTX (which, in a nice touch, is a purposefully misspelled abbreviation for "General Transportation Services"), and the first scene establishes that Bobby Walker is confident, friendly, happy, talkative, and simply loves his job. He's vaguely aware that a recent merger has led upper management to label certain jobs at the company as "redundant," but Bobby's a top earner, and considered by some to be "the best salesman on the east coast," so it's a complete shock to him (but not to the viewers, who immediately guess from the awkward glances he gets from his co-workers) when Bobby, like dozens of others, is suddenly and unceremoniously laid off.

Bobby's confidence doesn't disappear right away; on his first day of unemployment, he strolls into an employment agency and arrogantly announces that he'll be back at work -- presumably in an equally prestigious and high-paying position -- in four days. As days stretch into weeks, and then into months, we see that confidence slowly melt away. A little too slowly, actually; Bobby goes into denial, and consistently refuses to make any cuts in his extravagant lifestyle expenses. Country club dues, Porsche payments, expensive birthday gifts -- Bobby refuses to cut back on anything, because, he keeps explaining to his wiser wife, he will find another job again soon. Very soon.

Meanwhile, the only member of upper management at GTX that protests the firing of Bobby and others is Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones), a veteran of the company and best friend to C.E.O. James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson). His reasons for protesting increase as the movie unfolds: On a personal level, Gene trained Bobby himself, thinks he's a good kid, and had personally promised him that his job would not be in jeopardy. On a rational level, Gene points out a glaring inconsistency, that just as GTX is firing loyal employees because the company allegedly can no longer afford to pay them, Jim Salinger buys a new building for the sole purpose of devoting the top floor to luxurious executive office suites. On an ethical level, Gene notes that the "random" lay-offs almost exclusively target older employes, "with just enough under thirties to avoid being sued." Assured that GTX hasn't technically broken any laws, Gene replies, "I thought we had a higher standard than that."

Gene is, of course, wrong, and also naive for saying so. As viewers, we see how much his constant protests annoy his boss and "friend," and so when Salinger finally fires Gene and his buddy, fellow veteran Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper), it's again a shock to the men being fired, but not to the film's viewers. Gene and Phil point out that they've been with the company since its infancy, even since its inception, but this matters little to Salinger, who is all business and has no interest in unprofitable concepts like fairness or loyalty.

Woodward's attempts to find another job are hampered by his age; he dies his hair in a futile attempt to look younger, cringes when aspects of his resume are referred to as "ancient," and despairs when he walks into a waiting room where dozens of other applicants wait -- and they're all decades younger than he is. We feel for poor, old Woodward.

But Bobby is the real emotional center of the film, and I think it's fair to guess that anyone who's ever lost a job, or otherwise struggled with unemployment, can sympathize with the character. The many indignities of unemployment -- the constant rejection from job searches, the discovery that a hard-earned degree is increasingly worthless in today's job market, the gradual strain on finances with no source of income, and the mostly unspoken social stigma of being jobless, are all shown with disturbing honesty. The movie is also ruthlessly frank about the fact that a man will eventually take any job when desperate enough; over the course of a year, Bobby's priorities and grasp of reality change him drastically, and he goes from rejecting high-paying white-collar job opportunites because of imagined, minor insults, to asking his hated brother-in-law (Kevin Costner) for a brutally exhausting manual labor job.

Let me tell you, The Company Men has a lot to offer. The dialogue is compelling yet natural, the "everyman" performances are convincing enough to overcome the cast's considerable star power, and the storyline is admirably credible. Of course, if you've ever been unemployed, this movie will no doubt awaken very painful memories, so in that sense, I almost hesitate to recommend this. But damn this is one good movie.

Commander in Chief -- A Series in Review

2011-07-27T06:17:00.000-07:00

Every time Aaron Sorkin does anything, it will be compared to The West Wing, one of TV's all-time greats. The number of Emmys and other awards that this show was nominated for, and won, is simply astonishing, but rightly so -- The West Wing, known for its brilliant dialogue, compelling performances, dynamic "walk and talk" scenes, and ability to make even the most complex politics accessible without dumbing it down, was truly a remarkable show.

Almost forgotten, ABC's Commander in Chief is often seen as a poor imitation, relying too heavily on its central gimmick -- look, this time, the President's a woman! -- to draw in readers.

Like many others, I too dismissed Commander in Chief as a doubtful West Wing imitation when it originally aired. But now that the series is on DVD, I have found that the show has its own merits.

Here's the set-up: Geena Davis stars as MacKenzie Allen, the first female Vice President of the United States of America. In the pilot episode, President Theodore Roosevelt "Teddy" Bridges suffers from a stroke and, before he dies, begs Allen to resign so that his personal friend, Speaker of the House Nathan Templeton, can assume office under the 25th Amendment. Allen nearly does so, but at the last moment, decides that the intentions of the Constitution are more important than the intentions of Teddy Bridges. This angers a great deal of Teddy's most loyal followers and friends, most notably Templeton and White House Chief of Staff Jim Gardner. Allen placates Gardner by allowing him to keep his job as chief of staff, but Templeton more or less swears himself Allen's mortal enemy. Now, Allen must simultaneously deal with being the first female president, fight off political enemies in every corner of Washington, including even her own White House (and, as an Independent, having a notable lack of allies), overcome the political fallout from accepting the office of the presidency despite the increasingly public knowledge that Bridges asked her to resign -- and, oh yes, run the country and its military.

The writers, led by Rod Lurie, do a very good job of balancing all of these storylines. They understand that the key to drawing viewers into a good political drama is to populate it with interesting characters. As First Gentleman, Kyle Secor (whom you may remember as Detective Tim Bayliss from the excellent Homicide: Life on the Street) is thoroughly likable. As the first First Gentleman, Rod Calloway suffers from a series of humiliations, most notably being immediately replaced as Allen's chief of staff "because they can't think I'm in office only because I have a man helping me." Harry Lennix also deserves some praise for his nuanced performance as Chief of Staff Jim Gardner.

But the real star of the show isn't Lennix, Secor, or even Geena Davis. That honor goes to Donald Sutherland, who plays Nathan Templeton as one part noble lion and one part slimy bastard. As Teddy Bridges's intended successor to the presidency, Templeton feels a sense of entitlement that, in his mind, justifies some truly dirty political tricks. And yet, there are times when he clearly does have the nation's best interests at heart, and he's not above helping President Allen when he has to. These two political enemies can work together when necessary -- although even at his most helpful, Templeton always has a hidden agenda up his sleeve.

When Commander in Chief originally aired, both critics and ABC's own publicity for the show made a big deal about Sutherland's presence in the series, and his compelling performance as the series villain. But the truth is that, while Sutherland is indeed powerful in the role, its impact comes from the writers, who do an excellent job of mixing a bit of moral ambiguity into Templeton's villainy. Every time you think he's nothing but a worm, he turns around and does something noble -- but every time you think he may be redeemable, he turns around and does something despicable. The phrase is used too often, but Nathan Templeton really is "the character you love to hate."

The show is not without its faults. My biggest complaint is that the show can never seem to make up its mind who's got what job in the White House and elsewhere in Washington; characters quit, get fired, resign, and get replaced in every damn episode. In a couple of instances, they lose their job and then come back a few episodes later, making me wonder what the point of the whole thing was in the first place. After a while, watching yet another character lose his or her job becomes redundant. This flaw is especially interesting when you consider that the exact same thing was happening behind the scenes; original show runner Rod Lurie was replaced by Steven Bochco, who was replaced by Dee Johnson, and both Bochco and Johnson at some point unofficially turned some of their power back over to Lurie -- and all of this during the span of one season! Ostensibly, the behind-the-scenes transition from Lurie to Bochco to Johnson is seamless in the overall narrative and tone of the show, but I can't help but wonder if the revolving door of producers helps to explain the revolving door of characters.

The show also ends rather abruptly. All of the characters clearly have more to do in the storyline when the show ends (on a cliffhanger) and so there's more than a bit of irony to the fact that the final episode's title -- a reference to a bit of dialogue in the last scene, not originally intended to refer to the series' end -- is "Unfinished Business."

Still, I have to say that watching Commander in Chief was a lot of fun. It's true that the writing doesn't match Aaron Sorkin at his best, but I feel safe to say that if you liked The West Wing, you'll also like Commander in Chief. And to be honest, I have no idea if the makers of either show would approve that statement.

Bored to Death -- TV review

2011-06-04T14:05:00.000-07:00

From the very first frame of the opening credits*, to the final fade-out in the season finale, Bored to Death is a solidly entertaining viewing experience.

Jason Schwartzman stars as Jonathan Ames (which is also, not coincidentally, the name of the show's creator and head writer), an aimless young professional writer whose once promising life is in a downward spiral. The publication of his novel, which he initially viewed as a triumph, has met with mixed reviews and very poor sales, and despite accepting a sizable advance on his next book, he clearly has no idea how to write it. Adding a personal crisis to his professional one, his girlfriend leaves him early in the pilot episode, complaining that Jonathan is addicted to alcohol (a questionable accusation) and marijuana (an inarguably true assessment). Struggling with both heart-break and writer's block, Jonathan descends into a spiral of boredom until, on a whim inspired by his love for Raymond Chandler novels, he posts an ad on Craig's List, offering his services as an unlicensed private detective. ("The fact that I admit upfront that I'm unlicensed makes it less illegal," he eagerly tells anyone who'll listen.)

Most of the best stories -- adventure, comedy, drama, whatever -- involve ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. The basic concept of Bored to Death -- an inexperienced, untrained man moonlighting as a private eye -- neatly side-steps the problem of how to realistically put everyman Jonathan into extraordinary circumstances week after week. "I'm actually pretty good" as a private eye, Jonathan exclaims with surprise more than pride, pointing out that he has a 100% success rate with solving his cases. Is he a good detective? Hard to say. He either doesn't care or doesn't realize that many of his successful cases are solved through dumb luck rather than through any skill on his part, but even when the cards are against him, he tackles each case with determination and ingenuity, and at the end of every episode, his clients seem satisfied. He charges $100 a day, and there's a nice running gag about how he always forgets to add, "plus expenses," an omission that often results in him actually losing money on most cases, as bribes to informants and other expenses gradually add up. "The guys in Chandler novels always charge for expenses," he reminds himself at one point, but by the time he accepts his next case, he has already forgotten this lesson.

As Jonathan, Jason Schwartzman is a perfect everyman. He is alternately clever and clueless, awkward and charming. Reviews of Bored to Death tend to praise the supporting cast at the expense of acknowledging Schwartzman's contribution to the show; Schwartzman got his start acting in Wes Anderson movies, and Anderson's influence clearly affects Schwartzman's performance here, as he brings an Andersonian poignancy to nearly every line.

The supporting cast does deliver credit, though, for helping to create a believable environment in Jonathan's world. As Jonathan's friends, Ted Danson and Zach Galifinakis bring humor and warmth to their characters. The show is based on characters created in a short story by the real-life Jonathan Ames, but these characters feel like they were written with Danson and Galifinakis in mind, even if they weren't. Danson plays George Christopher, a wealthy magazine editor who routinely hires Jonathan to write fluff pieces for his up-scale magazine, Edition. A self-absorbed womanizer, George still manages to be sympathetic, thanks to a combination of good intentions, loyalty (he continues to be Jonathan's friend despite the class differences), and vulnerability. He often lectures Jonathan on social mores, but the truth is that George clearly wants to be like his friend, as every episode features a moment when George learns about something new going on in Jonathan's life, and George inevitably exclaims that he wants to try it too. Yes, this is not the first upper-class, charming womanizer Danson has played (witness Arthur Frobisher in Damages, Jeremy Brockett in Mumford, etc.) but he keeps getting cast in these roles because he does it so damn well.

As Jonathan's other buddy, Ray Hueston, Zach Galifinakis is equally well cast. While it may be true that Galifinakis may always seem to be playing only minor variations of his stand-up persona (witness Due Date, The Hangover, etc.) I say kudos to him for making every line sound like it was improvised by a comic genius. (Kudos also go to the writers for making the character so distinctively Galifinakian).

Incidentally, I also like how the character of Ray's girlfriend, Leah, is treated; comedies with a "best friend's girlfriend" so often go one of three routes, treating this character as either an annoying third wheel who views the hero with contempt, a shallow source of pity for the antagonist, or a forbidden third point on a love triangle. Bored to Death, wisely, takes none of these routes, and instead depicts Jonathan and Leah as purely platonic friends; Jonathan and Ray may occasionally share "guy talk" that often focuses on Leah's lack of libido, but other than that, neither Leah nor Ray ever try to put Jonathan in the middle of their relationship difficulties. Such a sympathetic, novel approach to the stock character of "the best friend's girlfriend" is refreshing and welcome.

The writing for this show is simply sublime. The characters are both likable and believable, the plots are elaborate enough to be constantly intriguing without ever becoming confused or contrived, and the dialogue never sacrifices either credibility nor wit, but instead finds a perfect balance between the two. Bored to Death is a show well worth watching, and I whole-heartedly encourage you to rent season one on DVD, which is available on both iTunes and Netflix. In the meantime, I will eagerly await the release of season two!

*When I say that even the opening credits are fun, I'm not exaggerating. The graphics feature a cute little animation, taking place on the pages of the short story that inspired the creation of the show. And the theme song is a catchy jazz number performed by Schwartzman's band "Coconut Records" and written by both the real-life Jonathan Ames and Schwartzman, the actor who plays Ames in the show.

A Few Gripes About the Artist Known as "Ke$ha"

2011-05-28T11:04:00.000-07:00

At Least She's Not a Nazi (Long Version of "Kesha")

2011-05-28T08:29:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about Kesha lately. (I refuse to use the "official" spelling of her name -- Ke$ha -- outside of griping about it, because it's just plain stupid. What's the pronunciation of such a name? "Ke- dollar sign -ha"? "Ke-money-ha?") I've been thinking about Kesha because her song "Tik Tok" has been stuck in my head. And I realize that I actually like it. Heck, I admit it, I like it a lot. The lyrics are fun because they're an unintentional satire of the very party culture they celebrate, and the music is fun because it's simply a catchy, dance-friendly beat.

Keep in mind that this is coming from someone who, for the most part, views the Kesha culture and its music with a mixture of alienation, confusion, and disdain. Sorry if that offends you, but I feel safe in making this confession, since very, very few people reading this would be a passionate defender of party culture.

My biggest beef with Kesha -- and there are quite a few -- but my biggest beef with her is the song "Blah Blah Blah," probably because that one song encapsulates almost every complaint I have about party culture and its music. Unlike the lyrics to "Tik Tok" (written by Kesha Sebert, Lukasz Gottwald, and Benjamin Levin), which use (intentionally or unintentionally, not sure) comical exaggeration in describing party culture, and fit into a discernible musical structure, "Blah Blah Blah" similarly celebrates party culture but without any sense of irony or self-examination. The "music," if that's what it can be called, is a discordant, unpleasant mess of disorganized notes, and the lyrics (written by Kesha, Levin, Neon Hitch, and Sean Foreman) alternate between a chorus that is the pinnacle of lazy songwriting and verses that explicitly (in both senses of the word) endorse the idea that sex is best if it's with someone who has no personality and keeps his or her mouth shut. The chorus and title of the song are a reference to the singer's argument that men should just shut up and put out, because when men open their mouths to speak, Kesha loses interest; he may have something to say, but all Kesha hears is "blah blah blah."

My problems with this song are two-fold. First of all, online music critic Todd Nathanson (a.k.a. "Todd in the Shadows") rightly points out that the chorus and title are a perfect summary of how techno-pop music in general is viewed by people who, like me, generally hate techno-pop music. (If you're interested in the link for Todd's rather amusing review, it's http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/teamt/tis/tpsr/20736-ep-01-kesha-blahblahblah) It's as if Kesha and her co-writers said, "oh, you think our music is bad, well we'll show you just how bad it can be!" Now, I might -- emphasis on "might" -- forgive or maybe even appreciate such an attitude if, as I noted before, I could detect some sort of irony or at least self-awareness. I cannot. Maybe you like Kesha and her song "Blah Blah Blah," maybe you don't, but let's at least be honest, does she really present herself as a social satirist?

I want to be clear here. This is not an identical story to my reaction to Paris Hilton's hit single "The Stars are Blind." When I first heard that Hilton, whom I find obnoxious (but not nearly as obnoxious as Kesha) was going to pursue a career in music, I, like many people, got a perverse eagerness to dislike her music, and so I was chagrined and confused to admit that I actually kinda like "Stars are Blind." I won't be memorizing the lyrics any time soon, but it's a nice little reggae number. Even now, it almost hurts to admit I like it, but I do.

But whether you like or dislike it, "Stars are Blind" is nothing more than a silly little love song. "Blah Blah Blah," on the other hand, is, quite simply, nothing short of offensive. Now, I've read many comments online -- from both casual listeners and music critics -- that have argued that it's okay, and even admirable, for Kesha to sing about men as worthless for anything other than sex, because this is how men have been talking about and treating women since the dawn of creation. "Blah Blah Blah," this argument posits, is actually a feminist triumph of gender equality. This argument is, frankly, very, very stupid. I have three responses to it.

First of all, gender equality, hip hip hooray, I'm all for it, yeah, but no matter how you slice it, this argument is basically that if men can act like pigs, women can too. Which is true, yes, but do we really want to go there, where the argument is basically that "yes, we acknowledge that this is disgusting behavior, but disgusting behavior is acceptable as long as everybody's equally disgusting"? That's the argument defenders of the song are making, and to me it seems a course perversion of the righteous goals of feminism.

Second of all, and I admit I'm getting more personal here, but I for one do not approve of treating women with disrespect, so the argument "why is this behavior alright for a man, and not alright for a woman?" is really lost on me. This behavior is not alright for a man, I never thought it was. I am holding men and women up to the same standard here.

Furthermore, I would point out that, while I admit to being somewhat out of touch with modern music, I am unaware of any mainstream song that so blatantly sends the message Kesha's song is allegedly a response to, that women are good for fucking and nothing else. Yes, some rap music can be embarrassingly misogynistic, but with "Blah Blah Blah," we're talking about something a lot more mainstream, we're talking about something that young people are dancing to en masse.

For me, the bottom line is that we would be offended by a song whose message is to treat women like shit -- and so we should also be offended by a song whose message to to treat men like shit. It's not "okay" just because it allegedly balances the scales.

And so, I have now established exactly why I find the lyrics, message, and music to "Blah Blah Blah" to be thoroughly obnoxious. But this whole anti-Kesha rant is really just an aside (albeit a very long aside) from my main point: Hate Kesha and most of her music, love that one song, "Tik Tok." And so I am torn. How can I justify lambasting Kesha one moment, and dancing to her biggest hit song the next? The issue here isn't that I just don't like most of her music, the issue is that I am both artistically and morally opposed to everything about Kesha -- her message, her music, the whole damn subculture that lets her not only get away with what she says and does, but actually propels her to success. And yet I love that one song.

The basic question is, can you separate the art from the artist? I am reminded of classroom debates from when I was a cinema student. Leni Riefenstahl was a ground-breaking and highly talented filmmaker. But her greatest achievements were unabashedly pro-Nazi propaganda. Oh sure, after the War, she denied being a true member of the Nazi Party. But her denials aren't really convincing when juxtaposed with footage of her happily socializing with Hitler himself.

Or let me put a more contemporary spin on it, so you can relate to it a little better. Michael Jackson. Every time Jackson would do something weird (okay, insane), every time he would be accused (never convicted) of child abuse, it would, at least for a time, become uncool to listen to his music. I remember, during the first big Michael Jackson backlash, a kid named Chris, who was one of Jackson's biggest haters, vehemently denying he'd ever liked Jackson's music; this from a kid who walked around in a red jacket and one glove for a year. This was an example of Chris, and society in general, being unable to separate the art from the artist. Artists themselves, understandably, don't have such a hard time with this type of conflict. Elton John, an openly gay man, famously performed with and even hugged Eminim despite Eminem's penchant for homophobic lyrics.

Another interesting contemporary example: Spike Lee. The guy is racist, no two ways about it. Every argument I've ever heard or read that asserted that Lee is not a racist stemmed from either a blatant ignorance of objective facts, or from a failure to consider the significance of Lee's dialogue -- both in interviews and in the movies he's written. A subtle hint of Lee's racism can be found in Get on the Bus. A more blatant example would be Do the Right Thing, and Lee's antagonistic, double-standard comments about the movie in subsequent interviews.

But here's the thing: I like Do the Right Thing and Get on the Bus. Yes, the racist moments (and here I'm talking about, among other things, the condemnation of Rick the bus driver, and Sal's uncharacteristic use of racial slurs during his loss of temper) get under my skin. But I still find artistic merit in these films. When I watch these movies -- and I do find them excellent repeat-viewing material -- I am not just looking past my distaste for the artist. I'm looking past my distaste for some of the morality of the very works of art I'm experiencing.

I guess the conclusion is that you really have to take this on a case by case basis. When I hear about people planning to boycott Mel Gibson, for example, because of his allegedly anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and racist attitudes, I respect that. I think people are doing themselves more harm than they are doing to Gibson, because I acknowledge that they are depriving themselves of works of art, and not doing much to affect Gibson's career or life one way or the other. But I at least respect where these people are coming from. Personally, I find Kesha Rose Sebert to be a reprehensible non-talent whose continued success is a blatant sign of pop culture's continuing moral degradation -- but the only real reason I don't listen to most of her music is because I find it aesthetically offensive.

That Tik-Tok song is pretty good though.

Smallville: A Very Subjective Retrospective

2011-05-14T03:28:00.000-07:00

After 10 years, Smallville is over. The Red-Blue Blur is now Superman (complete with iconic suit), Jimmy and Lex are back in the roles the mythology demands them to be, and Lois & Clark have eschewed the town of Smallville itself, in favor of the big city, Metropolis.

Now that the feature-length, long-awaited series finale has aired (enjoying heaps of praise from hyped-up Internet fans, but sure to elicit debate once the initial excitement wears off) it seems fitting to take a look back at the show that redefined the Legend of Superman.

Smallville began as a show that was very much about the identity of the W.B. as a television network, and only incidentally about the characters that inspired the series. Oh, sure, you had all of the characters most central to the earliest chapters of the Clark Kent mythos. But look at the the context of other shows on the network: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (high school drama with vampires), Dawson's Creek (high school drama with soap opera sensibilities), Popular (high school drama with fashion snobs), Roswell (high school drama with aliens), and finally, Smallville -- which really presented nothing more than high school drama with Superboy. Martha & Jonathan Kent were often paraded about so that they could dispatch some down-home country wisdom, but the emphasis was really on Clark's struggles to fit in as a freshman in high school.

To be sure, the show started out on the right foot, balancing the lame "Superboy in high school" concept with a more intriguing story, as rich kid Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) carelessly hits Clark Kent (a perfectly cast Tom Welling) with his car, before crashing off of a bridge and into the river below. Clark naturally saves Lex's life, with no way of knowing that doing so, while it may be the right thing on a moral level, will eventually spell tragedy for Clark time and time again.

Clark, who has managed to keep his super powers a secret his entire life, unconvincingly insists that Lex's car didn't really hit him, but Lex knows what he saw, and Clark's refusal to admit the truth -- a storyline that will last for years on the show -- sparks in Lex a curiosity about his mysterious savior. Over time, that curiosity would become a fascination, and finally an obsession.

However, after the pilot episode, that storyline was put on the back burner. Nearly every episode of the first four years -- and, it may be safe to say, every single episode of the first season followed the exact same plot: Somebody in Smallville (usually a high school student) has been exposed to kryptonite (referred to in the series as "meteor rock"), and while kryptonite may be poisonous to Clark, long-term exposure to humans tends to give them bizarre powers. Clark's friend Chloe Sullivan (played by the immensely likable Allison Mack) would somehow get wind of the mysterious incidents long before anybody else, and she would investigate the incidents -- usually getting in over her head -- for the dual purpose of both reporting for the school newspaper, and also adding material to her "Wall of Weird" -- an obsessive collection of evidence and newspaper clippings regarding these various "meteor freaks." Oddly, despite that every one of Chloe's suspicions turned out to be accurate, she was always dismissed as a crackpot by everybody but Clark, who would invariably have to save either Chloe or somebody else from the latest kryptonite-infected guest star. I honestly don't remember a single episode from season one that strayed from this formula. Smallville's version of variety was to, once in a great while, make the meteor freak a sympathetic character whose danger was due to inability to control his or her powers, rather than intentional malice.

Typically, until the climax of each episode, in which Clark would face off with the meteor freak, this "villain of the week" routine was usually little more than a MacGuffin, an excuse to further explore Clark's surprisingly typical high school life. Per the standard for a WB series, high school was more about who's in love with who, than it is about learning. Sidekick Pete had a crush on Chloe, who had a crush on Clark, who had a crush on popular girl Lana, who was in a relationship with school jock Whitney, who had a crush on Pete. Okay, I made that last one up, Whitney was totally into Lana, but in an unhealthy, "I'm your boyfriend, I therefore own and control you" way.

If all of this sounds maddeningly repetitive, it sure as heck was. The first season's only real saving grace was the Lex Luthor character. Because the entire audience knows that Clark Kent and Lex Luthor are destined to become bitter enemies, all of the Smallville scenes depicting them as best friends had a layer of poignancy beyond the surface text. Lex's gradual adoption of the Kents as a substitute family was especially bittersweet, since Lex's relationship with his own father (John Glover) was so adversarial that they were actually depicted as business rivals, vying for control of the multi-million dollar family company, LutherCorp.

Seasons 2 - 4 never completely strayed from the villain of the week/ everyone's in love with everyone else formula, but at least these seasons started to add a layer of interest, by delving a little bit into the Superman mythology. Christopher Reeve, who famously played Superman in the movies, was even brought in as a guest character who has somehow learned to read Kryptonian.

To emphasize Clark's dual nature -- an alien who looks like and was raised by humans -- the writers bent over backwards to tie Earth and Kryptonian histories together, as a discovery of an ancient cave reveals a Native American prophecy telling of a savior (obviously Clark) and three mystical "Stones of Knowledge." Clark learns that he must find these Stones of Knowledge, which tie in with his destiny, before they are discovered by Lex, Lionel, or the Teague family, played by Jane Seymour and Jensen Ackles.

The premiere episode of season two introduced a recurring plot device that would drive viewers crazy with frustration: the "false reveal." Every once in a while, the show would breathlessly advertise that "this is the episode where Lana (or Lex) finds out Clark's Secret!" And every time -- every time the writers would throw in a "twist" that negated this revelation. Wait, Lana didn't find out Clark's an alien, it was just a dream! Wait, yeah, we know Lex saw Clark use super powers, but that was an alternate reality! No, we know we said that Lex would discover Clark's alien heritage, but surprise, Clark turned back time and made it never happen! Over the course of almost the entire series, the writers would never fail to delight in the false reveal. They seemed to think themselves enormously clever, but this was really the reason I stopped watching the show for a while.

Season 5 drew me back to the show, with the addition of James Marsters as Professor Milton Fine, Smallville's version of the comic book villain Brainiac. (I could care less about the Brainiac character, but I was a fan of Marsters because of his brilliant performance as Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) Unlike Buffy, which lost some of its heart when its characters graduated from high school, Smallville's abandonment of the high school setting worked tremendously in the show's favor. Romance became an aspect, rather than the focus, of the characters' lives, and the show finally began to lose interest in the tired "villain of the week" storylines. Although he was merely a supporting character (until his eventual emergence, late in the season, as a major villain) Marsters provided the cast with a proverbial shot in the arm as Milton Fine. And, most importantly, the show replaced all of the tedious teen angst with plot lines that featured more action and spectacle -- a transition that understandably hooked new viewers into the show.

Clark and Lex, now rivals for Lana Lang's affections, were no longer friends, but not quite enemies yet either -- although their constant sniping, and Clark's tendency to blame everything on Lex did grow tiresome after a while, as if the writers were trying too hard to say, "look, we're showing you their transition from friends to enemies, just like we promised!"

Still, this is a minor complaint when you consider how radically superior season five was, compared to seasons 1 - 4. Notable episodes include "Lexmas," a critically acclaimed Christmas story in which Lex, realizing that he is on a morally dangerous path, dreams of an alternate reality in which he and Clark are again best friends. "The Reckoning," the show's much-celebrated 100th episode, was yet another false reveal story, as both Lana and Lex learn Clark's secret, only for Jor-El (voiced by Terence Stamp) to reverse the events by turning back time. The episode was notable, however, for shocking viewers with the unexpected death of Clark's father, who had been a central character since the beginning. The season five cliff-hanger ending, with Lex finally becoming a complete villain (because he was possessed by the evil Kryptonian General Zod), and Clark stuck in the extradimensional Phantom Zone prison, while Earth descends into chaos under the (temporary) conquest by Brainiac, had millions of viewers on the edge of their proverbial seats for an entire summer.

Season 6 didn't quite live up to the high standards set by season five, but did benefit from the addition of several characters from the Superman comics, most notably Justin Hartley, as millionaire Oliver Queen, a.k.a. vigilante "Green Arrow." Narratively, the most intriguing aspect of this season was the treatment of Lex's father, Lionel Luthor. In previous seasons, Lionel was at best a morally ambiguous character, and often hinted at being a villain. Yet the discovery of Clark's secret, surprisingly, motivates him to become one of Clark's most loyal (though least trusted) allies. The show's writers later lamented that they felt lost when writing for Lionel's character, but their dissatisfaction, in my opinion, doesn't translate to the screen.

Season 7 began promisingly, with an action-packed season premiere that hinted at a major villain in Bizarro, sort of an "evil twin" version of Clark. However, the show shifted focus to the character of Clark's maddeningly bland cousin, Kara, and lost my interest for a while. There was only so much Supergirl I was willing to put up with.

As far as I'm concerned, the following two seasons were, by far, the best the show had to offer. The disappearance of Lex Luthor lead to a goal shared by almost all of the characters (finding out if Lex is dead, and if not, where he's gone to), each for his or her own reason. The writers especially deserve praise for using this storyline to make the character of Lex a continuing presence on the series despite Michael Rosenbaum's departure from the series.

Sam Witwer was a welcome addition to the cast as Davis Bloome, a paramedic who develops a romance with Chloe despite her engagement to Jimmy Olson (Aaron Ashmore). Unlike the sappy, shallow romantic entanglements of Smallville's early, high school years, the Chloe/ Davis/ Jimmy love triangle was handled with maturity and sensitivity.

Most importantly, for the sake of fitting Smallville's continuity into the larger Superman narrative, season 8 would be the one in which Clark starts to develop a reputation and routine as a superhero. As the mysterious, and accurately-but-unimaginatively named "Red-Blue Blur," Clark patrols Metropolis and starts to show hints of the "beacon of hope" he is destined to become.

Davis would turn out to be Smallville's interpretation of Doomsday, the comic book character ultimately responsible for Superman's death. Because of this knowledge on the part of the viewers, each scene with Davis, who would occasionally transform into Doomsday in times of distress (similar to Banner's transformations into the equally mindless title character of The Incredible Hulk) was laced with delightful suspense. The biggest complaint for season eight -- and I consider it a very, very big complaint indeed -- was the lack of pay-off. The entire season is filled with explicit, ominous portents of an eventual show-down between Clark and Doomsday -- a show-down which proves fatal for Clark in the comic book continuity. Yet when they finally do face off in the season finale, the fight lasts for only a few seconds -- a total of three blows are exchanged -- before Doomsday is defeated.

Season 9, the best season of the series, re-introduces the villainous General Zod. Admittedly, the details of Zod's return are never satisfactorily explained. But this Zod has no memory of his criminal deeds, and Clark plans to befriend Zod -- apparently forgetting every lesson he's ever learned about destiny during the previous eight seasons.

These nit-picks do nothing to diminish the pure fun of season 9, which, quite simply, features the best action sequences, cinematography, and dialogue of the entire series. At the center of the cast is Callum Blue as the villainous Zod, who manages to be alternately menacing and sympathetic with equal aplomb.

Season 10 begins promisingly enough, with an exciting wrap-up of the General Zod storyline, flowing seamlessly into the plot twist of Lois Lane finally learning that Clark is the Red-Blue Blur. And, pleasant surprise, it's not a false reveal -- this time, Lois gets to keep her knowledge that Clark is the Blur! Thank you, Smallville writers, for finally abandoning the "just kidding" concept of plot twists!

Unfortunately, season 10 simply doesn't live up to the high standards of the previous two seasons, despite a very sincere attempt to use action and "clever" plotting to reconcile any remaining incongruities between the Smallville storyline and the greater Superman narrative. The season's biggest problem is its poor choice in a primary villain: After the dynamic performances of Sam Witwer as Doomsday and Callum Blue as Zod, we have . . . . well, nobody playing the primary villain Darkseid, a mostly incorporeal bad guy who does almost all of his evil deeds through bland minions.

The feature-length series finale, as I mentioned, is currently getting heaps of praise online, but in my opinion, it simply tries to do too much. Clark finally becomes Superman, Clark marries Lois, Lex returns after years of being presumed dead, Doomsday tries to take over the world, etc., etc. Some of this works (I loved Rosenbaum's cameo as Lex, including a monologue that neatly summarizes the nature of long-running adversarial relationships in fiction) and some doesn't (they never even bother to explain how Jimmy Olson is somehow back from the dead -- or if this second Olson is really the first Olson's younger brother, as it's implied, then why are they identical, and why do they share the same first name?) But after ten years, Clark Kent has finally embraced his destiny. His days as the anonymous, awkwardly named Red-Blue Blur are over. This looks like a job for Superman.

Scarface: A Comparitive Review

2011-05-10T20:16:00.000-07:00

Say what you will about the subjective quality of the 1983 version of Scarface -- some consider it a modern-day classic and others dismiss it as a live-action cartoon, an unintentional self-parody -- but whether you love it or loathe it, no one can accuse the film of subtlety. Considering the facts that the director is Brian DePalma (who once reported "guignol" to be his favorite word), the scriptwriter is Oliver Stone (who makes no compunctions about his tendency to hit his audiences over the head with his messages), and the concept of excess is so central to many of the film's themes -- excessive ambition, excessive greed, excessive materialism, excessive violence, etc. -- subtlety in presentation would probably be an inappropriate expectation, to say the least.

The film is such a loose remake of the 1932 movie of the same name that one should hesitate to refer to it as a remake at all; the modern term "re-imagining," albeit loosely defined, might be a word that better describes the '83 film, in its relation to the earlier movie.

Al Pacino stars as Tony Montana, initially just one anonymous face in the wave of Cuban refugees that came to Miami in 1980. Montana refers to himself -- and possibly even considers himself -- a "political refugee," although in truth he is just a petty criminal whose search for a new start in the U.S. is as much about escaping from his criminal past as it is about pursuing the American Dream.

Scarface follows Montana's rapid rise from errand boy for drug kingpin Frank Lopez (a fun performance from Robert Loggia) to a coveted spot in Frank's inner circle, to his rivalry with and eventual replacement of Frank as the number one man in Miami's cocaine trade. We see Montana rise from a nobody to a multi-billionaire, and while more than one person eventually observes that success has gone to Montana's head, his real problem is that success hasn't changed him at all; the crudity, cruelty, greed, paranoia, and other vices that Montana the Millionaire exhibits have been character traits of his all along, and until he finally crosses the wrong people once too often, these vices actually serve him quite well.

In the broadest strokes imaginable, the plot echoes that of the 1932 original, although the shift in focus from 30s Chicago prohibition-busting to 80s Miami cocaine dealing radically alters the story details even more than you might imagine.

As Tony Camonte, the protagonist of the '32 film, Paul Muni delivered a broad performance which seemed even broader in contrast to restrained performances of his co-stars; note how the other men in the 1932 film rarely even move their arms from their sides, an exercise in formal restraint which serves to emphasize Camonte's informal attitude and physical looseness. The supporting actors in the 1983 version don't follow their predecessors' example (and good thing too, especially in the case of the delightful Loggia) so to compensate for this, Pacino goes over the top. It's an appropriate choice, considering the over-all style of the film, but one can easily see how the performance lends itself to parody.

Although the plots of the two films are different enough that directly mirrored scenes are few and far between, there are two examples that illustrate both the positive and the negative of the lack of subtlety:

Both films have a story point about Tony's boss deciding to order a hit on Tony because he rightfully fears that Tony's ambition and fearlessness are a threat to his own power. The '32 film has a great moment when Camonte confronts Johnny Lovo. Johnny initially tries to act innocent, but when he realizes that Camonte ain't buyin' his act, he switches gears and begs for mercy.

"I never hurt anybody!" Johnny whines in his defense.

"No," Camonte agrees. "You send other people to do it for you."

With that, he walks out the door, leaving his sidekick alone in the room with Johnny. The look on Johnny's face tells us that he knows what we do, that Camonte will let his men do the dirty work, but either way, Johnny's days are over. This is arguably the most powerful moment in the film.

An almost -- emphasis on "almost" -- identical scene appears in the 1983 version, although the differences show that the excess of DePalma and Stone illustrate a lack of sophistication:

"I never hurt anybody!" Frank Lopez pleads.

"No," Montana agrees. "You send other people to do it for you."

Same great look of realization on Robert Loggia's face. But then Montana proceeds to boast and strut and curse and shout, and by the time he tells his sidekick to "shoot this fuck," all the grace of the scene has evaporated, and even if that's sort of the point, by this time, we've been so distracted by Montana's bombastic behavior that we barely remember the set-up, and wonder why Montana doesn't take the kill shot himself. DePalma and Stone may have their own legitimate styles, but the bumbling of this scene made me miss their predecessors in Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht.

However, both movies share one subplot that cried out for a lack of subtlety, and despite the '32 film's pre-code status, Hawks and Hecht oddly shied away from the incestuous feelings Camonte feels toward his sister. Interestingly, while watching the Hawks/ Hecht Scarface, I fully expected to see Gina eventually confront Camonte with a sexual advance and the line, "is this what you want, Tony?" This scene appears exactly as I'd imagined it, but only in the DePalma/ Stone version, which I knew very little about and had never even seen before until after watching the '32 film. It's as if DePalma and Stone watched the original movie and said, "oh, okay, we see where they're going with this, let's take it to where they wanted to go, but didn't quite dare to."

It's that fearless attitude that saves the '83 film from its own miscalls, and makes it a movie at least as good as, if not better, than the original.

What to Expect in the* Hereafter

2011-04-15T10:25:00.001-07:00

We've all got our own beliefs -- religious or otherwise -- and theories about what to expect in the Hereafter, the place/ state of being/ time after death. And that's the question at the heart of three separate stories presented in Hereafter, writer Peter Morgan's examination of variations of the theme. But leaving said central mystery behind just for a moment, I've got a mystery much more confounding than issues that merely deal with life after death, and that mystery is: What the hell is wrong with critics and the movie-going public?

Seriously, this movie, whether intended as such or not, seems to be the answer to every one of critics' complaints about modern cinema, and they responded to it with a baffling mixture of (depending on who was reviewing it) hostility or plain indifference. So let's consider this for a moment. What do critics complain about? An excess of action movies, dumb comedies, and slasher films, the three most dominant genres in the box office, all of which require you to turn your brain off if you're to enjoy the film. They complain about special effects that exist for no reason other than spectacle, about lazy and predictable storylines populated by one-dimensional characters, and about Hollywood's tendency to present death, sex, and violence as pure titillation, without pause to consider the consequences.

"And where's the originality?" people cry out (and here I'm talking more about your average IMDb user than about most professional critics, although lord knows the line has blurred lately). "Why does it seem like every movie is either a remake, a sequel, or based on a book, TV show, or graphic novel?" Such complaints inevitably lead to the same conclusion, always phrased as a rhetorical question, "is Hollywood out of ideas?"

Well, Hereafter proves that Hollywood isn't out of ideas, as Morgan presents us with an original screenplay that is both emotionally and intellectually stimulating. This sensitive, patiently paced (which, in this case, does not mean the same as "boring") drama tells three separate stories, carefully balancing all three so that no one ever over-powers the other two, so that we feel like we're watching one continuous narrative.

Ostensibly, the main character is the one played by Matt Damon; that is to say, trailers and TV ads lead us to believe that he's the main character, even though his story is more or less equal to the other two stories, in terms of import and screen time. Damon stars as George Lonegan, a genuine psychic who has turned his back on his astounding gift. At first, his reasons seem like the standard cliches you find in supernatural stories involving psychics -- he feels like a freak, he wants to lead a normal life like everybody else, "it's not a gift, it's a curse," etc. -- but as we follow his attempts to leave the life of a professional psychic behind him, we slowly learn exactly why George has made the decisions he's made. Bryce Dallas Howard's supporting role, as a night school classmate who has the potential to serve as George's love interest, plays a key role in answering some of these questions.

Then there's Marcus, a very young boy whose life is turned upside down when his twin brother Jason, in a very early scene, is killed in a car accident. In addition to this devastating loss, Marcus is forced into foster care, when social workers force his loving but alcoholic and heroin-addicted mother into a rehabilitation program. Screenwriter Morgan gives us an early sign that Marcus's storyline will eventually tie in to George's narrative, when Marcus exhibits his grief through a sudden obsession with psychic phenomenon. An extended sequence in which Marcus, desperate to contact his deceased brother, approaches several psychics, and discovers them all to be frauds, is heartbreaking, but realistic. Marcus is no fool, and he approaches his mission with a touching mixture of determination, hope, and healthy yet sorrowful skepticism. An insensitive viewer might accuse Marcus of being a glutton for punishment, but the truth is that he is merely exhibiting that admirable quality of Hope Against Hope.

Finally, there's Marie Lelay, a minor celebrity and television journalist based in Paris. Marie's story is set in motion by the infamous Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, which nearly kills her during her vacation in Thailand. Actually, the point of Marie's story is that the tsunami does kill her, at least for a few seconds, and she awakes having experienced a near-death vision that hints at the existence of Heaven. Marie returns to Paris and initially attempts to return to life as normal, but after a briefly successful return to career-oriented goals, she becomes obsessed with researching life-after-death phenomena. This fascination of Marie's eventually jeopardizes both her career and her love life, although, interestingly, refreshingly, it is never depicted as unhealthy; rather, it is the closed-minded skepticism of those around her that is presented as unfair and unwise.

I started this review by contrasting Hereafter with critics' complaints about Hollywood cinema, and I'd like to briefly return to that topic, so that I can wrap up my point. In contrast to the dumbed down material permeating the cinematic mainstream, Hereafter takes a look at some very big questions and examines them with intelligence and sensitivity. There are special effects -- mostly confined to the glimpses of Heaven and the tsunami that sets the story in motion -- but these effects service the plot, rather than the reverse. All three stories are populated by three-dimensional characters in distinct tales, whose connections are (for the most part) more thematic than narrative, thus lacking in contrivance, but serving as a textbook example of how to carefully construct a drama. And, most refreshingly, we are presented with scenes of death and violence which serve not as raw, insensitive entertainment, but rather as important moments of real consequence.

This is all presented with patience, respect, sensitivity, and genuine craft by director Clint Eastwood, who brings out the best in his cast; this film is filled with top-notch performances. Even Jay Mohr, of whom I am no fan, presents a previously unseen level of maturity in his role as George's well-meaning brother. But I was especially impressed by Bryce Dallas Howard, an actress who could have easily coasted through an acting career on the shoulders of her powerful father (director Ron Howard) but instead is turning into one of the finest actresses of her generation. Her performance as the charming but vulnerable Melanie will have you falling in love with her, and if an actress playing a romantic interest has the job of making you want her to get together with the hero in the end, Howard makes the very best possible choices as a performer in every instance; every movement in her face and nuance in her inflection communicates volumes about the character.

Hereafter, in a nut shell, is that most rare of rarities to come out of Hollywood -- an original story that elicits discussion, emotion, and thought in equal measures, presented with love and top craftsmanship, eschewing easy answers and predictability, in favor of hard questions and creativity. And for that, most critics, both amateur and professional, spat on it. I, for one, will not jump on that band wagon. I recognize top quality when I see it.

*movie called

movie review: Eye See You (D-Tox)

2011-04-04T04:39:00.000-07:00

There are countless ways a movie can thrill you, but for me, one of the biggest thrills is when you find yourself thoroughly enjoying a direct-to-video flick. When you buy or rent such a movie, something obviously led you to make that selection, but there is also always something in the back of your mind, a little voice constantly reminding you, "don't expect too much, after all, this went direct to video for a reason." But sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised.

Such was the case for Eye See You (a movie, by the way, that has also been released under the title D-Tox, in case the title of this review confused you). The first sign that I was going to be in for a better-than-expected ride: the opening credits. If you are even a casual movie buff, you will find yourself smiling as the credits reveal name after name that is both familiar and welcome. Even if you don't recognize the names, you'll recognize the faces; the supporting cast is filled with some of the most reliable character actors in Hollywood.

Here's the plot (and if the description sounds familiar, it may be because I contributed to the movie's Wikipedia page): FBI agent Jake Malloy (Sylvester Stallone) descends into alcoholism after he is unable to save his wife from a serial killer who specializes in killing police officers. After Agent Malloy slits his wrists in an unsuccessful suicide attempt, his best friend and supervising officer, Agent Hendricks (Charles S. Dutton), enrolls Malloy in a rehabilitation program designed exclusively for law enforcement officers. There, he meets several other current and former police officers suffering from alcoholism, depression, etc. Naturally, most of the officers there are reluctant participants, and a few petty conflicts develop at the drop of a hat. But just as Malloy starts to accept his role as a patient, mysterious things start to happen, and it soon becomes evident that his wife's killer -- whom Malloy thought to be dead -- is alive and well, and stalking the patients and staff of the hospital.

Some aspects of this film deserve special mention, especially the cast. As I mentioned before, the film is well populated with good actors, but what of the lead? What of Stallone? I'd like to submit that Stallone is a better actor than he is often credited for. I think his tendency to star in mindless action flicks hurts his reputation as an actor, and it doesn't help that one of his two signature roles is supposed to be uneducated. But hey, Stallone was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as Rocky, and there's a reason for it. He didn't get that nomination in recognition of playing himself, he got it in recognition of creating an iconic character with the power of his performance. Since then, he has devoted most of his career to explosions and fight scenes, but look at the exceptions -- out-DeNiro-ing DeNiro in Cop Land, showing off his comic timing in Oscar, and such -- and you realize that his career could have taken a very different path.

In Eye See You, Stallone is the lead actor in the extended prologue only; once he arrives at the rehab center, where the vast majority of the film takes place, he becomes less of a lead and more of a part of an ensemble. But pay close attention to his performance, and note the subtle changes in expression.

Kris Kristofferson also deserves mention, albeit for an entirely different reason. Whether he's a bad guy, good guy, or just plain morally ambiguous, Kristofferson always seems to be playing himself, but that's because he does it so damn well. He always has an air of credibility about him. He's introduced as a doctor, and you think, "yes, he feels like a doctor," but when he reveals he's actually an ex-cop, you immediately amend your assessment to "of course he's a cop, what else?" without skipping a beat.

And then there's Sean Patrick Flanery, whose role is small, but whose monologue about a grisly homicide so perfectly communicates grief and horror that the exact same performance in a different movie would have critics murmuring about Oscar buzz.

The only real shame of all these great actors and performances is that they are stuck in stock characters. There's Mr. Chip on his Shoulder, Mr. Vulnerable, Miss Concerned, Mr. Creepy, etc. No, those aren't the characters' actual names, but they might as well have been. Yet the script is constantly finding interesting things for them to do. Take a look at Hendricks, for example, the best friend who drives Malloy to the middle-of-nowhere asylum. In a lesser film, Hendricks would deliver his "pull yourself together" speech, drop the main character off, and disappear from the movie, since the function of his role has been fulfilled.

But the writers, interestingly, decided that wasn't enough. "Alright," they seemed to say. "So he's dropped Malloy off, but where does he go from here? Does he go back to the Big City? But he's a Big City man who is visiting the country for the first time, and even if he is here just to drop off his friend, what if he's intrigued by this new environment? What if all of his earlier jokes about ice fishing get him to thinking that maybe he wants to see what it's like? What if, rather than send him packing as a mere utility character whose use is at an end, we explore him a little bit, by allowing him to explore his surroundings? And what if, rather than using this subplot as a cheap excuse for the tired old "city boy's a fish out of water out here in the country" gags, we actually depict what such an experience might be like?"

On one level, this subplot about Hendrick's impromptu vacation -- and his surprisingly credible sudden friendship with a local old man (charmingly played by Rance Howard) -- has nothing to do with the main storyline involving Malloy, the hospital, the killer, etc. But on another level, it's what makes the movie. It's what reminds us that characters, even action movie characters, are more than mere talking plot points, they can also lead lives that go on after the camera cuts away.

Speaking of cutting away, what does the camera cut away to? Director Jim Gillespie clearly put a lot of thought into answering that question. The rather standard prologue does not prepare us for the visual delights that follow in the majority of the film, but the exteriors are stunning, as Dean Semler's cinematography gracefully captures the stark beauty of the wintery Wisconsin wilderness. And the interiors are equally impressive, as Gary Wissner's production design depicts the rehab center as less of a hospital and more like a prison designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It may be an implausible setting, but it makes for fascinating visuals, and it's never quite "show-offy" enough to distract from the story (too much).

Speaking of the story, I'd be lying if I told you that it's astoundingly original. It starts out as a standard "burned out cop" flick, and never completely abandons that formula even as it also turns into a very thinly disguised variation of Ten Little Indians. Guess what -- I found myself not caring at all that the story was chock full of cliches. Why? Because I enjoyed playing "spot the guest star" while watching the supporting cast. Because I found comfort in the down-home performance by Kristofferson, and empathy for the grief-stricken character played by Flanery. Because the writers kept me intrigued to see what would happen next for Agent Hendricks, once I realized to my surprise that he was not going to be unceremoniously abandoned as he could have been. Because my eyes wanted to gaze at the beautiful landscapes, and study the fascinating set design. And because I had every reason to expect Eye See You to be nothing more than a standard cop thriller. That's exactly what I got. And yet, in a very good way, it also wasn't what I got at all.

retro movie review: The Man who Laughs

2011-03-31T02:55:00.000-07:00

I ended up watching The Man who Laughs -- a 1928 melodrama often erroneously remembered as as horror film -- through a rather round-about manner. When Heath Ledger won his posthumous, well-deserved Oscar for his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight, formerly trivial knowledge about the Joker started to creep into the mainstream. One of these little tidbits is that two out of the three people who created the character of the Joker attribute their inspiration to the main character in The Man who Laughs. For a long time, my reaction to this bit of information was the same as yours probably is: a half-interested nod, followed by a complete dismissal. At best, this information is good for answering a question in "Trivia Pursuit" (and yes, that question actually does appear in the classic version of the game) but be honest, does the knowledge that this is the movie that led to the creation of the Joker make you want to bother with this movie?

Well, it should. Because The Man who Laughs is a fine piece of cinema. Granted, if you are the type to be automatically bored by old movies, no amount of quality in the world will be able to sway your personal tastes. I am not here to try to change your mind, nor will I attempt to persuade you to make an exception. But if you, like me, love good movies regardless of the era, The Man who Laughs will not disappoint.

In the prologue, we meet Gwynplaine, a little boy who (through an unnecessarily convoluted series of events) has been abandoned in the wilderness of 17th Century England. (If this movie is to be believed, the English wilderness is apparently an arctic glacier. But nevermind.) The boy rescues an infant whose homeless mother has perished in the cold, and the two are taken in by a traveling showman named "Ursus the Philosopher." The infant grows up to be the beautiful but blind Dea, while the boy, whose face is permanently in a disturbingly wide grin, grows up to be played by Conrad Veidt, whose involuntary, permanent smile is outright maniacal. Both work as performers for Ursus, who markets Gwynplaine as a famous clown known as "Gwynplaine the Laughing Clown," or, more commonly, as simply "the Laughing Man."

Dea and Gwynplaine are very much in love (and the movie sidesteps the incestuous fact that, although not related by blood, the two characters have been raised as siblings) but Gwynplaine, because of his deformity, feels unworthy of Dea's love -- despite the fact that, because she is blind, she is not bothered by it. (The story, by the way, was written by Victor Hugo, who also wrote of a deformed man falling in love in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.)

The story is set in motion when Gwynplaine starts to earn fame at a massive festival. His fame attracts the attention of Duchess Josiana, who attempts to seduce him -- apparently for no other reason than because she has either flirted with or slept with every other man in England, and she just wants to complete her record. Gwynplaine sincerely loves Dea, but feels a sort of vindication in the Duchess's attraction, since, unlike Dea, the Duchess can actually see Gwynplaine's deformity, and is attracted to him anyway. (He is unaware of the fact that the Duchess is attracted to every man in the kingdom.) Gwynplaine agrees to meet with the Duchess in her room, but at the last minute, decides he loves Dea too much to go through with making love to the Duchess. Unfortunately for all concerned, it is at this very moment that Gwynplaine's true heritage -- he turns out to be the rightful heir to the wealth that the Duchess currently enjoys -- is revealed, thrusting Gwynplaine into a mess of royal intrigue.

I haven't seen Conrad Veidt in that many things. I really only know him as Cesare the Somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and as the head Nazi officer in Casablanca, and while he delivered adequate performances in both films, I'd hardly describe either role as especially challenging. But his performance in The Man who Laughs is a revelation. He exhibits a full range of emotion -- some of those emotions quite complex -- throughout the film, and while that may seem like faint praise -- it is, after all, an actor's job -- keep in mind that he does all of this without the use of either his voice or even half of his face! After all, this is a silent film, and he can't move his face because the plot requires the character to be permanently stuck in that creepy grin. Yet Veidt illustrates fear, joy, sorrow, and countless other emotions, often mixed in various combinations, with little more than his eyes alone. I refuse to devalue my praise for his performance by allowing any consideration that I am merely projecting my own interpretation onto him because of narrative context. This is a performance that has to be seen to be believed.

One quibble, not about Veidt's performance, but about the movie itself: Through no fault of the makers of this masterpiece, it is obviously dated. This is most evident in the form of the animal character, Homo the Wolf -- a name laughable not only because of what the word "homo" has come to mean (I dare you to not laugh when, during a dramatic moment, Dea says, "where are you leading me, Homo?") but also because this "wolf" is clearly played by a common household dog that doesn't resemble a wolf in any way.

One final note: This movie is just dripping with sexuality. It's not uncommon for movies to use sexuality to contrast the devious "bad girl" with the purity of the "good girl," but in this pre-Code flick, the Duchess is one sensuous figure. Now, some know-it-alls who are familiar with the term "pre-Code" know that it refers to a time when Hollywood didn't yet have any form of censorship, and so they might feel like launching into a lecture along the lines of "oh, pre-Code, well, what do you expect?" But the fact of the matter is, even pre-Code films -- at least those in the mainstream, like The Man who Laughs -- were generally prudish compared to films of our time. Their version of "scandalous" sexuality meant scantily clad women, and talk of sexual activity. Well, friends and neighbors, the Duchess -- played by the very attractive Olga Baklanova -- does a lot more than talk, and wears a lot less than scanties. There is a bathing scene in which she appears in all her glory, and even if the shot is from behind, it's still a shock to see in a movie from that era. But it's really the explicit depiction of the Duchess's behavior which made my jaw drop, simply because it seemed wildly out of place for a 1920s movie (and yet perfectly right for the character). We see her allow men to fondle her breasts (over her clothing, but still, this is something that would never be seen in the days of, say, Clark Gable) and at one point, she gleefully gives the villain a peek up her dress (we don't see it ourselves, but it's been established that she's not wearing any underwear) in exchange for information. Yes, she has an ulterior motive, but she's clearly enjoying herself! Now, I'm not reporting all of this because I'm a horn-dog, or to complain, or to prudishly "warn" you about the sexuality, but at the risk of repeating myself, it's just so unexpected for a movie from this era, that it simply must be addressed.

That being said, sexuality aside (or maybe not putting the sexuality aside) The Man who Laughs is a very good movie. It boasts an interesting storyline, excellent performances, and atmospheric direction -- and deserves to be remembered as more than the answer to a trivia question.

retro movie review: The Karate Kid, Part III

2011-03-25T02:24:00.000-07:00

Back when it was released in 1989, nobody seemed to like The Karate Kid, Part III. Critics alternately panned it or dismissed it outright, few people actually went to see it, those who did mostly complained about it, and even the screenwriter, who had also written the first two installments, was so frustrated by it that he swore he would never write another Karate Kid movie again. Add it all up, and you don't get a very promising legacy.

But you know what? I recently watched the movie for the first time, and I actually enjoyed it. It's true to both the characters and the tone of the first Karate Kid movie, which is rightfully considered a modern classic. After watching The Karate Kid, Part III, I tend to feel that most complaints against it are based more on knee-jerk reactions to sequels, than to the quality of the film itself.

After the opening credits sequence provides us with a brief recap of some of the events in the first two films, the movie opens with an extended sequence involving John Kreese (very well played by Martin Kove), the villainous dojo master from the first film. The humiliating loss to an unknown in last year's karate tournament has ruined Kreese's business, and he is now broke, depressed, humiliated, and lonely -- in short, a completely defeated man. This early sequence is very interesting to watch, as it makes us sympathize with a villain from the previous entries in the series. We realize that this is a man who has his own dreams, disappointments, and friendships. He becomes -- albeit briefly -- a truly three-dimensional character. In cinema, such a sympathetic portrayal of a villain is rare and thus very interesting, from a viewer's standpoint.

The story is set in motion when we learn that Kreese is not the owner of the Cobra Kai dojo, as we were led to believe in the first film; the actual owner is his best friend, a duplicitous but charming karate master and millionaire named Terry Silver. Silver refuses to hear of Kreese's plans to leave town with his tail between his legs, and the two manage to convince each other that Kreese owes all of his current woes to our heroes, Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and Mr. Miyagi (Noriyuki "Pat" Morita). They hatch a revenge scheme that partially depends on hiring a small group of thugs to terrorize Daniel, Miyagi, and Daniel's new girlfriend, Jess (Robyn Lively).

Now, I emphasize the word "partially" because too many people latched onto this aspect of the plot, to falsely accuse The Karate Kid, Part III of being a carbon copy of the first film. Yes, it's true that both movies involve a group of bullies using karate as a constant physical threat to Daniel and his friends. But aside from the climax, which again takes place at a tournament where Daniel must face unethical opponents, that's really where the similarities in plot end.

Anyway, back to the story: The thugs start to beat on Daniel on a fairly regular basis, and also do everything they can to hinder Daniel and Miyagi's attempts to open a bonsai tree store. Ostensibly, the thugs' motivation is that they want to bully Daniel into entering the next karate tournament, so that one of them, "Bad Boy" Mike Barnes, can win the title from Daniel, who was last year's champion. Daniel has no way of knowing that it's all part of an elaborate scheme orchestrated by Terry Silver, who enters the picture pretending to be a fan and new friend of Daniel's. When Mr. Miyagi's refuses to train Daniel for the tournament (more on this in a moment), Silver offers his own services as trainer, free of charge. Of course, Silver's "let me help" attitude is all an act, and his training program for Daniel is secretly designed to bruise Daniel's body and spirit until he is incapable of properly defending himself at the tournament.

Much that has been written about this movie has focused on the alleged rift that develops between Daniel and Miyagi when Mr. Miyagi refuses to train Daniel for the tournament. That's a very, very misleading assessment of the storyline, for two reasons. For one thing, the story is more focused on Terry Silver's schemes than on any conflict between Daniel and Miyagi. More to the point, any claim that such a conflict even exists is simply inaccurate; yes, Daniel and Miyagi repeatedly argue over Mr. Miyagi's refusal to endorse Daniel's entry into the tournament, but their friendship never suffers from the disagreement. They still go out of their way to care for each other, further developing their unique relationship which is one half friendship and one half paternal in nature. Anyone who has avoided this film due to rumors that it depicts a rift in the friendship that was so central to the first two films needn't worry.

I do have a couple of nitpicks, and one involves Mr. Miyagi's refusal to train Daniel for the tournament. Yeah, I know I said it was relatively unimportant to the storyline, and that's true, but I still have a problem buying it as a subplot. At first, Mr. Miyagi's decision is understandable, and consistent with character, as Daniel initially wants to enter the tournament just to defend his title, and Mr. Miyagi says, "karate for honor, karate for self defense, karate not for winning championship." But after the bad guys make it clear that they will continue to harass Daniel and Miyagi until Daniel enters the tournament, Mr. Miyagi's mantra stops making sense. Is he really so blind that he cannot see the necessity for Daniel to fight? No, he eventually admits that Daniel has no choice, but then, he ridiculously still refuses to help Daniel train, and it becomes clear that writer Robert Mark Kamen just needed an excuse to get Mr. Miyagi out of the way, so he could set up the subplot about Terry Silver offering to become Daniel's trainer. The writing is just a little too transparent here.

My other nitpick involves a scene in which Kreese and Silver are plotting against Daniel. "Make his knuckles bleed," Kreese instructs, bitterly remembering the humiliation and pain he suffered when he injured his own knuckles while attacking Mr. Miyagi in the beginning of The Karate Kid, Part 2. In the context of the story, it's a powerful line, well delivered by Martin Kove, and emphasizing the pettiness behind the villain's motivations. Good way to end a scene! But then, bafflingly, the writers let the scene continue: "I like that, Johnny!" Terry Silver says, laughing hysterically. "I'm gonna use that!" Now, what, in God's name, were they thinking when they added that last part? It's bad enough that they used a completely pointless bit of dialogue to ruin the carefully constructed tone built during Kove's powerful moment. But Silver's laughter isn't even appropriate for the scene. It's not manic laughter, or realistic laughter, or even sadistic laughter, any of which might have worked. Instead, he laughs like a dork. "Good one, Johnny!" Yeah, it was a good line, until you ruined it. Yes, this is a small complaint, but it bothered me that the scene was ruined so pointlessly.

All in all, however, The Karate Kid, Part III is a better movie than you've probably heard. The dialogue is naturalistic as can be in this type of genre, the characters are believable and effective (hissable villains, likable good guys), the fight scenes are realistic, and the performances range from good to excellent. If you liked the first movie, you'll like this one too.

Muppet Review 2: The Great Muppet Caper

2011-03-21T03:05:00.000-07:00

A while back, I wrote a blog entry praising the virtues of the Sesame Street movie, Follow That Bird, so it should be no shock to anyone -- especially anyone who has known me for a long time -- that I love The Great Muppet Caper. When I was a kid, I loved it because it featured my beloved Muppets, whom, without exaggeration, I considered a second family when I was young. Now that I'm an adult, I admire it for an entirely different reason, a reason that almost contradicts the first: In a way, this isn't really a Muppet movie at all.

Now, I know that may seem preposterous -- the Muppets are, after all, the stars of this movie, and take center stage in nearly every scene -- but hear me out. This movie may have been written with the Muppets in mind, but watching it tonight, I realized that it would take very, very little rewriting to plug in human stars instead of the felt guys. Oh, sure, some of the jokes are too character specific to apply to anyone but the Muppets -- Animal's still got a crazy appetite, frog and bear jokes abound, and so on -- but most of the dialogue, both comical and serious, could be taken verbatim and put into human actor's mouths, with equal effect. The comedy is an effective mixture of styles -- absurdist humor, clever word-play, sharp observation, and an occasional breaking of the fourth wall all vie for dominance in the screenplay's arsenal. But despite the Muppet reputation for wackiness, the script never devolves into Naked Gun level silliness.

The plot is equally sophistocated. Fozzie Bear (Frank Oz) and Kermit the Frog (Jim Henson) play two New York City newspaper reporters who are also brothers (the fact that they look nothing alike, and are even different species, is hilariously both acknowledged and dismissed as irrelevant to their claim to be identical twins). Together with their photographer (Gonzo the Great), Fozzie and Kermit are fired by their editor after they distract themselves with a mundane story and fail to notice a high-profile jewel robbery across the street. Determined to get their jobs back, the trio decide to journey to London, to interview the victim of the crime, famous fashion designer Lady Holiday (Diana Rigg). Enter Miss Piggy (also played by Frank Oz), as an American immigrant determined to become a model for Lady Holiday. Holiday instead hires Piggy as a receptionist, but when Kermit mistakes Piggy for Holiday herself, Piggy falls in love at first sight and goes to great lengths to make him continue thinking she is the famous fashion designer. A romance develops, complicated by the fact that Piggy is lying about her identity, and has to avoid Kermit's constant questions about a jewel robbery she knows nothing about.

Meanwhile, Holiday's ne'er-do-well brother Nicky (Charles Grodin, in his best performance) falls in love with Piggy, forming a love triangle that is exacerbated by the fact that Kermit knows that Nicky is actually the leader of the jewel thieves that are repeatedly targeting Lady Holiday.

Take away the bear and pig jokes, and this is the kind of old-fashioned mixture of adventure and farce that could have starred Astaire & Rogers instead of Kermit & Piggy.

Now, on a personal note, it's no secret that my desire to master puppetry was the reason that I first got interested in becoming involved in the world of entertainment. But what I never realized until tonight is that I actually learned how to write dialogue by listening to the Muppets. This self-revelation came during a scene in which Fozzie, Gonzo, and Kermit talk at cross-purposes, simultaneously discussing Miss Piggy's possible culpability in the jewel heists, trying to solve the identity of the other thieves, and engaging in small talk. The conversation's humor, and even its cadence, sounded suspiciously familiar to me, and I soon realized that this was not only because I had seen the movie many times before; what I was recognizing was a dialogue style remarkably similar to my own, when I'm at my best. So I guess I owe the Muppets more than just countless hours of entertainment. They really have helped make me who I am today.

16 Random Oscar Thoughts From the Movie Man

2011-02-27T21:01:00.000-08:00

1. Anne Hathaway and James Franco? Really?

2. I'm glad they're sticking with the tradition of using clever editing to put the hosts into clips from the Best Picutre nominees (and Back to the Future for some reason?) and I enjoyed Alec Baldwin's and Morgan Freeman's cameos; I think Freeman gets the "good sport" award, and I laughed at the "funny because it's true" line about his ubiquitous narration because of his "soothing voice." But I gotta be honest, Franco and Hathaway are not winning me over here. Billy Crystal did it better. Sorry to sound petty, but he did.

3. I have mixed feelings about Kirk Douglas's presentation for Best Supporting Actress. He's an icon, and I'm glad to see him. But he is hard to understand, the poor guy. Despite, this, he displays some old-school charm. So yeah, frustraing and charming at the same time. I know some people have already posted their annoyance at his comical delaying the announcement of the winner, but I enjoyed it. Not so much when Justin Timberlake goofs on it. I am not a Timberlake hater, as so many people are, but he really bombed tonight.

4. I haven't seen The Fighter yet, but I've been a fan of Melissa Leo since Homicide: Life on the Street, so good for you, Melissa! I think her speech is not great, but enjoyable for its sincerity.

5. Yay, Aaron Sorkin! If I am a fan of Melissa Leo, I'm a super-fan of Aaron Sorkin. Everything the guy touches turns to gold, in my opinion, and The Social Network is no exception. Bottom line, the guy deserves the award.

6. Matthew McConaughey and Scarlett Johansson present sound mixing, and their "banter" about the sound of the word "sound" is performed and written so poorly, I'm pretty sure that untalented second-graders could have done a better job.

7. Dave Elsey's comment that "It was always my ambition to lose an Oscar one day to Rick Baker," will probably strike many people as false show-biz modesty, but Baker is so extremely accomplished in his field, I think there might be an element of truth to Elsey's comment.

8. President Barack Obama makes an appearance, giving Republicans an enormous amount of glee that they can go back to the ol' "hasn't he got anything better to do" complaint. Let's be honest, Republicans, you smiled with joy when you saw that.

9. Luke Matheny's joke about getting a haircut gets a surprisingly huge laugh. Is there an "inside" element to that joke that I'm not getting, because to me, it was just a very mildly amusing crack about his hair-style, but the audience loves it. Weird.

10. Billy Crystal at the Oscars -- usually a winner. But I bet his joke about prematurely announcing the Best Picture is just going to confuse some people. His tribute to Bob Hope is touching, and I think that whoever imitated Hope's voice (Dave Thomas?) to introduce the next presenters is shockingly perfect.

11. Jude Law and Robert Downey, Jr. -- especially Downey's effortless naturalism -- illustrate that even the cheesy dialogue of an Oscarcast can be entertaining, if you deliver it with style.

12. Randy Newman won for Best Song. Not his best effort, so I'm not sure he deserves it. At this point, I feel that his award is more for his body of work than for this particular song. As a loyal Newman fan, I don't care. Anyway, his acceptance speech isn't laugh-out-loud funny, but still the most entertaining speech of the evening. Every line is a winner. Newman's speech easily trumps the writing for the rest of the telecast.

13. Say what you will about Celine Dion -- I know she never recovered from the enormous backlash caused by the annoying omnipresence of "My Heart Will Go On" -- but you have to admit, she really has a beautiful singing voice.

14. Lena Horne -- I know she's a legendary performer, but to me, she will always be associated with Sesame Street. Then I found out on IMDb that she hasn't been on Sesame Street since 1980, when I was five years old. Now I'm busy being impressed by my own memory, and I forget to pay attention to the rest of the Lena Horne tribute.

15. Kathryn Bigelow -- wow, she could have been a model if she hadn't become a director. She looks amazing and exudes sexuality.

16. I have to say that, in my humble opinion (I refuse to use the obnoxious acronym) advertisers have done a terrible job with The King's Speech. Yes, it's done well at the box office, but I make my claim based on the fact that countless advertisements have made the film look boring to me, but the clips from the Oscars really make me want to see the movie. The Weinstein Company should have hired the makers of this Oscar telecast to advertise the movie, and I would have seen it by now.

"Kick-Ass" is Awful Entertainment

2011-02-27T06:09:00.000-08:00

Kick-Ass is the most disturbing, unpleasant movie ever passed off as mainstream entertainment. The fact that children -- including a very young actress/ character -- should be at the center of so much graphic violence and people think it's "empowering" because she gives as good as she gets . . . I am actually offended that more people aren't sickened by this movie. Okay, so different people have different opinions, that's fine, if you like it, I am not attacking you personally, because everyone's entitled to an opinion, but the fact that no one else seems to have a problem with any of this?

Don't tell me I'm taking it too seriously. I can take it and even enjoy it when Jason Voorhees hacks up irresponsible teens and John McClane blows up nameless thugs. I understand that cinematic violence is not the same as real violence. And lord knows I have a sense of humor, it is one of my most prominent traits, for crying out loud, I'm the Funny Guy. But this movie's violence is not played for laughs, it is played for impact. There are brutal beatings in this movie, brutal. People are shot, stabbed, hit by cars, and set on fire (we later see his face with his lips burned off) and this is just what happens to the good guys! This is not a comedy. Or if it is, it is a very sick one, and I don't mean that in a good way. When people start laughing at a movie in which a father/daughter bonding scene involves him shooting a pre-preteen girl in the chest and it's "okay" because she's wearing a vest -- and she is later featured in the bloody, graphic, knock-down, drag-out fight scene with the villain -- I think our society's indoctrination against cinematic violence has gone too far.

Anyone who has access to my Facebook page should already know two things about me, one that I'm the Movie Man, and I understand the difference between cinematic violence and real violence, and two, that I have and I'm even often defined by my sense of humor. So I say again, don't tell me that I am taking this movie too seriously. And at the risk of repeating myself even further, I do not take issue with any one person who enjoyed this movie, but I do take issue with the fact that seemingly no one else is offended by it. This movie is not empowering or funny as some would have you believe. It is an excercise in sadism.

"The Great Dictator" is a Great Film.

2011-02-24T02:24:00.000-08:00

I don't use that word lightly. In this blog, I've reviewed movies that were good, bad, terrible, and freakin' cool. But The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin's satire of the contemporaneous Nazi Germany, is a great film, just in the same sense that George Washington was a great man. Alternately hilarious, poignant, and terrifying, the movie is not flawless by any means, but its greatness partially stems from the fact that even many of its flaws work out in the film's favor.

The Great Dictator tells the story of an unnamed German war hero, identified only by his civilian identity, as "a Jewish Barber." After delivering some typically Chaplinesque slapstick on the front lines in the opening scene, the Barber displays heroism during the final battle of World War I, only to be injured in a plane crash. He falls into a coma, and wakes up during the height of Jewish persecution under Nazi Germany. It's a crueler, darker twist on the old Rip van Winkle tale, one in which the Barber has to learn the hard way that life has become very unkind to Jews in Germany.

As the Barber, Charlie Chaplin (who also directed, produced, wrote, and helped score the film) plays the role as a very slight variation of his trademark "Little Tramp" character. The Great Dictator apparently sparked a (still on-going) debate about whether the Jewish Barber and the Little Tramp should be considered the same character, but aside from the fact that the Tramp was a silent-film character and the Barber speaks, the two characters are clearly one and the same. It's not enough to say that the Barber is a "thinly-disguised" version of the Tramp; there really is no disguise at all.

Similarly, the fictional names Chaplin gives to the film's real-life characters are clearly not intended to disguise who they really are. In addition to the Barber, Chaplin plays Tomanian Phooey Adenoid Hynkel (German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler), who has a rivalrous alliance with Bacterian dictator Benzino Napaloni (Italian dictator Bentio Mussolini). The parallels are so clearly meant to be drawn that one almost wonders why Chaplin bothered to come up with false names.

This was a subject so important to Chaplin that it marks the end of his long-standing one-man boycott against the end of the silent era; the characters speak with great purpose of character, from the Barber's humble eloquence, to Hynkel's pitch-perfect parody of Hitler's oratory style, to Jack Oakie's fearlessly broad, scene-stealing performance as Napaloni, which caricatures Italians beyond offensiveness, and takes the caricature straight into the realm of innocent playfulness.

I said that this film is not flawless, and I meant it. Some of the dialogue is preachy, some of the plot developments, too-obviously contrived. But we forgive these flaws, because we sense a heart at their center. One of the most interesting flaws is that some of the comedy just doesn't work, to the point that I suspect that Chaplin was kind of hoping that it wouldn't always generate laughs. For example, one scene makes a far too hasty transition from dramatic suspense to comic slapstick, as two storm troopers harass the hapless, innocent Barber, and the brief fight sequence is abruptly ended, when a a woman conks all three of them over the head with a frying pan. This causes the Barber to dance deliriously about the street in a "comical" daze. It's a very Chaplinesque dance, but this time, it's not funny, because every window in the background is emblazoned with the word "JEW," just as windows were in real German-Jewish ghettos. I submit that Chaplin's clowning isn't supposed to make us laugh here; we're supposed to be distracted by the storm troopers' hateful graffiti in the background. Those postings identifying merchants and residents as Jews serve as an ever-present reminder that the Barber and his fellow Jews live in a constant state of peril, and at the mercy of Hynkel and his brutish storm trooper thugs.

How quickly we forget, but when Schindler's List, which also dealt so disturbingly with the Nazi regime, came out in 1993, it wasn't just a movie. It was, without exaggeration, a cultural phenomenon. Lines were around the block, high schools sponsored class trips to screenings, and theaters forfeited profit by refusing to sell snacks to audiences, out of respect for the film. The Great Dictator is every bit as important a film as Schindler's List. But at least The Great Dictator is fun to watch.

My Open Letter to Craig's List Personals

2011-02-16T14:48:00.000-08:00

FOR ALL YOU LADIES WHO USE CRAIG’S LIST PERSONALS

If this seems familiar, it’s because I’ve already posted a variation of this once. But much of it apparently bears repeating, and some of it has been revised to reflect recent experience. Yes, I wrote this from my own personal perspective, but trust me, I speak for many guys out there.

1. DON’T ASSUME ONE OR TWO DATES AUTOMATICALLY EQUALS A “RELATIONSHIP.” I hope we will end up liking each other enough for a relationship to develop. That’s the goal for both of us, right? But let’s be realistic. Even if we like each other and things seem to be going well, if we’ve had only one or two dates, it’s not a relationship yet. I’m not required to tell you where I was Friday night. If I haven’t mentioned I have a sister in Spain, I haven’t been keeping a “secret.” I’ll try to be as upfront as possible, but just because you don’t know every detail of my life doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve been “lying” to you.

2. IF ALL YOU WANT IS SEX. . . there are countless, and I do mean countless, guys for you, on Craig’s List and just in general. A surprising number of these men are upfront about this. Don’t assume I’m one of these men if I’ve given you no such indication. Believe it or not, some of us guys really do want a woman and not just a woman’s body. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got sexual urges as much as the next guy, and if the date/ relationship is going well, maybe we’ll get lucky in every sense of the phrase. But I’m more than just a penis, and if all you want to talk about is the size of my organ, and whether you spit or swallow, guess what, you’ve just turned me off, big time. It’s worth repeating: If this is all you care about, there are more than enough men willing to accommodate you, and they won’t be hard to find.

3. LEAVE YOUR MAN-HATING BITTERNESS AT HOME. This can’t be stressed enough. First of all, I’m hardly the right target audience for a lecture on how all men are the same. You won’t get any sympathy from me, because I’ll just wonder why you’ve put up with so many bastards and then saved up your anger for the well-meaning me. Second, if you approach a date with the attitude that all men are jerks/ liars/ out for only one thing/ afraid of commitment/ whatever, that’s not fair to me, and you’re setting us both up for failure. Why not get to know me first before assuming that all men are alike, and I’m just one of Them? I understand you may have been hurt in the past, I’ve been hurt too. I don’t open a conversation with “all women are evil.” Please return the courtesy.

4. READ THE AD I POSTED. Don’t ask me to meet you for lunch by Space Mountain if my ad says I live in Connecticut. If my ad says SWM, don’t start a correspondence and then tell me you date only black guys. And don’t ask me my age if my ad already says “34-yr-old.” I typed this stuff out for a reason. Why waste my time and yours by responding to an ad you didn’t even read first? And speaking of wasting time. . .

5. . . . STRINGING A GUY ALONG IS TOTALLY UNCOOL. I don’t care what your reason is. Maybe you’d like to meet but you’re too shy to take that first step, or maybe you think it’s funny to test how many times I’ll answer your emails when you secretly know I don’t have a chance in hell. Or maybe you’re just so “nice” that you don’t have the heart to admit you’re uninterested. (If this last one is the case, trust me, I have infinitely more respect for women who say “I don’t think it’s gonna work out, but good luck in your search.” Yeah, it’s as impersonal as a job interview, but at least it’s direct and honest.) No matter how cruel or well-intentioned your motivation may be, sending lots of emails that say “yeah let’s get together!” is, frankly, a disgusting thing to do if you know you’ll never really agree to any set plans. Ending a date with some variation of “we should do this again some time!” when you really have no intention of doing so – just because it seems the right thing to say at the time – is even worse. If the guy is into you, he’s going to keep calling and emailing until he “gets the point,” which will only annoy you and make him feel like a loser when he finally realizes you haven’t meant a word you said. Maybe you’ve broken a heart, or maybe he’ll just curse you out to his friends and then forget about it. Either way, not funny, not practical, and totally not cool.

Some of you women may find this ad to be insulting or maybe even unintentionally hilarious. Fine. If none of this applies to you – even better. I’m just trying to inject some should-be common sense into a process that has been far more insane than it has any right to be. Follow these simple rules, and you’ll save a lot of heartache on both sides.

movie review: Punch-Drunk Love

2011-02-13T14:06:00.000-08:00

Punch-Drunk Love is a fascinating film, full of contradiction and nuance. Because the star is Adam Sandler, and his character is not unlike many other Sandler characters, it is very much an Adam Sandler movie, yet at the same time, it very much isn't -- filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, a master at creating and developing interesting, three-dimensional characters, has taken the Sandler persona, and used this script to delve into the character's psyche. We are not spoon-fed any Freudian explanations, but we sense, through Sandler's interactions with his employees, sisters, and acquaintances, how he came to be the way he is, and with our understanding, comes empathy. Roger Ebert, by no means a Sandler fan, felt that Punch-Drunk Love was the key to understanding and even appreciating Sandler's other films, and while I think that evaluation goes too far, I can at least see where Mr. Ebert is coming from when he makes that statement.

As Barry Egan, the central character of the film, Sandler portrays a character whose moments of rage and violence (never directed at a human being except in self-defense, by the way) punctuate a gentle and kind soul. The character has similarities, both in detail and theme, to Sandler's character in Anger Management, although that film goes for laughs while this film goes for poignancy. The two movies would make an interesting double bill for film students.

Punch-Drunk Love doesn't show us much of Barry's life outside of the central narrative, but it shows -- or sometimes just hints at -- just enough of it for us to understand that he is a lonely, shy, well-meaning young man. If he has problems with anger or depression, it is only because his constant attempts to please people -- even people who clearly don't deserve it -- are too often unappreciated, and if he has problems with honesty, it's only because he needs to learn to like and trust himself more than he does. The dishonesty he sometimes exhibits, sometimes for seemingly very little reason, aren't intended as hurtful or self-serving, but as a mask to hide behind. Watching this movie, I wanted him to realize that he doesn't need the mask, to learn that his love interest, played effectively by Emily Watson, is attracted to him not despite the glimpses of Barry's true self, but because of them.

Narratively, this movie is a conundrum, because it tells the simultaneous stories of how Barry's life -- so completely rooted in mundanity and routine -- begins to both completely fall apart, and yet, simultaneously, finally start to come together. You get the sense that if he can manage to survive the series of misadventures that happenstance throws his way, he will emerge a better, stronger person. Only a character like Barry -- written by a screenwriter with imagination, love, and wit -- can get away with not only saying "I'm a nice guy" as he's preparing to beat the s*** out of someone, but also making us believe it. Note that I'm not just saying that we believe his sincerity, I'm saying that we agree with him. Barry is a indeed a nice guy who has been pushed too far.

Now, you may have read this far, and find yourself asking, "yes, all of this sounds good, but you still haven't told us anything about what actually happens in the movie!" And my response, not out of laziness, is that if you want to know what actually happens, there are other places online to find out plot points. In my mind, Punch-Drunk Love is not about plot detail, it's about character, style, and tone. The character of Barry Egan is so fully fleshed out that the incidents that happen to him are just that -- incidental. Writer P.T. Anderson probably could have chosen any number of alternate misadventures for Barry, but his grasp of the character is so strong, the results probably would have been just as good. So yes, I'm being vague. I don't want to ruin the sense of discovery you'll enjoy while watching this movie. The vagueness (if that's even a word) of this review is somehow fitting for the film, and all I can say is that you have to trust me. Trust my recommendation. This is one movie so beautiful, so smart, that it deserves your leap of faith.

*Note: I wish I could end on that positive note, but one final comment, however parenthetical, must be made. Jon Brion is credited as the film's composer, a credit which does disservice to the late, great songwriter Harry Nilsson, whose love song "He Needs Me" (originally from the musical Popeye) is at the heart of the film score. Yes, Nilsson receives a standard song-writing credit , during the song listing that is standard toward the end of the closing titles, but come on. Nearly the entire score of this film is based on the tune of "He Needs Me," which, in my mind, warrants a co-composing credit for Nilsson. I mean, Brion deserves praise for taking a single song and using it to musically illustrate an entire motion picture, but giving him sole credit is like giving Kenneth Branagh sole credit for writing Hamlet without even mentioning Shakespeare except for fine print buried within the closing titles. Alright. Now that we've got that straigtened out, go watch the movie!

retro movie review: A Countess From Hong Kong

2011-01-20T23:38:00.001-08:00

A Countess From Hong Kong is a movie made by people who didn't know what they were doing. And by that, I'm not referring to general incompetence (this review will make the filmmakers sound incompetent, but considering their stellar work before and after this movie, that would be a hard case to make) but I am saying that people making this film didn't seem to understand what genre they were working in.

Before I get into exactly how this movie missteps, let me provide a quick overview: Marlon Brando -- not the old, mumbling Brando, but the young, sex-symbol Brando -- stars as Ogden Mears, a rising star in the United States Foreign Service. Ogden's combination of youth and prestige within the foreign service makes him an international media sensation, and as the movie opens, there is talk of him being appointed Secretary of State, although he quickly learns that that lofty position has instead been given to a rival, and Ogden is instead given the consolation appointment as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Ogden sets out on a cruise ship from Hong Kong (where he has been vacationing) to the U.S., to formally accept his new position. However, his first morning at sea brings shock when he wakes up next to Natascha (Sophia Loren), a Russian countess and expatriate he has no memory of, thanks to a wild party the night before. Natascha is a stow-away, determined to make the trip to America, and although Ogden's initial impulse is to report her to the captain, his hands are tied, as he is a married man with a career and possible scandal to think about, while she is a beautiful, scantily clad woman who stowed away in the young diplomat's room.

Natascha and Ogden scheme to keep Natascha hidden in his room, but this proves complicated, as various members of his staff, the press, and the ship's crew keep finding reasons to enter Ogden's suite at the most inopportune times. The result is a lot of confusion, deception, improvised excuses, quick costume changes, and people ducking behind furniture and slamming doors, as everything gets further complicated by the fact that characters seem to fall in and out of love and lust at the drop of a hat.

What we have here is a fairly standard bedroom farce, and all of the material needed to make it a good bedroom farce is clearly present on the screenplay level. I wish that was enough to make it a good movie, but to praise this film because of its screenplay is like praising a condemned building because its blueprints were drawn well -- all of the potential for a well-constructed product may be there, but the result is still a wreck.

I took notes while watching this movie -- already a bad sign, since it means I wasn't too busy sitting back and enjoying what was playing out on the screen. The first note I made concerned the pacing. This is a story and a script which doesn't just require, but desperately cries out for madcap slapstick and rapid-fire delivery. Comedy often requires a fast pace, and farce demands it outright. Yet with A Countess From Hong Kong, every actor speaks with patient deliberation, and every shot lingers for a few beats too long -- just long enough to kill the comic potential in every scene.

Speaking of actors, this cast simply has no winners (with one very small exception I'll get to in a minute). The performances aren't bad as far as acting goes, so much as they are simply inappropriate for the genre; everybody in the whole movie makes the same mistake, delivering their lines with quiet earnestness when the dialogue so very clearly requires desperation and confusion. Marlon Brando is particularly miscast, providing an all-too serious interpretation of what should have been a funny character.

This is the movie that has finally convinced me that my friend Laurie is right about comedy necessarily stemming from frustration rather than anger. (Laurie insists that she got this theory from Norman Lear, but when I asked Norman Lear, he says he got the theory from Laurie.) Brando plays many of his scenes in this movie not with increasing frustration, which could have been hilarious, but rather with an undercurrent of intense, near-to-boiling-over fury. This was a trademark acting style for Brando, and in drama, it works wonders. In comedy, it completely destroys any attempt at light-heartedness. There is a scene, for example, in which Ogden finds Natascha wearing his pajamas without his permission, and he demands that she remove them immediately or he will take them off for her. The attempted humor to the scene -- the writer's intention is so clear, that it's a shame it doesn't play out as planned -- is that Ogden's frustration level is so through the roof that he doesn't realize the inevitable, sexual implications behind his demand that Natascha immediately remove her clothing. It occurs to Natscha, though, whose teasing comments go right over Ogden's head as he chases her about the room in an attempt to rip the clothing from her.

Had Brando played this scene with comical frustration, the result would have been a delightful mixture of eroticism and slapstick. But with Brando's barely contained rage, Ogden' doesn't come off as an oblivious innocent, but as a disturbed, possibly dangerous man. The extent to which Brando's choice is so wrong for this scene is exacerbated by the fact that Sophia Loren seems to understand the intent behind the humor, and has fun with it. The result is a really odd mismatch of stylistic interpretations of the same scene; on the one hand, you have Loren gaily laughing and cavorting about the room, and then you have Brando, who looks like he's going to tear her head off if he ever catches her.

I understand that Brando did a good job in the farce Guys and Dolls, but in A Countess From Hong Kong, he is simply dead wrong as the comic leading man. Plug Sid Caesar or Dick van Dyke into this role, and you probably would have had something. But Brando? What comically-challenged idiot thought to cast Marlon Brando as the leading man in what should have been a wacky comedy?

The answer to that question is what's weird about this movie failing so completely, because it was directed, produced, and written by none other than Charlie Chaplin, one of the greatest comedy minds of his or any other generation. It's hard, even mind-blowing, to reconcile Chaplin's genius with his complete bungling of this movie. And yet Chaplin is responsible not only for the miscasting of Brando in the lead role -- a terrible choice that is hard to fathom -- but also for the incompetently drawn-out pace that kills so much of -- in fact, all of -- whatever comic potential remains.

I earlier mentioned that there was one small exception in this cast, and that is Chaplin himself, who has two very brief scenes as a porter. An old man at this point in his career, Chaplin gave himself very, very little to do in his scenes, which amount to nothing more than an unimportant cameo. But if you watch the movie, note how his energy and positivity give each scene a small boost. It's not nearly enough to make up for everything else that goes wrong in every scene, but it's a small something. It proves that, at least on a performer's level, Chaplin understood what was needed for the movie. That's precisely what makes such a mystery out of his complete failure to turn this potentially fun farce into anything other than a dull disappointment.

movie review: The Last Exorcism

2011-01-08T06:37:00.001-08:00

The Last Exorcism is a horror film that is more intriguing than scary. It works in some ways and not others, but even when it fails, it often at least fails in an interesting way. I'd like to break the discussion down into several aspects of the film; skip the first paragraph only if you're hyper, hyper sensitive to spoilers, as I don't give anything important away, but I do discuss the ending in vague generalities.

The Ending -- I promised to speak in vague generalities to avoid giving anything away, so here goes. The way I see it, there are only three major types of twist endings a movie can have. There's the mind-blowing twist that forces you to reconsider significance of everying that has preceeded it (think The Usual Suspects, or almost anything written by M. Night Shyamalan), the "what a gyp!" twist that forces you to dismiss the significance of everything that has preceeded it (think "it was all just a dream!"), and, last and certainly least, the "huh, what?" twist that confuses everyone and explains nothing. Sadly, the ending to this film falls squarely in that latter category.

The Format -- The Last Exorcism is yet another faux-documentary style horror film. The concept, once both effective and intriguing, is now getting old and dated, as I've already explained in detail in my previous blog entry, "It Would be Scarier if I Actually Believed It" (and here's the link, if you're curious: http://moremoviemanmusings.blogspot.com/2010/06/it-would-be-scarier-if-i-actually.html). If you're not interested in reading another whole blog entry, the gist of my earlier entry was that the concept depends too heavily on convincing the viewer that the events in the film actually happened, that you're watching actual footage. The Blair Witch Project, for example, was a lot scarier for those who thought they were really watching the final, mysterious, terrifying days of three filmmakers lost in the woods. For many people who knew it was a hoax, it was downright laughable.

By now, even most otherwise guillible viewers are wise to the faux-documentary style. The Blair Witch Project inspired widespread speculation about its authenticity as a documentary. I doubt many people will speculate that The Last Exorcism is genuine. There are even stretches of the film when the camera work and editing are too Hollywood-smooth to be mistaken for an actual documentary, as if the filmmakers knew that the viewers wouldn't fall for the charade on any level, and so occasionally abandon the format they've established, hoping that we're so caught up in the narrative that we don't notice the obvious lack of spontanaeity. For all I know, this was the best way to tell this particular tale (it certainly provides an easy excuse for a lot of exposition). I would be really interested to ask the filmmakers why they chose this format.

The Scares -- Didn't really work for me. This is coming from someone who thinks The Exorcist and The Exorcism of Emily Rose are two of the most frightening films ever made, but the bottom line is that the exorcism itself, and the girl who is possessed, aren't really the most interesting aspects of the film, although they're clearly meant to be. We know that the girl is going to be alternately sweet and cruel, helpless and violent, both victim and villain. We know she will speak in strange voices, sometimes in laguages that (other characters will gasp) she couldn't possibly know, and when the possession reaches its height, she will contort her body horrifically and even exhibit telekinetic powers. This is less a formula than a checklist, and without adding anything new to the mix, the possession in The Last Exorcism simply lacks intrigue.

On the other hand, just as this film would be a lot more effective on novices to the overused format, it might be terrifying for someone who is unfamiliar to exorcism/possession films.

The Supporting Characters -- There are a few supporting characters, but the two most prevalent are Caleb and Louis, the possessed girl's brother and father. For inexplicable reasons, the writers chose to depict Caleb and Louis with every redneck cliche in the book. They've both got closed-minded, stereotyped, and strong views on the church, medicine, psychology, psychiatry, and, of course, city-folk. Caleb wears an army hat. Louis carries a shot-gun and demonstrates that he's a little too eager to use it. The viewer shakes his head and wonders whether the writers even tried to put any imagination at all into either character. If so, it certainly, certainly doesn't show.

The Main Character -- The main character, Reverend Cotton Marcus, is so believable, complex, intriguing, and original, that he almost makes up for all of the other film's shortcomings. The writers could have gotten away with making Marcus simply a charlatan (Rev. Ernest in Repossessed), a doubting Thomas (Father Karras in The Exorcist), an earnest believer (Father Moore in Emily Rose), or a jaded but seasoned pro (the main character in Constantine) and, because the main attraction is supposed to be the possessed girl rather than the exorcist, they would have gotten away with keeping him one-dimensional without much complaint from critics or viewers. Instead, they chose to provide Cotton Marcus with aspects of all of these characteristics.

Marcus's back story is just credible enough to be intriguing. Marcus comes from a long line of evangelical preachers and exorcists; both he and his father boast to having performed hundreds of exorcisms, and Marcus himself has been preaching the Word of God since he was a little boy. Then came a crisis of faith -- not from a bad event, which would be the cliche, but from a good event: Marcus's son had a very difficult birth, and, for a while, his survival was touch-and-go. When the kid managed to recover, Marcus was stunned to find that his first thought wasn't "thank God!" but "thank the doctors!" This led to a chain of thought that caused Marcus to question not only his current belief in God, but his past alleged belief as well. Had he ever really believed in God? Or has he just been operating on auto-pilot, acting out the role his father had laid out for him?

Still preaching despite his continually increasing lack of faith, Marcus soon realizes that his congregants are equally on auto-pilot; he even tests this suspicion by sneaking a banana bread recipe into one of his sermons, and his parishioners, sure enough, cry out "amen" and "hallelujah" but fail to notice Marcus's test.

His biggest crisis of faith is a sudden disbelief in the validity of possession and exorcism. The Last Exorcism is about Marcus's determination to discredit possession by faking an exorcism. His methods for faking an exorcism (or, at least, his planned methods, before the possession turns out to be genuine) do an excellent job of demonstrating to the film's audience how easily an exorcist can fake paranormal events, in an attempt to use the power of suggestion to exorcise a believer's demons -- which, Marcus insists, are purely psychological, not supernatural.

All of this adds up to a very interesting character. Marcus may be arrogant, but his arrogance lacks condescension or cruelty. He may be more than a bit too full of himself, but his motivation to mock a solemn Christian belief is well-intended, as he is reacting with sincere concern to a newspaper story in which a boy was recently killed in an attempted exorcism. "If I can manage to expose the falsehoods at the heart of exorcism," Marcus hopes, "no innocent child should ever have to die again at the hands of a misguided, would-be exorcist."

Of course, since this is a horror movie, Marcus's best laid plans, and his assertion that demonic possession is bunk, quickly go out the window. But I loved how, even as evidence in favor of actual possesion continues to mount, Marcus continues to insist that it's all just psychological in nature. He used to take the supernatural for granted, and now he's clearly overcompensating in the other direction.

You know what? Leave out the cliched supporting characters, the ineffective scares, and the stupid twist endings, and this movie would border on genius. I could watch a whole movie about this character alone, without all the gimmicks. The character of Cotton Marcus makes the movie worth watching. The rest is just window dressing.

How to Survive the Oregon Trail -- 5th ed.

2011-01-02T20:11:00.000-08:00

Rule @1 -- There are no guarantees. You could do everything right and still die along the way. Be emotionally prepared for that, lest you fall into an "it's not fair" funk. Heck, that's how the Oregon Trail really was -- misfortune could strike even the ablest of travelers. So I can not guarantee that following my advice will get you safely to your destination. However, after playing the game more times than I care to admit, I have made some observations about what choices will greatly increase your chances of survival while playing the fifth edition of the Oregon Trail computer game.

Rule #2 -- Be a banker. Period. Before you set out on your journey -- heck, before you even start preparing for your journey -- the game offers you scores of different professions your wagon leader could be. The game will confuse you by explaining that each profession has its pros and cons. A doctor, for example, allegedly has a better chance of curing sick family members (and yes, as the journey goes on, people will get sick, it's unavoidable), while a carpenter has a better chance of, say, fixing a broken wagon wheel. Don't be fooled. How often party members get sick or injured, or how often your wagon breaks down, and so on, seem to be purely random events. More to the point, your ability to cure the sick or injured party member or fix the wagon also seems to be random, regardless of what skills your chosen profession provides. Now, for all I know, there may be some probability matrix that is part of The Oregon Trail's gaming program, but I've played this game dozens of times now, and if being a doctor really makes your character more likely to cure someone, or a carpenter more likely to mend a broken wagon wheel, or a butcher more successful at properly cutting up your hunted meat -- I haven't seen any evidence. Besides, if you really want some of these skills, you can choose them as "extra" skills that your banker has somehow learned before setting out for Oregon. It still doesn't seem to make any difference one way or the other, but I tend to stock up on extra skills, more out of superstition than anything else.

"So," you may ask, "if the skills of your profession don't make a lick of difference, why does it matter if you're a banker?" Because, my inquisitive friend, bankers start out with more money. A lot more. And if you really want to be cynical (i.e., "realistic") about it, this game reflects the real world in one glaring way: Success in life depends a lot less on your skills, and a lot more on how much money you've got when starting out. Yes, much of the events that occur in your journey across the Oregon Trail will be random, but for the events that aren't random, money seems to be a decisive factor nearly every time. Note that every single remaining rule in this guide has money at the center of it.

Trust me, running out of money in this game sucks big time. If you have money, every city, fort, store, town, and trading post is a place where you can stock up on much-needed supplies that can literally bring you and your family members back from the brink of death. Without money, you simply have to make do with whatever little you already have or can scrounge from the wilderness. And it would be a mistake to put too much faith in the bounty of the wilderness.

Rule #3 -- Stock up on food, firearms, and ammunition. You can survive without anything else, but without food, you will get sick and eventually die. So before you set out, and again at every place that sells it, stock up on as much food as you can, because it will always run out more quickly than expected, often at the most inconvenient times. (If you're a day away from a trading post, no big deal, but if it's the middle of winter, and you're weeks away from civilization, a sudden discovery that you're low on food can be a deadly problem.) Personally, I enjoy stocking up on a variety of foods just for the heck of it, but unless your characters are starving to death, the only foods that make any practical difference during game play are meat, fruit, and vegetables, so if you have to make a choice while food shopping, always buy more meat, fruit, and veggies, and less of other food products such as bread, crackers, etc.

If you're starving to death, the bread and crackers are certainly better than nothing, but you can have a mountain of such foods and still start to suffer from ill effects if your characters go too long without meat, fruit, or veggies. My advice: If you have to make a choice, buy more fruits and veggies than meats. Why? Two reasons. First, nearly every trading post seems to have some kind of meat for sale, while fruits and veggies are surprisingly rare. Second, you can always hunt for more meat, and hunting is kind of fun, sort of like a game within the game. Gathering plants in the wilderness, however, is a pain in the neck. You have to look up every plant in the guidebook to prevent poisoning, and no matter how many plants you gather, they never seem to last more than a day or two. Furthermore, while hunting can be done in any climate, plants grow increasingly scarce in colder weather, and a long winter can spell disaster for the traveler who hasn't brought enough vegetables with them.

And speaking of hunting, stock up on firearms and all kinds of ammunition. I know nothing about antique firearms in real life, but I know that in this game, the use of any kind of firearm depends on the availability of buckshot, bullets, and gunpowder; you need all three (as well as the firearm itself, of course) for any given weapon to work. This is vital, because no matter how well stocked you try to be, you will eventually run out of meat, and hunting is often the only way to get more. Having a knife is cool, but the game doesn't allow you to hunt with it.

There are plenty of other things you can buy. Some, such as furniture, games, and musical instruments, are clearly pure extravagance, whose only practical use in the game is for boosting morale. Other items, such as blankets, winter clothes, and medicines, would seem to be necessities. Don't be fooled; just because something would be vital for survival in real life, doesn't mean it's necessary in the game. In the harsh winters of The Oregon Trail, someone with three extra layers of clothing may freeze to death as quickly as someone in their everyday outfit. And as for buying medicines, remember what I said about the pure randomness of how this game treats illness and injury? The bottom line is you will end up never needing most of the medicines that are sold in this game. Other medicines, such as laudunum, seem to be always available whether you buy them or not. And whether your patient will get worse or recover depends less on your medical supplies and more on your decisions along the way. (Should the concussion patient exercise or rest? Should the snake bite be cleansed or tourniqueted? Etc.) In short: Spend your medicine money on food instead. Many illnesses encountered on the trail, such as scurvy, stem from malnutrition.

I'll give this game credit for being sneaky. The first few times I played this game, I dismissed games and musical instruments with a laugh every time I saw them on sale at a store. Then I noticed that the game constantly monitors morale, and the guidebook claims that games and instruments can keep morale up. So I started buying this stuff to boost morale, only to learn that the potential morale boosts that allegedly come with having games and instruments never came into play. Why not? Because when morale dips, it's typically because of either a lack of food, or due to health problems (which, in turn, are also usually due to a lack of food). In short, if you're budgeting, spend your morale money on food, since a lack of food will devastate morale, while a lack of games and music barely makes a dent.

(Despite all of this, I personally like to spend money on medicines, winter clothes, and extravagances anyway, despite the knowledge that they will never be of any practical use in the game. But that's just me. What can I say, I just like getting into character, and my character would want that stuff!)

One more thing about keeping your supplies stocked: The game allows you to trade with other travelers and townspeople at almost any given time. The nearly constant opportunity to trade is misleading. Unless you are absolutely desperate, do not, do not, do not depend on this as a method of getting what you need to survive. People who are willing to trade with you rarely have the exact item you need, and when they do, their prices are often steep. If you must trade, keep an eye on your supplies, and make sure that you're not trading away something that you need. Twice now, I've been tricked into trading away an ox, only to realize that I now couldn't go anywhere, because my remaining oxes weren't strong enough to pull the wagon without their comrade.

And speaking of oxen, that leads me to . . .

Rule #4 -- Use oxen, not horses or mules. The game's "helpful" guidebook will go on and on about how each of these animals has their pros and cons as pack animals, but it simply ain't so. Horses may be faster, but unfettered speed don't mean a damn thing if they're tied to a wagon that's too heavy for them to pull. Oxen can carry a heck of a lot more (and they will have to, since any properly stocked wagon is going to weigh an awful lot) than horses or mules, they cost a lot less, and, unlike their more equestrian cousins, oxen can be more easily turned into edible meals should they die along the way. Considering how much more useful they are than horses, I can't figure out why oxes cost about a tenth as much. Maybe horses are just for suckers?

Rule #5 -- When crossing a river, use bridges and ferries whenever you can. Yes, it costs money, so you may sometimes find yourself asking, "how do I know if I can afford it?" Let me put it this way: If the ferry costs three dollars, and all you have left is three dollars, spend the three dollars on the damn ferry. Whatever money you spend on the bridge or the ferry will be worth less than all of the supplies you will lose if you try to cross the river on your own, and you end up tipping over. After careful study, I've learned that caulking the wagon and attempting to float across the river has a roughly 50% chance of success, while attempting to ford or wade across is even less likely to succeed. Crossing on a ferry has an almost 100% rate of success. Use the damn ferry.

Rule #6 -- Check the hill before ascent or descent. Remember what I said about there being no guarantees, and that these rules were more about increasing your chances? This rule embodies that statement more than any other. Yes, it's possible to blindly careen forward and still avoid tipping over, and it's equally possible to take the time to make careful preparations, only to smash the wagon on the rocks anyway. Shit happens. But I've learned that taking the time to evaluate a hill's rockyness, slipperyness, and steepness does increase your chances of getting the wagon over a hill in one piece.

Rule #7 -- donations: Occasionally, you may run into other travelers who ask for charity -- they need food or other supplies, and can not (or will not) offer anything in return. Be generous if you want to feel good about yourself, but keep in mind that there is no practical or karmic pay-off; it is charity, and the game never reverses the situation; no matter how desperate you get, nor how dire your situation may be, no one you encounter on the trail ever, ever offers to give you anything for free.

A Dumb, Lite Comedy That Makes Some Smart, Heavy Observations

2010-12-16T02:17:00.000-08:00

Joe Somebody is a deceptive film, pretending to be one part romantic comedy and two parts office farce, but the secret to getting more out of the film than cheap laughs is to acknowledge what it really is: a smart social satire that takes a surprisingly frank, even disturbing, look at the state of modern American adult masculinity.

Considering that he has built much of his career out of poking fun at masculinity -- although rarely with as much cynical honesty as he does here -- Tim Allen is an apt choice to play the lead role. Allen stars as Joe Scheffer, an office drone with a remarkably unremarkable career and life. At the office, he has spent the last ten years exhibiting excellent work habits and positive results, but all to no avail; few of his co-workers know who he is, those who do view him with indifference, and a well-earned promotion that had been dangled in his face was given to another man a year ago. The only thing that ever really changes for Joe is that his wife has recently left him for a younger man, a pretty-boy actor more in tune with her own neuvo-hippy lifestyle.

In his whole pathetic life, Joe has only two things to be happy about: his relationship with his daughter, and his parking space. Joe doesn't have a private parking space, but he does take a small amount of pride in the fact that he has earned the right to park in the convenient "ten year parking lot," since employees with less than ten years have to trek all the way from the ridiculously inconvenient parking lot that is depicted as driving distance to the office.

Joe has never realized how much of his own happiness that he has invested into that parking lot until he loses his space to Mark McKinney, an arrogant brute played by a well-cast Patrick Warburton. When Joe rightly (but unwisely) challenges Mark's use of the Ten Year Parking Lot -- after all, Mark has been working at the office for less than seven years -- Mark brutally knocks Joe to the ground and threatens to beat him severely. Mark's cruelty is heightened by the fact that he is fully aware that coworkers, and even Joe's own daughter, are witnessing the event, adding an extra layer of humiliation to the beating.

This is the moment when Joe Somebody starts to reveal that it is less interested in cheap laughs than most Tim Allen movies are. Oh, there will be plenty of cheap laughs later, but for the moment, Joe Somebody is content to admit to the viewer that there is nothing comical about the beating that sets the story in motion, nor in the sequences that immediately follow: Joe is injured only very slightly, but his humiliation is so devastating that he cancels Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, and then refuses to return to the office for weeks. He's risking his job but doesn't care, he is too embarrassed to return to the location of his downfall.

The fact that Joe's beating causes a depression that lasts far longer than any of his injuries, and the movie's refusal to play Joe's depression for laughs, reveal the screenplay's brutal honesty about masculine self-image. A man may be intelligent, or meek, or white-collar, or possibly all three, such as the case of Joe, but these aspects of identity, while important on one level, are, on another, deeper level, nothing but sheets of paper armor that we use to clothe our insecurities, and all it takes is one slap to shred that armor to pieces and reveal that beneath the facade of civilization, we still judge our self-worth by our ability to, and willingness to, engage in violence if we are physically confronted. Put another way, mankind as a race may have emerged from the jungle millennia ago, but no singular man ever fully has.

In the movie, this harsh reality is confirmed by the office's reaction to the conflict between Joe and Mark. Despite the fact that Joe is a sweet man who did not deserve the humiliation and pain caused by Mark, Joe's co-workers have little sympathy for him, and even admit to thinking of him as a schmuck for allowing himself to be victimized; they view Joe with more pity than sympathy.

The driving plot point of the film is that Joe's self-image, and, just as notably, his image among other people, is brightened only by Joe's decision to challenge Mark to a re-match. As soon as Joe allows himself to sink to Mark's level, everything changes for the better: He feels better about himself, men suddenly want to be his friend, women suddenly want to be his lover, and even his office superiors decide to finally give him that promotion they had forgotten about.

The "voice of wisdom" -- all but drowned out by the multiple voices of reality -- is provided by Joe's daughter, played by Hayden Panettiere, and his love interest, played by Julie Bowen. Bowen's and Panettiere's characters are the only characters in the film who are dismayed by Joe's determination to fight Mark in a rematch, the only ones who see violence as folly. "But," the movie seems to argue, "of course they wouldn't understand, they're women."

There's no question that the movie uses exaggeration to depict the positive turns that come Joe's way due to his decision to announce an upcoming fight with Mark, but it would be a serious mistake to confuse such exaggeration with inaccuracy; the movie's denial of the conventional wisdom that "violence doesn't solve anything" may be grotesque, but it's also quite convincing. Why? Because, sadly, it's not just self-image that depends on a man's physicality, it's image in general. There's a reason why the observation that "nice guys finish last" has become a cliche.

movie review: Gamers

2010-12-13T10:07:00.000-08:00

There are good movies, there are bad movies, and then there are movies that are so awful, so mind-numbingly bad, that you spend most of the movie wondering how much -- not "if," but "how much" -- the celebrities involved are humiliated by the fact that they've participated. It would not be hyperbole to describe director/writer Christopher Folino's studio film Gamers (not to be confused with Matt Vancil's similarly themed, hilarious indie film The Gamers) as such a movie. And when I say that this isn't hyperbole, I mean to emphasize that I'm not just trying to think of a clever, "writerly" way to insult Gamers. I mean I actually spent a good portion of the film feeling embarrassed on behalf of some of the actors.

"What were you thinking?" I thought to them on more than one occasion, the chastisement laced with sympathy more than anger. Because this movie's badness takes you beyond dissatisfaction, beyond anger. When serious movies fail on such an epic level, they can occasionally fall under the "so bad it's unintentionally funny" category. When comedies fail to the same degree, you don't even groan, for fear that you'd be insulting groans themselves.

The main characters are a group of friends who play a role-playing game called "Demons, Nymphs, & Dragons," or just "D.N.D." for short. (The exact parallels between D.N.D. and D&D -- the real-life Dungeons & Dragons -- are less satirical and more a mixture of lame joke and a clear ploy to avoid a copyright lawsuit.) The friends are excited because the game that they are scheduled to play in the upcoming weekend will officially break the world record of most hours devoted to playing DND.

Now, you don't have to be a D&D expert to understand either the movie or this review, but you should at least know that the concept behind D&D, DND, and most role-playing games in general is simple: In an event that is more or less cooperative story-telling, each player controls a single character, which represents an individual in a fictional setting, and results of the characters' choices and the overall storyline for the game are determined by the Dungeon Master (DM) according to the rules of the game and the DM's interpretation of those rules. In this movie, the Dungeon Master/DM is called a "Dungeon Lord," or "D.L." but it's obviously the same.

Anyway, as the big weekend approaches, we get to know each of the main characters: Gordon, who seems the most relatively normal person in the group; Paul, who ostensibly seems like a likable guy, but who secretly sabotaged the group's prom dates back in the 80s, just so they could devote more time to playing DND; Reese, a mentally unstable and pathetic loser; Fernando, a Mexican-American whose one joke seems to be his imperfect English (despite the fact that he's been an American citizen for 23 years when the movie takes place); and Kevin, the condescending singer-songwriter who serves as the group's Dungeon Lord, and who tries to balance his friendship with the other gamers, with his own belief that a DL shouldn't fraternize with the people in his group.

All of this is told, by the way, in a faux-documentary style that has become increasingly common since the continued success of Christopher Guest's faux-documentary comedies. One reason why Guest's movies succeed while this one fails is the film's attitude toward its characters. Guest encourages us to laugh at his characters, but also has a clear affection for them, and this feeling of good will affects the audience's reaction; as a result, even people who don't get Guest's humor usually don't outright dislike his films. Gamers director/writer Christopher Folino, on the other hand, has a clear contempt for his main characters, and it's hard to like a movie if the filmmaker himself so clearly dislikes the people who populate his own film.

The movie's most dominant joke by far -- the one factor that really drives the whole movie -- is the fact that each of the gamers is a truly pathetic loser. They are all adults who still live with their parents, are obsessed with DND to various degrees, and exhibit social ineptness both with each other and with the outside world of non-gamers. Considering the film's disdain for its gamer characters -- and by extension, real-life gamers -- it's no coincidence that the most central character is also the most pathetic of the bunch, Reese.

Reese is the newest member of the group and their exclusionary attitude towards him is reflected by the fact that they still refer to their group as "the Four Horsemen," even though Reese has been a fifth player for five years now. Dungeon Lord Kevin not only delights in killing off Reese's DND characters, but he openly admits it, and routinely mocks him for it (although Reese is also depicted as an idiotic player, whose character deaths are his own fault as often as they are Kevin's).

As the movie opens, Kevin has recently killed Reese's character Farrah, whom Reese has been playing in other people's DND games for 20 years. This devastates Reese, who risks his job by devoting hours of office time to leaving nasty messages on Kevin's answering machine. A friend of mine says that "frustration is comedy, anger isn't." I don't know if I agree with this formula, but Gamers makes a good argument in favor of that theory, as Reese's repeated tantrums and angry phone calls invariably motivate the viewer to cringe rather than laugh. Reese's heartbreak over the non-existent Farrah's death develops into an ongoing joke, as he repeatedly calls in to a request radio station to devote countless love songs to Farrah's memory. When the DJ finally tires of devoting so many songs to one person, Reese attempts to bribe him by mailing in beef jerky. This is funny?

Incidentally, I'm 100% positive that there are real-life equivalents to the character of Reese, but this film is an outright insult to everyone who enjoys role-playing games, by unironically presenting Reese and his fellow losers as representational of the group.

But that's not why I disliked the film. In the end, this is simply a comedy that is astoundingly unfunny. How unfunny? I'll give you three examples of the film's humor, and you can judge for yourself whether they make you want to see the film.

Example #1 -- Fernando works for Gordon's father, who is a farmer. This fact is introduced for no other reason except as a set-up to a joke that the farm's speciality is selling horse sperm, for the purposes of thoroughbred breeding, and the joke's punchline is when Fernando shows up covered in horse ejaculate.

Example #2 -- Reese brings beef jerky to a gaming session to share with the other players, but because of his anger over Farrah's death, he first rubs the jerky on his bare crotch in an act of petty revenge. The punchline to this joke is that this is the jerky he accidentally sends to the DJ mentioned earlier.

Example #3 -- Kevin's African-American girlfriend sews together a "wizard's cloak" for him, and the running gag is that neither she nor any of the gamers are aware that the cloak looks exactly like a Ku Klux Klan outfit. There is also a running gag involving a radio trivia question which callers keep getting wrong. The answer to the question is "David Lynch," a joke that exists only for the sake of the punchline that ties these two jokes together, as a frustrated Kevin, in his KKK outfit, keeps crying out "Lynch, Lynch, Lynch" as the furious black neighbor looks on.

If any of these jokes strike you as hilarious, then Gamers might be the movie for you. But I warn you that the movie's jokes aren't just bad in their own right, they're also presented badly, with no sense of comedic delivery or timing.

So is there anything about this movie that I did like? Yes. For one thing, Kevin Sherwood, the actor who plays the musician Kevin, is actually a pretty good singer and guitarist, and his condescending songs are pleasant enough to listen to, even if the lyrics aren't nearly as funny as they're intended to be. And actors John Heard and William Katt both provide good performances in their small roles. Katt's cameo as Reese's boss, a former DND fanatic who now must warn Reese that Reese's fanaticism has become a job risk, includes a terribly written but well-delivered monologue about the virtues of football-themed video games.

Heard's supporting role as Gordon's father includes the movie's only relatively good scene (meaning it's still a pretty bad scene, but there is at least an element of inspiration here that is lacking in the rest of the movie): Gordon's parents are both disillusioned that their son has devoted more time to a fantasy-themed game than to living life and making something of himself, but when they are invited to a party that turns out to be a tribute to one of Gordon's DND characters, it's almost touching how Gordon's father temporarily puts aside his animosity and tries to smile and get into the spirit of things. (Any potential humor or good will that might have been generated by the scene, however, is ruined by the palpable bitterness displayed by Gordon's mother, played by Beverly D'Angelo -- another good argument in favor of my friend's "anger isn't comedy" theory.)

What else did I like about the movie? I'm not trying to be a smart-ass when I observe that the DVD menu itself is funny, as Reese's answering machine messages segue into a rant about people who spend too much time listening to the audio on a DVD menu. And the opening credits sequence illustrate how the combination of exciting visuals and a fun rock tune can create enthusiasm for the movie about to follow. (In an extreme case of misdirection, this exuberant opening strongly implies an earnest zeal for fantasy role-playing games.) But it's all downhill from there. When the best things about a movie are the DVD menu and opening credits sequence, it's time to make another viewing selection.

retro movie review: Sherman's March

2010-11-23T13:23:00.000-08:00

In 1864, Civil War General William Tecumsah Sherman led Union troops in a march from Atlanta to Savannah, destroying everything in their path. Sherman's March is so infamous for its brutality that over a century later, southerners hundreds of miles from where Sherman ever set foot claim to still be recovering from the devestation.

In 1981, freelance documentarian Ross McElwee is assigned the task of producing a documentary on Sherman's March, an opportunity he jumps at, since it gives him an excuse to re-connect with friends and relatives in the area. However, just before filming is to begin, his girlfriend leaves him. He is devestated, although the fact that he lived in Boston and she lived in New York should have given him a clue that something had to give. Nevertheless, when Ross sets out on his journey to document Sherman's March, he is so distracted by this turn of events that his documentary radically shifts focus, becoming an exploration of his own pitiful love life.

This is the concept behind Sherman's March, Ross McElwee's award-winning portrait of southern women. As Ross sets out on his journey, ostensibly to make his documentary on Sherman's March, his mother, sister, and multitude of platonic friends (all of his friends in the movie are women; one male friend is briefly mentioned towards the beginning, but he is never seen, and quickly forgotten in the larger narrative) rally around to give him unasked-for, unsuccessful, and often unwelcome "help" in finding a woman.

Ross is clueless when it comes to women. One girl, for example, flirts with him shamelessly, and it isn't until hours later that he starts to wonder if her comment that she isn't wearing underwear was a come-on. He blows his chances with her, but she is such a carefree spirit that it takes him forever to realize it. He hangs around for weeks, shifting the focus of his documentary to her fledgling acting career, becoming emotionally involved in her own professional hopes, all the while oblivious to the fact that she has no romantic interest in him whatsoever.

Watching this movie, I couldn't help but wonder, "how can he not realize that she is completely uninterested in him?" She goes on and on about how she's got a crush on Burt Reynolds, and long after the viewer realizes that she actually believes in her fantasy about Reynolds, McElwee keeps filming, apparently under the impression that, by filming her diatribe about her fictional love affair with Reynolds, he is merely humoring her; what he doesn't realize is that, like so many women in this film, she is the one humoring him just by letting him hang around; the women Ross dates (or tries to date) in Sherman's March don't keep him around out of affection, they do so out of a tolerance that stems only from a detached amusement.

Meanwhile, both during and after Ross's non-relationship with the would-be actress/screenwriter (whose screenplay idea is so astoundingly insane and narcissistic that it should have given him a clue that she was a lost cause), the women in Ross's life continue to try, in vain, to help his floundering love life: They set him up on dates, they make stabs at life-coaching, and they offer him romantic advice that is alternately foolish, wise, ludicrous, and just plain inappropriate for their target audience; for all their affection for Ross McEwlee, it becomes clear through their unhelpful advice that a lot of these women don't seem to know much about what kind of women would suit his personality. In a reverse of stereotypical attitudes toward romance, Ross seems in search of a soul-mate, while the only criteria for the women trying to help him is that his significant other be A) attractive and B) available. Ross's mother is particularly eager to set him up with a woman, any woman, partially out of love for her son, but mostly, as she explains to a wearied Ross, because she finds his singleness "boring." "Do you like her?" she asks about one random female passerby. "If you do, mommy will buy her for you." She is joking. Sort of.

Ross's mother is easily the most interesting and likable character in the movie, and her monologues on the necessity of passion -- in dating and in life in general -- are both hilarious and profound. At the center of all of these women -- dates, friends, relatives, girlfriends, and ex-girlfriends -- is Ross himself, who remains ever clueless about romance. How clueless? At one point, he tries to reunite with an old girlfriend and remains undeterred when she reveals that she is now living with another man, and if Ross is to stay as a house guest, he has to sleep in the tree-house out back. The tree-house, she explains, is infested with fleas, mosquitoes, spiders, ticks, and a type of insect terrifyingly described as a "cone-nosed blood-sucker." Ross gripes to the camera about the physical discomfort and about his fear of the cone-nosed blood-suckers, but still agrees to spend the night.

Occasionally, Ross remembers that he's supposed to be making a documentary on Sherman's March, and includes a scene involving the historical event. Not often, but occasionally. He seems in denial that, just like his love life, his film project has fallen off the rails a long time ago.

Sherman's March is, without argument, a challenge to viewers. If you're not in the right mood to watch something like this, even a patient viewer will quickly get bored with McElwee's film. The pace is maddeningly slow, and McElwee's narration, delivered in a melancholy monotone, doesn't exactly help to make the film any less dull. I can't help but speculate that if this wasn't a documentary, but rather a Hollywood narrative, would it be a better movie? Surely the comedy potential is there, although viewers might dismiss the real-life characters as unrealistic (the actress's description of her screenplay, for example, really has to be heard first-hand for one to believe that anyone would come up with such an insane idea). But if you have the patience and time to sit down and watch a movie that is actually about real people -- not the arrogant, famous-for-being-famous "celebrities" on modern "reality TV," but ordinary people you might actually meet in your daily life, then Sherman's March is a fascinating and sometimes hilarious "slice of life" treat. Just don't say I didn't warn you about the pace.

Saturday Night Live: A Dissatisfied Retrospective

2010-11-22T05:23:00.000-08:00

Are you a fan of "Saturday Night Live"? Are you one of those semi-fans, who loves the classic episodes, but feels that the show has lost its way? Well, due to the wonders of Netflix, the show is available for viewing -- even most of the seasons not yet officially released on DVD are available for instant viewing on the Netflix website. And I have made a remarkable discovery: despite the conventional wisdom that the show used to be great, but now it sucks, the truth of the matter is that the show has always sucked.

Now, this may seem like sacrilege to many loyal fans of the show, especially to those who so fondly remember the years with the original cast of the 1970s, often referred to as the show's golden age. But after watching several episodes from seasons one and two, I'm forced to conclude that the show is much more fondly remembered than it deserves. Our memories have been tainted by countless "best of" compilations and retrospectives, which present classic sketches whose humor endures, often almost as funny with the hundredth viewing as they were with the first. But if you actually sit down and watch entire episodes, you'll find that those "best of" sketches actually represent a very small percentage of the series as a whole. The vast majority of sketches fall flat, to the point where it becomes a real chore to sit through an entire episode. Put simply, for all its legendary stature, SNL is a distressingly, painfully unfunny show. And I know my reaction is not from a lack of "getting it"; even the sometimes-visible applause sign often fails to elicit much of a reaction from the live studio audience, and it's clear to me that without that sign, the crowd would often sit silently.

Say what you will about the ups and downs of Chevy Chase's career, but you have to admit that he was hilarious on Saturday Night Live. The fact is, aside from the very occasional exceptions that we're all familiar with (Dan Aykroyd as Julia Child, the brilliant Star Trek spoof, etc.) Chase is the only real bright spot in the early seasons (he was replaced by Bill Murray mid-way through season two). He delivers his lines with a star-making mixture of charm, skilled comic timing, and downright good acting (note his letter-perfect performance as Spock in the aforementioned Star Trek spoof, for example).

Yet it would be unfair to give Chase too much credit, because despite common complaints about more recent cast members who allegedly "suck," the strengths and weaknesses of SNL -- since the show's inception right down to the present day -- have always been a result of the writing rather than the acting. Think about it. John Belushi, for example, immediately established himself as a brilliant mimic, with dead-on impressions of Joe Cocker, Marlon Brando, Ray Charles, etc. Belushi was, no two ways about it, the first of many great impressionists to be featured on SNL. But once you get past the delightful comic shock of how much Belushi's impersonations resemble the real-life counterparts, the smile quickly fades; "okay," we're left to wonder, "so Belushi is playing Humphrey Bogart in this sketch, got it, but where are the writers going with this? What about this is funny other than the fact that Belushi's acting like Bogie?" Sadly, the answer is usually "very little."

One flaw SNL is known for is just how long their sketches can last; it's bad enough when the joke isn't working, but when the writers take an already unfunny idea and stretch it past all reason, that's what turns a potentially minor fault into an outrightly negative viewing experience. Despite fond memories of the 70s SNL, those early years are filled with examples of this type. Jane Curtin's advertisement for Quarry-brand cereal, for instance, lasts longer than many real-life television commercials, and the only joke in the whole thing is the remarkably unfunny, extended gag that the cereal is made out of rocks.

An even better example of a sketch that lasts much longer than it should is a woeful Twilight Zone parody: Jane Curtin stars as an actress who checks into a hotel room, "but what she doesn't know," Aykroyd warns in a pretty good Rod Serling impression, "is that she has really just checked into the Twilight Zone!" This is a set-up with some potential. But Aykroyd/Serling then delivers a nearly identical monologue introducing Gilda Radner as another actress who enters the hotel room. And then we are treated to yet another monologue about a third actress in the same room. By now, the sketch is getting redundant, and I'm impatiently thinking, "ok, after all that, there better be a damn funny pay-off -- or at least an interesting one!" But no, the punch line is that Rod Serling has invited all three actresses into the room, so that he can seduce them. That joke would have fallen flat with even one set-up, let alone a set-up that is repeated ad nauseum. And please keep in mind that I'm not picking and choosing only the worst sketches to gripe about; my whole point is that these lumps of yawn-inducing dreck are sadly typical of SNL's output even in the 1970s golden era.

At the risk of repeating myself, I must emphasize that the fault lies with the writing, not the acting. (The fact that much of the writing is done by the actors is completely beside the point; they are simply failing at one task, and succeeding at the other.) Take the 1985/86 season, for example. The cast included gifted comic actor Randy Quaid and future Oscar winners Joan Cusack and Robert Downey, Jr. But the whole year was so forgettable that even most of Downey's countless fans are completely unaware that he used to be a cast member of Saturday Night Live.

The makers of SNL were the first to become aware that their success or failure depends on their writers. When the show's ratings plummeted in 1980, the producers tried to fix the situation by bringing back Michael O'Donoghue, who had served as the show's head writer during most of the 70s. During O'Donoghue's absence, we had the single worst season in the show's 35-year history. O'Donoghue came back, and saved the show from cancellation by making Eddie Murphy a star.

A more recent example is Tina Fey; while writing SNL has always been a highly collaborative process, Fey's reign as head writer almost speaks for itself. When she joined the writing staff, the show was hitting near-record lows in the ratings, but by the time she left, the show was popular again, sketches were reviewed on primetime news broadcasts, and Will Ferrell and others had become celebrities due to their tenures on S.N.L. This is not to suggest that Fey deserves sole credit for all of this, but the timing can't be denied; it's no coincidence that when she left in favor of her own series, 30 Rock, ratings immediately began to plummet.

None of this is to say that the legacy of Saturday Night Live should be ignored. The number of actors, celebrities, and comedians who owe their careers to the show is simply mind-boggling, and it's safe to say that the series has become a part of nearly every aspect of American popular culture. SNL gave us Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell, laughs and memories, and the much-needed occasional reminder that Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead. But don't confuse the show's legacy with nostalgia for a level of quality that never existed. Sometimes, the fondly remembered "good old days" just aren't as good as we remember.

retro movie review: Star Trek VI

2010-11-20T02:12:00.000-08:00

Let me preface this blog entry by admitting that this movie review reflects not only my opinions on the film, but also the circumstances surrounding my viewing experience. In the 19 years since Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was in the theaters, my only experience with the film has been through V.H.S. Now that I've finally watched the digitally enhanced version of the movie, I feel like I've seen it for the first time -- again. OK, so digital video enhancement is nothing new, so I understand that going on about it may make me seem a bit old fashioned. But if there's one thing I learned from watching Ghostbusters on DVD, after years of watching the movie only in TV broadcasts, the differences a digital enhancement can make are simply stunning no matter how familiar we are with the process.

And both the nature and the quality of the film determine how largely it will benefit from a digital enhancement process. I can't imagine caring much whether All the President's Men, for example, gets a high-tech treatment. But watching the digitally enhanced Star Trek VI made me feel like I was back in the theater again. The stars seem to leap off the screen, propelling us into space along with the U.S.S. Enterprise, and the sound quality is simply amazing. Cliff Eidelman's foreboding, ominous score creates a near-constant suspense, and is effectively complemented by both the sonorous voices of the aging actors, and the Oscar-winning sound effects. This movie really pays attention to audio detail: starship engines hum convincingly, dissatisfied characters quietly sniff their noses in contempt, and the prison on Rura Penthe is full of such off-screen ambient noises as dripping water, echoed footsteps, and grumbling convicts who pass by unseen.

But enough about the digital enhancement already, let's get down to the meat and bones of the movie. The story is set in motion by a catastrophic explosion which completely destroys Praxis, the primary energy production facility of the Klingons, who have been the primary Star Trek villains ever since the 1960s. The resulting devastation, as well as the Klingons' awareness of its long-term consequences, force the Klingon Empire to open negotiations toward peace with our own interstellar government, the United Federation of Planets. In light of the long-standing animosity between the Federation and the Klingons, no one on either side had ever dreamed that a day of peace talks would ever arrive, and while many people see recent developments as an opportunity for a better future, many others fear that future as an end to their familiar way of life.

Fear of having to change for a changing future is an affliction that affects the movie's heroes and villains alike. It's no accident that Gorkon, the one character with the most optimism for the future mistakenly refers to it as "the undiscovered country"; he's quoting Hamlet, but doesn't realize that Hamlet used the phrase "undiscovered country" not in reference to the future, but as a metaphor for death. Gorkon's misinterpretation of Hamlet is uncomfortable for everyone, for it inadvertently but effectively equates death with the future.

The parallels between the events in the film, and then-current realities of U.S./Soviet detente (with the explosion of Praxis standing in for the accident at Chernobyl) are not meant to be subtle, but with the Cold War now long over, those parallels seem almost unimportant. The topic of racism -- less commented on by reviewers of the film -- now seems to be the more notable theme. Most disturbingly, Captain Kirk himself, who has served as the franchise's primary hero for nearly thirty years, proves to be an unapologetic racist when it comes to Klingons.

Kirk's attitude can be partially explained away by the well-established but tragic reality that political hostility can often manifest as racism, as U.S. images of Asians during our wars with Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese enemies can attest. In Star Trek VI, the most obvious example of this phenomenon is when Admiral Cartwright (notably played by Brock Peters, a black actor whose own career has often featured racial themes) callously describes Klingons as "the alien trash of the galaxy." But Kirk's racism, while clearly influenced by political hostility, also has a more personal source. "I've never trusted Klingons," he says in a key bit of dialogue, "and I never will. I can never forgive them for the death of my son." With David's actual killers now long dead, Kirk has nowhere specific to focus his anger, and so shifts the blame from individual murderers to the entire Klingon race. Spock's pleas for compassion fall on indifferent ears: "They are dying," Spock explains. "Let them die!" Kirk replies with shocking brutality. For any audience members who may have missed the racial overtones, Chekov (Walter Koenig) later quotes the race-relations movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and for any viewers still unclear about the theme, a Klingon diplomat soon lays the cards on the table and explicitly calls the Enterprise crew racist. Over the course of the film, we learn which Enterprise crew members actually are racist, which ones aren't, and which ones start out with racist tendencies but show plenty of promise for change.

Yet for all its serious undertones, Star Trek VI is a lot of fun. Kevin Smith has publicly opined that, of all the Star Trek films featuring the original cast, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is both the best movie, and also the one Star Trek film most accessible to people unfamiliar with the Star Trek characters. I have to disagree. I saw Star Trek VI in the theater and I remember being surprised in the conversations that followed, by how many of the viewers in that theater were new to Star Trek, and how many of those newbies so thoroughly enjoyed the movie. The reasons, I think, are two-fold.

First, the heavy social themes of death, racism, war, peace, and fear of the future are ably balanced by a consistent sense of humor -- a sense of humor which, with apologies to Kevin Smith, is largely lacking in the excellent but generally humorless Star Trek II. The writers certainly deserve the lion's share of the credit for the film's humor, but keep in mind that the actors playing the Enterprise crew have, by this point, worked together for decades, and have mastered the art of witty repartee.

Second, all of this humor and melodrama are presented in the context of a compelling story. Star Trek VI succeeds as a science fiction adventure, but in the context of other, time-tested genres. On the one hand, the movie serves as a political thriller, with the assassination of Klingon Chancellor Gorkon (David Warner) serving as a catalyst for most of the plot's developments. On the other hand, you've got a skillfully written murder mystery, which pays such homage to the genre that Spock not only quotes Sherlock Holmes, but also claims Holmes to be one of his distant ancestors. And the subplot about Kirk and McCoy being framed for Gorkon's death includes all of the classic cliches of a standard prison film, complete with an unjust trial, a prison fight, and an obligatory escape sequence. A fan of any of these cinematic styles -- science fiction, action, political thriller, murder mystery, prison drama, etc. -- will find something to like about Star Trek VI.

At the center of it all is one of Star Trek's most effective villains, the duplicitous, possibly mad, General Chang. In light of Chang's eccentric obsession with quoting William Shakespeare, it's apt that he's played by accomplished Shakespearean actor Christopher Plummer, who spouts the Bard's lines out of context, molding the meaning of Shakespeare's words to fit Chang's own nefarious agenda. Plummer seems to be enjoying the role, as he chews the scenery with delight and revels in his own villainy.

Much has changed since Star Trek VI premiered. The Soviet Union that served as the inspiration for the villainous Klingon Empire has fallen. Cast members who once seemed doomed to eternal typecasting have made names for themselves in other roles. And the Star Trek franchise itself has passed through stages of media saturation, decline, and, at the hands of J.J. Abrams and his writers, resurrection. But the bottom line is that some movies stand up to the test of time, and others don't. Star Trek VI, with its important themes, layered storyline, and welcome humor, is as exciting and fun as it was in the theaters back in '91.

movie review: For Sale by Owner

2010-11-11T02:18:00.000-08:00

I just finished watching For Sale by Owner, a movie I've been looking forward to for a long time. Add a creepy subject matter (haunted houses, usually good for a fun time), a good supporting cast of reliable character actors, and the indie-cred of Port Pictures, and you've got a movie with a lot of promise. Unfortunately, the whole thing was directed by Robert J. Wilson and written by Scott Cooper, two filmmakers who, judging from this film, have more talent than competence; in other words, their work shows promise, but they really need to attend a couple of basic filmmaking and screenwriting courses (a criticism, by the way, which I've never made in any of my reviews before).

The movie starts so abruptly, and so awkwardly, that I swear I thought I was watching a movie preview, and didn't realize until the second scene that, oh wait, the actual movie's started. I realize that this sounds like an odd complaint, but all I can say is, at the risk of repeating myself, that's exactly how the film's prologue plays out, like an MPAA movie preview.

Then we meet the main characters, in a couple of scenes with distractingly artificial audio. Usually, when we talk about bad audio dubbing, we think of Asian films whose translated dialogue doesn't synch with movement of the actors' lips. Here, the audio is synchronized perfectly, but we get scenes which take place outside, that sound exactly like two actors talking to each other in a recording studio. Isn't it a relatively simple fix to alter the resonance so we don't get that "hey they're clearly inside" feel to it? I've seen YouTube backyard productions with better audio than this. (Fortunately, this audio problem doesn't last longer than a couple of brief scenes.)

The three main characters are schoolteacher Anna Ferrier; her fiance, protagonist James Wilson "Will" Custis; and her father, archeologist/ historian Clive Ferrier. Clive is played by Tom Skerrit in a performance that has become Skerritt's unique specialty, as a soft-spoken man who delivers his insults so gently you almost have to do a double-take to realize that what he just said qualifies him as an S.O.B. There's a reason Skerritt keeps playing this kind of character -- because he does it so well.

One of the subjects of these introductory scenes is Anna's revelation that she is pregnant. It plays out as a scene we've seen in countless movies before, the only difference being that here, it turns out to be completely pointless, since the pregnancy has zero relevance to the rest of the plot, and isn't ever mentioned again.

The other subject of these scenes is the introduction of Clive, to establish that he hates Will for reasons that are much more vague than, I suspect, the writers intended. Best as I can figure, he just thinks Will isn't good enough for his daughter, but the movie awkwardly hints that he has a specific reason for feeling this way, yet never reveals what that reason is.

The story is set into motion when Will stumbles upon the real estate classified ad mentioned in the title. Despite the fact that Anna and Will have no reason to move, Will decides to follow a whim by investigating. He instantly falls in love with the house, which looks like a fixer-upper, but is huge and being sold at a real bargain. The owner, Ferlin Smith, claims to be a direct descendant of the legendary Captain John Smith, and also claims that the house has been in the family since colonial times. Smith is played by Kris Kristofferson, in another one of his "just a friendly country boy" roles. For all his faults, director Wilson at least knows how to cast his guest stars.

Will sets about renovating the house on his own. His occasional trips into town allows him, and the viewer, to meet the other key supporting players, most of them highly cliched stock characters. There's the clueless but well-meaning sheriff played by Tom Bower, the menacing redneck mechanic played by Skeet Ulrich (unrecognizable behind a long, graying beard), and the friendly local handyman played by the always likable Frankie Faison.

If I had to describe this movie in just one word, it would be "unfocused." Screenwriter Cooper presents us with quite a few intriguing storylines, but every time we start to get wrapped up in one narrative, the movie bounces to the next. The story that is at the center of the others, and the one that plays out most effectively, is the haunting. But then there are also no less than five subplots:

1. The mystery of Ferlin Smith: Everyone in town insists that the only Ferlin Smith that ever lived in the area died years ago. So who was the guy who sold the house to Will? Was he an impostor? A ghost? A figment of Will's imagination? All three possibilities are hinted at, but we're never given a definitive answer.

2. The enigma of the house's title deed: It disappears mysteriously, never to turn up again. Considering how little this affects the rest of the plot, it's an odd detail for the writer to keep referencing, as characters keep asking, "so, did that deed ever turn up?" No, it didn't? Then I'd advise the screenwriter to either make something of it, or let the subject matter go! What's the point of bring it up over and over again if it ultimately has no consequence?

3. The question of Faison's handyman character, Gene Woodman: Will hires Gene to help renovate the house, and is confused by the fact that Gene insists on walking home through the woods at the end of every shift -- especially since, after taking only a couple of steps into the woods, Gene always immediately disappears from sight, as if by magic (or possibly just because the woods are deceptively thick).

4. The riddle of the little boy: Who is he? A ghost or a living kid? At one point, Will describes him to Gene, who tells Will that the kid is his stepson. But later, Gene asserts that he doesn't have a son or stepson, and insists that he never told Will otherwise.

5. The historical puzzle: Will discovers a mural in the basement that was apparently drawn by Governor John White and contains clues about what happened to the legendary Lost Colony of Roanoke Island. This subplot not only ties in to the haunting in a confusing way, but it also gives the writer an excuse to explore the Anna/Clive/Will dynamic, as Clive and one of his colleagues, Frank Kapla, are brought in as consultants after the discovery of the mural. Clive and Frank excitedly declare the mural to be the solution to "the greatest mystery in American history" although the movie never makes it clear exactly what that solution is. This subplot features a sub-subplot in which Clive, seeking academic glory, plans to steal Will's credit for discovering the mural. In an odd (but pleasantly effective) casting choice, Frank Kapla isn't played by an actor, but by famous anchorman Forrest Sawyer.

Any one of these subplots is interesting, but Cooper's attempt to juggle so many different storylines sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. The movie keeps dropping hints that all of these events are connected, which I have mixed feelings about, since the emotional result for the viewer is alternately intriguing and frustrating. I'm struggling with whether or not to reveal if all of this pays off in the end. I guess I shouldn't, because I don't want to spoil the movie for you if you plan on seeing it.

But that leaves me with a dilemma, because while I don't want to spoil anything, the ending simply must be addressed in some way, since some endings can make or break a movie, and in my opinion, the ending of For Sale by Owner is the worst aspect of the whole film. So since I don't want to give away any specifics, let me just say a few words about endings in general. Some endings, by their very nature, have a way of negating every aspect of the film that preceded it. The classic examples -- and I'm not saying that For Sale by Owner does or doesn't use any of these techniques, I'm just using a "for instance" -- are the old "it was all just a dream/hallucination/fictional story or lie told by an unreliable narrator" ploys.

Sometimes this works -- The Wizard of Oz comes to mind, and I'm sure you can think of your own favorite examples -- and sometimes it comes off as a cheap stunt and a cheat to the audience, robbing them of the emotional investment they'd put into the events of the film. The ending of For Sale by Owner falls squarely into the latter category, and this is where my advice of "take a couple of screenwriting courses" comes into play. Someone should have explained to Cooper that twist endings work only when they force you to reconsider, rather than dismiss, the dramatic significance of what has happened in the movie. For Sale by Owner, by contrast, has an ending that is clearly motivated not by any dramatic, narrative, or thematic element of the film, but rather by a writer who has discovered that he has painted himself into a corner with too many loose ends (I know, I'm mixing my metaphors) and then slapped on a half-assed "twist" ending that pretends to explain everything and ultimately explains nothing.

Follow That Bird: Watching a Kid's Movie With a (Sort of) Adult Perspective

2010-10-27T18:12:00.000-07:00

When Sesame Street Presents "Follow That Bird" orginally came out in 1985, I was ten years old, still in Sesame Street's demographic, and very much a fan. Now I'm 34 years old, but like many of my generation, I have a great affection for the Muppets. Perhaps more than most people my age, my affection goes beyond nostalgia.

Follow That Bird was made and released before the rise of Elmo, who would later go on to eclipse the entire series in his furry, annoyingly omnipresent shadow; here, he appears for only a couple of seconds, in the background. All the better. The story instead focuses on the character who was then the biggest star of the show, Big Bird, who in this film is adopted by a dodo family in Oceanview, Illinois. (Think about it.) Big Bird is talked into this unwise arrangement by an equally big bird, Miss Finch (voiced by Sally Kellerman), a social worker who thinks Big Bird would be happier living with a bird family than with the motley crew that lives on Sesame Street. Big Bird tries to fit in, but can't relate to either the Dodos' stupidity, nor their exclusionary attitude towards non-birds. The story really gets going when Big Bird decides to return to Sesame Street, and, with a childlike logic appropriate for his fictional age, mistakenly concludes that since the airplane flight from NYC to Illinois took two hours, the walk back will take three.

Soon, everybody has hit the road looking for Big Bird -- the familiar Sesame Street characters (who want to bring him home), the morally ambiguous Miss Finch (who wants to force Big Bird to return to the Dodo residence), and a pair of villainous con artists appropriately named "the Sleaze Brothers" (who want to kidnap Big Bird and make him a part of their carnival sideshow). Meanwhile, Big Bird remains mostly oblivious to all of this, as he treks across the Midwest, having mostly comical misadventures along the way, but occasionally delving into sadness, as he misses his friends and starts to wonder if he'll ever find his way home.

All of this works on multiple levels. I almost hesitate to say that, because it's an often misused cliche; I strongly suspect that when people say that a piece of art works on multiple levels, they'd be stumped if asked to mention more than one. But in the case of Follow That Bird, I think it really is true. Take Oscar the Grouch, for example. In the TV series, his grouchiness is usually presented as absurdist anti-logic; he's annoyed by things that most people rejoice in, rejoices in what most people are annoyed by, etc. Yet there has always been an element of social satire to the character, since there really are people who, like Oscar, tend to look for excuses to complain and insult.

I suspect that the social satire element of Oscar's character has rarely if ever been so well displayed as in Follow That Bird; his scene in the Grouch Cafe pokes fun at bad-service establishments that only adults can truly appreciate, and his "Grouch's Anthem" song solo, which opens the film, proudly revels in his unorthodox view of life, and defiantly encourages his fellow grouches to be true to their nature, to not be discouraged by the often shallow joys that surround them. Maybe we're supposed to be laughing at him, but I for one wanted to stand up and cheer at this song.

Then there's the more serious side of the social commentary. I was an innocent kid, so the -- now rather obvious -- anti-racism message passed right over my head back when I first watched this movie. Now, the racist nature of Miss Finch couldn't be more clear. Miss Finch is completely uninterested in Big Bird's actual happiness, or in the good or bad aspects of the people who surround him, caring only that he is surrounded by birds because, above all other priorities, a bird should live only "with his own kind" -- a subset which, based on Miss Finch's snooty attitude, she clearly regards as superior to all others. Likewise, the moronic Dodos who adopt Big Bird are equally scornful of non-birds, and outright forbid a visit from Mr. Snuffleupagus when they discover, to their disgust, that a snuffleupagus is not a bird.

There's another serious message in the movie, which is that the children in the audience should never get in a car with a stranger. Big Bird learns this lesson the hard way, as he twice gets in a stranger's truck. The first time, he meets a friendly trucker, who tries to help Big Bird, and even gives him some much-needed encouragement. The second time, however, Big Bird is kidnapped.

I'm trying to remember how I felt about this kidnapping subplot as a little kid, but my memory is too hazy. It's hard to imagine that I wasn't disturbed by it, though. Sure, kids' movies are full of bad guys with nefarious, sometimes even murderous, intentions. But despite the presence of puppet characters, this is no cartoon, this is a live-action story about a lovable character -- who in many ways serves as an audience proxy -- who ventures out of his loving, sheltered environment, into the real world, and encounters criminals who lure him into their truck and then won't let him go. That's got to be scary for little kids -- not to mention parents.

Yet despite the surprisingly serious undertones, there's a lot of fun here. The songs are especially enjoyable, from the harmonious, light-hearted "Easy Going" to Bert & Ernie's delightfully silly "Upside Down World," to the entertaining trucker anthem "Ain't No Road Too Long"; this latter song is partially performed by Outlaw Country singer Waylon Jennings, who plays a friendly trucker in this movie, and liked the tune so much that he later re-recorded it as a country single.

As for the cast and crew, Ken Kwapis is, no argument, an under-the-radar director, but his direction is surprisingly subtle for a children's film, and he knows how to milk both laughs and suspense. And the writers, more familiar with Sesame Street than with feature films, prove adept at adapting to the different medium. There is more than an element of self-parody here. From the very first few seconds, as Big Bird points to the Warner Bros. emblem and declares that "Sesame Street is brought to you by the letters W and B," to the closing credits, which the Count gleefully counts one credit at a time, the movie is filled with moments that wink at the audience, as if to say, "yes, we know some aspects of Sesame Street have become cliche, so why not have some fun with it?"

The performers deserve credit too. As Olivia, Alaina Reed delivers a beautiful, powerful musical performance with the song "One Little Star," and as Gordon, Roscoe Orman is allowed to show a range rarely exhibited on the TV series, giving us a hint that he may have had a career as a leading man if he hadn't found long-term gainful employment in children's television. Of course, it is the Muppets who take center stage, and the fact that we, as viewers, are so quick to think of the Muppets, rather than the puppeteers, as the performers, is the exact reason why the puppeteers deserve such praise.

The only disappointing performances are by Dave Thomas and Joe Flaherty as the villainous Sleaze Brothers. I hate to make that observation, since I am a fan of their work on SCTV, and it's so rare for either of them to have such a sizable role, that this opportunity should be a treat. But their performances are simply too broad here; there's something wrong when you're in a movie with a giant yellow canary and a green monster who lives in a trash can, and you're the one who lacks subtlety.

All in all, Follow That Bird is a children's movie that holds up over time, and has as much, if not more, to offer to its adult viewers. It's a delightful musical experience, a culmination of plenty of talent both behind and in front of the camera, and a nostaligic reminder of Sesame Street's pre-Elmo days.

Homicide: In Defense of the Final Season

2010-10-19T06:50:00.000-07:00

First of all, let's look at the phrase "jump the shark." Exactly what does it mean? According to Wikipedia, the term is "used to describe the moment of downturn for a previously successful enterprise" or "the point in a television program's history where the plot spins off into absurd storylines or unlikely characterizations."

If I had a list of best TV shows of all time, there wouldn't be enough for a top ten. The list would be short indeed: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, The Fugitive, Homicide: Life on the Street, and The West Wing. Maybe Quantum Leap. But I hesitate to add that one, because as much as I love the show and admire its acting, production, and writing, I frankly felt sorry for the main character often enough that it hindered my enjoyment. Come to think of it, you can say the same thing for The Fugitive. Buffy and Angel were both good right up until the end, but let's be honest, Buffy's final season meandered in the beginning and depended too much on deus ex machina later on, while Angel's final season, while enjoyable in many ways, completely abandoned some of the concept and style that had made the early seasons great. And while The West Wing's final season was highly entertaining, it managed to be so only by relegating most of the original main characters far, far into the background.

Ask fans of Homicide whether the series had a "jump the shark" moment, and they will cite the departure of Frank Pembleton, the show's break-out character. Even as a fan of Pembleton and the actor who portrayed him, Andre Braugher, I whole-heartedly disagree. Pembleton was written out of the series because Braugher had grown bored with the role, and I would argue with him that the writers were intelligent and talented; had he stayed, they surely would have found interesting storylines for the character. Braugher, however, felt that he had explored the character as far as it would go, and maybe, just maybe, he was right. We'll never know.

But then you could argue, "well, it doesn't matter why he left, he did, and the show was never the same." Well of course it wasn't. Any time you add or subtract a character to a series, you're going to get a different dynamic. But I say that every episode of the final season, the Pembleton-less season, is as much a winner as the episodes before, and even if that's an admittedly subjective argument, look at the storylines you'd miss if you tuned out the final season: The addition of Giardello's son to the unit, and how their personal and professional relationships conflict. The redemption of Mike Kellerman. The multi-layered conflict between Gharty and Munch. And, most important for long-term fans of the series, the gradual but inevitable mental breakdown of Detective Tim Bayliss.

Set up as an ostensible lead character in the pilot episode, Bayliss almost immediately settled back into a part of an ensemble. But we've watched him develop as a character and grow as a detective. Bayliss has always been the vulnerable member of the squad, quick to be hurt emotionally, obsessive to the detriment of his own emotional well-being, desperate for Pembleton's affections, constantly struggling with the professional, sexual, and spiritual facets of his identity, and the moral implications of his job. This is the season when it all comes together, and I can think of no other series that does such a great job at following a single character's emotional development over such an impressive arc. Bayliss's ending shows us how much things can change. But the last two lines of the series show us how much things stay the same.

movie review: MacGruber

2010-10-05T23:29:00.000-07:00

So I just saw MacGruber, the latest movie based on a Saturday Night Live sketch. With the exceptions of The Blues Brothers and Wayne's World, SNL movies don't have a very good track record, and MacGruber, based on SNL's recurring spoof of MacGuyver, doesn't change things much.

Will Forte reprises his role as the title character, whose reputation, amongst both soldiers and villains, is as a genius and hero, with bravery, intelligence, and fighting and spying skills of legendary proportions. In reality, he's an annoying, arrogant, bumbling moron, and this contrast is the central joke throughout the film; even people who have personally associated with him, and have every reason to know that he's an idiot, talk about him with awe -- until he repeatedly reveals his incompetence, to the point where even his admirers finally have to admit that MacGruber doesn't have much going for him.

Much of the humor revolves around the mockery of action movies of the 80s and 90s, which director Jorma Taccone and his writers accomplish not with exaggeration or satire, but rather straight-forward presentation. Sometimes this works, sometimes not. If nothing else, MacGruber at least illustrates that Taccone could make a very good serious action movie if he ever decides to. But as a comedy, the film too often falls flat on its face. MacGruber is, no two ways about it, a very disgusting man, and the movie is full of one gross-out gag after another. This is surely the only movie in history that actually tries to justify not one, but two scenes in which characters stick celery up their ass. The parade of one gross joke after another might sound appealing if you have that type of humor, but trust me, even if you think you've got a stomach for this kind of thing, sooner or later, you're going to find yourself turning your head from the screen in disgust.

The performers can't be faulted. As Jim Faith, the Army colonel who recruits MacGruber, character actor Powers Boothe walks through the paces of his thankless role with the right amount of determination, Val Kilmer is effective as the villain, and SNL comedians Kristin Wiig and Will Forte prove that they've got the acting and comic chops to make it to the big screen. Ryan Philippe is especially good as Lieutenant Dixon Piper, who ostensibly serves as Forte's straight man, although his reactions to MacGruber's constant nonsense provided the only real laughs for me. And at the risk of repeating myself, director Taccone is excellent at finding the perfect tone for an all-out action movie. Too bad all of this talent goes to waste in a comedy whose jokes were apparently written by six-year olds.

Sept. 11

2010-09-11T09:30:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting here, watching The Day the Towers Fell on the History Channel, and they're not revealing any new information at all, but you know what? Twice I gasped at what I saw. It's nothing I haven't seen countless times before but I gasped. Now, when most people say that, they just mean it as an expression, but I mean it literally: I was so overwhelmed with sudden emotion that I involuntarily gasped a huge breath of air. Nine years later, and images of September 11, no matter how much they've saturated our culture, can still affect us so.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have completely and permanently replaced the assassination of John F. Kennedy as the day that everyone asks each other "where were you when you it happened? What were you doing?" I'll tell you what I was doing.

We remember the fear we felt. The sorrow, the despair, the shock, the heroism. Here's what is largely forgotten: the confusion. I don't mean the chaos at the sites of the attacks. I mean the confusion across America. As the nation began to realize that we were under attack, the rumors started to fly fast and furious, borne of equal parts truth, fiction, and speculation. Some rumors were true, some were false, some were a mixture of both, and some were true but later turned out to have nothing to do with the attacks. Wikipedia mentions false reports of a car bomb at the State Department and a fire at the National Mall, for example, but the one I remember most clearly was actually a real incident, the theft of a state police helicopter in Pennsylvania. For some reason, it's the report of the stolen police helicopter that is the strongest memory for me that day. Considering all that happened that day, both from my perspective and to the country overall, that seems like a weird memory to latch on to, but I guess the mind is full of such mysteries.

At the time, I was working as the administrative assistant at the Department of Phrarmacoepidemiology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Mass. The news that the towers had been hit by airplanes was reported to me by my boss, the famous doctor Jerry Avorn. I reacted with skepticism, only academically recognizing the event as a tragedy, but not yet fully understanding the scope of what was happening -- mostly because the towers hadn't yet fallen.

But as I said, the stronger memory for me was the report of the much more trivial helicopter theft, reported to me by a coworker, Sharon "Sherry" Hawley. Sherry was a mystery buff, and seemed to actually enjoy tabulating all of the stories, true and false -- in America's moment of vulnerability, all of the stories seemed true -- writing them out on her notepad, too afraid she'd miss the latest news item, so walking from office to office to catch snippets of different radio broadcasts rather than daring to switch any one station off. Don't be hard on poor Sherry when I say that she enjoyed this process; it wasn't out of coldness or sadism, it was more out of a futile hope that if she could collect and process all of the information, she could figure out what was going on, maybe gain some sort of key insight.

But all of this is one massive aside, because I vaguely recall telling you that this is supposed to be about what I was doing on that day. So let's get back to the topic of 9/11 rumors, because they turned out to play a vital role in my day.

People were saying that the attacks weren't over, that hospitals and major cities would be targets. In retrospect, it's clear that such reports were 100% speculation, based on absolutely nothing -- it's not like any of the people that were saying any of this had the inside scoop on the terrorists' plans. But people working at the Brigham -- a major hospital in a major city -- began to feel like they were doubly exposed as targets. By lunchtime, an "unofficial" evacuation of non-essential personnel had taken place. Oh, doctors and nurses stayed on duty, but research divisions like Pharmacoepidemiology emptied out of everybody except for security officers. And me.

Yes, I was just an admin. assistant, as far removed from "essential personnel" as you can imagine. But some random guy got a wrong number and accidentally called Pharmaco instead of the hospital's main number; he had heard the rumor about hospitals being a target, and was calling to see if a friend of his who was a patient at B.W.H. was alright. I explained to him that the Brigham hadn't been attacked, and then called down to the switchboard to figure out if it was really a wrong number, or if they had accidentally transferred him to the wrong department. The operator turned out to be at the end of his rope; apparently, hundreds of people had heard the "hospitals are a target" rumor, and every operator at the hospital was overwhelmed with dozens of calls at a time, from people checking up on their loved ones, or calling to reach friends and family on staff, unaware that most of them had already left for the day.

I said, "listen, my phone can take five or six calls at a time before people get automatically routed to voicemail, so start sending some of your calls to me. I'll let people know about the evacuation and that no one at BWH has been hurt."

Except for me, Dr. Avorn was the last staff from Pharmaco to leave that day.

"You can go home," he told me on his way out. "We're not going to get any work done here today."

"I have to take these calls," I said, indicating the phone, where three or four "on hold" lines were already starting to blink.

Amidst the dozens and dozens of calls I took that day, calming people down, allaying fears, reporting on the evacuation, explaining that the Brigham hadn't been attacked, that the callers' friends and families at the hospital were safe, some of those calls were from my own family members. Some of those family calls were to tell me to go home, because of the whole false "hospitals are a target!" rumor. Other calls involved my sister, whose airplane was missing; she'd been on a flight from Spain to JFK, and amidst all the air traffic confusion, Heather's flight just kinda disappeared. "Do you know where Heather is? Where's Heather?" people kept asking me, as if I might somehow be privy to secret information. Meanwhile, I was listening to so many callers declaring, "hospitals are a target, get my wife/ son/ friend out of there!" that I started to imagine every noise as an airplane descending toward BWH for a crash landing.

I'd like to say "it all worked out in the end," but we all know better. Still, amidst all the confusion and tragedy, this one story does have its own happy endings. In the end, hospitals were never an intended target in the 9/11 attacks, Heather was inconvenienced but safely housed in a school in Gander, Newfoundland, where her flight had been re-routed, and that mysteriously missing helicopter? Turns out out it had been stolen by a couple of college kids for a joy ride prank; they were, the police eventually learned, unaware of the events that were rocking the country at the time, and just chose the really, really, wrong day to play a prank on a police department -- not that there's ever a right day to steal a helicopter from the police. But I think you know what I mean.

My Top Ten Movie Quotes

2010-07-15T04:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a Top Ten list of my favorite movie quotes of all time. Most of them, you've probably either never heard or forgotten entirely; this isn't about the quotes' fame, or the fame or even quality of the movie. Yes, this is a highly subjective list, and yes, few of these quotes mean much out of context -- but then again, so do few of the better-known "great" movie quotes people talk so much about. So how did I make my decision? Find out below -- but first, a run-down of the quotes themselves. Try to figure out which movies they belong to, before you read the answers below.

10. My god! It's full of stars!

9. My reputation precedes me. If it didn't, I'd be late for all my appointments.

8. It's not the years, honey. It's the mileage.

7. You think the crowd's ugly, you should see the dancing girls!

6. I was misinformed.

5. You're gonna need a bigger boat.

4. Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say "YES"!!

3. There isn't a government on this planet that wouldn't kill us all for that thing.

2. Don't even turn around to say goodbye.

1. This . . . is all . . . far . . . from over.

10. 2010: The Year we Made Contact: Out of all the quotes on this list, this is perhaps the best known, reaching almost iconic status; only the Jaws quote is any competition in the fame category. So why is it listed as # 10, after a whole series of relatively obscure lines? Because, frankly, I am not a fan of either 2001 (the film this quote is usually attributed to) or its sequel, 2010 (the film the quote actually appears in). When all is said and done, 2001 and 2010 are, for all their acclaim and epic scope, a couple of boring movies. But this line . . . if these films really had as much wonder in them as this line does (delivered by Keir Dullea, as astronaut Dave Bowman) -- that would really be something to watch.

9. Who's Harry Crumb? I don't know of anyone -- not even the few people who know and like this relatively obscure film -- would list it as one of the greats. It's a fun but ultimately insignificant comic mystery, enjoyable, but easy to dismiss as Hollywood's version of a throw-away gift. Actually, it was originally intended as anything but; at the time, TriStar Pictures was hoping to expand the film into not one, but two comedy/ mystery franchises, one featuring the further adventures of bumbling private eye Harry Crumb, and the other featuring his brilliant ancestors. Poor box office returns nixed that idea, and we ended up with only this one solo adventure, starring John Candy as Crumb.

Why do I consider this one Grouchoesque quote so great? Because with just this one line, the movie sums up the character of Harry Crumb, and, to an extent, the charm of the late, great John Candy. There is something about the way Candy delivers this line that is paradoxical -- exuding both charm and comical over-confidence in that charm -- that truly encapsulates the character, and the persona of Candy himself. How often does an actor get a line that does all of that?

8. Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Indiana Jones films are known more for their spectacular stunts and thrilling storylines than they are for their dialogue. But Raiders of the Lost Ark was co-written by none other than Lawrence Kasdan, a man who, to say the least, knows how to turn a phrase. By the time Raiders reaches its mid-point, poor Indy has been brutally beaten, double-crossed, and shot at by countless Nazi thugs -- and it's clear that this is not the first time he has knocked at death's door. So when ex-flame Marion gripes that he's not the same man she knew ten years ago, Indy's reply that it's not the years but the mileage means a lot more than how far he's traveled on a map. More to the point, it's a reply that mixes wit with a type of world-weariness to which we can all relate at times.

7. The Muppet Movie: The Muppets -- and I'm talking about the brilliant Jim Henson Muppets here, not the watered-down dreck that his company has churned out since his death -- have always not only used outdated humor, so much as reveled in it, made it their home. They work in a vaudevillian theater, perform time-worn acts, tell groan-inducing jokes, and associate with the likes of Bob Hope, George Burns, and Milton Berle, who at one point tries to tell Fozzie Bear that his jokes are so old they've got whiskers on them -- itself an eye-rollingly old pun. In this flashback film that allegedly explains how the Muppets first met, Kermit encounters Fozzie in a bar that's so rough that the owner himself is violently thrown out the door. When the dancing girls call in sick, Fozzie and Kermit try to appease the angry crowd with an impromptu soft-shoe number.

"The crowd's getting ugly!" Kermit exclaims to an unflappable Fozzie. "You think the crowd's ugly, you should see the dancing girls!" Classic.

6. Casablanca has a lot of classic lines -- certainly too many to list here -- but this relatively overlooked line is, for my money, the movie's best. Bogie says it to Claude Rains, whose character, the charmingly conniving Louis Renault, is trying to figure out what led the mysterious Rick Blaine to open a business in the dangerous town of Casablanca. "I came here for the waters," Rick enigmatically explains. "But we're in the desert!" Louis objects. "I was misinformed." Yes, it's a funny line, but it's more than that, it enhances Rick's mystery by refusing to reveal his motivation. And it helps establish the relationship between Louis, who is constantly trying to find the angle, and Rick, who is always dodging his past (until he can't any longer).

5. Jaws: Everyone knows this one. In the movie that put Steven Spielberg on the map (Duel had earned critical acclaim, but had hardly made him a household name) the threat of the great white shark that has been terrorizing Amity's waters has been building at a steady pace. The three main characters -- grizzled Robert Shaw, scholarly Richard Dreyfuss, and slightly aquaphobic everyman Roy Scheider -- join forces to hunt down and kill the shark once and for all. Then, while Dreyfuss and Shaw are preoccupied, Scheider gets the first glimpse of the shark, whose massive form breaks the surface just long enough to give Scheider's Police Chief Brody an idea of what they're up against. The understatement of Brody's observation is a classically Spielbergian moment of simultaneously building tension and earning a laugh -- and, considering what follows, also serves as a brilliant use of foreshadowing.

4. Ghostbusters: People love to quote this movie; it doesn't rank with Monty Python and the Holy Grail as the most overly-quoted movie, but it is in the same league. This line, though, delivered during the Ghostbusters' climactic battle with the villainous deity Gozer, earns a laugh no matter how many times we hear it. "Are you a god?" Gozer asks Ray Stantz. When Ray admits that he isn't, Gozer punishes the Ghosbusters with near-lethal rays of spectral energy. There's something about Winston's admonition that Ray should have said "yes" -- maybe it's the line's way of coming across as comical advice for everyday life, or maybe it's the unapologetic New York defiance between the words in the line -- that makes the moment unforgettable.

3. Sneakers: A group of private security specialists have been hired by the government to steal a mysterious black box. Among these experts is Donald Crease, a former agent for the C.I.A. who knows the bitter, dark side of the spy game all too well. There is a brilliant scene which parallels two simultaneous conversations being had by various members of the group. As one conversation reaches the unnerving conclusion that their employers may or may not be legitimate government agents, the other stumbles upon the discovery that the box is a universal code breaker, allowing its user to hack into any government or private electronic system in the world. They've stumbled upon a job they didn't even know was way over their heads, and Don Crease, played by the rock-solid actor Sidney Poitier announces that their lives are in danger in ways they previously couldn't imagine. "There isn't a government on this planet that wouldn't kill us all for that thing," he quietly warns his friends. He turns out to be right.

2. Mad Dog and Glory: Not many actors can trace their career path to a single line, but David Caruso may be one of them. In Mad Dog and Glory, he plays Mike, a police detective who oozes confidence and quiet masculinity -- in direct contrast to his best friend Wayne, a humble, nervous, shy detective played by a surprisingly meek Robert DeNiro. After Wayne fails miserably in an attempt to scare off his neighbor's abusive boyfriend, Mike gives it a shot -- and manages to reduce the massive brute to a terrified bowl of jelly, without so much as raising his voice. Caruso's performance in this scene is what inspired Stephen Bochco to cast him in the role that made him famous, N.Y.P.D. Blue's Detective John Kelly. But the scene is powerful enough in its own right.

1. Dead Again: This is the closing line of the very first scene of Dead Again, an intelligent thriller skillfully directed by Kenneth Branagh and brilliantly scripted by Scott Frank. Because the line occurs so early in the film, we know that the prediction is necessarily right on at least one level. Because it's spoken by a man about to be executed, a man who refuses to elaborate on the meaning behind his words, the line takes on the very essence of ambiguous, ominous foreshadowing. What does convicted killer Roman Strauss mean, exactly, when he says this? Is he threatening to return from the grave, or is he merely warning that his case will continue to reveal layer after layer even after his death?

As an actor, Branagh can never be accused of subtlety. As Roman Strauss, Branagh stretches Roman's last words out into an ominous whisper that hints at evil deeds destined to occur. When the events have finally finished unfolding, the movie's characters -- and viewers -- will never be able to forget Roman's deathbed warning.

Around the World in 80 Days

2010-07-09T04:44:00.000-07:00

When you claim to be a film buff, people are constantly bugging you to watch all the classics. Fifteen years after declaring myself a cinema major in college, I finally got around to watching Around the World in Eighty Days, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1956.

Based on the novel by Jules Verne, the movie tells the story of Phileas Fogg, whose stiff upper lip and obsession with precision are both tested when, on a bet, he sets out to prove that "modern" technology and transportation routes (from the perspective of the characters in 1872) would enable a man to travel around the world in a mere eighty days. Charming and suave as ever, David Niven is the perfect choice to play Fogg. His traveling companion and ostensible sidekick, Passepartout, is played by comedian Cantinflas, who, at the time, was such a huge star in Mexico that his celebrity had made him the richest actor in the world. Niven's effortlessly pitch-perfect performance as Fogg is, in fact, often overshadowed by Cantinflas, who gets most of the best scenes in the film.

The movie clearly got a re-write after Cantinflas was cast, to emphasize his particular talents. Cantinflas gets to clown, dance, and play verbal word games, while Fogg's role is alternately reduced to that of an observer, or even written out of the scene entirely. The most notable example is an extended bullfighting scene, which showcases the comedian's expertise in the sport. The scene goes on a bit too long, but it's worth it, as Cantinflas, who stays in character even as he plays the game in expert fashion, is still mesmerizing 53 years later.

Robert Newton also deserves mention as Inspector Fix, a Scotland Yard agent who pursues Fogg and Passepartout around the globe, after a false tip leads him to suspect the heroes to be involved with the recent robbery of the Bank of England. As Fix, Newton provides a comical performance which isn't exactly funny, but is still a lot of fun, if you can appreciate my distinction. Affable and likable despite his role as an antagonist, Fix breaks and follows the rules with equal glee; he refuses to arrest Fogg and Passepartout without a proper warrant, for example, but has no problem drugging and kidnapping Passepartout to stall them long enough for the warrant to arrive.

Aside from Cantinflas and Newton stealing the show, Around the World in Eighty Days was known for its celebrity cameos and its Oscar-winning cinematography. Audiences in 1956 enjoyed playing "spot the star" while watching the film, but the potential fun of this game was mostly lost on me, since the only purpose of the cameos seems to be as punctuation for the many long, drawn-out scenes where we are encouraged to gaze at the wonders of the then-innovative Todd-AO cinematography. Yes, the scenery is magnificent, but there's only so much staring at landscapes one can take before the "move" has gone out of the movie. That being said, there was one "spot the star" scene I thoroughly enjoyed -- the saloon scene, which features no less than five big stars in roles so small that the scene serves as a sort of punch-line to the whole cameo parade. (The movie's biggest star, Frank Sinatra, doesn't even have any lines.)

If the biggest flaw of the 1956 film is its slow pace (a common complaint modern audiences make about old movies, true, but I imagine even '56 viewers grew bored with some of the extended "vista" shots), the 2004 remake slightly errs in the opposite direction; whereas the '56 version had too many scenes where little to nothing happens, the '04 version has many scenes were almost too much happens; the camera whirls around like mad, fight and chase scenes erupt at the drop of a hat, and characters often have to shout to be heard above the chaos. While the '56 film was a patient and quiet ode to majesty and sophistication, the '04 version is a madcap romp with thrilling action and wacky comedy. It doesn't always work, but unlike the '56 version, the '04 remake is never boring.

Directed with energy and style by Frank Coraci, this update re-casts Fogg as an eccentric inventor who is routinely ridiculed by the Royal Academy of Science. This time, the bet that sends Fogg around the world is not a friendly gentleman's wager, but a high-stakes gamble, in which academy director Lord Kelvin (played with villainous gusto by Jim Broadbent) agrees to hand his title and authority over to Fogg if Fogg manages to travel around the world in eighty days, while Fogg foolishly agrees to give up his passion of inventing if he should fail to return before the deadline.

This time, Passepartout isn't just given all the best scenes, he's also given his own plotline, which parallels Fogg's wager rather than merely serving as a subplot to it. In this version, Passepartout's real identity is Lau Xing, a secret agent of the Ten Tigers of Canton (a group of ancient Chinese warriors who actually existed in real life). Lau is on a mission to retrieve the Jade Buddha, a sacred relic that has been stolen from his village and stored at the Bank of England -- a detail which adds an interesting twist to Inspector Fix's pursuit of Fogg and Passepartout, since, in this version, Passepartout really is guilty of the robbery he's accused of.

If there is any doubt that the '56 movie was re-written to accommodate the casting of Passepartout, there can be no doubt at all that the '04 version is clearly intended as a vehicle for Jackie Chan, as charismatic as ever as Fogg's faux-French valet. Chan's multiple fights with the Black Scorpions who want to steal the Jade Buddha back all serve as excellent showcases for Chan's unique style of fight choreography, which combines amazing acrobatics with inventive slapstick sight gags at thrillingly break-neck speeds. Chan's accent and niche-like persona may have combined to cause people to under-rate him as an actor, but there's no denying that he still excels most as an action hero, designing and performing creative and amusing stunts. On this level, Around the World in Eighty Days does not disappoint, even if it's all a million miles removed from anything Jules Verne could have imagined.

The result of all this is that Passepartout nearly becomes a more central figure than the original main character, Phileas Fogg. The film attempts to compensate for this by casting Steve Coogan in the role, a tactic that only sort of works. A gifted actor and comedian, Coogan definitely does more for the character of Fogg than the character does for his career; I won't go so far as to say that his talents are lost in the role, as I for one appreciated his performance, but he surely must have known that Chan's character would upstage his even more than Cantinflas threatened to overshadow Niven back in 1956. This is not a complaint about the movie so much as an observation that Coogan perhaps needs a better agent. (He really does seem to have a knack for delivering excellent performances in mediocre roles.)

Like the '56 version, the '04 remake features a lot of fun cameos, and, assuming you don't spoil the "spot the star" fun by looking at the movie's IMDb page, I won't spoil it by listing them here. However, two members of the supporting cast do deserve particular mention, both good and bad. On the negative side, you've got Ewan Bremner as Inspector Fix. As played by Bremner, the bumbling Mr. Fix is the embodiment of the film's emphasis on wacky comedy, but he plays the role much, much too broadly; his constant pratfalls, slapstick, and wildly "comic" overacting turn the character into a sort of live-action cartoon, and, more to the point, an annoying distraction which adds very little of use to the film. In Bremner's defense, it's impossible to tell how much of this is his fault, and how much of the character's irritating traits were decisions by the director or writers.

On the positive side, you've got Mark Addy in the small but memorable role as an enthusiastic steamer captain. Roger Ebert talks a lot about the "joy of performance," which may be sincere or an illusion, but either way, Addy definitely brings it to his character here. Addy is a delight as the eternally optimistic captain who genuinely likes his passengers and is cheerfully determined to see to their happiness, even at ridiculous cost. If Bremner's Mr. Fix represents the worst of this film's over-the-top excess, Addy's steamer character definitely represents the best.

So what's the final verdict for both films? Well, the '56 version definitely had more class. Cantinflas and Niven are both excellent in the lead roles, and the technical aspects are indeed notable achievements -- but the slow pace, even by '50s standards, really does a lot to make the three and a half hours' running time seem even longer. I'm glad I watched it, but I'll never be tempted to watch it again. The remake is a loud, silly, and occasionally juvenile travesty of Jules Verne, but as entertainment goes, the bottom line is it's a lot of fun. Sometimes, even for classic cinema fans such as myself, "they don't make 'em like they used to" is not necessarily a complaint.

The Fugitive: Landscape With Running Figures

2010-06-07T04:43:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that one of my favorite shows of all time is The Fugitive -- a Q.M. production. As Richard Kimble, the doctor falsely accused and convicted of murder and in an eternal search for the elusive One-Armed Man, David Janssen helped create a character whose story outgrew even his enormous fan base; you don't have to be a follower of the series to get the tired joke "the One-Armed Man did it."

For a long time, the series was mostly unattainable to modern audiences. With the exception of a very brief run on a local Seattle TV station, and an even briefer run on TV Land, the show's been absent from television since A&E cancelled the reruns in 1994 -- and only 42 out of 120 episodes were released on VHS.

Now, however, the series is being released half a season at a time on DVD, and fans too young to be familiar with the original run can finally watch the show as it was meant to be seen, for the first time.

One episode I found particularly compelling was a two-parter, the enigmatically titled "Landscape With Running Figures." Not only did the episode feature an excellent storyline -- even by Fugitive standards -- but it also presented an interesting example of how a given episode can both follow and stray from a show's set formula.

For example, most episodes begin with Kimble settled into the routine of his latest temporary alias -- a claustrophobically small apartment or hotel room, a low-profile, minimum-wage job, etc. Of course, just as Kimble starts to feel content in this new identity, something happens to jeopardize his anonymity. Usually, this is a result of circumstances beyond Kimble's control, but in "Landscape," he's got no one to blame but himself; he screwed up and accidentally wrote his real name into his job's daily sign-in sheet.

Before long, his boss contacts the local police (he's never heard of Kimble, but is spooked by his use of an alias), who in turn contact Lieutenant Gerard. All of this is familiar territory for regular viewers of The Fugitive. But here's where things get interesting: The Fugitive rarely gives us a peek into Lt. Gerard's private life, but here we meet his wife, who, it turns out, is just about fed up with his obsession with capturing Kimble. For Marie Gerard, the current adventure is a real slap in the face, as Gerard has interrupted their first vacation in years, to pursue the latest hot tip about Kimble's whereabouts. The last straw is when Gerard promises to call her from police headquarters at 11, but gets so wrapped up in coordinating the search for Kimble, that he completely forgets about her until hours later. By then, it's too late, and Mrs. Gerard -- notably going by her maiden name, Marie Lindsey -- has bought a bus ticket out of town. She's on her way home, but it's clear that this is the first step in what will be a separation and maybe even a divorce.

Meanwhile, Kimble has also high-tailed it out of town, hitch-hiking until he gets picked up by a gruff truck-driver. The guy turns out to be less than a good samaritan, however; he apparently picked Kimble up only so he could lecture Kimble about how pathetic he is. This is typical of The Fugitive, in which most seemingly nice people tend to have a hidden agenda. In fact, the trucker's insults and unfair conclusions are fairly benign compared to many "nice" people Kimble's encountered.

"I know all about people like you," the trucker gripes, and it goes downhill from there until the trucker has worked himself into such a frenzy that he finally kicks Kimble out -- as luck would have it, right by a roadblock the police have set up. Kimble avoids detection by blending into a crowd milling about a Greyhound bus, and slips onto the bus, unaware that his arch-enemy's wife is already a passenger. This would seem to be a ridiculous coincidence -- it wouldn't be the show's first, not by a long-shot -- but the episode made it a point earlier that transportation is scarce, due to many nearby towns having already evacuated in anticipation of a flood. So it sort of makes sense that Kimble and Mrs. Gerard would end up on the same bus.

Of course, things are never that easy for Kimble, so it's no surprise when his smooth escape is thwarted by a bus crash. Mrs. Gerard is injured, and Kimble volunteers to drive her to the nearest hospital. Because they're both going by false names, neither Kimble nor Mrs. Gerard realize each other's true identity, or how closely their lives have intertwined. Most of the episode consists of their journey, as they search for a doctor's office or hospital that hasn't been evacuated.

By making a main character out of Lt. Gerard's wife, "Landscape" dramatically breaks with the show's formula by giving us real insight into the private life of the usually one-dimensional Gerard. We see how Gerard has driven his wife away, not through cruelty, but by simply making her a clear second priority in his life. The Gerard marriage has been thoroughly destroyed by the lieutenant's Kimble obsession, and part of the tragedy is that Lt. Gerard is only dimly aware of this fact. When Mrs. Gerard propositions Kimble, she's not doing so out of some petty attempt to hurt her husband; it's clear that the sexual fantasies she confesses to are both sincere, and a result of emotional desperation. Kimble is not just some random man she is latching onto, but rather a man who has shown her the attention, care and kindness that her husband hasn't displayed in years.

For me, the best scene is the one in which Mrs. Gerard finally realizes the identity of her mysterious benefactor. She and Kimble start reminiscing about their lives when they were happily married. And Kimble screws up again; he's been careful not to mention his real name or the name of his home town, but he mentions the slogan of the local paper, which Mrs. Gerard, of course, recognizes as the Stafford paper. We see the realization on her face, as well as the unspoken decision that she will not turn him in. After all, Kimble may have inadvertantly, indirectly ruined her marriage, but while her husband is off running his own pursuits, Kimble took time out of his own to care for Mrs. Gerard. And so she selflessly decides to help him escape when the police come looking for him, despite the knowledge that his capture would finally end the very distraction that is tearing her marriage apart. This is especially ironic considering an earlier scene in which Lt. Gerard laments that Kimble "somehow gets decent people to help him -- even people who have no reason to." Gerard is stumped, because he doesn't understand that people only help Kimble after he has helped them, and they suddenly feel grateful and obliged. How would he feel if he were to find out that his own wife is now one of these many people who have helped his nemesis escape capture?

Yet despite the unusually personal stakes in the episode, "Landscape" is in other ways a very typical episode. The Fugitive was possibly the first TV series to treat Americana with extreme cynicism. Kimble meets some decent people throughout the series, but for the most part, almost everyone is out to screw him over in one way or another. Everywhere he goes, Kimble runs into people driven by cruelty, greed, and selfishness. In "Landscape," this motif is represented by a trio of teenagers. The teens laugh at Kimble's pleas for help, and take advantage of Kimble's and Mrs. Gerard's vulnerability by robbing them blind and tormenting the poor, injured Mrs. Gerard for no reason other than the fact that it amuses them. One of the teens even plots to rape the helpless Mrs. Gerard, as the other two keep Kimble occupied.

In the end, Gerard does the right thing, and temporarily abandons his search for Kimble long enough to find his wife and rescue her from the nefarious teenagers. (A little side-note: What's this show's beef with teenagers? Yes, the show's cynical about people in general, but teens get a particularly bad rap, to the point where we know that even the utterance of the word "teenager" means that something bad is going to happen.)

In the epiologue, we see that even though Gerard does love his wife, the love isn't nearly as powerful as his obsession with capturing Kimble. This is significant in the bigger picture of the series as a whole; many previous episodes are excitedly, falsely described as "the episode in which Gerard finally admits his obsession!" but those plot descriptions merely confuse obsession with determination. Here, however, Gerard finally, really does admit his obsession. He seems to be sincere when he apologizes to his wife, declares his love for her, and promises to devote his full attention to her -- but only, he adds, after he's captured Kimble. He confesses that he doesn't chase after Kimble out of mere determination or obstinance, but rather he chases after Kimble because he can't bring himself to stop. Capturing Kimble is all he thinks about, all day, every day, at the expense of all else.

Look at this from Mrs. Gerard's point of view. In one day, she has had her vacation cut short, attempted to leave her husband, been injured in a bus crash, suffered from temporary blindness, and tormented by cruel teenagers who have taunted and threatened to rape her. Her husband knows all of this, and what's his response? He still can't stop talking about Kimble!

"You're the only part of my life he hasn't touched," Gerard says, still unaware that this is no longer the case. Mrs. Gerard, still hurt, still angry -- hell, still pissed off to the Nth degree -- decides not to reveal to her husband the one thing that could ruin him, that she and Kimble had saved each other's lives. To me, that's a powerful ending.

It Would be Scarier if I Actually Believed It

2010-06-01T04:50:00.000-07:00

Ah, hype, a movie's best friend and worst enemy. Not enough, and the film can't drum up an audience. Too much, and a backlash develops that can lead to some pretty nasty comments and reviews.

Remember when The Blair Witch Project was so new that there was still a lot of talk -- even, briefly, amongst legitimate news outlets -- about whether the allegedly "lost and found" footage was real? I really wish I had seen it during that moment when everyone was arguing and asking whether it was authentic. Try to imagine how horrified you'd be if you actually thought you really might be watching the last few days of those hapless documentarians, with no explanation for the bizarre events that plague them. Whether you love the movie or hate it, you have to admit that the concept behind creating such uncertainty was itself brilliant.

Of course, once you figure out (or know from the beginning) the truth, there's just no putting that genie back in the bottle. As the first "reality horror movie" The Blair Witch Project's revelation as a hoax honed our skepticism and, to an extent, ruined it for all of the imitators to follow. (Then again, that's what they get for imitating, dammit!!) You can put yourself in the proper mood and suspend your disbelief all you want, but somewhere in the back of your mind, you can't help but remember it's only a movie.

Still, independent filmmaker Oren Peli and his producers did make a decent effort to capture that lightning in a bottle a second time, with his haunted house story, Paranormal Activity. Like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity claims to be comprised entirely of authentic footage shot by amateurs, chronicling actual paranormal activity. Does it fool us? Of course not. Even The Blair Witch Project didn't fool most of us for too long, and in Blair Witch's shadow, Paranormal Activity's chances for success as another successful hoax are almost nil. But does Paranormal Activity scare us? Obviously, that depends on who you are and what tingles your particular spine. Personally, I found parts of it to be creepy, but too much of it to be over the top for it to build up any genuine suspense. The concept of the time-lapse camera is novel, but effective only if you actually believe you're watching real footage, and results in a lot of staring at nothing until Peli finally (falsely) concludes that he's let enough time pass by to build tension.

Personally, I prefer Paranormal Entity. Yes, it's an unabashed rip-off of the other film, and yes, it was made by admitted schlock-making studio the Asylum (now trying to segue into a name-change, "the Global Asylum," possibly as a half-hearted attempt to distance itself from its reputation). But this is one type of film that even low-budget studios like the Asylum would be challenged to screw up, at least based on production values; the whole point of the concept is that there aren't any production values, it's just a few amateurs with a camera. I found the characters of Paranormal Entity to be more believable than the characters in the film that inspired it; the Activity characters were a bit too "actory" to be believable, while the characters in Entity do present a more believable family dynamic, with the brother, sister, and mother alternately supporting each other and getting on each other's nerves.

Paranormal Entity (that's the rip-off; considering the similarity of the titles, I just thought I'd remind you of which one I was talking about) also has a better back story. The back story in Activity is that the couple has only recently moved in together, and Micah, who initially believes that they are both flummoxed by the paranormal activity, only gradually realizes that his girlfriend has actually been plagued by such activity all her life. Director/ writer Peli try to present this twist as a betrayal on her part, because, as Micah is right to point out, Katie should have told him about this before he moved in with her. But the problem is that this back story leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and outright contradicts some of what happens later in the story. The biggest unanswered question is, why have events escalated so enormously, and why now? It's alright for a movie to raise questions, of course, but only if it communicates an idea that there are answers, and we just may not be aware of them. That's not the impression one gets from Paranormal Activity, though; it just feels like Peli was making it up as he went along.

In the rip-off Paranormal Entity, however, it's clear early on that the family is relatively new to the supernatural. Beloved father and husband David died about a year ago, and his grief-stricken widow started talking to him, and then writing to him, as if he could answer. This was more of a coping technique rather than an attempt to actually communicate with David, but a visiting parapsychologist explains that writing to the dead can, theoretically, invite not only the spirit of the addressee, but other, darker spirits as well. Even before the events of the film start, this family quickly learns there's nothing theoretical about that theory. Entity's partial explanation for the haunting is a satisfaction that Paranormal Activity sorely lacks. (The question "does a story about a haunting really need an explanation?" is a question only in theory; a comparison of these two films provides a pretty solid answer.)

Paranormal Entity is skilled at how it gradually builds toward the conclusion that something supernatural is inarguably occurring. At first, as scared as the family is, they are aware that imagination, nightmares, sleep paralysis, and sleep walking could explain a lot of the weird stuff that's going on. However, by the time events escalate beyond explantions involving sleep dysfunctions -- objects moving by themselves, for example -- no one is surprised.

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King's examination of the horror genre, King theorizes that the most effective horror often partially relies on a sense of moral offense. I'm not entirely sure I agree with him, but Paranormal Entity is a good argument in favor of King's theory, as the horror does seem to be heightened by the implicit offense made by the entity stalking the Finley family: to get into our world, it "piggy-backed" on the more benevolent, weaker spirit of their beloved David, and initially led the family to believe that David himself was responsible for the weird goings-on, until they are forced to conclude on their own that their beloved father and husband could never be responsible for the more violent acts. This adds a mostly unspoken layer of emotional turmoil to the family's suffering -- an effective narrative technique that adds a level of subtlety miles away from the inferior but more widely known Paranormal Activity. (And believe me, I never thought I'd describe an Asylum picture as "layered" or "subtle.") This point is driven home (but still uncommented on by dialogue -- a nice touch) in one scene about midway through, which I found to be the scariest part of the film.

So what's the final analysis? As I have indicated, both films suffer from Blair Witch syndrome, depending too much on earnest "this really happened" false sincerity that was old almost when it was new. But I'm honestly not sure how much the makers of any of these films honestly expect audiences to believe in the authenticity of the events depicted. Judged on their own merits, both Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Entity are worth checking out despite their flaws. But if you ask which is scarier -- and which has the better story -- the cheap knock-off Entity wins hands down.

Some Random Thoughts About Kenny Rogers

2010-05-29T08:28:00.000-07:00

I'm wondering if it's acceptable to start referring to Kenny Rogers as a one-hit wonder. I know he technically isn't even close, because he's had a ton of hits throughout his career, but I think that he's officially a one-hit wonder to anyone under the age of 40. I mean, I'm a country music fan, and even I don't know any of his songs except for "The Gambler" -- and I don't think I know anyone else under 40 who knows any of his other songs either. It's kinda odd that the same person whose music has allegedly dominated the country charts -- earning multiple Grammys, praise throughout the music industry, etc. -- also sort of owes his entire career to one song. It's seems entirely contradictory, but that's the case.

And the thing is, Rogers knows it, too. What Kenny Rogers song does everybody know all the words to, even if you're not into country? The Gambler. What song did he sing on "The Muppet Show"? The Gambler. What's the name of the movie that launched his laughable acting career? The Gambler. He even did a version with Wycleff Jean, for cryin' out loud, in what I felt was a desperate plea to stay relevant. I saw Rogers on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" one time, and Rogers was all excited because his latest single was written by Don Schlitz, who, as Rogers eagerly pointed out, was "the guy who wrote 'The Gambler'!" Based on that, Rogers predicted that "The Greatest," a cute but forgettable and too-short song about baseball, was going to be a huge hit. I knew right away when he performed it that it wasn't going to be a hit. I kinda felt sorry for him.

So anyway, I stumbled upon Rogers's "Gambler" movie series because they have a reputation for being a lot of fun. I remember my grandpa loved those movies, and despite our differences, we always had similar taste in movies. So I decided to try a couple of the movies. And my god were they boring. It's hard to explain how or why they're boring, because they have everything a good Western needs: bar fights, shoot outs, evil gunmen, horse chases, etc. But it all seems just so flavorless somehow.

One thing that the movies get wrong is the use of the title song during the opening credits. "The Gambler" is just an awful choice to play over a montage. I mean, it's a good song and all, but it's got a very deliberate, kinda slow pace, and there's just something wrong about it playing over a scene of, for example, a massive shoot-out. It's just all wrong ! Not to mention the fact (which I will now mention) that the lyrics tell a very specific story, which again matches up horribly with the action on the screen. The audio is talking about a quiet night on a train with a stranger, and the video is showing people blasting away at each other and running around like crazy. What the fuck !

One of the two movies I watched was The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw. Thom "Poobala" Holbrook has an excellent review of the movie here -- http://poobala.com/thegambler.html -- which is hilariously insightful and right on the money. If you don't want to read the entire review, here's Poobala's point in a nutshell: In addition to being a sequel to The Gambler, The Gambler Returns is also a tribute to classic TV Westerns. The stars of nine old Western shows make cameos as their old characters. This, to me, was the real draw. I don't know if you knew this about me, but I'm a sucker for TV crossovers. I just love 'em. I've been known to sit through an entire episode of shows I don't even like, just to catch a crossover with another show I don't like. So I was real excited to see all these old timers in one movie, as their old characters.

But I had no reason to. Even for someone as crossover crazy as I am, this was just a really stupid decision on my part. Why? Because I am completely unfamiliar with every single one of the shows featured in The Gambler Returns ! Looking back, I am baffled why this didn't deter my enthusiasm. But I had to learn the hard way. The crossovers were made extremely obvious even for someone as unfamiliar as I am. For example, when Lucas McCain, the main character of The Rifleman shows up, Rogers doesn't exclaim, "Luke!", he exclaims, "the Rifleman !" That kind of thing. (I'm wondering why Rogers's exclamation "the Westerner !" wasn't met with, "what ya talkin' about, Brady, ain't we all Westerners?")

When the Rifleman showed up for the first of the many cameos, I found myself as indifferent as I should have, but hadn't, expected. I knew I was in trouble when I felt the same way about the second cameo. "Wyatt Earp!" Rogers exclaims, and all I'm thinking is, "okay, I know who Wyatt Earp is, but I don't know this guy as Wyatt Earp, so I still couldn't care less." Yeah, it was a big deal to fans of the old Wyatt Earp show that they got the original Wyatt Earp actor back, but I was checking my watch. The only cameo in which I recognized the character was when David Carradine showed up as Caine from Kung Fu, but even that didn't mean much to me, since I never watched the show, I just know about it. And Carradine, oddly, played his cameo for laughs when everyone else was playing straight. I wonder, was Caine originally a comical character? I don't know, but I don't think he was.

I also found it odd that Rogers's character kept running into famous people. Buffalo Bill, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, D.W. Griffith, Teddy Roosevelt, etc. Rogers's Brady Hawkes is basically Forrest Gump without the special effects, I guess, because otherwise, I can't figure the logic behind the idea that one guy would not only run into a who's who of the Old West, but he'd also just happen to know every single one of them from some previous, unshown adventure. It would be one thing if this was presented for laughs, as kind of a running joke, but as a serious character development? Give me a break !

movie review: Heckler

2010-05-26T02:33:00.000-07:00

Heckler is a classic bait-and-switch, to the point where even the title is misleading. As a result of the blatant dishonesty, I was too frustrated to enjoy the movie as much as I might have.

According to nearly (note the qualifier) every blurb and review I could find, Heckler is a documentary about . . . well, about hecklers, which would make the title appropriate enough. Different aspects of hecklers are explored -- what motivates them, how they affect a performance, how performers feel about them (mostly frustration and hatred, although some of the comedians interviewed actually express amusement) and even how the act of heckling reflects on society as a whole. This is the movie Heckler, by all accounts, promises to be, this is the movie I wanted to see -- the concept is fascinating for anyone interested in either human behavior or the concepts of live performance -- and, for roughly fifteen minutes, this is the movie that is presented.

Then, there is a segment that rhetorically asks "what is the difference between a critic and a heckler?" and the film reveals its true target: critics. Hecklers are almost completely forgotten, and rarely mentioned again throughout the remainder of the film, as the focus shifts to critics and never returns to the alleged main topic. This is what I mean by calling it a bait-and-switch, and I question the filmmakers' motives; when I ask myself exactly why they would call their film Heckler, and then describe it as a documentary about hecklers, only for it to really be a documentary about critics, I cannot come up with any answer that allows for respect for the film's audience. Granted, the movie itself points out that critics and hecklers, from a performer's point of view, are related topics, but if I rent a movie called Dracula: A Documentary, and then spend an hour watching a documentary about Frankenstein, I won't care if the topics are related, I'm going to be pretty annoyed.

That being said, if you can get past the dishonest intentions of the filmmakers (I clearly never did) than Heckler does have some interesting tidbits to offer. As the film's co-producer, co-writer, and host, Jamie Kennedy interviews academics, actors, critics, filmmakers, hecklers, musicians, and a lot of comedians (most of them speaking seriously, rather than going for laughs), and while many of them merely unleash monologues of hatred toward critics and hecklers, many other interviews include amusing anecdotes or valid insights into the motivations behind criticism and heckling, as well as critics' role in the entertainment community.

But fairly soon into the film, the overall tone of the movie becomes hostile and self-indulgent. I mean, let's review each of the main points the movie strives to make:

1. Critics (amateur and professional alike) and hecklers tend to be narcissistic and selfish, caring more about drawing attention to their own imagined creativity than about allowing people to enjoy the show.

2. Critics and hecklers don't care whether they're hurting the feelings of the people they're criticizing.

3. Critics and hecklers typically don't have a background in the field they're criticizing, which should make you question the validity of their views.

4. The accessability and anonymity of the Internet allows hundreds of unqualified people to express their views, which often results in reviews that lack civility.

These are all valid points, but where is Jamie Kennedy going with all of this? His ultimate point seems to be, "you don't know what you're talking about, so if you don't like something, shut up."

Kennedy even goes so far as to track down and confront some of his harsher online critics. Some of them have written unnecessarily cruel comments that focus hostility at the performer and offer only vague comments about Kennedy's films. But some of the critics Kennedy confronts have written harsh, but well-written and carefully thought out reviews. Kennedy does not make a distinction between these people. The scenes in which he confronts these critics show a performer sinking to a low that should have him outright embarrased. It would be one thing if he tried to engage them in meaningful dialogue, which would be fascinating. Instead, Kennedy merely complains, swears, threatens ("I hope you get stomach cancer"), and whines. "I have feelings too," he whimpers to one critic, while another one is asked, "why do you hate me?"

I understand Kennedy's point here -- that many of these critics have gone beyond merely reviewing the film, in favor of making personal attacks toward the performer -- but this is a monumentally awkward and unconstructive way to go about making his point. In one scene, Kennedy compliments a critic on his vocabulary and writing style, but then suggests that the critic didn't like Kennedy's movie because he hasn't had enough blow-jobs. He then goes on to describe a particularly messy blow-job in great detail -- for no apparent reason other than the obvious motivation to make the critic uncomfortable. It's a disgusting scene, with the disgust existing on multiple levels; the scene is difficult to sit through, and laced with far too much sincere anger to be either funny or insightful.

And Kennedy has enough anger to go around. There is even a segment of the film entitled "Everyone's got an Opinion," which goes so far as to attack even casual remarks people make when they don't like a movie or performance. The inescapable -- and ludicrous -- conclusion being made here is that entertainment criticism of any kind, even informal exchanges made in casual conversation, is cruel and inappropriate. Up to this point, the film has made some valid points, but if Kennedy is going to be so thin-skinned that he doesn't like people even casually talking about his movies with anything other than praise . . . well, maybe he should find another line of work.

Armored

2010-04-12T01:45:00.000-07:00

Roger Ebert has long maintained a tongue-in-cheek movie "glossary" which doesn't define terms like "best boy" or "grip" but does point out illogical or overused movie cliches that have become so standard that the casual viewer rarely questions or even notices them. After watching Armored -- a highly entertaining and surprisingly intelligent action picture -- I consulted Ebert's movie glossary and was surprised to find a glaring omission. I'll call it the "Nobody Gets Hurt" Rule, which goes something like this: In any movie in which a heist, kidnapping, or other intricately plotted crime is planned, if the promise that "nobody gets hurt" is made, it's pretty much a given that by the end of the movie, a whole helluva lot of people are going to be hurt if not outright killed.

In Armored, the promise that nobody will get hurt is made to Ty Hackett (Columbus Short), a rookie security guard for Eagle Shield Security. Eagle Shield specializes in transporting large amounts of cash to and from banks, and this movie plays like a response to anyone who has ever wondered if the armored car drivers are ever tempted to dip their hands in the pot.

No doubt about it, Hackett needs the money. He's a good man who has been hit hard by the current financial crisis, trying to raise a rebellious younger brother who's still in school. Hackett worries about having enough money to buy food, let alone pay off the two mortgages he's facing, and in his words, the letters from the bank are getting "very ugly."

His best friend is Mike Cochrane (Matt Dillon), who acts like a big brother to Hackett, and sincerely despairs when he thinks of Hackett's financial woes. Mike thinks he has the answer, inspired by a legendary armored truck robbery which Mike theorizes to be an inside job. Mike's plan is fairly detailed, but basically comes down to stealing the money during a particularly large shipment, and then blaming the money's theft on non-existent thieves. Mike recruits his charismatic but trigger-happy brother-in-law Baines (Laurence Fishburne), as well as three Eagle Shield buddies, Dobbs (Skeet Ulrich), Palmer (Amaury Nolasco), and Quinn (Jean Reno). Hackett is the final recruit, but despite the fact that he seems to need the money the most, he's got moral qualms, and reluctantly agrees to take part in the heist only when Social Services comes calling and threatens to take his brother away unless Hackett proves that he can financially provide for him.

"Nobody gets hurt?" Hackett asks. "Nobody gets hurt," Mike promises, but to quote Robert Burns, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

I won't get into just how or why they go awry for this group of men, because I don't want to spoil the fun. But without getting into plot details, I do want to make some observations about how this movie unfolds -- or rather, how it doesn't unfold. First of all, there are very few Big Wow moments. Action movies love to stuff themselves with Big Wow moments -- amazing stunts, jaw-dropping plot twists, massive explosions, etc. The scriptwriter, James V. Simpson, simply isn't interested in any of that. Nor is he interested in suspension of disbelief: in Simpson's world, people can't pound on each other without getting hurt, and gunshot wounds are bloody, messy, and far too agonizing to be shrugged off with a few well-chosen wise-cracks. In other words, if an armored truck heist really did turn out to be an inside job, it really might play out the way it does in this movie.

The third thing Simpson isn't interested in is cliche. Most action movies -- even most good action movies, heck, even most of the best action movies -- are filled to the brim with cliche. Yet after poring over Ebert's glossary of movie cliches -- which really is quite exhaustive -- the only one I could find in Armored was the Principle of Pedestrian Pathology, which reads, "Whenever a character on foot is being pursued by one in a car, the pedestrian inevitably makes the mistake of running down the middle of the street, instead of ducking down a narrow alley, into a building, behind a telephone pole, etc. All that saves such pedestrians is the fact that in such scenes the character on foot can always outrun the car."

Yes, it's a stupid thing to happen, but it happens so frequently in action films that we've come to accept it. When you watch this movie, note the twist Simpson gives to the Principle of Pedestrian Pathology. It's an applause-worthy moment.

One final thought: I'm quite sure that you're supposed to overlook this, but I couldn't help but notice that every single one of the major characters -- good guys and bad guys alike -- would have been much better off if the hero had simply cooperated with the bad guys from the beginning. Friendship could have prevailed, injuries could have been avoided, lives could have been saved, money could have been made. Everything bad that happens to anybody in this movie is less a result of the criminal plot, and more a result of the hero's insistence to do the right thing. I seriously doubt that's an intentional message of the film. But it makes you think.

The Lawyers, the Inmates, & the Lone Gunmen

2010-04-10T08:16:00.000-07:00

note: This review concerns four television series that are no longer on the air. In the world of DVD, I consider no review "out of date," so I shall proceed.

Last night, I saw two crossover TV episodes back to back. They were both entertaining, but only the first was entertaining in a good way; the latter was like watching a train wreck -- you want to stop watching, but can't keep yourself from staring at the whole damn mess.

A crossover, for those who may be unfamiliar with the term, is a television episode that involves characters from more than one series. The first one I watched last night was "Unusual Suspects," an episode of The X-Files (a show I've never been that into, despite some part of me admiring it) featuring a guest appearance by Richard Belzer, reprising his role as Detective John Munch. Sadly, most people now know Munch as a minor character on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but back when "Unusual Suspects" aired, he was a regular character on Homicide: Life on the Street, a show which allowed a lot more of Munch's personality to shine through.

"Unusual Suspects" is unusual for an X-Files episode, as it doesn't focus on the two usual main characters (perhaps the reason for the otherwise enigmatic title) of the series; instead, the focus is shifted on John F. Byers, Langly, and Melvin, three supporting characters collectively known as "the Lone Gunmen" (and yes, they are aware of the oxymoronic nature of such a name).

A flashback episode, "Unusual Suspects" explains the origins of the Lone Gunmen -- how they met each other, how they met Agent Mulder (David Duchovny), how they were first introduced to the concept of government conspiracies, and even how they got their collective nickname. All of this is probably immensely rewarding for fans of The X-Files, filling in gaps that even long-time viewers most likely didn't even realize needed filling. But here's the thing, it also works on another level: The episode is a damn good story in its own right. You don't have to know a single thing about Homicide or The X-Files or any of their characters or on-going story arcs, and yet you can still enjoy "Unusual Suspects" as an independent story about three strangers who form an unlikely friendship while agreeing to help an archetypal damsel in distress, only to discover that her initial story of being stalked by a "psychotic" ex-boyfriend is merely a cover for entangling them in a layered web of government conspiracy and intrigue.

"Unusual Suspects" is so entertaining that, if I were to grade it on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd be tempted to give it a 10. Unfortunately, I have to downgrade it to a 9, because it does completely fail to explore its potential as a crossover episode. Munch's role is so minimal that his appearance is almost more frustrating than titillating, and if the Lone Gunmen had really been arrested by the Baltimore Homicide Unit that included Munch, then Homicide would have interrogated all three of the geeks to compare their stories. Had the writers of the episode followed this logic, then viewers would have been treated with two more Homicide characters making cameos, although perhaps the writers felt that would distract from the episode's main story.

In truth, this one complaint I have for the episode is indeed a minor flaw, and one which was made for artistically valid reasons. Compare the entertaining, skillfully written "Unusual Suspects" with the grating, inconsistent "The Inmates" to see how quickly a crossover idea can go downhill.

On the surface, Ally McBeal and The Practice seem like two shows that were almost (and perhaps were) destined to exist in a shared narrative right from the moment of their debuts. Both shows are written by David E. Kelley, both shows are about Boston lawyers, and while Ally McBeal is a comedy with serious themes, The Practice is a drama with a sense of humor -- a seemingly thin line which Kelley turns out to stumble over completely when he tries to cross the Practice lawyers over into an episode of Ally McBeal.

The story involves Marie Hanson, a woman who hires the law firm Cage & Fish to defend her on a murder charge. Marie's been receiving psychiatric treatment for inexplicable black-outs, and claims to have no memory of the moments during which her husband was hacked to bits with an axe. In other words, she claims that she's not even sure if she's the culprit, and if she is, she wasn't responsible for her actions. Despite the client thus laying the groundwork for her own defense, the good lawyers at Cage & Fish realize that they're not cut out for grisly murder cases, and so hire outside counsel to help with the defense. That's where the lawyers from The Practice come in.

Right from the very first moment that brings in the Practice characters, director Michael Schultz and writer David E. Kelley start to sabotage their own work. Before they even have any reason to (and they will eventually have plenty of reasons), the Practice lawyers stare at John Cage and Richard Fish like they're from outer space, firmly establishing from the get-go that these characters, despite all surface appearances, don't seem to belong in the same reality. On the one hand, you've got the Ally McBeal characters, with all of their eccentricities and quirks which, combined, work (or don't work, depending on your comic tastes) in a comedy, but in reality would land many of them in the nut-house. On the other hand, you've got the Practice characters, essentially good people who have hardened themselves out of necessity, in their grim battle for justice.

Left to their own devices, each group of characters emerges as likable and sympathetic, but when placed in direct contrast, everyone becomes merely obnoxious. Everyone at the firm of Cage & Fish comes across as annoying, incompetent, and unprofessional, while Bobby Donnell and his associates, with their cold, steely resolve, come across as harsh, judgmental, and even sleazy. When Ally defends her firm, stating that she and her colleagues like the idea of being able to one day look into the eyes of their (hypothetical) children with clear conciences, Bobby rightfully fires back that they all may be nice people, but "if she's found guilty, it's not going to help our client to learn that her lawyers can hug and hold hands."

Ouch. No wonder these people can't play nice even when they try. When Bobby intimidates a potential witness into agreeing to testify, he then casually tells Ally, "now you can good cop him," and the Cage & Fish lawyers are appalled. Billy claims that their outrage is due to the fact that Bobby never let them in on the good cop/ bad cop strategy beforehand, but to the viewer, it's clear that the real reason Ally and Billy are uncomfortable with Bobby's tactics is because they view it as bullying. At this point, you start to see Bobby's point about how the lawyers at Cage & Fish are so concerned about being nice that they would make for crappy lawyers -- and yet he still comes across as a jerk and a sleaze when he later tells the client to dump Cage & Fish. It's a betrayal which makes sense, but a betrayal nevertheless.

The one character who suffers the most is Billy Alan Thomas. As the reliable straight man on Ally McBeal, he would seem to be the most likely candidate to fit in with the Practice characters, and in a key scene, he even complains that he should be operating on their level; he's talking about his skills as a lawyer, but there's an unintended yet clear subtextual claim that the character might be more at home on the other series. But no, he wouldn't. Here we realize that he's too ambitious and serious to fit in with his Cage & Fish colleagues, but too naive to fit in with the lawyers on the other show. "I'm embarrassed to work here!" he shouts to his bosses at one point, and while we can't blame him for feeling that way, we also know the law firm featured on the other show would have no use for him. Talk about the opposite of having your cake and eating it too!

The real problem here is that director Schultz and writer Kelley can't make up their minds about whether this is supposed to be funny or serious. (In later projects, Kelley would prove masterful at compromising between comedy or drama, but he certainly fails to do so here.) At first, it's funny to watch the Practice characters react to the wackiness of the characters from the other show, but Bobby and his colleagues take everything so seriously that said wackiness eventually comes across as simply unrealistic.

Example: Ally takes a prat-fall, her third in front of Bobby. So far, no problem, because prat-falls are typical for the comical world of Ally McBeal. But actor Dylan McDermott, who can be funny when given the chance, doesn't react comically, or even as a deadpan straight man, which would have supported the laugh that actress Calista Flockhart was going for. He instead just stares at Ally with confusion, so humorlessly that I fully expected him to observe "you fall down a lot." He just doesn't get it, because prat-falls are common in comedy, but completely alien to Bobby's world of heavy drama. Reality is somewhere in between; Ally might trip over her high heels, but she couldn't then fall flat on her face without getting hurt. And that's a perfect metaphor for this episode as a whole.

Leaping Into Controversy

2010-04-04T07:42:00.000-07:00

A while back -- back when my blogs were published through MySpace, the online equivalent of saying when dinosaurs roamed the Earth -- I blasted Star Trek: Voyager for their episode "Repentance." I called it "a misguided, one-sided, unsubtle treatise on the death penalty, loosely disguised as entertainment," and I stand by that assessment. Now it's time for a similar review, although this time the controversy at hand is Gays in the Military, and the sci-fi show under question is Quantum Leap.

Now, before I go any further, I must establish that this rant isn't coming from a hater; Quantum Leap has always been one of my favorite shows, with compelling writing, excellent production, an intriguing premise, and likable characters. And all of these qualities can be found in "Running for Honor," the episode under question.

For those of you who don't know, Quantum Leap is about Sam Beckett, a time traveler who leaps into people's bodies (sort of like a temporary possession), fixes their lives up, and then moves on to the next leap through time. The show never shied away from controversial subject matter, a fact which eventually led to its cancellation when, despite strong ratings, sponsors pulled away from the show one by one until it was no longer commercially viable.

In "Running for Honor," Sam leaps into the body of Tommy York, a cadet at the prestigious naval academy Prescott College. On the surface, Tommy's life seems just about perfect: He's an honor roll student in line for valedictorian, he's got lots of friends, he's the school's biggest track star in generations, and he's even dating the dean's daughter -- with the dean's full approval. Things couldn't be rosier.

Yet beneath the veneer of perfection lies a reality of danger, intrigue, and prejudice. Tommy's roommate Phillip, who had (apparently single-handedly) published the campus paper, has recently been kicked out of the college for being gay. Sam discovers that Phillip and Tommy have been conducting an investigation to expose the CHAIN, a group of masked cadets who secretly bully rumored homosexual classmates into leaving Prescott. Sam also learns that CHAIN is comprised of Tommy's track team buddies, which pretty much makes it impossible for Sam/ Tommy to remain friends with both Phillip and his teammates. Sam has to make a choice, and he chooses Phillip, thus earning the absolute hatred of CHAIN. Tommy's former friends immediately turn on him, with beatings, threats, false accusations, and even a mock execution that comes dangerously close to being all-too real.

Phillip is alternately brave and cowardly, altruistic and selfish. As viewers, we are encouraged to judge him by his actions rather than by his sexual orientation. Similarly, the CHAIN thugs are villainous due to their loathsome attitudes and tactics, rather than their political position. Yet script writer Bobby Duncan has definitely chosen a position of his own, and he is unashamedly in favor of -- or at the absolute least, sympathetic towards -- gays in the military. This is made clear by the fact that our hero, Sam, vehemently defends the right of homosexuals to serve. Over the years that the show has been on the air, we have grown to love -- and, more to the point, identify with Sam, so when he gets offended by homophobia, we are implicitly encouraged to be offended as well.

Personally, I feel that I don't know enough about the "Gays in the Military" issue to pass a learned judgment; I know nothing about being gay, and nothing about being in the military, but my gut instinct tells me that if there's a problem with gays in the military, the problem lies with the homophobes more than the gays. But what do I know? I only know this: On Facebook, I recently asserted that "if you're going to address a controversy, you should either be neutral or take a side, but don't PRETEND to be neutral in a disguised attempt to discredit your opponent. That's just disgraceful." I stand by that assertion. Integrity depends on not just what your views are, but also -- and perhaps more-so -- on how you express those views.

And that leads to what I disliked about "Running for Honor": The episode, despite the clear leanings of writer Duncan in favor of gays in the military, does make a half-assed attempt to present the opposing viewpoint. There is one scene in which Admiral Spencer, the dean of Prescott College (and, don't forget, the father of Tommy's girlfriend) gets involved in the conflict between Sam and CHAIN. Faced with the accusation that Sam / Tommy is gay, the dean is forced to use disciplinary action against Sam. The dean is presented as a sympathetic character: he sincerely likes Sam/ Tommy, and is clearly uncomfortable with the regulations that require the disciplinary action. He's not a homophobe in the same vein as the bullying, possibly deadly CHAIN gang, but he does oppose gays in the military, and his attempt to explain his position is awkward, fumbling, and full of vague statements that fail to provide any actual reasons.

More to the point, the dean's position is strongly supported by Al, Sam's usually loyal sidekick. Why did writer Duncan make this decision? Clearly to present the appearance of neutrality. The show has only two regular characters, both thoroughly likable. And it turns out that Sam is in favor of gays in the military, while Al is opposed to it. But why is Al opposed to gays serving in the military? Tellingly, his arguments are as fumbled and imprecise as Admiral Spencer's.

I consider this a serious mistake on writer Duncan's part. Al has always been presented as a political and social liberal, so his opposition to gays in the military seems acharacteristic. Could it have something to do with the fact that Al has served in the military? Al says yes -- but is still unable express his reasoning. That's a real missed opportunity to explore the reasoning of some high-ranking military personnel who oppose allowing homosexuals to serve. Al is obviously proud of his military background; despite the fact that his job clearly doesn't have a dress code (judging from Al's usually outrageous suits) he still occasionally chooses to wear his dress uniform. But writer Duncan chooses to ignore the implications of all of this. Instead, Duncan presents Al (who is often used for comic relief) as a buffoon whose mind is full of stereotypes and myths involving homosexuality. He foolishly starts to worry that, by leaping into Tommy's body metaphysically, Sam has picked up some of Tommy's traits and might be becoming gay himself. Sam angrily and rightfully ridicules these comments, but where does that leave us?

The way I see it -- and writer Duncan seems to agree with me -- is there are more or less two types of people who oppose allowing gays in the military. CHAIN represents the outright homophobes, who respond to homosexuals with anger, hatred, and violence. And then there are the people like Al and Admiral Spencer, the dean. Neither of them have any problem with gay people in any other context, but they fear that allowing gays and straights to serve together poses insurmountable practical difficulties. Now, you and I may or may not agree with their position, with their reasoning, but here's my point: They do have reasoning behind their position, and that reasoning, whether or not you think it's ultimately logical or valid, is certainly more sophisticated than Al's bumbling "well, you know, it's just, uh . . ."

If you're going to address the issue, then address it. Otherwise, you do a disservice to both sides of the argument (and no, that doesn't mean that it's therefore okay because it somehow "cancels out"); people on one side of the argument don't get a voice at all, while people on the other side don't have a position to argue against. An unchallenged argument isn't stronger for the lack of counterbalance; with no opposing view to contrast itself, an unchallenged argument is forced to rely on broad statements ("opposing gays in the military is wrong!") that oversimplify views and ultimately fail to convince anyone of anything.

Spoilers for a Bad Movie

2010-03-03T02:45:00.000-08:00

The next time I jump all over someone for liking that piece of garbage that J.J. Abrams has the nerve to call Star Trek, all that person has to do is say one word to put me in my rightful place: Malice. Malice, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about (and considering it's failure at the box office, most of you probably won't), is a psychological thriller that is probably the only movie I've ever seen with more plot holes than Abrams's Star Trek. A lot more.

It's more or less impossible to describe the plot without giving important twists away, so I will now give important twists away. Bill Pullman and Nicole Kidman star as Andy and Tracy Safian, a happily married couple who have recently purchased a house they can't quite afford, and so they rent out the spare room to a man who turns out to be a lot more than meets the eye.

This set-up is exactly -- and I do mean exactly -- the same as the set-up found in the beginning of Pacific Heights, a psychological thriller which is inarguably more intelligent and yet, in my own humble opinion, less entertaining.

In Pacific Heights, the mystery man is a complete stranger who, for reasons that are never explained, sets out to ruin the lives of his landlords, in a very methodical manner. In Malice, the mystery man is Dr. Jed Hill (Alec Baldwin), the new wonderboy at the local hospital. Andy and Jed have a chance encounter, and Andy remembers Jed as his high school's football hero. Jed doesn't remember Andy, but this time they hit it off and become instant buddies, prompting Andy's invitation to become his new tenant. Tracy takes an instant -- and inexplicable -- disliking towards Jed, but tolerates him anyway.

To make a long story short, Tracy ends up on Jed's operating table after Jed's been out drinking all night, and Jed botches the operation; Tracy survives, but is no longer able to have children. Tracy blames Jed for the miscall and Andy for "giving him permission." Now the movie is no longer about the dynamic between Andy, Jed, and Tracy, but about the legal battle between Jed and Tracy. Meanwhile, Andy, now separated from Tracy, starts discovering a few things that don't add up. To make a long story -- oh, I already tried that and failed -- well, to make a long story not quite as long, Andy eventually discovers that Jed and Tracy were actually in cahoots, pulling a complicated scam on Andy himself (not to mention Jed's medical malpractice insurance company).

And that's where the whole thing just falls completely apart, without any semblance of logic whatsoever. The scam seems to depend partially on coincidence (Andy and Jed really do seem to meet by happenstance) and mostly on a couple of enormous sacrifices by the con artists: Jed has to lose his medical license, which he seems to value above all else, and Tracy, even less realistically, has to romance and wed a man she doesn't really love or respect, and then endure a major surgery to set the malpractice suit into motion. This part can't even be faked, since Jed is assisted by other doctors during the procedure. And if it's all a scam, why does Tracy bother faking all of those abdominal pains when no one is around? To fool the viewer, sure, but not for any reason that makes sense in character.

As I said, these plot holes are simply huge, too numerous and too obvious to ignore. And yet I still like the movie. Why? Maybe it's Harold Becker's moody atmosphere, or Josef Sommer's understated performance as Jed's attorney, or George C. Scott's powerful cameo, or the brilliant Aaron Sorkin monologue that Baldwin delivers at a crucial moment. I like how the main plot involving the scam and the subplot involving a serial killer turn out to be, not connected, exactly, but consequential to each other. I like the nice character touch that you only gradually learn that Andy is friends with the detective investigating the serial killer. I like a lot of things about this flick. But I can't realistically call it a good movie. I enjoyed it anyway.

The Roaring 20s

2010-02-25T14:53:00.000-08:00

It's amazing, considering how much plot details and even the title of The Roaring Twenties ties to a very specific time period, how timeless this film is. It's certainly not one of James Cagney's most famous films, in the memories of modern audiences; people remember "top o' the world, ma!" from White Heat, and maybe the famous grapefruit sequence from The Public Enemy. The only thing modern viewers might know about The Roaring Twenties is that clips were used in a Diet Coke commercial in the late nineties. That's too bad, because The Roaring Twenties is a compelling and fun film, similar to many modern Coppola and Scorsese films about the mafia.

Cagney stars as Eddie Bartlett, a World War I veteran who returns home from the battlefields to discover that the job he's been counting on has been given away to another man -- despite his employer's promise to hold the position for Eddie. Desperate for work, he alternates taxicab shifts with his only friend, a freelance cab driver. When one of his passengers turns out to be a bootlegger, Eddie ends up getting the blame. Despite this inauspicious introduction to the world of illegally transporting liquor, he nevertheless becomes immersed in the culture of bootlegging, thanks to his friendship with speakeasy hostess "Panama" Smith. Meanwhile, as Eddie rapidly rises through the ranks of organized crime, he pursues a romance with Jean "Mineola" Sherman, a struggling chorus girl who is very nice, but too young for Eddie, and completely uninterested in him romantically. Eddie's puppy love is blind to the facts that Panama is in love with him, while Jean is more interested in Eddie's lawyer, Lloyd Hart.

I know, I know, all of this sounds like a mushy romantic tragedy with a mere backdrop of organized crime, but the real emphasis of the story is Eddie's gradual transformation from an innocent do-gooder to a man who is honestly unaware of his growing corruption, to the leader of a small but lucrative criminal empire. Four great performances form the centerpiece of the action: As Eddie, Cagney is charming and witty, and most importantly for films of this type, completely sympathetic even when he's at his most dastardly. Frank McHugh is effective as Eddie's buddy and sidekick, and provides light-hearted comic relief without ever going over the top. Gladys George provides a skillfully subtle performance as Panama, who (in a welcome change of pace from a modern character, who would be either a schemer or a victim) tries to support Eddie's pursuit of Jean despite her own feelings. And Humphrey Bogart is simply amazing, in the supporting role of George, a disloyal and possibly sociopathic army buddy who goes into business with Eddie, much to their mutual regret. I can't say enough for the performances in this film. There's a moment when Bogie squints his eyes in just such a perfect way, he communicates worlds of thought in an instant.

All of this is tied together with a witty script by Jerry Wald and Richard Macaulay, which expertly balances action, humor, romance, and character. What do we learn from these characters? Lessons as true today as they were in the twenties and thirties: Soldiers returning from combat rarely get the aid and respect they deserve. Faced with a choice between two women, men will often pursue the younger girl with no interest, rather than notice that a more appropriate and willing woman is right in front of their eyes. If your instincts tell you not to trust somebody, trust those instincts. And most important of all, "it's not mine, officer, I was just holding it for someone else" never works, even if it's true.

Star Trek: New Voyages

2010-02-07T07:28:00.000-08:00

Not that my review of J.J. Abrams's Star Trek leaves any room for doubt, but in the unlikely event that you're reading this, and never read that earlier blog entry, let me summarize in five words: The movie sucked -- big time.

For true Star Trek fans -- or, for that matter, for anyone who actually likes quality entertainment, as opposed to complete garbage -- Star Trek: New Voyages (recently re-titled as Star Trek: Phase II) is a much more enjoyable experience. Yes, it has flaws, some of which I will address, but some of these flaws kinda sorta work in the show's favor (while some of the flaws are just plain old flaws).

New Voyages is a series of fan-made films, but there are two aspects of the show that give it more than an air of legitimacy. First of all, and most noticably, New Voyages has the exact -- and I do mean the exact -- look of the classic 60s Star Trek series. Every detail of the costumes, props, and sets looks exactly like you're watching an authentic 60s Star Trek episode. This is partially explained by the fact that, while other Star Trek fan films design their ships based on visual study of official Star Trek episodes, New Voyages creator/producer James Cawley somehow got his hands on the blueprints for the Enterprise -- not fan-written material, but the actual blueprints used to create the original sets. If this seems like ho-hum trivia, it's not; the result of Cawley's attention to detail really makes you feel like you're watching an original Star Trek episode.

Furthermore, New Voyages has another advantage over other Star Trek fan films: the direct involvement of actors, producers, and writers involved with the original Star Trek series and its first spin-off, The Next Generation. For true Trekkies, this gives it a more legitimate heritage than Abrams's reboot (despite Leonard Nimoy's extended cameo in that film).

New Voyages has released several episodes (it's difficult to count, since the series includes one unnumbered, "unofficial" pilot episode, one two-part episode, and several unnumbered "vignettes" that are not full-length episodes) and has several more in various stages of pre-production. I'd like to give a subjective review of the episodes that have been released so far*, but first I have some thoughts on the cast.

The producers don't bother trying to find actors with a physical resemblance to the original series' cast, which would probably be an exercise in futility anyway. The only actor who bears even a passing resemblance to his original series' counterpart is Andy Bray, whose performance as Chekov is surprisingly reminiscent of Walter Koenig. Bray appears in the first few episodes, but is eventually replaced by Jonathan Zungre, who isn't bad, exactly, but neither acts nor looks as much like Chekov as Bray does. This inconsistent casting is a recurring problem with New Voyages; Chekov, Spock, Sulu, and Uhura are all played by multiple actors (although, obviously, not in any one given episode). The only actor who really needs replacing is Charles Root, whose atrocious Scottish accent sounds like a bad parody of James Doohan (whose own fake Scots accent fooled American viewers, but is considered laughable by true Scotsmen).

Of course, the center of attention is still focused on the captain, and creator/ producer James T. Cawley casts himself as James T. Kirk. Whether this is an exercise in vanity, or a decision based on the coincidental similarity in names is beside the point, in my opinion. All that matters is that Cawley gives the most passionate performance in the series, and thus holds the cast together. Some Youtube comments blast Cawley for over-acting, but he gets the job done, in a manner similar to how Shatner's over-acting made Kirk an iconic character. Cawley's biggest flaw as Kirk is the ridiculously Elvis-like hairdo that he sports in the earlier episodes. What's the point of that?

As for the individual episodes, here are my thoughts. Weigh the facts, pros, and cons, and judge for yourself whether each episode review counts as a recommendation.

In Harm's Way: This episode is a direct sequel to two classic 60s episodes, focusing on the Guardian of Forever from "The City on the Edge of Forever" and the giant, planet-devouring ships introduced in "The Doomsday Machine." The story revolves around the "Doomsday Wars," in which the Federation and Klingon Empire are allied in a desperate, losing war with an army of Doomsday Machine ships. U.S.S. Farragut captain Kirk, his Klingon first officer Kargh, medical officer McCoy, and temporal researcher Spock somehow come to the erroneous conclusion that Commodore Matt Decker, the first starship captain to encounter the Doomsday ships, may have the key to defeating the Planet Killers. This leads to brief excursions to the Guardian of Forever and to contemporary America, since Decker was somehow sent back in time. In a 2004 suburb, the gang meets Decker's widow and views his videotaped last will and testament, which adds very little to the plot, but does give the show a chance to showcase guest star William Windom, providing a cameo as Decker, the role he originated in 1967.

Back in the 23rd Century, the Farragut crew discover that there is a second Guardian of Forever, this one large enough to accomodate an entire starship. The Farragut goes back in time to team up with the Enterprise, under the command of Captain Christopher Pike. Together, the crews of Kirk's Farragut and Pike's Enterprise, team up to defeat the first Doomsday ship, thus attempting to end the war before it begins. I'm probably not giving anything away (although skip to the next paragraph if you're hyper-sensitive to spoilers) that this ends up "correcting" the timeline, thus restoring the continuity with which viewers are familiar: Kirk's in command of the Enterprise, Spock's his first officer, the Klingons are bad guys again, and the Doomsday Wars never took place.

I can sort of see why the producers chose this to be their first episode: It's certainly the most action-packed episode they've produced, and it's chock full of references to the classic TV show. Nevertheless, regardless of whether or not you like this episode on its own merits, it's a really poor choice to use as the introductory episode, since it begins, and mostly takes place in, an alternate universe. Some viewers will be confused by the changes in the timeline, while other viewers will probably just grow impatient waiting for an explanation. The episode would have therefore been much more effective later on in the series, rather than as the premiere. This is especially true due to the presence of the Klingon Kargh as Kirk's first officer. Kargh later turns out to be a recurring villain in New Voyages, and it would have made a lot more dramatic sense to introduce him as such and then present his shocking alternate-universe version, rather than the other way around. My suggestion: Watch the other episodes before this one, regardless of official continuity; watching this episode after the others would make it easier to understand, and also just more fun.

To Serve all my Days: New Voyages has already boasted cameos from a few minor actors from the original Star Trek series, but this episode really brings out the first heavy hitters: Walter Koenig, reprising his role as Chekov, and, behind the camera, guest writer D.C. Fontana, the most famous Star Trek writer other than creator Gene Roddenberry himself.

This epsiode is a direct sequel to the classic 60s episode "The Deadly Years," in which the crew contracted a deadly illness that caused rapid aging. In that episode, Chekov was the only crew member who seemed immune to the disease, but in this episode, he finally succumbs to the illness when, a couple of years later, he is accidentally exposed to radiation.

Much of the episode revolves around the elderly Chekov (played by Koenig) falling into senility-related dementia, and thus hallucinating conversations with his younger self, played by Andy Bray. The purpose of these scenes -- as explicitly stated by Chekov himself -- is an exercise in Russian surrealism, but the result is the talkiest Star Trek episode ever; if not for the novelty of both Chekov actors appearing as the same character in the same scenes, most viewers would probably lose interest completely. Oddly, the episode ends with the biggest continuity gaffe in all of Star Trek, with a major plot change at the very end, which is completely ignored in the next episode without explanation.

World Enough and Time: This episode was nominated for a Hugo Award, which is to science fiction what the Oscars are to Hollywood. It lost, but the nomination itself is pretty impressive, considering that it's an amateur production, and all of the other nominees were episodes of professionally made television shows.

The thing is, it didn't really deserve either the award or the nomination. It's hardly the best episode of New Voyages, and is in fact a blatant rip-off of the Deep Space Nine episode "Time's Orphan," in which a time anomaly causes Molly O'Brien to age several years in an instant, replacing her familiar personality with that of a nearly mindless savage. In this episode, pretty much the exact same thing happens, although this time the victim is Sulu, whose older self is played by original actor George Takei. I'm sure the cast and crew of New Voyages must have been thrilled by the opportunity to work with Takei, but they really could have come up with a more original excuse to work him into the plot.

In fact, they sort of did, as the frame story takes place decades later, during Sulu's days as captain of the U.S.S. Excelsior. Yes, it's fun to see Captain Sulu again, but out of all of the science fiction produced in 2008, did one of only four Hugo nominations really deserve to go to a rip-off of an earlier Star Trek episode? In a word: No.

Blood and Fire: This two-part episode is directed and written by accomplished science fiction writer David Gerrold, who is best known as the author of the most beloved classic Star Trek episode of all time, the comical "Trouble With Tribbles." Anyone expecting another comedy would be gravely disappointed, though.

Bobby Rice joins the regular cast as Peter Kirk, the captain's nephew, who was introduced in the 60s episode "Operation Annihilate." Fresh out of Starfleet Academy, young Peter joins the Enterprise crew as a security guard, and although he bristles at his uncle's over-protectiveness, Peter gets more than he bargained for when he is finally assigned to a rescue & recovery mission, only for the landing party to get trapped on a derelict starship infested with hostile life forms.

In this episode, the primary threat to the Enterprise crew turns out to be an infestation of Regulan bloodworms, first mentioned in Gerrold's "The Trouble With Tribbles," but unseen until now. The primary threat to the viewer is a romantic subplot between Peter Kirk and Alex Freeman, a rookie on the Enterprise's medical staff. Gerrold's frank presentation of a homosexual relationship in the world of Star Trek is, infamously, why network executives rejected "Blood and Fire" several times: Gerrold had submitted the script idea for the original series, the animated series, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. We allegedly live in more tolerant times, but if you read the comments left by Youtube viewers, many of them are outraged and sickened by the romance between Alex and Peter, especially the (rather innocuous) love scene they share in Peter's quarters.

My own problem isn't with the homosexuality, it's with the romance itself. The original Star Trek rarely dealt with romance very well, usually resorting to boring, sappy dialogue. The Alex/ Peter romance is no different, and it doesn't help that neither of the two characters is that interesting in his own right. Bluntly put, if Peter wasn't Captain Kirk's nephew, we would have no reason to care about either him or his boyfriend.

In keeping with the homosexuality theme, Alex and Peter are exposed to a deadly illness that Gerrold intends as an allegory for AIDS. The allegory simply does not work; if I hadn't read that Gerrold had intended it to be allegory, I never would have known, and even now that I'm aware of the writer's intention, I still have to really, really stretch my imagination to see the connection he's trying to make.

I also wasn't crazy about the subplot involving a near-war with the Klingons. It actually starts out pretty well, with an exciting space battle that sets the story in motion, crippling the Enterprise within the first few moments of the episode, leaving the ship suspensefully vulnerable during the remainder of the adventure. However, after that initial battle, the Klingons are given little to do other than spout overly familiar threats that quickly grow tiresome. For the sake of this episode, the Klingons might have been better left forgotten after the crippled Enterprise drives them off in the opening scene.

Denise Crosby, who played Lt. Tasha Yar in Star Trek: The Next Generation, turns up here as Yar's grandmother, Doctor Jenna Yar. Dr. Yar and Com. Blodgett are two research scientists who are the only survivors of a Regulan bloodworm invasion that has devestated a Federation starship. Their characters are uninteresting and, for most of the episode, exist only to provide exposition. Denise Crosby and Bill Blair give lackluster, bored performances during the majority of their screen time, and seem to awaken only when their characters finally become more involved with the plot during the final few scenes.

Yet this episode does have some definite good points. The interaction between Kirk, McCoy, and Spock is finally starting to show hints of the chemistry between Shatner, Kelley, and Nimoy, and there is a nice inside joke when Kirk frets about sending his nephew on a security detail, only for McCoy to tell him to relax because "we don't put bull's eyes on the red shirts anymore," referring to the original series' infamous use of security guards as easily disposable characters. Naturally, despite McCoy's words, when the landing party beams over to the infected starship in this episode, the security guards immediately start dying one by one.

I also have to say that the ending of this episode, in terms of both dialogue and direction, is one of the best Star Trek endings of all time -- especially Captain Kirk's closing monologue, which really puts the entire Star Trek franchise into a thought-provoking perspective. It's just a shame that, in order to get to this brilliant ending, we have to slog through boring and underdeveloped characters, romances, and subplots.

Incidentally, "Blood and Fire" is the first episode to carry the show's new subtitle, "Phase II," instead of "New Voyages." Most Trekkies know that "Star Trek: Phase II" was the title of the proposed Star Trek revival in the 1970s, and that Gerrold had submitted "Blood and Fire" as a possible script idea for the series which never came to be. We'll never know if network execs would have rejected "Blood and Fire" for that 70s Star Trek series, because the box office success of Star Wars inspired Paramount Pictures to turn Star Trek into a film series rather than a revived television show.

All in all, I would summarize Star Trek: New Voyages as both highly flawed and highly watchable despite its flaws. I eagerly await future episodes, as the current episodes are interesting in light of both their strengths and weaknesses.

*Note: I don't review the "vignettes" or the unofficial pilot episode, "Come What May," which is relatively difficult to access online.

What Lies Beneath

2010-01-31T04:50:00.000-08:00

There may be no such thing as perfection, but some movies get closer to cinematically perfect than you could possibly hope. This list of films is a short one: Back to the Future. Ghostbusters. The Fugitive. Submitted for your approval: What Lies Beneath as the latest addition.

Not that What Lies Beneath is exactly a new film; I was surprised to realize that the movie is now twelve years old. But brother does it hold up!

Like every haunted house film, What Lies Beneath picks and chooses from a stock list of cliches. Appliances turn on by themselves. Electrical lights don't work when you need them to. Faint whispers are heard from the corner of the ear. Strictly speaking, you could argue that What Lies Beneath is a big case of "been there, seen that."

But Roger Ebert is fond of saying that "a movie is not about what it's about; it's about how it's about it," and What Lies Beneath is the perfect example. Yes, we've seen most of these elements before, in countless haunted house films, but rarely, if ever, have these elements been presented so skillfully. Every aspect of this film hits the perfect note: Actors Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, who play the happily married Norman and Claire Spencer, transcend their star personas to create a very believable married couple. They are aided by the under-rated writing team of Clark Gregg and Sarah Kernochan, whose dialogue perfectly captures the sound of two people whose clear mutual affection is informed -- but not tarnished -- by familiar routine. Together, these actors and writers really convince you that the characters exist.

The writers should also be praised for framing their ghost story with a compelling, intelligent mystery. Other ghost stories present us with passive victims, whose job is merely to react to the creepy events that surround them. Not Claire Spencer, Pfeiffer's feisty housewife who grows determined to figure out the ghost's identity, and whose investigation is thoroughly believable. Claire is neither an idiot nor a Sherlock Holmes, but an average woman who goes about her legwork and research pretty much the way you or I would.

When Norman convinces her to see a psychiatrist, the shrink is equally convincing as a real person. "Don't worry," Dr. Drayton (played by the always reliable Joe Morton) tells Claire. "I am required to see you for a minimum of three sessions, before I can have you committed." It's exactly the type of awkward, lame joke that a therapist might say. Dr. Drayton's character, who proves surprisingly open-minded toward Claire's assertion that her house is haunted, is especially interesting when contrasted with Claire's husband Norman, whose skepticism ostensibly stems from the fact that he is a research scientist. Yet Dr. Drayton is also a man of science, and is willing to believe or at least indulge Claire's claim that her house is haunted.

Cinematographer Don Burgess and director Robert Zemeckis capture all of this with beautiful camera work; every frame is a work of art. Zemeckis also works well with composer Alan Silvestri to create a non-intrusive, but highly effective musical score. Together, Burgess, Silvestri, and Zemeckis create a wonderful atmosphere of domestic tranquility punctuated by the creepy goings-on, and because we care about the characters in the center of it all, the events are that much more terrifying. But all of this is a long way of saying that What Lies Beneath is simply a fun, intelligent, scary horror flick. The movies don't get any better than this.

An Open Letter to eHarmony

2010-01-24T01:46:00.000-08:00

I understand that you probably receive many emails to this effect, but I nevertheless feel I must submit this complaint about your rejection practices, which I feel, with some justification, are both flawed and offensive.

They are flawed because one particular reason for rejection, if I understand correctly, is if a prospective eHarmony member provides contradictory answers to your personality profile. I think I'm right to question what counts as "contradictory." If I encounter two variations of the question, "I think of myself as a leader," and then have to answer them both on a ten-point "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" scale, would a 5 and a 6 count as contradictory answers? Must I remember my answer to the earlier question to avoid coming across as "contradictory"? The flaw here is an absurdly obvious one, that you are asking people to measure the most immeasurable aspects of their personality -- and to do so on a standardized scale!

The biggest problem here is that the questionairre in which Dr. Warren takes such pride doesn't take context into account. To stick with the "I think of myself as a leader" example (which may be purely hypothetical; I can't remember if that's actually one of the questions, but it will do to serve my point), a person can be a bona-fide, natural-born leader under certain circumstances, and invariably a follower in others. The same guy who actively leads a social group might desperately look for a savior in a crisis. The same person who's an aggressive go-getter at the office might be a laid-back, 'I'll do anything you guys want" fellow with his friends. The possibilities even for this one "I think of myself as a leader" question are endless -- and that's just one of many, many such ambiguous questions in your profile.

Now I know that one possible response to the above complaint is, "well, if he's a leader sometimes and a follower other times, then he should just click on the mid-range between "strongly agree" and "strongly disagree." This makes sense only ostensibly. Such a solution robs that person of an opportunity to advocate his genuine leadership skills to the personality profile. More to the point, the lack of context forces that person to make a ridiculous decision. "Am I a leader? Sometimes. So I should click in the mid-range. Except. . . when I am a leader, I'm a powerful leader. So maybe I agree. But wait, I am kinda laid back too, so maybe I don't agree. I guess I strongly agree, strongly disagree, and only sort of agree. Now what?"

I must emphasize that such thoughts aren't a sign of a wishy-washy individual, but rather a natural and in fact unavoidable consequence of the nature of asking applicants to measure the immeasurable, to provide answers with no frame of reference despite a desperate need for context.

I should also point out that your rejection statistics are probably flawed too. Granted, you're in a better position to understand your own statistics than I am, but consider: When I was first rejected by eHarmony, I complained about it to anyone who would listen (and probably a few who didn't). Out of sheer curiosity, several of my friends and family members then tried to sign up with eHarmony -- and every single one of them was rejected too. If I understand correctly, you claim that the statistics are an average of one rejection out of every five applications. With me, my friends, and our relatives, we found the statistic to be five rejections out of every five applicants. Admittedly, we were hardly a random sampling, but I fail to see how we're not a representative sampling. Even if there's something about this particular group that somehow makes us different than the rest of the world, I'd think we still represent some sort of microcosm of society -- and yet there's a huge statistical difference between "one out of every five" and "five out of every five." Not that I'm making the ludicrous claim that you don't accept anybody at all, all I'm saying is, there seems to be a bit of a discrepency here.

Yet even if you disagreed with all of the above -- although I think you'd have a difficult argument to make if you did -- I am sure that your rejectees would nearly unanimously agree that your rejection practices are offensive. The rejection message that you give to your applicants is two-fold: 1) that eHarmony has certain (albeit mysterious) standards that the rejectee has failed to meet; and 2) that eHarmony is so sure that this person is difficult, if not impossible, to match -- in other words, so sure that none of its thousands of members would want this particular person -- that you can't even take their money. Yes, I am, of course, paraphrasing, as eHarmony makes an extremely half-hearted attempt to use diplomatic diction, but those two messages are impossible to ignore. It's not a matter of interpretation or "reading between the lines" -- eHarmony is telling its rejectees, in so many words, one thing, and one thing only: You're not good enough. Harsh.

This Blog Contains a Spoiler for a Film You'll Probably Never See Anyway

2010-01-07T02:14:00.001-08:00

Here's a movie pitch for you: it's the story of a gambling addict named Tom Carver. Cast some guy who's good at playing sleazy leading roles. Maybe Ray Liotta. Unfortunately for Tom, he lives right outside of Atlantic City, so he is able to indulge his addiction on a daily basis.

Tom likes the slots. He initially thinks they're fun, but as he loses more and more money, he starts to get desperate for a big pay-out, and devotes even more time to playing the slots -- thus losing even more money, making him even more desperate for a pay-out, motivating him to spend even more time in the casinos, which causes him to lose even more money, etc.

Problem is, Tom's got a wife and kid, and he's got to justify all this time he's spending at the casinos, so he cooks up a lie that quickly becomes routine. He's an author, and claims that he's been spending time at a coffee shop, working on his next novel. The truth is that he never got past the first sentence of this alleged novel, but it's been keeping his wife off his back, and he's been telling the lie for so long that he no longer feels even a hint of remorse for the dishonesty.

The thing is that Tom's spending so much time at the casinos, his family, once patient, now starts to feel neglected. The nature of Tom's lie means that his family eventually starts asking, more out of curiosity and hope than anything else, "hey, how long are you gonna work on that thing, anyway? Isn't it ever gonna be finished?" "Soon," Tom starts promising, which turns out to be a mistake, because when "soon" doesn't arrive, his family finally starts losing patience.

Coincidentally or not, Tom's wife Carolyn finds a new route home from work that just happens to pass the coffee shop Tom's been claiming that he spends time in. Uh oh, now he needs to elaborate his lie, so he explains that he doesn't always go to the same coffee shop. It's an innocuous claim, but it raises Carolyn's suspicions, and she starts to wonder if Tom's having an affair -- a possibility their daughter has already been considering for a while. At one point, Carolyn decides to call Tom's bluff, and goes to the coffee shop to see if Tom's really there or if she'll catch him in a lie, and he races over, arriving in the nick of time to make it look like he's been there the whole time. The immediate crisis has been averted, but things are clearly getting out of control.

Despite Carolyn's increasing suspicions that Tom's been having an affair, his only mistress has been the slot machines, but by the time Carolyn gets up the nerve to ask if he's been having an affair, the answer is a little more complicated. Tom has started to spend a lot of time with a show-biz gal named Danni, and while their time together is ostensibly innocent -- no lines have been crossed into outright romance -- Danni clearly has a crush on Tom.

Now here's where the stakes get raised. Danni, unaware that Tom is a gambling addict, introduces him to the blackjack table. Tom's first visit to the table results in a streak of beginner's luck, and he makes a small fortune. Not enough to compensate all of the money he lost at the slots, but it's still a thrill. This is, of course, the worst thing that could possibly happen to a gambling addict, because now he starts spending all of his money and time at the blackjack table. Soon, he has gambled away his family's entire savings, including his daughter's college fund.

Carolyn finally realizes what's been going on, but when she confronts Tom, his apology quickly segues into the old "I'm not perfect" defense, which in turn becomes a cruel verbal attack on Carolyn, whose patience and all-around sweetness are thrown in her face as "boring." Tom runs off to Danni, but returns later that night to beg forgiveness and promise that things will be different. Carolyn, however, has finally had enough -- the loss of the college fund was the last straw -- and asks for a divorce.

Tom decides to quit gambling cold turkey, in the hopes that this will win Carolyn back, but then Danni comes to Tom with a "sure thing", and they conspire to make one last big bet. Tom is confident that a big score will win Carolyn back, and is truly clueless that the mere knowledge that he's betting again would be enough to estrange Carolyn once and for all. When the "sure thing" turns out to be a bust, Tom is so upset that he doesn't care that Danni has lost everything she owned, and responds by angrily hitting her before storming out, leaving poor Danni in tears.

All of this may sound like a fairly by-the-numbers story of a loser whose flaws lead him to hurt everyone around him. I'll admit we've seen variations of this story countless times before, but here's the first part of the twist: I'm describing one of the plots of an actual movie, Even Money. The movie stars Kim Basinger as Carolyn and Ray Liotta as Tom. And here's the real twist: In the movie, Carolyn is the gambling addict and Liotta plays the loving spouse who is victimized by his wife's dishonesty.

Now, I could commend writer Robert Tannen for his inspiration to switch the genders of otherwise familiar roles, putting a new perspective on an old story. Or I could condemn him for the exact same thing, using the gender switch to hide the fact that his story is full of cliches and and tired melodrama. Both reactions would probably be equally valid. But I'm not interested in either of these messages.

Instead, I want you to consider how you felt about these characters while you were reading about the sleazy Liotta and the loyal but victimized and ultimately defiant wife played by Kim Basinger. And compare that to how you'd feel watching Carolyn's desperate attempts to win back the money she'd lost, and Tom's furious accusations and futile attempt to catch her in the act of her lie. How do you feel about the main character's almost-not platonic relationship with the exciting stranger now that you know that she's not some busty red-head, but he's a humble Danny DeVito? How do you feel about the scene in which Carolyn loses her temper and repeatedly strikes her male friend? Is it o.k. now, because it's a woman hitting a man instead of the other way around? Does the gambler go from "what a jerk!" status to "poor woman's got a problem"? Do the actions of the jealous spouse become less justified and more disturbing?

You should consider these questions and ponder what the answers say about you and the society in which you live. Maybe that's what Robert Tannen had in mind all along.

Let's Confuse the Audience to Death

2009-12-15T12:57:00.000-08:00

Now that I've finally seen the horror classic Let's Scare Jessica to Death, I have to say that I am completely dumbfounded as to all of the praise that has been heaped onto this piece of schlock. Oh, I've disagreed with cinematic consensus about so-called masterpieces before. But at least in those instances, as much as I've disagreed with the majority view, I could still see what people saw in those films. But Let's Scare Jessica to Death just leaves me baffled. After seeing it, I simply have no idea how people can speak so highly of it.

And make no mistake, people do speak highly of this film. Everyone including my own mother has recommended this movie. The Chicago Film Critics Association lists it in their compilation of the 100 scariest movies ever made. Orville Stoeber cites the main character as "a metaphor for our moral confusion of that time." Stephen King refers to it as one of his favorite horror films. And Allmovie.com refers to it as "eerie" and then lavishes it with acclaim:

"This is a powerful ghost story, skillfully directed by John Hancock and surprisingly well-acted by a talented young cast. Zohra Lampert is especially convincing in the title role, taking her performance several layers beyond the wide-eyed hysteria shown by similar characters in other films. . . This elusive gem is well worth seeking out, and is guaranteed to raise goosebumps."

Wow. Now let me tell you what I see.

The movie tells the story of three middle-aged pseudo-hippies who move from New York City to a small, isolated town in rural Connecticut. There's Duncan, a prematurely retired cellist; Jessica, Duncan's wife, who has just been released from an extended stay in a mental institution; and their friend Woody, whom Jessica calls "David" at one point. (As far as I can tell, Jessica's reference to Woody as "David" is not an intentional plot point, but simply an actor's error that was never edited out. Yeah. It's that kind of movie.)

One of the very few things I like about this movie is the relationship between Duncan, Jessica, and Woody. The film doesn't bother with a tiredly predictable love triangle, nor does it saddle us with an unnecessary subplot about some sort of "third wheel" resentment regarding Woody. He is merely a friend, with a sincere but purely platonic love for his married buddies.

The trio moves into a farmhouse and improbably befriend Emily, a squatter who had moved in because she had thought the house abandoned while it was between owners. They even ask her to stay as an extended houseguest, believe it or not. But Jessica, despite her initial affection for Emily, begins to suspect that Emily may be a ghost of, or reincarnation of, or vampiric resurrection of (the movie is unclear which) Abigail Woods, one of the house's previous residents.

Meanwhile, Duncan and Jessica learn that the town is nearly entirely populated by old men who are inexplicably surly and antagonistic. There is a constant unspoken threat of violence in all of the town scenes, and this tension is admittedly handled well. Interestingly, the one decent resident of the town is the friendly antiques dealer -- who also moved from NYC. (Is this detail intended as some sort of irony or statement, that the people from the big city are friendly and the people from the seemingly Norman Rockwell town are all jerks?) The antiques dealer is brought into the story so someone can explain the direful history of the house Jessica has moved into. I think of such screenwriting as efficient but transparent.

What follows is a series of events so bizarre that they defy explanation. In attempting to craft its mystery, the movie ends up being far too ambiguous. And you know how I know it's not just a matter of yours truly, the Movie Man, being confused by the story? Because I've read two completely different interpretations of the film, with neither author seeming aware that they are offering interpretations; each reviewer, with a completely different and equally valid take on the film, thinks he's relaying an entirely objective explanation of events.

In the first interpretation, the critic declares that all of the unexplained events are the result of a massive conspiracy against Jessica. In other words, for reasons never addressed in the slightest, all of the other characters -- Duncan, Emily, Woody, and all the townspeople -- have inexplicably decided to band together to drive Jessica crazy. Yes, the very idea is ludicrous, especially since there is never even a hint at what the possible motivation for such a conspiracy could be. But this interpretation would at least explain many (not all) of the events in the film, not to mention the otherwise puzzling title of the movie. But, to emphasize a point that does bear repeating, if the events of the film are due to a conspiracy to drive Jessica insane, the complete lack of motivation is a plot hole the size of Gibraltar.

In the second interpretation, all of the crazy events in the film occur only in Jessica's mind, which would explain why Jessica (who was, after all, recently in a mental institution, and still hears voices she tries to ignore) keeps seeing scary things happening. But if this is the case, then how are we, as the viewers, supposed to be able to differentiate between Jessica's reality and her wild delusions? This explanation, ostensibly convenient, is ultimately dissatisfying.

Furthermore, there is a moment of the film that defies both of the above explanations, without offering a third. I almost hate to complain about it, since it is in fact one of the few truly effective parts of the movie, but it simply must be addressed, simply because of how completely it renders both of the above explanations invalid.

At one point early in the film, Jessica is in the attic, which still contains items left behind by the previous residents. As Jessica explores, she fails to see a mysterious dark figure lurking behind her -- and it doesn't seem to be shaped like a human. What is it? Is it just a crazy townsperson creeping around under a black blanket (which sounds silly, but would be consistent with explanation #1)? Or is it a supernatural presence, as if the shadows themselves pose a threat? In this scene, the lack of explanation works in the movie's favor, and really is quite creepy. When Jessica turns around, all she sees is Duncan walking into the attic to ask her some mundane question about moving in. But unlike Jessica, we, the viewers, know that Duncan was not the source of the noise that made her turn around. What was that thing?

So if this scene is so effective on its own, why doesn't it work in the movie as a whole? Well, for one thing, it seems completely unrelated to all of the other weird events. Crazy townspeople, fine. Ghostly reincarnations, o.k. And now something creeping around in the attic too? That's never even noticed by any of the characters, and never comes up again? What's up with that? And think about what the presence of that creepy dark thing does for the only two explanations given for the film. If crazy town people are trying to drive Jessica nuts, why not let Jessica see you in all your creepiness? But it can't be just a product of Jessica's delirious imagination; she never even sees the damn thing.

Meanwhile, the movie trudges along at a maddeningly slow pace. This is the kind of movie where you can get up and make a sandwich without pausing the DVD, and probably not miss much by the time you get back. The acting is mostly wooden. The direction is flat. The script is incomprehensible. And the budget is lower than a typical Friday night bar bill. At least the music is pretty good.

Comedy, Migraine, and Social Anxiety Disorder

2009-12-12T03:17:00.000-08:00

I had conflicting plans tonight, and I sorta bombed with both of them. First, there was the condo association holiday party. I originally didn’t plan on going, because it conflicted with the comedy show I mentioned earlier. Then I realized that I could go to the first half hour of the party and still make it to the show, but I made the strategic error of calling Frank mere seconds before the party started, so I could ask him and Donna to go with me. Turns out they both had plans; Donna was at a cookie swap, and Frank was working on a project for work. He predicted he’d be done in a couple of hours, but one of the very, very few things Frank is bad at is making such predictions. Things always, always take a lot longer than he predicts. So I would have to go alone (since Ernest is on vacation, and that uses up my local friends list). But Frank is a talker. A quiet talker, but a talker to be sure, so by the time the conversation was done, I had only ten minutes to “enjoy” the association party.

It turned out to be five minutes more than I needed.

I went downstairs to the lobby. The party had officially started 20 minutes earlier, but the turnout was small; I could count the people there on one hand, probably. I helped myself to some punch and was then told it had four kinds of liquor in it. Way too strong for someone who is usually a non-drinker. It took me the full five minutes I was there to finish a very, very small serving.

I stood around and made a bit of small talk with a few neighbors, but mostly I just watched other people make small talk, my social anxiety disorder preventing me from being more sociable. That same anxiety led me to flee – and yes, that was what it was, fleeing, no two ways about it – back to the safety of my apartment.

I then walked downtown to the bar where the WCI comedy show was being held in the events room upstairs. During the show, I was vaguely aware that I was squinting a lot, unintentionally and unnecessarily (and probably unattractively). This will be relevant later.

When the show was over, some of the audience members, myself included, were invited to the after-show party at the Dragonfly (the gothic Irish pub formerly known as “the Playwright”). Actually, I’m fairly certain that some of the audience members who went to the party weren’t invited, but just kinda tagged along because such a large group was making a bee-line from one bar to another.

We got to Dragonfly, which George humorously described as “Dracula’s Castle,” an apt descriptor of the pub’s overly gothic design – and an observation I will surely steal the credit for in a later conversation with somebody.

I was starving, and absolutely had to order food. A look at the prices made my jaw drop. I felt my unvoiced outrage at the prices to be a bit vindicated when somebody else started complaining about the “New York prices.” I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu that looked palatable: the turkey club, for $12 (expensive, if you figure tax is gonna up the price a coupla bucks). To paraphrase John Travolta from Pulp Fiction, I don’t know if it was worth twelve dollars, but it was a damn good turkey club.

Once we’d all been seated and the food had been ordered, we were finally all settled in, and that’s when my old nemesis, whom I’d seen far too recently, again reared its ugly head: Social Anxiety Disorder. Despite having strategically placed my seat near two of the people I knew on a social basis (Fred and George, who are members of my play-reading meet-up group), I still found myself at a loss for words for most of the night. Oh, there were a couple of exceptions. For example, I eagerly joined in the movie quote game, until people encouraged me to take a turn. I tried to warn them that every time I tried to play the game, I only thought of obscure quotes, but they mistook this for a challenge, and so grew even more insistent that I make a go at it.

“Don’t even turn around to say goodbye!” I quoted. Silence.

“Can you give us a hint?” George prompted.

“Like another line?” I asked.

“Yeah, that would help.”

“That ain’t blowback,” I quoted. “Blowback don’t jump over stuff.”

More silence. The game never really got back on track after that. (The quotes are from Mad Dog and Glory.)

For most of the rest of the night, I was more or less the observer of other people’s conversations. Awkward, to be sure, although I still feel I made the right decision in dining with WCI than with returning to the condo association party, because if you had the choice between eavesdropping on your neighbors making polite but shallow small-talk, or eavesdropping on a group of comedians joking and laughing and making hilarious observations on life, which would you prefer? I was in an odd state of being both happy and depressed – happy that I was spending the evening with these great people, but disappointed in myself that I was blowing my chance to make a good impression, since only a couple of them knew me socially, and I was certainly not at my best that evening.

Synchronistically, just as I was wondering why I had no problem making a fool of myself onstage, and yet could barely hold a conversation in a bar, my question was answered by a conversation between some of the improv-ers. They were talking about getting into character, and a guy named Chris was explaining that when he gets into character, he does things he would never imagine doing as himself. "The worse that can happen is you bomb," Chris edified, "but when that happens, it's the character that bombs, not me."

Exactly, Chris. Exactly.

I found myself squinting again, and this time, I knew the cause. It was the beginning signs of a migraine. Between that and the social anxiety, I was motivated to make a hasty exit. By the time I got home, the migraine had rapidly progressed. The pain was intense. I was able to keep my wits long enough to warn my roommate not to be alarmed if she heard screams of pain from the bedroom. I think I only let out a couple of groans before I passed out. And then, there was nothing but the dreams.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

2009-11-13T13:01:00.000-08:00

I had a dream in which I was in a high school science lab. A fire alarm was going off, and I was arguing with two women that we should evacuate the building, first of all because it’s the law, and second of all because of the slim chance that it might not be a false alarm. They simply refused to even consider leaving until I made the bizarre argument that “Penny Marshall would leave if she heard a fire alarm!” referring to the famous actress/ director. I knew that both women were huge Penny Marshall fans.

“You know, he’s right,” one of the women said to the other. “She would leave. And we should follow her example.”

“She wouldn’t necessarily leave,” the other woman countered. “It depends on whether you’re talking about Penny Marshall from Laverne and Shirley or Penny Marshall from The Odd Couple.”

“Well, clearly he’s talking about Penny Marshall from Laverne and Shirley.”

“Not necessarily. She was in quite a few episodes of The Odd Couple.”

“How are you going to compare 19 episodes of The Odd Couple with 178 episodes of Laverne and Shirley?”

“I’m just saying it’s a good performance that she gave in The Odd Couple, and it shouldn’t be dismissed just because she’s better known for Laverne and Shirley.”

And so they bickered until the dream ended. We never did end up leaving the building, or even the room, for that matter.

Now, here is some context: The reason I had a dream about a fire alarm going off is because the fire alarm really was going off. I slept through most of it. That is a pretty disturbing fact, and also an odd one, considering the fact that I’m usually such a light sleeper that I’ve been woken up by leaves rustling outside. But there’s a reason for my sleeping so heavily this time.
A while back, I went to the doctor for a routine check-up. We talked about my migraine-induced photophobia, and she grew concerned that I avoid sunlight so much that I may lack vitamin K in my bloodstream. Vitamin K, she explained, can be found in certain foods, but for most people, their primary source of vitamin K is sunlight, so avoiding sunlight can lead to a vitamin K deficiency. And so she prescribed a blood test.

As it turns out, the blood tests revealed that my vitamin K levels are fine, but I have lyme disease. So I was prescribed this horrific drug whose side-effect warnings include the criminal understatement “may cause nausea.” I spent half an hour vomiting non-stop, and yes, I mean non-stop, and no, I am not exaggerating or guessing when I say half an hour, it was almost exact, I checked the clock. That is a lot of vomiting, and after a while, I started to seriously fear that I might choke or develop some other immediately fatal breathing problem as a result of the complete lack of control. And when I say “I started to seriously fear,” I must emphasize that I do not mean that it was a concern in the back of my mind, I mean that when I had a brief (maybe thirty seconds) respite at about the fifteen-minute mark, I quickly ran to my computer. I was gasping too heavily to call anyone, and the reason for me running to my computer was to type out a quick email to tell people that I love them and good-bye. I know, this sounds melodramatic and a highly impractical thing to do in a crisis, but I wasn’t thinking clearly; the combination of physical exertion and improper breathing for fifteen straight minutes just left me feeling so light-headed, I couldn’t have typed anything coherent even if I had had the time. Anyway, it was a moot thought, because by the time I got to my computer, I had to just turn around again and return to the toilet for more vomiting fun.

By the time I was done, I was exhausted. I spent the rest of the day feeling terribly ill and in a daze of exhaustion. When I went to bed (I usually wait until the sun starts to go down, so around this time of the year, it’s about six o’clock) I thought, “better make extra sure your alarm is set, because otherwise you will sleep all night.” This thought would soon prove to be both ironic and prophetic.

I woke up in “the middle of the night,” which in my screwed up sleep schedule, means about eight o’clock. Actually, it was exactly 8:04 when I checked the clock, and thought, “cool, I can go back to sleep for a couple more hours.” I again checked to make sure that the alarm was set for ten, and then went back to sleep.

When I woke up, I looked at the clock, and it was exactly 2:30. What the hell? I had double and even triple-checked that the clock had been set for ten! You can probably guess what comes next: It turns out I had accidentally set it for 10am instead of 10pm. I was now three and a half hours late for work.
Fortunately, my supervisor was understanding. He had called at 11:15, and when he found out I wasn’t there, he went in to cover for me. When I called in to explain that I had been too sick to wake up in time for work (diplomatically leaving out the am/pm blunder) he agreed to switch nights with me so that I could still get in my two nights of work that week.
Because I had slept so soundly Tuesday night, I couldn’t fall asleep again all day Wednesday. So even though I’d been up since 2:30am, I went to work at 11pm, and got home at 7:30 in the morning. This means I’d been up for exactly 29 hours, and I was sure I’d pass out immediately upon my head hitting the pillow Thursday morning. But then I got a migraine attack, and my migraine medication is stuffed to the brim with caffeine. So I spent a good portion of Thursday tossing and turning in bed, but no sleep came. Sometimes I’d toss and turn, and sometimes I’d give up, get out of bed, and wander around the apartment in a daze, doing normal stuff like ‘net surfing, reading, watching TV, etc. Every time I tried to sleep, the caffeine kept me wide awake.

By the time it was 6pm, I remembered that I had my acting/improv class at seven. At first I thought, “no way, I need to get some sleep before I get back to work!” but when I tried to go to sleep, I was still tossing and turning violently, and sleep was still a pipe dream. I finally figured, “whatever, I’m not sleeping anyway, I might as well go to the class.”
I got back from class at 9:30 and figured it would be pointless to try to get some sleep at this point, because I’d have to get up in half an hour to get ready for work.

So by the time I got home at 7:30 on Friday, I’d been up for 53 hours straight. No longer a mystery why I slept through most of the fire alarm. It actually woke me up when it first started going off. I thought, “fire alarm, oh no!” And that thought led directly to the argument in my dream. The transition from sleeping to waking to dreaming was nearly instantaneous. I have no idea how long the fire alarm kept going off while I lay in bed, peacefully incorporating the noise into my dream.