Picture's Up

Dispatches from Lonelyland

I've been watching Stephen Merchant's Hello Ladies since it debuted and have mixed feelings.  As comedies go, it is only intermittently funny, and tends to rely too heavily on the tic of modern comedy (powerfully inaugurated in Merchant and Ricky Gervais's The Office) wherein awkwardness functions as a stand-in for humor and uncomfortable pauses often constitute the dramatic focal point of a given scene.  In The Office, the development of social discomfort was often exquisitely managed and left us in a limbo state, suspended between laughter and projected shame.  Here, though, it sometimes feels as if the writers just aren't sure where else to go with the scene.

But the show gets two things right.  First, it captures a sense of the tantalizing, imagined social scene in Los Angeles, at least as it is pictured in the libidinous imaginations of lonely males.  The action is placed against a backdrop of Sunset Strip clubs, brightly-lit LA boulevards, and Edward Hopper-esque all-night restaurants.  There is always the sense that the real party -- inextricably linked with the allure of the music and movie businesses -- is happening just out of reach, and that amid the gorgeous gym-toned bodies and free-flowing chemicals, there is a Dionysian glee that we (in the persona of the show's hero, Stuart Pritchard, played by Merchant) can never reach, because we aren't cool enough, hot enough, rich enough.

Secondly, the show uses farcical situations to evoke a psychological principle that we are often our own worst enemies in life, staging scenarios in which our deepest fears about our own inadequacies are confirmed.  At first, it seems that Stuart merely embodies the sin of Icarus -- he reaches too far, striving for women both physically and financially out of his league -- but it becomes apparent that there's more at work here.  Merchant and his writers bend plausibility, allowing Stuart to all but attain seemingly-impossible goals -- usually involving hot-tubs, exclusive venues, and statuesque models -- the better to give him room to sabotage himself.

Again and again, through an ill-timed joke or a mistaken impulse of snobbery and control-obsession, Stuart conspires to create a situation in which he is the excluded one -- looking longingly over his shoulder at the models entering a hot tub at a party he's just been ejected from, or futilely trying to scale the fence of an apartment complex to get into his own party, which he has locked himself out of with a too-stringent ticket policy.

Stuart, in other words, is trapped in a hell of his own creation, doomed to roll the Sisyphean boulder up the steep social incline of LA night after night.  His predicament isn't poignant -- he's too much of an ass for that -- but it is sternly instructive.  The question is, can the show develop something resembling a character arc for its forlorn hero without breaking the engine that drives it?

Roger Ebert: 1942-2013

I first became aware of Roger Ebert as one half of “Sneak Previews,” or “At the Movies,” or whatever the show was called when I was a kid.  Apart from vague memories of bad sweaters, petulant arguments, and the ending tagline “the balcony is closed,” I don’t have much recollection of Siskel and Ebert’s show from those days.  Its strongest legacy may be that for years I thought of Ebert as the second half of a compound name, with “Siskeland” invariably preceding it, in thought if not in speech.

When I was about 14, I received – possibly as a birthday or Christmas present – a copy of Ebert’s book, the 1988 edition of the “Movie Home Companion.”  This fat tome contained more information about movies than I had absorbed in my life up to that point.  If as a child I had mainly thought of movies as a delivery mechanism for tales about the Galaxy Far, Far, Away, as an adolescent I had Ebert’s writing to thank for the understanding that film was an art form decades old, continents wide, sophisticated and mature.  At the back of the book were essays like “My Ten Great Films, and Why,” in which I first learned about “Vertigo” and “Taxi Driver” and “Citizen Kane.”  In his review of Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy,” Ebert wrote that it “is the kind of film that makes you want to go and see a Scorsese movie.”  What did that mean, I wondered?  What was a true “Scorsese movie”?  I would find out two years later when, at the Kahala Mall outside Honolulu on Christmas Eve, I saw “Goodfellas” for the first time.  Ebert’s writing opened up names, worlds, contexts, vaults full of material that I knew it would take me decades to peruse.

A few years later, as a high school student, I attended a symposium at the 1991 Hawaii International Film Festival in Honolulu.  Ebert was there, moderating; I remember watching him walk down the aisle toward the stage.  The talk had some connection to local high schools – perhaps the featured speakers were alumni – and Ebert amusingly mangled the schools’ names, rendering my alma mater Punahou as ‘Puna-HOW.’  One component of the talk focused on the tortuous development process by which screenplays were acquired by studios and turned into movies.  A teenaged smartass, I raised my hand and asked why, if the development process was so involved, so many terrible screenplays ended up getting produced.  The room laughed, and Ebert with it.  I don’t remember what comment – if any – he made about my question, but years later, when I was a full-time scriptreader and deeply embedded in that dubious development process myself, I wondered if Ebert had been as annoyed at that pissant, holier-than-thou adolescent as my own older self would have been.  Probably not: Ebert, after all, had no skin in the game of making movies, only of watching and describing them.  He would, I imagine, have welcomed any snot-nosed kid who expressed however clumsily a desire to hold Hollywood’s feet to the fire and stand up for quality.  I like to think he spared me a kind thought that evening.

The TV show was always around in the background, and seemed until Gene Siskel’s shockingly early death as if it would go on for decades more.  But I gravitated more toward Ebert’s written reviews, in which he perfected a clear, crystalline style that seemed drawn more from some post-Twain mainstream of American colloquial writing than from the relatively hermetic world of film criticism.  His reviews were often bigger, deeper, richer than the movies they ostensibly addressed, and were roomy enough to contain delightful digressions on life in general.  At the end of his review of Richard Linklater’s “SubUrbia,” Ebert wrote: “There is, I believe, a seductive quality to idleness. To be without ambition or plans is to rebuke those who have them: It is a refusal to enlist in the rat race, and there may even be a sad courage in it. But what Linklater sees is that it is so damned boring.”  At the beginning of his “Swingers” review, he wrote: “…the new American frontier is the all-night diner, with Formica tops and ketchup and sugar on every table, and a waitress who writes down your order on a green and white Guest Check. And in these coffee shops, which reach out like an endless progression of stops on the highway to fame, there are countless young men like the heroes of ‘Swingers,’ who are so near to stardom they can reach out and touch it, and so far away they can't afford to pick up the check.”  Passages like this are all over his reviews, nuggets to be excavated.

And, of course, Ebert’s satirical side could be savage.  I have never read a better put-down than the concluding paragraphs of his “Armageddon” review: “Staggering into the silence of the theater lobby after the ordeal was over, I found a big poster that was fresh off the presses with the quotes of junket blurbsters. ‘It will obliterate your senses!’ reports David Gillin, who obviously writes autobiographically. ‘It will suck the air right out of your lungs!’ vows Diane Kaminsky.

“If it does, consider it a mercy killing.”

When I was a young hopeful film student, I envisioned a day when, having made my mark directing some brilliant debut feature, I might sit across a restaurant table from Ebert for an interview.  Then, I would think dreamily to myself, I really would have made it.  Such vanities blanch into triviality when I think of the last years of Ebert’s life – how, having made it to a degree few may dare to hope for, he was struck by a ruthless cancer that destroyed his broad jaw; and how, where weaker men would recede into despair, he doubled his industry, embraced new media, and produced some of the best work of his career.

Some TV Shows I Like

Carl Sagan in "Cosmos"

I just spend a half-an-hour writing up some of my favorite TV shows on the forums at Quartertothree.com, Tom Chick's excellent online community of highly literate videogamers.  Since this blog has been gathering cobwebs lately, I decided I'd cannibalize from myself and reproduce my comments over here.  To those of you who haven't watched any or some of the shows recommended herein, I can confidently state there's more than camp value to be extracted from even the older, "cheesier" selections.  To those of you who feel "genre" shows and science-fiction and cartoons are overrepresented... I plead guilty.  If you feel like pointing and screaming "NEEEEERD," go for it; the charge will be uncontested.  To those of you who feel there are too many old shows on this list, I'd say get off my lawn, if I had a lawn, which I don't.  Happy memorial day!

Comedy:

- The Simpsons: Even if you only count the first 8 seasons or so, it's one of the definitive pop-culture texts and American self-portraits of the past century. When the show is in its stride, the jokes come so fast that you don't have time to laugh at the next one because you're still laughing at the previous one. But there's also a very conservative center to the show (aesthetically, not politically), which is that we perceive Bart, Lisa, Marge, and Homer as distinct personalities, we feel they are trying to do the right thing within their myriad limitations, and we like them. The portrait of Springfield, with its dozens of perfectly-etched supporting players, is a descendant of American communities as imagined by Thornton Wilder or Frank Capra. A hundred years from now, many of its in-jokes will be as impenetrable to contemporary viewers as those in Shakespeare or Dante are to us today, but I think it will still retain its basic appeal.

- Fawlty Towers: Meticulously constructed farce centered on John Cleese's performance as Basil Fawlty, an odious, venal, miserable man ever-so-slightly redeemed by the saving grace of a razor wit.

- Yes, Minister: Until "In The Loop" (and, I presume, "The Thick of It"), I hadn't seen anything to compare to Yes, Minister's grasp of the inner workings of political bureaucracy. The show is sharply written, bottomlessly cynical, and features a star-making turn by Nigel Hawthorne as the magnificently reptilian apparatchik who represents either timeless institutional wisdom or do-nothing obstructionism (or both?) depending on your point of view.

- Space Ghost Coast to Coast: Deeply influential, I think, in its redigestion and refraction of existing pop-culture flotsam; in its deliberately incoherent, off-putting editing rhythm; and in its willy-nilly mashup of fictional and nonfictional elements.

Drama:

- I, Claudius: The best TV miniseries I've ever seen. A salacious chronicle of Rome's corridors of power in the dawning of the Empire, full of sparkling dialogue and memorable dramatic tete-a-tetes. Sian Phillips's Livia is the greatest villain (male or female) I've encountered in television, a ruthless spider whose scheming stretches over decades and impacts the lives of millions, yet whose motivation contains its own logic. John Hurt steals the show as Caligula, chomping every piece of scenery in sight with wonderful relish. Derek Jacobi in the title role plays the ultimate survivor, the man who makes it through the charnel-house of Roman imperial politics because nobody ever takes him seriously.

(Note: I go into this series in more detail here.)

- Star Trek (original series): A lot of it is now apparently only digestible as camp to many viewers, but a visionary core remains. The finest episodes (Mirror Mirror, Doomsday Machine, Amok Time) exemplify the tautly-constructed, idea-based writing of the best sci-fi short story writers from the Golden Age and shortly afterward. If Shatner's Kirk is somewhat dated as a 60's man-of-action archetype, he still oozes charisma, and his performance is a master-class in how to approach genre material (however seemingly ridiculous) with absolute conviction. Nimoy's Spock is an immortal, timeless performance: the perpetual outsider, the social misfit, the wandering intellect, the embodiment of that elusive paradox, the super-cool nerd. The score is propulsive, motivic and unforgettable; the production design was epochal in the history of sci-fi television and movies; the vision of the future, equal parts humanism and imperialism, still echoes in our current extrapolations of coming centuries; the sound design is so iconic that a lot of folks pulled off the street could recognize the sound of a transporter or a phaser if it were played back for them.

- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Uneven, but noteworthy to me mostly for its willingness to play out character changes over long, multi-season arcs, and for the self-deconstructing wit of some of its sharpest episodes ("The Zeppo," is one of the smartest teleplays I've ever seen, a fascinating case of a "B Plot" devouring an "A Plot" as the episode moves forward). Also noteworthy for the sheer operatic power of some of its season climaxes, most especially "Becoming Part II."

- Elizabeth R: The kind of smart historical drama the BBC does so well, depending more on good writing and Shakespeare-trained actors than on elaborate production values. The Tudors is entertaining as far as it goes, but Elizabeth R is the real deal, with Glenda Jackson absolutely convincing as England's embattled monarch (more so than Cate Blanchett would be in the same role twenty years later on the big screen).

- The Twilight Zone: A weird TV mashup of Dickens, Borges, and Playhouse 90, the show's quality varies episode-to-episode but it's always glued together by the indelible presence of Rod Serling as the narrator. The best episodes -- besides being gorgeously photographed in brooding black-and-white and featuring a cavalcade of midcentury talent from Robert Redford to Jack Klugman to Donald Pleasance to Burgess Meredith -- constitute wry 20-minute morality tales, buttoned together with a brain-buzz magical-realist twist. The theme song, of course, is also a marvel. Only the music from "Jaws" surpasses it for sheer compactness.

(Note: some more Twilight Zone discussion here.)

Documentary:

- Cosmos: A deeply moving portrait of the quest for knowledge as it has expressed itself in 2500 years of scientific inquiry. Carl Sagan is the perfect guide through this material: witty, wise, possessed of an inspiring capacity for wonder and awe, yet determined to avoid pseudoscience or lazy thinking. The opening scene, in which he stands on a shore and lets a dandelion fly off into the wind while the soothing harmonies of Vangelis underscore the moment, always chokes me up.

Abe on Film

Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

At first it seems odd that there have been few substantive cinematic portrayals of Abraham Lincoln, considering the incalculable impact he's had not only on American history but on the very iconography of what it means to be American.  But maybe that's the reason why: he's become so iconic, so carved in stone, that dramatizing him seems an almost impossible task.  We see him mainly as a mask of Americanness, appropriated every February by car dealerships, but otherwise left out of the mainstream of dramatic interpretation.  Nor is he alone in this: cinema and stage give us few memorable Napoleons or Socrateses either (though 1989's Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure boldly essays all three of those historical heavyweights).  The larger a character looms in history, the harder it seems to be to represent them with the specificity that's necessary for good drama -- although Jesus, the most nebulous and iconic of all, has been attempted more often than most: by Willem Dafoe, and Jeffrey Hunter, and James Caviezel, for starters.  Now that we are rounding into the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and now that Steven Spielberg's long-gestating Lincoln project is getting underway with Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role (filling in for the previously-attached Liam Neeson), it might be an apropos time to ask: who is Lewis competing with?  Has there yet been a cinematic Lincoln that tackled, in its full depth and breadth, the complexity of this endlessly fascinating politician whose words and decisions between 1861 and 1865 arguably shaped the destiny of the United States more than any single individual before or since?  The answer, surprisingly, is yes, although it happened on the small screen rather than the big one, in a production relatively few have likely seen.

More on that in a moment.  Thusfar, probably the most famous cinematic Lincoln has been Henry Fonda's turn in the president's size-fourteen shoes in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939).  There is, indeed, plenty to admire here, both in the performance and the casting.  Fonda's resemblance to Lincoln is more than passing -- the tall, gangly profile; the high cheekbones; the deep-set eyes; the unruly black hair.  In his performance, Fonda catches some essential qualities of the man that elude the typical pop-culture caricature of Honest Abe.  Much here also owes to the screenplay by Lamar Trotti, of course.  First, there's the ambition.  Our first understanding of Lincoln in the film is of a man who knows he is destined for bigger things than the one-horse town in which he's grown up.  Because Ford captures the essence of a Young Man on the Make, he gets at an aspect of Lincoln that is too-often forgotten in our post-facto conception of the wise and heroic president stamped by destiny for a Higher Purpose.  There's a scene in Young Mr. Lincoln which looks forward to a thousand lesser movies borrowing the same cliche: Lincoln, unsure where to go next, drops a stick on the ground and lets its wayward fall determine his decision.  This is the gesture of a man who doesn't know where he's going to go, but damn well means to go someplace.  It's kind of a revelation to see the great man so young, so rudderless, so incapable of comprehending what he'll become.

The second half of the movie subordinates itself to conventions of the courtroom drama and becomes, essentially, an extended Perry Mason episode, as trial lawyer Lincoln defends a murder suspect.  I don't know if the courtroom rhetoric displayed here has much to do with the real Lincoln, although the character's way with a joke -- he wins the jury over once or twice at the expense of people on the stand -- seems authentic.  More interesting is a scene about 20 minutes from the end, in which Abe dismisses a helping hand offered by the presiding judge.  Via his flat, reserved tone of voice and some wonderfully slouching body language, Fonda conveys the idea that Lincoln has little respect for this puffed-up factotum and knows the judge is not his equal -- not morally, not intellectually, not any which way.  As he picks up a mouth-harp and plays, pointedly ignoring his interlocutor, Fonda's Lincoln displays something just short of outright contempt for the man who thinks he's offering a lifeline.  Here we get a sense of Lincoln not merely as honest and kind, but as all but bursting at the seams with the barely-concealed awareness that he is generally the smartest person in the room.  I suspect Lincoln felt that way among the townsfolk of Kentucky and he probably felt that way in the courtroom with other circuit lawyers and he probably felt that way in the White House while taking counsel with William Seward, Salmon Chase, and the rest of his august cabinet.

The last scene of Young Mr. Lincoln is one of those overtly myth-making gestures that nowadays we'd dismiss as schmaltzy or overdone: having argued his case successfully, Lincoln dons the iconic top-hat and walks up a breezy hill and seems to be proclaimed for greatness by wind and lightning as the strains of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" fade up on the soundtrack.  It's a nakedly worshipful moment that modern audiences might be inclined to laugh at; but I'm grateful for this quality that some older films have of stating things outright.  There's a rough-hewn and primal strength to Ford's direction here that, I suspect, will outlast many modern attempts to be clever and ironic and above-it-all.  Ford is all but saying here that we need larger-than-life heroes -- that we need to elevate certain fortunate (or unfortunate) characters to the level of the superhuman.  That Lincoln is one such character (and was already by 1939) is so patently obvious that it gives this sequence, in retrospect, almost the character of a brute statement of unadorned fact.

Yet this is not the best screen Lincoln.  The best screen Lincoln was done by Sam Waterston, and he did it twice, in two different ways.

Sam Waterston in Gore Vidal's Lincoln (1988)

1988's Gore Vidal's Lincoln, a TV miniseries based on Vidal's historical novel about the man during the Civil War, came and went with little fanfare beyond the network marketing campaign that heralded it over two decades ago.  But it can be seen now (at time of writing) in its entirety on Hulu.com, and it's worth the three hours to do so.  Waterston's take on Lincoln is not only -- by a long stretch -- the best attempt I've yet seen at dramatically interpreting the man, it's the only one I know of that even tries to capture essential aspects of his personality.  As adapted from Vidal's novel, this Lincoln is not the "plaster saint" of the $5 bill, but a man of intellectual genius, fierce ambition, ruthless wit, and deeply-ingrained political instinct.  The miniseries' script not only shows Lincoln in the usual places -- at the speaker's podium, or in determined conference with his generals and his Cabinet -- but it shows him in the "smoky back rooms" of the political world too; wheeling and dealing with Congressional Republicans, securing votes, twisting arms, even covering up the odd scandal.  The cumulative effect of this characterization is impressive: Lincoln emerges as an essentially political animal, but also perhaps the most intelligent person in the country at that moment, capable of perceiving before anyone else what the Civil War was about, and then articulating it, and then shaping it to his own ends.  He's presented as both politico and prophet, a character of fearsome complexity.

This is a demanding role and only a virtuoso actor would dare to take it on.  Fortunately, Waterston, besides resembling Lincoln physically (albeit not so strongly as Fonda did), has the chops to handle it.  I've liked Waterston from the moment I saw him in Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields, one hand at his waist, inclining forward irritably as he berated Haing S. Ngor's Dith Pran about something or other.  His performance as Sidney Schanberg was both pissy and essentially courageous, showing his ability comfortably to contain contradictions within his performances.  Five years later, as the almost-blind rabbi in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, Waterston exuded an almost saintly reserve, a sort of willfully naive moral clarity.  Waterston's cinematic career has shown the many notes he can play on his instrument, but I'm not sure any role has demanded more of him than 1988's television Lincoln.  Waterston catches it all: he gets the steely resolve with which Lincoln chooses to discard habeas corpus and if necessary turn Baltimore into an armed camp rather than lose it to the secessionists; the anguish with which he contemplates the death of his 11-year-old son Willie; the spooky prophetic quality with which he states that he will not long outlive the work he has been assigned to do; the fury he feels toward his do-nothing generals, itself an outgrowth of his ability to feel the death of every soldier in the name of the war he is prosecuting.  It's a tour-de-force performance and sets a very high bar for Daniel Day-Lewis to overcome, though much inevitably will depend on the quality of the script Spielberg shoots; an actor can't be expected to play scenes that aren't written for him.

Waterston makes plenty of subtle acting choices along the way, but one of the most obvious is his adoption of a high-pitched Western twang which is probably closer to the man's real voice than the stentorian baritone so often associated with him.  Besides any documentary authenticity, this accent creates a more present, moment-to-moment, thinking-on-the-spot, and irritable Lincoln -- just the sort of tonic to dissolve some of the plaster off the bust of the sainted man.  It also highlights his outsider status within Washington, as a wild and untried Westerner among the likes of Seward and Chase, who were more at ease with the mannerisms of the Eastern elite and who, at least initially, felt themselves more qualified to be Commander-in-Chief.

Waterston's other small-screen take on Lincoln was broadcast two years later, in Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War.  Here, the "performance" consisted of no more than reading some of Lincoln's letters and speeches.  But the weight and heft of Waterston's voice, its seasoned, conscientious wisdom, remained appropriate for the subject matter.  Waterston here abandons the Western twang and reads the documents in his own voice -- appropriate, I suppose, for the more dramatically modest aims of the documentary format, but probably not hitting so close to the mark of what the actual man actually sounded like.  I don't know when this voiceover was recorded relative to when Gore Vidal's Lincoln was shot, nor whether the latter at all inspired Burns to cast Waterston in his magnum opus.  Regardless, the two television productions amount to about as intelligent and thorough a statement on the Civil War as moving pictures have yet seen, and there's Sam Waterston dead-center in both of them. 

Daniel Day-Lewis has his work cut out.

Action Items

Kenneth Branagh in Conspiracy (2001)

I'm an unabashed Kenneth Branagh fan, consarn it.  (That sentence just didn't seem to work without "consarn it" tacked onto the end of it.)  I admire his full-throated performance in 1996's Hamlet, and will take that interpretation over Olivier's.  His directorial endeavors have been up and down, but he always seems to be out there, trying to make Movies, dammit, fighting the good fight, and bringing a theatrical brio to the proceedings.  As he's gotten older, he's acquired that jowly gravitas that many another Respectable British Actor has attained.  More and more, I treasure his appearances in movies.  I don't know if I've ever seen him occupy a genuinely dull 24 frames, and that's worth a lot.

Enough gushing.  Above is a frame from HBO's Conspiracy (2001), which dramatizes the infamous Wansee Conference, at which certain logistical and operational aspects of the Holocaust were clarified and hashed out.  It is an impeccable production on every level, superbly cast, and among other things a good reference point for how to film a lot of people sitting at a big table and talking to each other for an hour or more.  That stuff gets complicated, with eyelines and screen direction going every which way.  (Sidney Lumet's Twelve Angry Men is another textbook for solving those sorts of filmmaking problems.)

What's evoked, I hope, in the above frame, is the particular quality that Branagh brings to this film in the character of Reinhard Heydrich, the high-ranking Nazi official and exemplar of Aryan martial virtue who more or less ran the meeting.  Branagh here is the proverbial "mailed fist in a velvet glove": he's all hearty good humor and brisk official competence, but underneath every indulgent smile and upward-sweeping "let's get this done!" vocal inflection lies the inescapable presence of power -- a power that, if wielded, could destroy the careers or even the lives of all those sitting in the room with him.  What's so superb about Branagh's performance is the restraint with which he's able to evoke this perpetually threatening quality: he never reveals it in full, and only a few times vaguely hints at it.  The folks in the room don't need to be reminded of it; the World War II equivalent of interdepartmental office gossip has already made it obvious to all but the dimmest of them.

I've been to my share of corporate meetings -- not the ones where the biggest of the bigwigs gather, but the midlevel ones where issues of consequence are hashed out.  It is extremely possible, in such meetings, for a lot of words to be thrown about and nothing concrete to emerge; for ownership and responsibility to remain vague and ill-defined.  In any large organization, there's a tendency among many members to resist initiating anything -- to wait for a perceived wind-change or a clearly-voiced order, and then to move forward with all the professional competency they can muster.  Meetings can swirl into chaos and uselessness unless someone among the attendees has ZE VILL!!! (sorry) to take control, appoint responsibility, and specify not only what's being done but who's responsible for doing what.  Leadership, in the corporate sense, depends in no small part on an executive or a manager's ability to extract this kind of clarity and purpose from meetings.

Branagh's Heydrich, in this respect, is a scarily good manager.  He exudes authority from the moment he steps in the room; he absolutely refuses to let the conversation get bogged down in tangential discussions; he steers the ship with a combination of tact, deliberate blindness, and measured impatience toward its inevitable and unspeakable destination.  When, by the end, he has secured the acquiescence -- willing or otherwise -- from the assembled worthies, we sense that perhaps the deepest purpose of the meeting has not been to initiate the Holocaust, but to create an atmosphere of collective implication in which everyone gives their blessing without anyone really taking ownership of the thing.  One of the sinister comforts of life in a corporation is that you seldom actually have to take responsibility for anything: it's always "the company" that's calling the shots.  Conspiracy meticulously documents the process by which individual responsibility is gradually worn down and surrendered, and by which civilized men may therefore perform and sanction barbarities.

One of the tangential peculiarities of watching Conspiracy is the way our minds, conditioned in moviegoing to seek out a "relatable" or at least somewhat sympathetic protagonist, desperately flit about, trying to find someone slightly less odious to alight upon.  It's a tough room in that respect.  In the end, the most "likable" characters are Colin Firth's Dr. Stuckart, author of the Nuremburg Laws and more put off by the legal arbitrariness of Heydrich's dictums than by any particular fondness for human rights, and David Threlhall's Dr. Kritzinger, whose last qualms are squashed by the brute force of Heydrich's influence.

Now in Glorious VistaVision

Finally having become fed up with the restrictive "500 pixel" width setting, and its deleterious effect on the quality of my screengrabs, I've switched to TypePad's "fluid width" setting, which I can only hope will display adequately on most people's browsers.  I'm going to experiment with image widths in the 800-pixel range, which should give a more cinematic flair while not exceeding the resolution settings of most modern PCs.  I'll continue to tweak and test the page on different computers and browsers.

In celebration whereof, I have above appended a screengrab from Lawrence of Arabia, which is about as widescreeny a movie as ever was.  By the way, viewing this on a 22" monitor in lamentable standard-def DVD resolution, I couldn't help but reflect that Lawrence is absurd in such viewing conditions.  I had the good fortune of watching it in a 70mm projection at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica last year.  I'm still waiting for the Blu-Ray which, preposterously, has not yet been issued.  In hi-def on a 40+inch screen, I'm hoping the Lawrence experience upgrades from "nonsensical" to "a pale shadow of what it should be."  I'll take that pale shadow just as soon as the Powers That Be release the damned Blu-Ray. 

The downside of the wider format is that some of my older blog posts are going to look a bit odd.  I'll retrofit them if I have time, but I'm more concerned about trying to get more new content up.

"Well, I Am The Nice One"

The Supreme Being, being supreme

My DVD of Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits trumpets on its cover, rather poignantly, the following critical endorsement: "*** - Roger Ebert."  While I'm glad Mr. Ebert -- a hero of mine and my single most valued guide through the world and history of cinema -- liked the movie, it saddens me a bit that so magical, imaginative, and inventive a film must brag about receiving a three-star rating that's been bestowed on so many vastly inferior movies.  Wasn't there something more superlative they could have found to bedeck the box?

I think the reason Time Bandits has always connected so deeply with me is that it treats properly of two subjects very important to a certain type of introspective, bookish, daydreaming child -- bedrooms and maps.    In my adolescence, my bedroom -- after I'd gotten one of my own, having had to share with an older brother in younger years -- was a sanctuary where I spent many an hour poring over fantasy and science-fiction novels, scribbling poorly-drawn homemade comics, and letting loose the weak steeds of my nascent imagination in whatever directions they cared to gallop.  Few items triggered my young fancy as powerfully as maps -- the sort you so often seen at the front of fantasy literature, depicting nonexistent worlds, rivers, continents, mountain ranges, cities with funny names.  The ones I liked best had archaic artifacts around the edges and corners -- puff-cheeked faces blowing the winds, sea serpents coiled in the waters, sketches of strange races and creatures found in far-flung domains.  The prototype can be found in J.R.R. Tolkien's hand-drawn map at the front of The Hobbit.

A very unusual map

In Time Bandits, the adventure begins in the bedroom of a little boy that just happens to be a focal point for a dimensional doorway to infinite eras in history and legend -- a fact that the hero, young Kevin, quickly discovers when a medieval knight comes bursting out of his wardrobe and into a forest just beyond the suddenly-nonexistent wall.  This is an obvious metaphor for youthful imagination, and it's been seen before -- most notably in the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis, where a wardrobe similarly becomes a gateway to a magical world, and in The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy walks out of her room into Munchkinland (and into color cinema, in the immortal 1939 MGM film adaptation).  Rather casually, Gilliam's film closes the story with a conventional "it was only a dream" explanation -- then immediately subverts it with a series of surreal and even mean-spirited twists in the film's final moments.  All of this is beside the point -- Time Bandits is too whimsical, too fluid, too married to the incoherent dreamlike logic of childish imagination, for the question of "is it all real?" to have any major relevance to the story's impact.

A child's bedroom as a gateway to other worlds

As for maps, Time Bandits has a doozy -- the film's Macguffin is a map of all the "holes" in reality, through which one may slip from one historical era to the next, and which has been stolen by a band of enterprising would-be-thieves led by the irrepressibly charming David Rappaport.  As, again, with Oz, the film relies on little people to convey the idea of strangeness, Otherness, and magic.  This was a cinematic cliche long before Gilliam employed it, and one of my favorite moments in movies is Peter Dinklage's exasperated complaint to Steve Buscemi's indie-film director in Living In Oblivion that not every dream sequence needs to have a goddamn dwarf in it.  Still, in the case of Time Bandits, the cliche is redeemed by the sheer quality of the diminutive cast.  Rappaport is impossible not to like in everything he ever did (including his lovely guest-star turns in L.A. Law), and a small slice of me died on the day I learned he had committed suicide; but the other Bandits are similarly engaging, particularly Jack Purvis as the fiercely loyal, fiery-tempered Wally, and Mike Edmonds as the not-too-bright Og, whose mind-controlled monologue about "The Most Fabulous Object In the World" is one of the movie's many highlights.

Pod People

The reveal of what precisely that Object is -- and how it ties back into the soulless world of crass consumerism that has turned Kevin's parents into TV-enslaved Pod People, a fate he desperately longs to escape -- is one of Time Bandits's satirical masterstrokes, unveiled against the backdrop of a third act whose setting (the appropriately-named Fortress of Ultimate Darkness) remains one of the triumphs of fantasy film production design.  In such sequences, Gilliam moves so fluently, so confidently, among adventure, farce, horror, and satire, that you're compelled into admiration.  At its best, the film successfully combines the FX-heavy overkill of the post-Star Wars era with the anarchic British wit that defined Monty Python, of which group Gilliam is of course an alumnus.  And if there are occasional missteps along the way -- such as some of the more broadly-comic depictions of historical eras, including a tiresome running gag involving two perpetually-star-crossed lovers played by Michael Palin and Shelly Duvall -- they're easy to forgive.

If there's a bit of stunt casting in having Sean Connery turn up as King Agamemnon, he presides nevertheless over one of the film's most enchanting sequences -- a haunting, beautiful, decidedly un-comical depiction of mythical Greece that, we quickly understand, is the place where Kevin feels most at home, and where perhaps he should have been allowed to spend the rest of his life.  The depiction of Kevin, however, is unsentimental; as played by Craig Warnock, he's likable and well-meaning enough, but also inordinately fascinated with blood and gore, and clearly thinks that the Trojan War must have been a ripping good time for all involved.  If Warnock's performance isn't quite up to the level of Henry Thomas in the following year's E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, it's not so very far off.

A God I could believe in

Of all the depictions of God, or the divine, or transcendent power that I've seen in movies, none pleases me more than the deliciously Deus Ex Machina turn by Ralph Richardson in Time Bandits's finale.  Personifying a certain type of Professorial British Authority -- in whose presence one instantly feels compelled to behave like a sheepish child -- Richardson lovingly clips off some of the screenplay's best lines, and leaves us feeling that, all in all, the universe could be in worse hands than this stern old codger.  If I should ever meet my Maker -- if (as I confess I disbelieve) there is any Maker for me to meet -- I'll be more than a little relieved if it turns out to be something like Richardson's irritable deity.  Praise too is due to David Warner (perhaps the most typecast villain-actor in cinema since the Golden Age trio of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Peter Lorre) who plays the personification of Evil, and who takes evident pleasure in simultaneously contributing to, and skewering, his onscreen persona here.

David Warner has some fun

Gilliam, who has had one of the really fascinating, problematic, up-and-down careers in film directing, went on to bigger if not necessarily better things in subsequent years.  1985's Brazil -- which combines Orwellian dystopia with a critique of mindless bureaucracy -- is considered by many his masterpiece, and he did good work afterwards, from the unwieldy-yet-dazzling Adventures of Baron Munchausen to the grim Twelve Monkeys.  But Time Bandits is the one film of Gilliam's that I truly love.

"And now, Mr. Serling!"

The Divine Rod

What an inspired choice, to make Serling the show's narrator.  When everything else about The Twilight Zone fades from memory -- plots, performances, actors -- two interstitial, wrapping-paper elements persist: that twinkly-twinkly theme song (second only to John Williams's Jaws score for sheer musical efficiency -- four notes instead of two), and the abiding presence of Serling himself.  With his crinkly smile, his pointed, confiding voice, his nervous posture, his aura of a 1950s chain-smoking man of letters, Serling embodies the persistent authorial presence behind the weekly anthology series.  He's our favorite slightly weird uncle, making his appearance to tell us another tale of the bizarre.  The quality of the episodes varies but he's always there, putting the Official Seal on the proceedings, comforting us, guiding us.

Twilight Zone, liberated by its anthology format, encompasses a wide tonal range -- from gentle Dickensian whimsy to broad humor to outright scariness.  As wide as the range in tones is the range in quality.  I've had an appropriately worshipful attitude toward the show since childhood, but watching dozens of its episodes now (many for the first time), I start to see the man behind the curtain.  The writing depends heavily on ironic, revelatory twists, usually expressing some moral judgment on a good or bad characteristic of the protagonist.  The formula isn't especially complicated, the twist is often heavily telegraphed, and the moralism underlying the writing becomes occasionally cloying.  But even in its second-tier episodes, Twilight Zone often escapes the trap of mediocrity by extending some element a little further -- either through the impassioned emotion of the lead performances (the show's cast is a who's-who of film and television talent from its era and earlier ones -- you can make yourself dizzy reading off the guest stars -- Burgess Meredith, William Shatner, Buster Keaton, Mickey Rooney, Don Rickles, Robert Redford, and on and on and on), or through the ornately literate dialogue, or a quality of randomness that sometimes creeps into the plotting.  Of this last, a notable example is The Odyssey of Flight 33, whose finale offers no resolution but merely drifts into the air.  That very absence of resolution -- in contrast to many another episode whose plot is tied up in a neat moralistic bow -- is the thing that lingers with us.

One of the episodes I've most enjoyed, lately, is The Obsolete Man.  Written by Serling and directed by Elliot Silverstein, this episode exists at a three-way intersection among George Orwell, avant-garde theater, and German Expressionism.  It's not one of the show's perfect episodes, but it illustrates the way weaknesses in one element can be compensated for by strengths in others.  Thematically, The Obsolete Man is rather uninteresting -- its depiction of a statist dystopia, exemplified by a ruthless apparatchik (Fritz Weaver) and defied by The Last Noble Individualist (Burgess Meredith, as a humble librarian who's considerably braver than most librarians I have met), is boilerplate.  But the two lead actors generate real sparks in their confrontations -- particularly the opening scene, in which Weaver denounces Meredith with such a thundering absence of subtlety that it becomes hypnotic.  Weaver's pull-out-all-the-stops performance strengthens my belief in the principle that overacting is not always a bad thing.  Sometimes it can have a wonderfully stimulating, breath-of-fresh-air effect.  An actor who can really chew the scenery well -- who turns up the volume from strength rather than desperation, who can modulate his voice and gesture convincingly -- can make quite a splash, as Weaver does here.

Fritz Weaver in high dudgeon

Note also the dramatic deep-focus compositions, the heavy reliance on diagonal lines, and the dramatic lighting.  We tend to think of Twilight Zone as a theatrical show, dependent primarily on actors and writing for its impact.  But sometimes -- here, to be sure, and also (for instance) in the silent-style Buster Keaton episode Once Upon A Time -- the show displays powerful cinematic and visual qualities.  The excellent transfers on the CBS DVD release highlight the often-superb black-and-white cinematography.  I'll leave with a few more frames from The Obsolete Man, which (to me at least) came as a pleasant surprise, a lesser-known, slightly flawed gem from Serling's oeuvre.

Burgess Meredith

My favorite 'Star Trek' movie

A stern, charismatic ship’s captain in relentless pursuit of an enemy vessel.  His closest friend, a scientist endlessly fascinated by the anomalies of nature.  An alien land replete with strange and exotic life forms.  An isolated craft, surrounded by hostile void, a self-sufficient world populated with a tireless crew.

 

I’m not actually talking about Star Trek – I’m talking about Peter Weir’s film of Patrick O’Brien’s seafaring novels, “Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World.”  Having recently purchased it on Blu-Ray and rewatched it for the first time in a long while, I’m beginning to suspect that it’s my favorite Star Trek movie, despite not actually being one.  In its reflection of Gene Roddenberry’s space epic, it invites us to consider that series’ conceptual debt to the famed Horatio Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester (to whom O’Brien must surely also owe a debt), and the larger degree to which popular science fiction (or, more precisely, space opera) has been deeply contaminated not merely by naval tropes but particularly by the “ship of the line” era – with its autocratic commanders, squabbling nations prosecuting their wars in far-flung locales, and majestic vessels scouring the seas in a time before mass communication and aviation seemingly shrank the planet to the size of a pin’s head.  The aliens of this era didn’t have ribbed noses or pointed ears, but different skin color and different language; all the same, they were equally mysterious, unpredictable, threatening, “other” – yet also potential friends far from home.

Even the first time I watched Master and Commander, I couldn’t help but be struck by the similarities between its central relationship (the deep friendship between Russell Crowe's Captain Aubrey and ship’s doctor Stephen Maturin, played by Paul Bettany) and the famous “trinity” that emotionally anchored the original Star Trek series, comprising Captain Kirk, science officer Spock, and Doctor McCoy.

That relationship was a prism that split the human character into three symmetrical sections – decisiveness, rationalism, and compassion – and much of the best writing in Trek illuminated the interdependency among these three components.  In “Master and Commander,” the three are reduced to two – Maturin is given not only Spock’s rationalism and curiosity, but also McCoy’s compassion, his essential humanism, and his deep skepticism of all authority.  The Trek connection never feels stronger than in the film’s final scene, in which Aubrey and Maturin exchange a couple of quips about flightless birds before beginning a violin/cello duet that will play us out to the end credits.  Russell Crowe, as Aubrey, even channels a shade of Shatner in his final lines of dialogue – whether consciously, or tapping into some universal source of Charismatic Ship Captains, I couldn’t say.  You could almost envision the scene ending with the camera pulling out as the words “Produced by Gene Roddenberry” fade up in familiar yellow titles.  There is the sense – derived no doubt both from the multi-book source series, and from the sadly unfulfilled hope that there might be many sequels produced – that this is but one of many adventures.  We would like to tune in next week, but there is no next week.

Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany

There are levels, structurally, on which “Master and Commander” may be frustrating to a devoted or inflexible student of Hollywood 101 Screenwriting.  Although the script is cleanly split into three acts, and there’s essentially the same goal throughout (catch the Acheron!), there are not really character arcs for the two leads – Aubrey and Maturin have their quibbles and self-doubts but are essentially carved in stone, arriving in this particular story quite complete (another artifact of the multi-novel source material, presumably).  When they argue over Aubrey’s battle plans or disciplinary methods, it’s not a question of the characters changing each other – it’s more a series of philosophical discussions for our benefit.  Some minor character arcs exist within the rich secondary supporting cast – particularly Blakeney (Max Pirkis), the young officer who seeks to define himself within the crew and in light of an unexpected amputation in the opening scenes, and Hollum, the junior officer who comes to believe the crew has placed a curse on him.

These subplots are absorbing but somewhat self-contained, as are Maturin’s adventures – his endlessly-thwarted quest to catch a flightless cormorant on the Galapagos, and his teeth-grindingly tense attempt to perform life-saving surgery on himself.  (In another Trek echo, this sequence recalls the memorable scene in the otherwise laughable episode “Spock’s Brain,” in which Spock must direct Dr. McCoy in performing brain surgery on him.)  The second act isn’t full of narrative urgency or propulsion; its structure feels less like a finely-tooled machine than a grab bag of independent episodes swimming around, marking time until the Acheron obligingly shows up to usher in Act III.  If my inner script analyst yearns to poke holes in the structural quirks of “Master and Commander,” I must also acknowledge that the film is infinitely more entertaining than many a more “correct” bit of hackwork – because the scenes in their own right are interesting, because the film contains information that we are likely not to know going in, and because the movie transports us to a place that from time to time our souls yearn to visit.

Of all these scenes, the one I find myself rewatching again and again occurs early in Act II, as the officers enjoy dinner and drinks, and Aubrey recounts an anecdote about the great Lord Nelson.  A couple of things about this scene are striking.  I like the way the film presumes we know who Nelson is, and doesn’t throw out any clumsy expository dialogue explaining it for us – such dialogue would be nonsensical in a scene in which all the players practically worship the man.  (We either know enough history not to get lost, or can quickly figure things out from context -- the movie offers the benefit of the doubt that we have a modicum of intelligence.)  I like the way the fictional universe of this movie echoes back into the reality of history, lending it depth and breadth.  And I like above all the closeup of a young officer who smiles hopefully as Aubrey explains that “with Nelson, you felt a glow.”  In that smile, we see the desperate ideological hunger of men who know their lives are on the line and who therefore crave not merely leaders but heroes, myths, legends, to fortify their spirits.

There’s also a good example of the film editor’s craft in an earlier scene, just after the Surprise has been badly damaged in a sneak attack by Khan – err, the Acheron.  Aubrey announces that they are not going to return to England – they are going to refit at sea and pursue the Acheron.  There’s a long pause as editor Lee Smith cuts to several reaction shots of the crewmen, absorbing Aubrey’s statement in disbelief.  The entire dramatic impact of this moment exists not in Aubrey’s statement, but in how his men react to it.  That’s a critical, fundamental component of film editing (and by extension direction, since the director needs to get the shots before the editor can splice them in).  An audience can only attain the appropriate catharsis to witnessing an event if they also witness others onscreen witnessing it.  Very often the reactions will take up more screentime, and much more, than the event that triggered them.  Of this essential editing principle, whose importance cannot be overstated, more in posts to come...

(I apologize, by the way, for the poor quality of the screencaptures.  They are the result of an extremely crude process -- taking iPhone pictures of my HDTV screen while it pauses frames from the Blu-Ray disc.  'Master and Commander' looks magnificent on Blu-Ray, and these images don't begin to capture that quality.  Before long, I hope, I'll have acquired a BD-ROM drive and the means to capture images directly on my computer.  For now, I go ghetto.)