March 20, 2008

Remembering Ivan Dixon

The actor Ivan Dixon died on March 16 in Charlotte, NC, while the media were buzzing about the need for more "dialogue about race." Too often, that means another recycling of the same-ol'-same-'ol, cliches and recriminations, until we grow weary and shut it down again.

We don't need any more of that. We need a 21st-century version of Nothing But a Man (1964), the quiet, eloquent film starring Mr. Dixon as a working man who marries a preacher's daughter (Abbey Lincoln) and insists on being treated respectfully by everyone he meets. That's it. But for a long time after I first saw it in the 1970s, it was my favorite film (and, I gather, Malcolm X's).

Nothing But a Man is available on DVD, and from the first black-and-white frame (I am referring to the film stock), you will see that it is of a different era. But if you stay with it, you will also see that some treatments of race do not grow tiresome, because they are simply, straightforwardly human. That's why I remember Ivan Dixon.

Posted by mbayles at 8:57 AM

March 18, 2008

Confession

The title of this entry does not refer to my own confession, but Leo Tolstoy's. I recently watched Sean Penn's Into the Wild, based on the eponymous best-seller by Jon Krakauer, about Chris McCandless, a young man who "dropped out," as they used to say in the sixties, only without then "tuning in" to any movement or "turning on" with any known drug.

What McCandless did do was abandon family, friends, future prospects, and affluent lifestyle, to embark on a quest without definition that, to judge by the film (I have not read the book), acquired definition as it went along. After two years of living as a voluntary hobo (he renamed himself "Alexander Supertramp"), hippie (he bonded with a counter-cultural tribe living in RVs), and latter-day alms-seeking monk, he trekked alone into the Alaskan wilderness, where after 112 days of foraging for food and living in an abandoned bus, he died of starvation.

In the wrong hands, this story could be unbearable, especially in today's acrimonious social and cultural atmosphere. And ... let me put it this way: I am not enlightened by Sean Penn's politics, and I don't much like him. But he is one of the major talents in Hollywood, if not THE major talent. This film is a masterpiece. I'm not even talking about its visual beauty, which is all the more stunning for not having been generated by a computer. Nor, really, am I talking about Emile Hirsch, whose only flaw in the lead role is that he is more lovable than the real McCandless seems to have been.

No, I'm talking about that rarest of qualities in Hollywood films these days, the story-telling. No one but Penn could have handled this as deftly, even to the point of using McCandless's favorite books in a way that skips the usual self-consciousness ("aren't we smart to be quoting a real book in a movie?") and cuts to the heart of Jack London, Henry Thoreau, and Tolstoy.

I seriously doubted whether this film would make room for Tolstoy, despite putting his books in McCandless's backpack. But if you stay with it, all the way to the end, you will see that it does capture him. Not the big shot author of War and Peace, but the restless soul of Confession, who rejects everything in his society, only to find God in a dream fraught with existential angst.

You can interpret the ending of Into the Wild any way you like, but for me, it completes the trajectory of this strange young man's life in a way very similar to Tolstoy's in Confession: doubt; disillusionment; cynicism; flight; heartache; yearning for human re-connection coupled with the realization (on the bank of a swollen river) that it's too late, there is no going back; terror in the face of death; and finally, transcendence that may or may not last beyond this life.

Quite a lot for one movie. And they gave the Oscar to No Country for Old Men, a plotless mess gagging on its own blood. It's enough to make a real movie lover drop out.

Posted by mbayles at 8:44 AM

February 25, 2008

The Dark Side

My sense of duty is as well developed as that of the next critic (let's not go there), but I couldn't bring myself to watch the whole Academy Awards last evening. I enjoy watching film clips and preening stars as much as anyone, but I couldn't abide the ads.

I don't mean the commercials, which would have served as a great plague on Pharoah, if only the Lord had thought of it. No, I mean the ads congratulating the Academy for being so wonderful and putting on all those wonderful awards shows of the past. I know there's been a writers' strike, but did they have to show all those replays of funny, touching, uplifting bits, when everyone knows that this year's nominees are sorely lacking in all three qualities?

The coverage focused on the "dark" mood of Hollywood, which according to some reporters is out of date now that a Democrat might get elected. But the darkness in American films has been building up for a long time now, especially in those precincts of the movie colony where people are just as cynical about politics as they are about everything else. To my knowledge, the only candidate who has said anything about the sick violence now pervading mainstream films is Barack Obama. So go figure.

This stylish, apolitical darkness dominates all the nominated films, with the exception of Juno - as host Jon Stewart put it, "Thank God for teenage pregnancy." Even the kerzillion-dollar blockbusters that keep Hollywood going feel obliged to get progressively "darker" with each sequel or lose their franchise.

So get ready for the sequel, Ratatouille Twouille , which will feature a demon rat voiced by Johnny Depp, who tears American tourists apart with his long yellow fangs, then drops the pieces into a savory boeuf bourguignon, which his pal Rémy will then feed to other American tourists. Maybe then the Academy will take notice ...

Posted by mbayles at 8:58 AM

February 11, 2008

Betrayed by IMDB

A reader writes to correct my statement that The House of Eliott was never aired in the States. It most certainly has -- on A&E, PBS, and BBC America. It also won top US awards for costume design, including an Emmy and a BAFTA.

Never again will I trust the Internet Movie Data Base, at least when it comes to television distribution.

Posted by mbayles at 11:06 AM

February 8, 2008

Upmarket, Downmarket

Apologies for back-sliding into sin of blog neglect. I'm up to my eyebrows in work on my book, and when I am done for the day, the last thing I want to do is spend more time in front of the computer.

But I do have a tip for voracious fans of British TV who have already gone through the better known classics. The House of Eliott, a series about two sisters who start a fashion business in the years after World War One, was never shown in the US. It was also knocked for being the last production shot on videotape in the BBC Television Centre, and (more serious) for concentrating on two touchy British themes: social class, and the relation between art and commerce.

There are some awkward moments in the series, on both fronts. The ancient tradition of treating the working class in a comic-ignoble way and the upper class in a tragic-noble way, persists to a degree. But this is not a series about the working class and the upper class, it's pre-eminently and definitively a series about the middle class. What's more, it's about three flawed but admirably brave and resourceful entrepreneurs: the Elliot sisters Beatrice (Stella Gonet) and Evangeline (Louise Lombard), and their good friend (and eventually husband to Bea) Jack Maddox (Aden Gillett).

Fashion, even the haute couture undertaken by the House of Eliott, is not considered serious art. On the contrary, it is regarded as a parasitical growth, feeding off genuine creativity not contributing to it. Its elitist clientele only add to the problem. It is extremely hard to deal with these topics in a TV series, not least because TV itself suffers from some of the same disdain. But we are in a golden age of longform TV these days, and programs like The House of Elliot made that possible by exploring their characters and themes at novelistic length. It helps that this show was "devised" (as the Brits put it) by Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins, who also created (the hell with "devised") the unforgettable 1970s series, Upstairs, Downstairs.

Unfortunately, the Beeb canceled The House of Elliot after the final episode of the third season was completed, so many loose ends were never tied up. But if you are willing to tolerate that (and some unattractive opening credits), you will be richly rewarded.

Posted by mbayles at 11:14 AM

January 10, 2008

Whatever Happened to Irony?

I have never been a fan of Hillary Clinton. But I will scream if one more pundit equates her now famous eye-moistening episode with her response to Scott Spradling's question about "the likeability factor" in the most recent Democratic primary debate.

The eye-moistening episode was not her finest moment. She did not cry, and it was a long way from a tantrum, but it smacked of one. She was saying, in effect, "I care more than they do, I'm better than they are, and I deserve to win. And if I don't, I'll cry." By itself, it would keep me from voting for her (if I did not already have other reasons).

The debate moment, on the other hand, won me over (for a fleeting second). To a patronizing question, one that I doubt would be asked of a male candidate, Clinton came back with a sly, kittenish, screw-you expression on her face: "Well, that hurts my feelings. But I will try to bear up." I wasn't in the room when this occurred, but I could hear the laughter, and my husband called out, "Hillary just did something brilliant." He was right: it was a brilliant stroke, intended to mock both the question and the questioner.

This was acknowledged by the talking heads right after the debate, but a day or two later, Chris Matthews boneheadedly ignored the ironic nature of Clinton's retort and equated it with the tears of New Hampshire. Then all the other boneheads piled on, and this dumb factoid is now bouncing around the media echo chamber.

Unfair. If the pundits can't detect irony any better than that, then they deserve to be exiled to the same howling, no-Blackberry-service desert as the pollsters who tried to persuade my fellow New Englanders how to vote. So there!

Posted by mbayles at 12:07 PM

December 22, 2007

Whatever It Takes

To judge by the bottom line, Hollywood's latest venture into cinema engagé is not resonating with the public. Autumn 2007 saw the release of four films claiming to tackle hard questions about hard power: In the Valley of Elah, directed by Paul Haggis, offers a nightmare vision of U.S. soldiers in Iraq; The Kingdom, directed by Peter Berg, dramatizes an FBI probe into terrorism in Saudi Arabia; Rendition, directed by Gavin Hood, focuses on "extraordinary rendition," the American government's handing over of prisoners to countries where torture is allowed; Lions for Lambs, directed by Robert Redford, accuses the news media of passivity and the privileged young of apathy. None has done well at the box office, so this trend may soon die out. But that raises a question: why haven't these films attracted a bigger audience?

Ask a blue-state pundit, and you'll hear that Americans are so brainwashed by Fox News, they are no longer capable of thinking for themselves. Ask a red-stater, and you'll hear that Americans are so savvy about the Global War on Terror, they reject unpatriotic propaganda, even if it does star Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise. These answers polarize as neatly as metal shavings around a magnet. But a better answer, albeit one less gratifying to pundits of all colors, is that Americans don't want to think about tough foreign policy issues--and they are encouraged not to by both Washington and Hollywood.

Speaking Their Minds

Let us begin with the most recent release, Lions for Lambs. The reviews damned it for being "talky," but this is a bogus criticism. Many great films are "talky" in the sense of giving us powerful characters capable of speaking their minds. Lions for Lambs is not a great film by any stretch. And many conservatives already know what they think about Robert Redford's politics. But at least this film has politics--and in its halting way it captures something of America's current mood. There are three story lines: in California, a political science professor named Stephen (Robert Redford) tries to motivate a gifted but apathetic student, Todd (Andrew Garfield); in Washington, an ambitious Republican senator named Jasper (Tom Cruise) tries to browbeat a liberal journalist, Janine (Meryl Streep), into supporting his new military initiative; and in the mountains of Afghanistan, two of Stephen's former students turned army rangers, Arian (Derek Luke) and Ernest (Michael Pena), try against forbidding odds to make that initiative work.

Strange as it sounds, the tête-à-tête between the senator and the reporter is won by the senator. Jasper's initiative may stink (the rest of the film says so), but Janine's protestations are truly feeble. Her main issue, it turns out, is not the war on terrorism (about which she has little to say) but the failure of the news media to voice any real opposition to it. This is a dodge, because while most of the news media did go along with President Bush's invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, one would have to be living on the moon (or in Europe) to think they are going along with the surge or with the idea of a military strike against Iran. Cruise and Streep are terrific actors, needless to say, but this plot line is much weaker than the other two--including, surprisingly, the conversation between the professor and his student.

Caveat: Hollywood never gets academia right. But having said that, let me give credit where credit is due. In his struggle to make Stephen a sympathetic character, Redford makes him into that rare species, the political science professor who does not use the old 1960s cattle prod to indoctrinate his students. How can we tell? Two of his favorites, Arian and Ernest (minority students on scholarship), respond to his call to "get involved" by enlisting in the army. Stephen objects, of course. But the film makes clear that the students' decision is not unreasonable, given what their professor has been urging. Later Stephen tells Todd that he served in Vietnam but then protested the war. What's amazing is that Todd doesn't already know this, because evidently, Stephen doesn't crow about it on the first day of class. Despite the blue denim and politics to match, this professor confines himself to exhorting students to take seriously their rights and duties as citizens. American higher education could do worse--and usually does.

As for Arian and Ernest, their story line is a pure comrades-in-arms war flick. Loyal and courageous to the end, their ordeal on a snowy mountaintop in Afghanistan is all the more gripping for the stark contrast it presents with life back in the states. While the politicians, journalists, professors, and students discuss weighty matters in comfortable surroundings, the real weight is borne by the soldiers in the field. Everybody gives lip service to this fact, but rarely is it brought home emotionally to those not directly involved. To give emotional heft to the facts is the work of culture, including popular culture. But popular culture has been doing a poor job of it lately. Indeed, if Redford is truly concerned about the public being fed fantasy instead of reality, he will make his next protest film about Hollywood's increasingly sick attitude towards violence.

Brutalization

In the Valley of Elah is the opposite of a comrades-in-arms war flick. It begins when Hank (Tommy Lee Jones), a retired military police officer living in Tennessee, learns that his son Mike, just back from Iraq, has been reported AWOL. This sounds suspicious to Hank, so he drives to Fort Rudd, New Mexico, to check things out. Stonewalled by the army and local police, he launches his own investigation, aided by a discontented detective, Emily (Charize Theron). When Mike's charred remains are found on a hillside, the film becomes a police procedural, though Hank and Emily are no high-tech CSI team: they just poke around, ask questions, collar the wrong suspect, and finally elicit a confession from one of Mike's buddies.

The denouement comes when Mike's buddy, morphing gradually from fresh-faced youth to cold blond beast, recalls how he stabbed Mike to death after a minor altercation, then set the body on fire because he and his buddies were hungry and did not want to take the time to bury it. To this horror are added two more, visualized through a succession of fractured images rescued from Mike's damaged cell phone. The first occurs on Mike's first day of duty: his armored vehicle runs over an Iraqi child who fails to get out of its way. The second occurs several months later, when Mike has become a different person, a joker whom the others call "Doc," because he gets his jollies thrusting his hand into the gaping wounds of captured Iraqi prisoners. Right after Mike's killer reveals this to Hank, the cell phone images coalesce into a shot of Mike grinning glassy-eyed while doing the deed off camera.

In the Valley of Elah is a deadly serious film about a deadly serious topic: the brutalization of young soldiers under the hellish conditions of an insurgency they are neither trained nor equipped to fight. Ironically, Hank, the straight-arrow warrior whose life is upended by these grim revelations, is a Vietnam vet. Last I checked, the Vietnam War was also a nasty insurgency that brutalized some of those fighting it. Hollywood certainly thought so. Right afterward, in the late 1970s, a slew of films appeared portraying soldiers and veterans as dangerous lunatics: Taxi Driver (1976), Rolling Thunder (1977), Apocalypse Now (1979), The Ninth Configuration (1980). The noble exception was The Deer Hunter (1978), and by the 1980s, it was no longer cool to portray Vietnam vets as nut jobs. In the Valley of Elah is based on a true story, and that story is not unique. But it would carry more moral authority if it appeared after the conflict was over. There is something unseemly about producing a film about the demoralization of American troops while thousands of them are still in harm's way.

Torture's Mythology

The sickest part, though, is the public response to In the Valley of Elah. Ten years ago, a movie showing an American soldier torturing a prisoner for kicks would have raised a hue and cry. Today it occasions barely a murmur. What has changed? In the realm of popular culture, the most obvious change is that scenes of torture, including vivid on-camera ones, are now standard fare. The best known example is 24, the Fox TV series starring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, America's favorite anti-terrorist. Jack Bauer does not torture prisoners for kicks, but he does torture them frequently: 67 times in the first five seasons, by one count. And these scenes are a wonder to behold. Jack Bauer can maul a captive and get actionable intelligence faster than I can put a dollar in a vending machine and get a Diet Coke.

The motives for torture are as old as human society: to punish wrongdoers, to crush dissent, to intimidate populations, to force retroactive confessions. Perhaps the most primal motive, shared by cats toying with mice, is to lord it over the weak. In war this is called "victor's spoils," the pleasure of inflicting pain on vanquished enemies. This is Mike's motive, which together with the others mentioned above is rejected as barbarous and tyrannical by all liberal democracies, including the United States. But that leaves one additional motive: Jack Bauer's. In the debate over whether it is right to define waterboarding, stress positions, and other "leave no mark" methods as "enhanced interrogation" not torture, a frequent touchstone is 24. For many Americans, Jack Bauer makes it easier to argue that even torture is okay when used by a scrupulous professional. To quote the standard riposte: what would you do if a ticking time bomb were about to go off, and the guy tied to the chair in front of you was withholding the information you needed to prevent catastrophe?

This frequent reference to 24 is unfortunate, because although 24 is highly addictive (your sober reviewer confesses to having inhaled the first four seasons), it should not be a touchstone in this debate. Despite its many charms, 24 embodies a mix of cowardice and recklessness, the two vices that Aristotle contrasted with the virtue of courage. The cowardice shows up in the program's timid selection of villains: vengeful Serbs, a bitchy German, red-handed Mexican drug lords, a turncoat British spy, a greedy oil executive, power-mad government officials (including one president), and--once in a blue moon, when the Council on American-Islamic Relations is looking the other way--violent jihadists.

As for recklessness, it shows up in the demeanor of 24's creative mastermind, Joel Surnow, a man who by his own testimony came up the hard way. The son of a Los Angeles carpet salesman, he grew up south of Olympic Boulevard, where there was never enough money for the designer sunglasses favored by his classmates at Beverly Hills High. Apparently this youthful deprivation provides an excuse for acting like a jerk. Last year, Surnow blew off Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, dean of West Point, and Joe Navarro, an expert FBI interrogator, when they traveled to Los Angeles to urge a change in the way 24 depicts torture. These visitors were seasoned practitioners with a practical complaint: that their cadets and trainees, steeped in the excitement of 24, now dismiss warnings about the legality of torture and (more troubling) the evidence of its limited effectiveness.

Some of Surnow's colleagues, including Sutherland himself, did meet with Finnegan and Navarro. So it will be interesting to see how torture is dealt with in the seventh season (scheduled to begin in January but probably postponed because of the Writers Guild of America strike). To judge by the online trailer, the issue will be front and center:

White letters on black screen: They can attack him.
Senator in hearing room, grilling Jack: "Mr. Bauer, did you torture Mr. Haddad?"
White letters on black screen: They can judge him.
Jack: "Senator, Ibrahim Haddad had targeted a bus carrying 45 people, 10 of which were children. I stopped that attack from happening."
White letters on black screen: But they can never break him.
Jack: "Don't expect me to regret the decisions that I have made, because sir, the truth is, I don't."

You go, Jack. And if I were faced with a choice between letting humanity be blown to smithereens and pulling out my grandmother's fingernails, it would be "Brace yourself, Granny," and no regrets afterward. But I'm not faced with that choice, and 99% of the time neither are real interrogators faced with the ticking time bomb scenario. Retired Colonel Stu Herrington, a 30-year veteran of military intelligence, has been quoted to the effect that this scenario "is so rare in real life that it's essentially mythology." The 24 creative team are smart and talented, so perhaps they will find ways to continue making great television while also addressing the concerns of those who are actually fighting the war against terrorism. But don't count on Surnow. His refusal to meet with Finnegan and Navarro is a classic case of recklessness holding courage in contempt.

A Reassuring Professionalism

Most people consider 24 a right-wing show, in contrast with the left-wing slant of the feature films discussed here. Yet 24 has left its mark on the feature film industry, make no mistake. In both The Kingdom and Rendition there is a Jack Bauer-like character: brave, smart, loath to inflict pain, but adept at doing so when needed. Interestingly, neither is an American. In The Kingdom, it is Faris Al Ghazi, an upright Saudi policeman played with toughness and charm by Ashraf Barhom. Basically an action film, The Kingdom stars Jamie Foxx as Ronald, a maverick FBI agent who defies his inept superiors and a timid State Department to lead a proper investigation into a terrorist attack on a U.S. enclave in Saudi Arabia (similar to the 1996 Khobar Towers attack). When Ronald's team arrives in Riyadh, they are stonewalled by the Saudis until a discontented cop, Al Ghazi, steps forward to help. His Jack Bauer moment comes when he stops the torture of a prisoner--not because he opposes torture in principle, but because he deduces from the evidence that it's fruitless in this case.

It is vital to distinguish between Al Ghazi, a fine officer with a warm heart and a cool head, and the nameless goons who do the actual trussing, beating, electrocuting, whatever. Like Mike's sadism, the goons' work is kept decorously off camera: all we see is the scrupulous professional giving the orders. A similar scene occurs in A Mighty Heart, the powerful film about the terrorist killing of journalist Daniel Pearl. In that film, the professional is a gentle, handsome officer (played by Irfan Khan) in the Pakistan secret police, the ISI, who gazes soulfully at his captive every time he is obliged to order another round of agony. Like 24, both The Kingdom and A Mighty Heart reassure us that the good guys are in charge, not the goons.

Surprisingly, the same reassurance appears in Rendition, a would-be exposé of extraordinary rendition. Anwar (Omar Metwally) is an Egyptian-born chemical engineer living in Chicago and married to an American, Isabella (Reese Witherspoon). Because his mobile phone has been receiving calls from a terrorist group, Anwar is arrested while traveling home from an overseas conference, and rendered to an unnamed country in North Africa, where he is stripped, beaten, isolated in a cold cell, and waterboarded by goons working for the local police chief, Abasi (Igal Naor). Strictly speaking, this interrogation is overseen by Douglas (Jake Gyllenhaal), a CIA "pencil pusher" who steps in after another agent's death. But compared with Abasi, Douglas is a cardboard figure whose sole purpose is to show revulsion at the proceedings and (regardless of Anwar's guilt or innocence) inveigle his release. Abasi, by contrast, is a surprisingly sympathetic character: brave, smart, loving toward his family, but also haunted by his grim job. Remind you of anyone?

At the end Rendition loses momentum because of a plot twist whose only conceivable function is to keep Abasi from being too sympathetic. The film starts with the suicide bombing of a café where he takes tea every morning. Many are killed, but Abasi survives, and from there the film cross-cuts between three story lines: Abasi's interrogation of Anwar; the efforts of Isabel back in the States to find out what's happened to Anwar; and a secret romance between Abasi's daughter Fatima (Zineb Oukach) and a scruffy artist named Khalid (Moa Khouas). This third story line climaxes when Khalid turns out to be a suicide bomber who wooed Fatima as part of a plot against her father. Over time, the two have fallen in love, so when Khalid goes to kill Abasi, Fatima tries to stop him--and might have succeeded if Khalid's handlers hadn't made that impossible. The bomb explodes, and both lovers die.

The weird part is that this is the same explosion that opens the film. Instead of reaching for our handkerchiefs, we scratch our heads: Huh? What's going on? Suddenly we're back at the beginning! Since this confusion destroys the whole momentum of the ending, we might also wonder why the romance and death of Fatima and Khalid are not simply treated as a flashback. My hunch is this was the original intention, but that during the editing process somebody realized that if the audience knows from the beginning that Abasi's daughter was killed by a terrorist, they might forget the whole anti-rendition message and start rooting for Abasi as the Maghreb's answer to Jack Bauer.

It soothes the conscience, and boosts the box office, to portray U.S.-sanctioned torture as occurring only under the watchful eye of scrupulous professionals. It also helps to neutralize criticism of Hollywood for stereotyping Arabs and Muslims, to cast excellent actors like Ashraf Barhom and Igal Naor in Jack Bauer-like roles. With guys like Al Ghazi and Abasi in charge, we can relax. The prisoners may be screaming, but the interrogators take no pleasure in making them scream, and the pain stops the moment the prisoners either talk or establish their innocence. The situation is dire but not spiraling out of control.

Playground for Sadists

The trouble is, the facts are otherwise. Ticking time bombs are rare, and so are human beings capable of sustaining a scrupulously professional attitude toward torture. Indeed, when torture becomes the routine business of any military or law enforcement organization, the first thing that happens is the good guys take off and the goons take over. To believe otherwise is to be naïve about human nature. But don't take my word for it, take that of Vladimir Bukovsky, the former Soviet dissident who spent 12 years in that system's prisons, labor camps, and coercive "psychiatric hospitals." His capsule summary of why it is never a good idea to legalize and routinize torture is worth quoting at length:

Apart from sheer frustration and other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they have a "ticking bomb" case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious NKVD [the Soviet secret police] became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will.

I do not believe that this is a description of the United States' war on terror. But if I were a foreigner with no better source of information than Hollywood films, I might be forgiven for believing it. To judge by overall box office, the American love of torture has regressed from Jack Bauer's reluctant rule-bending to the Marquis de Sade's voracious vivisection. Audiences do not flock to see Lions for Lambs and Rendition; they flock to see Saw IV and Hostel Part 2, the latest specimens of a new genre that David Edelstein of New York Magazine dubbed "torture porn." One of the cable channel Showtime's biggest hits is Dexter, about a forensic expert specializing in Advanced Bloodstain Pattern Analysis, whose chief joy consists in spilling blood not analyzing it. A boyish team player, Dexter moonlights as a vigilante, ritually torturing and killing those criminals whom the system fails to bring to justice. If Dirty Harry's threat was "Make my day," Dexter's guarantee is "Make my night."

It is hard to criticize this stuff, because ever since 1992, when Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs made casual cruelty look cool, the Sunset Boulevard party line is that violence ceases to be shocking when it goes "over the top" into depictions of mayhem so extreme, so surreal, that they resemble the fevered imaginings of a mass murderer or extreme sociopath. Why this should be so, I have never heard anyone explain satisfactorily. The question is considered infra dig by the P.R. flacks and bloggers surrounding this genre--their websites and commentary are full of a bizarre, morally inverted appreciation of ever greater spectacles of destruction. Torture is a favorite at this feast, folks, and we're not talking about some weak-weenie waterboarding, we're talking about real torture, the prancing-around-in-arterial-blood-spray kind that is fun for the whole family.

For a taste of the sensibility involved, consider this remark by Darren Bousman, the director of Saw IV (and two of its predecessors). Hyping his new film, he boasted that it contains "a scene...where I physically regurgitated in my mouth." Bousman belongs to the self-described Hollywood "Splat Pack," a group of junior sadists mentored by Tarantino, who revel in their ability to mass-produce the most repugnant imaginable fantasies. As Eli Roth, director of Hostel and Hostel Part 2, recently told a national magazine: "Everybody says that I'm different on the days we're shooting the gore--that I'm just extra happy. I try to have that same excitement and enthusiasm for every scene, but when we're doing some really disgusting scene I'll catch myself gleefully jumping up and down at the monitor." And in another interview, he mused, "Hopefully, we'll get to the point where there are absolutely no restrictions on any kind of violence in movies."

Earth to Roth: We're at that point now. And now is also the time when millions of people around the world perceive the United States, rightly or wrongly, as having abandoned the moral high ground regarding the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners. There is more freedom of expression in America than in any other country in the world, which is why Bousman and Roth can get away with their upchuck. But no one could accuse them of good timing.

First appeared in THE CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS, Winter, 2008

Posted by mbayles at 2:02 PM

December 15, 2007

Screenwriting Today

Winged Avengers of the Jury, I stand by everything I have said about Martin Scorcese, and also about the verbal poverty of The Departed and many other contemporary sceenplays. And as evidence I offer the following
short version of Scorsese's well acted, skillfully produced, but substantively inferior rip-off of Infernal Affairs (the cool, classy Hong Kong original).

Posted by mbayles at 11:01 AM

November 28, 2007

This Just In

The best jokes used to come from the Soviet Union. Here's one I especially like:

A Western journalist is talking with several Russians in a cafe, and he naively asks them what they think of Comrade Stalin. They stare at him in silence. But then, when the reporter leaves, one man follows and offers to share his true opinion of the Great Leader -- provided the reporter is willing to meet at midnight on the banks of the Moskva River. The reporter agrees, and that night they meet. The man insists on getting into a boat and rowing out into the middle of the river, where amid bitter winds and bobbing ice floes, he leans forward and whispers into the reporter's ear: "I like him!"

If you enjoyed this joke, then don't miss this news bulletin from the Onion.

Posted by mbayles at 7:59 PM

November 25, 2007

Wise Words

Javed Akhtar is a renowned Indian screenwriter, song lyricist, and poet. Here is wonderful comment of his from Nasreen Munni Kabir's book, Talking Films: Conversations on Hindi Cinema with Javed Akhtar:

"I can tell you two ways of writing an unsuccessful film. Firstly you decide you'll make a great film, and secondly, you decide the film you're making is not for you but for the common man, a film for the masses. In the first situation, you're looking upwards and in the other, you're looking down. You go wrong because in both cases you're going to create something that's not coming from you."

Posted by mbayles at 8:29 PM

November 17, 2007

Ankle Deep in Bollywood

Wading a step farther into the waters of Bollywood, I recently saw the 2003 comedy, Munna Bhai, which I heard about in Bombay.* I liked it very much, although to be honest, I am still getting used to such old-fashioned, industrial-strength entertainment!

Sanjay Dutt, a sandy-haired rogue in his 40s with bedroom eyes and a huge following, stars as Munnabhai, a loan shark with a heart of gold, shaking people down in one of the nicer Bombay slums. (Some scenes are shot in a semblance of that city's laundry district, where thousands of washermen and women ply their trade in stone tubs passed down through the generations.)

Munnabhai, it turns out, comes from a well-to-do background outside the city, and his refined parents don't know he's a crook. They think he's a medical doctor, and when they come to Bombay for their annual visit, he and his mates transform his gangster digs into a hospital.

Naturally, this scheme goes awry, and to the mortification of his parents, Munnabhai is exposed. Heartsick, he vows to cheat, charm, and strong-arm his way to a medical degree (anything but study, naturally). This, too, is a disaster, albeit the kind that occurs in Hindi films: lots of singing, dancing, and larking about included. In the end, Munnabhai's genuine goodness has become evident to all, including his worst enemies, the woman he loves, and -- at long last -- mother and dad.

Sounds corny, I know. But along the way, the film makes relentless fun of the medical profession, self-important people, and high-caste Indians who treat lower-caste people as faceless underlings. This is the kind of thing old-fashioned Hollywood films used to do, and it is fascinating to see it done in a whole different cinematic language.

NB: I thought "Mumbai" was politically correct until I went there and learned that everyone who grew up in the city calls it Bombay. So now I call it "Bombay" in order to be PC in some things, at least. I can understand their resistance, actually. What if someone came along and renamed Boston "Mustain"?

Posted by mbayles at 4:32 PM | Comments (0)

November 12, 2007

Comrades and Causes

Frank Capra's "why we fight" theme dominated films produced during World War II, even Korea. But these films also downplayed war's ferocity and horror. About Vietnam the only contemporary film was The Green Berets, produced in the style of 1944 and lobbed like a (dummy) grenade into the middle of 1968. After the war ended, a series of counter-cultural films, notably Taxi Driver (1976), caricatured Vietnam vets as dangerous lunatics. The Deer Hunter (1978) showed more respect for the veterans, while also painting an unflattering picture of the North Vietnamese communists. The lunatic vet made a comeback in the extravagantly awful Apocalypse Now (1979), but by the 1980s it was no longer cool to use vets as villains.

Yet at the same time, Hollywood in the 1980s was loath to make films retroactively supporting the Vietnam War. (Unfortunately, the sole exception, Lionel Chetwynd's The Hanoi Hilton (1987), is dramatically speaking a dud.) So the challenge became: How to make the soldiers look good, while also making the war look bad? A clever solution was devised by two directors, Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick, in two highly successful films, Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987). By focusing on the experience of a small unit of soldiers, and using state-of-the-art technology to render the sights and sounds of combat as vividly as possible, these films managed to avoid any focus on why they fought. At its cleverest, this approach also managed to make the soldiers' disgruntlement with ill-conceived orders and fruitless tactics look like principled opposition to the war.

This narrowly focused band-of-brothers approach is now a cliche, as film after film ramps up the special effects and dumbs down the characters and plots. A harbinger of this approach is Ridley Scott's Blackhawk Down (2001), a high-tech tour de force whose characters are as interchangeable, and unmindful of the reason why they are fighting, as the figures in a video game. Even We Were Soldiers (2001), Mel Gibson's attempt at a revisionist Vietnam film, spends more time reconstructing the physical details of the 1965 battle of Ia Drang Valley than defending the purpose for which it was fought. And despite its patriotic fervor, Gibson's film ends with the line: "They went to war because their country asked them to, but in the end they fought not for their country or their flag. They fought for each other."

They fought for each other. Very stirring, but how do you get them to do that? On the most basic level of narrative art, there's nothing wrong with the band-of-brothers approach. Since before Homer, the best war stories have focused not on grand strategies but on comrades-in-arms. And long before sociologists coined the term unit cohesion, storytellers have understood that in the heat of battle, soldiers think less about overarching goals than about their buddies. And when they act bravely, it is usually to save their friends, to avoid letting them down, or (at most) to uphold a shared sense of honor. So it's dramatically necessary, and sociologically accurate, to separate comradeship from cause while the bullets are flying.

But this only takes us so far. Soldiers are human beings, and when the shooting stops, they are bound to ponder why they fight. If no adequate reason presents itself, or if their sense of duty becomes eroded by a sense of futility, they may grow less willing to march back into hell. In the worst case scenario, they lose their moral bearings altogether, and cease to care about either cause or comrades. This is war's final bitterness, and only rarely does Hollywood dare to depict it.

Posted by mbayles at 8:46 AM

November 6, 2007

Followup Bollywood

Just a couple of things I'd like to fix in last entry, after hearing from an Indian colleague. First, for you non-Hindustani speakers, a translation of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge: it means "the one with the brave heart wins the bride." Second, Javed Akhtar is a song lyricist as well as a screenwriter.

More later as this neophyte wades into the Bollywood waters. Feet wet but a long way to go.

Posted by mbayles at 9:16 AM

November 3, 2007

Not the Wedding Crashers

When I was in India this last spring, several people recommended a Bollywood classic called Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge -- or, to use the popular shorthand for an immensely popular film, DDLJ. Now that I have seen the film, I understand why my interlocutors were so insistent.

"Bollywood" is becoming an obsolete term, or maybe it always was. There is Hindustani cinema, which uses a blend of Hindi, Urdu and English, and has been described by the famous screenplay writer Javed Akhtar as "one more state in this country, ... quite different from Indian culture, but it's not alien to us, we understand it." (See his book-length series of interviews with the writer Nasreen Kabir.) In addition, there are several regional film industries in other languages, which together with the Hindustani mainstream produced largely in Mumbai/Bombay, dominate a huge region stretching from West Africa to Central Asia to East Asia and Oceania -- not to mention London, Russia, and New Jersey.

We Americans think of movies as constantly "pushing the envelope" -- that is, first you show kissing, then foreplay (remember foreplay?), then sex in bed, then sex against the wall, then sex with baked goods and fruit, then sex with animals, then rape, then rape and strangulation, then rape preceded by torture (back to foreplay again?), and then -- what? Rape and strangulation of baked goods?

I'm not suggesting that this is a natural progression -- most people are content with the first 2-3 steps. But woe to the Hollywood director who stops pushing the envelope, or even riskier, pushes it in the opposite direction. The only director I can think of who does this is Judd Apatow, whose comedies The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up paradoxically use raunchy humor to affirm (relatively) traditional sexual mores.

There is no raunchy humor in DDLJ, but there is plenty of old-fashioned erotic attraction, battle-of-the-sexes combat, and finally passionate surrender, all accompanied by song-and-dance numbers that are (in the best Bollywood style) extravagant and surreal without being (in the worst Bollywood style) repetitive and tedious.

What is fascinating, though, is what happens after the lovers realize how hopelessly smitten they are. In The Wedding Crashers, the lover whose girl is engaged to someone else simply shows up at the wedding and claims her. He makes a short speech along the lines of "I really love you and that dude is a bum," and she falls into his arms. Needless to say, the wishes of parents and relatives are treated as a minor irritant quickly disposed of. When the bride embraces the interloper, they have no choice but to applaud -- they're old, after all, and therefore irrelevant.

Never mind that this is not how many young Americans see the world. It is the dominant trope of popular culture, that sexual attraction equals love, and that nothing must stand in its path. DDLJ would not disagree, but its way of making the same point is infinitely more subtle, powerful, and human.

When Raj (Shahrukh Khan) falls for Simran (Kajol), the problem is obvious: he is the spoiled playboy son of a London-based millionaire (Anupam Kher), she the sheltered daughter of Chaudrry Singh (Amrish Puri), a hard-working shop owner who hates England and longs for his native Punjab. The young people meet on a Europass tour of the Alps (very picturesque), but when Simram returns home, her father packs her off to India to marry the son of his best friend.

The old man is a stern, forbidding autocrat, and his dream of reconnecting with Punjab is not shared by his wife and two daughters. In an American film, these sentiments would have to be corrected, either by persuasion or coercion. But therein lies the difference: in DDLJ the old man is treated with the utmost respect, and although it seems impossible for 99 percent of the story, he finally yields. (This is not a spoiler! Everyone knows that the lovers get together at the end of a film like this!)

But watch carefully, because this is not just a case of the young folks bringing the old folks into the current century. It's also a case of the young learning from the old that there are two ways to do anything: the wrong way, which leads to happiness in the short term but emptiness in the long, and the right way, which is hard and painful but leads to the greatest happiness.

Maybe we Americans are too sophisticated for this stuff. In terms of revenue, Hollywood still makes a whole lot more money than Bollywood. But in terms of audience size, Bollywood surpassed Hollywood in 2004 and is still ahead: 3 billion, as opposed to 2.6 billion. And most of the latter are not Wedding Crashers fans so much as Titanic and Shrek fans. With regard to stories about human beings, it's the heart that counts. And on that score, 3 billion Bollywood fans may not be wrong.

Posted by mbayles at 9:03 AM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2007

Moment of Clarity

Lately the New York Times Arts & Leisure section has become increasingly mindless, with too much space devoted to celebrity chatter and reviews by critics who type faster than they think. It's a relief, therefore, to read A. O. Scott's lucid article about the current crop of Iraq / Afghanistan / Global War on Terror flicks. When surrounded by mud, clear water can seem a miracle.

Posted by mbayles at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2007

A Real Great Train Wreck

Tired of having your circuits overloaded by CSI? Longing for the kind of thrills that come not from guys crawling along the floor in front of a blue screen (to be filled in later by computer) but from gutsy stunt men doing actual stunts?

If so, then get yourself a copy of Runaway Train. This gritty 1985 film was written by a fascinating crew, from Ed Bunker, the former San Quentin inmate turned director (Straight Time, The Longest Yard) to the renowned Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Not only that, but it stars Jon Voigt, Eric Roberts, and Rebecca de Mornay; and was directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, a member of the Russian film aristocracy.

This one-of-a-kind gem starts with a hard-ass escape from a maximum security prison in Alaska, and is not appealing at first (due to what used to be graphic violence and an unpleasant trip through a sewer). But mercifully, it soon plunges the two anti-heroes, escaped prisoners Manny (Voigt) and Bunk (Roberts), into the vast, frozen wilderness, where they hop what turns out to be the wrong train.

Before long they are hurtling across the frozen landscape, sans conductor and sans brakes, and their reactions are not pretty, Manny being the hardest of the hard and Bunk the callowest of the callow. But when they discover they are not alone, that their onrushing fate is shared by a young female assistant engineer (de Mornay), the story lifts off and soars to a whole different level.

To repeat, what you see on the screen is a real train (four engines coupled together) hurtling through some real bleak, real Arctic, real estate. And the interaction among the unwilling passengers, torn between wanting to live and wanting to stay free, is even more real. Pay attention to what happens at the end, because this is not a trivial action flick but something more akin to a short story by Tolstoy. Needless to say, they don't make 'em like that any more.

Posted by mbayles at 6:51 PM | Comments (0)

October 22, 2007

Classify This

Believe it or not, there is still a film censorship - oops, "classification" - board in Great Britain. But to judge by its recent decision on Eastern Promises, another foul blood feast from David Cronenberg, the British Board of Film Classification might as well hang it up.

The film sounds like standard Cronenberg: eyes gouged out, throats slashed, all in such loving detail that the film managed to offend even the jaded audience at the London Film Festival. Yet the BBFC awarded the film an 18 certificate for general release, with no cuts - oops, edits.

This prompted Andreas Whittam, a former president of the BBFC, to complain: "If I thought this was the type of film that was likely to make people leave the cinema, or even make them have to look away for quite a while, then I would question why the scene should be left in."

Pretty mealy-mouthed, but a bold statement of principle, compared with the response from the current BBFC: "Scenes that make people turn away are part of the fun of going to movies. These days we are not here to cut; we are here to provide information and let people then make up their minds."

Uh-huh. Just one question, though: What, exactly, are we making up our minds about?

Posted by mbayles at 9:48 AM | Comments (0)

October 16, 2007

From Epic to Oscar

A friend recently posted this fascinating essay on Amazon.com. It's about the literary work that was the basis for one of the finest Hollywood films ever made: The Best Years of Our Lives, about three servicemen returning from World War II. I had no idea that the screenplay was adapted from an epic poem -- did you?

Read Don Bishop's account ...

The book that made the movie that moved millions and won the Oscar
October 12, 2007
By Donald M. Bishop (Virginia)

"Glory for Me" is the book-length narrative poem by MacKinlay Kantor which eventually became the movie "The Best Years of Our Lives." The film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, for 1946. It starred Frederick March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, and Harold Phillips.

In 1970, I was a lieutenant working at the Air Force Historical Research Center. The older historians told a word-of-mouth story how the book came to be. No doubt the story had been embroidered over many years of retelling, but here's the way I heard it.

In 1944, movie titan Samuel Goldwyn knew that whether the allied victory in World War II would come sooner, or later, millions of American veterans would return home. Many -- especially those with physical and psychological wounds -- would have trouble finding jobs and "readjusting."

Goldwyn knew that journalist and playwright MacKinlay Kantor, who had flown missions with the 305th Bomb Group from England earlier in the war, had gotten to know American servicemen in combat at first hand. Goldwyn asked Kantor to write a screenplay for a planned movie on the veterans returning home.

According to the story, Kantor had driven up to a Tennessee mountain retreat to work on the screenplay. He took his typewriter and a case of bourbon. He emerged some months later with empty bottles and "Glory for Me," written in the form of a narrative poem, not a screenplay. Goldwyn was not pleased, and he eventually gave Kantor's poem to Robert Sherwood to reshape for the screen. When the film finally appeared, Kantor was given a minimum of credit. Sherwood -- deservedly -- won the Oscar for Best Writing.

Those, like myself, who come to "Glory for Me" via "The Best Years of Our Lives" will be richly rewarded by reading the poem.

Kantor's and Sherwood's treatments of the same characters and the same American town ("Boone City") shows two gifted men working the same basic story in different literary forms, poem and screenplay. Reading the book allows one to discover how, here and there, they made some different creative choices.

In Kantor's poem, Homer's disability is spasticity, which makes for some painful reading. Sherwood gave Homer a physical disability -- loss of hands and the use of prosthetic hooks. Sherwood's choice was a wise one for the moviegoing public, and few are the hearts not moved by Harold Phillips' portrayal of Homer in the film. But Kantor's portrayal of Homer and his girl Wilma are equally moving, perhaps because the poem gave more room for character development.

When Frederick March played Al Stephenson -- the older sergeant returning to his prewar life as a banker at the Cornbelt Trust Company -- he masterfully compressed much of Kantor's material in eloquent but short scenes. In Kantor's fuller telling of the story, Al was the son of a pioneer banker who had made loans to farmers a generation earlier. The poem has more social and historical texture.

In Kantor's poem, Homer's uncle Butch (Hoagy Carmichael's character in the movie) provides a vehicle to explore class feelings in pre- and post-war America. This was one of Kantor's themes that Sherwood could not fit into the film. Similarly, Kantor told his readers more about Novak (the veteran asking for a loan to open a nursery) and his experiences as a Seabee in the Pacific. Kantor's use of lilacs as a metaphor for peace and normality could not be picked up in the film.

On the other hand, Sherwood changed the story line to say more about wartime marriages. Marie (Virginia Mayo in the film) proves shallow and unfaithful when Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) returns home. The movie's title, not found in Kantor's poem, came from a scene when the two argued.

The book was published in January, 1945, months before the war ended. Kantor well anticipated the major contours of veteran adjustment, but there was more to his foresight. On the final page of the poem he showed real prescience when he alluded to the unresolved social tensions that all Americans, not just the veterans, would confront in the coming years.

Reading habits have changed in the six decades since the book was published, and readers may now find that it takes some pages to adjust to the poetic form. Kantor's poetic shortcomings earned some dismissive reviews. Poems similar in form by Kantor's contemporaries like Stephen Vincent Benet are now dismissed as middlebrow when they are read at all. I am confident, though, that with each page the reader will find new lines and new scenes to savor and treasure.

"The Best Years of Our Lives" is a truly great American movie. "Glory for Me" deserves equal recognition. Kantor recognized the coming drama of the returning veterans. He dignified their individual struggles in a literary form that recalled the great epics and placed the American veterans among mankind's heroes. He gave an immortal film -- a film that affected tens of millions -- its basic structure, plot, characters, tone, and feeling.

Not a bad result for a few months of solitude with a case of bourbon.

Posted by mbayles at 8:40 AM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2007

Queened Out For Now

Spare yourself Elizabeth: The Golden Age , especially if you were bored by last year's Marie Antoinette, an over-produced, under-cooked souffle starring Kirsten Dunst - or rather, starring Kirsten Dunst's costumes, wigs, and makeup. Both films are luscious to look at but so devoid of content, they insult the intelligence of all women. Can you imagine a film about a king, any king, which focuses entirely on his clothes and pleasures to the exclusion of everything else? Maybe there's been one or two, but I doubt they were praised for "empowering" men.

If you want to see Queen Elizabeth in her maturity, wearing fantastic outfits and ruling, as opposed to being ruled by, her hot passionate heart while also ruling England better than almost any monarch ever ruled a country, then rent Elizabeth I, the brilliant and wonderful series starring Helen Mirren that aired on HBO last April.

I could elaborate, but better to offer two links, one to a review I did of Elizabeth I at the time; and the other to a long piece that discusses both Mirren's triumph as Elizabeth II (The Queen) and Marie Antoinette.

Posted by mbayles at 4:50 PM | Comments (0)

October 10, 2007

Enough Hemo-Technics

Recently re-watched The Usual Suspects, and while it has long been a favorite of mine, this was the first time I noticed its distinct Hong Kong flavor. Couldn't find anything online about its being a remake of a Hong Kong film, so I emailed my favorite Hong Kong cinema expert, who wrote back no, it's not a remake. But my expert agreed that the style was very Hong Kong.

I understand that bad movies come from Hong Kong, just as they do from Hollywood. But when it comes to the forensic crime genre, the world could do with a lot more of their style and a lot less of what passes for ours.

What's better about The Usual Suspects? 1) It has the right number of overlapping layers of deception and intrigue: not too many, not too few; 2) The characters are more interesting than the explosions; 3) The whole thing, including the production design, fits together like a fine Swiss watch; and 4) It's not totally about the blood.

Hong Kong movies can be quite violent, but perhaps because of the legacy of martial arts geniuses like Jackie Chan, the emphasis is on action, not hemo-technical displays like those spewing from Hollywood these days. There are too many morally stunted special effects guys out there, trying to win kudos from mentally stunted "critics" full of pseudo-aesthetic excuses. Don't remind me that the blood is fake. I know that, and so do most viewers. But the invitation to cruelty and voyeuristic pleasure at the agonized suffering of others -- are they fake, too?

Posted by mbayles at 8:56 AM | Comments (0)

October 7, 2007

Dickens Done Right

As the days grow shorter and the nights colder, you could curl up with a good fat book, like Charles Dickens's Bleak House. The Bantam Classic version is only 818 pages. Or you could rent the 2005 TV adaptation co-produced by the BBC, WGBH Boston, and a company called Deep Indigo. It's only six hours or so, and after the first, you will be hooked.

Full confession: before this Bleak House, I had never seen a Dickens adaptation that I truly admired. They were all too shallow and predictable, with too many tiresome caricatures who weren't really funny. Plus a treacly, Merrie Olde England look that works better in Thomas Kinkade paintings.

How does this series avoid all that? By extending the emotional range in both directions, so that the gloom and cruelty of Dickens's world feels truly disturbing, and warmth and light of justice and kindness truly a relief. This is no mean accomplishment, because while it's easy to find villains these days, it's hard to find characters as convincingly good as Esther Summerson (Anna Maxwell Martin) and her guardian, John Jarndyce (Denis Lawson).

I guess what I'm saying is that this series does not treat Dickens as a quaint old-fashioned moralist best suited to high school English classes. It brings out his brilliance at black comedy, in characters like Smallweed, the blood-sucking moneylender who goes about in a sedan chair complaining about his aching bones. Smallweed is played so brilliantly by Phil Davis, I looked forward to his every entrance and to watching those yellow rat's teeth chew up the scenery.

And beyond the comic, this adaptation makes room for sorrow. Yes, there is a happy ending, but only after several lives have come to bitter ends. Like Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the multi-generational law case at its heart, the plot closes with a perfect tradeoff. The characters lose exactly the amount they hoped to gain. For us readers and viewers, though, it is all gain.

Posted by mbayles at 7:52 PM | Comments (2)

October 4, 2007

Oh Grow Up

Am I the only person tired of Martin Scorsese's sensibility, which was perfect for 1973 but has been old so long, it's ... well, dead?

In today's LA Times there is an item about Scorsese's next film project, stalled between two studios. The passage that caught my eye is about the film itself:

"On paper, the movie looks like a great investment: Scorsese once again directing his 'Aviator' and 'Departed' star Leonardo DiCaprio in an adaptation of the just-published cash-coke-and-corruption memoir 'The Wolf of Wall Street' ... , the autobiography of New York stockbroker Jordan Belfort, a flashy, drug-abusing, hooker-hiring, model-marrying master of the universe sent to jail for securities fraud and money laundering in the '90s."

Didn't we do this already? "Wall Street," "Bright Lights, Big City," "The Bonfire of the Vanities"? Or, assuming Scorsese makes no distinction between Wall Street and the Mafia, "Goodfellas"? The image of American business as gangsterism is the dominant one around the world, used to justify the corruption and excess of robber barons in Russia, China, and many other ruthless plutocracies. When the US government gets on its high horse and preaches good labor practices and business ethics, it is taken as a joke, because thanks to Hollywood, everyone in the world knows all Americans are mobsters.

Scorsese is getting a little long in the tooth to still be celebrating the rotten behavior of bad-boy gangs he never belonged to. Get over it, Marty. Your stuff is boring and pernicious.

For a full treatment of this topic, see my essay comparing "The Departed" with the much superior Hong Kong film it was based on, "Infernal Affairs."

Posted by mbayles at 9:38 AM | Comments (0)

October 1, 2007

Team America Plus Two

Peter Berg made one of my favorite movies: the Texas football tragedy, Friday Night Lights. Does that qualify him to make a Saudi Arabian terrorism comedy? I exaggerate, of course. The Kingdom isn't a comedy, it's a state-of-the-art action flick. But what that means is plenty of comic moments stuck into the action the way nuts are stuck into baklava, to make it crunchier and tastier.

Comic moments also do a great service to action heroes and heroines, by humanizing them and showing how they can keep their cool even when being shot at. In these and other respects, The Kingdom, about a team of four FBI agents sent to solve a terrorist massacre in Riyadh, is technically expert but not thematically profound. The cast is great but predictable: two white guys, one a wise veteran (Chris Cooper) and the other a bumbler on a steep learning curve (Jason Bateman); one saintly tough African American (Jamie Foxx); and one sexy feisty gal with puffy lips and puffier you-know-whats (Jennifer Gault).

But here's the twist: the film adds two more cool customers, cast in the same mold, who are Saudis. One is a colonel played by Ashraf Barhom, an extraordinary actor about whom it is proving difficult at the moment to find a decent online bio. (He does such a good job, and is obviously so sought after, that this dearth of information is itself quite intriguing.) The other is his sergeant, played by Ali Suliman, who did such a brilliant job as a hesitant suicide bomber in Paradise Now. (Information on him is equally elusive.)

After all the complaints, some justified, of stereotyping of Arabs in Hollywood movies, especially the action genre, the presence of these two highly sympathetic characters (whose devotion to Islam is smoothly inserted) seems worthy of notice. At the same time, I wonder: The Kingdom was not filmed in Saudi Arabia but in Abu Dhabi (and Phoenix). But the image of the Saudis is so positive, the film could pass as state-of-the-art propaganda. It's not that, of course. It couldn't be. Could it?

Posted by mbayles at 8:24 AM

September 26, 2007

Pow!

Several big-name reviewers sniffed at Snow Cake, a Canadian film about a gloomy ex-con named Alex (played by Alan Rickman) who forms a (non-romantic) bond with an autistic woman named Linda (Sigourney Weaver) in a tiny whistle-stop near Winnipeg. Some dump on Rickman for being gloomy; others scold Weaver for taking on a no-makeup role that requires her to act like a four-year-old; still others mount their high horse and intone that autistic people don't act that way.

I beg to differ. Rickman is one of the few actors who can light up the screen with the merest hint that perhaps he might smile. Weaver draws on her inner child, including the one that throws tantrums, in a surprisingly convincing way - and since every autistic individual is different, and the screenwriter Angela Pell has an autistic son, I wonder where the high-horse critics get their expertise.

And finally, Snow Cake contains a killer-diller blindside blow, one of the most shocking I have ever seen. (Lately this is a preoccupation of mine - see two entries below.) I won't tell you where or when this hits, but it is staggering in a way that makes perfect sense out of (almost) everything else. I could criticize two or three things about this film, but withal, it has more class and integrity than most of the big-budget bullies getting all the attention.

(I am so happy to have used the word "withal." Part of a campaign to revive really useful but moribund English words.)

Posted by mbayles at 7:53 AM

September 23, 2007

Cinematic Bedford Falls, Video Pottersville

In today's New York Times, there is a nice short piece about the Drexel movie theater in Bexley, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus. It's not really an art house theater, although it occasionally shows filmfest fare. But neither is it a decaying single-screen relic. Instead, it's an experiment in populist preservation, created and sustained by Jeff Frank and his wife Kathy, natives of the area who bought it in 1981 and turned it into a showcase for classic Hollywood films, jazzed up with some old-fashioned hype (such as giving free passes to people who wear red shoes to Red Shoes). Blessedly, the Franks seem to have made a go of it.

I especially liked Jeff Frank's comment that he after graduating from film school, he went home to Ohio with the thought, "Go to Hollywood! Go to New York! Be involved in the film industry." But now he sees himself "as a sort of George Bailey, who never fulfills his dream of leaving Bedford Falls, yet comes to realize that remaining in his hometown is his passage to a wonderful life."

Perhaps we will see more such efforts, now that the technical quality of how consumers watch is declining just as the technical quality of what they watch is rising. All the fine camera work and special effects in the world are lost when people see movies on cell phones (a delivery platform that gives me even worse heebie-jeebies than those crummy little screens on the backs of airplane seats).

At the other extreme you have the phenomenon described by Joe Morgenstern in this weekend's Wall Street Journal (see below): the grotesque distortion that occurs when 4:3 images are stretched to fit deluxe flat-panel TV screens whose ratio is 16:9. As Morgenstern writes, "compact cars resemble stretch limos, puffy faces look like their cheeks have been pulled out," and "actors, even basket ball players, seem to have put on 30 pounds."

Why do people tolerate this? Morgenstern interviews two top cinematographers, whose reaction is to pretend it's not happening. And who can blame them? No true craftsman wants to see his careful work end up in a pawn shop in Pottersville.

MORGENSTERN ON MOVIES
By JOE MORGENSTERN

A Stretch Too Far
Why distorted flat-panel pictures are ruining TV shows and movies
September 22, 2007; Page W5

Wherever I go these days -- homes, bars, restaurants, airports, hotel rooms -- I see beautiful flat-panel TVs displaying awful, distorted pictures. Yet no one seems to notice, or care. I feel like a guy spouting off about the emperor's new clothes, except this emperor's problem is that his wardrobe doesn't fit.

Why should anyone care? And what does it have to do with movies? First things first: Why it happens.

American television is moving inexorably, if belatedly, from analog to digital, and from conventional to high-definition broadcasting. At the moment, though, we're in a period of higgledy-piggledy transition, thanks to bungling by the government, which is increasingly befuddled by new technologies, and to resistance by broadcasters and consumers. Almost all flat-panel TVs are tailored to the proportions of hi-def transmission -- they have screens with 16:9 aspect ratios -- but they don't all receive hi-def signals, and most programs are still being beamed conventionally, in a squarish 4:3 format that was never meant to fill a wide screen.

Many owners of wide-screen TVs don't make the distinction. Since they paid a premium for the width, they want their programs to fill the screen; never mind that 4:3 programs are correctly displayed on 16:9 panels only with black bars flanking the image. So people set their TVs to stretch the picture, or allow their TVs to set themselves. Either way, the result is distortion -- compact cars resemble stretch limos, puffy faces look like their cheeks have been pulled out in opposite directions.

As a movie critic, I try to tell myself that it's only TV. Moviegoers can still find impressive images on theater screens, where projection has actually improved in recent years. But condescension toward television doesn't wash. As everyone who watches TV knows, some programs and series are terrific -- lots better than the average feature films that fill the multiplexes. And everyone watches TV, which is one reason I obsess about the visual quality of what they're watching. If people don't care what they see, then what future can there be for the dazzlingly powerful -- and proportionate -- images I've been smitten by ever since I was a kid?

It doesn't pay to obsess about things you can't change, but I forget that each time I find myself a captive audience in a hotel room with a flat-panel TV that's been set to stretch every picture it processes. The setting can't be switched with the hotel remote; you need the remote that came with the display, but getting your hands on one can drive you crazy.

First comes a call to the front desk: "There's something wrong with my TV. I need the remote that came with it so I can fix it." The response may vary by hotel or region, but in New York it's always the same: "I'll send up the engineer."

Rather than being a designer of airplanes or skyscrapers, the engineer is more likely to be a bleak, overworked handyman who looks at the TV and says, "It's fine." Not really, I begin, hating my obsessive self as I start to explain, yet again, why the picture is cockeyed. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I had so much trouble communicating with the last engineer, who may have been Russian, that I pinched my cheeks and pulled them out to demonstrate the problem. The man stared at me as if I were insane, but he did bring the remote, watched patiently as I changed the setting and then shrugged a semi-private it-takes-all-kinds shrug before moving on to another nut job in another room.

In the course of my obsessing, I've sometimes wondered how such ubiquitous distortion and the public's indifference to it affects the people who create those dazzling images on the big screen -- cinematographers of the first rank. Writing this confessional gave me an excuse to call two of the best shooters I know.

Caleb Deschanel said the way his films get stretched on TV bothers him a lot, and public indifference puzzles him. "It is odd when people don't notice that actors, or even basketball players, seem to have put on 30 pounds. But all sorts of things in modern society bother me. Kids in their 20s and 30s think absolutely nothing of stealing intellectual property on the Internet."

John Bailey is not a heavy TV watcher. "I'm the guy who finally got rid of my 20-year-old Pioneer square-screen TV not long ago, and I only did that when the sound went out." But he acknowledged the subject's crazy-making potential. "It makes you ask the question, 'What the hell am I doing? What are we all doing?' Once you get beyond the theatrical exhibition, it's a free-for-all. But you really can go crazy if you start to think of the downstream implications. The only thing I feel I can control, and shoot for, is to make negatives or show prints as good as they can be. Then, if they go back and remaster something years later, at least the archival material is of the highest quality."

That's good, philosophical advice, and I plan to take it. The next time I'm tempted to make a call that will summon the engineer, I'll call room service and order a drink.

Posted by mbayles at 9:34 AM

September 16, 2007

Success With Chinese Characteristics?

Once upon a time there was a musician, a teacher and performer of Western classical music, in Beijing. During the Cultural Revolution this man was attacked and humiliated by a gang of rowdy students - a painful experience made infinitely more so by the fact that one of the students roughing him up was his own son, Chen Kaige.

Chen Kaige is now a renowned film director, best known in America for rich costume dramas such as Farewell, My Concubine and Temptress Moon. But Chen is also the author of Young Kaige, a soul-searching memoir about his participation in the Cultural Revolution. (Unfortunately, the book does not appear to be available in English).

Chen Kaige's 2002 film, Together, tells a different story but one suffused with strong emotion drawn from this background. It is about Liu Cheng (Liu Peiqi), a comical but affecting peasant from a small provincial city, where he works as a cook and nurtures the musical career of his gifted 13-year-old son, Liu Xiaochun (Tang Yun). Xiaochun is devoted not just to the violin in general but to a particular violin that, according to Cheng, was left to him by his deceased mother.

Despite his rough manners and lack of education, Cheng manages to take Xiaochun to Beijing and enter him in a national contest, which he loses. But then, hearing one of the judges, Jiang (Wang Zhiwen), complain about the system being rigged in favor of the not-so-talented children of the rich, Cheng cajoles Jiang into taking Xiaochun as a pupil.

Jiang is a fine but embittered teacher who lives alone with six cats in one of the old, picturesque but poor districts of Beijing known as hutong (meaning something like, "street wide enough for two carts to pass"). When he has taught Xiaochun all he can, he gracefully allows the boy to graduate to Shifeng Yu (played by Chen Kaige himself), a celebrity teacher more skilled at hustling his students into the big time.

Father and son also live in a hutong, but one seemingly threatened by redevelopment, because right next door is a new high-rise, one resident of which is Lili (Chen Hong, the wife of Chen Kaige), a pretty young woman whose life consists in entertaining her rich boyfriend and spending the money he gives her. Lili isn't a prostitute, as uncomprehending critics have suggested, but rather a "kept woman" (to use an antiquated phrase) But she is not happy, any more than Jiang is happy pretending to teach music to the unmusical offspring of plutocrats.

As these characters are drawn into a tale of Horatio Alger ambition and Charles Dickens self-discovery, the film feels both old and new. It feels old because of these literary echoes, and the way it tackles the themes of money, success, and loyalty - which is strongly reminiscent of classic Hollywood. (Some reviewers have found hints of Frank Capra, and they are right.)

Yet Together also feels new, because while hardly a tragedy, it does take a somewhat critical stance toward the way these themes work themselves out in contemporary China. It's tempting to say, well great, the Chinese have their own Frank Capra. But that raises a troubling question: Was Together released in China? I have checked the Internet Movie Database, and according to that fairly reliable source, it was not!

Posted by mbayles at 12:00 PM

September 14, 2007

Good, Not Feel-Good

About a year ago, I posted an entry about a little known film called The War Within, which I admired for its refusal to satisfy our kneejerk expectations of a happy ending.

Now I have seen another film that does the same thing. Civic Duty is a UK-Canada-US production whose protagonist is not a Pakistani suicide bomber wandering around New York, but an all-American accountant, Terry (Peter Krause), who happens to be down on his luck. Having lost his job and with too much time on his hands, Terry becomes obsessed with the mysterious doings of his new Middle Eastern neighbor, Gabe (Khaled Abol Naga).

Terrifically acted, the film engages in too many pseudo-artsy camera tricks for my taste. But this is a small vice compared with its major virtue: a courageous script that, like The War Within, encourages us to draw conventional conclusions then yanks each one away.

Terry is a media-manipulated reactionary who carries suspicion too far ... or is he? Gabe is an angry Muslim but innocent of any crime ... or is he? There's no hero, though Terry's girlfriend Marla (Kari Matchett) comes close. But even her love for Terry and trusting good nature do not produce the Hollywood resolution we crave. And much as I love Hollywood, on this topic I prefer irresolution.

Posted by mbayles at 2:08 PM

September 10, 2007

Another Clueless Expert

With mixed feelings, I read in today's New York Times that the hottest TV show in Russia is a Russian version of Married With Children, the in-your-face sitcom that happily deconstructed the American family between 1987 and 1997.

I was never a big fan of Married With Children, which in hindsight seems a loss leader in substituting vulgarity for wit. But if the Russian media want to allow this freedom while murdering journalists and suppressing political speech, then the more repressive tolerance to 'em (as Herbert Marcuse used to say).

But it is really depressing to see what passes for expert commentary in Russia. The Times article quotes Daniil B. Dondurei, editor in chief of Cinema Art magazine, saying that TV shows like Schastlivy Vmeste (Happy Together) are "training [people] to not think about which party is in Parliament, about which laws are being passed, about who will be in charge tomorrow. People have become accustomed to living like children, in the family of a very strong and powerful father. Everything is decided for them."

Huh? Turn on your TV, Mr. Dondurei. This is Married With Children, not Father Knows Best. You need to update your critique, unless of course you are trying to be irrelevant.

Posted by mbayles at 11:36 AM

September 6, 2007

Twelve Agonizing Brits

The first courtroom drama was Aeschylus' Oresteia, in which a cycle of blood vengeance driven by the Furies is arrested by Athena, instituting drama's first jury trial. "Let me be just," the goddess tells Orestes. "Let me remember the fair tongue of reason."

Jury trials abound in films, of course, but the most famous will always be Twelve Angry Men (1957), based on the stage play by Reginald Rose and directed by Sidney Lumet. After many revivals of the play worldwide, the film was remade for television in 1997 by director William Friedkin. Remarkably, that remake is not available on DVD, even though the cast includes George C. Scott, Ossie Davis, Hume Cronyn, Jack Lennon - and Sopranos star James Gandolfini.

Twelve Angry Men is not just about the jury system, it is also about racial and ethnic conflict, which is why it proves a perennial. A superb recent update is The Jury (2002), a British-made television series directed by Pete Travis, set in London's Old Bailey courthouse and glittering with young and old British thespians (Gerard Butler and Derek Jacobi, to name just two).

The series follows the trial of of a 17-year-old Sikh boy (Sonnell Dadral) accused of murdering an English classmate with a sword. The evidence is strong against him, but at the same time, the victim's anti-immigrant father, relatives, and police cronies do everything they can to push the proceedings toward a lynching.

The Jury departs from Twelve Angry Men by including a great deal of drama outside the courtroom, in particular the stories of a half dozen jurors whose lives are in such turmoil, they actually find respite (and for one couple, romance) in a murder trial. If you want to know how it all comes out, you'll have to watch it. I'm no spoiler, and besides, it contains far too many shadows of doubt to yield a snap verdict.

Posted by mbayles at 8:30 AM

September 4, 2007

Love That Upchuck

Where are the "cutting-edge" artistes of Hollywood taking us? This article from the Washington Times will give you some idea.

Posted by mbayles at 9:36 AM

September 3, 2007

Too Happy

Blood Diamond is a much better film than I expected. Extraordinary production values, even in this era of pricey trans-national co-productions; and superb performances, especially by Leonardo DiCaprio as Danny, a mercenary from Zimbabwe (back when it was Rhodesia); and Djimon Hounsou as Solomon, a fisherman from Sierra Leone whose village is raided by paramilitary thugs trading in illegal diamonds.

Forced into slavery in the mine, Solomon finds a huge diamond, which he manages to bury during a government raid. Barely escaping with his life, Solomon desperately wants to retrieve the stone, not so he can become rich but so he can rescue his son, Dia, impressed into murderous service as a child soldier.

Greed and paternal love are then united, as Solomon reluctantly teams up with Danny to find the stone. Of course, as director Edward Zwick says on the DVD commentary, the real diamond is the boy, not the stone, and as the story unfolds, this hard lesson is learned by the hardest of men, Danny the mercenary.

Why "Too Happy"? Because the right ending occurs about 10 minutes before the credits actually appear, and those last 10 minutes are nothing but feel-good gas. There are so many grim scenes in this film, the ending I am calling "right" - which consists of a narrow escape and an honorable death - is plenty. Why ruin it with additional scenes poured out of that big bottle of Hollywood Formula? Probably because the film was audience tested on the kind of people who find anything but swelling music, warm embraces, and applause for the hero "depressing."

Bitter truths beautifully presented, then coated with saccharine at the end. That's what I call depressing.

Posted by mbayles at 1:00 PM

August 30, 2007

Another Good Punch

Two entries ago, I mentioned that the fine Australian film with the unprepossessing title Japanese Story packed an unexpected wallop. Another film that does the same thing is The Man in the Moon (1991), about a 14-year-old Louisiana farm girl who falls in love with her older's sister's boyfriend. It is a gem, partly because of Reese Witherspoon's superb performance as the younger sister (her first film role), and partly because of the sudden blow it delivers to the viewer's solar plexis.

What's striking about both films is the way they avoid telescoping the punch, and what's interesting to think about (if you are a plot junkie like me) is the fact that most movies do telescope their punches, to the great detriment of realism. Anyway, if you are looking for a good film to watch over Labor Day, The Man in the Moon is easy to find and well worth it.

Posted by mbayles at 10:18 AM

August 27, 2007

Truer Than Wuxiu

Somewhere between Dickens and Tolstoy stands British novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), whose pen name in the proper Victorian mode was Mrs. Gaskell. Little known in America, she is beloved enough in England to have inspired a BBC adaptation of North and South, her Pride and Prejudice-style love story between a minister's daughter from England's green, prosperous South and a textile magnate from its grim, industrializing North.

I haven't read the novel, but the film is gritty, compelling, romantic. And timely in this sense: it doesn't make one me about England, it makes me think about China. History's biggest industrial revolution is happening right now, and with it a gigantic version of all the problems depicted in this film. And Mrs. Gaskell's vision of rapprochement between management and labor is also oddly of the moment. At least the answer in China is not going to be Marxist-Leninist revolution. Been there, done that.

One thing I learned while visiting the PRC this spring is that audio-visual piracy (a major industry, make no mistake) is not just "theft," as the Motion Picture Association puts it; it also the lifeblood of China's independent film scene. It is not illegal to make indie films there, but very few are released. (The government prefers the blockbuster wuxiu films, in which exotically dressed super-heroes and heroines engage in gravity-defying combat.) So piracy - taoba - is also samizdat. Watch North and South and let me know if you agree: it would be quite interesting to see VCDs (cut-rate DVDs) of this film show up in the street stalls of Shanghai.

Posted by mbayles at 11:45 PM

August 26, 2007

Prodigal Blogger

Loyal Reader:

I've been away from SP for a couple of months, traveling around the world doing research for my book about how people perceive life in America through the lens of our popular culture and, to a much lesser extent, US cultural diplomacy. I interviewed 133 individuals in six countries and am now drafting the manuscript. But loath to let SP expire, I beg you to kill whatever fatted calf you have on hand and welcome me back.

I woke up this morning still thinking about an extraordinary film I saw last night on DVD. Its unprepossessing title, Japanese Story, does not begin to capture its power.

Set in the Pilbara Desert of Western Australia, the story is simple: Sandy, a female geologist (Toni Colette), is asked by her boss to be driver and guide to the son of a major Japanese investor. The young visitor, Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima) is as smooth and proud as Sandy is rough and humble, and were it not for a series of unexpected mishaps, they would never have connected. But connect they do, in ways as starkly beautiful as the rugged, red-earth landscape they travel through. The film also contains something exceedingly rare: a punch that knocks the wind out of you, and isn't at all telescoped.

Posted by mbayles at 7:30 AM

April 28, 2007

Cultural Learnings for Make Benefit Glorious Comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen

Strolling along the Thames last summer, I did something unusual for me: I paused to check out some street performers and stayed for the whole show. Two young men were performing in a series sponsored by the Royal National Theater, and though their act was mostly wordless clowning, I stood transfixed by their skills. First they would single out someone and imitate his stance or gait (passing joggers were a specialty). Then, while the crowd was roaring with laughter, they would back away from their target, making elaborate gestures of apology but also blame, toward each other ("He did it, not me") and toward the crowd ("They made us do it"). And invariably the victim would relent, playing the good sport to general applause.

Street comedians have operated this way since time immemorial - with reason. They must ruffle a few feathers in order to tickle the crowd's funny bone, but they must also know exactly how much feather-ruffling the traffic will bear. Great comedians ruffle deeply, almost to the point of pain, and provoke correspondingly deep, almost painful laughter. Yet the emphasis is on "almost." As Aristotle noted in the Poetics, "the laughable is an error or disgrace that does not involve pain or destruction." The line between funny and hurtful is fine but definitive.

The chief feather-ruffler in the world today is Sacha Baron Cohen, the 35-year-old British comedian best known for his hit film, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Baron Cohen plays Borat Sagdiyev, a clueless, feckless, tasteless TV reporter from "Kazakhstan" (no resemblance to the real country), who visits New York to make a documentary about America, but after seeing Pamela Anderson on Baywatch, embarks on a cross-country journey to Los Angeles to meet the sexy star. The character's purpose is straightforward: to seize Anderson and "make a romantic liquid explosion on her stomach." The comedian's purpose is more devious: to find ripe targets for his special brand of hit-and-run comedy.

That's hit-and-run, not street comedy. Unlike the performers on the South Bank, Baron Cohen is merciless. His other comic persona, Ali G, the white British hip-hop wannabe host of HBO's Da Ali G Show, specializes in ambushing prominent people. A recent article in Rolling Stone described the process: "The interview requests come from a fake British production company ... And until just before the cameras roll, the interviewee is under the impression that the clean-cut, well-dressed director is going to do the interview, and that the baggy-clothed, wraparound-shades-wearing character carrying equipment is just part of the crew."

Confronted with the bizarre-looking, patois-speaking Ali G, a few guests (Pat Buchanan, INS chief James Ziegler) keep their cool. But most (Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, Ralph Nader) totally lose it when Ali G asks one of his incredibly dumb questions - to astronaut Buzz Aldrin: "Wot's it like, walkin' on da sun?"- then interrupts the reply with a blue streak of vulgarity. When a guest bristles, Ali G does likewise, demanding to know, against all visible evidence, "Why da aggro, geezer? Is it coz I black?" And woe to the good sport: the more cheerfully a guest plays along, the more gleefully Ali G slays him.

Borat's targets are not celebrities, but the process was similar. First, they were invited to participate in a news documentary for Belarus TV (one unknown country being much like another). Then they signed a release, indemnifying Baron Cohen against any claim of "false light (allegedly false or misleading portrayal of Participant)" or "fraud (alleged deception or surprise about the Film)." And finally they bared their unwary good nature to Borat's swift "gotcha."

Don't get me wrong. Both Ali G and Borat can be wildly funny - for example, when Borat bops up to strangers in midtown Manhattan, kissing the men on both cheeks and crowing, "Hi! I Borat! I new in town! I want be your friend!" Some curse, some flee, some - like the passengers in the subway car where Borat's suitcase opens and live chickens flutter out - just laugh. As far as I know, none of these New Yorkers has filed a lawsuit. The lawsuits (about a dozen) have come from remoter places, such as Helena, Alabama (about which more below), and, at the extreme, Glod, the Roma (gypsy) village in Romania whose residents mugged for the camera as Borat's benighted kith and kin. This is not just because New Yorkers are more used to bizarre behavior. It's also because the farther Baron Cohen went into darkest America, the harder he worked at outing the savages.

David Brooks has criticized Baron Cohen for "snobbery"; others have defended his bold exposure of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. He did turn up some unsightly prejudices: a trio of drunken frat boys make puerile comments about women and minorities; a rodeo manager in Tennessee advises Borat to shave off his mustache so he won't look Muslim, then jokingly agrees that homosexuals should be persecuted. But the question is, compared to what? Would a road trip through the Middle East, or any other part of the world yield a bigger crop of tolerance? Granted, Borat finds reinforcements for his caricatured bigotry. But most of the Americans he meets put up with all sorts of nonsense from this weird foreigner, doubtless because they assume (based on their history) that he is just another immigrant seeking to become "Americanized."

Surely this is the real message of the much discussed episode in which a group of genteel white folk in Helena, Alabama, host Borat in their dining club, only to have him (in his fractured English) call a "retired" man a "retard," insult a minister's wife for being less attractive than two other women, and return to the table after a trip to the bathroom brandishing a plastic bag full of his own feces (which prompts a patient lesson on how to use the toilet). The last straw is when Borat telephones for a hooker, and when one arrives, introduces her as his guest. The pair are summarily ejected, and because the hooker is black, the scene is widely cited as evidence of racism. Give me a break. Or as Ali G might say, Wot is yooz bangin' on about?

Lawsuits and controversy are good publicity, of course. But Baron Cohen's turbo-boosted fame presents a more daunting challenge. In January he sold his next "mockumentary," Bruno, to Universal Studios for $42.5 million. Bruno is his third comic persona, a flamingly gay fashion reporter for Austrian TV, who gives new meaning to the term "air head." So this new project promises to stimulate the chattering-blogging classes: Is he really homophobic, or is he outing the homophobes? Post your comments below. But how on earth is Baron Cohen going to pull off another round of hit-and-run comedy? Of the potential marks most likely to see him coming, surely gay fashionistas top the list.

Thus the super-star comedian faces the same problem as the humble street comedian: how do you make fun of others when you're outnumbered - and surrounded? It's nice to prattle on about comedy being anarchic and unbounded, but it almost never is, because like all things human, comedy is social - and political. This is not to saddle it with social or political "messages." The only way comedy can deliver a message is negatively, through satire. In his excellent book, Redeeming Laughter, Peter Berger finds "satirical elements" - aggressive impulses, glints of malice - in all forms of comedy. But only in satire, which he defines as "the comic used in attacks that are part of an agenda," are these elements "welded together into the shaping of a weapon."

Here arises the vexed topic of anti-Semitism, an obsession in Borat. Borat's fellow villagers are depicted not only as whores, abortionists, animal rapists, and assorted cretins, but also as anti-Semites cheering at their annual "Running of the Jew," a Pamplona-style event with papier-maché effigies of Jews instead of bulls. In a bed-and-breakfast in the American South, Borat and his producer panic when they learn that the meek proprietors are Jewish. And the joke is on the dim-witted gun dealer who, when asked by Borat, "What is the best gun to defend from a Jew?", blandly recommends a .45. An observant Jew whose mother comes from Israel, who lived on a kibbutz, and who wrote his Cambridge history thesis about the role of Jews in the American civil rights movement, Baron Cohen rarely plays "gotcha" with his co-religionists (or with African Americans). As he explained in a recent interview, "Borat essentially works as a tool. By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice."

Very high-minded, I'm sure. There's a lot of anti-Semitism in the world today; why shouldn't a gifted comedian satirize it? I can think of no good reason except a practical one: Baron Cohen's anti-anti-Semitic jokes are not very funny. And, in a curious way, they are not very Jewish. If he'd written a thesis about the role of Jews in American humor, then perhaps he would have learned that the best ethnic comedy is that in which people laugh as hard at themselves as they do at others.

This lesson comes from vaudeville, the popular theater that flourished between the end of the Civil War and the Depression. Vaudeville was big business, with impresarios booking acts in New York and sending them out on the national "circuit." To stay in the black, they had to "keep it clean." But that didn't make vaudeville timid or safe. Quite the opposite: it was rife with irreverent humor about the dominant social reality of the time: immigration. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, America absorbed 33 million newcomers from Europe, as well as 200,000 from China. The latter were subject to racist legal sanctions, as were blacks and Indians. But several European groups, especially Irish, Slavs, and Jews, also met with prejudice, both from the mainstream and from one another. So vaudeville traded in heavy-handed stereotypes: the drunken, belligerent Irishman; the volatile, irresponsible Italian; the stodgy, thick German; the clever, grasping Jew.

Yet this is precisely where the Jews made their mark. As Berger notes, turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants to America brought with them a sophisticated comic culture, rooted in the Yiddish-speaking shtetls of Eastern Europe and, after emancipation, refined in the coffeehouses of Budapest, Prague, and Vienna. Two qualities made this culture an excellent fit for America: first, it did not need to be "kept clean" because it contained "almost no scatology and remarkably little sexuality"; and second, it was already capable of reaching beyond the group. Writing about the coffeehouse culture, Berger notes that "insiders and outsiders were no longer identified only in terms of ethnicity and religion." Then he adds: "It was in America that large numbers of gentiles have been drawn into the magic world of Jewish humor."

Vaudevillians were not social workers, needless to say. They were fierce competitors, vying for dollars and applause. But as noted by Edward Rothstein, a critic for the New York Times, their rough-and-tumble yielded a rare social alchemy:

"Irish, German and Yiddish accents were part of the patois of vaudevillian comedy, the mangled sentences echoing the increasingly familiar immigrant sounds of cities like New York. Oddly, though, these exaggerations were not generally an occasion for bigotry or hostility. There was an element of celebration in the mockery, partly because the actors were often themselves from these groups. Even stranger, ethnic actors would adopt alien ethnic identities for the sake of the comedy, making the artifice even more apparent. Blacks appeared as Chinese, Jews as Irish. It was as if, by some unspoken agreement, marginal groups had joined forces in displaying, to each other, the comic absurdity of their position."

This distinctive style of ethnic humor shaped radio, Hollywood movies, and TV - right into the 1970s, when, remarkably, it dominated Saturday Night Live. In the '70s America was beginning to experience another great wave of immigration, and the topic pervaded that legendary NBC show from the premier segment, which opened with a sketch about an ESL instructor (Michael O'Donoghue) teaching an immigrant (John Belushi) the ever-so-useful English sentence, "I want to feed your fingertips to the wolverines." When the instructor keeled over with a heart attack, the docile pupil did the same. Immigration also drove such running gags as the terminally uncool "wild and crazy guys" from Eastern Europe; the limited-menu diner ("Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, Pepsi, Pepsi"); Belushi's Samurai hotel clerk; Gilda Radner's linguistically perplexed Emily Litella (reportedly based on a Puerto Rican custodian in Rockefeller Center); and Don Novello's tactless Father Guido Sarducci. With a stretch, one might also include those poorly assimilated aliens, the Coneheads ("We are from France"). In this respect, Saturday Night Live was pure vaudeville.

Baron Cohen has never said so, but Borat's obvious predecessor is Latka Gravas, the befuddled "Foreign Man" created by Andy Kaufman and showcased on Saturday Night Live and the ABC sitcom, Taxi. Because these shows were network, not cable, Kaufman had to "keep it clean" - and he apparently chafed at that. But significantly, Kaufman seems not to have chafed at making Latka's country of origin entirely fictional - an island in the Caspian Sea called Caspiar. On the contrary, having invented Lakta's quaint customs and peculiar beliefs out of whole cloth, Kaufman could riff on them all the more cleverly.

Why couldn't Baron Cohen do this? Along with a great many Kazakh bloggers, I've been wondering why Borat used the name of a real country but then refused to satirize it outright, offering instead a hilarious but safe caricature of rural life in Soviet Russia. (Full disclosure: I laughed so hard at the Kazakh national anthem played at the end, they almost had to carry me out of the theater. It begins, "Kazakhtstan, greatest country in the world / All other countries are run by little girls.") Could it be that Baron Cohen itched to stick it to Muslims for being anti-Semitic but did not itch to share the fate of Salman Rushdie or (worse) Theo van Gogh, so he decided to pick on a majority-Muslim country that (in his own words) "no one had heard anything about"? Borat is full of in-jokes, not least its use of Hebrew as a stand-in for Kazakh. But the biggest in-joke of all may be its bait-and-switch treatment of Kazakhstan.

A friend of mine, a Central Asian expert, worries that Borat's "portrayal of Kazakhs as ignorant, misogynist, prejudiced fools" might "feed existing prejudices against backward natives, especially Muslim ones." I told him to chill: in America, the vast majority of Borat fans can't even pronounce Kazakhstan, much less find it on a map. And they learned nothing about its religious demographics from Borat. According to the film, the state religion is anti-Semitism, and then, after Borat's return, a form of Christianity in which peasants stick pitchforks into a sorry-looking compatriot on a cross. In the entire film, there's only one reference to Islam, and that's when the rodeo manager asks Borat if he is Muslim. The cryptic reply: "No, I am Kazakh. I follow the hawk."

Actually, from an American perspective, Baron Cohen is less vaudevillian than minstrel. I refer, of course, to the blackface entertainment that preceded vaudeville in the 19th century. Performed by whites before the Civil War and largely by blacks afterward, minstrelsy featured grotesque costumes (blacks and whites alike smeared their faces with burnt cork); sexual and scatological humor (depending on the audience); and stock figures (Jim Crow and Zip Coon) who were "low" in both senses: in status, because as slaves they had no hope of upward mobility, and in moral character, because (like all caste societies) the slave South operated on the presumption that virtue resided at the top and vice at the bottom.

Baron Cohen's comic personae do not wear burnt cork, but there's plenty of it in their speech, dress, and general ineptitude. His use of slapstick and obscenity both to ridicule himself and to explode the pretensions of the hoity-toity resembles not just minstrelsy but also the Old Comedy of ancient Athens, which grew out of the komos, a ritual practiced on festival occasions by family, religious, and military groups for the purpose of settling scores with rival groups and prominent figures. Speaking as a college professor, it's always a pleasure to watch the language of Aristophanes curl the hair of undergraduates. Which is, of course, its function: to reveal the unsightly and disgraceful side of human nature, and to demonstrate that the high and mighty are not immune.

But here's a point worth pondering: Old Comedy was the product of a small society with fixed status levels and a shared moral code, performed as part of a public religious ritual, the annual festival of Dionysus. Its obscenity may shock genteel Americans, but according to classicist Jeffrey Henderson, "the comic poets did not ... enjoy complete license to say anything they pleased." As for the performance setting, that was a live issue for Aristotle, who argued in the Politics that the most abusive and slanderous comedy should be placed off limits to women, youth, and others considered incapable of resisting its presumed negative effects.

No such limits are possible on the distribution of Baron Cohen's performances, needless to say. Now that Borat is on DVD, it is available in every nook, cranny, and media platform on the planet. This has not escaped the artist's notice, I am sure. But as he adjusts to the fact that his global celebrity is going to put a kink in his hit-and-run M.O., perhaps he should consider a different path. Classic gross-out comedy works well when performed by servants and slaves at the expense of their social "betters." But it is less appealing when performed by elite-educated pranksters at the expense of ordinary citizens. Immigrant New York was never a level playing field, to be sure. But it is arguable that the equal-opportunity insult humor of the great vaudevillians helped to keep it from becoming a war zone. And it is worth remembering, in this era of resurgent anti-Semitism, that they did so with a heavy Jewish accent.

This article originally appeared in the Claremont Review of Books

Posted by mbayles at 2:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 1, 2007

Dear Serious Reader

If you are still checking in with Serious Popcorn, you deserve better! It has been badly neglected in recent weeks, because I have been preparing for a round-the-world trip (9 cities in 6 countries), focusing on the influence of US popular culture, especially movies, on societies and media in the Middle East, India, Indonesia, and China. (This is for my book about the image of American culture in the world.)

I hope to revive Serious Popcorn while traveling, perhaps even keep a journal of sorts. So bear with me, and forgive me!

Posted by mbayles at 10:04 AM

December 28, 2006

Departed Soul

If you feel that the obits for James Brown don't quite get it, then please try this humble offering, a review written over a year ago. It's as close to getting it as I'll ever get.

Posted by mbayles at 2:21 PM

December 15, 2006

Celebrity vs. Royalty

Without doubt, the media event of summer 1997 was the death of Lady Diana Spencer, the former Princess of Wales. Newly divorced from Prince Charles, Diana was living the do-good, act-bad celebrity life when the limousine of her latest squeeze, Dodi Fayed (the son of the Egyptian-Swiss billionaire, Mohamed Abdel Fayed), crashed in a Paris tunnel while fleeing a pack of motorcycle-mounted paparazzi. Since Diana was no longer a member of the royal family and had appeared on the BBC complaining about how badly they had treated her, Queen Elizabeth II was disinclined to make a fuss. Holed up in Balmoral, their retreat in the highlands of Scotland, her majesty and the immediate family did their best to maintain an iron reserve.

As dramatized in The Queen, that royal reserve turns out to be an immovable object meeting an irresistible force--a flood of public grief unleashed by Diana's death. Captured on screen by television news footage of swelling crowds and mounting heaps of flowers outside Buckingham Palace, this surge of emotion surprises and discomfits the queen (Helen Mirren). So when the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), urges her to make a series of gestures aimed at dampening public resentment at her perceived cold-hearted indifference, she resists, then eventually comes around. It's a fascinating tale, full of political resonance, and The Queen, written by Peter Morgan and directed by Stephen Frears, tells it superbly.

But kindly ignore the reviews. This is not a film about "a frumpy, emotionally stunted monarch," a "stubborn, blinkered, coddled woman, who can't even grieve like a human being," who reacts to the untimely death of "a pretty, vulnerable young woman" by "clinging obliviously to bygone codes of class and civility." Despite his limitations, the queen's husband, Prince Philip (James Cromwell), is not portrayed (in the words of still other reviews) as a "dim bulb," "whose exclamations are unfailingly snobbish and dull," any more than the Queen Mother (Sylvia Syms) is depicted as "tipsy," "half-dead," and dispensing advice that "pertains to another era and is of no use." Most of all, the royal family are not shown "cloistered at Balmoral, knitting and nattering in their plain wool sweaters, caring more for their pets than for their children"--so "clueless" about "the cultural shift" in their own country that it takes Blair, a young Labor pol full of "fire and grace," "incorrigibly cheerful and gently manipulative," to "slap the royals awake and "practically order them to get back to London."

After rattling on in this vein for a while, most of the reviewers then dropped the whole shtick and praised the film for somehow tricking them into sympathizing with the queen. Most chalked this up to Mirren's performance (which is extraordinary; the actress, always worth watching, is on a roll lately, winning an Emmy earlier this year for a stunning performance as the first Queen Elizabeth in the HBO series, Elizabeth I; see my review in Reprisals).

But one or two reviewers came close to conceding that maybe, just maybe, the queen had a point. For example, Roger Ebert wrote that "the queen is correct, indeed, by tradition and history in all that she says about the affair--but she is sadly aloof from the national mood. Well, maybe queens should be." And David Edelstein of New York magazine halted his gleeful royal-bashing to lament "the passing of a more dignified, orderly world."

The prize for most idiotic review goes to Manohla Dargis of the New York Times, who described The Queen as "a sublimely nimble evisceration of that cult of celebrity known as the British royal family." The film is exactly the opposite: a subtle and intelligent exploration of the difference between royalty and celebrity. The contest between monarch and prime minister is fascinating precisely because they are both fully aware of the difference. What they disagree on is how best to split it.

Just because the queen is surprised by the size of the media circus surrounding Diana's death, that doesn't mean it is "bewildering" to her, or represents "a shift in values she does not understand." After all, this is the monarch who brought Great Britain into the media age, circling the globe to foster a positive post-colonial image; wearing pastel coats and flowered hats so people (and cameras) could pick her out of large crowds; and pioneering televised appearances such as the annual Christmas address and the "royal walk-around." How could she not have been aware of the superheated celebrity culture of the 1980s and '90s, when several members of her own family (not just Charles and Diana) were its favorite fodder?

Throughout her long reign, Elizabeth II has refused to be interviewed on camera. But this may be media savvy, not naivete. Billions would tune in to see her share memories of being doted on by her grandparents, Queen Mary and King George V; of studying modern languages with private tutors; of driving a truck for the Women's Auxiliary Territorial Service during World War II. Your Majesty, what was it like to grow up third in the line of succession and then, at age 26, be crowned queen of half the world? But as the queen doubtless suspects, the millions who cried their eyes out over Diana would demand more. For them, nothing would do but a ten-hanky confession, to Barbara Walters if possible, of Elizabeth's deepest feelings about everything from her upbringing by starchy remote parents to her relations (erotic? Oedipal?) with ten prime ministers from Winston to Tony. Your Majesty, have you ever felt envious of Diana's fantastic wardrobe and thrilling sex life?

Unthinkable, of course. Most people, even some Di-worshipers, would object to seeing the soiled knickers of this public figure laundered for the entertainment of the great unlaundered. The interesting question is why. It's not strictly a function of power. The most powerful office on earth, the American presidency, is hardly exempt from pressure to get up close and personal. (Who can forget that 1997 was also the year that Bill Clinton "did not have sex with that woman"?) At the same time, exemption from the smarmier modes of media scrutiny is not given to powerless people, should they be so unlucky (or lucky) to be thrust into its glare. No, the exemption has to do with the nature and origin of one's power. Despite the legacy of English journalist Walter Bagehot, who argued in the 19th century that the British monarchy was just a "bauble" used to pacify the masses, the present queen holds significant power. Some of it belongs to her alone, the product of a half-century's dignified and engaged presence. And some of it is rooted in soil more ancient than any being traded on today's media market.

Film critics should understand this, because their line of work is one of the few that require occasional reflection on political regimes other than liberal democracy. The typical movie monarch may be a lion, grasshopper, human, monster, or high-IQ insectoid from outer space; it hardly matters, because the plots are invariably driven by the ancient political question of what makes a ruler good or evil, just or unjust. And of course, there are plenty of small-r republican movies, in which bands of aristocrats, wielding light-swords or briefcases, battle to topple evil tyrants and establish new orders ruled by themselves, the best and brightest. But regrettably, today's critics tend to see every political actor as either an evil fascist Republican or a good progressive Democrat.

That's why the reviews misinterpreted the stag. The climactic scene in The Queen occurs in the high country near Balmoral, where the queen is alone, driving her vintage Land Rover in search of Philip, who is out hunting a magnificent and elusive 14-point stag. Here the queen is depicted as the embodiment of the British virtues of toughness, self-reliance, preference for rugged nature over coddled luxury, and faith that the wisest counsel is conscience, heard in solitude. But as it happens, she drives too fast into a mountain stream and damages a wheel. She has a cell phone and calls for assistance, but that doesn't alter the significance of the moment, which is that even her majesty cannot always go it alone. Meditating on this lesson, she climbs onto a rock overlooking the stream, and removing her scarf so the wind can ruffle her hair, settles down to wait. At first she is cool and collected, gazing appreciatively at a landscape she obviously loves. But then she starts to weep.

Wisely, Frears films the weeping queen from the back, so that rather than gape at her red face and runny nose (a movie staple these days), we see only the back of her head and heaving shoulders. Then enters the stag, picking his way across the hillside until the queen sees him and exclaims, "O Beauty!" (You'd better believe there's no "h" after that "O.") A moment later, hearing gunfire and voices, she tells the animal "Shoo!" And watching him retreat without yielding one jot of his dignity, she breaks into a smile. The queen is resolved. Assuming her customary expression of stern benevolence, she proceeds to comply with the prime minister's suggestions. But clearly she has been moved less by the talkative pol than by the noble beast.

The word noble is crucial. While preparing to leave for London, the queen learns that the stag has been shot, not by the royal hunting party but by a guest at "one of the commercial estates." Upon her departure she stops at the estate in question and asks to see the "imperial 14-pointer," which is hanging beheaded in a game shed. From the gamekeeper she learns that the stag was wounded "by an investment banker" and had run 14 miles before the gamekeeper could "finish him off." "Let's hope he didn't suffer too much," remarks the queen. Then with her characteristic dry irony, she adds, "Please pass my congratulations to your guest."

None of this makes any sense if the stag is interpreted as "a mawkish stand-in for the doomed Diana" or "a simplistic reminder to Elizabeth that Diana, too, is dead and deserving of some compassion" (to quote two metaphorically challenged reviewers). Just as roses symbolize love, stags symbolize nobility. If you want to get mythological about it, Diana is the name of the Roman goddess of the hunt, the one who slays the stag. The queen's epiphany is not about her pathetic former daughter-in-law, it's about herself. And not the private self who wants to hide under the covers whenever Tony Blair rings, but the public self who has been raised from birth to be the living residue of an ancient ideal: rule by a person or persons superior in virtue. Watching the stag beat his dignified retreat, the queen realizes she can do the same. And shortly thereafter, we see Blair lose his temper with his wife Cherie and his press secretary, Alastair Campbell, who have been dissing the queen. Whether or not the real Blair is given to eloquent outbursts defending the importance of the Crown to the British system of government, this one certainly comes at the right dramatic moment.

What, exactly, does Blair want the queen to do? First, fly a flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace: a highly inappropriate gesture, since that flag is not the Union Jack but the Queen's own standard, raised only when she is in residence and never lowered for anyone's death, not even that of a king. Second, go to London and pay her respects to Diana, preferably on the telly--the last thing the queen wants to do after reading mawkish tabloid headlines like "Show Us You Care." And third, authorize a state funeral: an idea so unprecedented, the queen's staff are forced to adapt the plans for the Queen Mum's funeral, with charity socialites standing in for soldiers and pop stars for foreign heads of state.

To object to such changes may seem silly to us Yanks, steeped as we are in the notion that improvised ceremonies are better than traditional ones. Take funerals, for example. There is a whole sub-genre of American indie film, in which estranged family members come together to carry out the last wishes of old Uncle Natural, usually something along the lines of having his ashes baked with hashish into Alice B. Toklas brownies and fed to the albino elk that in a remote part of Yosemite had watched him lose his virginity to a hippie girl now obese and living in a trailer with 17 cats. (This is a generic plot, available free of charge to anyone at Sundance.)

But even we Yanks respect tradition...sometimes. Ask yourself: Should graduating seniors wear thongs and pig noses instead of caps and gowns? Should the White House be painted chartreuse? Should the Academy Awards be held in an underground parking garage and pod-cast to your cell phone, instead of beamed in HD-TV to your new plasma screen? Multiply these reactions by a googleplex, and you'll grasp what tradition means to many Britons.

An intriguing illustration comes from the life of Dame Mirren herself. Christened Ilyena Vasilievna Mirinov, she is the daughter of an Englishwoman and a Russian, Vasily Mirinov, whose father, Pyotr Mirinov, came to London during the First World War as an envoy from the court of Tsar Nicholas II. The grandson of an aristocrat, Count Andrei Kamensky, Pyotr could not go home after the Bolshevik Revolution. So he stayed in London, driving a taxi, until his death in 1957. In 1950 his son Vasily changed the family name to Mirren and anglicized their first names. According to the Daily Mail, Helen Mirren has been keen to track down her Russian origins, not least because, as the reporter comments, "the actress, currently winning plaudits for her role as Elizabeth II in the acclaimed film The Queen, is herself descended from nobility. Her family tree can be traced back to a famous Russian soldier, ennobled by Tsar Paul I in the 18th Century."

For good historical reasons, Americans have trouble comprehending this preoccupation with nobility--an incomprehension well reflected in Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola's over-the-top tribute to the Last Days of Disco--I mean, Versailles. Filmed on location and starring Kirsten Dunst as the Habsburg princess who at the age of 14 was wrenched from her home in Vienna and married to the French dauphin, this film stuffs the screen with obscenely extravagant visions of Louis XV's obscenely extravagant court. Much has been made of the 1980s rock soundtrack, which jells better with some scenes than with others. But the real anachronism is the acting, from Rip Torn playing Louis XV in a manner that would suit Uncle Natural, to Jason Schwartzman turning the future king, Louis-Auguste, into a befuddled high school nerd who does not know what to do when a pretty blonde lands in his bed.

Above all, Dunst transforms Marie Antoinette into a Hollywood stock character: the lower-class beauty with a brain, who is suddenly swept into the orbit of people richer and more powerful, but not necessarily sharper, than she. From Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday to Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada, this smart cookie typically starts out resenting those who did not come up the hard way, then ends up pitying them and teaching them the Golden Rule. To be born Archduchess of Austria is not exactly coming up the hard way, but never mind. When we first meet Maria Antonia Josefa Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen, she is living in an okay palace (nothing special), playing with her pug dog, and wearing her hair loose. It's only when she crosses into France that she is forced to submit to all that heavy-duty royal razzmatazz, and her reactions are every bit as irreverent and entertaining as Judy Holliday's would have been.

I have yet to read a satisfactory explanation of why Marie Antoinette was booed at Cannes, but here's one possible explanation of why they found it mind-bendingly wrong: say what you will about the French, they do know the difference between celebrity and royalty. Even when chopping off their monarch's head, the French have always grasped what the institution stood for. And as for aristocracy, no amount of decapitation has ever made a dent in its salience in French politics, culture, and life. La République is still governed by the best and the brightest, soi-disant.

Barnard professor Caroline Weber, author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, defended Coppola's liberties in the New York Times, asserting that Marie is "multifaceted enough to accommodate most any interpretation, any ideology, any cultural bias." So chill, citoyens: this ungainly film is not a distortion of French history, it's a deliberately unflattering self-portrait of the Americans. Weber concludes: "With no interest in thorny policy issues, no care for the consequences of her actions, and no doubts about her own entitlement, this Marie Antoinette is today's ugly American par excellence: a Bush Yankee in King Louis's court."

That should get them clapping again. But unfortunately, when Coppola's film is viewed in this light, it comes off as even less successful, because it is not anachronistic enough. No doubt this is because Coppola's heavy reliance on Antonia Fraser's fine biography, Marie Antoinette: The Journey, introduced a discordant note of historical accuracy. This shows up most clearly in the subplot involving Louis XV's mistress, Madame du Barry. A commoner and former courtesan, du Barry's sole reason for being at court was to service the randy old king. And this did not sit well with Marie Antoinette--indeed, the historical evidence indicates quite clearly that she snubbed the low-born du Barry, who took it quite ill and promptly became her enemy. Needless to say, such snobbery hardly fits with Coppola's portrayal of Marie Antoinette as a perky egalitarian whose heart goes out to the class nerd (Louis-Auguste). The only way this character could possibly react to the class skank (du Barry) would be to make friends with her and then join her in plotting revenge against all those bullying, stuck-up courtiers.

Marie Antoinette fails both as history and as anachronism. It clumsily distorts its subject, not just by keeping the starving masses offstage (as many have complained), but also by saddling its heroine with a slew of democratic, nay, populist virtues that are singularly ill suited to her particular time, place, and fate. Excoriated for 140 years after her execution as a symbol of aristocratic selfishness, Marie Antoinette was rehabilitated in 1933, when the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig wrote a biography highlighting the young queen's courage and grace under the pressure of capture, imprisonment, and the guillotine. If you can't find Zweig's book, rent the 1938 movie starring Norman Shearer, which is based on it. Of course, that MGM production, lavish at $3 million, can't compare with the gorgeous eye candy Coppola bought for herself at $40 million. But in its creaky way, the older film tells a better story. Too bad the next version of Marie Antoinette's life cannot be a truly definitive portrait, written by Peter Morgan, directed by Stephen Frears, and starring the young, dewy, and suitably aristocratic Ilyena Mirinov.

Posted by mbayles at 9:52 AM

November 19, 2006

Free Casting Advice

The New York Times just ran an article about two bio-pics in the works about Miles Davis. One, based on the autobiography Miles "wrote" with Quincy Troupe, is produced by Rudy Langlais in conjunction with Patriot Pictures and Beacon Pictures. The other is an official bio-pic authorized by the Davis estate. From what I read, neither has solved the problem of whom to cast in the title role. How do you substitute for an icon?

Some free advice: Instead of casting well known Hollywood actors such as Don Cheadle or Wesley Snipes (both have been mentioned), cross the pond and ask David Oyelowo, the young British actor best known to Americans for playing Danny in the excellent spy series MI-5 (known in the UK as Spooks). Handsome and charismatic, Oyelowo, who cut his teeth doing Shakespeare on the stage, steals every scene while also projecting a degree of sophistication that transcends color and nationality. What could be more suited to a portrayal of Miles at his best?

The question is, will either of these films bother to portray Miles at his best? Or will they go for the usual cliched portrait of the jazz musician as drug-addled celebrity and sourpuss victim of racial prejudice? If I were Oyelowo's agent, I would ask!

Posted by mbayles at 2:58 PM

November 10, 2006

No Satire, Please. We're Russian.

Well, the good news was that the Deputy Foreign Minister of Kazakhstan, Mr. Rakhat Alievthe, proved even cooler than Sacha Baron Cohen -- by inviting the British comedian, better known as Borat, to visit the country he has been so gleefully lambasting. (See entry below.)

But now uncooler heads are prevailing, as the Russian Federal Culture and Cinematography Agency, which certifies films for distribution in Russia, has banned Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan , on the ground that "it could be offensive to some religions and nationalities."

Uh, duhhh ... Mr. Cohen's film is every bit of that, with the number one religion and nationality it mocks being Christian Americans. It is also screamingly funny, which makes all the difference. (If only those German opera directors would acquire a sense of humor, not to mention those Danish cartoonists, they might get a pass from me.)

Suggestion to Mr. Cohen: Invite the spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Yury V. Vasyuchkov, to be a guest in Da Ali G Show. On this show, Cohen (in his persona of Ali G, a patois-speaking Brit-hip-hopper) holds mock interviews with real guests, only to ambush them with exquisite vulgarity until they sit frozen and blinking like a moose in headlights.

This is hilarious, if painful, when the guest is 1) unhip; 2) self-righteous; and 3) comedically challenged. Among the worst casualties have been Pat Robertson and James Lipton (the stuffy and rather silly host of Inside the Actors' Studio). It is even better, though, when the guest catches on and tries, at least, to stage a counter-ambush. These do not always succeed, but they do stimulate Cohen/Ali G to greater heights of outrageousness. What's more exciting, watching a cat kill a baby mouse or watching a mongoose kill a cobra?

Anyway, it would be fun to watch Cohen/Ali G do his thing with Mr. Vasyuchko, a man whose job it is to say things like, "We do not have the right to ban a movie ... We simply refused to certify it." Also Michael Schlicht of Gemini Films, the distribution company for 20th Century Fox, who not only accepted the ban (what choice did he have?) but also felt obliged to echo Vasyuchko's doubletalk: "Russia is a liberal country. They make recommendations, and we follow them."

Ali G, me main man, what you waitin for? We peeps want them tongue-forkers now.

Posted by mbayles at 7:26 PM

November 6, 2006

Disarming Borat

It's hard not to laugh out loud at the young British comedian Sacha Baron-Cohn's various comic personae: da hip-hop MC, Ali G; the Austrian fashionisto Bruno (star of "Funkyzeit mit Bruno"); and, of course, the antic Kazakh bull-in-America's-china-shop, Borat, star of the new film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (now in theaters -- and for a glimpse of all Cohn's characters, see reruns now on HBO). In these tense times, one might question the wisdom of making such an obscenely uncivilized character come from a real country instead of a fake one (such as Andy Kaufman's Caspiar). But not to worry: peace between the US and Kazakhstan is being saved by Kazakhstan's classy Deputy Foreign Minister Rakhat Aliev, whose response to Borat is to invite Cohn on a state visit to Kazakhstan, where he will "discover a lot of things. Women drive cars, wine is made of grapes and Jews are free to go to synagogues."

For a full account of this refreshingly smart act of public diplomacy, see this story by Patricia Lee Sharpe at Whirledview.

Posted by mbayles at 9:03 AM

October 13, 2006

Better Late Than Never

I've long wanted to do a parody of the Dan Brown PR machine. Finally, here 'tis:

DECODING DAN BROWN

The following is a transcription of the pitch session for Dan Brown's next novel, The Botticelli Botch. Present are the author, his new agent Bizzy Boca, his new publisher Ernst Kluliss, and (getting in on the ground floor) the famous film producer Sam Schnellgeld.

Dan: (arriving ten minutes late): Sorry, guys. Crazy schedule. Can't wait to get back to New Hampshire and the writer's life. Bizzy, did you lay out my basic position? Royalties, rights, creative control, profit-sharing on the movie deal. I'd really rather not get ripped off this time.

Sam (arriving two minutes later): Well, hello dream team. Bizzy, that skirt is hot.

Bizzy: It's so exciting to have you here, Sam.

Ernst: Yes, and for a stodgy old bookbinder like me, it's exciting to do business with a real Hollywood mogul.

Sam: How about you, Danny? You excited?

Dan: Sure. But we need to close quickly. I have another appointment in an hour. Crazy schedule. Can't wait to get back to New Hampshire -

Sam: No biggie. I got lunch in twenty. So Bizzy, you wet dream, lay it on me. And please, no retread. The Da Vinci Code is a hard act to follow. Will this new one get all the religious nuts crawling out of the woodwork to do our marketing for us?

Dan: I'll make the pitch, if you don't mind. Bizzy's still learning the names. Sam, Ernst, The Botticelli Botch will not be a retread. For starters, the opening money shot will not be in Paris but in Florence. The Uffizi.

Sam: Uffizi, eh? Didn't know you were into automatic weapons. I confess, I did wonder why your wacko Opus Dei albino monk didn't shoot the curator with an Uzi. But here's some advice: if you're taking the Mafia route, use Russians. More sadistic, and no goddamn lobbyists. Does this one start with a murder, too?

Dan: No, a rape. Under Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.

Ernst: Splendid! And who will play the victim? How about Kiera Knightly? She certainly has the face and figure to be a descendant of Mary Magdalene. And personally, I'd be very interested in meeting her.

Bizzy: Don't you just love the Mary Magdalene theme in The Da Vinci Code? The Holy Grail as her uterus, and Jesus as her stud muffin? I meant to tell you, Dan: I dreamed I was part of the bloodline, right down through the Merovingian dynasty. Talk about royalty!

Dan: Actually, I'm skipping that plot. Too much hate mail from narrow-minded Christians who won't even consider that Emperor Constantine might have cooked up the whole Jesus-divinity thing in order to stamp out goddess worship. Not to mention all those nit-picking Bible scholars. My facts all come from Henry Lincoln's Holy Blood, Holy Grail, I tell them, and if he were a charlatan, would the BBC have funded his programs?

Bizzy: Plus it's a novel. It's scary, isn't it, how some people can't distinguish between fact and fiction? The Da Vinci Code is a work of the human imagination!

Ernst: And a tribute to the human spirit, unfettered by the chains of religious dogma.

Sam: For marketing, you're probably right to sideline the Jesus stuff. I gotta hand it to Sony. It was brilliant to hire that Jesus-freak consultant - you know, that Jonathan Bock guy - to set up a "Da Vinci Dialogue" at the Sony Pictures website. Company-sponsored blogging catches the mall rats, so why not the Bible thumpers? The more they blog, the more they want to see the movie. It's amazing how your average mouth-breather will do anything to feel like he's part of the industry.

Ernst: Wish we could do that in publishing. But the masses want to be Dan Brown, not Ernst Kluliss. Ha-ha.

Sam: Trouble is, you can only milk that for so long, before some harpy like Barbara Nicolosi comes along and accuses you of turning people into "useful Christian idiots." Next time, I fear, it'll be The Last Temptation of Christ all over again - pickets, not tickets.

Dan: I beg you, don't mention that title. Some lunatic in Athens keeps emailing me about how that Greek writer, Katzi-somebody--

Ernst: Nikos Katzantzakis. He also wrote Zorba the Greek and an amazing, if interminable, re-creation of the Odyssey. A passionate, learned man who--

Dan: Right. So this lunatic keeps emailing me I should read The Last Temptation of Christ, because Katzi-what's-his-face deals with Jesus' humanity and the relationship with Mary Magdalene in "a really profound way." This implication being that I don't.

Bizzy: Oh, please. How many copies did it sell? Danny, I gotta ask you. You're not going to drop the Sacred Feminine riff, are you? Despite what you hear, Joe Six-Pack's not the one making movie choices these days.

Ernst: My priority too, Dan. All those book clubs out there - overwhelmingly female. The books are mainly an excuse to swill wine and talk about their sex lives. But who cares? Book groups move product. Ha-ha.

Bizzy: Poor men! Sometimes I wonder what's left in the culture for them.

Sam: Sports, video games, online porn.

Dan: Now, Sam, you're making my pitch for me. The Botticelli Botch will unite the male and female demographic like no other book. Every writer has a secret, and mine is something I learned in prep school.

Bizzy: By the way, we don't advertise Dan's not-so-humble background. Not only did he go to Phillips Exeter, he also taught there for a few years.

Dan: Yeah, during my semi-failed literary career. But I did learn something from cramming literature down adolescent throats. Why do ordinary people buy novels? Out of mixed motives. On the one hand, they want a fast-paced story that will keep them turning pages and get their mind off their troubles.

Ernst: Sad but true. Which is why we publish Dean Koontz and Christine Feehan.

Dan: But people also aspire to higher things. Great books, great art - a lot of Americans crave to know more about them. But they also associate them with snobbery and pretentiousness, which they hate. So the road to riches is to satisfy the public's craving for high culture without setting off their anti-snobbery alarm.

Ernst: You mean, revive the middlebrow?

Dan: Oh, no. You can't go back to dumbing down high culture and spoon-feeding it to people. You gotta spike it, twist the meaning, hit 'em where they live. What do most readers learn from The Da Vinci Code?

Sam: That Jesus was Abraham and his seed are a bunch of French Frogs?

Dan: You assume they make that connection. They don't. Who reads Genesis these days? No, what people learn is what they want to learn: namely, that you can travel around Europe, visit all those museums, churches, and castles, and understand it all, without effort. You don't need a Ph.D. or even a B.A. Western Civilization is a riddle, and if you know the solution - which you can get from one book, mine - you're good to go.

Ernst: Brilliant! But please, make it two books. Tell us about The Botticelli Bitch.

Dan: That's Botch. Cue the Power Point, Bizzy. This time I'm not using a painting that's half flaked away. Compared with Leonardo's The Last Supper, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus will knock your socks off. I'm jumping ahead, but imagine the camera panning down this babe as she covers her boobs with her right hand and pulls her hair over her privates with her left.

Ernst: Astonishing! I've seen the painting dozens of times, but it never occurred to me that she's being modest. How unlike Venus!

Dan: If you'll forgive me: "Our preconceived notions are so powerful that our mind blocks out the incongruity and overrides our eyes."

Bizzy: The Da Vinci Code, chapter 58, page 242.

Sam: Wow, chapter and verse. Where'd you get her, Danny?

Dan: Hands off, she's mine. Anyway, while the camera is eyeballing Venus, we hear the soundtrack of a terrible assault - male grunting and cursing, female screaming and crying. The war between the Roman Catholic Church and Sacred Womanhood is ratcheting to a new level, as the stunning and intelligent Dr. I. Connie Klast, professor of Feminist Art History at Georgetown University and world-famous expert on Botticelli, is being brutally raped by a priest.

Ernst: Splendid! Timely! The Church won't have a leg to stand on! What kind of priest, if I may ask? A Jesuit? It would be nice to avoid an embarrassing mistake, like having an Opus Dei monk, when there aren't any.

Dan: No problem. The assailant is a Dominican, from the secret Twenty-Ninth Province, known as the Manfriars. The Manfriars were founded in 1498, the year Pope Alexander VI had the excommunicated monk, Savonarola, burned and hanged.

Sam: Burned and hanged at the same time?

Dan: Yup, and in the same place, the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, where Savonarola staged his famous Bonfires of the Vanities, in which he burned all the luxury goods he could lay his hands on - including several "pagan" paintings by his loyal follower Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, a.k.a. Botticelli.

Sam: I'm liking it. Whatever it costs, we'll shoot these scenes on location at the ... Pizza della Whatever. But wait a minute. Who are the good guys? You're saying Botticelli was a follower of the creep who burned his pictures?

Dan: That's right. Savonarola was a magnetic figure. Look at this portrait of him by Fra Bartolommeo.

Sam: Wow, intense. Look at the schnozz! Maybe Tim Roth? Love the hood, by the way.

Ernst: Monks From the Hood? Ha-ha. But seriously, Dan, if I get your drift, you're making Savonarola and Botticelli the good guys. But who are the bad guys? The pope? That could work - dollar for dollar, your pope is your most reliable movie villain, next to your Nazi and your oil CEO. But how will you twist the meaning so it hits ''em where they live?

Dan: Cue the painting again, Bizzy. Check yourselves, guys. You're drooling, like me. None of us can take our eyes off that sexy Venus. The feminist art historians have got us pegged. What is the essence of art? The male gaze. Admiring, yes. But also lustful, possessive, controlling. For 2,500 years, depicting nude women (and in the case of queer artists like Michelangelo, nude men) has been a way of asserting power over them. My heroine, Connie, became interested in Botticelli for that reason. Her first book, Beauty As Rape, denounced Botticelli for reducing his model, the young Simonetta Cattaneo, to a passive object literally blown about by the winds. It's no accident that Simonetta was the mistress of Giuliano de' Medici, brother of Botticelli's patron, Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Sam: Hold on, my eyes are glazing over. I thought we were talking entertainment here.

Dan: Let me translate. Simonetta is the hottest babe in Tuscany, married at 15 to a dull dude named Marco Vespucci (whose only claim to fame is that they named America after his cousin, Amerigo). Every rich playboy in Florence wants Simonetta, but the one who gets her is Giuliano - brother of the city's godfather. Giuliano wins a big jousting tournament under a banner with her picture on it, painted by Botticelli. She becomes Giuliano's prize, but then dies a year later - never having really lived. All her life she's been a possession, an ornament, a trophy. Now look at the painting again. Not the naked flesh. The eyes. See how sad they are?

Ernst: That's why the painting is so lovely. There are many other portraits of Simonetta, but most have a vacant expression. Only Botticelli captured her soul.

Dan: It's not a question of soul. It's a question of gender politics. As Connie comes to realize, the sadness, the victimization, is the whole point. Botticelli wasn't just painting the objectified Venus, he was painting the Venus who resists being objectified. This work is subversive! Look at how awkwardly Venus is drawn - her left shoulder barely exists, and her left forearm is the size of her calf. An objective observer not blinded by reverence for Renaissance art might say that he botched it. And Connie is that observer. For reasons I will relate in a moment, she sees through all the lies about this being a great painting. In truth, it's a deliberate botch!

Ernst: Dan, you've done it again! I'm on the edge of my seat! Why did Botticelli botch it?

Dan: Because he understood. He, too, was in love with Simonetta. But as an employee of the Medici, he had to keep his distance. But distance reveals truth. Botticelli came to understand the patriarchal system - in essence, he became a radical feminist. Like Savonarola.

Ernst: What? Savonarola a radical feminist?

Dan: How do you know he wasn't? Or rather, what has conditioned you to think that he wasn't? What got burned on his Bonfire? Silk dresses, lacy lingerie, cosmetics, fancy wigs, corsets, paintings of nude women - all the trappings of female oppression! Why did Botticelli throw some of his own paintings onto the flames?

Bizzy: To liberate the women! To empower them!

Dan: Right! But then the Church cracked down, condemning Savonarola to a horrible death and forcing Botticelli to spend the rest of his life painting the Virgin Mary. This is where the Manfriars come in. Savonarola was a Dominican, but when he began to crusade for women's rights, the order got into trouble with the pope. They knew that if they didn't deal with Savonarola, the pope would shut them down. So they founded the Manfriars, a secret province devoted to the suppression of the Sacred Feminine. Their first act was to hand Savonarola over to be hanged and burned. Then they went after the artists, making sure they painted gorgeous, sexy nudes for powerful men to ogle. This was called the Renaissance, and we've all been brainwashed - even you, Ernst - into thinking it produced great art. In truth, it was a huge propaganda campaign on the part of the nobility and the Church to keep women in their place. And the deadliest weapon in this campaign was beauty. The beauty of helpless girls like Simonetta, turned against them as the instrument of their oppression.

Bizzy: Oh Dan, that's beautiful. Excuse me - I'm choking up.

Ernst: I'm beginning to see, Dan. A dramatic medieval tale, full of passion and blood, that also illustrates the very truth you revealed in the previous novel. I must say, I admire your integrity.

Sam: I'm liking it, too. But I'm a little worried about the broad who gets raped. What's her name, Connie? An art history professor? That's gonna put a crimp in the casting.

Dan: Not at all. Remember, I described Connie as "stunning and intelligent." In fact, when I get all the details worked out, she may turn out to be a descendant of Simonetta - and if I'm feeling bold, of Botticelli. That's why she understands. When she was growing up in a Dominican orphanage, the nuns made her pose for figure drawing classes. So some of her earliest memories are of shivering in a cold drafty classroom, stark naked, while everyone stared at her - not just the other girls, who hated her beauty, but also the nuns, including a couple of real bull dykes.

Sam: Good, that could work. As long as she's not too young. You know lawyers.

Dan: Do I ever. No, I think that can be done tastefully - to establish Connie's character as a dynamic teacher who empowers female students. Kind of like Julia Roberts in Mona Lisa Smile. The contemporary plot, which will be action-packed, involves a struggle between Connie's students and the Georgetown administration over a production of The Vagina Monologues - you know, that play where women talk candidly about their, uh ...

Bizzy: See? Even Dan can't say it. I did the play all four years at Smith. What an experience! So empowering!

Sam: Hmm. Not sure that will fly at the box office. Could we maybe fudge the details?

Bizzy: No problem. At most schools the play is part of "V Day," which is devoted to raising awareness of violence against women. At the stricter Catholic schools, they allow the anti-violence activities but not the play (which is kind of raunchy).

Ernst: Well, we certainly don't want to make strict Catholics look good! The trick, Dan, will be to frame the conflict so that it looks as though normal women are being oppressed by the Church.

Dan: No problem. I'll background the play, and foreground the big event planned for Georgetown's V Day: a keynote address by Connie, in which she reveals the hidden truth about Renaissance art, and explains why The Birth of Venus was not included in Savonarola's bonfire. Thanks to the Florentine art market, the painting soon became too valuable to burn, anyway. So it lives on today, complete with its botched drawing, as a reminder of the injustices that have killed literally trillions of women.

Sam: Very nice. But I'm still fuzzy on the rape. How does that fit? I'll be frank: I don't see a lot of box office in old Connie.

Dan: She's not old! And like I said, she's a knockout! Maybe we could even use the same actress to play her and Simonetta.

Ernst: I would discourage that. Why have just one pretty face when you can have two?

Dan: The point is, Connie's a framing device. We begin with the rape, then flash back to 15th-century Florence, where we witness the whole back-story, including Simonetta's stunted life, the founding of the Manfriars, and the destruction of Savonarola and Botticelli. Next we flash forward through the centuries, highlighting the Manfriars' more horrible deeds, and end up with the conspiracy to silence Connie. We show the rape as a political act, orchestrated by the province and the Florentine authorities, then accompany Connie back to Georgetown, where, deeply traumatized, she's on the verge of quitting - until, miraculously, her students appear and through their devotion to her message, start the healing process. On the big day, when the president of the university is about to announce the cancellation of the keynote speech, we see Connie, bruised but not broken, struggle to the podium and proclaim the truth to the world. Tears stream down thousands of fresh young faces, the music swells, and once again the camera pans the succulent body of Botticelli's Venus - only this time, it lingers on those sad, sad eyes.

Bizzy: Omigod, I can't stand it! Anyone got a Kleenex?

Ernst: Here, my dear. And they say the novel is dead!

Sam: Nice, Danny. Like the yadda-yadda at the end. Have your people call my people. Meanwhile I'm outta here. Lunch is getting cold.

**********
This parody first appeared in the Claremont Review of Books

Posted by mbayles at 4:34 PM

August 20, 2006

Corked

Just reviewed a remarkable book called Black Like You, by John Strausbaugh. It's a history of that verboten topic, blackface entertainment, and a demonstration that it is far from kaput in today's popular culture. I will paste the review below, but first let me recommend, as a companion piece, Bamboozled (2000), Spike Lee's remake of The Producers, in which a black television executive (Damon Wayans) tries to get out of a network contract by pitching an idea guaranteed to offend everyone: a nineteenth-century minstrel show, complete with burnt cork and exaggerated red lips, dancing pickaninnies, a band called the "Alabama Porch Monkeys," and plenty of watermelon.

When Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show is a hit, the network hires a consultant to spin the fact that it is profiting from obnoxious racial stereotypes. It's too bad the spin doctor is herself stereotyped as an arrogant Jew, because her lines perfectly capture the defensive game of the entertainment industry: "The biggest thing in public relations is to smile. Wear Kente cloth. Invoke the spirit of Martin Luther King. Use the word 'community' a lot. Mantan is a satire. If they can't take a joke, then fuck 'em."

Bamboozled is not just about network television. In his DVD commentary, Lee says, "In my opinion, this gangsta rap is a twenty-first century version of minstrel shows. And what's sad is these brothers don't even know it." For people conversant with both minstrelsy and the recent history of hip hop, Bamboozled is a brilliant satire.

Unfortunately, there aren't that many people conversant with both, so the general discussion of hip-hop is singularly lacking in historical perspective. Looking at its current decline into vulgar, racist entertainments like crunk, it is tempting to project a "rise and fall" scenario, in which minstrelsy aided the rise, and hip hop the fall, of classical African-American culture. At the moment I resist such a scenario. But unless a few more music lovers step forward and call crunk by its right name, the process started by blackface minstrelsy may well end in something even worse.

Read my review, which ends with some comments about the sorry state of hip-hop:

Review of Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture,by John Strausbaugh

Meet Shirley Q. Liquor, the middle-aged, overweight, Ebonics-speaking black persona of a white comedian, Chuck Knipp, who has been leafleted in Manhattan as "racist, classist, and misogynist." Adept at skewering "ignunt" folks of all colors, Shirley is a character who could easily pop up in the repertoire of many a present-day black comedian. But as John Strausbaugh writes in his fascinating but uneven new book about the impact of blackface minstrelsy on American popular culture, the color of the comedian makes a difference. Because of its painful history, "blackface is taboo, and a White comedian making jokes about Black people will be banned."

Yet Mr. Strausbaugh defends Shirley and all of her ilk. As he explains, blackface minstrelsy was the dominant form of popular theater in nineteenth-century America, and it definitely did trade in demeaning racial stereotypes. But it also introduced white (and European) audiences to at least a semblance of African-American music, comedy, and dance. And after the Civil War, when minstrelsy was opened to black performers, it became a unique training ground for their talents. As Mr. Strausbaugh's lucid, fast-paced account makes clear, it is impossible to understand the popular culture of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first, without first understanding blackface minstrelsy.

Studded with apt quotations and nicely pitched anecdotes, the first 300 pages of Black Like You survey both the good and the bad sides of blackface - the grossly racist and offensive, and the genuinely comic, musical, even subversive. For instance, he recalls a "stump speech" by the famous minstrel Lew Dockstader, in which the performer, a white man corked up to look like a caricatured black man, poked fun at another white man, Teddy Roosevelt. Imitating Roosevelt's description of a make-believe club for his mendacious political enemies, Dockstader intoned: "While I am not a member of this club, it was founded, confounded, and dumfounded by me. Every member on its long rolls was proposed, seconded, and unanimously elected by an overwhelming majority of myself ... Its purpose [is] to provide an institution where distinguished stiffs - after I have laid them out - can LIE in state."

With swift strokes, Mr. Strausbaugh traces the transition from minstrelsy to vaudeville, when at the turn of the last century massive immigration filled the popular stage with a slew of new ethnic stereotypes - not just the blackface staples of countrified Jim Crow and citified Zip Coon, but also "brawling Irish, wheedling Jews, oily Italians, thick-headed Germans, inscrutable Chinamen." Here Mr. Strausbaugh waxes eloquent on how, before "the rise of multiculturalism and identity politics encouraged everyone to be 'offended' by everything," newcomers to America simply "presumed that earning a spot for yourself was a rough-and-tumble procedure. It took a thick skin and a sense of humor."

Yet as Mr. Strausbaugh adds, this was true "for everyone except Black people ... For newly arrived immigrants, mixing it up in vaudeville theaters was one part of the process of becoming assimilated and recognized as White ... Blacks were still outcasts." It is debatable how quickly all the groups Mr. Strausbaugh mentions became "recognized as White," but one can hardly dispute his larger point, which is that blacks remained largely segregated "until they forced their way in through the civil rights movement."

But if blacks "forced their way in" during the civil rights era, then presumably the racial dynamics of American culture would have changed at that point, and instead of the minstrelsy model, in which powerful whites amused themselves at the expense of powerless blacks, post-1960s popular culture would have followed the vaudeville model, in which all groups mix it up on a more or less equal footing. This is an important moral distinction, which Mr. Strausbaugh himself makes when treating topics from the past. But he gradually loses sight of it while tracing the legacy of blackface through Broadway; "Negro-dialect" literature; "race" and "Blaxploitation" movies; the collectibles known as "Negrobilia"; the 1996 Ebonics flap; and finally hip hop.

Hip hop appears in the final chapter, and Mr. Strausbaugh's treatment of it leaves much to be desired. To be fair, he does compare it with minstrelsy - a comparison, verboten just a few years ago, that is now commonplace among hip-hop's critics, especially such African-American critics as Greg Tate, Debra Dickerson, and Stanley Crouch. Mr. Strausbaugh quotes these and others, but then reverts to the vaudeville model, basically defining even the most racially demeaning rap as good old rough-and-tumble, an updated form of clowning and mugging that in essence helps the world to become better acquainted with black Americans. And he dismisses the recent criticism as "moral panic" on the part of "civic leaders, the cultural elite and the upper classes" - y'know, all those uptight prisses who've been fussing and fuming about the sexy good times enjoyed by the poor, especially the black poor, since Day One. Why the poor are assumed to have no moral concerns of their own, he does not clarify.

Just as vaudeville degenerated into a form of burlesque theater centered on titillation, so has a certain strain of rap degenerated into what one veteran of 1990s hip hop calls "a sad marriage with pornography." The lyrics of many "crunk" rap songs, for example, are nothing but variations on the old strip club chant, "Take it off, take it all off." Of course, nowadays most of it has already been taken off, so tracks like "Get Low," "Lean Back," "Tilt Ya Head Back," "Flap Your Wings," and "Ass Like That" urge ever more explicit display of wagging behinds and jiggling implants. One wonders why such urging is necessary. If acres of faceless female flesh are not enough to excite crunk fans, then perhaps they should see a therapist. Or better still, give it a rest. Even Groucho Marx took his cigar out of his mouth once in a while.

Burlesque was not vaudeville, and likewise, this stuff is not hip hop. Because pornography's spouse in this marriage is the old trope of black bestiality and stupidity, well documented by Mr. Strausbaugh in his chapter on "coon songs," a better name might be "coonporn." Coonporn is now being exported to the rest of the world in massive quantities, including to remote places where people have never seen a black American, except perhaps a soldier. Not surprisingly, this creates perceptions that can come as a shock to African Americans traveling abroad. Consider this comment by Darius James, a Berlin-based writer who, as it happens, also wrote the epilogue to Black Like You.

Describing the experience of hearing coonporn in Berlin, Mr. James writes: "I'm not condemning gangsta rap, or rap in general, or sex and violence. I'm talking about some drunken and blunted fool spewing abusive and dysfunctional bullshit that's not about anything at all, except being abusive and dysfunctional. And a lot of young Germans listen to this shit because it's supposed to be hip, not really understanding what's going on in the lyrics. If they knew, they would puke."

Memo to John Strausbaugh from Shirley Q. Liquor: If this shit don' make you puke, you jus' ignunt.

**********
This review first appeared in the New York Sun.

Posted by mbayles at 3:23 PM

August 12, 2006

War and (Partial) Remembrance

Having finally finished watching the 1988 classic miniseries War and Remembrance (based on Herman Wouk's best-selling novel), I come away with mixed feelings. On the plus side, the production remains impressive. Rather than overdose on special effects, ABC put its money where it mattered: on finding the right locations and framing every scene as effectively as possible for the small screen. It's a study in that elusive and rare artistic virtue: economy.

But there's also a minus side. You must have a strong stomach to watch this second installment of Wouk's World War II saga, because unlike the first, The Winds of War, which focuses on the lead-up to Pearl Harbor, War and Remembrance focuses on the war itself -- and above all, on the Holocaust. It is hard to believe that anyone made a fuss about broadcasting Schindler's List, when this made-for-TV series was, in its down-to-earth way, even more graphic.

Some argue that aesthetic considerations are inappropriate to the topic of the Holocaust. But this is unconvincing, because unless you are an art-for-art's-sake purist (which I am not), the aesthetic is intertwined with the moral. So from that perspective, let me offer some praise and criticism for this landmark in popular American understanding of World War II.

First I would praise an aspect of the film that may seem perverse: the way it introduces the Holocaust not from the perspective of the victims but from that of a camp commander at Auschwitz who is nervously preparing for a visit by Heinrich Himmler. By foregrounding the commander's petty concerns, these scenes throw an especially stark light on the evil being done. The later scenes, in which three of the main characters are sent to Theresienstadt, and thence to Auschwitz, are certainly gut-wrenching. But because they focus on just three faces in the crowd, their overall impact is somehow less.

As for my criticism, it is pretty simple. So intent is this film on remembering the Holocaust, it forgets other dimensions of the massive suffering that occurred during the war. Just to cite one example, it does not even mention the Warsaw Uprising of August-October 1944, in which the Polish Home Army fought the Nazis for 63 days. After crushing the uprising, killing 18,000 Polish soldiers and executing over 250,000 civilians, including virtually the entire educated class, the Nazis systematically destroyed between 85 and 90 percent of the city. And all the while, the Soviet army sat a few hundred metres away, on the east bank of the Vistula, and watched. When it came to breaking Poland, Stalin and Hitler were of like mind.

One would think, given the vast sweep of this miniseries, that this and other atrocities committed by Stalin would have been mentioned, at least. But no, Wouk's burly, vodka-drining Russians seems taken from a Popular Front propaganda film of the late 1930s. This is too bad, because the last thing Wouk would have wanted was for his powerful work of popular remembrance to be dismissed as a case of special pleading.

Posted by mbayles at 10:43 AM

July 17, 2006

Hidden By The Trees: The Woodlanders

There's an old peasant saying: "Life is beautiful - and hard." In America we tend to reverse the emphasis: "Life is hard - but beautiful." That's what William Dean Howells meant when he said, "What the American audience really wants is a tragedy with a happy ending." We don't mind watching fictional characters suffer, as long they are somehow redeemed by it.

Working the middle ground between beauty and hardness was one of my favorite novelists (and poets), Thomas Hardy. And one of his favorites among his own books, reportedly, was The Woodlanders, about a young woman from a rural village whose father sends her away to school to "better" herself, then marries her to a "better" prospect than the woodsman she has loved all her life, only to discover that some living things are not improved by being pulled up by the roots.

Full confession: it's been years since I read The Woodlanders, and the glue holding my paperback copy together has long since turned to dust. But I recently saw a little known film based on the novel that makes me want to buy a new copy: not the 1970 BBC production, but the 1997 Arts Council of England production, made in cooperation with Channel Four, Pathé Productions, and River Films. (If you are lucky you will find one in your video store, hiding in the bottom rack.)

A two-hour film of a 300-page novel must strip things down, of course. But here the result is a separate and freestanding work of art: a simple, fast-paced tale of true love thwarted, not by wickedness but by a father's affection and ambition. The ending isn't happy in the Hollywood sense, but it is satisfying in the sense of containing a much needed note of justice. Without being sentimental or pretty, The Woodlanders is beyond being a gem (that's a cliche anyway). It's a diamond. Every facet - the writing, the acting, the production itself - is pure, clear, and (here's a word I almost never use) perfect.

Posted by mbayles at 8:34 AM

June 26, 2006

Uncaptive Mind

"All my films, from the first to the most recent ones, are about individuals who can't quite find their bearings, who don't quite know how to live, who don't really know what's right or wrong and are desperately looking." These words do as good a job as any of summing up the career of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski. But if you want to read more about him, see my recent essay ....

... in The Claremont Review of Books:

When Czeslaw Milosz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, the esteem he enjoyed in Poland blossomed into adoration. And as the struggle against Communist rule intensified during the 1980s, the long-exiled poet found himself cast as the "national bard." Yet as Milosz remarked to many interviewers (including this one), "I am not by nature a political writer." The example he offered was not his youth in Nazi- and Soviet-occupied Polish Lithuania, but his 1960 arrival in America, where his reputation rested solely on The Captive Mind, his 1953 study of the corruption of literature under communism. "Pressed to play the role of the crusading anti-Communist but lacking the ability," he settled for being "an obscure professor in an obscure department" (Slavic literature at U.C. Berkeley). "But," he added with a wink, "I was happy. I had come in search of bread, and I found it."

Most Polish artists worth their salt are obsessed with the tension between individual expression and communal obligation. Not for them the tidy balance articulated by William James: "The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community." When for generations one's national identity has been brutally suppressed, and the only way to preserve it is through culture, the artist feels acutely his responsibility to the community. But when the dead hand of ideology squeezes the life out of all communal expression, the artist feels just as acutely his responsibility to himself. To produce good work amid such cross currents takes not only talent but doggedness.

To some, this is ancient history, because Polish artists now enjoy Western-style freedom, albeit at the price of feeling marginalized by Western-style entertainment. Nevertheless, the international reputation of some Polish artists, notably the film maker Krzysztof Kieslowski, has never been higher. To use a crass commercial yardstick, the DVD boxed set of his Decalogue series (ten one-hour dramas based loosely on the Ten Commandments, made for Polish TV in 1988) is currently number 3,700 in Amazon.com's sales rankings (about even with The Alfred Hitchcock Signature Collection). Another Kieslowski boxed set released in 2003, the Three Colors trilogy (Blue, White, and Red), is a staple in video stores everywhere. And in 2005 Kino Video released The Krzysztof Kieslowski Collection, a six-disc boxed set including several of the director's earlier films and some fascinating interviews.

Loyalty to Poland

Kieslowski died in 1996 at the age of 54, while undergoing heart surgery in Warsaw. Accounts vary, but most agree that he turned down the chance to have the operation done in a Western hospital with state-of-the-art training and equipment. Christopher Garbowski, author of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue Series, offers this explanation: "The hospital where he had the operation was supposedly qualified, and he simply didn't seem to have such an unusual problem. He was something of a patriot on these matters, not wanting to go abroad if it didn't seem necessary." This explanation captures two of Kieslowski's most salient traits: his loyalty to Poland, and his skepticism toward newfangled gimmickry from the West.

The loyalty ran deep. Born in 1941, Kieslowski had an unsettled boyhood, because his father suffered from tuberculosis and had to move from sanatarium to sanatarium. Intense, gloomy, but gifted with wry humor, Kieslowski enrolled at age 17 in the College for Theater Technicians in Warsaw, because it was better than the alternative presented by his father, which was to become a fireman. As he muses in his autobiography, "My father was a wise man.... [He] knew perfectly well that when I got back from that fireman's training college, I'd want to study." The years 1958-1962 were extraordinarily creative in Polish theater, and Kieslowski aspired to become a theater director. But in order to do that, he had to attend another institution of higher learning. After three attempts, he was accepted by the Lodz Film School.

That it took three attempts should not reflect poorly on Kieslowski's abilities, since typically there were 1,000 candidates for five or six places. Nor should it suggest undue political conformity, because the Lodz Film School enjoyed a fair amount of freedom at the time--at least until 1968, when General Mieczyslaw Moczar cracked down on the student movement and purged thousands of Jews from higher education. With bitter sarcasm, Kieslowski recalls how the authorities cloaked their actions in "grand words" about "experimental cinema," which meant in effect that it was better "to cut holes in film or set up the camera in one corner for hours on end" than "to see what was happening in the world, how people were living and...why their lives weren't as easy as the paper described them."

To catch Kieslowski's drift, you need only watch The Office, a six-minute student film he made in 1966 that shows a line of patient sufferers getting the bureaucratic run-around in a state insurance office. Not only does the film draw a devastating portrait of official hard-heartedness, it also lights a spark of pure defiance at the end, when over the grating voice of the clerk repeating,"Write down everything that you have done in your entire lifetime," the camera pans a wall of shelves sagging with hundreds of folders, each containing an "entire lifetime."

The 1968 crackdown did not prevent documentaries from being made, however. During the 1970s they were perhaps even more highly regarded than feature films. And the production of both was generously subsidized by the state. Of course, no film could be shown without the approval of the Vice-Minister of Arts and Culture and the State Board of Censorship, and many were shelved. But the film-making process was pretty much controlled by self-governing Production Houses (for features) and Studios (for documentaries). Each of these Zespoly (zespol means "team") had its own distinctive character and tended to attract...well, distinctive characters. Thus it was only natural that, after graduating from Lodz, Kieslowski would gravitate toward the Documentary Film Studio (WDF) in Warsaw.

At WDF Kieslowski continued for a while in the same vein, showing the evils of officialdom and the tribulations of the masses. And he became expert at the game of getting his films past the censors. Actually, one of the most fascinating interviews in the Kino collection is with Irena Strzakowska, an officer of the censorship board who (against type) is a smart, handsome woman who ended up collaborating with Kieslowski on a number of films. But as the 1970s wore on, Kieslowski's documentaries began to work on a quite different level, one that neither attacks nor defends the system but rather probes the humanity of all those who must live with it, including officialdom.

Not a Local Artist

The most striking example of this is From the Night Porter's Point of View (1978), a 17-minute portrait of Marian Osuch, a watchman and all-around enforcer in a Warsaw factory. Shot on East German film stock known for its cold garish colors, the film combines a voice-over of Osuch's musings with scenes of him collaring a vagrant, monitoring the workers as they clock in and out, training his guard dogs, and finally hosting a group of visiting school children. His views are, shall we say, not those of the enlightened intelligentsia. He believes in law and order, strict rules, total obedience, and (when necessary) public hangings. His home life elicits no warmth, only a comment about his daughter boiling his pet fish to death and his son drowning his pet budgie. To judge by the dog scenes, this is a man who prefers animals to humans because they are more trainable.

Yet the film is suffused with a strange tenderness. In his autobiography Kieslowski recalls that it took forever to find the right porter. The first one selected had the requisite "anti-humane or fascist opinions," but he also "had so many shortcomings it was absolutely impossible to make a film about him." In other words, Kieslowski went to great lengths to find a more sympathetic "fascist." At the end of the film, when the visiting teacher asks the children to identify "the officer in the fine uniform," we don't hear their reply (apparently it was cut). But we do see Osuch's expression: that of a lonely, beleaguered man whose heart positively aches for respect.

Kieslowski's distrust of the West may not have helped him in medical matters, but it served his art well. The humanity that shines through his portrait of Osuch continued to illuminate just about everything he did. Of course, humanity can be a liability among a certain class of cinéastes. One of Kieslowski's mentors, the director Krzysztof Zanussi, says Kieslowski was "long undervalued outside Poland," and that the Cannes Film Festival rejected two of his most accomplished films, Camera Buff (1979) and Blind Chance (1981), as the work of a "local artist." Why the same charge didn't apply to the ever-so-American Norma Rae, which took several prizes in '79, is unclear.

Camera Buff is anything but "local." It's about a callow young factory worker named Filip (Jerzy Stuhr) who buys an 8-mm camera to film his new baby, then gets mesmerized by the challenge of trying to film the whole world. Like Kieslowski, Filip is initially embraced by the authorities--the bosses in his factory ask him to chronicle a big meeting. But Filip cannot resist showing them sneaking out to the men's room, so he loses his new status, his job, and eventually--as he proves incapable of curbing this new passion for truth-telling--his wife and child. Along the way, though, Filip does one good thing. He makes a TV documentary about a fellow worker who is a dwarf, and despite some fussing on the part of the censors over whether the film disparages its subject or (here's the real disparagement) insults Polish labor, the film is broadcast--and everyone loves it, including the dwarf, a simple man who weeps because "it is beautiful."

Blind Chance and Decalogue

Blind Chance, one of Kieslowski's most fascinating films, is based on a clever device--a "butterfly effect" arising from a mishap that occurs while a medical student named Witek (played by Boguslaw Linda) is running for a train. In the first scenario, Witek bumps a man in the crowd, pauses briefly to apologize--and catches the train. In the second and third, he pauses a moment longer--and misses the train. Then the story splits again, as the first miss leads Witek to a scuffle with the station guard, the second to an encounter with a woman from his anatomy class, whom he later marries.

In 1998 this device was copied in a fluffy British movie, Sliding Doors, and a trendy German one, Run, Lola, Run. But there's nothing fluffy or trendy about Blind Chance. On the contrary, each of Witek's possible lives presents him with choices that still resonate today. Catching the train, he meets an older man who recruits him into the ruling communist Polish United Workers' Party. Missing the train and getting into a scuffle, he is arrested and while doing community service gets drawn into a student-Catholic-worker movement that looks a lot like Solidarity. Missing the train and meeting his future wife, he decides to stay out of politics and focus on his career. Ironically, each path brings him to the same place: in the Warsaw airport trying to board a plane out of Poland. In the third life he succeeds, only to have the plane explode during takeoff.

Blind Chance came out during an especially rough time. In December 1981 General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law, driving Solidarity underground and crushing the hopes of thousands. In that atmosphere, the film was attacked by all sides--indeed, it may be one of the most politically incorrect films ever made. But Kieslowski wasn't trying to be politically correct, he was trying to transcend a situation that felt politically hopeless. The title is meant ironically, because as he put it, "Witek, the main character, behaves decently in each situation. He behaves decently even when he joins the Party. At a certain moment, when he sees that he's been manipulated into a situation where he ought to behave like a bastard, he rebels and behaves decently."

Looking back, Kieslowski is quite critical of Blind Chance. But his remarks about that film illuminate both it and his subsequent masterpiece, the Decalogue: "We don't ever really know where our fate lies.... Fate in the sense of a place, a social group, a professional career, or the work we do. We've got much more freedom than this in the emotional sphere." In other words, human beings are subject to fate and blind chance, not to mention the so-called objective forces of history. But they are also free to make choices. If they were not, then there would be no such thing as plot or character. According to Aristotle, the most important ingredient in tragedy is plot. It's not character, because character is revealed only through action, i.e., plot. It's probably worth noting that by "action" Aristotle did not mean helicopters crashing into suspension bridges. He meant moral action, the kind we judge "decent" or "like a bastard."

Aristotle also said that the best plots are so powerful that a bare-bones summary is enough to move a listener. To this ancient wisdom Kieslowski adds the modern insight that "everybody's life is worthy of scrutiny." That is why he and his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz shot all ten Decalogue segments in the same large apartment complex. "It's the most beautiful housing estate in Warsaw," Kieslowski recalled, "which is why I chose it. It looks pretty awful so you can imagine what the others are like." For the sake of illustration, here is a summary of the first plot, reflecting on the commandment "Thou shalt have no other gods before me": An agnostic scientist and his adored ten-year-old son are so excited by the powers of their new computer, they ask it to calculate the exact hour when the ice on a nearby pond will be thick enough to hold a skater. The computer produces the answer, the boy goes skating, and when the ice breaks unexpectedly, he drowns. After watching all ten of these simple, powerful stories, you will never look at an ugly apartment complex in quite the same way again.

Kieslowski was a doubter not a dogmatist, and the Decalogue series ends with an anti-Ten Commandments rock song: "Kill, kill, kill / Screw who you will ... Everything's yours." But this negation only underscores the affirmation of the whole. About the Ten Commandments, Kieslowski has said, "Everyone breaks them daily. Just the attempt to respect them is a major achievement."

The French Films

Like many Eastern European artists, Kieslowski felt his own world start to crack after the fall of Communism. For one thing, there was no money to make films in Poland, so he relocated to France to make his final four: The Double Life of Véronique (1991) and the Three Colors: Blue, White, and Red (1993-4). It would be nice to say that the French climate agreed with our Polish emigré, but to judge by the results, it did not. By a strange sort of alchemy, the moral sense of the Kieslowski's best films gets transformed, in the Parisian setting, into a self-conscious preoccupation with the process of film making.

Take, for example, the theme of alternative lives, which in Blind Chance is tied to such larger questions as how does one live when one's choices are constrained by injustice and repression? In The Double Life of Véronique, the larger question is...what? After an opening sequence about Weronika, a very pretty Polish singer (Irene Jacob) who dies of a heart attack, the focus shifts to picturesque Paris, where an identical very pretty young woman is mooning over mysterious "signs" sent to her by a very handsome young man (Phillippe Volter) who makes his living performing with marionettes. After much dithering they meet, and Véronique gets to moon over his marionettes, which, he explains, must be created in pairs because--hélas! --one of them might get "damaged."

The story ends with Véronique returning to her family homestead, where we can be sure she will be safe. The trouble is, she was pretty safe to start with. Compared with Weronika, whose life seems interesting, or at any rate real, Véronique seems incredibly idle and self-absorbed. In other words, she's a typical young woman in a French art film, beautiful to look at but devoid of any recognizable human emotion.

The Three Colors take their cue from the French flag: blue for liberty, white for equality, red for fraternity. Blue is about a woman (played by Juliette Binoche) who, after losing her husband and child in a car accident, tries to live a totally unfettered life, only to discover that this is impossible. Red is an intriguing but self-indulgent study of a cynical retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintingant) who eavesdrops on his neighbors' phone conversations until a young fashion model (Irene Jacob again) gently restores his humanity. Red is beautiful to look at, but in a self-indulgent way, as the camera lingers a bit too obsessively on Jacob. Some feminist critics have accused Kieslowski of committing fashion photography on these female performers, which is certainly the case. Binoche is a more interesting actress than Jacob, but after a while both films start to feel like the "How To Spend It" section of the Financial Times.

My own reaction to Blue and Red is start hankering for Warsaw. So my favorite among the Three Colors is White, in which the homely, slightly rotund Zbigniew Zamachowski plays Karol Karol (basically Charlie Charlie), a Polish hairdresser living in Paris whose French wife (Julie Delpy) wants a divorce because, as her lawyer makes painfully clear in court, the marriage has never been consummated due to a failure of husbandly equipment. This is only the beginning of Karol's humiliation. By the time he's begging for francs in the Paris subway, he is ready to accept the offer of a fellow Pole to return home in a way that makes flying coach look (relatively) comfortable. Crammed into a trunk, he suffers even worse when, upon its arrival in Warsaw, the trunk is stolen by a gang of thugs who, disappointed at Karol's lack of resale value, beat him severely and leave him for dead in the public dump. The best line in the whole trilogy comes when Karol wakes up covered in blood and garbage, looks around and says, "Home at last!"

Beauty is Strong

If Kieslowski had lived longer, it would have behooved him to make more comedies, not more Frenchified art films. After completing Red, he announced that he was not going to make any more films, period. But he was also engaged in writing the screenplays for a new trilogy based on Dante's Divine Comedy. Only one of these has been made into a film--Heaven (2002), starring Cate Blanchett and directed by Tom Tykwer (who also directed Run, Lola, Run). It is an unholy mess, bereft of the Decalogue's moral honesty, and not even postcard-pretty like Three Colors.

Because of this disaster, many critics have concluded that Kieslowski's art was an exotic, twisted plant unable to bloom without political repression and state censorship. But that conclusion is unfair. What does the magnificent example of Czeslaw Milosz tell us, if not that Polish artists can thrive in freedom and even survive consumerism? A few lines from Milosz's poem, "One More Day," provide a fitting tribute to Kieslowski:

And though the good is weak, beauty is very strong.
Nonbeing sprawls, everywhere it turns into ash whole expanses of being,
It masquerades in shapes and colors that imitate existence
And no one would know it, if they did not know that it was ugly.

And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil.
Only beauty will call to them and save them
So that they still know how to say: this is true and that is false.

Posted by mbayles at 3:55 PM

June 21, 2006

Miles Ahead

I steal a title from Miles Davis to highlight a fine essay by Jack Miles, one of my favorite writers on religious matters. If you have succumbed to the posters promising that if you see The Da Vinci Code you will "Know the Truth," then don't miss Miles's gentle but thorough post-mortem. It doesn't fulminate in the manner of a would-be censor, but neither does it shrug and say, "It's only a movie."

Posted by mbayles at 12:54 PM

June 17, 2006

Not Your Typical Caring Dad

You don't need to study Kabbalah to enjoy The Bee Season, but it helps. At first, the film seems yet another tribute to the hearth gods of middle America: Family, Success, Competition, and (scheduled for worship this weekend) Caring Dads. Indeed, Saul (Richard Gere) seems the ultimate Caring Dad, a professor of Jewish philosophy who is devoted both to Family - he cooks a gourmet dinner every night for his scientist wife Miriam (Juliette Binoche) - and to the Success of his two children, teenaged Aaron (Max Minghella) and nine-year-old Eliza (Flora Cross).

Unfortunately, only Aaron seems destined for Success. While he plays the cello and shines in every sort of Competition, little sister Eliza is distinctly ungifted. Now, the usual pattern for hearth-god flicks is for the ungifted sibling to discover a hidden talent that the parents don't notice at first, so focused are they on the gifted one. But then the hidden talent comes to light, preferably in a public Competition, one or both parents start to pay attention, making the gifted sibling jealous - and for one terrible moment it appears that Family, Competition, and Success will clash.

The next step, of course, is a therapeutic processing of negative emotion, followed by an even bigger public Competition in which the Family's future hinges on the Success of the previously ungifted sibling. Typically, the Competition starts before all the negative emotions have been processed. But then, at the crucial moment, the remaining bad feelings are dealt with, and with victory comes a great celebration of all the hearth gods together.

The Bee Season follows this formula to such a degree that if you listen to the insipid commentary on the DVD (and most reviews), you'll conclude it does nothing more. But as I say, it does do more, because the most important deity in this film is not a middle American hearth god but that other one, whose name is spelled with one capital letter in English and four in Hebrew.

I have not read the novel by Myla Goldberg on which this film is based, but I suspect it is the source of the film's extraordinary conclusion. Without giving away the ending of this Father's Day recommendation, let me just point out that the aptly named Saul is not the ultimate Caring Dad at all. Instead, he is a classic figure from the Hebrew Scriptures: pious, proud, and stiff-necked. And when he is rebuked, it is not really by the young daughter whom he has been pushing so hard, it is by a larger and sterner force rarely seen, or even hinted at, in what passes for "spiritual" entertainment these days.

Posted by mbayles at 1:36 PM

June 11, 2006

When the Miniseries Was King

This month I have some evening busy-work to do, so I scanned Netflix for something mildly diverting -- and long. Well, I am neglecting my busy-work, because the film I chose is a miniseries from the golden age: The Winds of War, based on Herman Wouk's beloved best-seller.

Poking about online, I find only one review of this film, a snarky one -- which doesn't surprise me, given what passes for criticism these days. This is not Shoah. Nor is it The Sorrow and the Pity. It's a TV miniseries in the populist, let's-make-this-easy-for-the-folks-back-home line. And it was made in 1983, so its production values do not compare with those of HBO's Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan . It contains nothing like Private Ryan's eye-and-ear-popping depiction of the landing at Normandy, for example. But given the limitations of the small screen and the network censors (still functioning back then), Winds does a remarkable job of evoking battle and danger, not to mention a variety of European and American landscapes, on its small canvas.

Most of all, Winds accomplishes its goal, which is to blend a foreground of watchable characters into an accurately painted background of world-historical events. This may be an inherently ridiculous undertaking, but that hasn't deterred a great many novelists, not to mention playwrights. The question is, does director Dan Curtis (who died this spring) make himself ridiculous? Not at all. Apart from a certain cheesiness in the depiction of the Nazi High Command (especially Hitler), The Winds of War blends charm, action, and gravitas in just the right proportions.

Of course, you have to give it the benefit of the doubt. First, you must believe that there is actually something going on behind the stone face of Pug Henry (Robert Mitchum), naval attache to the US Embassy in Berlin in 1936. Second, you must accept that the starry-eyed response of his wife Rhoda (Polly Bergen) to the blandishments of the Nazi leadership reflects not perfidy but vanity. Third, you must feel the chemistry between the Henrys' callow son Byron (Jan-Michael Vincent) and Natalie (Ali McGraw), his razor-tongued sweetheart, who thinks nothing of going to visit her long-lost Jewish relatives in Poland during the late summer of 1939.

Perform these acts of faith, and I promise, you will be swept along. One of the virtues of art is economy of means: making do with what is available within the constraints of one's medium and the expectations of one's audience. In that sense, these fast-paced, deftly constructed fourteen hours of television deserve to be called classic

Posted by mbayles at 6:06 PM

June 4, 2006

Mindful Fluff

While browsing through the New Releases in the video store, don't neglect the recently released comedy, In Her Shoes. Probably there are multiple copies on the shelf, which usually means mindless fluff. But not in this case. This movie is that rare, wonderful thing: mindful fluff.

The story concerns two sisters: Maggie (Cameron Diaz), pretty and out of control; and Rose (Toni Collette), plain and in control (sort of). These differences drive the sisters apart and then, through some undistinguished plotting, bring them back together. There is no point in describing the plot or the characters any further, because they are formulaic. The charm lies in the execution: the screenplay, pacing, and acting, especially Diaz and Collette, who do a beautiful job of portraying the two sisters' complicated but powerful bond.

To judge by most Hollywood films, not to mention popular TV fare like Sex in the City and Desperate Housewives, women have no lives apart from their sex lives, and their relationships with one another are based solely on a neurotic need to process information about their sex lives. No amount of rhetorical prattle about "female empowerment" alters this dismally one-dimensional portrait. But in its light-handed way, In Her Shoes provides an alternative.

It's a comedy, of course, which means that the family conflict gets resolved at the end. This doesn't always happen in life, needless to say. But the best compliment I can give In Her Shoes is that it could have worked as a tragedy, in which the sisters never reconcile. Indeed, one reason why it succeeds as a comedy is that it allows tragic emotions to peek through the surface. In sum, fluff this good is hard to make and deserves at least as much respect as, say, mindless gloom.

Posted by mbayles at 11:53 AM

May 12, 2006

Away Message

Dear Kind and Patient Readers,

I am going to be away for two weeks, on a Fulbright speaking tour of Poland. In preparation I have been watching many Polish films, and I strongly recommend Kieslowski's Decalogue, and also the DVD boxed set of his earlier works from Kino on Video. Both are extraordinary, especially compared with a lot of other films being made at the same time. I am not a big fan of Blue and Red in the Three Colors Trilogy, but I adored White. (This is not the consensus view, only the opinion of a crank who tires quickly of French film preciosity, which Kieslowski caught a mild case of after 1990.) My article on Kieslowski will appear in the next issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Talk to you soon,
Martha

Posted by mbayles at 1:07 PM

April 25, 2006

Rome Lives!

HBO has just announced that production has begun on the second 10-episode season of its magnificent series, Rome. I am delighted, although it will be a challenge to proceed without Ciaran Hinds as Julius Caesar, who (in case you missed ancient history) got stabbed in the Senate. If you want to read my full-fledged review of the first season, buy the current Claremont Review of Books. Or see ...

When staging a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the first thing one must decide is how to slant it, because the play’s sympathies are quite evenly divided between the conspirators, especially Brutus, who persuade themselves that assassinating Caesar will restore the Republic, and the Caesarians, who get the best lines (Mark Antony), not to mention the victory (Octavian). It is possible to slant the play by cutting it, of course. But it is better to do so through interpretation.

Or one can keep Julius Caesar idling in neutral, as Joseph L. Mankiewicz did when adapting it for the big screen back in 1953. At that time, the “swords and sandals” epic was part of Hollywood’s counteroffensive against TV, so the emphasis was on spectacle: scarlet Roman legions against the rocky terrain of Italy (or Los Angeles County); white marble vistas stretching to the matte-painted horizon; vast interiors decorated in a style best described as Il Duce Does Vegas. Thanks to the self-imposed censorship of the production code, popularly known as the Hays Code (after Postmaster Will H. Hays, who administered it between 1922 and 1945), these epics were also free of all bodily fluids except the occasional trickle of blood, sweat, or tears. Likewise politics: not until 1960, when Dalton Trumbo emerged from behind his many fronts to write Spartacus, did the epic become “swords, sandals, and socialism.”

Personally, I am still waiting for Hollywood to tackle the Gracchis, those notorious price-fixing, land-distributing tribunes who a century before Caesar introduced a fateful note of direct democracy into the Roman Republic. If today’s Trumbos would read some history and stop obsessing on how the oil industry caused 9/11, they would see the cinematic potential of the Gracchis – especially since there is now no production code to forbid showing Tiberius Gracchus getting clubbed to death, or even better, his brother Gaius being decapitated by thugs on the aristocrats’ payroll, who then proceeded to pour molten lead into his skull and murder 3,000 of his followers without trial.

If you’re still reading out of sheer zest for Roman ferocity, then by Jove, do I have the TV series for you! HBO’s Rome (co-produced by the BBC) is not the first swords and sandals epic to remind us, in graphic terms, what those handsome swords were actually used for. The pioneer here was Gladiator (2000), Ridley Scott’s hugely popular film about a power struggle between Maximus, a fictional general chosen by the emperor Marcus Aurelius to succeed him, and Commodus, the emperor’s sick kitty of a son. There is a smidgeon of politics in this muddy bloodbath, but it takes the risibly anachronistic form of a senator named Gracchus (get it?) who 220 years after the death of Julius Caesar still dreams of restoring the Republic.

The first season of Rome aired last year, and while it is not yet available on DVD, it can be accessed “on demand” (meaning the customer must pay extra and be a computer geek to boot). Is HBO going to rebroadcast the first season? There are rumors to that effect, but apparently the date and time are classified information. Will there be a second season?

YES, I am glad to report. Not only is it one of the best TV series ever made, it is also one of the best screen portrayals of Rome, surpassing a whole herd of Hollywood sacred cows. In part, this is due to smarter production values. Rome has always been costly: in 1925 MGM spent $3.9 million on the first Ben-Hur; in 1959 it spent $15 million on the second; and in 2000 Dreamworks coughed up $145.8 million for Gladiator. The budget for Rome is $100 million, but considering that this paid for 12 hours not just two or three, it seems to me the money was spent exceedingly well.

The five-acre set, built in cooperation with Cinecittà Studios near Rome, recreates the real ancient city, not some immaculate MGM (or Albert Speer) pipe dream. Rome in the 50s BC was a funky place, with every inch of marble decorated with colorful paintings, proclamations, and graffiti, and every twisting street jammed with busy artisans and merchants. From the palatial villas on the Palatine Hill to the polluted alleys of the Aventine, where the poor scraped by in five- and six-storey tenements that were cesspools below and firetraps above, the whole city is conjured with marvelous verisimilitude. The same is true of the props and costumes, from the women’s looms to the soldiers’ leather cuirasses and brass helmets. All were made by skilled Italian artisans like Luca Giampaoli, the latter-day Vulcan who hand-hammered Caesar’s breastplate.

Of course, none of this would matter if the screenplay and acting were on the historically tone-deaf level of most Hollywood fare. But here Rome compares favorably with I, Claudius (1976), the BBC’s brilliant adaptation of the Robert Graves novel about the vexed problem of succession under the first four emperors; and with Julius Caesar (2003), a little known but fine miniseries directed by Uli Edel for Turner Network Television, which among other charms features a stirring reenactment of the battle of Alesia, in which Caesar’s army of 55,000 outfoxed 250,000 Gauls led by the great shaggy Vercingetorix.

If it’s battles you want, then don’t miss the first episode of Rome, which opens with a brief but authentic depiction of the Legio XIII Gemina waging the grimly efficient warfare that enabled the Romans to conquer wild-and-woolly foes like the Gauls, whose manner of fighting was, shall we say, freestyle. This sequence shows such Roman techniques as the sword-thrust through a tightly packed wall of shields, and the constant rotation of fresh troops to the deadly front line. Unfortunately, someone was pinching the denarii, because in the whole 12 hours there is no comparable battle scene, only a clash in the civil war between Caesar and Pompey that, after an impressive build-up, comes as a major let-down, a cheesy blur that evokes not history but the History Channel.

But if it’s compelling characters you crave, and the aroma of truth found in good historical fiction, then don’t miss a single hour of Rome. To start with the wholly fictional characters, the most accessible are probably two soldiers who start out as enemies and slowly become comrades: the severe centurion Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and the brash infantryman Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson). (These two names are mentioned in Caesar’s Gallic Commentaries, but the characters are invented.) Vorenus is an old-fashioned fellow, whose Stoic virtus and Republican sympathies harden him to his family after long separation, but also outclass the eroding dignitas of most of the patricians he meets. Pullo is the son of a slave woman, so what matters to him is the libertas of the plebeian soldier.

Also fictionalized are two aristocratic women, Servilia of the Junii, mother of Marcus Junius Brutus (yes, that Brutus) and (a few rungs down the social ladder) Atia of the Julii, niece of Julius Caesar and mother of Octavia (later wife of Mark Antony, spurned for Cleopatra) and Octavian (later Augustus, first emperor of Rome). The gloriously twisted soap opera that unfolds within, and between, these two households would be impossible to summarize here. But it’s worth noting how well it reveals the political intrigues festering on the home front. Not since Livia in I, Claudius has the distaff side of Roman ruthlessness been so skillfully portrayed.

Both Servilia and Atia existed, but little is known about their lives. Servilia (Lindsay Duncan) is remembered for her lineage and for an affair that she had with Julius Caesar. Atia (Polly Walker) is just a name in the history books, so the writers have shrewdly transformed her from a low-profile Roman matron into a high-profile bombshell resembling Clodia Metelli, the patrician party animal whose numerous lovers included the poet Catullus. If there is a villain in Rome, it is probably Atia, whose promiscuity, nudity, and eager participation in a ritual sacrifice that drenches her with bull blood are highlighted in the first two episodes.

If you are one of those viewers who recoil at HBO-style sex and violence, then be warned that Rome contains a good dose of both. Is it gratuitous? Maybe a little. But, I am tempted to say, this is Rome! Staying with Atia for a moment, if I hadn’t read Catullus’ obscene, tender, hilarious poems about Clodia (whom he called Lesbia, sans the modern connotation), and about the mating and quarreling habits of his fellow patricians more generally, I might have ascribed the more lurid bits in Rome to the cutthroat competitiveness of the cable TV industry. But no, stuff like this really happened, and should properly be ascribed to the cutthroat competitiveness of the Roman plutocracy.

If Rome has a weakness, it is the same weakness that, in the view of Cato, Cicero, and other eminent anti-Caesarians, brought down the Republic: failure to respect the ancient aristocratic virtues. It is, of course, hardly surprising that aristocratic virtue should get short shrift on HBO, that bastion of Emmy-winning populism. The co-creators and executive producers of this series include four Americans (John Milius, Frank Doelger, William J. MacDonald, and HBO vice president Anne Thomopoulos). The talented writers and directors include veterans of such plebe-pleasing fare as Sex and the City, Entourage, and Desperate Housewives.

But one also finds a healthy supply of Brits, including director Michael Apted (president, since 2003, of the Directors Guild of America), co-creator and writer Bruno Heller, and almost all of the cast, including the formidable Irish actor Ciaran Hinds as Caesar and the enigmatic newcomer Max Pirkis as Octavian. These individuals are not aristocrats – heaven forfend! But coming as they do out of British theater, film, and TV, they know how to fake it. Ever since Shakespeare, Roman patricians have been speaking the Queen’s English and plebeians Cockney. No one defends class distinctions any more, but as long as they remain embedded in the Brits’ acting tradition, their Romans will come off as more convincing than ours.

All the more astonishing, then, to see Cato and Cicero come off as a scold and a fussbudget, respectively. Leaving aside the evidence that Cato drank too much and Cicero‘s finest moments were never quite as fine as his oratory made them sound, these two figures should be weighty enough to hold down the republican side of the argument – and here they are not. Cato (Karl Johnson) is a bony old grouch who makes a strong speech in the beginning but spends the rest of the time kvetching. When he finally stabs himself at Utica, the music swells as if it were a big deal, but it is hard to know why, since this Cato is more dyspeptic than Stoic. As for Cicero, it was a mistake to cast David Bamber in the part. I hate to typecast actors, but if this was Bamber’s big chance to leave behind his best known role, that of the insufferable Mr. Collins in the 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice, he blew it. Cicero was the world’s greatest orator, not a country parson.

The Republic was tottering long before Julius Caesar gave it the final shove. But it did hold Rome together for nearly 500 years, and for much of that time it was the world’s sole alternative to absolute monarchy. Cato’s and Cicero’s greatest fear was not that a gaggle of fat-cat senators would lose their perks (the main message here), but that Rome would succumb to being ruled in the same way as the Hellenistic kingdoms of the East: by despots with even more perks, among them the status of divinity and the right to demand not only obedience but worship.

For our modern difficulty in grasping the Republican cause, I blame Shakespeare, who, despite his even-handedness in Julius Ceasar, was a monarchist. (I would be, too, if Queen Elizabeth liked my plays.) In Julius Caesar Octavian calls Brutus “the noblest Roman of them all.” But consider who is left standing after the unpleasantness following Caesar’s assassination: not high-minded Brutus, the noble master of miscalculation, but low-key Octavian, the quiet little dude who ends up calling the shots. And here we arrive at the very finest part of Rome: its double portrait of the strong man who did not become emperor, and of the weak boy who did.

The relationship between Caesar and Octavian is not made explicit; there is no male-bonding scene where the older man adopts the younger as his son, gives him his name, and makes him his heir. In fact, they rarely meet. But their separateness only reinforces their standing as the two poles around which everything else revolves. This being a story about a cataclysmic power struggle, it is only natural to ask who really does, and does not, possess power. And while everyone’s attention is rightly fixed on Caesar’s ability to grasp the lightning and store it in his own private bottle, it gradually becomes evident that Octavian is studying to do the same, if only in the microcosm of his family. Caesar may be up against Cato, Cicero, and Pompey, but Octavian is up against Atia and his sister, and it’s hard to say which proving ground is more rigorous.

Was Octavian’s upbringing dominated by a scheming, deceitful mother? I don’t know, but given how he turned out, it could have been. Indeed, some clever feminist scholar should write a book about how the first Roman emperor owed his ascendancy less to masculine will than to feminine wiles.

How did Octavian subdue the nobility and the Senate? By convincing them that he was restoring the Republic. Unlike Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, and his great uncle Julius, he avoided grandiose titles, preferring to call himself princeps (first among equals), the title Cicero gave to Cato. In 27 BC, after defeating Antony and Cleopatra (who also had a thing about titles, naming their two children Sun and Moon), Octavian made a great show of returning his accumulated powers to the Senatus Populusque Romanus. True to their ancient constitution, the Senate accepted. But to show their appreciation, they awarded their humble consul a province consisting of half the world, 20 legions, a crown (for his door, not his head), and (of course) a new and even more grandiose title: Caesar Augustus. In other words, Octavian managed to wrap them all around his little finger.

This Rome fan would like nothing better than to see the same cast and crew, building on the costs already sunk into that fabulous set, props, and costumes, produce a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh season, straight through to the conversion of Constantine. Imperial Rome has more ready-made storylines, full of lurid details, than even the most gifted HBO screenwriter has ever dreamed of. If HBO were a republic, I would head straight for the Campus Martius and cast my vote in the Ovile, where the Roman people used to elect their magistrates. But I won’t get the chance, seeing as Augustus turned the Ovile into a venue for bread and circuses, reducing the vox populi to the roar of the mob. From the cheap seats, then, a thumbs-up: “Let Rome live!”

Posted by mbayles at 10:19 PM

April 22, 2006

At the Top, Not Over It

Not too long ago, I was addicted to 24, the suspense-on-steroids series about counter-terrorism now finishing its fifth season on Fox. Everything about 24 is over the top, including the futuristic surveillance technology and the Odyssean resourcefulness of the hero, Jack Bauer (played with frightening dedication by Kiefer Sutherland).

But while recovering from this addiction, I did occasionally wonder what counter-terrorism operations are really like -- when the threat is small to medium-sized, and the technology (and derring-do) is of human proportions. Perhaps that's why I tried MI-5, the British series known as Spooks in the UK, where it has run on BBC Channel One for three seasons starting in 2002. This one took longer to get its clutches into me, but when it did, the grip was tighter.

It's not a cartoon, for one thing. Unlike Fox's fictional Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU), MI-5 is a real agency with a tangible connection to the society it aims to protect. And the plots (in both senses of the word) do not spiral upward in ever more stratospheric loops of improbable conspiracy. They seem concocted by terrorists not scriptwriters.

Or maybe I just admire British actors, especially when they are pretending to be spies pretending to be people other than themselves. This does not work well during the first season, when Tom (Matthew Mcfadyen) moons unconvincingly over his inability to live a normal life with a whiney non-spy girlfriend. But then it takes off, thanks to the brilliant acting of Keeley Hawes as Zoe, Rupert Penry-Jones as Adam, and (my three favorites) David Oleyowo as Danny, Nicola Walker as Ruth, and the one and only Peter Firth as the agency director, Harry.

Hoping that you will follow the full course of treatment prescribed here, I will not give away what happens at the end of the third season, except to say that it shocked me more than almost anything I have ever seen in a film or TV show. And it did so without whiz-bang special effects. All that happened was an unexpected, deliberate violation of my rights as a viewer -- in particular, my right to see my favorite characters prevail.

Posted by mbayles at 5:17 PM

April 10, 2006

Grandes chausseurs, petits pieds

OK, this is a book review. But it contains a reference to the French director Eric Rohmer! I cannot resist sharing my review of American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, by Bernard-Henri Lévy, owner of the small feet. The big shoes belong to Tocqueville.

ONE THING TO AVOID, if you are not Sharon Stone, Charlie Rose, or Norman Mailer, is having lunch with Bernard-Henri Lévy. By all accounts he merely picks at American vittles: The Wall Street Journal reports him ordering nine raw clams and leaving them on the plate, which would be more impressive if they were oysters--or perhaps not, since this is a man accustomed to living, and lunching, in Paris. What he does devour, though, is American conversation. He gulps it down, can't seem to get enough of it--a consequence also of living in Paris? The trouble is, he sometimes takes home a doggie bag without paying for it ...

This is what he does to Samuel P. Huntington, whom he meets in Boston and then caricatures as nuttily xenophobic: "What startling violence wells up in his blue eyes when he says to me, 'The big problem with Hispanics, is they don't like education!'" The caricature also includes a hand-wringing retraction on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, one of those mini-calumnies that can never be disproved. Then, 20 pages later, Lévy unleashes a tirade against American "minority-rights movements," including Hispanic, on the grounds that they "result in countless demands for unlimited rights, thus gnawing at public law and running the risk of dissolving the social bond."

This exchange reflects Lévy's ambivalence toward America's extreme and (to most Europeans) disquieting ethnic diversity. His starting point, not surprisingly, is the French ideal of foreigners being ennobled and transformed by citizenship in la République. And he is not entirely free of the French prejudice that sees the United States as an agglomeration of undigested lumps that "has never really been a nation-state." Yet Lévy also marvels at the surprisingly strong bonds that hold America together. And while his effort to explain the patriotism of recent immigrants (including Arab Americans in Dearborn, Michigan) and to defend the mysterious alchemy of e pluribus unum may be the intellectual equivalent of a soufflé (a thin batter of ideas puffed up to unnatural size), it tastes pretty good, compared with the anti-American junk food recently topping the French bestseller list.

Granted, it is hard to get too excited about Lévy's grudging admission that, come to think of it, the United States is not really the most evil, grasping, fascist/imperialist colossus ever to bestride the earth. But here, at least, he pays for his doggie bag. He confesses to having studied some (not all) of the American debate about U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, and while he does not give the dreaded neocons the final word, he makes it quite clear that he respects them, and their fellow conservatives, for actually thinking about problems like terrorism and radical Islamism--as opposed to most liberals and leftists, who seem to him to think only about Democratic party fundraising.

On two contentious questions, then, multiculturalism and foreign policy, Lévy does a good job of cutting through the merde. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of his observations in three other areas: arts and letters; custom and public morality; and (most egregiously) religion.

Regarding the first, Lévy is, at best, a name-dropper. Rather than write perceptively about American music, he drools over Woody Allen playing trad-jazz at the Hotel Carlyle. About classical music, popular music, and that ubiquitous American phenomenon, rap, his silence is curious, given that his wife, the actress Arielle Dombasle, is a pop singer in France. He visits no art museums, or indeed serious museums of any kind, preferring to reduce America's cultural riches to beetle-browed antiquarianism and (echoing Eco) the theme park approach to history. About literature, he manages to be shallow, gossipy, and pretentious all at once. In Asheville, North Carolina, he speculates about how F. Scott Fitzgerald passed his days while his wife Zelda was in the insane asylum there.

Actually, Lévy's account of Fitzgerald moping around Asheville reads like a treatment for one of those arty French films in which handsome people idle their time away instead of engaging in good healthy sex and violence. In this connection it is intriguing to note that Dombasle (who was born in Connecticut and raised in Mexico, where her grandfather was French ambassador) got her first big break from the New Wave director Eric Rohmer. Perhaps this is why Lévy's prose style resembles one of those Rohmer (or Godard or Truffaut) films in which the flow of images and sounds is mercilessly explicated by a hyper-articulate male voiceover: "Aren't road and language, after all, siblings in humanity? Isn't it when both roads and languages are invented that commerce, mediation, civilization, begin?"

Please, couldn't we just look out the window?

About education, especially higher education, Lévy seems clueless. The only campus he visits is the University of Texas, in Austin, where he is astounded to find "here in . . . the capital of Texas, a state that is supposed to be a conservative stronghold," a class on Tocqueville taught by Paul Burka, executive editor of the Texas Monthly, in which a student approves of presidential candidate John Kerry's waffling on abortion, because "to believe one thing but refuse to impose it on other people; to have your convictions but leave other people to act the way they want--isn't that good policy? Isn't that the definition of democracy, in Tocqueville's sense?"

We don't get to hear Burka's response to this inanity, because Lévy goes into transports of delight at this glimmer of enlightenment "on the edge of the South that I'm about to dive into."

After diving, he meets Rod Dreher, a Roman Catholic journalist in Dallas who, Lévy is happy to report, home-schools his children but wants nothing to do with "those absurd fundamentalists." Here, in a nutshell, we have Lévy's tortured perception of American religion. Basically, his stance is that of an old-fashioned anthropologist intent upon sniffing out only the purest and most authentic version of an indigenous culture. He delights in a genuine Amish village in Iowa, a meeting of Orthodox rabbis in Brooklyn, and a convention of black women from the Church of God in Christ in Memphis, whose fancy clothes and gospel singing ("eyes rolling upward") suggest to him "an intensity of piety that has nothing to do with what can be observed in the megachurches of the North."

Lévy bases this pronouncement on a visit to the Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, where he learned from a couple standing in line with him that (in his paraphrase), "We're a living church. Our ministers are of our time, just as Christ was of his time. And we make a point of honor to have a useful religion." This brief exposure to what is known in the pastoral trade as "seeker-sensitive methodology" sets off a violent reaction in our anthropologist. What we have here, he sputters, is "a religion whose secret is, perhaps, to get rid of the distance, the transcendence, and the remoteness of the divine that are at the heart of European theologies."

Perhaps this would be a good time to mention my French Huguenot ancestors, who came to America back in the good old 17th century, when you had to travel coach and the grace of God was not cheap. They did not want to leave France but had to, on account of the unpleasantness on St. Bartholomew's Day. And since then, many others have come to these shores hoping to worship God in their own way, and the good folk of Willow Creek are hardly the first to water down the wine.

Lévy's defense of the Old Time Religion would be more persuasive if it weren't bound up with nastiness toward America's born-again president ("an overgrown daddy's boy") and socially conservative believers ("the harpies of neo-morality"). Plus, it is curious to see Lévy the anthropologist morph into Lévy the missionary when, at Willow Creek, he stops accusing these Christian fellow travelers of over-adapting to the modern world and starts accusing them of under-adapting to it. On the day of his visit, the senior pastor (Bill Hybels, one of many names Lévy fails to catch) is absent, so minister-author Lee Strobel shows up to flog his latest book, God Proven by Science and Scholars, and show a video called In the Heart of DNA. This sends Lévy into a paroxysm of indignation, unmitigated by Strobel's inscribing a copy of his book--"Hi, Bernie!"--and reciting "the atheist's prayer . . . God, if you are there, show yourself!"

Damned if we do, damned if we don't. Our religious wine is either too diluted or not diluted enough. Our war paint and feathers are either too authentic or not authentic enough. American religion is a thorny topic, even for Americans. For modern Europeans, it is "baffling," as Lévy himself admits. But the topic is not made less baffling by distinctions without differences. Those "European theologies" Lévy is so fond of were rather given to theories of intelligent design, if I recall correctly. And were Lévy to ask those rustic Amish, wizened rabbis, or elegant black church ladies what they thought of Charles Darwin, their answers might set his own eyes a-rolling.

Do some more homework, BHL, and then come back and see us again. And in the meantime: "Tocqueville, if you are there, show yourself!"

First appeared in the Weekly Standard, 04/17/2006, Volume 011, Issue 29

Posted by mbayles at 8:50 PM

April 2, 2006

Video Virgil: Last Laugh

First, a gripe. The Motion Picture Academy should have given the 2003 Oscar for Best Foreign Film to Zelary, a marvelous Czech film that I recently discovered on DVD. The film is about Eliska (Anna Geislerová), a nurse in Nazi-occupied Prague who, when her Resistance activities are discovered, flees to a remote mountain village, where to survive she must marry a taciturn woodcutter named Joza (György Cserhalmi).

Filmed in the mountains of Slovakia, Zelary is stunning to look at, and the story of how this stylish city dweller grows to love her rough-hewn peasant hosts, is more emotionally powerful than a dozen Hollywood melodramas like Cold Mountain (which I mention because it came out around the same time and, despite being about the American Civil War, was filmed in Rumania).

To the American reviewers at the time, the setting and theme of Zelary were "overly familiar," even "cliched." What on earth did they mean? Has the U.S. market been glutted with Eastern European films dramatizing the social and cultural gap between urban and rural ways of life in the 1940s? Are we jaded about post-Cold War Czech films showing the rape and murder committed by the first wave of Soviet "liberators"?

Directed by newcomer Ondrej Trojan and based on a novel by Kveta Legátová, Zelary also has a terrific ending. I won't be a spoiler, but suffice it to say that it involves the amazing actress Jaroslava Adamová, playing an old peasant woman named Lucka, and that it reminds us, in one blazing moment, why human beings are ultimately irrepressible.

Posted by mbayles at 4:30 PM

March 19, 2006

Lessons in Manliness

I haven't read Harvey Mansfleld's new book, Manliness, and I suspect that when I do, I will have many criticisms of it. But let me register here my disgust at Walter Kirn's "review" of it in today's New York Times. When I write my book on Puerility, I will make a point of quoting "critics" like these. The editors should be embarrassed.

But on to my (speculative) criticism of Mansfield's book, which by all accounts names Achilles as the Homeric hero who best exemplifies manliness. This seems wrong, not least because Mansfield's oft-quoted definition of manliness is presence of mind in the face of danger. If this is so, then the Homeric hero you want is not Achilles but Odysseus. It is Odysseus who exemplifies sophron, that hard-to-translate Greek word that does not just mean wisdom, shrewdness, gutsiness, grace, or persistence, but rather all of these - in essence, knowing how to act in any given situation.

Sophron is not achievable by following a set of rules; anyone can do that. Sophron means doing the right thing, the smart thing, without recourse to rules. It means being able to read the situation and the people involved, to discern the most compelling moral imperative, and to act - and all for a higher purpose than one's own aggrandizement.

Now for the movies. Manliness like this is hard to find in the cineplex these days. But here are two wildly different recommendations on DVD:

First the TV series 24, now in its fifth season on the Fox Network. The title comes from the gimmick of having each hour-long episode “occur in real time,” and except for a few plodding bits about the personal lives of Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) and his fellow agents at the Los Angeles branch of the fictional U.S. Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU), 24 is addictively suspenseful. And despite my misgivings about the show's routinization of extra-legal wiretapping and (especially) torture, I confess to being captivated by the character of Jack, whose alertness, courage, and cunning are positively Odyssean.

Second, the truly wonderful BBC adaptation of the Horatio Hornblower adventure novels by C.S. Forester. I have never read the novels (I do read books, though you might not get that impression from this posting), but I am tempted to do so after watching this series, which was produced between 1998 and 2003 and stars Welsh heartthrob Ioan Gruffud in the title role, not to mention British theater heartthrob Robert Lindsay as his mentor, Captain Sir Edward Pellew.

There is nothing dumbed down, campy, or forced about this vivid evocation of His Majesty's Navy at the turn of the 19th century; just great acting, great ships, and great production values (for TV). Patrick O'Brian fans especially will appreciate it, since in my opinion no one has yet properly adapted O'Brian. (I found Master and Commander painfully hurried and superficial, with no real texture to the characters.) As for manliness, there are plenty of examples to be found, including a duchess (Cheri Lunghi) who turns out to be a London stage actress working as a spy. Of course, instead of "manliness," one could just say sophron.

Posted by mbayles at 12:32 PM

March 14, 2006

Casting Problem: Who Could Play Miles?

It would have to be made by a genius who understands jazz, rock, pop music, American culture, and the history of race relations. It would also have to star an actor combining the talents of Sidney Poitier, Jimi Hendrix, Don Cheadle, and Mos Def. And finally, it would have to be seventeen hours long. Maybe that's why we haven't seen a biopic about Miles Davis ... ?

As for putting Miles in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, see Soundtrax box on right. It's a little like nominating Picasso for the Ink-Doodling Hall of Fame.

Posted by mbayles at 10:21 AM

March 10, 2006

Sopranos R Us

With high hype, HBO's hit series, The Sopranos, returns to the airwaves this week. But personally I worry that this time around, the producers will start to believe the cliche that the show's amazing popularity stems from cable TV's ability to "push the envelope" on sex, drugs, profanity, and violence. It's easy to speculate that over 10 million people watch The Sopranos every week because they relish hearing curses, ogling silicone-enhanced breasts on the Bada Bing dance floor, and watching wiseguys get offed. And it's just as easy to condemn The Sopranos on the same grounds, as William F. Buckley Jr. once did, citing its "arrant exploitation of sex, exhibitionism, murder, sadism, cynicism, and hypocrisy."

But such judgments are obtuse. Most people do not love The Sopranos because it pumps vulgarity and venality into their homes any more than they love it because it stereotypes Italian-Americans (pace groups like the American Italian Defense Association). People love the show because it takes something tried and true -- the Mafia drama -- and uses it to explore social class, the ordeal of immigrant assimilation, the ethical compromises of the workplace, and other aspects of contemporary American life barely touched on in film and television, except in the most pious and didactic fashion. More...

The Sopranos beckons us first with its humor. The show's premise -- the well-heeled, well-educated psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi treating the boss of the northern Jersey syndicate -- is comic on its face. Back in the 1970s, Saturday Night Live's John Belushi played the Godfather attending group therapy. Then a feature film along the same lines, Analyze This, spawned a sequel, Analyze That. The Sopranos is not above milking the spectacle of rough, burly Tony working with mild, bookish Dr. Melfi on issues like impulse control and depression resulting from his own mother trying to have him whacked.

Yet as every fan knows, there's a lot more going on in The Sopranos than gags about waste management meeting anger management. (If you're catching up with past episodes, you might want to hold off on reading more.) For starters, Dr. Melfi and Tony (Lorraine Bracco and James Gandolfini) are antagonists, in the fullest sense of the word: two people involved in a contest of wills that, while leavened by wry humor, can feel, at times, like a struggle unto death.

In that respect, The Sopranos draws directly on its gangster setting. Like the Western, the gangster drama dwells less on a particular place and time than on the clash between certain modern virtues (reason, order, process) and certain ancient ones (honor, loyalty, vengeance). When one code fails, as the former did when Dr. Melfi was brutally raped and the rapist went free on a legal technicality, the alternative -- Tony's ability to carry out swift retribution -- can look pretty damn good.

Hence the emotional intensity of the scene when Dr. Melfi, back at work bruised and limping from what she says was a car accident, aches to tell Tony what really happened. Battling with herself, she bursts into tears. Tony's response is to get up from his chair and walk over to hers. Every other time he has done this, it has been in anger. Now the gesture is one of comfort, and the moment is powerful precisely because the small distance between the two chairs is so laden thematically. When Tony asks, "Do you wanna say something?" and she says, "No," we understand that she is going to abide by her own code, even though right now it is making her the victim of an unpunished crime. I dare say this was the only time most viewers actually wished Tony would order a hit.

At the same time, Tony's ancient code seems to be unraveling before our eyes. A constant refrain is the loss of old-school mobsters, the kind who would do time rather than rat, and the decay of organized crime into disorganized crime. The mob characters are like many other Americans, deploring what they perceive as a breakdown in the values of older generations.

Which brings us to the real secret of the show's success. While some of the conflicts it depicts are rooted in the specifics of the Mafia code, most of the show's funniest and finest moments have nothing to do with a clash between the mainstream and the Mafia, but with the ways in which the mainstream irritates various traditional sensibilities. If the crude appeal of the Mafia theme were the crucial ingredient, then there would be a dozen successful clones of The Sopranos out there, and there are none. What makes the show unclonable is the skill with which it uses the gangster genre as a device for bringing undercurrents of shared emotion to the surface. Indeed, the very familiarity of the Mafia genre allows viewers to distance themselves from certain painful feelings while at the same time identifying with them.

Some of those feelings are about social class. As many critics have observed, Tony and Carmela Soprano (Edie Falco) are rich enough to live in an upscale suburb, where they mix with professionals and corporate executives. But they don't feel entirely comfortable there, and most of their discomfort stems not from being Mafiosi but from trying to learn the peculiar folkways of upper-class America. For instance, after their son, Anthony Jr., or AJ, helped some other boys in his elite private school to vandalize the swim coach's office, how many viewers shared Tony and Carmela's chagrin when the headmaster refused to mete out punishment?

Beyond class, The Sopranos takes an indirect but refreshingly unorthodox approach to immigration and assimilation, themes rarely touched on because identity politics have made them fragile almost to the point of taboo. Italian-Americans are hardly recent arrivals in America, and despite the occasional Russian, African, or Middle Eastern character, The Sopranos is not about any other group. But the Sopranos' experience -- their relatively rapid movement into the affluent suburbs -- is shared by millions of other first- and second-generation immigrants today. And while only a tiny minority of those other newcomers have any connection with crime, the vast majority have much in common with the Sopranos.

It is, for instance, laughingly hypocritical of a crime boss to want a school to discipline his son. That hypocrisy resonates with assimilating groups, however, because as children pick up new ways of thinking and acting, their elders reflexively want to reassert authority. Yet because wielding that authority would work against their offspring's social mobility, the elders just as often retreat. Either way, both generations are prone to feelings of shame, of imagining that just because they are who they are, they have something to hide, even if that something is usually not a thick file with the FBI.

The Mafia connection is also essential to another immigrant-related theme, which is the disdain many people feel toward their jobs. Cynicism inevitably creeps in when we encounter the hypocrisy, ambiguity, and ethical compromise involved in every work environment -- blue, pink, or white collar. We persevere in spite of that, abiding with our bad consciences by telling ourselves that it's all for the sake of our families. But as we see with Tony, that rationalization can be hard to sustain when the family is less than holiday-greeting-card perfect.

In The Sopranos, such ambivalence balances delicately on the characters' criminal dimension. When Tony discovers that his lifelong friend and associate Big Pussy has been "flipped" by the Feds and made to wear a wire, together with his (more or less) loyal associates Silvio and Paulie, Tony takes Pussy out on a yacht, shoots him, and dumps his garbage-bagged corpse overboard. Because the scene delicately parodies the classic tableau of the Mafiosi executing a traitor to uphold the code, it is too stylized and predictable to do great damage to our identification with Tony, although I for one was glad to see him haunted by a nightmare in which Pussy appears in the form of a reproachful talking fish.

In sharp contrast is the earlier episode in which two aspiring goodfellas, Sean Gismonte and Matt Bevilaqua, try to impress Tony's rival, Richie Aprile, by ambushing Christopher, Tony's nephew and designated heir. Christopher is gravely hurt but survives, and in retaliation Tony and Pussy execute Matt in an especially gleeful and cold-blooded way, only to follow up the deed with a hearty steak dinner, during which they reminisce about their good old days as young mobsters. The grotesque sequence belongs in a Quentin Tarantino movie, not The Sopranos.

Some critics cheer every time the series takes such a "dark" turn. But for the majority of fans, too many adventures like that on Tony's part and the whole carefully balanced edifice would start to topple. The show's writers apparently felt the same, because right after Matt's killing they created a foil in the person of an eyewitness: a snooty, self-righteous type who plays the good citizen until he discovers that the perpetrators were Mafiosi. At that point he rushes from his library to call his lawyer, while his wife panics. Pegging the guy for an upper-middle-class coward, we revert to our usual fondness for Tony as the opposite of all such phoniness. For good measure, a later episode shows Tony haunted by the memory of Matt crying "Mama!"

Most of Tony's violent deeds are carried out either with cold calculation as a necessary cost of doing business, or in the heat of passion, as in the current season's vengeance killing of the despicable new capo, Ralphie. In Tony's universe, familiar but alien to us, he's fighting himself and fighting to make it in America. When he does something patently evil, the tenuous threads connecting him to us fray and break. But don't expect Sopranos creator David Chase and his smart, talented colleagues to break too many. For if they did, we would no longer recognize ourselves in these striving, conflicted compatriots.

The article first appeared in the Chronicle Review.

Posted by mbayles at 9:57 AM

March 5, 2006

Dig Those Oscars

If you are planning to sit through the Oscars tonight, here are some comments based on last year's festivities.

People who love music hate medleys. And people who love movies hate those “Celebrate the Movies” clip reels shown on cable TV to promote movie channels, and in theaters to promote movie-going. Watching the 77th Academy Awards, I really hated the opening clip reel, put there by the movie industry to remind me how much I love movies. Even the most willing cow needs an occasional rest from the milking machine.

If the members of the Academy had wanted to attract more viewers, then perhaps they should not have been so timid about including the two most controversial films of 2004, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The Passion, which received but did not win three nominations (Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, Best Makeup), deserved one for Best Picture and Best Director. And Fahrenheit, which received no nominations, deserved one for Best Documentary, a category in which fairness and accuracy have never been among the criteria.

Without re-masticating the well masticated debates over these films, I will simply note that both sold a lot of tickets to people who do not ordinarily go to the movies. So if they had not been airbrushed out of the proceedings, then perhaps all those one-time ticket buyers would have tuned in, boosting the ratings and saving us from that tacky clip reel.

It was, of course, entirely appropriate that the clip reel rolled across the ceiling of the Kodak Theater before and after each commercial break. For this is what movies are rapidly becoming: commercials for themselves. Instead of drama, comedy, suspense, or any other recognizable genre, the standard-issue Hollywood flick is now a pastiche of attention-grabbing moments meant to thrill, tickle, tease, and titillate audiences too immature or distracted to care how, or whether, they all fit together. Like music videos, these messes only reinforce the mini-attention span of the average popcorn buyer. Usually they don't survive to a second weekend, but that doesn't really matter. The industry is now structured so that one weekend of suckers is usually enough.

Which returns me to the Oscars. Given the tone of most releases these days, Chris Rock was the perfect MC. His opening monologue was painfully convoluted, making sense only as an attempt to offend the right people (notably President Bush) without offending the wrong people (notably the millions who voted for Bush but might also shell out nine bucks to see Chris Rock movie).

Jon Stewart will probably do better at hitting the Zeitgeist between the eyes. But even more than Rock, he is going to have a major problem cutting through his own thick carapace of irony. Maybe he won't have to; maybe the good people writing his material will drop all pretense that this is a ceremony of artistry, excellence, and achievement (including lifetime achievement). But that would be a mistake, for no other reason than it would lose audience share.

Consider: most movie fans look at the Academy Awards the way the two children in the urban folktale look at the room full of pony manure. Either they can turn away, disgusted by all that you-know-what, or they can start digging, inspired by the idea that there must be a pony in there somewhere. The latter approach is worth keeping, even when the irony mounts to the ad-buzzing ceiling, because somehow this industry keeps turning out a couple of good films a year. Of course, if Munich wins Best Picture, I will be tempted to lay down my shovel.

Posted by mbayles at 10:48 AM

February 28, 2006

Video Virgil: Cast Them Out To Sea

I won't mention any names, but the so-called critics who reviewed The Beautiful Country (2004) for the New York Times, Austin Chronicle, and Boston Phoenix should be set adrift on the ocean a long way from land. How can people be so oblivious to others they see everyday - for example, the guys scraping the dishes in the really cool restaurants where really hip movie critics eat lunch?

Pardon the outburst, but I recently suffered through a meeting where several otherwise smart people relieved themselves of the opinion that it's easy to become an American: "Just go shopping and watch the sports channel." To say otherwise - to suggest that immigration is a painful ordeal that involves loss as well as gain - is to violate Section One, Paragraph Two of the 2001 Anti-Anti-Americanism Act, which defines patriotism as voluntary cessation of all cerebral activity.

And, I might add, of all emotional empathy. The Beautiful Country, about the son of a Vietnamese woman and American GI who in 1990 embarks on a journey to find both parents, is not gulity of "sentimental excess." Neither is it a "melodrama" either "earnest" or "shameless." Look up these words, fellow critics. "Sentimental" means indulging in stock, predictable emotion. "Melodrama" means moralistic, black hats and white hats. None of that applies to this film, which deals with a timely and politically loaded topic with rare subtlety, intelligence, and understated humor.

Just to cite one example: When Binh (Damien Nguyen) finally reaches New York and becomes a kind of indentured servant in Chinatown, forced to pay off the exorbitant fee charged for his illegal passage, he learns from a fellow worker that as a dui boi (the term means "low as dust") he could have "flown to America for free" (a reference to the 1988 Amerasian Homecoming Act). Amazed to hear that America actually welcomes people like him, he decides immediately to flee his job and go find his father in Texas. (He has learned his father's whereabouts from his mother, whom he located in Ho Chi Minh City and would have stayed with, had it not been for an incident that forced him to leave.)

By now Binh has evolved from a ragged outcast in a rural village (where he was eking out a Cinderella-like existence with relatives) to a rugged individualist in the classic grain. He has seen corruption and cruelty but has not succumbed to either. He is convincingly (not sentimentally) resourceful, brave, stubborn. So when he is stopped in mid-flight by his boss, a tough character who clearly cannot believe one of his captive workers just walked out on him, Binh (by now a veteran poker player) pulls a major bluff: "I am American citizen now," he says, "I can go where I want."

If this were a melodrama, the boss would drag Binh back and make him pay for such impudence. But this is not a melodrama, so the boss just stands there giving this odd young man a quizzical look. Then with a philosophical (and appreciative) shrug, he says, "Congratulations!" And off Binh goes, to a reunion with his father (Nick Nolte) that is one of the most moving yet unpredictable such scenes I've ever seen.

Rent this beautiful film, and if any of those aesthetically challenged critics should hail you from a leaky raft, my advice is: Let 'em sink.

Posted by mbayles at 9:33 AM

February 12, 2006

Sense and Sensibility on the Chesapeake

On a misty April morning in 1607, three tall, square-rigged English ships glide up the wide, luminous estuary of what is now the James River. Instead of discovering the land from the ships, we discover the ships from the land, as a band of Powhatan Indians trot along a ridge, marveling at what must have been the seventeenth-century equivalent of alien spacecraft.

Yet wisely, The New World does not presume to plumb the Powhatans’ reactions. Rather the camera floats behind their backs, offering a detached perspective on the whole majestic scene. Best of all, writer-director Terrence Malick decided at the last minute to accompany this scene not with the pretty noodlings of James Horner’s commissioned score, but with music that is truly sublime: the murmuring, rising, surging prelude to Wagner’s Das Rheingold.

“The soul of beauty is distance,” wrote Simone Weil, and Malick’s best work bears this out. No other living director can touch him when it comes to natural panoramas, filmed here by Emmanuel Lubezki entirely on 65mm stock (the first time this has been done since Kenneth Branaugh’s Hamlet). In several such glorious sequences The New World gives something like a God’s-eye view of that first, fraught encounter between the Old World and the New. Film critics who do not thrill to such achievements should take up another line of work.

But film is not just a visual art, it’s also a narrative art. And while Malick has hold of a terrific yarn (at least, Captain John Smith thought so when he invented parts of it), this film tangles the spinning of it. By now, everyone knows that Pocahontas was only 11 when she begged her papa, Chief Wahunsonacock (a.k.a Powhatan) not to puree Captain Smith’s head. From this fact sober historians deduce that the two could not possibly have been lovers. (In a dark corner of my mind, a little voice squeaks, “Why not? This is Virginia.” But let us not go there.)

Historians also note that such staged reprieves were a customary form of hospitality among powerful Algonkian chiefs. Which makes sense, really: if your host has the power to crush your skull but refrains from doing so, then you are all the more likely to follow your visit with a thank-you note. At any rate, Malick does not waste much time on this legendary scene, choosing through blinding chiaroscuro and tortured camera angles to make it appear less an historical set piece than a reject from the Stoned Otter Indie Film Festival.

Malick is respected for his screenplays. But never before has he attempted anything quite this ambitious. In his first successful feature, Badlands, about a killing spree carried out by two aimless teenagers in South Dakota, he had a headline-grabbing story to tell. In Days of Heaven, he had the idiom of his native Texas to set a wry, laconic tone. In The Thin Red Line, he had James Jones’s World War II memoir to adapt. Here, by contrast, there is no clear guide, only multiple, conflicting, obscure sources. And for all his cinematic gifts, Malick seems somewhat lacking in the one thing most needful: historical imagination.

Somewhat, not totally. If you want the historical imagination strangled in its crib, see the 1953 clunker, Captain John Smith and Pocahontas (Peyton Place in deerskin), or the 1995 Disney cartoon Pocahontas (Barbie and Ken in a canoe). The New World, by contrast, commits one major anachronism but also works to correct it. In brief, it goes from overripe romanticism to something more sober and ultimately moving, then (unfortunately) back to romanticism. It should have quit while it was ahead.

The romanticism comes first, in the form of a prolonged sunlit dalliance between Smith (played broodingly by Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (played brilliantly by 14-year-old Q’orianka Kilcher, the striking daughter of a Swiss mother and a Peruvian Indian father). These love scenes are served just the way a certain middlebrow audience prefers, with a dollop of Mozart on top and a sprinkling of bad poetry:

Love, ... shall we not take what is given?
... There is only this. All the rest is unreal.

Father, where do you live? In the sky, the clouds, the sea?
Show me your face, give me a sign ... We rise, we rise.

I gag, I gag. It is possible that the hard-charging Smith was stopped in his tracks by unexpected tenderness for this almond-eyed Lolita. And it is possible that Pocahontas, by all reports an extraordinary individual, was a Kierkegaardian animist before she became a good Anglican. But please. When such characters speak, they need to sound as though they are living in their own time, not ours – or worse, the time of D. H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan, when pale-faced aesthetes sought transcendence through sexual intercourse, Native Americans, and (where possible) sexual intercourse with Native Americans.

Eventually Smith leaves, and a bereft Pocahontas allows herself to be wooed and won by John Rolfe, the man who taught the world to smoke. Why does Smith leave? The reasons are not entirely clear in the 135-minute version now showing in theaters, but it seems he has difficulty sustaining the proper romantic mood through a winter of starvation, relieved only by the generosity of the Indians, and a summer of warfare, ignited when Powhatan (August Schelling) and his brother Opechancanough (Wes Studi) realize that the English are planting corn and planning to expand their holdings.

Believing Smith dead and held captive by the English, Pocahontas loses her spark until the sweet-faced Rolfe (Christian Bale) delicately rekindles it. Interestingly, he does so without ceasing to be thoroughly, and unapologetically, English. This is not Dances With Wolves: not all the virtue is on the Indian side. For example, the female of English species arrives in Jamestown looking cold and pasty, quite the unappealing dish compared with our heroine. But surprise surprise, the English matron put in charge of “civilizing” Pocahontas turns out to be a wise and kindly soul whose lessons are eagerly absorbed by her pupil.

At this point, the film takes a turn for the better, not because it favors the English way of life over the Powhatan, but because it does not, for the sake of political correctness, grossly distort the choice that Pocahontas did in fact make.

Things stay on the right track until the dramatic peak of the story, which is the return of Captain Smith. In a marvelously depicted voyage to England, Pocahontas (baptized Rebecca) lends her charm to what is essentially a PR campaign on the part of the floundering Virginia Company of London. These scenes are magical in their ability to evoke a sense of astonishment similar to that found in the abovementioned scene of ships on the James River. For a fleeting moment, my eyes felt were gazing not at another movie set version of merrie olde England but at the amazing apparition London must have been to Pocahontas.

But Pocahontas is troubled. Having learned that her first love is still alive, she grows cool toward Rolfe, prompting him to risk everything on an arranged meeting between her and Smith. The encounter, which takes place in a formal garden, is both subtle and powerful. Smith is much the same, but through some alchemy of voice and expression Farrell makes this man who was wild and romantic amid the tall grass of Virginia seem shrunken and coarse amid the London topiary. Pocahontas, by contrast, has grown in stature. Elegant and restrained, she takes Smith’s measure, and almost before she realizes it, she has decided to stay with Rolfe. “Did you find your Indies?” she asks Smith before they part. He gives her a long look, then says, “I may have sailed right past them.”

Cut, that’s a wrap. No need for Smith’s next line: “I thought it was a dream, what we knew in the forest. But it was the truth, the only truth.” Romance isn’t the only truth here, that’s the whole point. When Malick re-edits this film for DVD, the word is that he plans to make it longer. Great, if this means further development of the clash between English and Powhatan, and more lingering vision of strange worlds. But please, cut the New Age mush. It’s important when you have a great story not to sail right past it.

Posted by mbayles at 8:08 PM

February 7, 2006

Stupid, Actually

Feeling a little stressed this past weekend, I decided to watch Love, Actually. Cursed with major recall of past movie reviews, I knew it had been swathed in praise for being both funny and heart-warming. Just what the doctor ordered.

Bring on the malpractice suit. It's not easy to waste talents like Colin Firth, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Laura Linney, and Alan Rickman. But this movie makes donkeys out of them all. The only one left standing on two legs when the hee-hawing stops is Bill Nighy, playing a burnt-out rock star trying to make a comeback. And he does it by being totally asinine from the git-go.

The biggest jackass of all, though, is Hugh Grant pretending to be a newly elected Prime Minister in love with his slightly plump secretary. It used to be said of Jack Lemmon that his acting consisted mostly of a patented collection of tics. At least Lemmon had a collection. Grant has only one tic: a prissy expression that says, "Terribly sorry, old chap, but I'm feeling dreadfully horny just now."

if you want to laugh at a British Prime Minister, allow me to recommend the immortal BBC series Yes, Prime Minister and its predecessor Yes, Minister. I wrote about them a while back (see Reprise). And if you want heart-warming, don't miss The Notebook. Among other things, it stars two veterans, Gena Rowlands and James Garner, who are gracious enough to allow themselves to be upstaged (upscreened?) by the two excellent young actors, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, who portray their younger selves.

Posted by mbayles at 12:20 PM

February 2, 2006

Entertained and Lived to Tell About It

Intrepid Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam has ventured into what he aptly calls "the brave new world of movie theaters." Now that most sane human beings would rather watch DVDs at home than put up with the noise, grime, ear-bleeding sound, poor projection, and unpleasant atmosphere of the average cineplex, some of the big theater chains are experimenting with ways to make the experience more ... er, rewarding. From Beam's amusing account, it sounds about as rewarding as an evening at the airport. And they still haven't figured out how to compete with the fact that at home, a call of nature can be dealt with simply by pushing the "pause" button.

Posted by mbayles at 10:59 AM

January 31, 2006

"For No Particular Reason That Anyone Could Explain"

There are two films called The Battle of Algiers. One is a cult film of the late 1960s, shot on newsreel stock and depicting the 1950s struggle of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) against the French colonial occupation. Despite its skilled use of non-actors and its gritty neorealist feel, this movie contains "not a single foot" of documentary material (as director Gillo Pontecorvo often pointed out). Nonetheless, it was embraced as a training film of sorts by radicals from Berkeley to Belfast.

The other Battle of Algiers is a hot contemporary property, reportedly screened at the Pentagon in September 2003 and now available in a 3-disc set replete with retrospective documentaries and interviews with interested parties from Pontecorvo to Richard Clarke. This film's depiction of Arab radicals assassinating police and planting bombs in public places could not be more timely.

The two films are the same, of course. Only the world is different.

Or is it? With cold objectivity, The Battle of Algiers shows how the French authorities undertook to "decapitate the tapeworm" of the FLN, when that organization was assassinating policemen and planting bombs in public places. Because each FLN cell had only three members, the French found it necessary to torture hundreds of prisoners before cornering and killing the last two.

The film ends with a postscript: "For no particular reason that anyone could explain," there was an uncontrollable popular uprising two years later, which led to Algerian independence in 1962.

If you detect a note of tragic irony here, then perhaps you'll detect the same note in Clarke's comment that "it surprised the hell out of me" when Al-Qaeda seemed to grow two new heads for every one cut off. After 35 years, shouldn't counterterrorism experts be able to tell the difference between a tapeworm and a hydra?

Posted by mbayles at 8:38 AM

January 24, 2006

The Weak Man With the Sponge

I believe it was Lord Acton who said the strong man leads with the dagger, followed by the weak man with the sponge. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reverses this order by giving Oscars to makeup artists but not to stunt men and women.

This is unfair but understandable, given the size of most film star egos. Makeup artists work closely with actors, chatting and flattering while using those cute little sponges to paint great white patches on their faces. (I once had a makeup lesson with a Hollywood professional, and it's amazing how much time they spend whiting out your features then re-drawing them for the camera.)

Stunt performers, by contrast, rarely work with actors. According to a piece by Mark Yost in today's Wall Street Journal, most actors do not know any stunt people, and do not want them to get awards. As I say, this is all too transparent. Why call attention to the fact that while Tough Guy Hooper is chasing the bad guys off the cliff, you are in your luxury trailer getting a massage?

Posted by mbayles at 10:07 AM

January 21, 2006

"Let's Try And Not Hack This Up"

Why do people watch TV shows like Showtime's "Masters of Horror"? Why don't they just curl up with a good book, like Justine by the Marquis de Sade? Much as I enjoy being scared out of my wits (though preferably not before bedtime when alone in the house), I do not like depictions of savage cruelty. The proper attitude, I know, it to treat this stuff as a campy joke, saying, "It's so over the top, it's funny." But it's not.

Anyway, given the entertainment industry's current contest to see who can induce the most vomiting among viewers, I was amazed to read in the New York Times that Showtime actually cancelled a film, Imprint, by the "deliberately and spectacularly transgressive" Japanese director Takashi Miike. Why, in this post-censorship age, would a feisty cable channel suppress such a hot property? Not for any good reason, I fear. Take a look at Kehr's plot summary:

In mid-19th-century Japan, an American journalist ... goes in search of the prostitute he has fallen in love with but was forced to abandon. The American's quest leads him to a mysterious island zoned exclusively for dimly lighted brothels, where one procurer, a syphilitic midget, introduces him to a relatively sympathetic prostitute ... Hideously deformed, the right side of her face pulled into a permanent rictus, the nameless woman tells the American the terrible story of what happened to his lover, throwing in at no extra charge the story of her own hideous childhood as the daughter of impoverished outcasts. As the woman's story continues, her revelations, scrupulously visualized, become more and more outlandish, and her descriptions of the violence done to the missing prostitute, who was suspected of stealing a ring from the brothel's madam, become more cruelly imaginative and difficult to stomach. But the most shocking imagery is yet to come, as the nameless woman describes her collaboration in her mother's work as an abortionist.

In other words, it's OK to drool over the agony of grown men and women, and a way-cool director like Miike can even toss in a child or two. But fetuses, forget. There are too many reactionaries in high places who get uptight about that sort of thing.

Still, the good people at Showtime have some moral qualms. Asked why he didn't order more cuts in the film, series executive Mike Garris replied, "It is what it is. It really was, let's try and not hack this up." How nice to know that, unlike human beings, horror films are too precious to mutilate.

Posted by mbayles at 10:24 AM

January 20, 2006

Smile and Say "Camembert de Châtelain"

In case you are one of the lowly mortals who must work this week instead of clomp around Park City in your all-weather film-watching boots, here is the Sundance website. A few minutes' scrolling and clicking will turn up a worthy tidbit or two, but for me the overwhelming impression is of a lot of silly people who think art consists of having your picture taken. And I'm not talking about the tourists.

Posted by mbayles at 11:22 AM

January 19, 2006

Video Virgil: The Harmonists

A couple of years ago I had the privilege of being guided through a Berlin record shop by the eminent jazz musician Sigi Busch. With a kindly didactic air, he urged me to buy a 3-CD box called Comedian Harmonists: Mein kleiner grüner Kaktus. At the time my ignorance of all things German was sufficiently great that I did not realize I had acquired a gem. (It didn't help the box had no liner notes.)

Aber jetzt, Sigi, sehe ich den Licht! My language skills may still be in the dark, but about the Comedian Harmonists I have seen the light. Founded in 1928 by a down-and-out baritone named Harry Frommermann, this all-male close-harmony sextet blossomed in the 30s, then slowly withered under the stifling cultural policies of the Third Reich. Three of the six were Jewish, and much of their material was by Jewish songwriters, so even though their immense popularity protected them for a while, they eventually split up, some to bitter exile and others to the dead end of official Nazi "folk music."

For a sprightly, touching telling of this tale, see The Harmonists (1997), a fine small film directed by Joseph Vilsmaier, best known the US for his grim but riveting Stalingrad (1993) (definitely not the Hollywood war treatment). If you share my (now jettisoned) prejudice that most German films are excessively marinated in angst, The Harmonists will cure you. It's not best music flick I've seen, and there are quite a few formulaic moments. But what's fascinating is how this German production avoids the truly tired formulas of Anglo-American films about the same period. In particular, the ever-so-Ayran bass, Robert Biberti (Ben Becker), is beautifully drawn, without an iota of the usual caricature.

If Americans had made this movie, the focus would have been on the group's ethnic diversity: three Jews (one from Poland), one Bulgarian, and two Germans coming together in perfect harmony, only to be destroyed by evil of racism. True enough, but wisely The Harmonists focuses less on the obvious political lesson than on the innocent, antic spirit of these young fellows as they cavort their way to the edge of the abyss. Let me put it this way: If you loved Life is Beautiful, then you'll probably like The Harmonists, and not only because the actor playing Harry (Ulrich Nöthen) looks like Roberto Begnini.

For more on the Comedian Harmonists, check out this website.

Posted by mbayles at 11:10 AM

January 14, 2006

Director's Cut (Burn, Shock, Waterboard ...)

Fear not, this thread won't last forever. But lately I've been troubled by the ubiquity of graphic torture scenes in mainstream movies, not to mention TV series - and even more bothered by the seeming inability of critics to address the moral dimension of what has clearly become an audience-pleasing shtick.

HBO is currently showing Man on Fire (2004), an action flick by Tony Scott, brother of Ridley, starring Denzel Washington as Creasy, a burnt-out Special Forces vet hired by a wealthy family in Mexico City to protect their little daughter Pita (Dakota Fanning) against mercenary kidnappers. The role seems tailored for Washington, because it exploits both ends of his spectrum: cold and bitter before befriending Pita, warm and sweet during their friendship, then cold and bitter again after the kidnappers grab her.

The torture occurs throughout the film's second half, when, believing Pita to be dead, Creasy takes bloody revenge on a colorful cross section of Mexico City's residents. About the various agonies we're invited to enjoy, let me just say that it is impressive what a resourceful inquisitor can do in a parked car using only duct tape, a sharp knife, and a dashboard cigarette lighter.

To be fair, some reviews of Man on Fire made the quasi-moral point that these scenes would be more thrilling if Creasy were trying to save Pita, not just wreak vengeance. But this implies that torture is, or should be, a routine part of police investigation. Indeed, the only honest cop, a visiting Italian Interpol officer (Giancarlo Giannini), seems content to let Creasy do his thing, because after all, "He can go places we can't."

Beyond this, the critics directed some outrage at the film's violation of the P.C. Code of Ethnic Representation, Chapter 27, Subsection 12, which reads: ""Films set in Latin American cities shall not have a preponderance of positive Anglo and negative Latino characters." Point taken. But while we're being thin-skinned, perhaps we should be a bit touchier about Hollywood's easy acceptance of a world where the rule of law has lost all meaning.

In the end, Creasy finds a way to redeem himself that gives the closing scenes unusual moral as well as emotional depth. But here the reviews were especially dispiriting. For instance, David Ng of the Village Voice concluded that this portrait of a killer trying to save his soul made the film "a right-wing fever dream, or perhaps just another day at the office for our country's leaders." When baroque evil is accepted as art, and genuine goodness dismissed as propaganda, then criticism has come to a sorry pass, indeed.

Posted by mbayles at 10:53 AM

January 7, 2006

What a Pain

One of the strongest arguments against torture was made recently by Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent twelve years in the Soviet gulag.Writing in the Washington Post, he noted that “Torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery ... Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one’s sources. When torture is condoned, the rare talented people leave the service, ... and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists.”

If you need further evidence of this point without leaving the comfy precincts of entertainment, consider Hostel, the latest from Eli Roth, a writer-director who makes his mentor Quentin Tarantino look like Euripedes. Marketed as a campy horror flick, Hostel is something much uglier: an open invitation to share the pleasures of Bukovsky’s playground. (“There is a place where all your darkest, sickest fantasies are possible,” rasps the trailer.) When distributed overseas, this vomit will do a fine job of souring America’s feeble efforts at public diplomacy.

Posted by mbayles at 10:23 AM

December 22, 2005

Of Lions, Witches, and Noseless Demons

Two of the top-grossing movies in the world right now are The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire . Strange, isn't it, that these huge, loud, public spectacles began life as small, quiet, private children's books, suitable for bedtime reading?

Bedtime stories lead to dreams, though, and these dreams are now shared by millions. So perhaps it's worth asking whether there's any substance to the squabble over the role of magic in Harry Potter versus the allegorical Christianity in Narnia.

The Judeo-Christian objection to sorcery and the occult goes back to Deuteronomy, so it's hardly surprising that orthodox believers would object to the Harry Potter trope of brilliant lovable youngsters escaping the dull bourgeois world of non-magical humanity ("Muggles") for the fantastically exciting Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

But are the Harry Potter stories really about magic in this traditional sense? They revel entertainingly in its lore and trappings, to be sure. But the real source of the stories' emotional resonance is their vivid portrayal of a generation growing up amid an only slightly more fantastic version of 21st-century technology ( especially the extraordinarily transformative powers of digital electronic media as displayed in the films themselves!).

Like Harry, young people are better at commanding these powers than their elders. But unless they are studying micro-electronics, they have only a weak grasp of how their wonderful toys work. Hence the need for a few aging mentors who understand the origins and secrets of the magic they teach. (It is no accident that Hogwarts itself should resemble a pipe dream of Oxbridge.) But this creates a problem: these mentors are also supposed to impart great wisdom, not to mention an ethical code. And at this, they are pretty poor.

So while I admire the Potter books and (especially) films, I also think their religious critics have a point. Does the world of Hogwarts have a moral compass, apart from the vague benevolence of senior-citizen witches and wizards? The question matters in the real world, not just the fantasy one, and becomes more urgent as the films make the Faustian journey toward ever more malign magic. To judge by the raves of critics whose vocabulary extends from D (for "dark") to E (for "edgy"), these frail counselors may not be able to hold out against the fabulous noseless hideousness of Voltemort.

Meanwhile, Narnia has the opposite problem. The richly animated Aslan is a wonder, even before he starts growling in Liam Neeson's mellow baritone. But here the evil isn't vivid enough. The White Witch may satisfy religious viewers who grasp the symbolism of white witchcraft being just as bad as black. But to a generation raised on state-of-the-art bitchcraft, how scary are those frozen dreadlocks?

Moreover, Narnia lacks the contemporary resonance of Potter. Its human characters command no magic, being instead at the mercy of the unknown forces that transport them to and fro. They aren't passive, and the moral transformation of Edmund is more sophisticated than any lesson offered in Harry Potter. But compared with the students at Hogwarts, what do these kids actually get to do?

They get to wage a picturesque medieval war against the wrong sort of demons, in order to become the rightful rulers of the kingdom. Excuse me, but this is 2005, and it is hard to imagine a saga based on the divine right of kings packing the same emotional wallop as one about state-of-the-art wizardry being employed for evil purposes.

Posted by mbayles at 6:42 PM

December 19, 2005

Eye Candy

Memoirs of a Geisha is doing a brisk business in Japan, despite many cultural false notes. (Personally I am still wondering why all the US ads show Zhang Ziyi, the Chinese star of the film, as having blue eyes. What, she's not beautiful enough with the eyes God gave her? Why not make her a blonde, and call the movie "Memoirs of a Shiksa"?) But I digress. From press reports I gather that Japanese audiences adore the film, just as they adored the Tom Cruise missile, The Last Samurai (2003). And probably the reason is simple: these films are glorious to look at. The phrase "eye candy" comes from the TV producer Aaron Spelling, whose vapid productions are now justly forgotten (I don't think Love Boat even qualifies as camp.) But let's face it. Some confections are irresistible. If a chocolate Santa comes from Fassbender & Rausch, who cares if he looks like Howard Stern?

Posted by mbayles at 12:56 PM

December 17, 2005

Big-Oil-Ze-Bub

Beyond its dazzling settings, acting, and soundtrack; beneath the twists and turns of its fantastically pretzled plot; Syriana is based on a pretty dumbed-down idea: the root of all evil in the world - the Great Satan, if you will - is American Big Oil.

Wearing Hermes and Rolodex instead of horns and tails, the bad guys are instantly recognizable: glit-edged attorneys, greedy politicians, colluding bureacrats, and gimlet-eyed techno-warriors all orchestrating the assassination of Prince Nasir Al-Subaai (Alexander Siddig), the lone progressive leader in an unnamed Arab Emirate who is about to sign an oil deal with the Chinese.

Prince Nasir is Doing the Right Thing, because according to the prince's American consultant (Matt Damon), "the Americans are sucking the Emirate dry" and the prince cannot modernize or redistribute the wealth while "the Americans keep making demands."

Here is where the dumbing-down kicks in. The Chinese, evidently, are not going to make any demands or mismanage any natural resources. Is this because they have modeled their environmental policies on the wisdom of Chairman Muir ... er, Mao?

In another plot twist, Big-Oil-Ze-Bub is depicted as being directly responsible for terrorism. Not because the United States has invaded Iraq - that little detail is not mentioned in the film (too controversial, perhaps). No, the Evil One encourages terrorism through unfair employment practices. Early in the film, a group of Junior Managerial Demons summarily fire a hundred Pakistani workers, an unhappy event which leads directly to two sweet-faced young men being recruited by a suicide bomber cell.

Again, the meaning is clear. This sort of thing would not happen under the enlightened management policies of Beijing. (Or maybe we wouldn't hear about it, under the enlightened media policies of Beijing?)

I could go on. But suffice it to say that this film, like so many other "thought-provoking" Hollywood confections, provokes only one thought: Better the Devil we know ...

Posted by mbayles at 10:46 AM

December 4, 2005

I'm Available

My ever-elusive dream of snagging a Pentagon R&D contract may now be coming true. I understand why the military never asked me to design weapons systems, desert camouflage, or toilet seats. But now that they're in the propaganda business, I respectfully offer my services as a PR consultant.

My fees are pretty high, but not unreasonable when you consider how esoteric this PR stuff can be. Only a high-priced expert like me can understand some of this stuff. Here's one example:

If America wants to revive its Cold War image as a beacon of human rights, the perhaps we should not make illegal detention and torture a staple of our entertainment. Lately I've been struggling with an addiction to 24, the first TV series to succeed in turning the war on terrorism into family entertainment. Famous for its steroidally suspenseful plots that unfold in "real time," 24 contains scene after scene of systematic bloodletting, bonebreaking, electrocution, and summary execution of familiy members - acts performed as often, or more often, by the good guys as by the bad. The series is thoroughly gripping, and while the torture bits are not my reason for watching, they do make the show feel ... well, cutting edge.

How this plays overseas, I will be happy to speculate if the powers-that-be put me on retainer. Call me greedy, but I'm not the one driving up the price of common sense.

Posted by mbayles at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)

November 23, 2005

Video Virgil: Crash and Cranberry

Here's my recommended double bill for Thanksgiving: Crash, this year's dark film about ethnic collisions in Los Angeles, and What's Cooking (2000), a sunnier film that treats the same topic by following four L.A. families - one African American, one Jewish, one Latino, one Vietnamese - through the ups and downs of Thanksgiving.

Both fillms pull off the difficult trick of fully developing multiple plots and characters in the tight space of two hours. This is much harder to do in a feature than in cable TV, where series of 12 hours or more provide room for novelistic expansion. (Whether or not the results are novelistic, we can debate on a case-by-case basis.) Here, suffice it to say that the editors of Crash and What's Cooking, Hughes Winbourne and Janice Hampton, deserve kudos for fitting everything in without apparent strain.

Now for the critics. Read the reviews, and you will conclude that Crash is a better film than What's Cooking. Why? Because Art (upper-case A) rubs our noses in grim reality, and entertainment (strictly lower-case e) coddles us with feel-good fluff. Well, there is such a thing as feel-good fluff, and for a long time I avoided seeing What's Cooking because I assumed it would coddle me, and being coddled makes me grim.

I was wrong. There is a third category, one not generally acknowledged by the herd of independent critics: the category of delight. Like every city, Los Angeles does not lack for grimness. And while Crash cops out of the tragic endings it builds up to (perhaps because of audience testing?), it certainly convinces us that ethnic and racial friction can lead to tragedy.

But having lived in L.A. for several years, I do not accept the view that grimness is all. Just as the city does not lack for grimness, neither does it lack for delight. And the richly seasoned humor, pathos, and realism of What's Cooking captures that delight in a way that really does feel good. So for that, let us give thanks.

Posted by mbayles at 9:58 AM

November 20, 2005

Al-Hollywood

How do Arabs and Muslims around the world see America through the prism of Hollywood movies? For a sanguine account, see this article by Joseph Braude in the Los Angeles Times. It has been a long time since I have shared Mr. Braude's optimism about the export of American pop culture being good for our country's image. But it would be nice to agree with him!

Posted by mbayles at 3:02 PM

November 16, 2005

Video Virgil: Carmen and No Bull

On the theory that we bloggers should always write about what interests us, I hereby devote this entry to the 1984 film verson of Bizet's Carmen, directed by Francesco Rosi and starring Julia Migenes-Johnson and Placido Domingo. It is available on DVD from Netflix (bless Netflix).

Full disclosure: I just returned from a two-day conference on Carmen, for which I read the novella by Prosper Merimee, listened to the supreme recording with Maria Callas, and watched Rosi's marvelous film, which was shot on location in Spain and brims with movement and color, including two authentic bullfights.

Of course, authentic bullfights come at a price. Having opera stars lip-sync their way through action-packed scenes that they could not possibly perform while actually singing, creates a strange hybrid. One of my fellow participants, a seasoned performer, found it painfully distracting to watch Migenes-Johnson, Domingo, Faith Esham and the rest produce all that glorious music without any visible muscular strain. And he was right; it is distracting.

But so are the artifices of the stage. And if, like me, you are more movie buff than opera lover, then prepare to be as thoroughly seduced by this Carmen as Don Jose was by that gypsy girl who shattered his heart merely by throwing a flower at it.

Posted by mbayles at 9:55 PM | Comments (1)

November 5, 2005

SEX (NOT REALLY), LIES (A FEW), AND VIDEOTAPE (NONE)

Let me start on a positive note. For a film made in the present climate that dramatizes the 1953-1954 clash between Edward R. Murrow, the broadcast personality who pioneered the TV news magazine, and Joseph McCarthy, the Republican senator who gave anti-communism a bad name, Good Night, and Good Luck has many fine qualities. If you like rich black-and-white cinematography; precision-tooled acting (especially David Strathairn as Murrow); artful skeins of cigarette smoke; meticulous re-creations of early-1950s offices, TV studios, and hotel bars; and jazz standards sung by the incomparable Dianne Reeves, then you will relish every minute of this film, which was co-written and directed by George Clooney (who also plays CBS news producer Fred Friendly).

Or almost every minute. Curiously, the critics have ignored this movie’s most glaring artistic flaw: a subplot about Joe and Shirley Wershba, two Murrow associates who kept their happy marriage a secret because of CBS’s anti-nepotism rule. This is possibly the dullest subplot of modern times, made even duller by the casting of Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson, a couple who generate about as much spark as Kent cigarette stubbed out 50 years ago.

Why include this deadwood? My first impulse, naturally, was to blame the vast left-wing Hollywood conspiracy. By wasting valuable screen time on the Wershbas, Clooney and his boys avoided dealing with other, less boring subplots, such as the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the Maoist revolution in China, the perjury conviction of Alger Hiss, the successful testing of an atom bomb by the USSR, and the invasion of South Korea by the communist North.

But then a quick web-surf revealed that the Wershbas (now retired and living on Long Island, Joe after a 20-year career at "60 Minutes") were consultants to the film. So perhaps in exchange for sharing their valuable memories, they were granted the pleasure of seeing their youthful selves depicted onscreen. At the risk of coming off as a heartless movie critic, I must note that this pleasure is not likely to be shared by the rest of us.

But enough artistic quibbles. The reader is doubtless slavering for political red meat, especially since Clooney recently underwent the standard Midlife Mulholland Mutation from skylark star to activist asteroid. “He’s really interested in politics and social justice,” says friend and co-writer Grant Heslov. Last summer, Clooney attended the G-8 summit in Edinburgh, where he and other celebrities enlightened world leaders about poverty. To his credit, Clooney’s modest admission that the summit “taught me a lot of things” sets him apart from show-biz know-it-alls like Bono and Alec Baldwin.

But please. Of all the political districts burned over by righteous Hollywood, anti-communism is the most scorched. Again, it is to Clooney’s credit that he did not head straight for ground zero: the 1947-1948 hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that resulted in the despised blacklist and the jailing of the Hollywood Ten – also known as the Unfriendly Ten (as in “unfriendly witnesses”). I believe it was Billy Wilder who remarked about these individuals: “Two were talented, the rest were just unfriendly.”

No, Clooney went for the slightly less burned-over district of TV news in its early fluid state, before it hardened into the monstrous shape we know and love today. Not surprisingly, the red meat here is anti-anti-communism – or if you prefer, red-baiter-baiting, performed at the highest level of photogenic integrity. The film neither stresses nor denies the fact that Murrow came late to this cause. By the time his program, “See It Now,” jumped on the anti-McCarthy bandwagon, it was already loaded with radio commentators, print journalists and editorialists, congressmen and senators from both parties, military brass, and the Eisenhower White House.

But no matter. If this movie achieves anything beyond flogging the well pulped carcass of McCarthy, that achievement will be its portrayal of how unfree TV was during its so-called Golden Age. One set of pressures was technological. Back in 1954 there was no such thing as videotape, so the closest “See It Now”got to actually seeing it now was sending a film crew into the field, shooting a few thousand feet, shipping the film back to New York, and hoping it could be developed and edited in time for the live broadcast. (All TV broadcasts were live at the time.)

This is what Murrow and Friendly did for their first indirect swipe at McCarthy: send a film crew to interview Milo Radulovich, a lieutenant in the air force reserve who had been forced to resign on the grounds that his father and sister were communist sympathizers. Radulovich came off well in the interview and was soon reinstated, an outcome depicted in the movie as a clear victory – although, as Glenn Garvin of the Miami Herald wrote recently, “Would we be comfortable these days with an Air Force officer with a security clearance whose father belonged to al Qaeda?”

The next attack was more direct, and less costly. Just as Frank Capra had made brilliant anti-Nazi propaganda by recycling clips from Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, so did Murrow and Friendly make brilliant anti-McCarthy propaganda by recycling clips of McCarthy’s TV appearances dating back to 1950. As Andrew Ferguson has pointed out, the result was “a compendium of every burp, grunt, stutter, nose probe, brutish aside, and maniacal giggle the senator had ever allowed to be captured on film.” These same clips are blended into the movie so seamlessly, test audiences asked who was the actor playing McCarthy. (That’s easy: James Gandolfini wearing extra eyebrow pencil.)

The second set of pressures on TV news was commercial. Next to Strathairn’s, the film’s finest performance is Frank Langella’s as CBS president and chairman William S. Paley, a man who admired Murrow but also had to reckon with such harsh realities as the priorities of advertisers and the preferences of the viewing public. The scenes between the narrowly focused Murrow and the wider-ranging Paley are beautifully done, and convey a real lesson: to speak truth to power, you must have power yourself. And it doesn’t hurt if your suit is also bespoke.

The third pressures were, for lack of a better word, professional. After the burp-and-grunt portrait of McCarthy aired, the critic Gilbert Seldes, who was a friend of Murrow’s and no friend of McCarthy’s, wrote a scathing piece in which he raised important questions about the character-assassinating powers of TV and the limitations of the “equal time” principle. According to historian Michael Kammen, “Liberals were generally puzzled by Seldes’ concerns about precedent and high principles. The damaging substance of Murrow’s achievement seemed easily to outweigh what might happen, if, at some future time, the white hats became black hats and the process were reversed.”

Needless to say, these questions are still with us. And so are the three troublesome tendencies identified by Murrow in a 1958 speech before the Radio-Television News Directors Association in Chicago: “Decadence, escapism, and insulation.” Since Clooney re-created this speech as bookends to Good Night, and Good Luck, it seems only appropriate to evaluate the movie in these terms.

It isn’t really decadent, unless you count the smoking. As Jack Shafer pointed out in Slate, Strathairn is the best screen smoker since ... well, I’d say since Jeanne Moreau picked the tobacco off her tongue in Jules et Jim. Nor is it escapist like Julia, Fred Zinneman’s 1977 film about two women of the left, one of whom worships the other. Since Julia was based on the memoirs of Lillian Hellman, some critics wondered why it starred two actresses, Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. The answer, of course, was that Hellman herself was two women, one of whom worshiped the other.

But Good Night, and Good Luck is insular. As mentioned, the only character whose mind ranges wider than a smoke ring is Paley, and his worries are mostly about the bottom line. And the decision not to have an actor play McCarthy – to reduce the dreaded witch hunter to a flickering shadow in a cathode ray tube – places the political reality of the time at an even greater remove than usual in such films. In the end, the movie is so swaddled in layers of artistic self-referentiality that it totally shuts out the concerns that made McCarthy’s witch hunt possible. Maybe the communists of the 1950s were not under every bed or in every State Department closet. But neither were they trick-or-treaters in black pointy hats. Some witches are real.

Originally published in the Weekly Standard, October 31, 2005

Posted by mbayles at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2005

Talk About a Sleeper

While in Washington recently, I saw a new film called "The War Within." After sitting though any number of movies where members of the audience laugh at inappropriate moments -- especially scenes of cruelty and violence -- it was refreshing to be among film-goers who seemed genuinely sobered and moved by what they were watching.

Why? This is the most powerful depiction I have seen of contemporary terrorism. It's the story of a young Pakistani studying in Paris who becomes a suicide bomber after being arrested by American agents and "rendered" to Pakistan for torture.

Now, my expert informants tell me that very few torture victims become terrorists, which makes sense in a way. But the proximate cause of the young man's decision is less important than the ambivalence he experiences upon arriving in New York and witnessing the life of an old boyhood friend and his family. Their happiness attracts and repels him in equal measure, and his inner conflict is exquisitely portrayed.

Maybe I'll write more about this, but in the meantime, go see this film if it is anywhere near you, because it won't be in the theaters long. It opened in New York, got a tepid and evasive review from the Times, then disappeared. If you know why, please write and tell me.

Posted by mbayles at 8:53 AM | Comments (1)

October 4, 2005

Catch Up

According to my students, most of whom are compulsive instant-messengers, I am a very bad person, because while neglecting to feed my blog I have also failed to post an "away" message.

Here are two links that may help to explain, if not justify, recent neglect. One is an article in the Washington Post about the role of popular culture, including the movies, in shaping America's image abroad. The other is an online discussion that I did for the Post the next day.

Original article

Online chat

More catch-up soon...

Posted by mbayles at 1:01 PM | Comments (0)

September 11, 2005

Video Virgil: Make 'Em Laugh (Not Squirm)

A friend writes with this question:

"Have you seen the new 'thing' in Hollywood, the 'let's see how far we can go before we are told we are crass' comedies like 40 Year-Old Virgin and Wedding Crashers? God they are, at times, insanely funny, but I couldn't help but think that they are pushing the envelope in a pretty big way ... I went with my 16-year-old son to Virgin, and I am certain he wished he were with ANYONE other than his dad."

I confess to having deliberately missed these, due to extreme prejudice against Hollywood wanker humor that
goes back several years, when I bailed out of Something About Mary, and would have done the same with the original American Pie if I hadn't been a guest at the house of friends who insisted on watching it with their young teenage kids. On this occasion I was definitely on the side of all awkward 16-year-olds.

But before you cast me as the Church Lady, consider my delight in the fourth segment of Jim Jarmusch's little known Night on Earth (1991). You don't have to sit through the whole five segments about taxi drivers and their nighttime passengers in five different cities. Just cut to the one in which a Roman cabby (played by Roberto Benigni in his prime) picks up a gloomy elderly priest (Paolo Bonacelli) who agrees, against his better judgment, to hear the cabby's confession. The whole thing is in very bad taste, I assure you. But my rule is: when it gets that funny, it can be as gross as it wants.

Posted by mbayles at 8:35 PM | Comments (0)

September 3, 2005

Crunk News Network

After yesterday. I don't believe I'll watch CNN again for a long time. Aaron Brown's bosom can heave all it wants about "race and class" in flood-ravaged New Orleans; his sighs look hypocritical against that endlessly looping clip of a demented-looking black man woofing at the camera by the Superdome.

Some negative images are newsworthy - looting and dead bodies, for example. We don't want to see them, but up to a point, we must.

But why this guy? Why, out of thousands of people in and around the Superdome, did CNN choose to put a face on the suffering with this bad imitation of "crunk" rapper Lil Jon? Is it because crunk just happens to be the most popular style of rap in the country right now? Is CNN is competing with MTV?

Say it ain't so, Aaron. Your bosom heaves so professionally, I almost forget that your reporters can't seem to make contact with any of the thousands of ordinary people enduring the hunger, thirst, filth, heat, and desperate anxiety of this terrible week. Like President Bush staging a Bill Clinton bear hug with two young girls who despite their brown skin were not African Americans, your intrepid reporters seem incapable of stepping across the divide and actually interacting with "them."

Everyone's bashing the public sector this week, but one of the things it has been doing right is cover this story. In one hour last evening, PBS's "Newshour with Jim Lehrer" reported more about the crisis than ten hours of CNN. Not only did they interview a real reporter, Peter Slevin of the Washington Post, who left the CNN folks bobbing in his wake, they also found some down-to-earth, sensible African Americans to testify what they were going through. Let's hear it for bold investigative reporting!

Posted by mbayles at 10:54 AM | Comments (1)

August 30, 2005

Reply to Rachel

Thank you for your very thoughtful response to my cultural diplomacy piece and discussion (see Rachel's comments and links below). You raise the essential and most vexed issue of all, which is the use and abuse of liberty in a supposedly self-governing regime. I offer some general comments on this below.

But since this is a film blog, let me first mention a movie that for me captures this issue in an incredibly timely way: My Son the Fanatic (1997), based on the novel and screenplay by Hanif Kureishi. It is about an Indian taxi driver (played brilliantly by Om Purim) in the north of England, whose son is so offended by his father’s assimilation to decadent British society that he joins a fundamentalist Islamist group.

The father’s decadence consists of having a crush on a hooker whom he drives around the city, and at the end of the workday, drinking a scotch and listening to his beloved jazz records. But to the son's new mentors, the old man might just as well be a violent rapist shooting heroin and listening to death metal. Fanatics don't make distinctions.

But distinctions must be made: first, between ordinary mortals struggling to behave decently and perfectionists who seek to reconstruct human nature by any means necessary; and second, between the humane loosening of puritanical constraint and the out-of-control indulgence of appetite.

As you so wisely note, people around the world are drawn to the freedoms enjoyed in America. But they are also repulsed by the abuse of these freedoms - and this is true of ordinary mortals, not just fanatics. When people in traditional societies look at us, what they see most glaringly is what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty,” or freedom from tradition, religion, family, restraint of all kinds. As Berlin argued, this contrasts with the “positive liberty” to participate in the governing of one's country - and oneself.

Right now our public diplomacy (such as it is) touts "freedom" as our highest ideal, meaning self-government. But our popular culture often (not always) touts negative liberty. It would be nice to think we could craft a cultural diplomacy that conveys this distinction. But first we must remind ourselves that it exists.

Posted by mbayles at 10:21 AM

August 20, 2005

The Talented Mr. Minghella

This summer I've spent a fair amount of time gazing gloomily at the mountain of pony manure that comprises the movies, and feeling like laying down my shovel. Then I watch a DVD interview with the British writer-director Anthony Minghella, and suddenly I'm digging again.

The interview is on the DVD of Minghella's directorial debut, Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991), a low-bucks, high-bang portrait of a woman grieving for her husband after his sudden death from a sore throat. If that sounds a bit odd, the film is odder still, ranging from twee comedy (don't you just love foreign words?) to Sophoclean tragedy, all effortlessly brought off by the superb Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman (as the grief-summoned ghost of the husband).

A successful playwright and screenwriter, Minghella turned down a chance to start directing with an episode of Inspector Morse (where he was a regular writer), because as he says, if he was going to screw up, he preferred to do so on an obscure film rather than on the top-rated TV show in Britian.

He didn't screw up: Truly won several prizes and launched his directing career, which now includes The Talented Mr. Ripley, The English Patient, and Cold Mountain.

All three are literary adaptations, and it's interesting to read Minghella's comments about the process in a recent online interview.

In that interview he talks about two of the authors, Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient) and Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain), as though they were Tolstoy and Turgenev. He is being too modest. Both films are a bit on the precision-tooled, precious side, like the novels. But they are also livelier and more robust than the novels, and surely Minghella knows that.

Which way will Minghella jump now? Into the manure, it would seem from his recent venture into executive producing: the vacuous dud The Interpreter. Personally, I wish he'd go back to writing original screeplays for ponies like Juliet Stevenson.

Posted by mbayles at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2005

Reel Faster, This One's Getting Away

The saga of the dying movie theater continues...

In today's NY Times, Bruce Weber reports on the latest attempt of the theater chains to lure adults out of their homes to watch movies: "luxury" theater accommodations.

One megaplex is described as "an ornate, Mediterranean style" temple suggesting "the ambience of a las Vegas hotel." Another pays "homage to the faux-Mediterranean" look of Boca Raton. Several boast baby-sitting services (don't ask), cash bars, and full course meals - all before the happy patrons sink into their "plush wide seats" next to "small tables with sunken cup holders" to watch ... The Dukes of Hazzard.

Where to begin? First, "homage to the faux" sounds a tad too authentic for me - better to wait for the next generation: perhaps the sand-castle imitation of the papier mache version of the virtual hologram copy?

Second, the luxuries on offer sound suspiciously like those of old-fashioned dinner theater, only without the thrill of a semi-live performance.

Third, do they really expect to sell all that booze and then show a two-hour movie without what the Germans call "eine pinkel Pause"?

And fourth ... The Dukes of Hazzard?

Posted by mbayles at 1:23 PM

August 11, 2005

Video Virgil: The Wire 2

David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter who created the powerful HBO series The Wire, has strong political views. For example, he told Reason magazine that he regards the war on drugs as pointless:

A guy said, "Well, what is the solution? Give me the paragraph; give me the lede. What’s the solution, if not drug prohibition?" I very painstakingly said: "Look. For 35 years, you’ve systematically deindustrialized these cities. You’ve rendered them inhospitable to the working class, economically. You have marginalized a certain percentage of your population, most of them minority, and placed them in a situation where the only viable economic engine in their hypersegregated neighborhoods is the drug trade. Then you’ve alienated them further by fighting this draconian war in their neighborhoods, and not being able to distinguish between friend or foe and between that which is truly dangerous or that which is just illegal. And you want to sit across the table from me and say ‘What’s the solution?’ and get it in a paragraph? The solution is to undo the last 35 years, brick by brick. How long is that going to take? I don’t know, but until you start it’s only going to get worse." And the guy looked at me and went, "But what’s the solution?"

Yet at the same time, Simon made it clear that he did not intend The Wire to be protest art:

The Wire will have an effect on the way a certain number of thoughtful people look at the drug war. It will not have the slightest effect on the way the nation as a whole does business. Nor is that my intent in doing the show. My intent is to tell a good story that matters to myself and the other writers -- to tell the best story we can about what it feels like to live in the American city.

And indeed, the entire first season unfolds without a single reference to the loss of jobs in America's inner cities. Instead, it dramatizes how disconnected the residents of West Baltimore housing projects are from the rest of society. The only man with a job is a janitor who, having turned state's witness, is shot to death in the first episode.

It's disappointing, therefore, to encounter a bunch of political speeches in the second season of The Wire. This time, the police are investigating links between a Greek crime syndicate and the stevedores' union, whose Polish-American boss, Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer) needs cash not to line his pocket but to grease the palms of politicians willing to vote for improvements in the city's dying port.

Like the drug kingpins in the projects, Frank is a vivid and convincing character. And here, too, the economic plight of the city is made abundantly clear through the unfolding of a well designed plot. So it's a real flaw to have Frank spend so much time on his proletarian soapbox. This sort of thing rang hollow back in the 1930s, and today it rings both hollow and weirdly antique. The point is, we get the point!

Posted by mbayles at 12:01 PM | Comments (1)

August 8, 2005

Quote for the Day

Fellow AJ blogger Drew McManus writes: "I wonder if David Carr has some strategy for the movie business to improve?" Good question. In the immortal words of Sol Hurok: "If people don't want to come, nothing will stop them."

Posted by mbayles at 12:32 PM

Bold Business Analysis

In the Business section of today's New York Times, David Carr reports that the "boomer moguls" (Spielberg, Geffen, et al) never achieved the total control of the movie-making process enjoyed by the first generation of studio bosses.

Stay awake, it gets better. The article's conclusion is worth quoting for the sheer beauty of its illogic:

The people who built the current version of Hollywood did so by coming up with movies that people felt compelled to see - not as a matter of marketing, but as a matter of taste. What was once magic, creating other worlds in darkened rooms, has become just one more revenue stream. The movies have been commoditized [sic] to even more lucrative ends, and the men who made it so will shift in their seats as the credits roll.

Now we know. The movies are losing money because thay have become "commoditized," and if they would just quit being so damn "lucrative," the audience would return. OK, it's a slow news day in August. But even the crickets work harder than this.

Posted by mbayles at 7:00 AM | Comments (0)

August 1, 2005

Video Virgil: Hooked

Most fans of the 3-year-old HBO series The Wire started out sniffing and skin-popping: one hour-long episode a week, with the habit building up slowly over time. Me, I went straight to mainlining the stuff: over the last several days I've watched the whole first season, and until the next batch of DVDs arrives, I'm stuck here with a severe jones, craving my next dose of sorry-ass Baltimore cops, drug dealers, mixed-up kids, and cynical city officials.

Thanks to rap, movies, and video games, the hardcore urban setting of this show feels familiar to millions of viewers who have never been anywhere near places like the projects of West Baltimore. But here's the amazing thing about The Wire: unlike most of the entertainments that trade in what hip-hop pioneer Bill Stephney calls "the ghetto orthodoxy," it doesn't sensationalize the place or the people. Rather it humanizes them.

To appreciate this, you have to get past the language, which (as was once said about the British Army) uses "fuckin'" to indicate the approach of a noun. Even the middle-class characters talk like this, and after a while, it has the same effect as the childhood game of repeating a word until it loses all meaning.

But that's my only complaint. The point of comparison here is The Sopranos, a show I would admire more, were it not for its juvenile compulsion to push out what's left of my envelope. The Wire couldn't care less about my envelope. In this first season, the drug kingpins meet in a "gentleman's club," but the camera doesn't ogle the bobbling silicone. People get killed, but there aren't any Tarantinoesque scenes of inept gangsters chopping up a body in a bathtub.

Instead, The Wire is about something truly shocking: power and politics, especially as played out within small organizations (the drug ring) and large bureaucracies (the police department). If you start tracing the parallels between these two worlds, and noting the similar ways they exploit and then stifle what's best in human nature, then you'll be getting the point of The Wire. But I warn you: it's addictive!

Posted by mbayles at 5:30 PM

July 29, 2005

Computers Can't Draw

According to the Canadian Broadcast Corporation's website, the Walt Disney Company has announced the closing of its last "hand-drawn animation studio": DisneyToon Studio in Sydney, Australia. All animated features will now be "computer animated." The clear implication, deliberate or not, is that the human hand (and mind and imagination) is getting squeezed out of an increasingly automated industry.

Not so. Computers can't draw. Nor can they design characters. And if I'm not mistaken, neither can they map out the broad gestures and movements that carry animated action. These tasks have always been done by artists, and (until computers get as creative as people) they always will be.

For a fascinating glimpse into the process, rent the DVD of The Incredibles and watch the interviews and production features that accompany the film. Or try Prince of Egypt, the Dreamworks version of Exodus that, despite major liberties (the correct word is really idiocies) regarding the substance, is technically one of the most brilliant animated features ever made, combining hand-drawn and computer techniques.

Computers are not the enemy. What they can do, very efficiently, is the laborious work of "in-betweening": that is, filling in all the small incremental movements between Nemo hearing a scary noise and Nemo turning around to swim the other way. This work has been outsourced to other countries for years; and it is true, the better in-betweeners sometimes rise to the top and become master animators and character designers. So in that respect the closing of DisneyToon is a loss.

But in-betweening is not the only way, or even the best way, to learn how to draw. Training the eye and hand is basically the same process it always was, so my best advice to the aspiring animator is take a good drawing class!

Of course, this is all coming from a frustrated animator who confesses to hoping that a billioniare will give her the budget to hire the best classical draftsmen and women and make glorious grownup animated features of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, followed by the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

P.S. After posting this entry, I caught up with the article in the Chicago Sun Times about the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, currently in the headlines as the designer of the Fordham Spire. After watching Calatrava sketch a tree then a figure, Sun Times architecture critic Kevin Nance is so impressed he exclaims, "What a Disney animator he would have been!" Guess I'm not alone in my grownup animation fantasy...

Posted by mbayles at 10:18 AM

July 28, 2005

Hustle & Annoy?

Haven't seen the new "crunk" rap movie, Hustle & Flow, but from what I can gather, it is not sitting well with a number of African-American commentators. See articles by Stanley Crouch of the New York Daily News and Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe, just to name two.

Posted by mbayles at 9:33 PM

July 26, 2005

That's Entertainment

Recently I compared Hotel Rwanda (excellent) with Sometimes in April (excellent in a different way: the lead actor cannot compete with the brilliant Don Cheadle, but the film itself feels more authentic). Anyway, Rwanda is at least a visible blip on the media screen these days, which is ironic, given what Nicholas Kristof writes in today's New York Times about the unspeakable neglect of Darfur by the so-called network news. Maybe ten years from now, a dramatic film about the genocide in Darfur will win a prize at Sundance, and we can all enjoy feeling bad about what we didn't do today.

Posted by mbayles at 10:20 AM

July 21, 2005

Video Virgil: Saint Che...Not

I loved The Motorcycle Diaries. Warm, funny, emotionally powerful, it takes the viewer on a visually stunning journey northward along the mountainous spine of South America with two young Argentinians, dreamy Ernesto and earthy Alberto, who rattle along like a mid-20th-century Don Quijote and Sancho Panza on an oil-spitting Rocinante, until they discover their destiny, which is to trade their bourgeois future for a life devoted to the poor.

I also loved the soulful performances of the two stars, Gael Garcia Bernal and Rodrigo de la Serna, and of all the other actors and non-actors who grace the screen. In the best sense, this is not Hollywood.

But it is also not true. Maybe Ernesto "Che" Guevara was brave, kind, and loving when young. But he didn't stay that way. In a 1967 address to his fellow communists, he highlighted the importance of "hatred as an element of the struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine."

To place this remark into the context of Guevara's actual career, see this article by Peruvian historian Alvaro Vargas Llosa in the current New Republic. After reading that essay, you may want to retire your Che T-shirt and pick up your Cervantes.

Posted by mbayles at 10:45 AM

July 15, 2005

New Releases: Beyond the Sea

The best thing about Beyond the Sea, Kevin Spacey's uneven biopic about Bobby Darin, is its sympathy for the awkward position Darin occupied, in the 1950s and 60s, between pop music and rock'n'roll. Born Walden Robert Cassotto in 1936, Darin was only one year younger than Elvis. But he was not a Southerner; he was an Italian-American from the Bronx, and his dominant musical influences were not the great black and white stars of rhythm & blues, country & western, and gospel, but the great Italian pop singers, from Tony Bennett to Sinatra.

Pop was the residue of the big band era, a music focused on the fine-grained, microphone-magnified vocalism disparaged as "crooning" by ignorant critics. It could be that, but when practiced by singers as subtle and brilliant as Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Torme, or Sarah Vaughan, it approaches the sublime. (See related entry under Soundtrax.)

All the more pity today's young 'uns don't know any better than to call this whole body of work "lounge music." Blame their parents: for the 60s generation, pop was the ancien régime against which their beloved rock'n'roll was the revolution.

So Darin turned to pop in 1959 and never let go (I will pass in respectful silence over his early 70s foray into "folk"). For all its faults (and there are many), Beyond the Sea is worth seeing for the sheer effort Spacey makes to replicate that bygone sound and attitude - an effort all the more poignant because Darin himself was replicating it. Bless him, he was an anachronism all his life.

Posted by mbayles at 11:00 PM

July 14, 2005

All Of The Above

It's been fun speculating about the box office slump - almost as much fun as watching the record industry collapse under its own weight. But I'm going to have to find another subject to write about, because Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle has summed up the entire situation.

With particular delight I recommend Mr. LaSalle's "Reason 6: Going to the Movies on a Saturday Night Has Become a Fairly Hideous, Repulsive Experience":

Art houses and repertory houses are exempt from this observation. Those theaters preserve the moviegoing experience as a fun, rewarding collective activity. But to spend Saturday night going to see a major release at a multiplex can be more stressful than going to work the first Monday after vacation.

It costs $10 for a ticket and almost another 10 for something at the concession stand, and you have to wait in line to buy both. To get a decent seat, you have to get there 20 minutes before the show starts, and once it starts, you have to sit through seven or eight trailers, then advertisements for TV shows and then commercials.

By now, 50 minutes have gone by and you haven't seen anything. Finally, the movie comes on, and it's lousy. It ends, and you get banged around to the exit and then have the fun of fighting with your fellow patrons to get out of the parking lot. And half of them are so jacked up by caffeine and screen violence that they think they're Vin Diesel.

Posted by mbayles at 9:48 AM

July 12, 2005

Set Straight

I thank Dr. Taso G. Lagos for the following correction of an important detail in my July 4 posting, "The East is Green":

You indicated that since 1948 it has been illegal for movie studios to produce, distribute AND also own the theaters in which the films are shown. This practice is called "vertical integration." While it was illegal after 1948, since 1985, under the Reagan Administration, those prohibitions [the Paramount Consent Decrees] have been relaxed and now most major movie houses in America are owned by the major studios (the only exception is Disney, which at this writing, does not own any interest in movie theaters). So in Time Warner opening up theaters in China, this is hardly unusual. It has been going on here for 20 years, although silently ... By "silently" I mean that it was not widely publicized that this change took place in the mid-1980s. So far as I know, only the Wall Street Journal reported about it, and it was not a big deal.

Posted by mbayles at 9:46 AM

July 8, 2005

Up Close and Personal

Maybe the world is past wondering what goes on in the minds of suicide bombers. But what about a suicide bomber who is deeply conflicted about her mission and could go either way? In the aftermath of the London attacks, I recommend a quiet but powerful little film called "The Terrorist."

Written and directed by Santosh Sivan, this 1999 film relates the story of Malli (Ayesha Dharker), a young Indian woman who, wishing to revenge the death of her brother, volunteers to assassinate a political figure by serving as an official greeter who while offering him flowers will detonate a bomb hidden under her clothing.

The camera follows Malli through every step of preparing, then waiting, for the explosion that will rip apart her body and that of her victim. I put it that way because Malli's body, in all its vitality, youth, and sensuous delight, is very much the star of this film.

Malli doesn't talk much; she listens. She listens to her handlers: ideologues who, while not religious (the film is based on the 1991 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi), clearly see the life of ordinary people as vastly inferior to the death of glorious martyrs. But Malli also listens to birds, breezes, bubbling brooks, and her own heartbeat - not to mention the voices of other human beings who do not share the fanaticism du jour. And in the end...

Posted by mbayles at 7:00 PM

London Comments

About yesterday's events, I recommend today's blog by Clive Davis, a friend and colleague in London. The quotes and comments he collects offer a more thoughtful treatment than the endlessly repeated bits of news being ... well, endlessly repeated. 

Posted by at 1:50 AM

July 6, 2005

No Room At Hotel Rwanda

Amazingly, a better film than "Hotel Rwanda"aired on HBO this March and is now available on DVD. Don't be fooled by the wistful title; this drama set during and after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda is about as uncompromising as a film can be, and still be watchable.

Mercifully, "Sometimes in April" does not show much more graphic violence than "Hotel Rwanda" does. But by focusing on the lives of a half-dozen people for whom refuge in the Hotel Milles Collines was not an option, it brings us closer to the full horror of those terrible 100 days, when hate-maddened Hutus slaughtered almost a million of their Tutsi and Hutu countrymen.

What I find most impressive is the skill with which writer-director Raoul Peck weaves a handful of personal stories into the fabric of a national catastrophe. This is hard to do well, as most would-be historical storytellers soon discover.

But after a slow start, we become totally absorbed in the fates of Augustin (Idris Elba), a Hutu soldier who refuses to join the killing; his wife Jeanne (Carole Karemera), a Tutsi who tries to escape with her children; Augustin's brother Honoré (Oris Erhuero), a radio host who as the story opens is being tried by a 2004 war crimes tribunal for having broadcast hate propaganda; and finally, Martine (Pamela Novete), the headmistress of a Catholic school attended by Augustin's and Jeanne's daughter.

These are urban middle-class people and therefore easy for Westerners to identify with. But unlike "Hotel Rwanda," which further cultivates the Western viewer by including sympathetic American and European characters, "Sometimes in April" draws us toward the rural poor, including some older people (not actors) whose brief appearances evoke both the searing emotion and the exhausted indifference felt by anyone who survives events like those of April 1994.

A personal note: both films cut away to Washington, DC, where the Clinton administration was stepping on its own tongue trying not to use the G-word, because to call what was happening "genocide" would have obliged the world to take action. It's easy to denounce well fed officials for doing nothing, but I was living in Washington at that time, and that same month was the publication date of a book I had been working on for a long time. So I spent those 100 days flogging my book. This is never a pretty sight, but it is even less so in the sobering hindsight provided by this film.

Posted by at 3:00 PM

July 4, 2005

The East Is Green

Ever since 1948, when the Justice Department won its lawsuit, U.S. v. Paramount, against the major movie studios, it has been illegal for a company to produce and distribute movies while also owning the theaters in which they are shown.

If you read carefully the article in today's New York Times about the high hopes of Hollywood in China, you will notice that the rule laid down by that 1948 case does not apply there. For example, Time Warner is investing not only in production and distribution but also in "more than 70 cinemas around the country in preparation for a potential theater-going boom."

Americans like to think that our movies are just so wonderful, the world can't get enough of them. On the whole, we reject the left's now stale-sounding accusations of "US cultural imperialism." But despite the genuine popularity of our films worldwide, there has always been an element of coercion involved, as well as a distinctly double standard regarding business ethics.

This is an old story. During World War I, the fledgling studios made domestic propaganda films for the Committee on Public Information, and after the war, Washington repaid the studios by pressuring war-weakened European governments to allow the import of US films. Without this help, countries like France (then the leading supplier of films in the world) would have been more successful in keeping the US out of European markets.

This process got racheted up after World War II, when despite much rhetoric about free markets, Washington exerted extremely heavy pressure toward the same goal, while in the process allowing the studios to engage in monopolistic practices overseas that were outlawed at home. In a nutshell, they were allowed to form a cartel, the Motion Picture Export Association, that conspired against foreign theater owners by acting as a single distributor, booking films in �blocks,� threatening to cut off supply if theater owners showed non-US films, and allocating foreign profits based on domestic box-office receipts.

The studios were also given a huge advantage over foreign competitors by the Informational Media Guaranty Program (1948), which reimbursed them in dollars for all films sold to countries with soft or inconvertible currencies. And finally, the Marshall Plan for Europe contained provisions linking financial aid to the willingness of foreign governments to reduce or eliminate import quotas on American films.

A few years later, TV followed same pattern. In 1960 the Television Program Export Association enlisted the aid of the State Department in overcoming foreign resistance to �Batman,� �Mod Squad,� and �The Fugitive.� Especially after the movie studios began producing TV shows, they made the same case for the small screen that they had made for the large - that exporting entertainment was not just good business but also good PR. As Harrison Salisbury once said, �American pictures are the best and most forceful medium for selling the United States.�

This may still be good business, but is it good PR? That is a question very much on my mind these days...

Posted by at 1:45 AM

June 30, 2005

Good News! More Manure!

In a fine piece outlining all the reasons why movie theaters are hemorrhaging money these days, the Baltimore Sun quotes the upbeat projection of Dan Fellman, president of Warner Bros. distribution: "We could still have that surprise this year."

What surprise? "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" in July, and "The Dukes of Hazzard" in August. And if these fail to reverse the tide (perish the thought), other industry spokesmen predict a really big summer next year, when millions of excitement-starved theatergoers will flock to blockbuster sequels like "Mission: Impossible 3," "X-Men 3," "Superman Returns," "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," and "Indiana Jones 4."

Usually I am the child who believes that with all this crap, there must be a pony in there somewhere. But even I get tired of digging when the pile just keeps getting higher.

Posted by at 10:00 AM

Video Virgil: Seniority

Neither Istv�n Szab� nor Ronald Harwood are getting any younger, and it has been a long time since W. Somerset Maugham topped the bestseller list. Maybe that's why several critics praised Annette Bening's performance in "Being Julia" but disparaged the film itself, adapted from Maugham's 1937 novel, "Theatre," about a 40-something actress in 1930s London trying to stay in the game.

Roger Ebert described the "basic material" as "wheezy melodrama"; Mark Kermode of the Guardian called the film "contrived fluff"; and Slate's David Edelstein found aspects of it "shopworn" and "old-fashioned." These comments are surprising, given the perennial appeal of the 1930s and 40s in films of all kinds.Why pick on "Being Julia"? The answer, I fear, is that it is about a theme most film critics do not find interesting: how a woman of a certain age needs just the right mixture of defiance and resignation.

In the few films that bother to treat women over 40 as people rather than stock characters or props, defiance is the preferred mode, because the assumption is that (to quote Cole Porter) the gals who are no longer hot tomatoes are yesterday's mashed potatoes. If Stella Can't Get Her Groove Back, why go on living? This is why, when Julia starts an affair with a much younger man, Tom (Shaun Evans), we are supposed to applaud her brave, futile gesture but then wait for her to lose him and then fade bitterly away.

She doesn't, of course, which is why so many women admire this film. But here's where the resignation comes in, because defiance only takes Julia so far. She cannot be hotter than Avice (Lucy Punch), the gangly blonde who seduces both Tom and her husband (Jeremy Irons). But she can be cooler. After gloriously upstaging Avice, and everyone else, Julia does something women in movies rarely do: she dines alone, content to be in her own company. If this is wheezy, contrived, shopworn, and old-fashioned, please tell me what other movies made it so.

Posted by at 9:30 AM

June 29, 2005

Back Soon

I haven't exactly gone fishin', but I have been away for too long. If the reader will bear with me, SP will be back up to speed in a day or two. And soon it will have the new format you are noticing in the other AJ blogs. Thanks for checking in.

Posted by at 8:00 AM

June 4, 2005

Video Virgil: Deep Grey

Are the American occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq heroes or villains? The world is full of righteous souls who know the answer and will brook no argument. But to anyone who reflects on what those forces have been asked to do, the answer looks grey.

That is why, when the time comes to make a meaningful film about America's war on terror, I nominate a South African, Ronald Harwood, to write the screenplay, and a Hungarian, Istv�n Szab�, to direct. Harwood's credits include "The Pianist" (2002), "Cry, the Beloved Country" (1995), "The Browning Version" (1994), "The Dresser" (1983), and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (1970); while Szab�'s include "Sunshine" (1999) and "Mephisto" (1981).

Harwood and Szab� recently collaborated on "Being Julia" (2004), about an aging actress in 1930s London. But more pertinent to today's distressing headlines is "Taking Sides" (2001), a remarkable film about the interrogation of the eminent German conductor, Wilhelm F�rtwangler, by U.S. occupation authorities right after the war.

Set amid the rubble of bombed-out Berlin, "Taking Sides" stars Stellan Skarsg�rd as F�rtwangler, a proud, weary highbrow who served but also defied the Nazi regime; and Harvey Keitel as Major Steve Arnold, an edgy, aggressive lowbrow who takes very much to heart the de-nazification directive not to be fooled by German charm or intelligence.

Already you can see the difference between "Taking Sides" and the long line of Hollywood flicks stretching back to "Judgment at Nuremberg."  In most of those films, the victorious Yanks have all the advantages, not just the obvious moral one but civilizational ones, as well. With the possible exception of Jimmy Cagney hamming it up as a Coca-Cola carpetbagger in Billy Wilder's hilarious "One, Two, Three" (1961), victorious Yanks in Hollywood movies tend to be just as cultivated as the Germans, only much nicer about it.

Not Major Arnold. He doesn't know Beethoven from Br�ckner, and he could give a flying fig. What he cares about is screwing any sonofabitch who played footsie with the bastards responsible for Bergen-Belsen. He is a combination rare in the movies: a crude bully who also happens to be right. And the only reason we applaud his bullying is because it is in service to a political system that (most of the time) places curbs on the freedom of bullies. By making the victor a worse man than the vanquished, this film achieves a tragic sense that is unusual, to say the least, in this genre.

The tragic sense is heightened by terrific performances by two young actors playing Major Arnold's assistants: Birgit Minichmayr as Emmi Straube, the daughter of one of the officers who plotted to kill Hitler; and Moritz Bleibtreu as Lt. David Wills, a German-born Jew whose parents sent him to America just before the rest of the family were engulfed. Although "Taking Sides" errs in not emphasizing fully the evidence that led to F�rtwangler's eventual acquittal, it more than makes up for that by revealing the deep grey depths where justice is never more than an approximation.

Posted by at 2:20 AM

May 25, 2005

Hacks and Flacks: The State of Arts Criticism

Columbia University reported Monday that it is closing its well known National Arts Journalism Program. AJ helmsman Doug McLennan and fellow blogger Jan Herman have been posting insightful commentary about this, and the LA Times has published a long piece about the decline of traditional criticism.

I have a lot more than two cents riding on this debate, but for the moment, let me ante up the following:

The overriding problem is what linguist Deborah Tannen calls "the argument culture": the media�s habit of framing every topic as a highly polarized debate between two extremes, even when this is not appropriate. This has a distorting effect on many issues, including the arts. Just think about the quality of discussion, even among reputable critics, on issues like government funding of the arts; violence in entertainment; censorship and the Internet; and the "canon" in the humanities.

These powerful cross currents can be tricky for critics and other arts journalists to negotiate, especially they are operating in a culture that does not have any coherent, agreed-upon standards by which to make aesthetic judgments. Too often, critics and reviewers muddle along, using several competing standards, each inherited from a different phase in the history of Western art.

What critics have trouble doing is developing their own robust, well grounded taste. "Taste" is an antique concept but an irreplaceable one. Most people, even cultural theorists who would not grant the concept any credence in their academic work, exercise taste all the time in their non-academic life. Just ask them about the last movie they saw, or (even better) the music their kids are listening to.

But because taste is something of a taboo topic in academia, many well credentialed critics do not feel very confident of their own judgment, which makes them vulnerable to being swept up by one or the other side in the so-called culture war. Next thing the hapless critic knows, he or she has become a hack: someone who writes about the arts from an overly ideological perspective.

Hacks exist on both sides of the political fence. But hackdom is always a dead end.

On the left, the hack soon reaches an impasse: while making a principled case for total artistic freedom, he or she must accept ever greater excess from what I call the culture of transgression - art whose sole purpose is to �shock the bourgeois� (assuming this can still be done).

On the right, the hack faces a contradiction: on the one hand, a libertarian shrug that assigns all evaluative functions to the market; and on the other, a righteous crusade that looks askance at any work not didactically committed to religious and moral uplift.

Caught in this cross current, the unwary critic steers by his or her subjective judgment. Readers accept this, because it is typically assumed that aesthetic judgments are wholly subjective. But danger arises when the rudderless subjectivity of the journalist meets the blandishments of PR people in the arts, to say nothing of entertainment. Before you can say "flack,� the critic is repeating the latest press releases and dropping the hottest names.

These pressures can be resisted, but only if the budding critic takes the time to think through the essential questions of aesthetic standards: where they come from, how they have changed, what their truth claims are, and how they operate in a diverse, decentralized, pluralistic culture like ours. I don't know for sure, but I doubt whether the case for arts journalism programs is often made in these terms.

Posted by at 1:15 AM

May 23, 2005

Redford Logs On To SP!?!

You can interpret the following however you like, but I am choosing to conclude from it that my recent postings have caught the eye of Robert Redford. (As you read this, Mr. R., don't forget about the latte.)

From the New York Times (May 23, 2005):
ARTS, BRIEFLY
Compiled by BEN SISARIO

"Sundance to Open Theater Chain"

"The Sundance Group, owned by Robert Redford, will open a chain of theaters for independent, documentary and foreign-language films, as well as some studio projects, The Associated Press reported. The new chain, Sundance Cinemas, is to be operated by the theater management team of Paul Richardson and Bert Manzari, who have worked together since opening a theater in 1975. The number of new theaters was not announced, but Mr. Manzari said Sundance Cinemas is looking nationally for locations."

Posted by at 12:10 PM

May 21, 2005

One-Horse Town Gets It Right

Colleen Schmoyer writes from Annville, PA:

"Take heart, for even in my one-horse town of Annville near Hershey,
Pennsylvania, we have a benevolent man that renovated a 30's-era theatre above and beyond its original glory, but kept the good parts (like the removable-type marquee) and added an adjoining, hip cafe. The Allen shows a mixture of first- and second-run mainstream and independent films, as well as playing host to some jazz and live theatre events. People increasingly come from Harrisburg (the capital of Pennsylvania) just to see this little piece of heaven. Maybe it will indeed catch on - Harrisburg itself has in recent years opened a now-successful art film house of its own."

Link to this theater and see what you think -- can it be franchised?

Posted by at 12:15 PM

May 20, 2005

Hate Those Sticky Floors

An article in today's Christian Science Monitor asks whether the new "Star Wars" prequel will reverse the overall decline in theater-going. Surely not! Long before we humble consumers figured out that we were not alone in preferring to watch DVDs at home, the industry had us pegged. For some years now, Hollywood has been happy to take its real profits from shiny little discs ("'Blood Out Tha Wazoo'! Own it now!") than from all those dreadful cineplexes with their icky decor, endless ads and previews, crummy projection and sound, and sticky floors.

Yet much as I dislike the cineplex, I regret the prospect of no more movie-going. Like railroads, movie theaters are so full of memories and meanings, it hurts to think of them as obsolete. At the moment such feelings attach mainly to those theaters that have a sense of place and history. Fortunately, many of these are now part of the Landmark chain, which does a pretty good business showing first-run independent and foreign films.

But Landmark theaters do not exist in many parts of the country, and that leaves millions stuck with the choice between cineplex and home. I wonder, then, why some smart entrepreneur doesn't enter this market with a new kind of cineplex.

Think Borders. Think Starbucks. Millions of people gravitate to these places, because while not historic or exclusively highbrow, they offer pleasant, interesting surroundings and fare suited to human beings over the age of 12. Why not do the same with a chain of small, classy movie theaters? They could even serve latte! And although this is probably too much to hope for, an audience built on such theaters might even stimulate the production of more midsize movies suited to human beings over the age of 12.

Posted by at 12:45 PM

May 18, 2005

"Terrible Americans" Defended

I regret to report that you, dear readers, have failed to send enough cash to get me to Cannes this year. No matter. My British colleague Clive Davis offers this report on the fulminations of Lars von Trier, the Danish director who specializes in showing the "dark underside" of America (although he's never been here, because he is afraid to fly). What can I say to a guy who complains that my country is occupying 60 percent of his brain?

Posted by at 7:20 AM

May 13, 2005

Kingdom of ... uh, whatever

There's something missing in "Kingdom of Heaven," Ridley Scott's latest eye-popper about the Second Crusade. But most of the reviews don't tell you what. Instead, they blame the star, Orlando Bloom, for lacking "true gravitas" (Austin Chronicle). Some express regret that Russell Crowe was not available to play Balian, the humble blacksmith who ends up defending Jerusalem against the Muslim general Saladin. Others bash Bloom for being a "pretty boy" barely able to swing a sword.

I will grant that Bloom is not the industrial-strength warrior type. But neither is Elijah Wood, who as Frodo in "The Fellowship of the Rings" did a pretty good job of battling Orcs. No, the problem is the script. Written by one-time novelist and first-time screenwriter William Monahan, it is painfully laconic and annoyingly noncommittal.

I know, I know. Hollywood is under a lot of pressure to eliminate human language from its product. Research has shown that popcorn-munching skateboarders don't like "talky" movies. Foreigners don't like subtitles. And DVD-watching couch potatoes don't like dialogue about stuff they didn't bother to learn about in school. But give me a break. This film wants to make a statement, and you can't do that without talking.

What is the statement Scott wants to make? In a world riven by religious fear and hatred, he seeks to dignify religious tolerance, past and present. To some extent, he succeeds: those who mock "Kingdom of Heaven" as politically correct and anachronistic are mistaken. Mercy and justice were not unknown in the 12th century. For example, Saladin (played magnificently by the Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud) was an extremely devout Muslim who was nonetheless capable of compromising with Christians and Jews when it was in his interest to do so.

The main problem, according to historian Thomas F. Madden, is that in its effort to tout tolerance, "The Kingdom of Heaven" waters down the religiosity of all the characters. How much more timely and interesting this film would be if someone had dared to show deeply, even zealously religious people practicing tolerance!

After all, Dante was a medieval Christian, and he respected Saladin enough to put him in Limbo with the great pagan poets and philosophers. But then, Dante wasn't afraid to write about great themes in the vernacular...

Posted by at 10:15 AM

May 10, 2005

decline

New York Times

Posted by at 9:08 AM

The Ten Guidelines

The college freshmen I teach may be forgiven for having a shaky grasp of the Bible. Some have never read a page of it; others have absorbed it in highly diluted form. So naturally they say things like, "Oh, I thought the Ten Commandments were more like guidelines." But in my experience, they change their tune after actually reading the Bible (especially when translated by Robert Alter and Reynolds Price). Believers and non-believers alike are struck by its beauty, oddness, and intimidating severity.

The diluted form is still out there, though. In 2002 the newly launched (and unfortunately named) Crusader Entertainment, backed by Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz, released "Joshua," its first overtly "Christian" film, through a subsidiary called Epiphany Films. "Joshua" tackles a challenging topic: the arrival of Jesus in small town America. But it has nothing to say, either about Jesus or about small town America. Instead, it depicts Jesus as a nice fellow being nice to already nice folks who then become even nicer. The one person who is not so nice, a Catholic priest intent upon enforcing the Ten Guidelines, becomes much nicer at the end.

Skip the cross, cue the music, we're outta here.

"Joshua" is popular in the surreal realm of "Christian" entertainment, where the standard fare is a bowl of sugar with honey and molasses on top. But to his credit, Anschutz took a different tack after backing this dud. He has backed a number of mainstream films, the best of which is "Ray" (see SP review). And in December his subsidiary, Walden Films (in conjunction with Disney), will release "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," the first feature film based on the Narnia children's books by C. S. Lewis.

Lewis, of course, was a highly literate Christian who spent his life arguing against the kind of "feel-good" faith that makes God into "a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves.'" For Lewis, the God of the Bible is "something more than mere kindness ... He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense."

Can this stern view succeed at the box office? The singular example I can think of is "Dead Man Walking," Tim Robbins's brilliant film about the Death Row ministry of Sister Helen Prejean. Some conservative Christians I know admire this film. But you won't find it listed on most of the sugary "Christian" websites, because after all, it was made by Hollywood liberals. What can I say? Maybe some of those who call for better movies while thumping the Bible ought to try reading it instead.

Posted by at 1:30 AM

May 4, 2005

The Tea Sipper's Guide to Absurdity

If the universe is meaningless, should we laugh or cry? According to the Theater of the Absurd, born on the Left Bank in the 1940s and now on life support in a million high school drama clubs, neither laughter nor tears is appropriate. Instead, we are enjoined to watch actors shuffle onto a half-lit stage with no scenery (except maybe a dead tree), glare at us with befuddled expressions, and (either by talking or by not talking) say nothing at all.

I always wondered why, if the universe were meaningless, we had to sit through plays by Beckett, Genet, and Pinter. Why not attend lavish productions of Broadway musicals? Or skip the theater and go roller skating? Or (pushing the envelope here) kidnap small children and drop them into vats of boiling oil?

Some (not all) of the same questions seem to have occurred to Douglas Adams, author of the 1970s radio series, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," which over the next 30 years spawned several novels, a TV series, and now the top-grossing film in America. If the universe is meaningless, then why not follow the example of the hero, an ineffectual Brit named Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman), and hitch a ride on a passing spaceship, because one fine morning the Earth blows up with him still in his jammies?

Strange but true: most of the Adams fans out there seem to find the universe profoundly meaningful. Why else would they be blogging so madly about how the forces of evil (Touchstone Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment) have corrupted the pure art of their shining hero (Adams)? One is tempted to say, get a religion. Most of the big ones are at least as clever as Adams.

Oh, well. The movie is fun. I liked the singing dolphins - the second most intelligent life form (after mice) bidding farewell to the third most intelligent (us) by singing, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish." I liked the Babel Fish, a life form that when stuck into the ear of any other life form, enables it to understand the languages of all. I liked the crusty female computer who, after humming away for untold years, announces the answer to the ultimate question: "42." I liked the no-nonsense planet designer, Slartibartfast (Bill Nighy) who won an award for the Norwegian fjords.

And I especially liked the cool, minimalist graphics used to illustrate lessons from the guidebook of the title. For instance, after the main story ends, there's a tag about how the denizens of a distant galaxy become so enraged at the rebuilt Earth, they send a mighty invasion force to destroy it. But (as we see in the nifty little drawings) they miscalculate the scale, and their force arrives no bigger than a golf ball and is gulped down by a suburban dog.

This is a very cool meaninglessness. Indeed, they could have made the whole movie out of these graphics, and I would have skipped a whole evening of Albee to see it.

Posted by at 7:40 AM

May 3, 2005

The Roots of Civility

In my review of the movie "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" (see below), I marvel at the courtesy of motorists in Southern California. In case you are having trouble reconciling that observation with the recent freeway shootings there, I offer the following, from Verlyn Klinkenborg in today's New York Times:

"These shootings change the very idea of the freeway ... I've been struck by the attentiveness and skill of the drivers around me, by the fact that nearly everyone signals a change of lane and tries to keep a reasonable distance between vehicles. In three months of freeway driving here, I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard a horn sounded in anger. And now I know why.

If nothing else, these good driving manners express the centrality of the freeway system in the consciousness of Southern California. I've begun to think of those lanes as a giant public square spreading all across the city, a square where most people try to contribute their mite of civility in hopes of keeping the overall experience as tolerable as possible. But there's another way to look at it. The civility on display may reflect nothing more than the profound hostility lying just below the surface.

As a friend from Fullerton puts it, you drive politely, without challenging other drivers even implicitly, because 'they're packing.' No one honks because no one wants a fight. People use their turn signals to say, as innocently as possible: 'Changing lanes now! Not cutting in! No disrespect intended!'"

Mr. Klinkenborg makes perfect sense. But my question is, why doesn't this work in Boston?
 

Posted by at 9:00 AM

April 30, 2005

Road Rage

In 2001, when the "rolling blackouts" doused the traffic lights in my part of Los Angeles, I was amazed at the behavior of the drivers. East Coast motorists would have cut directly to Demolition Derby. But not those Californians. Even at the major intersections, they spontaneously slowed down and began to take turns. It was enough to restore my faith in human nature.

Of course, if those polite Golden Staters had been able to hear the cackling of the Houston hyenas who were messing with their power grid, they might have raised a posse and headed straight for South Texas. For the scavengers of Enron were not only ripping off the whole state, they were joking about how much fun it was to gouge the old, the sick, and the poor.

The main thing you need to know about "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," is that it is NOT a film by Michael Moore. It uses some of the same tricks, such as a soundtrack full of sardonic counterpoint (for example, a clip of President Reagan extolling "the magic of the market" is followed by footage of a natural gas facility, accompanied by the song, "That Old Black Magic"). But the tricks are in service to a solid indictment, not a half-whacked conspiracy theory.

Some have criticized "Enron" for being too admiring of Head Hyenas Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Andy Fastow, and Lou Pai. And yes, it does drool a bit over their bad selves. Based on the eponymous book by Fortune writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, the film also relies heavily on the testimony of former Enron employees who (to judge by their plush surroundings) deserted the sinking ship with their Rocquefort intact. Of all the people interviewed, only one man speaks for the 20,000 employees whose cheese disappeared into the pockets of "the smartest guys in the room."

It is worth noting that while three of the Head Hyenas wait to have their wrists slapped by Blind Justice, the fourth, Lou Pai, turns out to be the smartest guy of all. After helping his subsidiary, Enron Energy Services, lose $18.8 billion and put 5,500 people out of work, Pai made off with $270 million. Then he divorced his wife, married his favorite stripper, and bought a 77,5000-acre chunk of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in southern Colorado.

To be sure, Pai later sold the property when it looked as though the locals were going to win a lawsuit over water and timber rights. But he did OK, I'm sure. You won't see him on BET any time soon, but the man is a "playa."

Unseemly though it is, the aforementioned drool is what makes "Enron" convincing. The whole country thought these guys were "smart." And the last I checked, the popular definition of the word has not changed. For too many Americans, "smart" still means, "Screw you, I'm driving my armored Hummer right through the intersection."

Posted by at 10:30 AM

April 27, 2005

Some Like It Microwaved

Finally, what everyone hasn't been waiting for: a character-driven XXX-rated art film. Reports Stephen Holden of the NY Times, this year's TriBeCa Film Festival will include two screenings of "9 Songs," a 70-minute indie about two nice people who while not in love regularly take time out of their busy schedules to make the funky monkey.

It's all perfectly normal, except for some kinky maneuvers at the end. And of course, that clever little camera showing us stuff that not even the lovers can see (because their eyes are located on their heads).

Years ago, observes Mr. Holden, the line for such a film would have stretched around the block. But today, why bother? It's so much easier to stay home and watch tumescent organs flail away on your computer.

The "9 Songs" gimmick is to combine porn explicitness with conventional narrative. But as Holden notes, this makes the viewer feel like a voyeur.

Now, a defender of "9 Songs" might say that's exactly the point: to discomfit us by connecting the action below the neck with the action above. And who would argue against such a connection? Real sex with a real person is presumably what most of us seek.

But usually this search does not entail spying on others. What's weird about this movie is that its starting place is not sex in the world but porn on the screen. The guests of the TriBeCa Film Festival will decide whether that is worth lining up for.

Posted by at 11:00 AM

April 25, 2005

Screen Smarts?

There are few cliches sturdier than the one about TV encouraging "passivity" and "mindlessness." Whether stated simply by a frustrated parent or elaborated upon by a communications theorist, this cliche basically boils down to the idea that it is more of a workout, cognitively speaking, to read print than to watch a screen.

An interesting challenge to this idea can be found in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, in which Steven Johnson argues that today's most popular and sophisticated TV shows have a much more complex and demanding structure than the leading shows of just a few years ago.

The truth of this will be driven home if you've ever watched "The Sopranos" or "The West Wing" with an octogenerian: the multiple plots, the references to previous episodes, the use of dialogue not as meaning but as "texture," the withholding of detail to tease the viewer - such devices only confuse people whose viewing experience was shaped by the regular pace and clear exposition of programs like "Gunsmoke" and "Perry Mason."

This stuff is fascinating, and I agree with Mr. Johnson that it refutes the cliche about "passivity." But I disagree with his conclusion that newfangled TV "makes us smarter."  For one thing, as he notes, many of these devices come from soap opera, a genre known to be addictive but not especially educative.

For another, the skills involved - observing a large number of people, keeping track of their doings, basically getting the goods on them - are ancient and universal (another name for them is "gossip," or perhaps, "politics"). And while these skills are vital to success in any age, they do not add up to what is currently defined as "smart." In the higher reaches of the professions and the workplace generally, "smart" still refers to what is learned in school. And, like it or not, at home - when the TV is turned off.

Posted by at 9:50 AM

women execs

make link to New York Times

Posted by at 8:47 AM

April 21, 2005

Video Virgil: The Wansee Conference

In my last entry I judged "Downfall" to be a superior film on the strength of one character, Magda, the stern wife of Josef Goebbels. Of all the characters in the film, she is the one who conveys the difference between ordinary and extraordinary evil.

Where did I get this standard? From "The Wansee Conference," a 1984 German TV film broadcast on PBS in 1989. (It is not available on DVD but can be rented or bought on VHS.) Based on the research of a Prussian-born Israeli, Manfred Korytowski, this German-Austrian coproduction recreates in real time (85 minutes) the clandestine 1942 meeting that set in motion the last phase of the "final solution." The script is taken directly from the notes of that meeting, and there is no music or other add-ons. Just brilliant acting and direction.

Present at the Wansee Conference were the top brass of the Party and SS, assorted military men and bureaucrats, a note-taking stenographer (the lone woman), and Reinhard Heydrich, head of the security police and golden boy predicted to succeed Hitler. Like Magda, Heydrich (played by Dietrich Mattausch) is not an icy robot or a snarling wolf but something worse: an elegant, arrogant human being with a silver tongue and a winning sense of irony about the difficult task ahead.

For example, at one point Heydrich indicates on a map how the remnants of European Jewry are still "scattered all over like fly-specks." Just back from heading the "murder battalions" that killed more than a million Jews in occupied Soviet territory, Heydrich informs Rudolf Lange, the Gestapo chief for the Eastern Territories, that he will soon be receiving more "shipments from the Reich."

When Heydrich first arrived, Lange greeted him a heel-clicking report, "Estonia, Jew-free!" But now we see Lange's hands trembling at the news. "We didn't really plan on starting up again," he protests feebly. Richly amused, Heydrich orders cognac and starts to flirt with the stenographer.

Do not for a moment confuse this film with the HBO film "Conspiracy" (2001) starring Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich. "Conspiracy" is standard Nazi-movie fare, with a bunch of English actors looking severe and repressed, like a public school headmaster about to cane some boy's bottom.

"The Wansee Conference" is different. The actors speak German, for one thing. But more important, they remind us that the Holocaust was not designed by cartoon bad guys but by proud, intelligent human beings at the peak of their capacities - including the capacity for evil.

Posted by at 4:30 AM

April 18, 2005

The Damning Remnant

Can any movie capture the massive evil of the Third Reich, or has the whole business become a self-referential media cliche? Every time another earnest, gloomy film about World War II and/or the Shoah is released, a little voice in my head says, "Dollar for dollar, your Nazis are still your best entertainment bargain!"

But "Downfall" ("Der Untergang") provokes no such voice. For one thing, it is not a self-congratulatory American film but a self-lacerating German one. For another, it is not about the victims but about the victimizers. By focusing tightly on Adolf Hitler and his inner circle, hunkered down in the "F�hrerbunker" while the Red Army blasts its way into Berlin, this film depicts the Nazis not as Them but as Us.

Naturally, this disconcerts some people. For example, when "Downfall" premiered in Germany, it was sharply criticized in the highbrow weekly "Die Zeit" by the eminent director Wim Wenders. By portraying Hitler on a human scale, Wenders argued, the film effectively denies the global scale of his wickedness. The subsequent debate has been over whether it is acceptable to portray Adolf Hitler as human (which the fine Swiss actor Bruno Ganz definitely does). To that question the answer is easy: Yes. It is not only acceptable but necessary to portray Hitler as human. Had he been a demon, then humanity would be off the hook.

But the real question is one of scale. "Downfall" focuses on four sympathetic characters: Tarudl Junger, Hitler�s naive young secretary; Peter, a 13-year-old boy trying to be a war hero; Dr. Schenck, an army medic harrowed by the suffering of ordinary Berliners; and Albert Speer, high-toned architect to the F�hrer. To foreground the plight of these four is to background the horror being done in their name. If that were the sum total of "Downfall," then Wenders would be right.

But that is not the sum total of "Downfall." Along with these four characters, this film gives us one of the most convincing movie Nazis ever seen: not Hitler, Himmler, G�ring, or G�bbels, but Magda, G�bbels� wife, played stunningly by Corinna Harfouch, a renowned theater actress from the former East Germany.

More than any man in uniform, Magda is a true soldier of the Reich. Her rigidly correct manner, her impeccable dress, and above all, her attentiveness to her six rosy-cheeked Aryan children all suggest an iron-willed commitment to the lofty vision of National Socialism that will not flinch in the face of duty, no matter how unpleasant. And sure enough, when it comes time to kill her six children rather than allow them to grow up in a fallen world, Magda does so smoothly, efficiently, and (here is the nub) proudly.

Whether sick, crazy, or coldly sadistic, the besetting sin of movie Nazis is always violence. But this is inaccurate. The true sin, the defining trait, of the Nazi movement was not violence but pride. And in Magda we see that ultimate evil at work. Her love for her children is not overcome by anger, fear, or blood lust. It is overcome - easily - by twisted pride. Dante put the proud at the very bottom of Hell, far below the incontinent and violent. If you ever wondered why, "Downfall" will make it abundantly clear.

Posted by at 5:30 AM

How Michael Saved Mickey

For a penetrating look at the success, as opposed to the pecadillos, of Micheal Eisner's tenure at Disney, check out Edward Jay Epstein's latest posting on Slate. The numbers are impressive, and so are the strategic decisions (viewed with 20/20 hindsight). 

Posted by at 2:50 AM

April 14, 2005

Video Virgil: Antique Self-Portrait

While on the subject of movies about Hollywood, it's worth revisiting one of the great ones: "The Player," directed by Robert Altman and based on the icy-hearted novel by Michael Tolkin.

The plot is simple: an egotistical, unimaginative producer (Tim Robbins) is terrified of losing his job to an even more egotistical, unimaginative producer (Peter Gallagher). Plus he keeps finding threatening postcards in his car, desk, pockets, and home. Someone is stalking him, and since his job consists of sneering at writers' pitches all day, he suspects a disappointed writer. After guessing which one, he tries to buy the guy off, then semi-accidentally murders him.

"The Player" riffs beautifully on the old themes of art and commerce and the ugly side of human nature as revealed in the sort of competition where the prizes don't go to the best but to the most cutthroat. Our producer comes out on top without being redeemed in any way. Indeed, the film cleverly manipulates our ingrained expectation of a happy ending.

It was not a Hollywood mogul but the novelist William Dean Howells who said, "What the American audience really wants is a tragedy with a happy ending." To their credit, screenwriter Tolkin, director Altman, and the many Hollywood luminaries involved in this film stay true to that ironic line.

Two caveats. First, the love interest played by Greta Scacchi is annoyingly opaque. I was ready for her to be the mastermind behind it all, not just one of the prizes. But that would have required a female to be smarter than all the males, NOT a Hollywood trope.

Second, "The Player" came out in 1992, long after the system was taken over by the blockbuster - or to use the term of art, "locomotive": huge, repeatable extravaganzas like "Star Wars," "Star Trek," "Terminator," "Indiana Jones," "Die Hard," "Batman," "Harry Potter," "The Fellowship of the Ring," "Toy Story," "Finding Nemo," "Shrek" ... the list keeps getting longer. In this context, "The Player" feels downright antique. If there is a good blockbuster parody out there, please tell me about it!

Posted by at 10:00 AM

April 7, 2005

Video Virgil: Self Portraits

The literary critic Irving Howe was once asked whether the New York literary scene was self-absorbed and incestuous, and he replied, "It only looks that way from the outside." The same could certainly be said of the agglomeration of organizations and individuals who make up Hollywood. They live in a heavily fortified bubble that almost always distorts their view of the society in which the rest of us live.

That's why Hollywood's best social criticism tends to be directed at itself. As a longstanding fan of movies about the movie biz, I recently revisited "The Bad and the Beautiful," directed by Vincent Minelli and starring Lana Turner in what may be her finest role. It views a gifted but ruthless studio head (Kirk Douglas) through the eyes of three people he sucked in and blew out: an alcoholic, going-nowhere-fast actress (Turner); a talented but too diffident director (Barry Sullivan); and a frustrated college-Joe writer (Dick Powell).

Of course, if you prefer your classic studio heads to be the embodiment of philistine evil, then I recommend "The Big Knife," an overwrought study of a matinee idol (Jack Palance) caught between the integrity urged by his wife (Ida Lupino) and the servitude imposed by his boss (Rod Steiger). Steiger is only on the screen for one scene, in which he manipulates the hapless Palance to renew his contract for another seven years. But that one scene is worth the price of admission.

Posted by at 10:15 AM

March 31, 2005

Comic Book Pain

In case you were worried that the Walt Disney Company was pulling out of the sick violence biz, today's New York Times will set you straight. Even though someone else will now be paying for Harvey and Bob Weinstein's gourmet meals (see photo), the new studio head, Dick Cook, reassures us that "family-friendly" Disney "will not be turning its back on the extremely violent fare that helped make the Weinsteins ... famous."

The new Miramax release, "Sin City," based on the "graphic novels" of Frank Miller, features "cannibalism, castration, decapitation, dismemberment, electrocution, hanging, massacres, pedophilia, slashings and lots and lots of torture."

For anyone naive enough to think about actual human suffering while watching images of "the heads of five prostitutes mounted on a wall, or a dog eating the legs of a still-live boy, or a man ripping out the genitals of another man," the director Robert Rodriguez (who, to judge by the photo, is just getting started on gourmet food) notes that the MPAA gave the film an "R" rating because "they got the stylization, they got the abstractness of it and it was obviously not a realistic movie."

Whew. But go easy on the red paint, Hans Hofmann, because along with buckets of "white blood, and yellow blood," this movie has "plenty of red blood." Why? The ever-so-sensitive Mr. Rodriguez wants "to make clear that characters getting beaten to a pulp were, indeed, feeling pain."

Bon appetit.

Posted by at 10:15 AM

March 25, 2005

Star Power Well Used

When movie stars lend their glittering names to political causes, the effect is sometimes ludicrous.

The movie "Simone" (2002) stars Al Pacino as an egotistical director fed up with egotistical actresses, who is given a computer program capable of digitally creating the perfect star. The movie is a dud, perhaps because Mr. Pacino sleepwalks through it, and Rachel Roberts, the lissome model who plays Simone (short for Sim One), could learn a lot about acting from the animated paper clip on Microsoft Word.

But there are a few good bits, including a TV interview given by Simone while ostensibly "on a goodwill mission to the Third World." With a few keystrokes, the director projects his star's immaculate image against a backdrop of filthy hovels, burning garbage, and starved dogs. The irony is underlined by the fact that Simone does not seem to have a clue about why she is there.

One could compare this to Don Cheadle's January trip to Darfur. Nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of Paul Rusesabagina (the hero of "Hotel Rwanda"), Mr. Cheadle had something to gain from lending his name to efforts to stop the genocide of the Sudanese government.

But so what? This was a case of a star's self-interest coinciding with a moral emergency. And to judge by Mr. Cheadle's actions since then, his commitment is more than a career move. Find out more on the website he co-sponsors with Mr. Rusesabagina.

Posted by at 9:15 AM

March 19, 2005

Video Virgil: Burn, Liebling, Burn

One of the coolest DVDs I�ve seen recently is "What To Do In Case Of Fire?" ("Was tun, wenn�s brennt?"). Since the answer to the title question is "let it burn," ("brennen lassen"), I did not expect to like this film. It�s a post-punk German version of "The Big Chill," and I am on record as not liking punk or the "The Big Chill" (which I find about as authentic as Las Vegas).

But "What To Do" impressed me from the opening sequence, a home video supposedly shot by six "creative anarchists" in the Kreuzberg section of West Berlin in 1987. Hand-held, jump-cut, overlaid by graffiti-style graphics and driven by a pounding soundtrack, this video shows the six joining a battle against armored police who are trying to evict squatters, and then planting a sizable bomb in an abandoned mansion.

At that point, the video ends. The bomb ticks, then gets stuck. And twelve years pass before it explodes, set off by a real estate agent in the new, unified Berlin, who is showing the property to just the sort of wealthy businessman the anarchists of the 1980s were trying to keep out. No one is hurt, which is important, because the rest of the film asks us to care about the six bomb-makers as they reunite to block a police investigation.

"What To Do" impressed me because in the first place, it is smart. Its cynicism cuts deep but not too deep, and is largely directed at the group�s own myth of itself. While none of the six has reckoned fully with this myth at the beginning, all do so by the end. This is not true of "The Big Chill," which gradually chokes on its own self-righteousness.

It is also fun. In "The Big Chill," the former radicals reunite for a funeral, which is unfortunate, because it gives them nothing to do but smoke joints and jaw. In "What To Do," the six former anarchists must act, thereby illustrating Aristotle�s dictum that only through action is character revealed. We judge them not by what they say but by what they do. And eventually, they all do what is right.

It�s possible that an old Kreuzberger would find "What To Do" as phony as Potsdamer Platz. The real Autonomen, as they called themselves, pulled some nasty tricks to keep "imperialists" out of the neighborhood. For example, they waged a campaign of threats against a restaurant that was too bourgeois for their taste, finally shutting it down by throwing human feces all over the place. The Autonomen didn�t care that the proprietor was a well known Marxist filmmaker; they just wanted to be the most nihilistic kids on the block.

But this is not the tone of "What To Do." On the contrary, it is suffused with a youthful, funky exuberance that was doubtless what made Kreuzberg appealing in the last days before the fall of the Wall. So I recommend it highly - in the spirit of anarchism that knows how to liberate without doing harm.

Posted by at 11:00 AM

March 12, 2005

Reprise: Head-On

Back in January I wrote about a new film from Germany called "Head-On" ("Gegen die Wand'), which at that time was playing only in New York and L.A. To judge from the number of reviews popping up everywhere, the film has been deemed sufficiently marketable to open in a few more cities (like Boston). So here is my review again, if you will forgive the repetition. This film, the fourth from Turkish-German writer/director Fatih Akin, is worth seeing.

Comic, tragic, absurdist and affirmative, "Head-On" is about two people moving at escape velocity...but in opposite directions. Cahit (Birol �nel) is a Turkish-born denizen of the Hamburg punk scene whose marriage to a German woman has failed, sending him into drink and depression. As the film opens, he leaves his miserable job picking up empties in a bar and drives very fast into a concrete wall ("Gegen die Wand" means "against the wall").

Alive but banged up, he is next seen in the waiting room of a psychiatric clinic, where he meets Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), a daughter of Turkish immigrants who rebels against her tradition-minded family by slashing her wrists.

Recognizing scraggly Cahit as a kindred spirit, Sibel conceives a better escape route than suicide - marriage to a guy who, being Turkish, will pass muster with her family, but who also, being a complete lowlife, will not care about the wild fling she hopes to enjoy once she�s free. As it turns out, Cahit does care. Or rather, he learns (re-learns?) what it means to care. And Sibel is drawn, reluctantly, into caring for him. They don't live happily ever after. On the contrary, some grim things occur before the end (this is a German film, after all). But they do pull each other back from the brink.

"Head-On" is so timely, it's easy to miss the subtleties. For example, the New York Times describes Sibel's background as a "cloistered society where women are kept captive by their fathers and brothers." But this is a caricature. Sibel's father (Demir G�kg�l) is strict, and her brother (Cem Akin) is a bully. But they are not the Taliban. If they were, then Sibel's mother (Aysel Iscan) would not dye her hair blond and chain smoke. And the hilarious scene where Cahit comes to call would not end the way it does. After listening to his son berate Cahit, the father turns to Sibel and asks, "Is your mind made up?" And when she says yes, the stern old man shrugs: "What is left to say? When two people are in love..."

For Cahit and Sibel the road is not just rocky, it is land-mined. Against the presumption that it�s always good to shake off the fetters of tradition and religion, "Head-On" opposes a distinctly unromantic portrait of the liberated Western lifestyle. Cahit wants to end his life of booze, drugs, impersonal sex, and selfish behavior; Sibel wants to start hers. But for a moment they glimpse something better: not the old ways, but not their total rejection, either. The sweet spot is when, after cleaning up Cahit's pigpen of a flat, Sibel cooks him a meal of stuffed peppers. The music on the soundtrack is perfect, the camera lingers on her hands, and even though the film contains several sex scenes, this is the most erotic.

There is no hotter issue in Europe right now than the assimilation of large Muslim immigrant populations. But Europeans still have a tendency to think of assimilation as a one-way street. Here in the nation of immigrants, we have learned to think of it as a two-way street. Indeed, in recent years millions of immigrants have come to America and learned new ways. But they have also kept some of the old, and in the process, the rest of us have learned (remembered?) that life is best lived between the poles of individual liberation and the constraints of family and community. If the success of "Head-On" is any measure, then the same lesson is being pondered in Europe.

Posted by at 9:00 AM

March 10, 2005

Codex: I Can See Clearly Now

Ever wonder why, after shelling out nine dollars at the local multiplex, you find yourself squinting at the screen and feeling vaguely cheated by the quality of the image? Every time I've complained about this, I've been told, basically, that SukEmIn Theaters International uses state-of-the-art technology - and, as a not so subtle afterthought, "Maybe you need new glasses, lady."

So whom should I believe, the local popcorn merchants or my own damn eyes?

My eyes, as it happens. "The Big Picture," Edward Jay Epstein's fascinating new book about the movie industry, explains how multiplexes cut costs by employing only one projectionist, causing the occasional neglected machine to jam, and the projection lamp to burn a hole in the film.

The one time I saw this happen was during the closing sequence of "Troy," when the tall towers were aflame anyway. For this moment of poetic justice I received a full refund.

But as Epstein shows, there's a connection between this occasional meltdown and my chronic sense that films look better on my home DVD player: "To prevent such costly mishaps [burnt films], multiplexes frequently have their projectionists slightly expand the gap between the gate that supports the film and the lamp. As a result ... films are often shown slightly out of focus."

Apparently the skateboard set don't care about this, since their eyesight is already shot from all those computer games... But if you care, tell the manager - right after you butter your popcorn.

Posted by at 10:30 AM

March 9, 2005

Follwing the Money

DO AN ENTRY ON EPSTEIN'S BOOK AND "DEMYSTIFICATIONS" SITE FOR HOLLYWOOD:

http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/photos.htm

Posted by at 11:07 AM

Against Type

Elisabeth Bumiller reports in the New York Times on the movie-viewing habits of the president, whose home theater surpasses anything on offer at Bang & Olufson. (The White House screening room was built during Ronald Reagan's presidency, with $150,000 donated by a group of disinterested citizens who just happened to work for Disney, Universal, Fox, Paramount, Columbia, MGM, and Warner Brothers.)

Unlike LBJ, who slept through movies (a presidential trait found also in my spouse), and unlike Nixon, who watched the same movie over and over (yes, it was "Patton"), Bush seems to appreciate movies, as evidenced by his choice for best film of 2004: "Friday Night Lights," a sleeper about high school football in Odessa, Texas.

If you like movies but don't like Bush, then this is a good time not to indulge in stereotypes. Because "Friday Night Lights" is not your typical sports movie, and its portrait of football mania in the sovereign state of Texas is not painted with red-white-and-blue triumphalism.

Based on a book by H.G. Bissinger, "Friday Night Lights" is pretty formulaic on the surface: a team with one star player (Derek Luke) and a crusty coach (Billy Bob Thornton) passes through trials and tribulations, including losing the star to injury, then pulls together and heads for the state championship.

The first fifteen minutes are so fast-paced, it makes your average hip-hop video look sleepy. But then, mercifully, the pace slows, and the film begins to breathe a wonderful, subtle life. It is not triumphalist - indeed, it shows lucidly what happens to people (and towns) when they become too obsessed with winning.

But neither does "Friday Night Lights" take the easy path of ridiculing the narrow horizon of its characters. Instead, it treats them as full human beings and explores the hard realities behind their passionate compulsion to win. And without giving away the ending, I can say that by the time the team hits the boards for the Big Game, this movie has given new vitality to old cliche about sports being more about honor than victory.

Posted by at 10:45 AM

March 8, 2005

Berlin Film Festival

In case you chose not to spend Spring Break in cold, rainy Berlin, here is a good overview of the recent Internationale Filmfestspiele. I like this treatment because the writer takes a critical attitude - a welcome change from the eye-glazing glosses found not only in film festival programs but also in many so-called reviews. Of the films that appeared, I predict that only one, "Sophie Scholl - The Final Days" ("Sophie Scholl - Die Letzten Tage") will make it to the United States. It's good that this one will, but bad that so many won't.

Posted by at 9:10 AM

March 6, 2005

Mixed Message

My British colleague Clive Davis recently posted a couple of interesting links. The first is to Chuck Colson's obtuse assessment of "Sideways," which made me agree with Clive that Colson should definitely not be a movie critic.

The second is to an article about how, at press screenings of new films, the "Christian" (meaning evangelical) reviewers are the only ones asking serious questions. This rings true to my experience. One of the talks I gave relating to "Hole in Our Soul" was to a group of young rock and rap musicians who used those styles to convey their evangelical message. They asked me whether I thought there was such a thing as an "evil sound." After battling the blandness of CCM (Contemporary Christian Music), these young people clearly did not think there was. But they had given the whole topic a lot more thought than most of the many other groups I encountered on that circuit.

That's why I'm glad not only that Colson is not a critic but also that people who think like him do not, generally exert censorship power over their co-religionists - never mind the rest of us!

Posted by at 8:00 AM

March 3, 2005

Phantom of the Oscars

I have written about Oscar night elsewhere and will link to that piece ASAP.  In the meantime, three cheers for the Uruguayan songwriter Jorge Drexler, winner for Best Original Song, for insisting on delivering a few bars of it himself during the 20 seconds most winners have to thank everyone they ever knew, plus the heavenly host and all the powers under the earth.

Drexler was defying the Academy's refusal to let him perform the song himself.  Instead, "Al Otro Lado del Rio" ("The Other Side of the River"), from "The Motorcycle Diaries," a film about the youthful Che Guevara, was Rolfed by the Spanish pop star Antonio Bandera, accompanied by American rock idol Carlos Santana (born in Mexico). Back in Montevideo, Drexler is being hailed as both a winner and a rebel - which is entirely appropriate, given that Che was the first fully commodified socialist revolutionary.

It is, of course, customary to have Big Stars perform the nominated songs, rather than the obscure nobodies who actually wrote them. On occasion this has added emotion and excitement to the proceedings, but not this time.

Beyonce (sorry, my software doesn't have a fake accent aigu) is a very beautiful young woman with great pipes. But somebody - her managers? her fans? herself? - is working overtime to waste both beauty and talent. Even ghastlier than her costumes were the songs she sang. And ghastliest of all was "Learn to be Lonely" from "The Phantom of the Opera." Here the Academy allowed the songwriter onstage, since he is, after all, Andrew Lloyd "Clobber 'Em Again" Webber.

I only have ten seconds left, so I'd like to thank Counting Crows for their energetic and unpretentious performance of "Accidentally in Love," from "Shrek 2." They get my nomination for Best Imitation of Van Morrison and also (hands down) Best Hair.

Posted by at 9:30 AM

February 25, 2005

Aims, Shoots & Leaves?

Filmmakers and photographers adore "Born Into Brothels," and no wonder. This Oscar-nominated documentary about eight children in the red light district of Calcutta brandishes the camera the way Christian missionaries used to brandish the Bible � as the physical manifestation of salvation. The question, though, is: Who is saved? To judge by the film alone, I would say the filmmakers, not the children.

When British photojournalist Zana Briski first entered these filthy, rat-infested back alleys, her aim was to film the prostitutes ("sex workers," in her enlightened parlance). But her subjects, evidently not sharing this enlightened view of their profession, proved uncooperative. So Briski and her cinematographer, Ross Kauffman, turned their viewfinders toward the children.

Which was understandable, given the beauty and vivacity of these amazing kids. Between 10 and 12 years old, they revive the old cliche about brilliant flowers pushing up through a dungheap. Yet they are also social outcasts, and unless their lives change drastically, they will very soon become prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, and addicts � just like their elders.

Briski doesn't just film the kids. She gives them cameras and teaches them the fundamentals of photography. Some are more gifted than others: the clear winner is a pugnacious little fellow named Avijit, already an accomplished watercolorist. But each child manages to produce a couple of exceptional photographs, and Briski works hard to have the collection exhibited in a Calcutta bookstore.

But this is where the film stumbles. As the little ones go from seeing their first contact print to being driven to the exhibition in a nice section of town, they become terribly excited - and the gap between their dreams and their reality becomes achingly wide. To her credit, Briski understands this, and struggles to help. But her efforts are excruciating to watch, because they are all predicated on uprooting these tender blossoms from the only world they know.

After a long search, Briski manages to locate two boarding schools in Calcutta that will accept pupils from such a background. It�s not easy to enroll them, and between obtuse bureaucrats and impossible demands for documents, she almost gives up. But finally, assiduously dotting every "I" and crossing every "T," she gets everything arranged.

Or almost everything. Here's the rub, because it is then, only then, that Briski talks to the parents. Or rather exhorts them, with comments like: "Don�t you want Puja to have a better life?" and "Of course you�ll be able to see him...once a month." Maybe it�s a distortion of the film, but Briski seems painfully oblivious to the fact that these downtrodden adults not only love their kids but also depend on them.

Most of the parents give their consent - but grudgingly. And as the film ends, we learn that most of the children did not stay in school. Either their parents took them out or they left of their own accord (for emotional reasons not hard to imagine). Ironically, the only child who sees all this coming is Avijit, and he is also the only one who truly escapes. Unlike the others, he has a grandmother who has long supported his painting and is willing to loosen her grip.

I gather from various websites that Briski's efforts did not cease with the completion of "Born Into Brothels." Far from it. She raises money for them through the sale of their photos (some through Sotheby�s), and she presides over an organization, Kids with Cameras, that seeks to bring the joys and opportunities of photography to other impoverished children around the world. If she wins the Oscar, these efforts will receive a gratifying boost.

But as Briski and others spread the gospel of the camera, I hope they bear in mind the lesson this film inadvertently teaches: Talk to the parents first, and put yourself in their shoes. If you lived in a dungheap, would you want to lose your only flower?

Posted by at 4:30 AM

February 24, 2005

Upside Deep Doo-Doo

No, I am not going to review "Inside Deep Throat." The original film I found stupid, boring, and anti-female, and the idea of making a documentary about it I find even more so, especially considering that this is 2005, not 1972.

So imagine my delight at seeing both films trashed by Anthony Lane in the current New Yorker. Instead of disgust or disapproval (reactions that, while understandable, backfire by making the critic seem a prude), Lane goes in for ridicule - especially of "the predictable roster of guest preachers" who appear in the documentary. These lit-crit nitwits, people like Camille Paglia, Norman Mailer, Hugh Hefner, Erica Jong, and Gore Vidal, would endorse horse manure if they thought it would keep them in the celebrity game.

Posted by at 9:10 AM

February 21, 2005

Merlotted

Fellow AJ Blogger Drew McManus writes:

"I loved Sideways, my wife and I agree it was a well made flick with some excellent acting. But I also hate the film because, as wine drinkers, my wife and I also hate Merlot; so now we look like Sideways tag-alongs when we say we'd rather drink soda than Merlot. In the movie world, is there a name for something like that, when a movie takes away something that you used to feel was uniquely you and turn it into a public fad?"

Not that I know of, Drew, but there ought to be. I'd suggest Merloted (mer-LOAD), but it looks funny. So how about Merlotted? Somewhere between garrotted and besotted...?

Posted by at 5:15 AM

February 17, 2005

Halfways

Today's Wall Street Journal reports a flood of tourists arriving in California�s Santa Ynez wine country, re-enacting some of the less savory moments from the surprise hit movie "Sideways," such as the scene where a self-pitying, drunken Miles (Paul Giamatti) asks a bartender for a porn magazine.

So the makers of "Sideways"* have pulled off a winning combination: a serious idea wrapped in consumer-friendly frippery. The phenomenon recalls "Babette's Feast," Gabriel Axel�s 1987 film about an ascetic religious colony on the windswept coast of Denmark being restored to life and true spirituality by a marvelous French chef.

"Babette�s Feast" set off a round of lavish restaurant-going in New York City, with chefs competing to reproduce the meal depicted in the film down to the last tender morsel of baby quail flesh. Of course, the people who gobbled this up had not spent the previous half-century subsisting on boiled fish and breadcrusts.

By the same token, the Miles wanna-bes slurping down the vintage in Santa Barbara County probably do not have very good palates, in wine or anything else. If they did, they would not be living vicariously through a movie the whole point of which they seem to have missed.

* See my review, posted January 7

Posted by at 10:00 AM

February 13, 2005

Shallower Than It Looks

A handsome young man stands on the edge of a rocky cove staring down into rippling turquoise water. It looks deep, so he dives. But it is not deep. He hits bottom, breaks his neck, then spends 28 years as a quadriplegic. He also becomes famous for battling with the legal authorities in his native Spain for the right to commit assisted suicide. He loses the battle but wins the war: after publishing a book, he persuades one of his many devoted helpers to give him a glass of water spiked with cyanide.

"The Sea Inside" ("Mar adentro") is about a real man, Ramon Sampedro, whose followers are no doubt hoping that it will win this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Film. I am hoping it doesn't, because like the water into which Sampedro dove, it is exquisitely beautiful - but a lot shallower than it looks.

The acting is superb, especially Javier Bardem's portrayal of a man whose face, especially his eyes, are filled with all the seductive vitality missing from the rest of his body. Also finely drawn are the people who pass through Ramon's picturesque Galician farmhouse: his father, brother, sister-in-law, nephew, and three loving women: a "death with dignity" activist, Gene (Clara Segura); a lawyer, Julia (Belen Rueda), who is warding off her own debility from strokes; and a local factory worker and single mother, Maria (Lola Duenas), who at first urges Ramon to live but then becomes the one who helps him die.

But as lovely and beguiling as this film is, it is also tendentious. This is especially true of its caricature of a quadriplegic priest, Fr. Luis de Moya, who has said in an interview that he and Sampedro had a serious correspondence about assisted suicide before Fr. de Moya came to visit Sampedro in Galicia, and that while neither man swayed the other, they parted with mutual respect.

If this is true, or even if it isn't, why does director-writer Alejandro Amenabar feel obliged to ridicule Fr. de Moya, making him mouth petty dogma in a scene contrived to be as farcical as possible? And why accuse the Church of being inconsistent on such issues as suicide, euthanasia, abortion, and the death penalty, when in fact it is consistent?

One needn't be a Catholic or even a believer to grant that the Church's reasoning about these questions is strong and philosophically compelling. If "The Sea Inside" had the courage to take on that reasoning, then it would be worthy of its own considerable artistry. Admire the artistry if you want (I did). But be careful. Don't plunge in head first.

Posted by at 9:00 AM

February 11, 2005

Observing the Formulas

It took me a while to see "Million Dollar Baby," the Clint Eastwood movie nominated for seven Academy Awards, but it was worth the wait. The film is a beautiful example of why tried-and-true formulas are ... well, tried and true. This isn't faint praise. Every art has its formulas, and success depends on what a given artist does with them. In this case, Eastwood takes a venerable formula - the boxing flick in which the contender's hardest fight is outside the ring - and burnishes it to a rich, glowing patina.

Of course, that's not all Eastwood does. It's impossible to prove a negative, but I suspect that if the contender in question were a young man from the white-trash side of the tracks, the critics would have dismissed the film as (you guessed it) formulaic. By making his star a young woman, Maggie (Hilary Swank) Eastwood makes plenty of room for all that burnishing.

Recently several talk-radio "conservatives" have accused "Million Dollar Baby" of being an advertisement for euthanasia. What can I say to this, except: Come on, guys. Look at the blinking movie.

Frankie, the burnt-out trainer played by Eastwood, is the sort of Catholic who attends mass every day in order to ventilate his doubts with Father Horvak (Bryan O'Byrne). When Maggie is paralyzed by a dirty punch and begs Frankie to disconnect her life support, Frankie asks Father Horvak what to do. The priest tells him (very sympathetically, I might add) that euthanasia is a sin. And Frankie obeys, refusing Maggie's pleas.

But then Maggie starts biting her own tongue in a desperate attempt to drown in her own blood. At that point Frankie does the deed. But not in the spirit of Dr. Kervorkian liberating another paying customer. Rather he does it in the spirit of a stoic, self-punishing man sacrificing his own soul for that of another. Maybe God will forgive him, maybe not. You get the feeling he is willing to take the chance. And despite the wistful closing lines by his old friend Scrap (Morgan Freeman), there is no happy ending. After Frankie disconnects Maggie, he disconnects himself - from everything and everyone he has ever known. He disappears.

What sort of standard are these "conservatives" using, I wonder? If artists are not allowed to show troubled mortals committing mortal sins out of love, then talk radio has a long list of artists to condemn. How about starting with some of the worst offenders, like Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dostoevsky...?

Posted by at 5:30 AM

February 5, 2005

Codex: Eye-Opening

This is a new category of entry - recommendations of books about film that are actually worth reading. They are few, in my opinion, for reasons I hope to set forth as we go along. The heading is "codex" because that is the word used for the bound book when it was a new medium.

Whenever I plow through another essay or book about film "theory," the main conclusion I reach is that the people who write it never made anything with their own two hands. Theorists seem to think that a film either springs directly from the forehead of an individual genius, or it gathers spontaneously as a sort of excrescence on the surface of an entire society.

That's not how films are made. They are made by groups of people working collaboratively, which is the single best explanation both of why most are so bad AND of why the good ones are so astonishing. It follows that the best writing about film is by talented people who understand this.

Such a writer is Walter Murch, the veteran editor and sound designer whose credits include "Apocalypse Now" (original and recut), "The Godfather Part II," "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," "The English Patient," and "The Talented Mr. Ripley." Read Murch's "In the Blink of an Eye," if you want to be reminded of how much old-fashioned craftsmanship, not to mention artistry, goes into the making of a good film.

Effortlessly Murch goes from explaining fine detail to expressing large understanding. Here are two examples, though it's tempting to quote the whole book:

"By cutting away from a certain character BEFORE he finishes speaking, I might encourage the audience to think only about the face value of what he said. On the other hand, if I linger on the character AFTER he finishes speaking, I allow the audience to see, from the expression in his eyes, that he is probably not telling the truth..."

"The underlying principle: Always try to do the most with the least ... Why? Because you want to do only what it necessary to engage the imagination of the audience - suggestion is always more effective than exposition. Past a certain point, the more effort you put into a wealth of detail, the more you encourage the audience to become spectators rather than participants."

Posted by at 9:30 AM

February 1, 2005

You'll Never Valet Park in This Town Again

If you've ever attended a Hollywood press event or been wooed by the media relations department of an entertainment firm, then perhaps you share my distrust of how most reporters cover show business. If the word "cover" is taken in the agricultural sense to mean what a bull does to a cow, then typically it's the reporter who gets covered.

For a funny, bittersweet recollection what this beat is like, see Bernard Weinraub's column in Sunday's New York Times. After 14 years writing about the movie, TV, and record industries, Weinraub is stepping down. These quick reflections are not revelatory or earthshaking, but that's why I like them: they offer a human's-eye view. For example, Mr. Weinraub writes:

"Waiting for a valet at the Bel-Air Hotel to bring my company-leased Ford, I once stood beside a journalist turned producer who said, 'I used to drive a car like that.' Though I'm ashamed to say it, I was soon hunting for parking spots near Orso or the Peninsula Hotel to avoid the discomfort of having a valet drive up my leased two-year-old Buick in front of some luncheon companion with a Mercedes."

What I recall are not just my luncheon companions' reactions but also the reactions of the valets. Whenever one of those nice young men would deliver my Honda Accord, I would give him a five-dollar tip and watch the look of pity on his face turn to contempt. A hundred might have helped, but I decided not to try. In those environs, there's no real cure for sagging vehicular status.

Posted by at 10:40 AM

January 27, 2005

Interviews I Never Finished Reading

From Agence France-Presse:

Multiple Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman lamented the state of modern filmmaking, using a promotional session for his latest feature to pan a money-hungry marketing-focused industry. "The whole culture is in the craphouse," Hoffman told journalists gathered in London to hear him promote his latest comedy vehicle "Meet the Fockers" ...

Posted by at 4:15 AM

January 23, 2005

Their Small Starved Turkish Wedding

If you live in New York or Los Angeles, rush out and see "Head-On" ("Gegen die Wand'), the fourth film from Turkish-German writer/director Fatih Akin. Comic, tragic, absurdist and affirmative, "Head-On" won the Golden Bear in the 2004 Berlinale and has been causing quite a stir in Europe. It's a terrific, timely piece of work that deserves a larger distribution here.

The two central characters are moving at escape velocity but in opposite directions. Cahit (Birol �nel) is a Turkish-born denizen of the Hamburg punk scene whose marriage to a German woman has failed, sending him into drink and depression. As the film opens, he is driving into a concrete wall ("Gegen die Wand" means "against the wall"). Alive but banged up, he is sitting in the waiting room of a psychiatric clinic when he meets Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), a daughter of Turkish immigrants who rebels against her tradition-minded family by slashing her wrists.

Recognizing scraggly Cahit as a kindred spirit, Sibel conceives a better escape route than suicide: marriage to a guy who, being Turkish, will pass muster with her family, but who also, being a complete lowlife, will not care about the wild fling she hopes to enjoy once she�s free. As it turns out, Cahit does care. Or rather, he learns (re-learns?) what it means to care. And Sibel is drawn, reluctantly, into caring for him. They don't live happily ever after; on the contrary, some grim things occur before the end (this is a German film, after all). But they do pull each other back from the brink.

"Head-On" is so timely, it's easy to miss the subtleties. For example, the New York Times describes Sibel's background as a "cloistered society where women are kept captive by their fathers and brothers." But this is a caricature. Sibel's father (Demir G�kg�l) is strict, and her brother (Cem Akin) is a bully. But they are not the Taliban. If they were, then Sibel's mother (Aysel Iscan) would not dye her hair blond and chain smoke. And the hilarious scene where Cahit comes to call would not end the way it does. After listening to his son berate Cahit, the father turns to Sibel and asks, "Is your mind made up?" And when she says yes, the stern old man shrugs: "What is left to say? When two people are in love..."

For Cahit and Sibel the road is not just rocky, it is land-mined. Against the presumption that it�s always good to shake off the fetters of tradition and religion, "Head-On" opposes a distinctly unromantic portrait of the liberated Western lifestyle. Cahit wants to end his life of booze, drugs, impersonal sex, and selfish behavior; Sibel wants to begin hers. But for a moment they glimpse something better: not the old ways, but not their total rejection, either. The sweet spot is when, after cleaning up Cahit's pigpen of a flat, Sibel cooks him a meal of stuffed peppers. The music on the soundtrack is perfect, the camera lingers on her hands, and even though the film contains several sex scenes, this is the most erotic.

There is no hotter issue in Europe right now than the assimilation of large Muslim immigrant populations. But Europeans still have a tendency to think of assimilation as a one-way street. Here in the nation of immigrants, we have learned to think of it as a two-way street. Indeed, in recent years millions of immigrants have come to America and learned new ways. But they have also kept some of the old, and in the process, the rest of us have learned (re-learned?) that life is best lived between the poles of individual liberation and the constraints of family and community. If the success of "Head-On" is any measure, then the same lesson is being pondered in Europe.

Posted by at 7:20 AM

January 20, 2005

Parody (Barely)

Sometimes the best approach to parody is just to parrot what's already out there with a slightly louder squawk. Good example: Dateline Hollywood's report of actress Jennifer Garner's "three-shitty-picture deal" with Fox.

Posted by at 9:20 AM

Anti-Gravitas

Of late, the public ceremonies of my country fill me with mixed emotions. Today is Inauguration Day, and as the pale wintry sun gleams on the U.S. Capitol, and the excellent armed services band plays on the surreally high podium, my blood stirs in a way that is half-joyous, half-anxious.

Joyous because, like most Americans, including those who did not vote for Bush, I know my country to be high-minded, idealistic, brave. Yet anxious because, like countless other people around the globe, I also know America to be hubristic, self-deluding, rash. Maybe the president's speech will resolve this ambivalence?

No chance. The speech itself is not eloquent or soaring (don't touch that cliche), but it is well crafted and strains earnestly to lift off. Yet the president's delivery makes me squirm. His speaking style is no longer forced and mangled (he's come a long way), but it remains incurably tinny. No matter how hard he tries, he just can't wring the insincerity out of his voice.

Why is that? His enemies say, "It's the stupidity, stupid." But Bush isn't stupid. He's no intellectual, but he's as smart as the proverbial whip. His problem is different. Until three years ago, his success in the world derived from his skill at cheerfully deflating the seriousness of others. The English wit Sydney Smith once quipped that while others were rising by their gravity, he was sinking by his levity. For Bush it has been the other way around.

I'm not suggesting a lack of seriousness now. Along with the rest of us, Bush changed on 9/11. You don't have to take my word for it. Just rent "Journeys With George," the flawed but fascinating documentary about the 2000 Bush presidential campaign, made by Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D. California). It will show you, up close and personal, the pre-9/11 Dubya.

And what a droll, sardonic, towel-snapping fellow he was! Traveling with him was tough for the rumpled reporter types, because instead of snapping their towels at the candidate, they found themselves getting snapped at by his. The film ends at the First Inaugural of Bush the Second, and the podium was just as surreally high then as now. But everything else has changed, hasn't it? Which is why Bush's speech only intensifies my ambivalence. It contains too much dissonance of its own.

Posted by at 4:30 AM

January 19, 2005

If You Don't Like Suspense

If you prefer not to stay up past midnight on February 25 to hear the words, "And the winner is...", The Guardian (UK) has a formula for predicting who will take home the Oscars this year. Which leads me to wonder: will the movie industry soon be adopting a hit-prediction system as effective as the pop music software described elsewhere in the Guardian?

Among critics, the cliche is that the entertainment industry already works by tried-and-true formulas. And certainly this is what studios, networks, cable channels, and record companies would LIKE to do. What mega-corporation wants to go on investing millions of dollars in a product so unreliable it comes out different each time it is manufactured? But among the good people who actually make movies, TV shows, and records, the cliche is just the opposite: "Nobody knows anything."

What do AJ readers think of this apparent paradox?

Posted by at 8:45 AM

January 16, 2005

Pay Attention

A married couple no longer young sit on the roof of a luxury hotel, palm trees swaying in the tropical breeze. By candlelight, over a beer, the husband reveals that shortly after meeting his wife he had bribed her boss to transfer her to a job near him: "So I could marry you." Joking about the amount of the bribe, they kiss.

The only jarring note is the chatter of machine guns in the background. This is Kigali, Rwanda, in May or June of 1994. And outside the hotel gates, Hutu militias armed with guns and machetes have started the genocide that because of the world's inaction left between 800,000 and one million ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutu dead.

But this scene is not a mistake. It's been carefully staged by the husband, Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), the elegant manager of the hotel, so he can tell his wife Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo) how he wants her and their four children to die. Paul is Hutu, his wife Tutsi. And seeking refuge in the hotel are 1,200 more Tutsis. Paul is trying to keep the militias at bay, but if he fails, he wants his family to jump off the roof rather than watch each other be raped and hacked to pieces.

This strange doubleness - candlelight, mass murder - reflects the startling depth of "Hotel Rwanda," which you will miss if you look for the usual ingredients. The world knows that Mr. Rusesabagina succeeded, so there isn't much suspense. None of the killing occurs on camera (except for some grainy news footage), so there isn't much violence. And while director Terry George makes clear the moral failure of the US, the UN, and the West in general, there isn't much politics, either.

Instead, "Hotel Rwanda" achieves something almost never seen in the movies: a serious portrait of a good man. Paul loves his family and is brave - in Hollywood this would be more than enough to make him the good guy. But this film does more. It emphasizes Paul's mental qualities. He is no intellectual, just a hotel manager. But he is alert, attentive, self-controlled, swift to read people and manipulate them (through cunning if necessary), and above all, cool in the face of danger. He is what the ancient Greeks called sophron.

In the same vein, there is a classical resonance to the fact that Paul in the hospitality business. Hospitality meant far more to the ancient Greeks than it does to us. In Homer, it means not just being nice to people but showing them how rich and powerful you are, placing them in your debt through good treatment and fine gifts, and finally being in a position to call in your chips.

This is precisely what happens in the escalating scenes between Paul and the Hutu general Augustin Bizimungo (Fana Mokoena), which alone are worth double the price of admission. Smoothly and convincingly, Cheadle's Paul goes from being the kind of host who knows what everybody is drinking to being the kind of hero who knows what every fearful moment requires. Against such a hideous backdrop, this is a beautiful thing to watch.

Posted by at 1:10 AM

January 9, 2005

Penn - etrating

Who are the two best actors in America? Robert Duvall and Sean Penn, IMHO. To judge by a fascinating interview with Penn in today's Boston Globe, there is no love lost between them. But that's not what strikes me about the interview. What strikes me is Penn's ability to relate the political side of his brain to the artistic side. For what are probably very good historical reasons, artists tend to compartmentalize these.

Sean Penn is the son of Leo Penn, a blacklisted figure from the bad old McCarthy days, so it is not surprising that he is a man of the left. Yet not the Hollywood left, I'm tempted to say. It's a matter of proportion. Most movie people live in a bubble, and when they try to connect with the world, they typically do so by taking highly moralistic, simplistic, one-sided stands on pet issues. (A political style found on both sides of the ideological divide, needless to say.)

What's impressive about Penn is not that he never takes such stands (he does), but rather that he does more. In plugging his new film, "The Assassination of Richard Nixon," he brings the open, imaginative, penetrating side of his mind - the artistic side - to bear on a political topic. On Nixon and George W. Bush, he sound more like a thoughtful historian than a celebrity actor.

Too bad he couldn't muster the same sympathy for Robert Duvall.

Posted by at 12:45 PM

January 7, 2005

"Tastes Good to Me"

Writing in today's Christian Science Monitor, David Sterritt asks an excellent question: Why do movie critics engage in groupthink? At press screenings, he notes, he and his compadres often seem to be "on different wavelengths" about the films they see. But when the time comes to compile lists of the year's best movies, "the same titles keep leaping out, as if some secret signal had been transmitted to our movie-critic brains."

I agree with Mr. Sterritt that along with challenging the taste of the public, critics should challenge the taste of other critics. But I disagree with his account of how to do this. Rather than engaging in groupthink, he writes, critics should be "following our own lights, disagreeing more often than agreeing, and remembering there's no scientific test to determine 'good' or 'bad' at the movies." The first two points make sense but not the third. Of course there's no scientific test. But that doesn't mean there are no tests at all.

Personally I find critical groupthink reassuring, because even when wrong, it suggests a certain coherence. The alternative is found on the ubiquitous chat-rooms attached to movie websites. They contain many intelligent remarks, to be sure, and every now and then you find someone who can actually spell. But these free-form reviews also illustrate what happens when (as the saying goes) "everyone's a critic": unfettered subjectivity, bizarre free association, celebrity gossip, and worst of all, a childish inability to disagree without reaching for the flamethrower.

Now let me offer a flameless rebuke to Mr. Sterritt. The critical favorite of 2004 is "Sideways," a judgment I am happy to endorse; it does my heart good to see such a terrific film get the kudos it deserves. Mr. Sterritt admires "Sideways" too, but so intent is he on the virtues of disagreement for its own sake, he quotes A.O. Scott of the New York Times reducing the critics' plaudits to narcissism. They like "Sideways," Scott suggests, because as "white, middle-aged men" they identify with the main character's "self-pity and solipsism," qualities that "represent the underside of the critical temperament."

Oh, dear. Leaving aside the merits of proving one's independence by quoting the New York Times, isn't it possible that all those hard-working criticis actually have good reasons for praising this movie? If they identify with the character of Miles (Paul Giamatti), it is probably not because he is a sad sack (excuse me, Mr. Scott, but your description of the movie critic does not cover all cases). Rather it is because Miles has a fine palate for wine, which he has developed over a long period of time, and he is traveling with a buddy who keeps saying, "Tastes good to me!" while slurping down the worst rotgut. Hate to sound like a snob, but I've been there. Haven't you?

Posted by at 11:45 AM

December 31, 2004

Movie of the Year (II)

Yes, it was "Fahrenheit 9/11." To see my review, click on "Moore" in the BAYLES ELSEWHERE box to your right. But for a much better documentary, just as barbed but made in better humor, click on my review of "Super Size Me" in same box. HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Posted by at 8:00 AM

December 29, 2004

Video Virgil: Austen Power

Having introduced the topic of Jane Austen (see "Sideways" rave below), I feel moved to mention why the 1996 BBC/A&E production of "Pride and Prejudice" starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth is my favorite.

I admire this one the most because it achieves the most delicate balance between two very different worlds: that of Jane Austen�s novels and that of our contemporary film sensibility.

There are an amazing number of Austen adaptations out there. On this side of the pond they range from the old-fashioned Hollywood feature, the 1940 "Pride and Prejudice" starring Greer Garson and Sir Lawrence Olivier; to the new-fangled Hollywood feature, the 2003 update set in contemporary America, with the necessary social morality supplied by having the characters all be Mormons.

The chief fault of these, and of all novel-based feature films, is the adaptation process itself. No matter how highly credentialed the writers, they are bound by the stricture of the two-hour screenplay to commit ugly acts of amputation and evisceration.

The BBC led the way to a solution: the TV miniseries. Give the writer six hours instead of two, and he or she is less likely to turn into an Edward Scissorhands, out to discipline fusty old novelists for wasting kerjillions of words on material that doesn't advance the plot.

The BBC has adapted "Pride and Prejudice" four times: in 1952, 1967, 1980, and 1996. I haven�t seen the first two, but the contrast between �80 and �96 suggests the solution created a new problem: misplaced fidelity.

While Austen�s prose may seem dry to the newcomer, to the seasoned reader it purls along, clear and rapid as a fast-running brook. For reasons of cost, undue attachment to theatrical conventions, or perhaps both, this fluency was absent from the �80 production, which (despite a fine performance by Elizabeth Garvie as Elizabeth Bennet) is stagey and ... well, dry.

By �96 somebody at the Beeb - or at A&E - had figured out two things. First, that Austen is not dry. And second, that film has its own way of bubbling along, one that is different from both the page and the stage. Let the purists complain; if Austen were alive today, she would delight in this version and find ever so tactful fault with the others.

Posted by at 12:45 PM

December 23, 2004

Fine and Mellow for the Holidays

It's tricky to judge "Sideways," because "Sideways" is about judgment. All kinds of judgment, from the wine taster's palate to the would-be lover's heart. And it is so good, it makes you vow never again to drink rotgut.

The story is simple. Two 40-ish guys, former college roommates, take a tour of the Santa Barbara, California wine country. One of them, a failing actor named Jack (Thomas Haden Church), is about to get married. So his old friend Miles (Paul Giamatti), a pudgy failing novelist suffering post-divorce depression, suggests the trip as a last fling.

Of course, what Miles has in mind - open road, golden scenery, gourmet food, and great wine - is not what Jack hankers for. Like an aging woodthrush, Jack wants to puff out his feathers and make funny noises in his throat to attract females. Soon he is happily banging a wine pourer named Stephanie (Sandra Oh), while Miles goes into an emotional tailspin over sensing that a classy waitress named Maya (Virginia Madsen) might be a kindred spirit.

I saw "Sideways" right after "Closer" and was struck by the fact that Jack could be a character in either film. Like the "Closer" foursome, he's a narcissist whose life consists of yielding to every impulse, hurting other people, then absolving himself in fluent psychobabble. The only difference is, "Closer" glamourizes the type and "Sideways" does not. Thanks in part to a brilliant performance by Church, we see Jack in the kindest possible light as a greedy little boy half-trying to grow up.

Is "Sideways" moralistic? Not at all. But it is moral in a way that few contemporary films know how to be. Without giving away the ending, let me just say that by the time Jack and his Armenian-American bride are taking their vows under a large ornamental cross, he is the most pathetically sincere hypocrite you ever saw.

As for Miles, he turns out to be anything but pathetic. In a curious way, his fine palate becomes a metaphor for the fineness of his judgment in other more important matters, such as love. Just when you thought the movies had forgotten how to do courtship, along comes this contest between two people who see themselves reflected in Pinot, the most vulnerable wine grape but also the richest.

Let me state my praise this way: If you admire Jane Austin, and take pleasure in her delicate distinctions of right and wrong, not to mention her angelic patience toward human weakness, then you will very likely savor the long, smooth finish of "Sideways."

Posted by at 10:30 AM

December 19, 2004

Movie of the Year (I)

Now that Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" has made its way through the world's movie theaters and is selling briskly on DVD, critics and pundits are looking back at the various predictions, fearful and hopeful, that accompanied its release. The broad, eclectic website Beliefnet.com is a good place to go if you want a quick update on those predictions or an open-ended and seemingly endless discussion of the film.  In the spirit of shameless self-promotion, I refer the reader to my own comments on the film, posted last spring - just click on "The Passion" to your right.

Posted by at 2:00 AM

December 18, 2004

The Lemmings Cliff Film Festival

According to the filmfestivals.com website, there are 2,500 film festivals occurring every year. Now this is a global figure, so it may inc

Posted by at 8:05 AM

December 17, 2004

Jumpers

Take it from generations of storytellers: dollar for dollar, erotic deception is your biggest entertainment value. In "Closer," the Mike Nichols film just nominated for a Golden Globe, the deception begins with the title, which implies the existence of something solid in a human being to which others may come close (or closer). But there's no such solidity in these four pretty protagonists. The moment they get close, they fly apart.

This makes for some intriguing patterns, like the swirls traced by a magnet in a pile of metal shavings. The question is, are the forces at work in this film any more complicated than the positive and negative charges found in a magnet?

Plot summaries are a drag but in this case necessary: An American stripper named Alice (Natalie Portman) goes to London and jumps the bones of an English journalist named Dan (Jude Law). Dan later betrays Alice by jumping the bones of an American photographer named Anna (Julia Roberts). By jumping Dan's bones, Anna is betraying her husband, an English dermatologist named Larry (Clive Owen). In the end, Larry and Alice claim to have jumped each other's bones, but they might be lying.

So many bones, so little time. Oddly, "Closer" would have us believe that these four take several years to do what any self-respecting spouse-swappers could do in a single evening. But spouse-swapping is shallow and "Closer" is deep. Right?

There's one deep-seeming gimmick: instant messaging. Pretending to be Anna, Dan erotic-IMs with Larry as a practical joke, only to arrange a rendezvous that results in some serious bone-jumping. But Cyrano de Bergerac these people ain't. It is not clear why Larry would venture forth to meet the author of such lines as, "I want 2 cum on yr face." Cum to think of it, this isn't deep, or even erotic. Just trendy.

If there is a deep character, it would be Natalie, the stripper skilled at exerting power over men without letting them exert any over her. The film's most riveting scene occurs when Larry (heartsick over Anna) visits a strip joint and pays for a private ogle with Alice (heartsick over Dan). Larry wants to jump Alice's bones, but Alice cites the house rule, "Look but don't touch." And when Larry begs her to say her real name, she insists on using her fake nom de strip, Jane. Of course, at the end we learn that her name really is Jane.

This pattern is tidy: by attracting and repelling in equal measure, the gorgeous but vulnerable heroine achieves a moment of maximum control that enables her to speak the truth. Unfortunately, even this pattern dissolves at the end, when the happiness of Natalie and Dan reunited is destroyed by the question: DID Larry jump Alice's bones, after all?

We never learn the answer, a device doubtless intended to make us share these characters' morbid desire to know the truth even when it destroys happiness. This might pass for deep, if this film contained any happiness or emotional truth. But it doesn't. So the magnet in use here has only one charge.

Posted by at 10:45 AM

December 15, 2004

Blockheads

Hurt by competition with Netflix and other mail-order video rental services, Blockbuster's operating income threatens to stay flat this coming year. So the company in its wisdom has decided to eliminate its most-griped-about policy: late fees.

Instead of charging you an average $4 for the late return of a video, Blockbuster will now let you keep it an extra week, then charge your credit card for the purchase price. Oh, you didn't want to buy it? Well, you're in luck: you then have a 30-day "grace period" in which to return the video for a store credit, minus a $1.25 re-stocking fee. And just to clarify further: the grace period includes the extra week. So it's really only 21 days.

Is that clear? If you are regular customer at Blockbuster, you may be harboring some small doubt about waiting in line for the privilege of having some Tarantino wannabe explain the new fee structure to you.

For this is the real reason why people are switching to mail-order video: THEY NEVER HAVE TO GO TO THE VIDEO STORE!

Consider: You can order books by mail, too. But people flock to Borders and Barnes & Noble. Why? Because they're pleasant public places where people can buy coffee, sit and relax, browse in peace, even read. Quite apart from the debate over chains vs, independents, most people will agree that compared with the average Blockbuster, the average Borders treats its customers like human beings.

And this is true regardless of age or level of education. Compare the human specimens in Blockbuster with those in Borders, and you will find that they are basically the same. The only real difference is that the latter are happier. They aren't trying to choose a video, add up their late fees, or handle their children in an environment that assaults them with blaring promotional ads and mountains of candy, popcorn, and all the other unspeakable junk food that Blockbuster would have us believe is the normal, natural accompaniment to watching a film at home.

My point is simple. Instead of interpreting the difference between Blockbuster and Borders as proof of a McLuhanesque gap between noble print and debased electronic media, maybe we should think of it as the difference between a company that batters its customers into submission and one that understands that most people will actually pay for the privilege of feeling civilized..

Posted by at 11:00 AM

December 13, 2004

Not So Rich

Last spring, Frank Rich screened "Kinsey" and found it "an intelligent account of a half-forgotten and somewhat quaint chapter in American history."

Now he finds the film more timely. Indeed, his column in yesterday's New York Times held up "Kinsey" as the harbinger of a returning dark age, as religious conservatives hatch a new, post-electoral "plot against sex in America."

Golly, when I heard that "Kinsey" was attracting the usual spitballs from the usual suspects, I just took it as another skirmish in the Thirty Years War between publicity-seeking preachers and keister-covering broadcasters. To judge by Rich's account, though, the situation is more serious than that. Indeed, the battlements of sexual enlightenment are being stormed by an army of Bible-reading Orcs.

This is odd, given that only last week Rich was reassuring us that red-state couch potatoes enjoy televised T&A just as much as blue-state ones do. That struck me as a singularly uninteresting observation, but about all we can expect from a critic who (to paraphrase Charles Peguy) would go to any length to avoid being thought a prude.

Still, I can't help but wonder whether Rich is really worried about the end of nonmarital nooky as we know it, or whether he's just running short of ideas. To quote Peguy directly: "A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."

Posted by at 8:00 AM

December 12, 2004

Same Director: "Hail, Hail, Rock 'n' Roll"

While we're on the subject of 1950s rock & roll, let me recommend a fine documentary by the man who directed "Ray." In 1987 Taylor Hackford made "Hail, Hail, Rock 'n' Roll" (1987), a portrait of Chuck Berry as he prepared for a 60th-birthday concert in St Louis' formerly segregated Fox Theater. The film offers revealing glimpses of such rock luminaries as Bo Diddley, Johnnie Johnson (Berry's original pianist), Little Richard, Eric Clapton, Linda Ronstadt, Bruce Springsteen, and Keith Richard.

The finest moment, worth double the price of admission, is when Berry, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard recall how naive they had been in the face of sharp practices by the record labels that signed their first hits. Berry, who has been bragging all along about his business acumen, listens to his compadres confessing their mistakes, then informs them that he was too smart to get ripped off. "I majored in math," he says - only to have the spotlight immediately stolen by Little Richard's hilarious retort: "Well, I majored in MOUTH!"

Posted by at 10:00 AM

December 11, 2004

Shining Brother Ray

According to popular myth, the late fifties were "the day the music died." That was when most of the original rock & rollers quit recording: Carl Perkins because of a car accident; Little Richard because of religion; Elvis because of being drafted into the Army; Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry because of sex-related scandals; and Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens because of a fatal plane crash.

That's hardly the whole picture, though. To quote music critic Nelson George: "Many rock & roll historians, with their characteristic bias toward youth rebellion, claim that the last two years of the fifties were a musically fallow period. But that claim only works if you're willing to ignore Ray Charles's brilliant work."

I couldn't agree more. To talk about Ray Charles is to talk about the finest vintage: ripe essence of blues, jazz, country, and (most important) gospel warmed by the Southern sun, fermented in the soul of a brave and gifted man, then bottled by wise vintners like Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, the type of entrepreneurs who once upon a time gave the American record industry a reason to exist.

If you're still reading, you've probably savored this musical vintage. But unless you've read "Brother Ray," the salty-sweet autobiography that Charles did with David Ritz, you may not know the fascinating life story of this musical icon. Now you can learn about it, with a minimum of foolishness and a maximum of feeling.

As a writer about popular music, I've seen a lot of "biopics," and believe me, most are rotgut. Not "Ray." From the production design, which richly re-creates an America that now seems as remote as ancient Rome, to the phenomenal cast, who quite simply act their hearts out, this movie is...what? Rather than reach for a superlative, let me just say that this movie is worthy of its subject.

Posted by at 10:15 AM

December 7, 2004

"Kinsey": All Bonobos and No Chimps

Behold the bonobo, Dr. Kinsey tells his enraptured students. They're our closest relatives, and they have sex all the time, with as many partners as possible, while living together in peace and harmony!

Way cool, we say. But depending on our knowledge of primate evolution, we might also ask why the kindly prof doesn't mention chimpanzees, those larger cousins of bonobos who really ARE our closest relatives (just a few chromosomes away from Uncle Fred). Is it because recent field research suggests that chimps in the wild take giddy delight in such activities as rape, mate-battering, and murder?*

Personally, I don't put much stock in sociobiology. It's fascinating to compare ourselves with animals, but for a couple of millennia, human beings have understood that, like it or not, we are different. For one thing, animals don't conduct scientific studies of their own sexual behavior, publish them in best-selling volumes that contribute to significant changes in social organization (if not behavior), then make movies celebrating only one side of the story.

To be fair, "Kinsey" tells its one-sided story gracefully. Bill Condon is a deft director with a flair for sexual themes (see his excellent 1998 "Gods and Monsters"). And Liam Neeson is a vast improvement on the original Alfred Kinsey - not only is he better looking, with a better sense of humor, he is also better behaved.

Oops. This is science, folks. We're not supposed to judge behavior as better or worse. That belongs to the dark ages B.K. (Before Kinsey), when ten-year-old boys were forced to wear cruel contraptions to keep them from masturbating.

Huh? Where did I get that idea? From a gripping scene in which it is revealed that the suffering flesh of Kinsey p�re (John Lithgow) had been mortified in this bizarre way. As it happens, there's no evidence that such a thing ever occurred. Why then add it to the movie? The answer is simple: to make the dark ages look even darker than they were.

America had no lack of sexual hangups in the 1950s: anti-gay prejudice, racist myths, and gross disinformation about female sexuality (thanks a lot, Sigmund). A more measured film would not feel the need to add sexual morality to the list. I say this because the last I checked, sex was a pretty strong passion that sometimes needs channelling, if not curbing. (I assure you, my acceptance of this hard fact does not compel me to strap chastity belts on ten-year-old boys.)

One one level, "Kinsey" accepts this hard fact. There aren't many erotic practices out there that most people agree are wrong, but raping children is one. So "Kinsey" includes a moment of moral indignation at it, as though trying to reassure the audience that this is a movie about noble scientists, not nasty libertines.

The trouble is, Kinsey and some of his associates WERE libertines, and like all libertines they ended up hurting and violating one another. There are some hints of this: a scene where two researchers who've been sleeping with each other's wives succumb to jealous anger; and one great line: "When it comes to love, we are all in the dark."

But these are only hints, which is too bad, because underlying this story is a compelling set of questions about what science can and cannot tell us about ourselves. For example, love is not the only thing science cannot illuminate. Morality is another. Can it be proven scientifically that raping children is wrong? Of course not. That is a truth of another kind, no less true for not being subject to the experimental method.

If "Kinsey" went a little further in addressing such questions, instead of pulling back from them (for fear of appearing prudish?), then it would be a great movie instead of merely a good one.

* My source is the work of anthropologist Richard Wrangham, whose 1997 book, "Demonic Males," uses solid research to buttress a less-than-solid brief for what might be described as the bonobo lifestyle.

Posted by at 9:45 AM

December 4, 2004

Video Virgil: Nice Beards, Great Bathrobes

Speaking of film in the classroom, here�s a sleeper: "King David" (1985, directed by Bruce Beresford). To show this to students before reading I and II Samuel would be a mistake, because unlike the Scripture, the film is not about the problem of monarchy itself.

Americans may have rejected kings in political life, but we yearn for them in fantasy - consider "The Lion King." By contrast, I and II Samuel tell of the Israelites yearning for a king so they can be like other tribes, and of the Lord anointing a bad one, Saul, to teach them why they should not crave an earthly ruler other than his prophets. The twist, of course, is that David comes along, and through one of the Hebrew Bible�s great human-divine wrestling matches convinces the Lord that monarchy can work (at least for a while).

"King David" reduces this capacious theme to a psychological battle between Saul (Edward Woodward), the test-dummy king who succumbs to envy and paranoia, and David (Richard Gere), the golden-boy upstart who can do no wrong. And when David does do wrong, seducing Bathsheba and then arranging to have her husband, Uriah the Hittite, killed in battle, the film smooths things over by making Uriah a sexually dysfunctional wife beater. As any astute college student will immediately notice, this makes Nathan the prophet look kind of silly rebuking David with a parable about a shepherd who loses his beloved pet lamb to the greed of a rich man. As I recall, the shepherd in the parable did not go in for lamb abuse.

OK, in this respect "King David" is just another "beards and bathrobes" flick that takes what is deep, tortured, gnarly, and puzzling in the Bible and reduces it to facile melodrama. But in its defense I will say that "King David" does get a lot of things right - indeed, more than most examples of the genre. And because the acting, production design, and (especially) music are generally excellent, the film provides certain pleasures well known to avid readers who are also movie lovers: the pleasures of allusion, of illustration, and (not least, as demonstrated above) of correction!

Posted by at 10:20 AM

November 23, 2004

College Try: Timing is Everything

It is natural for college professors to knock movie adaptations of great books, and no wonder: Hollywood's record of dumbing down classic literature, not to mention popular culture's overweening claims on student attention, can make showing a film seem more hindrance than help.

Yet film adaptations have their place. I would argue that right movie, shown at the right time and in the right way, can be richly educational. But let me propose a caveat: Never lead off with the movie.

To the hapless educator trying to interest students in material that is less user-friendly than, say, "Spider Man," it's tempting to use the film version of a book as a sort of canap� to whet student appetite for the main course.

But this doesn't work. To lead off with the film is to invite students to treat it as a substitute for the book. (This is especially true if the film is old. slow-paced, or otherwise lacking in state-of-the-art production values. About technical filmcraft young people are terrible snobs. For them, sitting through an antiquated movie is hard work, almost as hard as turning pages.)

To lead off with the film is also to give it a prior claim to authenticity, and to reduce the book to source material - or worse, corrective. The process of reading and discussion thereby becomes one of finding fault with the movie. This is no fun and often prompts students to say, "We're sure you're right, Professor Scoldtongue. But we liked the movie!"

Thus it follows logically that the right time to show the film is after the book has been thoroughly digested. If the film is halfway competent, it will provide the pleasure of allusion, as students recognize characters, details, and themes.

To students who have difficulty visualizing from the page, the film will also provide the pleasure of illustration (which, contrary to the print-worshiping McLuhanites among us, is a perfectly respectable pleasure that has been around for many centuries).

But most important, showing the film after reading the book puts the burden of correction on the students. And in my experience they take great delight in parading their superior understanding, using the text as the standard by which the film's every deficiency may be rooted out.

This isn't a reason to show lousy adaptations. The more elusive a film's deficiencies, the harder the students must work to root them out. Again, these observations are based on a tiny sample: my own students. But here is my rule of thumb: when good books are followed by good movies, the classroom comes alive.

Posted by at 3:45 AM

November 20, 2004

Made for TV: "The Wool Cap"

Brace yourself. We are now entering the season of feel-good TV movies in which angelic choirs, colored lights, and lightly falling snow possess a miraculous healing power over even the worst family traumas. Most directors of holiday movies have never seen an estrangement, betrayal, embitterment, or deep psychic would that does not instantly dissolve when two family members say "I love you" and give each other a big bear hug.

I won't kid you - there's just such a moment in "The Wool Cap," a made-for-TV movie airing this Sunday, November 21 on TNT. But "The Wool Cap" is worth watching all the same, because while it is definitely full of cliches, it manages to suffuse them with rare honesty and humor.

The secret ingredient is William H. Macy, an actor who was never a favorite of mine until last year, when he and Steven Schachter made "Door to Door," an Emmy-winning film about a traveling salesman with cerebral palsy. Now they have collaborated on a new, equally affecting character: Gigot,  gloomy alcoholic who works as a janitor in a dilapidated New York tenement.

Gigot cannot speak because of a neck injury sustained in a long-ago car accident, but thanks to Macy's terrific wordless acting, Gigot's feelings are crystal clear as gradually, through no wish of his own, he becomes the sole responsible adult in the life of Lou, a young African-American girl abandoned by her crack addict mother.

Maybe "The Wool Cap" works because the Christmas-Bear-Hug scene is not the main event but rather a step in the process by which Gigot learns to be a father (by reconciling with his own father). Or maybe it succeeds because of Keke Palmer, the gifted young actress who brings Lou to vivid, unstereotypical life. Or Don Rickles, pulling off a lovely understated star turn as one of Gigot's tenants. Or the pet monkey who steals every other scene. Whatever the reason, "The Wool Cap" is a keeper. Take it from someone who actually likes eggnog and fruitcake - but only when made with the finest ingredients.

Posted by at 2:51 AM

November 16, 2004

Video Virgil: Washed Out

I quit reading Philip Roth around the time he wrote "The Breast" - a case, methought, of Big Author morphing into Big Boob. But "The Human Stain" is supposed to be a good book. Which may well be, because it stops short of being a good film the way films made from good books often do. In particular, the film faithfully depicts every surface wrinkle of a relationship that is of interest only in its emotional depths. Among other things this causes the sex scenes to have an odd, second-hand quality, as though they had been staged by one of those aliens who go around abducting humans and calibrating their gonads.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. "The Human Stain" is two films, and one is indeed very good (if truncated). It opens with the less than good one, starring Anthony Hopkins as a sixtyish classics professor named Coleman Silk, who uses the word "spook" to describe two students who never show up in class (and are therefore invisible, like ghosts). As luck would have it, the students are black, so Coleman is hurled into the sort of P.C. hell that could erupt all too easily in place named "Athena College" in "Athena," Massachusetts.

Poor Coleman�s wife is so distraught she dies of a heart attack, and the only friend he has left is Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's fictional alter ego (Gary Sinise). It's just as well Nathan is there, because when Coleman meets Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman), an unhappy young woman who works menial jobs in the town, the resurgence of lust he experiences might escape the viewer�s attention, save that Coleman tells Nathan all about it. On the screen Coleman's emotion looks more like dyspepsia. More erotic than any of the Hopkins-Kidman scenes is the sequence where Coleman puts Fred Astaire on the stereo and induces Nathan to dance with him to "Cheek to Cheek."

Part of the problem is Kidman, who labors so hard to look scuzzy, she has no time to flesh out a character who (in the novel) must labor to look pretty. One of these days, Hollywood will cast a plain woman as a plain woman. But don't hold your breath.

Of course, none of this is the point. Just as Kidman is trying to pass as a scuzz, so is Coleman trying to pass as something he�s not. In particular, he�s not Jewish, as everyone thinks. He�s black. Hence the irony of the racism charge. And hence the plot of the other film, the good but truncated one.

The good film is a flashback in which Wentworth Miller plays the young Coleman, the son of a genteel African-American family who learns the hard way that the world of his aspirations is off limits to him as a Negro. So Coleman (who is, as the saying goes, "light, bright, and damn near white") decides to pass - and in doing so breaks two hearts, his mother's and his own. Every actor in this flashback is superb, from Anna Deveare Smith as Coleman�s mother to Jacinda Barrett as the white girlfriend who leaves him when she learns of his background. It�s too bad this part couldn�t be the whole movie.

Coleman never shares his secret with anyone � not colleagues, not Nathan, not even his wife � until at the end he shares it with Faunia. He does so because Faunia has painful secrets of her own. The trouble is, it�s hard to care about Faunia�s secrets, because they seem cobbled together for the occasion. First, her poverty is not inherited, like that of most struggling people who mop floors in elite institutions. Like a character in Dickens, Faunia is high born but fallen low through no fault of her own.

Whose fault is it? Brace yourself for the cliches: a sexually abusive stepfather, and a crazy Vietnam vet husband (Ed Harris, wasting his talent). For the sake of the story, I�m willing to tolerate Hopkins as the older Coleman, although his resemblance to the younger is nil. But compared with the other female characters, Faunia feels like something cut and pasted from a bad TV movie. It is sad her crazy husband drives the lovers off the road into a frozen lake. But it is not surprising. For all the talent that went into it, this movie was badly steered from the beginning.

Posted by at 10:00 AM

October 24, 2004

Video Virgil: What Was Hip?

There's a new book out called "Hip: The History," by New York Times writer John Leland.  It sounds fascinating, but if you want to witness the pure essence of hip, watch the DVD of "Jazz on a Summer's Day," Bert Stern's documentary about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.

"Documentary" is the wrong word, because this is a visual poem, as hip in its way as a solo by Dizzy Gillespie or a poem by Frank O'Hara.

Like all crucial words, hip is hard to define. Rooted in African-American musical culture, especially jazz, hip is also white, though not in the crude heavy-handed way of Norman Mailer's bone-headed essay, "The White Negro." Hip is in eclipse today, because it is neither crude (like most pop music) or heavy-handed (like most "serious" commentary on pop music).

The word hip originated in West Africa: "hepi" or "hipi" is Wolof for "to open your eyes." And Stern's wide-open camera eye gives us amazing close-ups of Jimmy Giuffre, Thelonious Monk, Anita O'Day, Sonny Stitt, Gerry Mulligan, Dinah Washington, Big Maybelle, Chuck Berry, Chico Hamilton, Louis Armstrong, and Mahalia Jackson.

Great artists, all. But great artists need great audiences, and what is most amazing about this film is its portrait of the crowd. Newport was no paradise - Stern himself described it as bringing not-rich New Yorkers, black and white, into a rich white enclave. Unlike the revelers at Woodstock eleven years later, this crowd did not fancy itself a utopian community. They just dug the music. But the way they dug it had a rare and magical beauty, and I for one am glad Stern was there to capture it.

Posted by at 12:16 PM

September 22, 2004

We Don't Do Continuity Any More

The critics have been spooning over "We Don't Live Here Any More," a new film adapted from two 1970s novellas by Andre Dubus. Dubus's fine-tuned fiction was also the basis for "In the Bedroom," one of the most remarkable films made in the last decade. This time, though, his art is not so well served.

The problem is partly the material. Instead of murder, grief, and revenge, the weighty subjects of "In the Bedroom," the topic here is wife-swapping 1970s-style.  I'm tempted to add "pre-feminist 1970s-style," since both husbands are youngish academics married to women who never utter a peep about doing anything more interesting than keep house. The acting is OK (I rarely blame actors for anything).  But the story is thin, the sexual equivalent of watching somebody decide not to have a cookie, then decide to have one, then decide not to have another.  John Updike did it better in "Couples."

The real problem, though, is a distracting linattention to what film makers call continuity.  That usually means keeping details consistent from scene to scene - for example, if a character is riding a green bicycle in the beginning of a scene, he or she should not be riding a blue one a minute later.

The continuity problem here is a bit more serious.  Let me quote from the New Yorker's rave review: "The lovely cinematography of Maryse Alberti ... creates a canopy of nature over the characters, season after season, which tells us that life will go on for these four - they may not find happiness, but they will survive. Scene by scene, the movie is precise, vibrant, and, for all its turmoil, moving."

Huh? Watch the scenes unfurl, and you will witness what can only be called season-swapping.  One moment it is summer, then fall, then spring, then winter, and so on.  Maybe I should give the film the benefit of the doubt and take this as a cinematic metaphor suggesting the frustration of these four individuals whose relationships with one another don't seem to be getting anywhere?  Nahh.

Posted by at 9:15 AM

September 9, 2004

Addendem

When I wrote in my last entry that Americans are incapable of seeing the humor in close political combat, I did not mean we don't laugh at "Yes, Prime Minister."  I just meant we don't make shows like "Yes, Prime Minister."  Instead, we make pious stuff like "The West Wing." 

Posted by at 9:46 AM

September 5, 2004

Video Virgil: "Mystic River"

Winner of this year's Oscar, "Mystic River" has been compared with Greek tragedy. This intrigued me at first, because most Hollywood films treat of tragedy in the spirit described by William Dean Howells: "What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending."

"Mystic River" does not have a happy ending, which makes its Oscar win all the more impressive. But because it screws up the tragic ending it could have had, "Mystic River" wouldn't have won any prizes in Athens.

The three main characters, Irish-American boys from a fictional blue-collar section of Boston, are as happy as they're ever going to be on the day when one of them, Dave, gets abducted by a pair of pedophiles pretending to be cops. After several horrific days locked in a cellar and roughly abused, Dave escapes. But he is never the same, and neither are his two friends, Jimmy and Sean.

The film opens with Dave's ordeal, but in keeping with Greek unity of time, place, and action, that ordeal is implied more than shown. A purist might set up a chorus -- five guys in the Purple Shamrock bar? -- but director Clint Eastwood is not a purist. He's a master of film, and it is through film that he achieves the emotional tone, searing yet detached, of the tragic chorus.

Then commences the main plot. On the same street, in the same weather, we see the three boys grown up: Dave (Tim Robbins) is a lost soul barely held together by his wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden). Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-con with a second wife who walks the straight and narrow as proprietor of a mom-and-pop grocery. Sean (Kevin Baker) is a police detective who has split from the neighborhood.

For a while, the plot unfolds with Sophoclean swiftness. Jimmy's beloved daughter by his first wife, a mercurial beauty named Katie (Emmy Rossum), is murdered late one night and dumped in a park. Jimmy is frantic. Sean warily shows up to investigate, and Dave spooks Celeste by coming home that night with blood on his clothes and a not very credible story about having beaten and possibly killed a mugger.

And the tragic elements are all in place. A sense of foreboding, of deadly fate set in motion long ago, hangs over the proceedings, mixed with suspense: Did Dave kill Katie? Will Jimmy seek revenge before the facts are in? Will Sean's guilty loyalty cause him to blow the case? Then a series of interlocking recognitions and reversals culminates in a harrowing sequence: Jimmy's gangster-style execution of Dave, followed by the revelation that Dave was innocent, and Sean's decision to let Jimmy walk, his rage and sorrow at having killed his unhappy friend punishment enough.

So why not give "Mystic River" the prize? Because instead of stopping there, Eastwood adds four or five extraneous scenes, tying up loose ends that do not need tying up, and in general draining off all the tragic emotion that the film has successfully evoked. This ending-after-the-ending is so bad, I can't thinking that it was tacked on after the movie was market-tested on the same American public that Howells knew so well. If this is the case, then all I can do is thank Zeus that the theater of Dionysus didn't go in for such foolishness.

Posted by at 11:00 AM

September 2, 2004

War Flix

Sorry for the hiatus. It was unavoidable.

Some thoughts prompted by the news that Warner Brothers has canceled its distribution of David O. Russell's anti-Iraq war documentary made to accompany the re-release of his 1999 film, "Three Kings."

I haven't seen the documentary, but I am curious about it, because Russell is a figure to be reckoned with. "Three Kings" is a flawed but fascinating film about the 1991 Gulf War, which begins with a scene of self-indulgent chaos on the part of American soldiers that is not unlike the opening sequences in "Apocalypse Now."

Amid drunken celebrations of victory in Kuwait, a band of cynical G.I.'s decide to venture into Iraq to steal some gold.  But unlike the Americans in "Apocalypse Now," who descend into the heart of their own darkness, these adventurers encounter a group of desperate Shi'ites involved in the thwarted uprising against Saddam Hussein. By helping them to escape, the Americans ascend to a state of surprisingly convincing moral clarity. The film is full of black humor and graphic violence, but at the end it achieves something like a modern vision of democratic honor.

This stands in sharp contrast with more popular and commercially successful war films like "Black Hawk Down" (2002). Directed by Ridley Scott, "Black Hawk Down" is about the Delta Force and Ranger soldiers who battled to save a helicopter crew stranded in the streets of Mogadishu. As sheer spectacle it is ear-splitting and eye-popping, and it brilliantly evokes the physical aspect of modern high-tech warfare. But unfortunately, "Black Hawk Down" goes out of its way to avoid showing WHY its fresh-faced, all-American heroes, who as characters are as interchangeable as avatars in a video game, are in Somalia in the first place.

This is typical of today's war movies. Some attract a loyal following among veterans and other people familiar with the situations they depict. For example, a veteran friend of mine is a great fan of Mel Gibson's revisionist Vietnam movie, "We Were Soldiers" (2002), for the uncontestable reason that he fought in the battle of the Ia Drang Valley back in 1965. At a recent reunion with his unit, he and his former buddies reconstructed the battle with the aid of the film -- an exercise that clearly meant a lot.

Nonetheless, "We Were Soldiers" is a mediocre movie, in part because it, too, avoids saying WHY the battle is being fought. The first American casualty moans, �I am glad to die for my country,� but by the end, even patriotism is muted, as a voice-over attributed to the film's hero, Lt. Col. Hal Moore, says that the men of the Seventh Air Cavalry �went to war because their country asked them to, but in the end they fought not for their country or their flag. They fought for each other."

This is the mantra nowadays: "Forget cause - leave that to the politicians. Real men fight for comradeship, period."  It makes a lot of sense, as originally defined by psychologists studying the behavior of men in combat. In the heat of battle, many studies have found, soldiers risk their lives not for the sake of abstract ideals but for their friends. The term for this is "unit cohesion," and story-tellers have long understood it. Ever since Achilles rode into battle to avenge his beloved Patroclus, comradeship, not cause, has been the source of drama in all war stories worth telling.

But great story-tellers also understand that cause must be addressed. Yes, comradeship rules while the bullets (or flaming arrows) are flying. But at some point the shooting stops, soldiers ponder why they fight, and if no adequate reason presents itself, they grow less willing to re-enter hell. This is what happened in Vietnam, and this could happen in Iraq.

So what are we left with? Incredibly vivid war movies that drift away from meaning and toward violence for its own sake. "Black Hawk Down" mounts a mighty assault on the senses, but because the thrill is vicarious, it makes war look more exciting than horrible, closer to a video game than to a deadly serious undertaking. Such richly produced, poorly scripted spectacles ignore the bitterest but most important lesson of war � namely, that the willingness of one soldier to sacrifice for another, however potent in the short run, depends in the long run on his knowing why he fights. When the cause is perceived as meaningless or unjust, unit cohesion dissolves and battle spirals into a dishonorable nightmare of every man for himself. Surely that is not a movie that any human being wishes to see.

Posted by at 11:55 AM

August 10, 2004

The New Cultural Diplomacy?

During the 1990s the U.S. government quit engaging in old-fashioned cultural diplomacy. With the Cold War over, it proceeded between 1993 and 2001 to cut the State Department budget for cultural and educational programs by 33 percent, dismantle the U.S.Information Agency (USIA), and close American libraries and cultural centers from Vienna to Ankara, Belgrade to Islamabad.

At the same time, the U.S. exported popular culture, especially movies, big time. Between 1986 and 2000 the fees generated by American exports of film and tape went from $1.68 billion to $8.85 billion, an increase of 426 per cent.  Not only has foreign box office revenue grown faster than domestic, it is now approaching a 2-to-1 ratio.

In other words, while the big State Department was dozing at the wheel, the "little State Department" (the nickname, since the 1940s, of the Motion Picture Export Association) was busy prying open new markets all over the globe.

Which brings us to the present moment: "Fahrenheit 9/11" is now playing in theaters in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and on DVD in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. According to the New York Times, the theaters are packed. And the message, diplomatically speaking, seems twofold: First, people are struck by "how the American adminstration was able to manipulate the American people." And second, they "want to know more about the reaction to the movie among Americans, who have bought more than $103 million in tickets."

In other words, American democracy is still being showcased overseas, only now the image is of mindless mob being manipulated by demagogues. We could be sanguine and assume that this is OK, it shows that we are free to disagree. But if we keep in mind the classic and contemporary critique of democracy as...well, as a mindless mob being manipulated by demagogues, then this new cultural diplomacy looks less appealing. Maybe the old USIA wasn't so bad, after all?

Posted by at 9:30 AM

August 9, 2004

Video Virgil: "Phone Booth"

I wouldn't have rented this one, but when I saw the stunning opening sequence on HBO, I stayed for the rest.

The opener begins with a cliche: a zoom shot from outer space through the earth's atmosphere down toward North America and finally into good old gridlocked Mahattan. But the cliche is nicely souped up, as we are also pulled into an ocean of humming frequencies: millions of people talking on their cellphones.

Then we are prancing down Broadway with Stuart (Colin Farrell), a slick, obnoxious would-be talent agent shouting ridiculous promises into two different cellphones while a young sycophant juggles two more.

You won't like Stuart, but stay with him, because he's about to undergo an amazing transformation. By stepping into a beat-up phone booth to call a young woman he's trying to hit on, he also steps into an evil trap.

Or maybe it's a good trap? Leaving the booth, Stuart hears the phone ring and out of curiosity picks it up. Then he is stuck, because high in one of the surrounding buildings is a sniper who not only knows Stuart's soul but intends to save it -- by any means necessary.  Every pseudo-artist claims moral ambiguity as a theme, but few actually pull it off.  This one does.

Posted by at 9:45 AM

August 3, 2004

Video Virgil: "Yes, Minister"

If you have read this before, apologies. I am moving Video Virgil into the main weblog, because Virgil does not like being sidelined. After the first couple of postings we will move into new territory.

If this political season is making you feel a bit cynical, then I have just the thing for you. If you like smart cynicism instead of dumb, and don't mind being reminded of the comic helplessness of elected officials pitted against the vast bureaucracy of the modern state, then by all means rent the terrific British TV series "Yes, Minister." It is witty, insightful, occasionally side-splitting, and (except for certain references and some appalling 1980s eyeglasses) as timely as tomorrow's op-eds.

Two tips: Ignore the ugly animated drawings that precede each episode, and ignore the clumsiness of the opening episode, in which newly minted Minister for Administrative Affairs Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington) first encounters his nemesis, Permanent Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby (the incomparable Nigel Hawthorne) and Sir Humphrey's earnest apprentice in the art of house-training new ministers, Bernard Woolley (Derek Fowlds).

Once the situation and characters are established, the comedy starts to simmer. Then it bubbles, and by some miracle performed by the writers, Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, it keeps boiling for nigh unto four full discs. I never tired of it, even though the joke remains pretty much the same throughout. Who would have thought that so much hilarity could  be brought forth from the proposition that government exists not to do anything but to perpetuate itself?

Posted by at 11:00 AM

August 2, 2004

I'd Walk A Mile For This One

What a strange movie. Without ceremony, The Story of the Weeping Camel plunks you down in Southern Mongolia, in a part of the Gobi Desert that makes Death Valley look inviting. There you witness the daily round of a nomad family who live entirely off their small herd of sheep and camels. And while these people are quite appealing with their thick colorful garments, their capable calloused hands, and their tender but unsentimental tending of both beast and kin, you still wonder what you are doing there.

Then the story kicks in. I use the word "kick" advisedly, because if you are squeamish about the hindquarters of large animals, you will not enjoy the sequence where a pregnant camel walks around for the better part of two days with the legs of a gawky half-born albino colt sticking out of her rear. As you might imagine, she is not comfortable. Lying down, rolling over, getting up and walking around some more, she cannot get the colt to come out.

Finally the people grab the legs, yank really hard, and pull the colt out. The mother is so relieved, she trots away, leaving the colt to fend for itself. She doesn't want it, and although it whimpers pitifully, and the people try everything to get her to nurse it, she couldn't care less. At one point she even kicks the poor little thing in the head.

If you are not already engrossed, you will be when the two youngest boys ride camelback 50 kilometers to the nearest town, where they hire, of all things, a musician. While in town they also encounter bicycles, satellite dishes, TVs, and slouching teenagers in Western dress. But curiously, the movie does not seem to be about the usual clash between tribal purity and modern corruption. On the contrary, the boys' other errand is to buy batteries for their grandfather's radio -- a detail that suggests these two worlds have been coexisting for quite some time. If this is one of those films about how wonderful life was before modern media, it's pretty subtle about it.

Then you forget about such abstract themes, because the musician rides out to the nomad encampment (on a motorcycle) and plays his instrument, accompanied by the singing of the boys' mother. Charmed by the music, the neglectful mother allows the baby to nurse, weeping great Mongolian camel tears while she does so. If this doesn't cause you to shed a few of your own, then you are even more ornery than a dromedary. Which is mighty ornery.

Posted by at 5:30 AM

July 27, 2004

Right on McTarget

"Super Size Me" is better than any Micheal Moore film, for the simple reason that it was made by a better human being. Morgan Spurlock, a thirty-something filmmaker with one previous production credit, attacks McDonald's with the same aggressive glee that Moore showed when going after General Motors ("Roger and Me"). the gun lobby ("Bowling for Columbine"), and President Bush ("Fahrenheit 9/11"). But while Moore is a carpet bomb blasting everyone who wanders into his viewfinder, Spurlock is a smart bomb hitting only his chosen target.

It's no fun deliberately ruining your health by adopting the sedentary lifestyle and fast food diet that are turning so many Americans into human Humvees, but that is what Spurlock does. Cheerfully making himself the guinea pig, he starts his experiment with a complete medical exam, in which three different doctors declare him to be in "perfect" shape.

Then, after enjoying a healthy "last supper" cooked by his vegan girlfriend, he spends a painful and hilarious 30 days sitting on his behind and scarfing down everything on the McDonald's menu, from Sausage McGriddles to Chicken McNuggets to Double Quarter Pounders with Cheese, accompanied by Super Size French Fries and gallons of Coke, and finished off with horrors like Baked Apple Pie Triple Thick Shakes.

After three weeks the doctors are advising him to stop, and at the end of the month, he has gained 40 pounds and developed something like an addiction to the rush caused by massive amounts of fat, sugar, starch, and sodium. After four weeks the doctors are telling him to quit or suffer alcoholic-like cirrhosis of the liver.

Spurlock uses some Moore tricks: the sarcastic voice-over that doesn't even pretend to be objective; the ironic editing that makes you laugh out loud; the campy use of old ads and TV; and the interview-ambush. The object of the latter is a General Foods spokesman who, in the middle of expressing corporate concern about the obesity epidemic, blurts out, "We're part of the problem." The poor guy is instantly freeze-framed and plastered with the logos of General Foods subsidiaries, while his words are re-played for the movie-going millions. At the end we learn that he no longer works for the company.

But this is Spurlock's sole victim. To everyone else, from McDonald's employees to pudgy consumers who admit to gobbling fast food several times a week, Spurlock is unfailingly sympathetic and polite. One way of measuring the difference between him and Moore is to ask yourself: Who would you rather be attacked by, an unpleasant egomaniac who enjoys making other people look foolish, or a sweet-faced fellow who just grins, rubs his belly, and delivers a knockout punch?

Posted by at 1:40 AM

July 25, 2004

Crouching Trojan and Hidden Greek

How much did I enjoy Troy? This much: In the big-screen theater where I watched it, the film caught fire, literally, during the final sequence depicting the burning of Troy. (How's that for versimilitude?) The manager handed out free re-admits, and I walked into the adjoining theater and watched it all over again, without being in the least bored.

It helped a lot that I had recently spent a month teaching The Iliad. When your head is clanging with Homer's poetry (or at least with a decent translation, my favorite being Robert Fitzgerald's), and your imagination has been straining to grasp the utter strangeness of Homer's universe, the movie is a treat.

Frank Virga, one of my students, put it this way: "Even though I felt the movie failed at times to present the true story of the Iliad, the set did an excellent job of portraying the look of the battles, the atmospheres of the cities, and the look of the warriors." I agree. For all its defects, this film contains moments of breathtaking beauty -- for example, the night scenes when battle is suspended and "they piled dead bodies on their pyre, sick at heart, and burned it down." [Iliad VII 514-16]

Troy does something else right -- and here the comparison is not with Homer but with other screen epics like The Fellowship of the Ring. One of the hardest things for students to grasp about Homer's war is that, unlike most of the blockbuster wars they've seen, it does not pit the Bright Side (sweetness, bravery, loyalty, clean hair) against the Dark (bile, cowardice, treachery, bad teeth). There are heroes on both sides, human frailties on both sides. And when a hero has a glorious day, the enemies he kills are not mouth-breathing subhumans (as in The Two Towers) but real men (and occasional women) with real names, tribes, and life stories.

Whether the medium is great poetry or state-of-the-art digital animation, this is a lesson worth teaching.

Posted by at 1:30 AM

July 24, 2004

Tough House

The readers of ArtsJournal do not fool around. They know Aristotle, and they know Dorothy Fields -- the "too-little-appreciated lyricist" who wrote the lyrics I quoted in my posting about "De-Lovely" (below). With all due respect to Jerome Kern, let me compensate for my own "too little appreciation" by quoting reader Chris Schneider:

"Fields is the same woman who wrote words for 'I Must Have That Man' and 'I Can't Give You Anything But Love' (composer for both: Jimmy McHugh); 'Make The Man Love Me' (composer: Arthur Schwartz);  and 'Big Spender' (composer: Cy Coleman)."

Posted by at 6:51 AM

July 21, 2004

Nice and Gay

Kevin Kline and Cole Porter are both the top. Kline is that rare thing, a graceful comic; and Porter is simply the gold standard of 20th-century song. But this movie disappoints, for two reasons: music and sex.

First music. The reviewers seem to fall into two camps, those who get a kick out of the songs as performed here, and those who don't. My guess is that the first haven't heard many Cole Porter songs before, so renditions by Robbie Williams, Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow and others sound pretty good. Curiously, the most accomplished vocalists on the soundtrack, Natalie Cole and Diana Krall, are played down, while the lesser lights � most egregiously Alanis Morissette meowing �Let�s Fall in Love� � get the full spotlight.

Still, these songs can take a licking and keep on ticking, and some are done imaginatively. For example, �So In Love,� the great torcher from Cole's Broadway classic, �Kiss Me Kate,� is croaked by Kline in a whisper to his dying wife at home, then smoothly interspersed with a full-throated version on stage.

Now for the sex. In a self-conscious improvement over the 1946 biopic �Night and Day,� this film portrays Porter as two things he wasn't: bisexual and nice. By all accounts, he was not at all interested in women (he treated Linda, who was eight years older than he, as a mother figure).

Nor was he all that nice. This film makes him nice when wooing socialite Linda Lee (Ashley Judd) and explaining that he wants a beard, not a bride; nice when leaving the bed of ballet dancer Boris Kochno and explaining that during the day his heart belongs to Linda; and nice when helping a strapping young singer to learn �Night and Day� then accepting his overtures.

Please, listen to Cole Porter's voice. Look at Cole Porter�s photograph. This wasn't a bad man, but not such a bloody nice one, either. Tom Hulce (wherever he is) could play Porter, or Robert Downey, or (don't laugh) Jack Black. The role needs someone who can do the imp, rascal, throughgoing decadent Porter was. For all his talent, Kline just isn't the rapscallion type.

Porter was madly in love his whole life, but not with Linda. His passionate affairs with other men -- Kuchno, Howard Sturges, Ed Tauch, Nelson Barclift, John Wilson, Ray Kelly -- were the smoldering fuel of his songs. His erotic life was crowded, back-biting, steamy, and amazingly uncloseted for its time. It was not a Sunday School picnic with the parsons holding hands.

How quickly the mainstream depiction of gay life has become...well, mainstream. Porter didn't write these lines, Jerome Kern did; but they capture perfectly what is wrong with this movie: "True love should have the thrills that a healthy crime has / But we don't have the thrills that the March of Dimes has."

Posted by at 9:22 AM

July 19, 2004

Brush Up Your Aristotle

Next time I will quote Aristotle with a bit more care.  Here is a recent exchange with Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Greek, Hebrew and Roman Classics at Temple University:

Dear Martha,
Your blog comments on Aristotle left me scratching my head a bit. Aristotle never pitches epic and tragedy against one another, and certainly doesn't demean one in order to exalt the other.  I can't find the remarks about cultivated epics anyplace in the Poetics. I hope that doesn't sound too pedantic, because you're absolutely dead right that the growing predominance in film of spectacle at the expense of plot and characterization is a HUGE problem (though nothing worse than the Romans experienced, or perhaps even some Greek audiences).
Best, Robin

Dear Robin,
Maybe it's a question of translation?  I find the discussion at the very end of the "Poetics" (pp 137-141 in the Loeb Classical Library edition; pp. 116-118 in the translation I quoted, Francis Fergusson's, published by Hill and Wang).  I did not say "demean" or "exalt," I said that Aristotle was weighing what one does vs. what the other does.  Maybe both translations have it wrong?  If so, I would be most interested to learn that!
Cheers, Martha

Dear Martha,
Luckily, I have the Fergusson (though I never use it). Note that Aristotle stresses that "WE ARE TOLD that epic poetry is addressed to a cultivated audience."  This implies that the supposition is false. Aristotle would have known about epic in performance,  and Homeric rhapsodes were notoriously flamboyant and emotional (see Plato's "Ion," a text that Aristotle would have known as well." As that chapter progresses, Aristotle narrows his focus to unity of the plot of tragedy. His interest really is plot types and forms. Elsewhere in the "Poetics," he dismisses the "Odyssey"'s ending as, essentially, pandering to its audience.
Best, Robin

Posted by at 11:17 AM

July 17, 2004

Aristotle at the Cineplex

Like most people who saw "The Day After Tomorrow," I found the special effects brilliant. And eerie: the tidal wave rolling through Manhattan recalled the dust-and-debris one of 9/11. Spectacle is spectacle, and computer-imaging whiz kids can't be blamed, I guess, for cannibalizing a big one. More fun, and less troubling, were the mega-storms that freeze-dried El Norte and (in the film's only comic sequence) sent frantic gringos scurrying illegally into sunny Mexico.

But this particular blockbuster also widened the usual gulf between the brilliance of the special effects and inanity of the plot and characters. Here, that gulf became an abyss. Happy ending: neglectful dad learns to say "I love you" to son, and son learns to say "I love you" to girl. Backdrop to happy ending: destruction of all life in the Northern Hemisphere.

Which brings me to Aristotle's Poetics. At the end of that short treatise, after dissecting classical Greek tragedy, Aristotle asks whether this relatively new art form is better or worse than the older, more revered epic poetry of Homer. The main difference, he says, is that "Epic poetry is addressed to a cultivated audience, who do not need gesture," while ragedy appeals to "an inferior public" by combining poetry with gesture, music, dance, and "spectacular effects."

His conclusion? That tragedy is superior precisely because of these add-ons, which "produce the most vivid of pleasures." In other words, it's fine to listen to a rhapsode pluck the lyre and sing the Iliad, but it's even finer to watch actors strut across a stage whose scenery can be raised and lowered by hidden water pumps, while gods in gilded costumes sweep overhead suspended from cranes.

This conclusion comes with a caveat, though. Tragedy cannot succeed on "spectacular effects" alone. They are "important accessories," but the play must also possess "all the epic elements," meaning plot, character, and thought -- in that order. It is wonderful, is it not, that just about every moviegoer over the age of 12 would agree with Aristotle's priorities?

Posted by at 4:50 AM

July 15, 2004

It's A Wonderful Flight

One of 2002's best movies was Catch Me If You Can, a scrumptious creamsicle of a movie. From the delicious opening credits to the heart-warming surprise ending, it burst with the seductive, manipulative charm we've come to expect from director Steven Spielberg, not to mention star Leonardo diCaprio.

But Catch Me If You Can is based on the true story of a teenage con artist who flummoxed then joined the FBI -- in other words, it's ABOUT seduction, manipulation, and charm. The thicker diCaprio shines it on, the wiser we feel for not succumbing to his scam...while, of course, succumbing totally.

The Terminal draws on some of the same talent. The eye-candy direction is by Spielberg, the ear-candy score by John Williams, and everyone's favorite ur-American, Tom Hanks, plays Viktor Navorski, a visitor to New York who because of a coup in his fictional Eastern European country becomes a transient without legal status, compelled by the bumbling Department of Homeland Security to live in the International Terminal at JFK for several months.

The Terminal isn't terrible. It's funny at times, and visually delicious. But it wants to be more than empty calories. It wants to be a Frank Capra classic about the little guy winning against all odds. That's why it borrows such Capraesque touches as the fancy dinner improvised for Viktor and a pretty flight attendant by the ramp rats, janitors, and other working folk at the airport -- lifted from It's a Wonderful Life.

But Spielberg does not succeed in borrowing what Graham Greene saw as Capra's main theme: "goodness and simplicity manhandled in a deeply selfish and brutal world."

Capra's genius was to know exactly how much selfishness and brutality the market will bear. Spielberg must think it will bear very little, because while The Terminal is supposed to be about immigration and uprootedness in an age of terrorism, the worst that befalls Viktor is his stomach rumbles for a while before he can figure out how to collect quarters from a luggage cart machine in order to buy a Whopper.

Would Capra have told a better story? For example, would he have dramatized a case like that of Purna Raj Bajracharya, a 47-year-old visitor from Nepal who in October 2001 was arrested by the FBI and placed in a secret detention facility in Brooklyn, because he had been videotaping a tall building that, unbeknownst to him, contained an FBI office?

Within a week, the arresting agent, James P. Wynne, concluded that Bajracharya was innocent of any crime beyond over-staying his work visa. But Bajracharya was not deported for three months, during which time he was kept in solitary confinement, deprived of sleep, stripped, mocked, and manhandled. The Capraesque part is that throughout this ordeal, Bajracharya's only friend, the one who kept appealing for his release and finally enlisted the help of Legal Aid, was Agent Wynne.

Strong stuff, but affirmative in the end, and certainly not more brutal  than the market will bear. What Spielberg does best is wrap smooth, tasty technique around the wooden stick of a good story. There is no such stick holding up The Terminal, so it melts into a smooth, tasty puddle.

Posted by at 12:20 PM

July 13, 2004

Reply to reader

Thank you, Kit Baker, for your thoughtful comments. I will try to address a couple of your points. First, about the curious fact that "Fahrenheit 9/11" contains no reference to Israel. "Since the Bush administration has hardly mentioned Israel in its pronouncements on the Iraq war," you write, "why should we fault Moore for doing the same?" Well, because Moore is trading in every other coin of the conspiratorial realm. Why not this one?

Second, about oil. To anyone who can remember the ideological battles of the post-Vietnam era, Moore's caricature of America as a greedy imperialist power out to exploit the world's resources must feel as comfy and familiar as an old pair of slippers. Unfortunately it's also about as sturdy. It does not even come close to describing the complex geopolitics of oil in the 21st century. For a sense of this complexity, see "Saving Iraq From Its Oil," by Nancy Birdsall and Arvind Subramanian, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.

Moore is shocked, shocked, that economic self-interest was part of the reason why the U.S. invaded Iraq. But isn't he the one who worries about the prosperity of working Americans? Didn't every politician, Democrat and Republican, pro and con, refer to "America's vital interests in the region?" What did Moore think they were all talking about? If he sees something illegitimate about being interested in oil, then by all means follow through, and say why America, alone among all the countries of the world, should not be so interested. But Moore deals in innuendos, not real questions.

Consider: what if Al Gore had been president on 9/11? What would he have done differently? If Moore is serious about wanting to elect a Democrat, as opposed to, say, lead a socialist revolution, then this is the narrow space where he ought to be aiming his barbs. Scattershot is OK, but in troubled times like these, precision is preferable.

Posted by at 6:03 AM

July 12, 2004

Super Sized Rhetoric

The pundits have been intoning that Fahrenheit 9/11 will not change any minds. But they are not taking into consideration the outlook of someone like Nick Anderson, a 22-year-old resident of New York who told the Times that he "wanted to see it as soon as possible. This is easier for people to understand than reading books, reading newspapers or watching C-Span."

Michael Moore is a master rhetorician, in the ancient and not flattering sense. But his rhetorical language is not English. It is film � not narrative film, but the information-imparting kind known as documentary. There is no point in accusing Moore, as some have, of not being a documentarian because he�s dishonest and manipulative. That�s like saying Hitler wasn�t an orator because his speeches told lies. The test of rhetorical skill is not truth but persuasion. Just ask Plato.

And Moore is persuasive. As a polemicist of film he is witty, inventive, messy in just the right way, and a master at three essential skills: timing, segue, and (not least) ironic juxtaposition. For example, he uses music brilliantly. Over a sequence of two spiffed-up Marine recruiters cruising a run-down shopping mall, he runs bright, effervescent disco. When a pumped GI says combat is more fun "with a good song playing in the background," Moore plays the soldier�s favorite, "Burn" by the punk band Rancid ("We don�t need no water / Let the motherfucker burn") over footage of an Iraqi man fleeing with a bloody child in his arms.

So here�s a tip for pundits and (especially) politicians: Don�t underestimate the power of rhetoric delivered in the crowd�s native tongue, just because you can�t speak it.

But Moore is a lazy thinker. Look for the ideas behind the polemic, and you will find a mind as flabby and inert as the body. Fahrenheit 9/11 contains a total of one idea and eight-tenths of a conspiracy theory.

First, the idea. It is fixed, unmovable, a regular North Star: The rich are out to screw the poor. There�s a lot to be said for this idea (as perhaps Moore understands, now that he�s rich). But usually it�s better to combine one idea with another, and this Moore seems incapable of doing.

Once you figure out what Moore�s fixed idea is, you can negotiate what to a normal mind seems inconsistent. Take the American soldiers in Iraq. When Moore sees them as poor, hailing from economically depressed places like Flint, Michigan, then they are the ones getting screwed. But when he sees them as rich, riding around in fancy tanks and shooting at ragged Iraqis, they are the ones doing the screwing. Really, it�s no more complicated than that.

This simplistic worldview causes some weird effects. For example, the sequence in which several African-American members of the House of Representatives register objections to the outcome of the 2000 election, only to be told by the Rich White Dude on the podium that without the support of at least one senator, their objections don�t count. In a voice-over oozing with sympathy for the underdog. Moore sums up what the Rich White Dude is really saying: "Shut up and sit down!" The only problem is, the Rich White Dude is Al Gore.

Now consider Moore�s conspiracy theory. Eight-tenths of it are the same as the conspiracy theory held by millions around the world, from European leftists to angry Muslims, who see Bush as the clueless but conniving head of a gigantic imperialist plot to take over the Middle East (not to mention the rest of the globe). But Moore�s version is missing two key elements.

First, Israel. In this entire frenzied centrifuge of a movie, in which no corrupt, finagling, behind-the-scenes, back-scratching connection among presidents, princes, CEOs, sheiks, and terrorists is too tenuous to be credited, there is not one single mention of Israel. Given that millions of Moore admirers around the world believe that the rich Americans are in cahoots with the rich Israelis, why does he focus on rich Americans in cahoots with rich Saudis?

The answer is simple. Moore can do without the added PR boost that comes with being called an anti-Semite. Earlier this spring, Mel Gibson�s movie The Passion of the Christ got just such a boost, but with it came widespread opprobrium. If Moore were desperate for box-office tinder, he�d probably light this match. But he�s got plenty of other matches to light. Indeed, he does something very clever: he trades on both anti-Semitism and anti-Arab prejudice by casting the Saudis in the role typically reserved for the Israelis.

Still, in a film about terrorism and the Middle East, the omission of any mention of American support for Israel is not just glaring, it is (to judge from the lack of comment about it) blinding.

The second missing element is the link that, if made explicit, would complete Moore�s paranoid logic: George W. Bush is responsible for 9/11. Think about it. Without this conclusion, the film�s critique (if you can call it that) is strangely attentuated and unresolved. With it, everything falls into place. The Bush family, the bin Laden family, Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, the Unocal company and the rest of corporate America worked together to kill over 3,000 people on September 11, in order to provide a pretext for cracking down on civil liberties, sweeping the poor off the streets to serve as cannon fodder, and in general creating the conditions for what George Orwell called "perpetual war." All for the sake of greater profits.

If this is Moore�s message, then he ought to come out and say it, instead of relying on innuendo. But that would require guts, as opposed to a big gut.

Posted by at 11:00 AM

Mel Gibson, Conceptual Artist

Mel Gibson is the most powerful celebrity in the country, says Forbes magazine. He is also the head of a production company, Icon, rolling in filthy lucre ($608 million) earned worldwide by The Passion of the Christ. He is involved in several new projects, from family-friendly TV shows to historical action features. And he is the world's leading conceptual artist.

What? Mel Gibson a conceptual artist? Aren't conceptual artists supposed to do things like talk to dead animals (Joseph Beuys) and cover billboards with obscure theoretical statements (Joseph Kosuth)? Isn't the whole purpose of conceptual art to "make us think"?

Well, yes. Which is why Gibson qualifies.

What's the first thing a conceptual artist must do? Attract attention. This is harder today than back in the 1960s, when all Lawrence Weiner had to do was light a flare outside an Amsterdam museum and call it The Residue of a Flare Ignited Upon a Boundary. Today the would-be conceptual artist has to light a pre-release media firestorm, which Gibson did by lacing his film with anti-Semitic tropes from medieval art, Passion Plays, and the visions of the 18th-century German stigmatic, Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich.

Most of this furor died down when the movie was released, perhaps because most Americans didn't notice such anti-Semitic tropes as demon Jewish children throwing rocks, Jewish crowds baying for Jesus' blood, and donkey-riding Sadducees gloating at the cross. They didn't notice because the popular imagination in this country associates anti-Semitism with Nazis, not medieval iconography. As one of my colleagues at Boston College quipped after we led a student discussion on the topic, "If they don�t know it�s anti-Semitic, should we be telling them?"

Whether or not he meant to, Gibson also satisfied the most important requirement of conceptual art: He made us think.

First, he made us think about truth. To a remarkable degree, The Passion galvanized two groups who process truth for a living: academics and religious leaders. During the controversy I dove into several scholarly and religious websites and immediately hit the rapids of historical, philosophical, linguistic, theological, pastoral debate over the nature of biblical truth. Before going under, I wondered: When was the last time thousands of teachers and preachers got so worked up over a movie?

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that a movie should be truthful. Then by what standard of truth do we judge The Passion?  Here Gibson pulled off another feat: he got biblical scholars using the Gospels as a standard. For example, Paula Frederikson in The New Republic objected to the presence of Satan and of a "post-crucifixion Mary-and-Jesus pieta" on the grounds that "No such scenes exist in the Gospels."

Hmm. Does this mean we should cut all those Satan bits from Milton's Paradise Lost? Toss a tarp over Michaelangelo's Pieta?

And whether or not our idea of truth is Gospel, why are we suddenly using truth as an aesthetic standard? Aren't artists supposed to create their own truth? Isn't it dangerous, potentially censorious, to make them toe the line of some externally defined truth? The flap over The Passion reveals a sobering fact: When people become exercised about matters of truth, they become less forgiving of art.

The other topic stirred up was violence. Many critics accused Gibson of turning Jesus' last hours into a big-screen bloodfest, like Braveheart and Lethal Weapon. I confess to not liking designer violence, but it was strange to see it embraced by people who normally share my dislike.

For example, most Protestant denominations have prayed for generations before a bare cross, in principled rejection of what their forefathers saw as an unhealthy Catholic obsession with Christ's blood and suffering. Yet according to a number of reports, many evangelical Christians found themselves deeply engrossed in every spurt, splash, smear, and spatter of blood in The Passion.

Finally, Gibson is a conceptual artist if we define the term broadly enough to include the century-old desire of artists to gain instant notoriety through mass media. Filippo Martinetti was one of the first, publishing his Futurist Manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909.

Today this impulse is so mainstream, we half expect media feeding frenzies to be deliberate, the work of clever prestidigitators for whom publicity is in itself an artistic medium. Deliberate or not, Gibson's media blitz went far beyond the stale formulae of sex and violence. And he provoked millions of conversations about art, truth, faith, history, and freedom of expression. As provocations go, that's pretty impressive.

Posted by at 10:00 AM