The Wolf of Wall Street
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) is visually impressive. That is also the film's biggest problem. Released only in digital format, the film glistens and shimmers throughout inordinately numerous scenes of sex, drug use and tantrums which we intuit are intended satirically, although director Martin Scorsese gives us no particular reason to believe this is so. This movie is not the Return of A Clockwork Orange, although it might like to be. In order for the movie to be a satire, there would need to be some humor or wit attached and because of the utter lack of humanity expressed by real life sleaze-hole Jordan Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), the only way to find this movie funny is to dive head first into the lifestyle that is being offered.
Scorsese does make that head-long dive tempting, of course, because, as with any number of previous black comedy efforts (Goodfellas, for instance), the caricatures drag us in with the excesses of their actions. In one scene where a new employee in Belfort's scam of a phone room stops working two minutes early to clean the fish tank, second in command Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) publicly ridicules the schlep and then swallows the tropical fish in spite. We are also treated (or mistreated) to scenes of pitching midgets at bullseyes, dangling a gay chef out the window of an office building, and a drunken rape scene on an airliner. To the extent that anyone finds this funny depends on the extent to which that person can be led to identify with the Belfort character.
And that is where the other problem lies. Because we are denied any viewpoint other than that of Jordan Belfort--and because he ultimately gets away with his amazingly anti-human behavior (to the extent that he wrote a popular memoir about his life and also received one million dollars for the film rights, in addition to creating his own post-prison series of sales seminars), we never actually get to perceive the son of a bitch's actions from any place other than the lofty precipice Scorsese coaxes us onto.
The director, of course, is not obligated to dumb down his intentions in order to make them clear. So when the guy leaving the theatre ahead of me turns and says, "I wanna be Jordan. I wanna be that guy. Buying everything. Party time, man," I just shrug and figure there will always be idiots in the world.
But maybe I'm the real idiot. After all, what Martin Scorsese is saying here is that taking Quaaludes and snorting cocaine while lying to everyone about everything is a great way to get filthy fucking rich. (I beg your pardon about my use of the fuck word, but if you do see this movie, you will hear it uttered more than five hundred times, setting a record for people who concern themselves with such things.) Maybe I'm crazy to think that what Scorsese wants us to do is be aghast at the celebration of this kind of lifestyle. But let's consider the evidence to the contrary. In The King of Comedy, Rupert Pupkin (DeNiro, natch) gets away with everything and becomes a star even after kidnapping Johnny Carson (Jerry Lewis) and getting arrested by the FBI. Henry Hill in the aforementioned Goodfellas gave up virtually nothing in exchange for being a rat. Even in the not particularly worthwhile Casino, DeNiro (again!) loses very little in exchange for the demands he makes on life. So a pattern begins to develop. But, hey, let's give Scorsese the benefit of the doubt. Let's pretend or imagine that the real message behind all these movies and several others is that people are collectively stupid and that is the deep down reason why all these charlatans the director "appears" to be celebrating get away with so much; therefore, the man is doing us a public service by playing up just how corrupt our society is as a whole. Even if one is willing to make that colossal concession, then what the fuck is the point in making ten thousand movies with the same actors over and over again, every frame in which those men appear serving to repeat the same tired goddamned point, unless, oh wait, maybe I get it at last! What Scorsese is really doing is he's so fucking smart that what he's doing is he's proving our collective ignorance and worthlessness by lulling us into accepting his ultimately misanthropic viewpoint of humanity itself. In other words, the more commercially successful a given digitally released Scorsese film is, the more fucked up we are as a society.
Whew! At last, after all these years, I finally get it. Thank God. Now maybe the motherfucking asshole can make a goddamned movie about some other fucking piece of shit thing, like maybe caterpillars in the Bronx or some such shit because you old bastard, we fucking get it! We don't give a damn that Jonah Hill worked for only $60,000 because he wanted to be near you. We don't care that you think DiCaprio is the next DeNiro. We don't fucking give a good goddamn what you think about anything because the last halfway decent movie you made was Taxi fucking Driver and that was damn near forty years ago, unless you think that swill about New York actually proved anything to anybody.
Only a few good things can be said about The Wolf of Wall Street. Margot Robbie is more than just beautiful. She can actually act and the male dominated bullshit of this movie is far beneath her ultimate talents. Also Matthew McConaighey just gets better and better with every film in which he appears and the only reason he has such a brief appearance in this garbage heap of a film is that if he'd stuck around, nobody would have given a shit about Leonardo.
The only other thing of a positive nature regarding this teeming load of bile is that the details of the boiler room work are one hundred percent on the money. Every last instant of every scene featuring telephones is so perfect that for those moments you can almost forgive the cast and crew for making what is in the final analysis a morbidly reeking slab of infantile detritus. Get the clap before seeing this movie. You'll want a dose of penicillin afterwards anyway.
Scorsese does make that head-long dive tempting, of course, because, as with any number of previous black comedy efforts (Goodfellas, for instance), the caricatures drag us in with the excesses of their actions. In one scene where a new employee in Belfort's scam of a phone room stops working two minutes early to clean the fish tank, second in command Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) publicly ridicules the schlep and then swallows the tropical fish in spite. We are also treated (or mistreated) to scenes of pitching midgets at bullseyes, dangling a gay chef out the window of an office building, and a drunken rape scene on an airliner. To the extent that anyone finds this funny depends on the extent to which that person can be led to identify with the Belfort character.
And that is where the other problem lies. Because we are denied any viewpoint other than that of Jordan Belfort--and because he ultimately gets away with his amazingly anti-human behavior (to the extent that he wrote a popular memoir about his life and also received one million dollars for the film rights, in addition to creating his own post-prison series of sales seminars), we never actually get to perceive the son of a bitch's actions from any place other than the lofty precipice Scorsese coaxes us onto.
The director, of course, is not obligated to dumb down his intentions in order to make them clear. So when the guy leaving the theatre ahead of me turns and says, "I wanna be Jordan. I wanna be that guy. Buying everything. Party time, man," I just shrug and figure there will always be idiots in the world.
But maybe I'm the real idiot. After all, what Martin Scorsese is saying here is that taking Quaaludes and snorting cocaine while lying to everyone about everything is a great way to get filthy fucking rich. (I beg your pardon about my use of the fuck word, but if you do see this movie, you will hear it uttered more than five hundred times, setting a record for people who concern themselves with such things.) Maybe I'm crazy to think that what Scorsese wants us to do is be aghast at the celebration of this kind of lifestyle. But let's consider the evidence to the contrary. In The King of Comedy, Rupert Pupkin (DeNiro, natch) gets away with everything and becomes a star even after kidnapping Johnny Carson (Jerry Lewis) and getting arrested by the FBI. Henry Hill in the aforementioned Goodfellas gave up virtually nothing in exchange for being a rat. Even in the not particularly worthwhile Casino, DeNiro (again!) loses very little in exchange for the demands he makes on life. So a pattern begins to develop. But, hey, let's give Scorsese the benefit of the doubt. Let's pretend or imagine that the real message behind all these movies and several others is that people are collectively stupid and that is the deep down reason why all these charlatans the director "appears" to be celebrating get away with so much; therefore, the man is doing us a public service by playing up just how corrupt our society is as a whole. Even if one is willing to make that colossal concession, then what the fuck is the point in making ten thousand movies with the same actors over and over again, every frame in which those men appear serving to repeat the same tired goddamned point, unless, oh wait, maybe I get it at last! What Scorsese is really doing is he's so fucking smart that what he's doing is he's proving our collective ignorance and worthlessness by lulling us into accepting his ultimately misanthropic viewpoint of humanity itself. In other words, the more commercially successful a given digitally released Scorsese film is, the more fucked up we are as a society.
Whew! At last, after all these years, I finally get it. Thank God. Now maybe the motherfucking asshole can make a goddamned movie about some other fucking piece of shit thing, like maybe caterpillars in the Bronx or some such shit because you old bastard, we fucking get it! We don't give a damn that Jonah Hill worked for only $60,000 because he wanted to be near you. We don't care that you think DiCaprio is the next DeNiro. We don't fucking give a good goddamn what you think about anything because the last halfway decent movie you made was Taxi fucking Driver and that was damn near forty years ago, unless you think that swill about New York actually proved anything to anybody.
Only a few good things can be said about The Wolf of Wall Street. Margot Robbie is more than just beautiful. She can actually act and the male dominated bullshit of this movie is far beneath her ultimate talents. Also Matthew McConaighey just gets better and better with every film in which he appears and the only reason he has such a brief appearance in this garbage heap of a film is that if he'd stuck around, nobody would have given a shit about Leonardo.
The only other thing of a positive nature regarding this teeming load of bile is that the details of the boiler room work are one hundred percent on the money. Every last instant of every scene featuring telephones is so perfect that for those moments you can almost forgive the cast and crew for making what is in the final analysis a morbidly reeking slab of infantile detritus. Get the clap before seeing this movie. You'll want a dose of penicillin afterwards anyway.
American Hustle
I am almost always predisposed against new movies, which is why I am particularly elated to tell you that American Hustle (2013) has affected me more than any movie I have seen in several years. To offer an example: when we first meet Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), he is piecing together with quantities of stick-um what another character in the film refers to as an elaborate comb-over. He carries a paunch that would encourage most men to cover themselves up. And he affects a look of cool with ridiculous shaded indoor glasses. He is, in short, the last person in the world that a man would emulate. Yet I guarantee you that by the mid point in this wonderful movie, any man watching this will want to look exactly like this guy, at least for the duration of the film.
And that will work out fine because before the movie closes, half the women in the audience will want to be either Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), Irving's cohort, or wife Rosalyn Rosenfeld (Jennifer Lawrence).
What that amazing sense of identification means is that the writing is tight, the improvisation works, the acting takes the art to new improved levels, the ensemble work among Bale, Lawrence, Adams and Bradley Cooper (the latter playing a Studio 54 version of an FBI agent) is more comfortable than compatible, which is the way it should be, and the cinematography actually implies emotions without beating us over the head with them.
American Hustle is everything that The Wolf of Wall Street yearned to be.
Based just loosely enough on the ABSCAM entrapment of the late 1970s, American Hustle tells a story of survival--and the cost of that survival. Irving and Sydney (inspired by Melvin Weinberg and Evelyn Knight, respectively), are two world class confidence players who take advantage of gamblers, cheaters and six-time losers hanging 'round the theatre (girl by the whirlpool's looking for a new fool). They are also constantly busy reinventing themselves as anything other than what they really are. Yet what they are isn't half bad. They are both into Duke Ellington while their contemporaries are into Chicago. They both love art while their contemporaries enjoy politics. And they love one another while everyone else apparently loves them.
I don't want to give away much more of the plot. However, I will say that the plot is amazing in the way that the tension builds and builds around first, genuine physical danger, and second, the possible loss of friendship. It is this latter point on which everything else in the movie spins. When Irving becomes a genuine friend of the mayor of Camden, New Jersey (played with perfect understatement by Jeremy Renner), we genuinely ache at the prospects of the former's behavior injuring the latter.
As marvelous as every component of this movie is, we might expect that with a running time of 138 minutes there would be some over-indulgences. That is not the case at all. Every second of this powerful movie is necessary for its resolution. Every grimace, every slight of hand, every weird look from an uncredited Robert DeNiro (he plays the hitman gangster) is necessary. This is very much a movie you will hate to see end.
And that will work out fine because before the movie closes, half the women in the audience will want to be either Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), Irving's cohort, or wife Rosalyn Rosenfeld (Jennifer Lawrence).
What that amazing sense of identification means is that the writing is tight, the improvisation works, the acting takes the art to new improved levels, the ensemble work among Bale, Lawrence, Adams and Bradley Cooper (the latter playing a Studio 54 version of an FBI agent) is more comfortable than compatible, which is the way it should be, and the cinematography actually implies emotions without beating us over the head with them.
American Hustle is everything that The Wolf of Wall Street yearned to be.
Based just loosely enough on the ABSCAM entrapment of the late 1970s, American Hustle tells a story of survival--and the cost of that survival. Irving and Sydney (inspired by Melvin Weinberg and Evelyn Knight, respectively), are two world class confidence players who take advantage of gamblers, cheaters and six-time losers hanging 'round the theatre (girl by the whirlpool's looking for a new fool). They are also constantly busy reinventing themselves as anything other than what they really are. Yet what they are isn't half bad. They are both into Duke Ellington while their contemporaries are into Chicago. They both love art while their contemporaries enjoy politics. And they love one another while everyone else apparently loves them.
I don't want to give away much more of the plot. However, I will say that the plot is amazing in the way that the tension builds and builds around first, genuine physical danger, and second, the possible loss of friendship. It is this latter point on which everything else in the movie spins. When Irving becomes a genuine friend of the mayor of Camden, New Jersey (played with perfect understatement by Jeremy Renner), we genuinely ache at the prospects of the former's behavior injuring the latter.
As marvelous as every component of this movie is, we might expect that with a running time of 138 minutes there would be some over-indulgences. That is not the case at all. Every second of this powerful movie is necessary for its resolution. Every grimace, every slight of hand, every weird look from an uncredited Robert DeNiro (he plays the hitman gangster) is necessary. This is very much a movie you will hate to see end.
Hannah Arendt
Not too many well-written books have earned such a disturbing a reputation that even fifty years after their publication one may still encounter people who will say, "Oh, that? No. I refuse to consider reading that vile stack of rubbish!" Yet there are people, even to this very day, for whom the suggestion that there might actually be some value in Eichmann in Jerusalem is not merely anathema; it is the exemplification of nausea.
That reaction to the compiled articles Hannah Arendt wrote for the New Yorker (along with her substantial and grisly historical narrative of the Holocaust) has been linked to the writer's purposeful flippancy, to her suggestion that certain Jewish leaders were passively complicit in the Shoah, and even to her earlier schooling by and relationship with Martin Heidegger. The real reason, I suspect, is that some people were distressed by the subtitle: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
After all the psychoanalysis and superlatives, what Arendt actually gets across in her beautiful book is that Adolf Eichmann could not think. His responses to the orders he was given at the time contained value only insofar as they pertained to his being employed so that he could receive additional orders and thereby go on being employed. Eichmann was responsible for the deportation of one-and-a-half million Jews to killing centers in Poland and the Soviet Union. His emotional attachment to this fact--during his trial--was bogged down in specificities. Was he here or there or a given day or at another time, rather than addressing the core issue. But even on that core issue--extermination--Eichmann clearly felt exasperated at the Israeli court's unwillingness or inability to see things from his point of view.
They hanged the bastard.
But before that, before the trial, Israel's Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, or Mossad, captured (or kidnapped) him from the safety of post-war Buenos Aires, Argentina and smuggled him into Jerusalem. Because of the inconceivable horror of the Holocaust and of Eichmann's indisputable role in it, the world was supposed to understand and accept this action on the part of Mossad.
Again, though, the implication that the nation of Israel may have had a few flies in the ointment is not what some in the intellectual community rejected. What they disliked was the implication that the nature of Eichmann's fascism was mundane. For if that were true, could not even the best and brightest of us--if not checked and rechecked by other thinking and feeling people--be every bit as vile as Eichmann and his alleged superiors?
Well, sure. There is more to fascism than Henry Ford, Prescott Bush and Charles Lindbergh doling out money and lending their faces to the flashbulbs. Any time we decide that one group of people are better than another, a kind of Nazi-like thinking has slipped in. Some people might argue that we even need a bit of that hierarchy stuff in the name of order. After all, they say, the policeman is presumed better than the suspect, just as the prisoner is thought to be non-entitled to freedom while his jailers walk among the rest of us. I use the criminal justice system as a working example here because one time period's administrators of law and order (Eichmann) may wind up another time period's criminal underclass (dead Eichmann).
The alleged ambiguity and its ultimate resolution is the subject matter of a very good film called Hannah Arendt (2012). Written and directed by Margarethe von Trotta, this movie sugarcoats nothing, giving us the self-satisfied Arendt, the humorous Arendt, the smoking, wisecracking, professorial and impassioned Arendt, played with a perfect balance of intensities by Barbara Sukowa. (Sukowa has worked with Trotta before, first as one of the leads in Marianne and Juliane and later in the title role of Rosa Luxemburg.) Everyone in this beautiful movie trembles with the magnitude of Hannah's recognition of this everyday evil. I especially liked Janet McTeer as writer, journalist and friend Mary McCarthy.
Good as both the film and Arendt's book are, I suspect that modern audiences may not necessarily gain from the material the full sense of "Good is the new Bad" (or vice versa) that seems to have come across in Eichmann's trial. If I am correct, that speaks not so much bad for the movie and book but rather very ill for current times.
Many years ago, while teaching an employee a moderately complex series of procedures based on a few contingencies, I remarked, more or less in a joking way, that rules were invented because people do not like to think. The employee roared with laughter, finally suggesting that that would be a good "rule" for the place where we worked. I had inadvertently stumbled upon the closest thing I've ever said that I would like engraved. When you strip away all the larceny, dehumanization, brutality, avarice and sadism of the Third Reich, what you find are people of moderate intelligence who were extraordinary in (a) the breadth of their ability to plan and carry out cruelty, and (b) their unwillingness to put themselves in the other person's shoes. The efficiency of any bureaucracy requires some degree of the latter. Yet without a sufficient number of people to step outside the social situations and peer in at themselves in those situations, the humanitarian aims of the bureaucracy--if any--can become quickly lost. If someone working intake at the local Department of Economic Security office stops to contemplate the monumental horror of the lives of each person she interviews, she will be unable to help any of them. And yet if that person is unable to think beyond the constrictions of forms and computer logins and neither mentally nor emotionally connects with her clientele, she will quickly become useless to the goals of her organization. In the Third Reich, of course, those aims were the complete and total elimination of a race of people from the Earth. Any deviationist thinking was considered a spanner in the works and in Germany between 1933 and 1945, such thinking could get a person shot.
The leadership of the Party were not idiots. They had been spoon-fed on Martin Luther and breastfed by Heidegger, Herbert Spencer and Thomas Malthus. This philosophy of Social Darwinism (which the real Charles Darwin would have despised) celebrated the victory of presumed strength over presumed weakness, manipulating a Europe already predisposed towards anti-Semitism onto its own "noble cause." But even moderately bright people can turn themselves into machines when they find it in their own interests to do so. Just as the end of the world felt very near from 1933 through 1945, today many people in positions of authority choose to ignore the facts of human control on the effects of global heating, yet convince themselves in the veracity of the twisted fairy tale that the Amazon rainforest creates air pollution.
The story of Hannah Arendt, then, remains vital, not only as a point of historical information or dramatic catharsis, but more importantly because, as thinking continues to be hard work, we may persevere and elect to draw some parallels between her time and our own.
That reaction to the compiled articles Hannah Arendt wrote for the New Yorker (along with her substantial and grisly historical narrative of the Holocaust) has been linked to the writer's purposeful flippancy, to her suggestion that certain Jewish leaders were passively complicit in the Shoah, and even to her earlier schooling by and relationship with Martin Heidegger. The real reason, I suspect, is that some people were distressed by the subtitle: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
After all the psychoanalysis and superlatives, what Arendt actually gets across in her beautiful book is that Adolf Eichmann could not think. His responses to the orders he was given at the time contained value only insofar as they pertained to his being employed so that he could receive additional orders and thereby go on being employed. Eichmann was responsible for the deportation of one-and-a-half million Jews to killing centers in Poland and the Soviet Union. His emotional attachment to this fact--during his trial--was bogged down in specificities. Was he here or there or a given day or at another time, rather than addressing the core issue. But even on that core issue--extermination--Eichmann clearly felt exasperated at the Israeli court's unwillingness or inability to see things from his point of view.
They hanged the bastard.
But before that, before the trial, Israel's Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, or Mossad, captured (or kidnapped) him from the safety of post-war Buenos Aires, Argentina and smuggled him into Jerusalem. Because of the inconceivable horror of the Holocaust and of Eichmann's indisputable role in it, the world was supposed to understand and accept this action on the part of Mossad.
Again, though, the implication that the nation of Israel may have had a few flies in the ointment is not what some in the intellectual community rejected. What they disliked was the implication that the nature of Eichmann's fascism was mundane. For if that were true, could not even the best and brightest of us--if not checked and rechecked by other thinking and feeling people--be every bit as vile as Eichmann and his alleged superiors?
Well, sure. There is more to fascism than Henry Ford, Prescott Bush and Charles Lindbergh doling out money and lending their faces to the flashbulbs. Any time we decide that one group of people are better than another, a kind of Nazi-like thinking has slipped in. Some people might argue that we even need a bit of that hierarchy stuff in the name of order. After all, they say, the policeman is presumed better than the suspect, just as the prisoner is thought to be non-entitled to freedom while his jailers walk among the rest of us. I use the criminal justice system as a working example here because one time period's administrators of law and order (Eichmann) may wind up another time period's criminal underclass (dead Eichmann).
The alleged ambiguity and its ultimate resolution is the subject matter of a very good film called Hannah Arendt (2012). Written and directed by Margarethe von Trotta, this movie sugarcoats nothing, giving us the self-satisfied Arendt, the humorous Arendt, the smoking, wisecracking, professorial and impassioned Arendt, played with a perfect balance of intensities by Barbara Sukowa. (Sukowa has worked with Trotta before, first as one of the leads in Marianne and Juliane and later in the title role of Rosa Luxemburg.) Everyone in this beautiful movie trembles with the magnitude of Hannah's recognition of this everyday evil. I especially liked Janet McTeer as writer, journalist and friend Mary McCarthy.
Good as both the film and Arendt's book are, I suspect that modern audiences may not necessarily gain from the material the full sense of "Good is the new Bad" (or vice versa) that seems to have come across in Eichmann's trial. If I am correct, that speaks not so much bad for the movie and book but rather very ill for current times.
Many years ago, while teaching an employee a moderately complex series of procedures based on a few contingencies, I remarked, more or less in a joking way, that rules were invented because people do not like to think. The employee roared with laughter, finally suggesting that that would be a good "rule" for the place where we worked. I had inadvertently stumbled upon the closest thing I've ever said that I would like engraved. When you strip away all the larceny, dehumanization, brutality, avarice and sadism of the Third Reich, what you find are people of moderate intelligence who were extraordinary in (a) the breadth of their ability to plan and carry out cruelty, and (b) their unwillingness to put themselves in the other person's shoes. The efficiency of any bureaucracy requires some degree of the latter. Yet without a sufficient number of people to step outside the social situations and peer in at themselves in those situations, the humanitarian aims of the bureaucracy--if any--can become quickly lost. If someone working intake at the local Department of Economic Security office stops to contemplate the monumental horror of the lives of each person she interviews, she will be unable to help any of them. And yet if that person is unable to think beyond the constrictions of forms and computer logins and neither mentally nor emotionally connects with her clientele, she will quickly become useless to the goals of her organization. In the Third Reich, of course, those aims were the complete and total elimination of a race of people from the Earth. Any deviationist thinking was considered a spanner in the works and in Germany between 1933 and 1945, such thinking could get a person shot.
The leadership of the Party were not idiots. They had been spoon-fed on Martin Luther and breastfed by Heidegger, Herbert Spencer and Thomas Malthus. This philosophy of Social Darwinism (which the real Charles Darwin would have despised) celebrated the victory of presumed strength over presumed weakness, manipulating a Europe already predisposed towards anti-Semitism onto its own "noble cause." But even moderately bright people can turn themselves into machines when they find it in their own interests to do so. Just as the end of the world felt very near from 1933 through 1945, today many people in positions of authority choose to ignore the facts of human control on the effects of global heating, yet convince themselves in the veracity of the twisted fairy tale that the Amazon rainforest creates air pollution.
The story of Hannah Arendt, then, remains vital, not only as a point of historical information or dramatic catharsis, but more importantly because, as thinking continues to be hard work, we may persevere and elect to draw some parallels between her time and our own.
This Must Be the Place
Not everyone will be ready for This Must Be the Place (2011). But if you are, other people's lack of ease may be among the reasons you will like it.
That and the fact of Sean Penn will turn the movie for you. You will like it because you like Sean and because you will know some other people will be incredibly annoyed with this movie, as well as because you will have a kind of sensitivity that not everyone else possesses. Or else you'll simply rock back on your heels from the majesty of director Paolo Sorrentino's vision of America and Ireland. Then again, you might thrill to the sight and feel of Frances McDormand, Judd Hirsch, Joyce Van Patten and Eve Hewson cast in roles that freed them up in ways no one else ever dared provide them. You might even be happy to watch David Byrne singing.
Mostly, though, I believe you'll stand up and cheer with the way Sean Penn explores the pores and molecules of his Cheyenne character, a retired rocker who lives off his musical proceeds and suffers the agony of having inadvertently inspired two young fans to commit suicide while he lives in a mansion he does not understand. His wife, played by McDormand, is a firefighter. He has a gothic groupie he tries to fix up with a young man from the mall. And when Cheyenne's father takes sick, he returns to New York just in time for the old man to die.
His father is a Holocaust survivor who spent the last years of his life trying to find the Nazi guard who humiliated him. Cheyenne picks up the search, in the process encountering a waitress with a curious son, a pair of ping pong wannabes, the man who invented rollers for luggage, a Nazi hunter, an aging tattoo artist, and that legion of fans he cannot quite let down.
To tell more of the plot would be stupid. I will reveal that the hook of this movie--aside from the acting, which is among the best I've ever seen anywhere--is the grandest twist of the "coming of age" theme ever made. Penn gets every last nuance of this transformation exactly right, mostly because he invents his character from the inside out. Just to give you a touch, imagine a former rocker worn so fragile that we actually ache when he encounters people who stand a chance of hurting him, only to find that he is more than capable of taking care of himself. When a skinhead in a bar asks Cheyenne if he likes his tattoos, Penn's character replies, "I was asking myself that same exact question."
The temptation here is to quote you a hundred lines from this movie. But I won't. I'll just ask you to consider taking a trip with some fascinating people, none of whom will hurt you, at least not as bad as you have hurt yourself.
That and the fact of Sean Penn will turn the movie for you. You will like it because you like Sean and because you will know some other people will be incredibly annoyed with this movie, as well as because you will have a kind of sensitivity that not everyone else possesses. Or else you'll simply rock back on your heels from the majesty of director Paolo Sorrentino's vision of America and Ireland. Then again, you might thrill to the sight and feel of Frances McDormand, Judd Hirsch, Joyce Van Patten and Eve Hewson cast in roles that freed them up in ways no one else ever dared provide them. You might even be happy to watch David Byrne singing.
Mostly, though, I believe you'll stand up and cheer with the way Sean Penn explores the pores and molecules of his Cheyenne character, a retired rocker who lives off his musical proceeds and suffers the agony of having inadvertently inspired two young fans to commit suicide while he lives in a mansion he does not understand. His wife, played by McDormand, is a firefighter. He has a gothic groupie he tries to fix up with a young man from the mall. And when Cheyenne's father takes sick, he returns to New York just in time for the old man to die.
His father is a Holocaust survivor who spent the last years of his life trying to find the Nazi guard who humiliated him. Cheyenne picks up the search, in the process encountering a waitress with a curious son, a pair of ping pong wannabes, the man who invented rollers for luggage, a Nazi hunter, an aging tattoo artist, and that legion of fans he cannot quite let down.
To tell more of the plot would be stupid. I will reveal that the hook of this movie--aside from the acting, which is among the best I've ever seen anywhere--is the grandest twist of the "coming of age" theme ever made. Penn gets every last nuance of this transformation exactly right, mostly because he invents his character from the inside out. Just to give you a touch, imagine a former rocker worn so fragile that we actually ache when he encounters people who stand a chance of hurting him, only to find that he is more than capable of taking care of himself. When a skinhead in a bar asks Cheyenne if he likes his tattoos, Penn's character replies, "I was asking myself that same exact question."
The temptation here is to quote you a hundred lines from this movie. But I won't. I'll just ask you to consider taking a trip with some fascinating people, none of whom will hurt you, at least not as bad as you have hurt yourself.
The American Ruling Class
On a sobering note, last night I was delighted to view Lewis Lapham's The American Ruling Class (2005), a documentary-drama-musical and a movie so far advanced from much of the drivel that gets put out there with the direct intent of making people stupid that this will either physically affix you to your chair or else send you flying from the room. Lapham--former editor of Harper's and all-around smart and well-connected guy--employed two young male actors to pose as recent Ivy League graduates turned loose upon the world. Jack has an offer at Goldman-Sachs. Mike thinks it might be nice to work as a waiter until that novel or screenplay he has in his closet materializes into something. Both men assure their friends that they want to make the world a better place. Jack figures the best way to accomplish this is to join the ruling class--if it exists--and work within the system while getting very rich. Mike fears that joining such a group may corrupt him, yet the tips at the restaurant fail to keep him afloat.
Throughout the movie, the two young men get advice from several of Lapham's knowledgeable friends and colleagues, including Kurt Vonnegut, Walter Cronkite, Barbara Ehrenreich, Howard Zinn, Pete Seeger, former Defense Secretary Harold Brown, James Baker III, Hodding Carter (perhaps the most revelatory speaker in the film), Bill Bradley (easily the most rationalizing and despicable), and Robert Altman. Nothing will be served by revealing more of the plot, other than to celebrate its occasional deliberate absurdity. However, the freshness and vigor of the IHOP employees breaking into "Nickled and Dimed" is enough to make even a sour old vinegar sucking demon such as James Baker appear nearly human.
Nearly each member of the American ruling class presented in the film acknowledges the existence of the elite group, as well as his or her role within it. The individual analyses of and by each elite is more interesting than chilling, the latter being what I think director John Kirby was going for. Aside from a pair of inspired and hilarious songs (and this is not really a musical; the songs were just a way of breaking up the plot to keep it fresh), the most searing moments in the movie occur when Lapham interjects his own nearly self-deprecating observations, most pointedly:
Americans are an inventive people, Mike. Manufacture our ruling elites, we like to call the meritocracy, in the same way that we build SUVs or 747s. The members come and go, and power for a season or generation, then replaced by new technology, fresh money. What never must change, Mike, is the belief that by doing well one is also doing good.
To be fair, much as I enjoyed having the things I already know and believe validated, there's little in The American Ruling Class that is going to alter your life once the film ends. The acting quality of the two young men simply falls short far too often and, much as I like Lewis Lapham, there are times when his own delight in ambiguity wears thinner than a retread through a pot hole. Will you enjoy watching the movie? Absolutely. Will it changed your life? Anyone whose life could be significantly altered by this movie would be far too preoccupied serving the ruling class. As Howard Zinn says, "All that is necessary for the system to collapse is for people to disobey."
Throughout the movie, the two young men get advice from several of Lapham's knowledgeable friends and colleagues, including Kurt Vonnegut, Walter Cronkite, Barbara Ehrenreich, Howard Zinn, Pete Seeger, former Defense Secretary Harold Brown, James Baker III, Hodding Carter (perhaps the most revelatory speaker in the film), Bill Bradley (easily the most rationalizing and despicable), and Robert Altman. Nothing will be served by revealing more of the plot, other than to celebrate its occasional deliberate absurdity. However, the freshness and vigor of the IHOP employees breaking into "Nickled and Dimed" is enough to make even a sour old vinegar sucking demon such as James Baker appear nearly human.
Nearly each member of the American ruling class presented in the film acknowledges the existence of the elite group, as well as his or her role within it. The individual analyses of and by each elite is more interesting than chilling, the latter being what I think director John Kirby was going for. Aside from a pair of inspired and hilarious songs (and this is not really a musical; the songs were just a way of breaking up the plot to keep it fresh), the most searing moments in the movie occur when Lapham interjects his own nearly self-deprecating observations, most pointedly:
Americans are an inventive people, Mike. Manufacture our ruling elites, we like to call the meritocracy, in the same way that we build SUVs or 747s. The members come and go, and power for a season or generation, then replaced by new technology, fresh money. What never must change, Mike, is the belief that by doing well one is also doing good.
To be fair, much as I enjoyed having the things I already know and believe validated, there's little in The American Ruling Class that is going to alter your life once the film ends. The acting quality of the two young men simply falls short far too often and, much as I like Lewis Lapham, there are times when his own delight in ambiguity wears thinner than a retread through a pot hole. Will you enjoy watching the movie? Absolutely. Will it changed your life? Anyone whose life could be significantly altered by this movie would be far too preoccupied serving the ruling class. As Howard Zinn says, "All that is necessary for the system to collapse is for people to disobey."
Who is Harry Nilsson (and Why is Everybody Talkin' About Him)?
Harry Nilsson wheeled his way in and out of life with such tender rapidity it's a wonder his poor body and soul withstood things as long as they did. With a voice that echoed as much Tin Pan Alley as Abbey Road, this insecure man lulled us out of our somnambulism with many a fine tune, the first big one being the Fred Neil-penned "Everybody's Talkin'," the hit from the film Midnight Cowboy, a song that beat out both Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell because of its appropriateness for the movie as well as stark, simple skill at capturing a sentiment beneath the mouth of a jar and kissing it through the glass.
The movie Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin' About Him)? was released a couple years back and one of the downright dirty shames of this new thing called the twenty-first century is that it didn't sell more tickets than it did, as if Harry was just some flash in the grease who didn't warrant an entire documentary film about him, an idea I for one reject because (a) I've always loved his songs, and (b) because making a documentary this good is something one does not have the ability to do just every day. For one person the point of reference may be that he wrote the song "One," a huge hit for something called Three Dog Night. For another person it may be his album of songs written by Randy Newman. For most people it is probably the thoroughly enjoyable Nilsson Schmilsson record, an album from which no less than three Top Forty singles were culled, an album produced by Richard "The Lion-Hearted" Perry, when the singer's voice was at or near the top of its incredible precipice of talent. Whether one loved the Number One smash "Without You" (written by two guys from Badfinger, whose own version was great but still not as great as Harry's), or the silly and brilliant "Coconut," or the not-as-simple-as-it-seems rocker "Jump into the Fire," Nilsson Schmilsson had a little something for no one and a lot of something for everyone else.
The movie Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin' About Him)? was released a couple years back and one of the downright dirty shames of this new thing called the twenty-first century is that it didn't sell more tickets than it did, as if Harry was just some flash in the grease who didn't warrant an entire documentary film about him, an idea I for one reject because (a) I've always loved his songs, and (b) because making a documentary this good is something one does not have the ability to do just every day. For one person the point of reference may be that he wrote the song "One," a huge hit for something called Three Dog Night. For another person it may be his album of songs written by Randy Newman. For most people it is probably the thoroughly enjoyable Nilsson Schmilsson record, an album from which no less than three Top Forty singles were culled, an album produced by Richard "The Lion-Hearted" Perry, when the singer's voice was at or near the top of its incredible precipice of talent. Whether one loved the Number One smash "Without You" (written by two guys from Badfinger, whose own version was great but still not as great as Harry's), or the silly and brilliant "Coconut," or the not-as-simple-as-it-seems rocker "Jump into the Fire," Nilsson Schmilsson had a little something for no one and a lot of something for everyone else.
As a kid back in the times when being a kid counted for something, my own first exposure to the man came from hearing him sing the theme from the mediocre TV show "The Courtship of Eddie's Father." Mere days later I was treated to the soundtrack from a kid's animated film called The Point, to this day one of the most enlightened exercises a kid can encounter, and I grooved in total sullen silliness first to "Me and My Arrow" and then to the rest of the album.
No one had ever sung quite like that before. It sounded like what you might get if you'd crossed Paul McCartney with Frank Sinatra and put the voice in the throat of playwright Arthur Miller.
John Scheinfeld has been making good documentaries since the early 1990s (The Unknown Marx Brothers, The Unknown Peter Sellers, The U.S. vs. John Lennon). Now he has made a great one. Who is Harry Nilsson? takes you by the lapels from the instant Dustin Hoffman walks out on the stage to make the announcement of the passing of this human being and continues to shake you until we get to the L.A. earthquake that occurred the day of Nilsson's funeral. Memories are shared by Micky Dolenz, Van Dyke Parks, Brian Wilson, Richard Perry, Eric Idle, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, Harry's wives and kids, The Smothers Brothers, Robin Williams, and throngs more, and even if the name of this singer-songwriter means absolutely nothing to you, I would still encourage you to see this movie if for no other reason than to get some sense as to how artistically successful a music documentary can be when the subject is not necessarily a household name, however much it should be. For those with only a passing familiarity, you will be dipped in the lifetime of a man whose music you will find will add cosmic joys and sorrows to your days and nights, and to those of you who, like myself, waited in record stores for the release of the next product (Pussycats, for instance, with Lennon producing, or a song that should've been a hit and couldn't have been, such as "Jesus Christ You're Tall"), this movie may actually bring you to the edge of despair over just how much was lost that stupid day in January 1994 when we lost a great American hero.
No one had ever sung quite like that before. It sounded like what you might get if you'd crossed Paul McCartney with Frank Sinatra and put the voice in the throat of playwright Arthur Miller.
John Scheinfeld has been making good documentaries since the early 1990s (The Unknown Marx Brothers, The Unknown Peter Sellers, The U.S. vs. John Lennon). Now he has made a great one. Who is Harry Nilsson? takes you by the lapels from the instant Dustin Hoffman walks out on the stage to make the announcement of the passing of this human being and continues to shake you until we get to the L.A. earthquake that occurred the day of Nilsson's funeral. Memories are shared by Micky Dolenz, Van Dyke Parks, Brian Wilson, Richard Perry, Eric Idle, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, Harry's wives and kids, The Smothers Brothers, Robin Williams, and throngs more, and even if the name of this singer-songwriter means absolutely nothing to you, I would still encourage you to see this movie if for no other reason than to get some sense as to how artistically successful a music documentary can be when the subject is not necessarily a household name, however much it should be. For those with only a passing familiarity, you will be dipped in the lifetime of a man whose music you will find will add cosmic joys and sorrows to your days and nights, and to those of you who, like myself, waited in record stores for the release of the next product (Pussycats, for instance, with Lennon producing, or a song that should've been a hit and couldn't have been, such as "Jesus Christ You're Tall"), this movie may actually bring you to the edge of despair over just how much was lost that stupid day in January 1994 when we lost a great American hero.
This Film is Not Yet Rated
The Motion Picture Association of America has had a ratings system in place since 1966. Back then the ratings were G, M, R and X, with the M being the precursor to the PG and R actually having the age 16 as the cut-off point. This Film is Not Yet Rated, the 2006 documentary by Kirby Dick, objects to the rating systems on grounds of censorship, homophobia, ambiguity, and favoritism against independents and in support of the majors. Anyone predisposed to view this movie would be inclined to agree with the director's point of view, except for the members of the Ratings Board themselves, the folks who gave this movie an NC-17 rating, they claimed, due to sexual content and certainly not because the movie actually releases the heretofore secret names of members of the Ratings Board and Appeals Board. Because Dick's inventiveness in the tact taken in this film is quite clever and ironic and because his anti-censorship attitude bodes well with those who favor this kind of thing (and I will include myself in this group, just as you probably include yourself), it pains me a lot that I am personally compelled to point out that Kirby either disingenuously or for some other reason ignores the uses to which the censorship ratings have allowed the studios to release films that were certain to make money specifically because of these ratings.
Granted, traditionally an X or NC-17 rating has been a dead knell for a motion picture. This is no longer the case and it was not the case for any significant period of time, at least as long as the purpose of the objectionable material was prurient rather than artistic. So, for example, a piece of unmitigated detritus such as Showgirls, which bombed at the box, ends up (pardon the expression) being one of MGM's bestselling movies on DVD. You have likely noticed that the studios actually plan releases based to some extent on ratings. If it is Christmastime, most new movies will have a rating of G, PG, or PG-13 because the kiddie market is out of school and into the theaters. The same thing goes in the summertime. The spring and fall are the big seasons for R-rated pictures because, presumably, that is when the grown-ups are out and about and looking for some excitement.
I am not minimizing the impact the idiotic ratings system has on the commercial viability of a film. A lot of great or at least good movies have been originally burdened with NC-17 to their own detriment because most major theater chains won't run the movies which means the studios won't fight for them or allocate movie to promote them, all of which means that the people involved in making the films suffer a kind of contemporary blacklisting unless they can be persuaded to re-cut the film to arbitrary specifications. The extent to which the MPAA serves as arbiters of public morality for a film industry not particularly well-celebrated for its dealings with either the public or morality is one that deserves a film as fine as this. However, to ignore the conservative uses of the liberal reform (the MPAA is indeed the definition of liberalism) instead of spending time focusing on the not-too-interesting aspects of hiring private investigators to locate and identify the board members is one damned shame too many.
This Movie is Not Yet Rated, ironically, does not go far enough.
All the same, it is good to meet some of the people affected by the rating system, a list that includes Kimberly Peirce, Jon Lewis, Wayne Kramer and John Waters. The personal anecdotes go a long way toward making the director's point that male homosexuality, for instance, makes the MPAA quite uncomfortable, especially when filmed by an independent studio, or that missionary or girl on top are often the only acceptable heterosexual positions and that anything else is perceived as pornographic, particularly if pubic hair belonging to someone other than Sharon Stone is shown. Certain other aspects of the ratings which I will not give away here--because you really should see this film and about that I want to be quite clear--reinforce the hypocrisy of the entire system.
The other problem, aside from ignoring the uses to which hard-R's, X's and NC-17's have been used to increase revenues, is the limited time spent comparing violence to sex. Most astute film-goers have observed that changes in MPAA mores regarding violence have "evolved" more rapidly than the norms regarding sexuality. Kirby Dick spends a little time on this but doesn't quite get to the point of why this might be. Maybe that's another movie.
All in all, This Film works well if you happen to be a product of the MTV generation that has few clues as to the historical context into which contemporary censorship falls. For the rest of us, it's a nice refresher course.
Granted, traditionally an X or NC-17 rating has been a dead knell for a motion picture. This is no longer the case and it was not the case for any significant period of time, at least as long as the purpose of the objectionable material was prurient rather than artistic. So, for example, a piece of unmitigated detritus such as Showgirls, which bombed at the box, ends up (pardon the expression) being one of MGM's bestselling movies on DVD. You have likely noticed that the studios actually plan releases based to some extent on ratings. If it is Christmastime, most new movies will have a rating of G, PG, or PG-13 because the kiddie market is out of school and into the theaters. The same thing goes in the summertime. The spring and fall are the big seasons for R-rated pictures because, presumably, that is when the grown-ups are out and about and looking for some excitement.
I am not minimizing the impact the idiotic ratings system has on the commercial viability of a film. A lot of great or at least good movies have been originally burdened with NC-17 to their own detriment because most major theater chains won't run the movies which means the studios won't fight for them or allocate movie to promote them, all of which means that the people involved in making the films suffer a kind of contemporary blacklisting unless they can be persuaded to re-cut the film to arbitrary specifications. The extent to which the MPAA serves as arbiters of public morality for a film industry not particularly well-celebrated for its dealings with either the public or morality is one that deserves a film as fine as this. However, to ignore the conservative uses of the liberal reform (the MPAA is indeed the definition of liberalism) instead of spending time focusing on the not-too-interesting aspects of hiring private investigators to locate and identify the board members is one damned shame too many.
This Movie is Not Yet Rated, ironically, does not go far enough.
All the same, it is good to meet some of the people affected by the rating system, a list that includes Kimberly Peirce, Jon Lewis, Wayne Kramer and John Waters. The personal anecdotes go a long way toward making the director's point that male homosexuality, for instance, makes the MPAA quite uncomfortable, especially when filmed by an independent studio, or that missionary or girl on top are often the only acceptable heterosexual positions and that anything else is perceived as pornographic, particularly if pubic hair belonging to someone other than Sharon Stone is shown. Certain other aspects of the ratings which I will not give away here--because you really should see this film and about that I want to be quite clear--reinforce the hypocrisy of the entire system.
The other problem, aside from ignoring the uses to which hard-R's, X's and NC-17's have been used to increase revenues, is the limited time spent comparing violence to sex. Most astute film-goers have observed that changes in MPAA mores regarding violence have "evolved" more rapidly than the norms regarding sexuality. Kirby Dick spends a little time on this but doesn't quite get to the point of why this might be. Maybe that's another movie.
All in all, This Film works well if you happen to be a product of the MTV generation that has few clues as to the historical context into which contemporary censorship falls. For the rest of us, it's a nice refresher course.
Plastic Ono Band
How easy it remains to mock the things that hurt us the most.
John Lennon Plastic Ono Band remains one of those recordings that is so easy to forget because the feelings it evokes get pushed back into the crevices of our awareness, the tender, quivering spots on our brains where all the pain and fear hide. Then one day we are sitting alone at a computer, or television, or book, and from an open window come the death knell bells of "Mother." Never was so simple a song done with such naked conviction, such artful agony, that all these years later we can rediscover ourselves crying along as we marvel at the reach of that vocal, twitch at the repeating edge of the piano notes, moan at the pulse at the bass as it bleeds onto our desk.
A child is born, he cries out at the pain of birth, and he notices in his total awareness that he has been abandoned. "Mother, you had me, but I never had you." Then "Father, you left me, but I never left you." And the revelation: "I couldn't walk and I tried to run."
With that song the dream that was The Beatles began to dissolve. By the time of the low-fidelity "My Mummy's Dead," the dream retains nothing but the force of exhaustion. The fade out of the guitar suggesting that you have been somewhere with this singer, somewhere important, wonder where, who is this man who sings for my nightmares?
Plastic Ono Band is an album. It is not a movie. Someone at VH-1 decided it would make a nice fifty-three minutes for one of their "Classic Album" segments. That person was correct.
If the subject of this album matters to you, chances are good that nothing "revealed" by the biopic will be informational. Of course, that is also true of the recording itself, yet some of us return to that time and again. And so this very gentle short film is well worth seeing once, twice, however many times, not because it aids in our unending collecting of post-Beatles trivializations but quite properly because it helps break down the emotional equivalents for us in ways that only people who were there at the time have the capacity to do.
One of the most annoying aspects of any type of look back is always some teenage expert rambling on about what Duane Allman was really like or how Cobain understood Schubert or some such nonsense. This film features the people who were there, those who, if not directly responsible, certainly played a role in getting it together, be it Jaan Wenner recalling from his "Lennon Remembers" interviews (which are sampled liberally here), or bassist Klaus Voorman plucking out musical lines as if he'd developed them day before yesterday rather than back in 1970, or Ringo Starr, who is actually quite loquacious here, even discussing intelligently about drum fills and about his friendship with John.
As I mentioned at the outset, anything as honest as this album sets itself up for some nasty satire. The National Lampoon did one hell of a funny version of this album all in one song.
John Lennon Plastic Ono Band remains one of those recordings that is so easy to forget because the feelings it evokes get pushed back into the crevices of our awareness, the tender, quivering spots on our brains where all the pain and fear hide. Then one day we are sitting alone at a computer, or television, or book, and from an open window come the death knell bells of "Mother." Never was so simple a song done with such naked conviction, such artful agony, that all these years later we can rediscover ourselves crying along as we marvel at the reach of that vocal, twitch at the repeating edge of the piano notes, moan at the pulse at the bass as it bleeds onto our desk.
A child is born, he cries out at the pain of birth, and he notices in his total awareness that he has been abandoned. "Mother, you had me, but I never had you." Then "Father, you left me, but I never left you." And the revelation: "I couldn't walk and I tried to run."
With that song the dream that was The Beatles began to dissolve. By the time of the low-fidelity "My Mummy's Dead," the dream retains nothing but the force of exhaustion. The fade out of the guitar suggesting that you have been somewhere with this singer, somewhere important, wonder where, who is this man who sings for my nightmares?
Plastic Ono Band is an album. It is not a movie. Someone at VH-1 decided it would make a nice fifty-three minutes for one of their "Classic Album" segments. That person was correct.
If the subject of this album matters to you, chances are good that nothing "revealed" by the biopic will be informational. Of course, that is also true of the recording itself, yet some of us return to that time and again. And so this very gentle short film is well worth seeing once, twice, however many times, not because it aids in our unending collecting of post-Beatles trivializations but quite properly because it helps break down the emotional equivalents for us in ways that only people who were there at the time have the capacity to do.
One of the most annoying aspects of any type of look back is always some teenage expert rambling on about what Duane Allman was really like or how Cobain understood Schubert or some such nonsense. This film features the people who were there, those who, if not directly responsible, certainly played a role in getting it together, be it Jaan Wenner recalling from his "Lennon Remembers" interviews (which are sampled liberally here), or bassist Klaus Voorman plucking out musical lines as if he'd developed them day before yesterday rather than back in 1970, or Ringo Starr, who is actually quite loquacious here, even discussing intelligently about drum fills and about his friendship with John.
As I mentioned at the outset, anything as honest as this album sets itself up for some nasty satire. The National Lampoon did one hell of a funny version of this album all in one song.
In order for anything this savage to retain its humor, you can bet the original has to be real art and that is absolutely correct. I have two parrots, Gilligan and Blue, both of whom go completely insane every time any of the songs from Plastic come on. They don't give a shit about Madonna or Britney or anybody else, but put the needle to the record by Lennon and the bastards call out as if their tails were on fire.
So, yes, you should watch this fine movie because it will motivate you to glorify the present so that the past does not dry up, to toy with a Bono-ism. Quite contrary to the idea that the past is dead, this film helps us realize the past is no more than one or two breaths back in the memory, breaths to which we owe the future.
So, yes, you should watch this fine movie because it will motivate you to glorify the present so that the past does not dry up, to toy with a Bono-ism. Quite contrary to the idea that the past is dead, this film helps us realize the past is no more than one or two breaths back in the memory, breaths to which we owe the future.
Paul McCartney Really is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison
Just when you think that the idea of conspiracies being used to discredit proper analysis can't get any more hysterical, someone named Joel Gilbert comes along and releases Paul McCartney Really is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison. The first reek of this rather grim jest emerged from the crypts back in October 1969 when a listener contacted a Detroit Disc Jockey, informing him of all sorts of odd "clues" about the death of Beatle Paul nearly three years earlier. Because that was a time when a lot of decent people had some legitimate concerns about the nature of their own reality, the story was deemed to have legs, as it were, and became the subject of all sorts of speculation. After all, the argument went, if THEY could lie about the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, then surely THEY could be lying about McCartney. In a flash, all sorts of evidence sprang up, from album cover symbolism to straight-forward lyrics to hidden meanings to backward masking on the vinyl LPs. Finally, Paul McCartney stepped out of his Scottish farm house and denied that he was dead, that he had ever been dead, or that being dead anytime soon was on his list of immediate plans.
Then in 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed.
Then in 1999, George Harrison was stabbed.
Then in 2001, George Harrison died.
Then in 2005, a company called Highway 61 Entertainment and headed by a guy named Joel Gilbert, reportedly received a package containing two audio cassettes with a narration claiming to be from one Mr. George Harrison. Gilbert--or someone purporting to be Gilbert--appears briefly at the beginning of this documentary to state that he has been unable to successfully authenticate the voice on the tapes as being that of Beatle George. The rest of the film is the narration accompanied by a mix of some fairly common and a bit of rare footage, most of it familiar to Beatles fans, although the story that comes out is as wild as anything we've heard lately, I must admit.
Naturally I've heard all of this before.Chances are you have as well. Gary Patterson published a neat book a few years back called The Walrus was Paul, all about this great hoax and the clues that substantiated it. This film, however, takes things to an absurd extreme, in the process, it pains me to admit, evoking a few guilty laughs along the way. For instance? Well, when the MI5 guy, Maxwell, takes George, John and Ringo to the scene of the tragedy, he points to Paul's decapitated body and says, "Looks like a walrus, don't he?" to which a horrified and furious Lennon responds, "I am the walrus!"
The narrating Harrison further claims that all of Lennon's post-Beatles activities were intended to prove that Lennon was insane and hence should not be held responsible for leaving all those ghastly clues all over the bloody albums.
Similarly we learn that the Paul impostor, William Campbell, was taken by the three real Beatles to India under the pretext of seeking enlightenment, the REAL reason being that they hoped to channel the dead soul of McCartney through the body of Campbell, or "Faul" as he became known.
Likewise, it turns out that photographer Linda Eastman blackmailed Faul into marrying her once she discovered that he was a fake. Indeed, the reason for Lennon's assassination was that he had dared defy Maxwell by threatening to finally reveal the truth to that galaxy of fans.
It's all quite ridiculous and not a little ghoulish, especially when you notice that the narrator--who sounds more like someone doing a parody of a Beatle voice than any actual member of the group--gets the chronology for many of these events wrong. Still, it's kind of quaint listening to the backwards stuff, like "Turn me on, deadman," although I for one refuse to believe that Harrison had originally planned to name "Taxman" "Taxidermist," as this movie claims.
All in all, it's a stupid concept for a documentary and if I had actually paid anything to watch it you can bet I would have felt ripped off, although not entirely disappointed. After all, Gilbert is the guy who claims to have discovered the real live Elvis and who is certain that Bob Dylan's famous motorcycle accident was staged to allow the singer to go through drug rehab.
Mythology has its place, even in pop music. It might have been more clever, however, to have staged an original hoax rather than to dig up this old tripe after so many years.
Oh, by the way: the license plate on the VW on the Abbey Road album that reads 28IF--indicating that McCartney would have been twenty-eight years old if had he lived--is fallacious. Paul would have been twenty-nine. Sorry.
Then in 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed.
Then in 1999, George Harrison was stabbed.
Then in 2001, George Harrison died.
Then in 2005, a company called Highway 61 Entertainment and headed by a guy named Joel Gilbert, reportedly received a package containing two audio cassettes with a narration claiming to be from one Mr. George Harrison. Gilbert--or someone purporting to be Gilbert--appears briefly at the beginning of this documentary to state that he has been unable to successfully authenticate the voice on the tapes as being that of Beatle George. The rest of the film is the narration accompanied by a mix of some fairly common and a bit of rare footage, most of it familiar to Beatles fans, although the story that comes out is as wild as anything we've heard lately, I must admit.
Naturally I've heard all of this before.Chances are you have as well. Gary Patterson published a neat book a few years back called The Walrus was Paul, all about this great hoax and the clues that substantiated it. This film, however, takes things to an absurd extreme, in the process, it pains me to admit, evoking a few guilty laughs along the way. For instance? Well, when the MI5 guy, Maxwell, takes George, John and Ringo to the scene of the tragedy, he points to Paul's decapitated body and says, "Looks like a walrus, don't he?" to which a horrified and furious Lennon responds, "I am the walrus!"
The narrating Harrison further claims that all of Lennon's post-Beatles activities were intended to prove that Lennon was insane and hence should not be held responsible for leaving all those ghastly clues all over the bloody albums.
Similarly we learn that the Paul impostor, William Campbell, was taken by the three real Beatles to India under the pretext of seeking enlightenment, the REAL reason being that they hoped to channel the dead soul of McCartney through the body of Campbell, or "Faul" as he became known.
Likewise, it turns out that photographer Linda Eastman blackmailed Faul into marrying her once she discovered that he was a fake. Indeed, the reason for Lennon's assassination was that he had dared defy Maxwell by threatening to finally reveal the truth to that galaxy of fans.
It's all quite ridiculous and not a little ghoulish, especially when you notice that the narrator--who sounds more like someone doing a parody of a Beatle voice than any actual member of the group--gets the chronology for many of these events wrong. Still, it's kind of quaint listening to the backwards stuff, like "Turn me on, deadman," although I for one refuse to believe that Harrison had originally planned to name "Taxman" "Taxidermist," as this movie claims.
All in all, it's a stupid concept for a documentary and if I had actually paid anything to watch it you can bet I would have felt ripped off, although not entirely disappointed. After all, Gilbert is the guy who claims to have discovered the real live Elvis and who is certain that Bob Dylan's famous motorcycle accident was staged to allow the singer to go through drug rehab.
Mythology has its place, even in pop music. It might have been more clever, however, to have staged an original hoax rather than to dig up this old tripe after so many years.
Oh, by the way: the license plate on the VW on the Abbey Road album that reads 28IF--indicating that McCartney would have been twenty-eight years old if had he lived--is fallacious. Paul would have been twenty-nine. Sorry.
South of the Border
Given a bit of time, the proper alignment of circumstances, and the rigorous application of tenacity, the dispersed components of truth manifest themselves while oceans of aridity and disillusionment freeze in that instant of doubt. The connections among events, some real, others imagined, coalesce along the border and between breaths there emerges a blip, a flicker, a flash of recognition of a fist pounding the air as men and women gaze, as old people cry, as children utter nervous giggles. In that moment of incredulity, the universe explodes.
The universe laughs until its kidneys explode.
Have you ever noticed how ridiculous most politicians appear when they attempt to identify themselves with working people? Whether it is Michael Dukakis riding in an army tank, George H. W. Bush trying to buy something without cash, Mitt Romney arguing that he knows Detroit because his wife drives two Cadillacs, or Abraham Lincoln manufacturing much of his working-class childhood, the stench of the bovine defecation chokes us until we pass out from laughing. Yet, there is a scene in the Oliver Stone documentary South of the Border (2009) where president Hugo Chavez visits the community where he grew up. He hops on a bicycle in a staged attempt to amuse the crowd and the bicycle virtually snaps in half under his considerable weight. Can you imagine how a modern day American politico would handle this? The camera crews would be locked up, the crowd of onlookers quarantined, and the photographic equipment would be confiscated and destroyed. The Venezuelan leader handled things a bit differently. He laughed at himself, right on camera. He laughed and said that he would have to buy the kid who owned it a new bike. The moment was natural because it was true and because it was true it was beautiful.
To an extent, something that psychologists call the observer-expectancy effect may be happening here. After all, Chavez is no dummy and the presence of a renegade filmmaker such as Mr. Stone may have prompted some of the glad-handing scenes. Still, this monumental film of inspired counter-propaganda shines a rarefied light onto the fascinating Hugo Chavez and his presidency.
President Chavez, you see, is fighting against the effects of colonialism.
The last time the government of the United States identified anything explicitly as colonialism was when we still had the thirteen original colonies. From the time of the American Revolution onward, we have owned and operated much like our own former European masters, seeing the people of other countries as an ungrateful lot who have to be protected from their own worst impulses. Flash forward to South America, to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, to Evo Morales in Bolivia, to Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in Argentina, to Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, Lula de Silva in Brazil, Rafeal Correa in Ecuador. These folks recognize the one-time colonial status of their countries because they know their history, they know the stories of Simon Bolivar, and they know, as did he, how to think in centuries. These folks are the formerly disaffected. They are women, the soldiers, the bishops, the metal workers, the trade unionists. They are the people who have suffered and who have grown from their suffering.
Oliver Stone spent time with each of the leaders mentioned above and his interviews with them, and with Raoul Castro of Cuba, are the superficial focal point of his fascinating documentary. History, however, is the real star of the show. It is a history that began with the dream of a united Latin America speaking with one voice in favor of its people and against the Europeans and their descendants.
The President of the United States, Barack Obama, came to that office at a most monumental time in world history. With leftist and populist movements celebrating their victories throughout South America, with nations paying off their debts to the International Monetary Fund and thereby freeing themselves to act in accordance with the best interests of the people of their countries rather than in the interests of financiers, and with a massively unpopular outgoing series of imperialist foreign policies from a previous administration, the proper alignment of circumstances appeared to be set in place.
For a long time I wondered why the ruling class in the United States--by which I mean the media, the banks, the oil companies--were so united in their opposition to Obama. After all, wasn't he simply a dark-skinned member of their own old boys club? Perhaps he was. But the attacks against Obama in this country stem from his refusal to endorse centuries of colonial efforts against the people of Latin America. Chavez himself told Stone that he hopes Obama will be another [Franklin] Roosevelt. He meant that statement in terms of U.S. domestic policy, but the reality is that Obama's policies regarding Latin America are closer to those of FDR than any president since World War II. Venezuela has oil, a lot of it. And when the oil companies in that country became nationalized, just as the sugar cane fields did in Cuba decades ago, that fact is upsetting to those who profit from the exploitation of natural resources. Nationalization is the opposite of privatization. And it is the latter practice that diverts wealth into the hands of a few, leaving billions of empty stomachs grumbling for crumbs. If that sounds hyperbolic, I apologize. You see, this film has that kind of an effect on me, in large part because, watching South of the Border, one is again reminded of the corruption of most of the global media empires. CNN does not have your best interests at heart. Certainly Fox does not. The less regressive (as opposed to the word of the moment "progressive") Current TV and MSNBC occasionally do but that's only because of the renegade work of the teams of Maddow and (formerly) Olbermann. And so this film demands that we think about the issues it raises. Stone himself argues in favor of the possibility of a "benign capitalism," rather than the overtly predatory version currently in place. Naturally, the movie does not explore what he thinks the components of such a system would be. That's because, in the final analysis, some type of leftward socialism is coming and he knows it. Obama is not a socialist. However, even that Harvard graduate is smart enough to recognize the wisdom of an old man, long dead, who said, "When a man senses the winds of change blowing, if he is wise he builds a windmill and not a wind block."
The universe laughs until its kidneys explode.
Have you ever noticed how ridiculous most politicians appear when they attempt to identify themselves with working people? Whether it is Michael Dukakis riding in an army tank, George H. W. Bush trying to buy something without cash, Mitt Romney arguing that he knows Detroit because his wife drives two Cadillacs, or Abraham Lincoln manufacturing much of his working-class childhood, the stench of the bovine defecation chokes us until we pass out from laughing. Yet, there is a scene in the Oliver Stone documentary South of the Border (2009) where president Hugo Chavez visits the community where he grew up. He hops on a bicycle in a staged attempt to amuse the crowd and the bicycle virtually snaps in half under his considerable weight. Can you imagine how a modern day American politico would handle this? The camera crews would be locked up, the crowd of onlookers quarantined, and the photographic equipment would be confiscated and destroyed. The Venezuelan leader handled things a bit differently. He laughed at himself, right on camera. He laughed and said that he would have to buy the kid who owned it a new bike. The moment was natural because it was true and because it was true it was beautiful.
To an extent, something that psychologists call the observer-expectancy effect may be happening here. After all, Chavez is no dummy and the presence of a renegade filmmaker such as Mr. Stone may have prompted some of the glad-handing scenes. Still, this monumental film of inspired counter-propaganda shines a rarefied light onto the fascinating Hugo Chavez and his presidency.
President Chavez, you see, is fighting against the effects of colonialism.
The last time the government of the United States identified anything explicitly as colonialism was when we still had the thirteen original colonies. From the time of the American Revolution onward, we have owned and operated much like our own former European masters, seeing the people of other countries as an ungrateful lot who have to be protected from their own worst impulses. Flash forward to South America, to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, to Evo Morales in Bolivia, to Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in Argentina, to Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, Lula de Silva in Brazil, Rafeal Correa in Ecuador. These folks recognize the one-time colonial status of their countries because they know their history, they know the stories of Simon Bolivar, and they know, as did he, how to think in centuries. These folks are the formerly disaffected. They are women, the soldiers, the bishops, the metal workers, the trade unionists. They are the people who have suffered and who have grown from their suffering.
Oliver Stone spent time with each of the leaders mentioned above and his interviews with them, and with Raoul Castro of Cuba, are the superficial focal point of his fascinating documentary. History, however, is the real star of the show. It is a history that began with the dream of a united Latin America speaking with one voice in favor of its people and against the Europeans and their descendants.
The President of the United States, Barack Obama, came to that office at a most monumental time in world history. With leftist and populist movements celebrating their victories throughout South America, with nations paying off their debts to the International Monetary Fund and thereby freeing themselves to act in accordance with the best interests of the people of their countries rather than in the interests of financiers, and with a massively unpopular outgoing series of imperialist foreign policies from a previous administration, the proper alignment of circumstances appeared to be set in place.
For a long time I wondered why the ruling class in the United States--by which I mean the media, the banks, the oil companies--were so united in their opposition to Obama. After all, wasn't he simply a dark-skinned member of their own old boys club? Perhaps he was. But the attacks against Obama in this country stem from his refusal to endorse centuries of colonial efforts against the people of Latin America. Chavez himself told Stone that he hopes Obama will be another [Franklin] Roosevelt. He meant that statement in terms of U.S. domestic policy, but the reality is that Obama's policies regarding Latin America are closer to those of FDR than any president since World War II. Venezuela has oil, a lot of it. And when the oil companies in that country became nationalized, just as the sugar cane fields did in Cuba decades ago, that fact is upsetting to those who profit from the exploitation of natural resources. Nationalization is the opposite of privatization. And it is the latter practice that diverts wealth into the hands of a few, leaving billions of empty stomachs grumbling for crumbs. If that sounds hyperbolic, I apologize. You see, this film has that kind of an effect on me, in large part because, watching South of the Border, one is again reminded of the corruption of most of the global media empires. CNN does not have your best interests at heart. Certainly Fox does not. The less regressive (as opposed to the word of the moment "progressive") Current TV and MSNBC occasionally do but that's only because of the renegade work of the teams of Maddow and (formerly) Olbermann. And so this film demands that we think about the issues it raises. Stone himself argues in favor of the possibility of a "benign capitalism," rather than the overtly predatory version currently in place. Naturally, the movie does not explore what he thinks the components of such a system would be. That's because, in the final analysis, some type of leftward socialism is coming and he knows it. Obama is not a socialist. However, even that Harvard graduate is smart enough to recognize the wisdom of an old man, long dead, who said, "When a man senses the winds of change blowing, if he is wise he builds a windmill and not a wind block."
As an addendum, while writing this piece, very much by way of coincidence, the Summit of the Americas was going on in the U.S. and drug-friendly country of Columbia. At this meeting, U.S. President Obama signed a free trade agreement with the host nation, allowing most industrial and manufactured products exported from the U.S. and Colombia to become duty free, making it cheaper for American businesses to sell their goods in Colombia. More than half of U.S. agricultural exports to Colombia will also become duty free. Quite properly, U.S. labor leaders oppose the deal because of widespread harassment and violence in Colombia as trade unions have tried to organize workers. Dozens of union organizers and activists have been killed in the last three years.
Meanwhile, some odd shenanigans have been happening surrounding the President. First, there was the threat to his personal security caused by the dereliction of at least eleven Secret Service agents charged with his protection. While there might well be justified concern over the lack of morality in the Secret Service going after hookers (legal in Columbia, of course), the real issue is the impact, if any, that this behavior may have had while the President was visiting Cartagena. Since the opposition party in this country was unable to celebrate their commander coming home in a bag so they could blame the death on Hugo Chavez, they settled for the next best thing: bashing Hillary Clinton for having a couple beers in a nightclub on their final night in the country. The idea that a woman of her girth could be plowed under by two beers is ridiculous on its face. To make matters worse, the right-to-be-wrong media blasted photos presumably showing the Secretary of State in a drunken condition. The question of how many of those photographers themselves could have passed a sobriety test has yet to be answered.
Meanwhile, some odd shenanigans have been happening surrounding the President. First, there was the threat to his personal security caused by the dereliction of at least eleven Secret Service agents charged with his protection. While there might well be justified concern over the lack of morality in the Secret Service going after hookers (legal in Columbia, of course), the real issue is the impact, if any, that this behavior may have had while the President was visiting Cartagena. Since the opposition party in this country was unable to celebrate their commander coming home in a bag so they could blame the death on Hugo Chavez, they settled for the next best thing: bashing Hillary Clinton for having a couple beers in a nightclub on their final night in the country. The idea that a woman of her girth could be plowed under by two beers is ridiculous on its face. To make matters worse, the right-to-be-wrong media blasted photos presumably showing the Secretary of State in a drunken condition. The question of how many of those photographers themselves could have passed a sobriety test has yet to be answered.
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
No matter how much you think you know about the case charging unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor brought against Roman Polanski, this amazing film will surprise you.
The film, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008) was directed by Marina Zenovich and does not suffer the same torturous exploitation as many HBO documentaries, probably because HBO had almost nothing to do with the movie. The credit for this movie's excellence goes to Zenovich, Antidote Films and the BBC. Credit must also go to former deputy District Attorney Roger Gunson and defense attorney Douglas Dalton, two men who emerged from the manipulated quagmire of Judge Rittenband's proceedings to share their feelings about a miscarriage of justice, not only for Polanski, but for the victim, Samantha Geimer, nee Gailey.
Obviously, if I tell you everything here, your interest in seeing the documentary may be diminished and that would be a shame because this fascinating film won for editing at Sundance, won at the National Board of Review, won twice at the Emmys, and was nominated several other times. Certainly it deserved every honor it has received. However, I think it is fair to admit that Zenovich weaves extremely rare file footage with interviews from most of the participants, including an extraordinarily pissed-off Philip Vannatter, whom you may recall from the witness stand in the televised trial of O. J. Simpson. This tapestry becomes more and more fascinating the longer we examine it.
Here are some points that are not in dispute:
Roman Polanski did have sexual intercourse with a thirteen year old girl at the home of actor Jack Nicholson in 1977. That was a crime. It was also wrong.
The prosecutor, Roger Gunson, was selected, the joke around town went, because he was the only man in the D.A.'s office at that time who had not had sex with an under-age girl. Today Gunson gives every appearance of being a thoughtful man who does not much cherish his time in the D.A.'s office.
The defense attorney, Doug Dalton, at all times put the interests of his client in the forefront of his efforts.
The trial judge, Laurence Rittenband, was experienced in high-profile Hollywood litigation and intended from the outset to control the media presentation of the proceedings.
The probation department recommended Polanski be given straight probation. This was one of several options available to the judge as part of the director's plea bargain arrangements. Instead, the judge sentenced him to ninety days observation at Chino State, where he would be evaluated by staff to determine a judicious outcome.
A court-appointed psychiatrist had already determined that Polanski was not a mentally ill sex offender.
Polanski was released by Chino after forty-two days. Their recommendation was probation.
Concerned that whichever way he ruled the press would skewer him, Judge Rittenband instructed the defense attorney to appear in court to argue for probation, while he also ordered the prosecutor to demand a harsher sentence.
Roman Polanski left the United States for France prior to sentencing because he was unwilling to accept the possibility that a crazy judge might sentence him to as much as fifty years in prison.
To tell more about the legal proceedings would be to give away too much.
Outside the courtroom, however, Zenovich hits on some interesting details, not least of which being the art of Mr. Polanski. And that is where one expects her to get into trouble. And yet she does not. At no point does Zenovich attempt to mitigate her subject's behavior. Polanski escaped the Nazis at the age of five, attended film school, made his first feature at a young age, was introduced to the actress Sharon Tate, and was putting the finishing touches on a film in Europe when he got the phone call of the murder of his wife and four others at the hands of the Charles Manson family.
She also quite wisely casts attention on the way Europe has chosen to experience the director of such films as Rosemary's Baby,Repulsion, Macbeth, Chinatown, The Tenant, Tess, The Ninth Gate, The Pianist, The Ghost Writer, and others.
But the real thrust of this exciting documentary is in the legal proceedings themselves. Zenovich, on the website for the film, makes this statement: "Samantha Geimer and her attorney appeared on Larry King Live [in 2003] where she publicly forgave Polanski. Her lawyer said something that night, which started my five-year odyssey. He said, ‘What happened that day, both to Polanski and to some extent the American judicial system, I really think it was a shameful day.’ What was he talking about? I knew that Polanski fled the country but I couldn’t imagine how or why Geimer’s lawyer thought that Polanski had been wronged. I was intrigued. I realized that the only way I was going to get to the truth was to talk to the people who were there. I soon discovered that 30 years on, this long misunderstood case still stirred extremely strong feelings. Having spoken to most of those involved, I discovered that Polanski fleeing the country has totally eclipsed what happened during the judicial proceedings. I also realized the case was tragic for everyone involved. Polanski remains in France, unable to return to the U.S. or countries that have an extradition treaty with the U.S. for unlawful sexual intercourse. Samantha Geimer will forever be known as ‘the girl who had sex with Roman Polanski.’ Both the prosecution and defense have expressed remorse regarding the way the case unfolded."
The film, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008) was directed by Marina Zenovich and does not suffer the same torturous exploitation as many HBO documentaries, probably because HBO had almost nothing to do with the movie. The credit for this movie's excellence goes to Zenovich, Antidote Films and the BBC. Credit must also go to former deputy District Attorney Roger Gunson and defense attorney Douglas Dalton, two men who emerged from the manipulated quagmire of Judge Rittenband's proceedings to share their feelings about a miscarriage of justice, not only for Polanski, but for the victim, Samantha Geimer, nee Gailey.
Obviously, if I tell you everything here, your interest in seeing the documentary may be diminished and that would be a shame because this fascinating film won for editing at Sundance, won at the National Board of Review, won twice at the Emmys, and was nominated several other times. Certainly it deserved every honor it has received. However, I think it is fair to admit that Zenovich weaves extremely rare file footage with interviews from most of the participants, including an extraordinarily pissed-off Philip Vannatter, whom you may recall from the witness stand in the televised trial of O. J. Simpson. This tapestry becomes more and more fascinating the longer we examine it.
Here are some points that are not in dispute:
Roman Polanski did have sexual intercourse with a thirteen year old girl at the home of actor Jack Nicholson in 1977. That was a crime. It was also wrong.
The prosecutor, Roger Gunson, was selected, the joke around town went, because he was the only man in the D.A.'s office at that time who had not had sex with an under-age girl. Today Gunson gives every appearance of being a thoughtful man who does not much cherish his time in the D.A.'s office.
The defense attorney, Doug Dalton, at all times put the interests of his client in the forefront of his efforts.
The trial judge, Laurence Rittenband, was experienced in high-profile Hollywood litigation and intended from the outset to control the media presentation of the proceedings.
The probation department recommended Polanski be given straight probation. This was one of several options available to the judge as part of the director's plea bargain arrangements. Instead, the judge sentenced him to ninety days observation at Chino State, where he would be evaluated by staff to determine a judicious outcome.
A court-appointed psychiatrist had already determined that Polanski was not a mentally ill sex offender.
Polanski was released by Chino after forty-two days. Their recommendation was probation.
Concerned that whichever way he ruled the press would skewer him, Judge Rittenband instructed the defense attorney to appear in court to argue for probation, while he also ordered the prosecutor to demand a harsher sentence.
Roman Polanski left the United States for France prior to sentencing because he was unwilling to accept the possibility that a crazy judge might sentence him to as much as fifty years in prison.
To tell more about the legal proceedings would be to give away too much.
Outside the courtroom, however, Zenovich hits on some interesting details, not least of which being the art of Mr. Polanski. And that is where one expects her to get into trouble. And yet she does not. At no point does Zenovich attempt to mitigate her subject's behavior. Polanski escaped the Nazis at the age of five, attended film school, made his first feature at a young age, was introduced to the actress Sharon Tate, and was putting the finishing touches on a film in Europe when he got the phone call of the murder of his wife and four others at the hands of the Charles Manson family.
She also quite wisely casts attention on the way Europe has chosen to experience the director of such films as Rosemary's Baby,Repulsion, Macbeth, Chinatown, The Tenant, Tess, The Ninth Gate, The Pianist, The Ghost Writer, and others.
But the real thrust of this exciting documentary is in the legal proceedings themselves. Zenovich, on the website for the film, makes this statement: "Samantha Geimer and her attorney appeared on Larry King Live [in 2003] where she publicly forgave Polanski. Her lawyer said something that night, which started my five-year odyssey. He said, ‘What happened that day, both to Polanski and to some extent the American judicial system, I really think it was a shameful day.’ What was he talking about? I knew that Polanski fled the country but I couldn’t imagine how or why Geimer’s lawyer thought that Polanski had been wronged. I was intrigued. I realized that the only way I was going to get to the truth was to talk to the people who were there. I soon discovered that 30 years on, this long misunderstood case still stirred extremely strong feelings. Having spoken to most of those involved, I discovered that Polanski fleeing the country has totally eclipsed what happened during the judicial proceedings. I also realized the case was tragic for everyone involved. Polanski remains in France, unable to return to the U.S. or countries that have an extradition treaty with the U.S. for unlawful sexual intercourse. Samantha Geimer will forever be known as ‘the girl who had sex with Roman Polanski.’ Both the prosecution and defense have expressed remorse regarding the way the case unfolded."
The U.S. criminal justice system is indeed a mess. And not only in Santa Monica, where the Polanski case was adjudicated. Here are some tidbits from the Pew Center on the States:
- The U.S. has an incarceration rate of 743 per 100,000 people (2009): That’s the highest rate in the world, an astonishing fact that can’t be repeated enough. However, it should be noted that crime in the U.S. in general has decreased over the last 20 years. For example, from 1980 to 2009, the murder rate decreased from 10.2 per 10,000 inhabitants to 5.0 in 2009; the violent crime rate decreased from 596.6 per 10,000 inhabitants to 429.4; and the robbery rate decreased from 251.1 per 10,000 inhabitants to 133. Now, whether or not the improvements are a result of harsher punishment has yet to be proven. For comparison, from 1925 to 1975, the crime rate stayed at about 110 per 100,000 people, excluding those kept in state and local jails.
- The U.S. houses a quarter of the world’s prisoners (2008): The U.S. population is 311,341,000, roughly 4.5 percent of the world’s population, and in 2008, it kept 2.3 million people behind bars. China, the world’s most populous country with 1,339,725,000 people, kept 1.6 million people behind bars the same year, though it should be noted that it had hundreds of thousands of people in administrative detention. During America’s younger years, it was regarded around the world as more relaxed on criminal justice, hence the Wild West reputation. But as the population has grown, particularly in cities, we’ve taken more drastic measures to control crime.
- The U.S. houses more inmates than the top 35 European countries combined (2010): Europe, which has a denser population than the U.S., is well-below the U.S. when it comes to incarceration rates. In England and Wales, for example, 139 people are imprisoned per 10,000, one of the highest rates in Western Europe. Harsher sentencing in recent years is blamed for the rise in prison population in the U.K. Nevertheless, it pales in comparison to America’s rate; only Easter Europe’s Belarus comes close, with a rate of 385 people imprisoned per 10,000.
- The federal prison population has more than doubled since 1995 (2010): Because the federal system is generally stricter than state systems and has expanded its jurisdiction over certain offenses, it has seen a drastic increase in the amount of people it houses. In particular, an increase in immigration cases since 1994 has been a main contributor, as they accounted for 28.2 percent of all federal sentencing in 2008, for example.
- The number of state prisoners declined by 4,777 from December 2008 to January 2010: Possibly due to the recession, many have attributed the decline in state prisoners to large state budget deficits, which have forced states to release inmates to save money. However, according to the Pew Center on the States, the decline actually started just before the economic downturn due to a reduction in the amount of people sent to prison for new crimes, while the number of people released from prison increased. Of course, prison rates vary from state to state.
- The most significant decreases in state prison populations from 2008 to 2009 occurred in California (-4,257), Michigan (-3,260) and New York (-1,699): Overall, 26 states saw a decrease in prison population. California led them all, as the state has made an effort to cut the number of low-risk parolees returning to prison by expanding the use of intermediate sanctions. Overcrowding has been a problem for California; so much so that a deferral court in 2009 ordered the state to reduce its prison population by 40,000 in just two years. Michigan has cut its prison population by decreasing parole revocation rates, improving its reentry planning and supervision, and reducing the number of inmates who serve more than 100 percent of their minimum sentence.
- The most significant increases in state prison populations from 2008 to 2009 occurred in Pennsylvania (+2,122), Florida (+1,527) and Indiana (+1,496): During the last three decades, Pennsylvania’s prison population has expanded from 8,243 to 51,326. In recent years, the increase can be attributed to former Gov. Ed Rendell’s 2008 moratorium on paroles in response to the killing of a Philadelphia police officer by a paroled felon. The state also transferred prisoners out of state due to overcrowding. In Florida’s case, some attribute the rise to legislators failing to cut corrections spending like in many of the states that saw reductions in their prison populations.
- Those who have spent time in prison earn 40 percent less annually (2010): Universally, crime is associated with people from poor economic backgrounds who have few options in life. In many cases, those who’ve been incarcerated grew up around family members and friends who suffered the same fate. Their ability to escape the rut decreases greatly after their first offense, as their annual earnings are almost slashed in half because many employers refuse to hire them. Most unsettling is the fact that more than half of those incarcerated were the primary financial providers for their children.
- One in every 28 children has an incarcerated parent (2010): A quarter of a century ago, one in every 125 children had an incarcerated parent. The rise, of course, can be attributed to the implementation of harsher laws for lesser crimes; two-thirds of today’s incarcerated parents committed non-violent offenses. The above stat is one of the most disconcerting of all U.S.-related prison stats because common sense dictates that a child’s chances of growing up as a productive, law-abiding adult are greater when both of their parents play significant roles in their life.
- More than one in three young black men without a high school diploma are in prison (2010): Additionally, more black men without a high school diploma are incarcerated than employed. As previously mentioned, it’s more difficult to secure a job once a person has spent time in prison, further limiting the options of the already less fortunate. In fact, black men earn 44 percent less after they’ve been incarcerated, four percent less than the average for all races/ethnicities.
So, by all means watch this documentary. You'll not only be more informed, you may even change the way you look at those folks charged with a crime.
American: The Bill Hicks Story
The idea of something or someone being the greatest is ridiculous. You read The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald and you say to yourself, "My God, that is the greatest book ever written!" Then you read another book, maybe something by Dostoevsky, and it blows your mind, so you say, "Wait! I was wrong! Notes From Underground is really the greatest book of all time!" Or perhaps it's a painting. You stand before Picasso's Guernica and you can't even move as the tears run down your face and in your mind you are saying, "This! This is the greatest painting of all time!" And then your kid comes home from first grade with some retarded little finger painting exercise he did, something that took him all of five minutes to create. You shoot a glance over at his cherubic face, seeing that he wants you to guess what this thing is. And you say to yourself, "The kid's no fucking Picasso, that's for sure."
I don't believe in relativity, in the sense that people use the word when they say, "It's all relative." I say, "What's all relative?" They look at me kind of funny because everyone else has always just nodded and agreed with them. They say, "Well, you know. It." "Oh," I say, giving them the nod they were so obviously expecting. "You mean our perceptions as we interpret them in relation to other presumably sentient beings upon this tiny mud ball of a planet in the sense that two people staring at an apple cannot possibly be experiencing that apple in the same exact way?" And they say, "Uh, well, sure. That's right."
So I have never much cared for this notion that any one thing in any one classification--a book, a movie, a building, a car--can be the objectively greatest thing of its type because up until just a few minutes ago I bought into the spectacular notion that these morons were right when they said that everything is relative. Relative to the moment, relative to the person, relative to the situation.
Well, relevate this.
The greatest comedian I have ever seen is Bill Hicks.
Wait, wait, wait! I know already what you're going to say. You're saying something like, "Naw, Phil, you must be crazy. First of all, we've never heard of anybody with a name like that and besides, how can you say such a thing? I mean, there was poor old George Carlin who died a few years back. There's Lily Tomlin, John Belushi, Richard Pryor, Elayne Boosler, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl! Dude, you don't know what you're talking about!"
Actually I do know what I'm talking about. I know because I just finished watching American: The Bill Hicks Story (2009). I've seen it, you haven't, so come back when you've watched it a few times and then we can talk.
What's that? You can't watch it right now because you're reading this blog? Sir or madam, you have some fucked up priorities. But, okay. I'll tell you what. I'll do my best to write today's blog in the style of the comedy of the late Mr. Hicks. That way--wait for it!--you'll get the idea without having to trouble yourself with all the messy aggravation of turning off the porn on TV and Netflix doesn't have the really good dirty shit anyway, but heck, now you've been there without even leaving the farm.
I think perhaps I have butchered Bill's style enough for one day. Still, I stand by what I said in the rant above. He was the greatest comedian this country has produced, at least in my lifetime so far. He did his first performance in a comedy club in Houston when he was fifteen-years-old and never looked back, except in anger. He was no Sam Kinison, screaming for its own sake, or cutey boy Robin Williams being quick-witted to get laid. He was no clown, no fool, no panderer. What he was was the rust on the blade of an serrated switchblade knife.
What we've come to expect with documentaries about artists is interviews with people who knew the person, some old pictures, maybe a bit of old film footage of the genius at work and a bunch of sad-eyed ladies of the lowlands moaning about what a monumental loss that person's passing has been. We've come to expect cynical, sentimental drivel from people like Elvis's bodyguards or John Lennon's chauffeur or Kurt Cobain's drug dealer. "Yep, he was a helluva guy. Let me tell you something about him that'll disillusion the shit out of you." This movie is none of those things.
Directors Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas use the old footage, the still photographs, the funny stories, but they use them in a way that actually gives the audience a sense of what it must have been like to have known Bill Hicks from a hundred different perspectives. His friends and family serve as narrators while the still pictures get cut and placed into moving images that add to our appreciation for the spirit from which Hicks emerged.
That spirit, of course, was the suburbs. Bill, like many a kid before him, wanted out. A need drove him to be funny. A need drove him to rebel. And a need drove him to accuse.
I don't believe in relativity, in the sense that people use the word when they say, "It's all relative." I say, "What's all relative?" They look at me kind of funny because everyone else has always just nodded and agreed with them. They say, "Well, you know. It." "Oh," I say, giving them the nod they were so obviously expecting. "You mean our perceptions as we interpret them in relation to other presumably sentient beings upon this tiny mud ball of a planet in the sense that two people staring at an apple cannot possibly be experiencing that apple in the same exact way?" And they say, "Uh, well, sure. That's right."
So I have never much cared for this notion that any one thing in any one classification--a book, a movie, a building, a car--can be the objectively greatest thing of its type because up until just a few minutes ago I bought into the spectacular notion that these morons were right when they said that everything is relative. Relative to the moment, relative to the person, relative to the situation.
Well, relevate this.
The greatest comedian I have ever seen is Bill Hicks.
Wait, wait, wait! I know already what you're going to say. You're saying something like, "Naw, Phil, you must be crazy. First of all, we've never heard of anybody with a name like that and besides, how can you say such a thing? I mean, there was poor old George Carlin who died a few years back. There's Lily Tomlin, John Belushi, Richard Pryor, Elayne Boosler, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl! Dude, you don't know what you're talking about!"
Actually I do know what I'm talking about. I know because I just finished watching American: The Bill Hicks Story (2009). I've seen it, you haven't, so come back when you've watched it a few times and then we can talk.
What's that? You can't watch it right now because you're reading this blog? Sir or madam, you have some fucked up priorities. But, okay. I'll tell you what. I'll do my best to write today's blog in the style of the comedy of the late Mr. Hicks. That way--wait for it!--you'll get the idea without having to trouble yourself with all the messy aggravation of turning off the porn on TV and Netflix doesn't have the really good dirty shit anyway, but heck, now you've been there without even leaving the farm.
I think perhaps I have butchered Bill's style enough for one day. Still, I stand by what I said in the rant above. He was the greatest comedian this country has produced, at least in my lifetime so far. He did his first performance in a comedy club in Houston when he was fifteen-years-old and never looked back, except in anger. He was no Sam Kinison, screaming for its own sake, or cutey boy Robin Williams being quick-witted to get laid. He was no clown, no fool, no panderer. What he was was the rust on the blade of an serrated switchblade knife.
What we've come to expect with documentaries about artists is interviews with people who knew the person, some old pictures, maybe a bit of old film footage of the genius at work and a bunch of sad-eyed ladies of the lowlands moaning about what a monumental loss that person's passing has been. We've come to expect cynical, sentimental drivel from people like Elvis's bodyguards or John Lennon's chauffeur or Kurt Cobain's drug dealer. "Yep, he was a helluva guy. Let me tell you something about him that'll disillusion the shit out of you." This movie is none of those things.
Directors Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas use the old footage, the still photographs, the funny stories, but they use them in a way that actually gives the audience a sense of what it must have been like to have known Bill Hicks from a hundred different perspectives. His friends and family serve as narrators while the still pictures get cut and placed into moving images that add to our appreciation for the spirit from which Hicks emerged.
That spirit, of course, was the suburbs. Bill, like many a kid before him, wanted out. A need drove him to be funny. A need drove him to rebel. And a need drove him to accuse.
I've been hearing so much bullshit lately from people who have not bothered to think in something like the last twenty or thirty years and I'll just bet you've had those same kinds of people coming at you with their pent up nonsense because they've found you, brother, they've got you, sister, and now that they have you, they're damned sure going to make certain you understand where exactly the fuck they are coming from. Never mind that in their own sick, demented worlds time has no value and the biggest concern they can imagine is whether or not "Dancing with the Stars" or "American Idol" will be on tonight and oh God I hope Steven Tyler doesn't fart while he's trying to seduce Gladys Knight again this week.
Okay, okay, I'll stop. But I want you to understand the reason I bring such passion and vulgarity to this particular session today. The reason why is that I stopped getting belly-laugh kicks out of life around the time that Reagan took control of the United States. Call me an alarmist, but what with all the union-busting, delaying of the release of hostages, attempts at building an invisible shield over our country to deflect the anti-ballistic missiles launched by the evil empire, and my idiot grandmother in awe of the man because, as she put it, "He's so handsome," a good bit of the jollies just up and marched out of my life.
Then I endured that vile cocksucker that came after Reagan. Then I endured that rabid scumbag that came after that cocksucker who came after Reagan. Then I endured that sniveling, smirking piece of rodential feces that came after Clinton. Then I endured that corporate shill that came after Bush Junior. So I haven't exactly had any good reasons to laugh out loud lately.
Now I do. And so do you.
The bad news is that Bill is dead. Stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer. Cancer cancer. It killed him. He's dead. And yet I think he enjoyed his life. I hope he did. I hope that his spirit somewhere is surfing off the coast of the imaginary hell where he screams out Ozzy tunes and he's looking down on us with that knowing set of eyes. He'll be nodding. And he'll say, "Don't sweat it, man. It's all relative."
In the meantime, friends, enjoy every sandwich.
Okay, okay, I'll stop. But I want you to understand the reason I bring such passion and vulgarity to this particular session today. The reason why is that I stopped getting belly-laugh kicks out of life around the time that Reagan took control of the United States. Call me an alarmist, but what with all the union-busting, delaying of the release of hostages, attempts at building an invisible shield over our country to deflect the anti-ballistic missiles launched by the evil empire, and my idiot grandmother in awe of the man because, as she put it, "He's so handsome," a good bit of the jollies just up and marched out of my life.
Then I endured that vile cocksucker that came after Reagan. Then I endured that rabid scumbag that came after that cocksucker who came after Reagan. Then I endured that sniveling, smirking piece of rodential feces that came after Clinton. Then I endured that corporate shill that came after Bush Junior. So I haven't exactly had any good reasons to laugh out loud lately.
Now I do. And so do you.
The bad news is that Bill is dead. Stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer. Cancer cancer. It killed him. He's dead. And yet I think he enjoyed his life. I hope he did. I hope that his spirit somewhere is surfing off the coast of the imaginary hell where he screams out Ozzy tunes and he's looking down on us with that knowing set of eyes. He'll be nodding. And he'll say, "Don't sweat it, man. It's all relative."
In the meantime, friends, enjoy every sandwich.
Into the Abyss
First, let's refresh your memory with a snatch of hate speech from the ghoulish Texas governor, Rick Perry. It was back in September of last year, during one of the ridiculous network-financed campaign seminars masquerading as GOP debates, when NBC anchor Brian Williams inquired of Mr. Perry whether he'd ever struggled with the idea of the state putting a person to death. After a bit of circumlocution about how the government he claims to not trust never makes mistakes, he ended with words which I am sure he believed to be powerful. He said, "In the state of Texas, if you come into our state, and you kill one of our children, you kill a police officer, you're involved with another crime and you kill one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the state of Texas, and that is you will be executed."
Chances are Perry was referencing charges that he had acted improperly--conspiratorially--by appointing three of nine commission members to investigate the circumstances of the evidence, trial and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham back in 2004, an execution for a crime which, in all likelihood, Mr. Willingham was innocent.
Twelve hundred thirty-three people have been executed within the domain that is the state of Texas since 1819.
If you want the names of other people who were almost certainly innocent but executed by Texas anyway, check out Carlos DeLuna, Ruben Cantu, David Spence, Gary Graham, and Claude Jones. Their executions were all quite recent. Guilt or innocence really doesn't matter in Texas. All that matters is that the electorate gets to taste the blood. That's it.
Texas executed Michael Perry for a triple murder for which in all likelihood he was guilty as sin. And still the execution was wrong. Werner Herzog's incredible documentary Into the Abyss (2011) looks at the family and friends of the victims, as well as the killer and his convicted accomplice, and the details of what turned out to be a very stupid crime motivated by the desire to steal a fancy sports car.
In 2001, when the murders were committed, Michael Perry and Jason Burkett were eighteen years old. The victims in the case were Sandra Stotler, her son Adam, and a friend named Jeremy Richardson. All of this, as well as a police shoot-out with the perpetrators, happened in the small town of Conroe. I can say with some confidence that no matter what your pre-existing position on capital punishment, nothing in this movie will alter that position. However, it can also be said that your heart will change because you will be forced to admit to yourself the infinite complexities that heart of yours contains. Herzog listens to the people he interviews. He listens hard and so do we. The camera stays on a young man who knew one of the assailants. He stands there with his Pitbull ball cap, talking and spitting, telling us about the time one of the convicts stabbed him under the arm pit with a nine inch Phillips head screw driver all the way up to the handle. No, he didn't go to the hospital. Spit. He just thought himself lucky to be alive and went back to work.
Whether you know it or not, you are never far from someone who has committed a violent crime. A good many of these people are housed in the many correctional facilities throughout this country and others are not. Some of those who are not live in parks or shelters. Others live in very nice homes. Some cannot read. Others are highly literate. And every now and again, one of these folks goes to Texas and kills somebody, gets caught, and the state puts him or her to death, usually after about ten to twelve years.
Herzog does not preach. He just asks questions, good questions, such as early in the film when we meet the prison chaplain who will oversee the execution of Michael Perry. He talks about what he does to stay sane. He golfs a good bit. Occasionally he runs into some squirrels. "Talk about your encounters with squirrels." What a question! Is this guy nuts? Then the pay-off. The chaplain explains that one time he was riding in the golf cart and a squirrel darted out in front of him. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to have run over the rodent. But he stopped in time. The squirrel just looked at him. The chaplain stared back. And he knew that he had had the power to kill the squirrel and instead opted not to use that power. If that's preaching, then I need to start going to church again.
Werner Herzog is not a sentimentalist. He does not romanticize either the killers or the victims. He simply lets the temporary survivors tell their story. The camera lingers on these men and women and we see them in ways we never do in documentaries. For instance, again early on, Michael Perry comes into the visitation area for his interview. He turns around to place his handcuffed wrists in an adjoining hole so the guards can unlock him for the interview. He wipes the separating glass with a cloth. He wants to be able to see Herzog and he wants us to be able to see him. It is one of the most disturbing scenes I have ever witnessed in a film.
The other scene I feel obliged to mention is that of a former correctional officer from the Texas Death Wall who resigned after the execution of Karla Faye Tucker. You may remember her. In June 1983 she struck Jerry Lynn Dean twenty-eight times with a pick-ax. Her conviction and execution in 1998 received some play because she converted to Born Again Christianity in prison and no less a blood-thirsty robot than Pat Robertson came out and begged for the state not to kill Tucker for the reason that killing a Christian is just not good policy. In any event, this C.O. resigned after strapping down over one hundred inmates. He just couldn't do it any more. He began to sense that something else was happening, that this wasn't about justice any longer. And he made an interesting observation about "living the dash." On your tombstone, he pointed out, there is the date of your birth and the date of your death. These dates are separated by a dash. That dash is your life. Live it.
With the highest incarceration rate of any western country and the only such country to practice the death penalty, our time together may be short.
Chances are Perry was referencing charges that he had acted improperly--conspiratorially--by appointing three of nine commission members to investigate the circumstances of the evidence, trial and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham back in 2004, an execution for a crime which, in all likelihood, Mr. Willingham was innocent.
Twelve hundred thirty-three people have been executed within the domain that is the state of Texas since 1819.
If you want the names of other people who were almost certainly innocent but executed by Texas anyway, check out Carlos DeLuna, Ruben Cantu, David Spence, Gary Graham, and Claude Jones. Their executions were all quite recent. Guilt or innocence really doesn't matter in Texas. All that matters is that the electorate gets to taste the blood. That's it.
Texas executed Michael Perry for a triple murder for which in all likelihood he was guilty as sin. And still the execution was wrong. Werner Herzog's incredible documentary Into the Abyss (2011) looks at the family and friends of the victims, as well as the killer and his convicted accomplice, and the details of what turned out to be a very stupid crime motivated by the desire to steal a fancy sports car.
In 2001, when the murders were committed, Michael Perry and Jason Burkett were eighteen years old. The victims in the case were Sandra Stotler, her son Adam, and a friend named Jeremy Richardson. All of this, as well as a police shoot-out with the perpetrators, happened in the small town of Conroe. I can say with some confidence that no matter what your pre-existing position on capital punishment, nothing in this movie will alter that position. However, it can also be said that your heart will change because you will be forced to admit to yourself the infinite complexities that heart of yours contains. Herzog listens to the people he interviews. He listens hard and so do we. The camera stays on a young man who knew one of the assailants. He stands there with his Pitbull ball cap, talking and spitting, telling us about the time one of the convicts stabbed him under the arm pit with a nine inch Phillips head screw driver all the way up to the handle. No, he didn't go to the hospital. Spit. He just thought himself lucky to be alive and went back to work.
Whether you know it or not, you are never far from someone who has committed a violent crime. A good many of these people are housed in the many correctional facilities throughout this country and others are not. Some of those who are not live in parks or shelters. Others live in very nice homes. Some cannot read. Others are highly literate. And every now and again, one of these folks goes to Texas and kills somebody, gets caught, and the state puts him or her to death, usually after about ten to twelve years.
Herzog does not preach. He just asks questions, good questions, such as early in the film when we meet the prison chaplain who will oversee the execution of Michael Perry. He talks about what he does to stay sane. He golfs a good bit. Occasionally he runs into some squirrels. "Talk about your encounters with squirrels." What a question! Is this guy nuts? Then the pay-off. The chaplain explains that one time he was riding in the golf cart and a squirrel darted out in front of him. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to have run over the rodent. But he stopped in time. The squirrel just looked at him. The chaplain stared back. And he knew that he had had the power to kill the squirrel and instead opted not to use that power. If that's preaching, then I need to start going to church again.
Werner Herzog is not a sentimentalist. He does not romanticize either the killers or the victims. He simply lets the temporary survivors tell their story. The camera lingers on these men and women and we see them in ways we never do in documentaries. For instance, again early on, Michael Perry comes into the visitation area for his interview. He turns around to place his handcuffed wrists in an adjoining hole so the guards can unlock him for the interview. He wipes the separating glass with a cloth. He wants to be able to see Herzog and he wants us to be able to see him. It is one of the most disturbing scenes I have ever witnessed in a film.
The other scene I feel obliged to mention is that of a former correctional officer from the Texas Death Wall who resigned after the execution of Karla Faye Tucker. You may remember her. In June 1983 she struck Jerry Lynn Dean twenty-eight times with a pick-ax. Her conviction and execution in 1998 received some play because she converted to Born Again Christianity in prison and no less a blood-thirsty robot than Pat Robertson came out and begged for the state not to kill Tucker for the reason that killing a Christian is just not good policy. In any event, this C.O. resigned after strapping down over one hundred inmates. He just couldn't do it any more. He began to sense that something else was happening, that this wasn't about justice any longer. And he made an interesting observation about "living the dash." On your tombstone, he pointed out, there is the date of your birth and the date of your death. These dates are separated by a dash. That dash is your life. Live it.
With the highest incarceration rate of any western country and the only such country to practice the death penalty, our time together may be short.
Looking for Fidel and Comandante
It may not have been on a par with Chelsea's wedding or Meghan McCain turning into a journalist, but Oliver Stone's visits to Cuba between February 2002 and May 2003 were certainly noteworthy as they were essential to two films put together by the director: South of the Border and Looking For Fidel, the latter not being the rather shabby 2006 Leonardo Corbucci mess, but rather the 2004 production shared between HBO and France 2. According to a report in the Miami New Times, Stone was fined by the Office of Foreign Asset Control, a division within the U.S. Department of Treasury, for violation of the U.S.-Cuban Embargo. The director's production company, Ixtlan, agreed to a settlement of $6,322.20 for violating the rules that then forbade Americans traveling to Cuba, a nation ninety miles off the coast of Key West, Florida. The embargo does permit journalists to travel to Cuba; however, Oliver made the mistake of admitting that in his role in Cuba he did not consider himself so much a journalist as a filmmaker.
That's too bad because Stone proves himself to be precisely the kind of journalist we in America have had in short supply for many years now. Anyone expecting a puff-piece directed at the secret behest of Fidel Castro will be very much surprised. For instance, in the film's most dramatic scene, Castro himself shares a room with eight men charged with trying to hijack a plane to Miami. Castro encourages the men to speak freely and to be mindful that in that room they are not on trial. In response, all eight men insist that their motivation for their crime was economic rather than political. I have tried and failed to think of a parallel in the history of the United States where people accused of a crime "against the state" had the opportunity to confront the national leader, even for the purposes of "show." It might be interesting to have situated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a small room crammed with journalists from across the globe along with George W. Bush so that we could hear the US commander say, "Go on, say whatever you want" and Mohammed saying something like "Look, this was nothing personal, you understand." The exchange is fascinating as we watch Fidel thinking about every word the men speak, insisting that their fate is in the hands of the courts. Stone asks the men what they believe would be a fair sentence for their crimes and several of them declare thirty years imprisonment would fit the crime. In the end, three of them received that exact sentence, while the other five received life terms. Stone suggests that five years with parole would be suitable, but Castro interjects that Cuba has no such system of justice.
One of the things anyone who watches this hour-long film will come away with is the sheer presence of the man in the title role. Castro refers to himself at one point as the "spiritual leader" of his country and watching him with the people on the streets, you get the sense that this is a fair self-assessment. Back in my college days I watched some pro-Pol Pot academic visitor show a film he had made to our school and the film showed all sorts of smiling children gazing into the camera and the visitor then stopped the film and announced that this was proof that rumors of mass exterminations were just so much imperialist propaganda. Well, it was no such thing, as one of our own professors angrily stood and pointed out. But I don't think this interview with Castro was necessarily a Stalinist-style staged performance. These folks in the crowd with Fidel weren't scripted. They appeared genuinely enthused with the opportunities the Cuban government has afforded them, not the least of which being a free education all the way through doctorate-level work, free healthcare for all Cubans, an infant birth survival rate that is better than the one in the United States, full employment, etc. Most of these people are too young to have the Batista regime to use as a contrast, but they are not idiots, either. They are able, as I suspect most people living anywhere are able, to discern the crap from the creole. And they know their own history, a history that is inseparable from that of the USA.
For anyone looking for a film that sets Castro within his proper historical context, thereby permitting some of his more newsworthy actions to make any kind of sense, the movie to see is Comandante, which also happens to be directed by Mr. Stone. Of course, HBO, which originally commissioned the 2003 documentary, decided they didn't like what they took to be the pro-Castro tone of the film and chose not to air it. However, if your Spanish is decent you can still find it easily on YouTube and I would recommend watching it even if you don't speak a word of the language if for no other reason than the the archival work Stone assembled is brilliant in setting up the reality that way back in early 1959 the United States actually endorsed the Cuban revolution led by Mr. Castro. It bears recalling as well that many of the positions of the Cuban government have been what they viewed as reasonable responses to U.S. actions, such as the 734 known attempts on the life of the Cuban leader, the attempted coup at the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the ongoing Cuban Embargo which forced Castro's government to trade with countries sometimes unfriendly toward the USA, the CIA-sponsored terrorist activities against Cuba carried out by Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada and others, the conspiracy at Watergate, the Iran-Contra ordeal, the stolen U.S. election of 2000: all of these have direct ties to the so-called Cuban dissident movement, much of which has been run through the Dallas-New Orleans-Miami corridor and which remains in full force to this day.
In the famous words of Jim Garrison, "Some people think I'm crazy." Well, there are ways to determine if I am making up all these connections. You can read a Cuban history book. You can read books on the history of Cuban-American relations throughout the twentieth century. You can follow the trail of money from U.S. front organizations into the hands of trained mercenaries who in turn train a small section of disaffected Cubans to act as traitors. Or you can read the following, quoted verbatim, from the National Security Archive, circa 2002. "In his new exposé of the National Security Agency entitled Body of Secrets, author James Bamford highlights a set of proposals on Cuba by the Joint Chiefs of Staff codenamed OPERATION NORTHWOODS. This document, titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba” was provided by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals--part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose--included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake 'Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,' including 'sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),' faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a 'Remember the Maine' incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. Bamford himself writes that Operation Northwoods 'may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.'"
Ultimately people everywhere are free to believe whatever they want, even in a democracy, even in an authoritarian system, even somewhere in between. "Nobody's perfect," quips Oliver Stone at the end of an interview conducted by Slate.com upon the release of Looking For Fidel. True, that. But, at least in Comandante, we get a serious, even somewhat academic look at one of the most fascinating and certainly one of the key human beings of our life time. As I say, it may not be on a par with the release of the latest Janet Evanovich novel or the merger between Nabisco and Typhoid, but it'll do in a pinch.
That's too bad because Stone proves himself to be precisely the kind of journalist we in America have had in short supply for many years now. Anyone expecting a puff-piece directed at the secret behest of Fidel Castro will be very much surprised. For instance, in the film's most dramatic scene, Castro himself shares a room with eight men charged with trying to hijack a plane to Miami. Castro encourages the men to speak freely and to be mindful that in that room they are not on trial. In response, all eight men insist that their motivation for their crime was economic rather than political. I have tried and failed to think of a parallel in the history of the United States where people accused of a crime "against the state" had the opportunity to confront the national leader, even for the purposes of "show." It might be interesting to have situated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a small room crammed with journalists from across the globe along with George W. Bush so that we could hear the US commander say, "Go on, say whatever you want" and Mohammed saying something like "Look, this was nothing personal, you understand." The exchange is fascinating as we watch Fidel thinking about every word the men speak, insisting that their fate is in the hands of the courts. Stone asks the men what they believe would be a fair sentence for their crimes and several of them declare thirty years imprisonment would fit the crime. In the end, three of them received that exact sentence, while the other five received life terms. Stone suggests that five years with parole would be suitable, but Castro interjects that Cuba has no such system of justice.
One of the things anyone who watches this hour-long film will come away with is the sheer presence of the man in the title role. Castro refers to himself at one point as the "spiritual leader" of his country and watching him with the people on the streets, you get the sense that this is a fair self-assessment. Back in my college days I watched some pro-Pol Pot academic visitor show a film he had made to our school and the film showed all sorts of smiling children gazing into the camera and the visitor then stopped the film and announced that this was proof that rumors of mass exterminations were just so much imperialist propaganda. Well, it was no such thing, as one of our own professors angrily stood and pointed out. But I don't think this interview with Castro was necessarily a Stalinist-style staged performance. These folks in the crowd with Fidel weren't scripted. They appeared genuinely enthused with the opportunities the Cuban government has afforded them, not the least of which being a free education all the way through doctorate-level work, free healthcare for all Cubans, an infant birth survival rate that is better than the one in the United States, full employment, etc. Most of these people are too young to have the Batista regime to use as a contrast, but they are not idiots, either. They are able, as I suspect most people living anywhere are able, to discern the crap from the creole. And they know their own history, a history that is inseparable from that of the USA.
For anyone looking for a film that sets Castro within his proper historical context, thereby permitting some of his more newsworthy actions to make any kind of sense, the movie to see is Comandante, which also happens to be directed by Mr. Stone. Of course, HBO, which originally commissioned the 2003 documentary, decided they didn't like what they took to be the pro-Castro tone of the film and chose not to air it. However, if your Spanish is decent you can still find it easily on YouTube and I would recommend watching it even if you don't speak a word of the language if for no other reason than the the archival work Stone assembled is brilliant in setting up the reality that way back in early 1959 the United States actually endorsed the Cuban revolution led by Mr. Castro. It bears recalling as well that many of the positions of the Cuban government have been what they viewed as reasonable responses to U.S. actions, such as the 734 known attempts on the life of the Cuban leader, the attempted coup at the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the ongoing Cuban Embargo which forced Castro's government to trade with countries sometimes unfriendly toward the USA, the CIA-sponsored terrorist activities against Cuba carried out by Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada and others, the conspiracy at Watergate, the Iran-Contra ordeal, the stolen U.S. election of 2000: all of these have direct ties to the so-called Cuban dissident movement, much of which has been run through the Dallas-New Orleans-Miami corridor and which remains in full force to this day.
In the famous words of Jim Garrison, "Some people think I'm crazy." Well, there are ways to determine if I am making up all these connections. You can read a Cuban history book. You can read books on the history of Cuban-American relations throughout the twentieth century. You can follow the trail of money from U.S. front organizations into the hands of trained mercenaries who in turn train a small section of disaffected Cubans to act as traitors. Or you can read the following, quoted verbatim, from the National Security Archive, circa 2002. "In his new exposé of the National Security Agency entitled Body of Secrets, author James Bamford highlights a set of proposals on Cuba by the Joint Chiefs of Staff codenamed OPERATION NORTHWOODS. This document, titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba” was provided by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals--part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose--included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake 'Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,' including 'sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),' faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a 'Remember the Maine' incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. Bamford himself writes that Operation Northwoods 'may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.'"
Ultimately people everywhere are free to believe whatever they want, even in a democracy, even in an authoritarian system, even somewhere in between. "Nobody's perfect," quips Oliver Stone at the end of an interview conducted by Slate.com upon the release of Looking For Fidel. True, that. But, at least in Comandante, we get a serious, even somewhat academic look at one of the most fascinating and certainly one of the key human beings of our life time. As I say, it may not be on a par with the release of the latest Janet Evanovich novel or the merger between Nabisco and Typhoid, but it'll do in a pinch.
Tales from the Script
All kinds of methods present themselves when it comes to creating a documentary film, especially one with a subject matter that you might expect would have a limited and precise appeal. In the case of Tales From the Script (2009, Peter Hansen), the director asked some questions of a lot of screenwriters, filmed the replies, developed some clever chapter titles to help move the film along, and edited the final product together along with five or six scenes from recognizable movies, any one of which being far more entertaining and infinitely better made than this one. In other words, this is not the writer-version of "The Actor's Studio." This is just possibly the least inspiring presentation about a job since Timothy Leary decided to take up knitting.
No shortage of behind-the-camera on-screen writing talent derails the project. We are given some of the very fine writers, such as William Goldman, Guinevere Turner, Ron Shelton, Paul Schrader, Billy Ray, Naomi Foner, and John Carpenter, among other luminaries. Sadly, either the questions they were asked failed to evoke any memorable answers or all the good stuff was left on the floor because all we get here is either cliched drivel from sages or boring anecdotes from those about to die. Granted, a movie for theatrical release has no business teaching the viewer how to write a script. It would have been nice, however, for the movie to have taught us how to stay awake.
No shortage of behind-the-camera on-screen writing talent derails the project. We are given some of the very fine writers, such as William Goldman, Guinevere Turner, Ron Shelton, Paul Schrader, Billy Ray, Naomi Foner, and John Carpenter, among other luminaries. Sadly, either the questions they were asked failed to evoke any memorable answers or all the good stuff was left on the floor because all we get here is either cliched drivel from sages or boring anecdotes from those about to die. Granted, a movie for theatrical release has no business teaching the viewer how to write a script. It would have been nice, however, for the movie to have taught us how to stay awake.
My advice to the next director who wants to make a movie about the writing process of a movie is to buy the rights to the William Goldman confessional called Which Lie Did I Tell? Then cast writer Guinevere Turner somewhere in the movie and don't require her to wear a lot of clothing, but give her the ability to improvise some of the scenes, and then you will have a hit.
Don't believe me? That figures. Fine. You may even be correct. Take a look at a couple excerpts from the book in question.
Don't believe me? That figures. Fine. You may even be correct. Take a look at a couple excerpts from the book in question.
I don't think I was aware of it, but when I started work on Adventures in the Screen Trade, in 1980, I had become a leper in Hollywood.
Let me explain what that means: the phone stopped ringing.
For five years, from 1980 till 1985, no one called with anything resembling a job offer. Sure, I had conversations with acquaintances. Yes, the people whom I knew and liked still talked to me. Nothing personal was altered in any way.
But in the eight years prior to 1978, seven movies I'd written were released. In the eight years following, none.
I talked about it recently with a bunch of young Los Angeles screenwriters, and what I told them was this: If I had been living Out There, I don't think I could have survived. The idea of going into restaurants and knowing that heads were turning away, of knowing people were saying "See him?—no, don't look yet, okay, now turn, that guy, he used to be hot, can't get arrested anymore," would have devastated me. In L.A., truly, there is but one occupation, the movie business. In New York, the infinite city, we're all invisible.
Example: my favorite French bistro is Quatorze Bis, on East Seventy-ninth. Best fries in town, great chicken, all that good stuff. Well, I was there one night last year when another guy came in, and we had each won two Oscars for screenwriting, and we lived within a few blocks of each other--
—and we had never met. (It was Robert Benton.)
Impossible in Los Angeles. But that kind of thing was my blessing during those five years.
My memory was that the leprosy didn't really bother me. I asked my wonderful ex-wife, Ilene, about it and she said: "I don't think it did bother you, not being out of Hollywood, anyway. But one night I remember you were in the library and you were depressed and I realized it was the being alone that was getting to you. You always enjoyed the meetings, the socialness of moviemaking. You were always so grateful when you could get out of your pit."
I wrote five books in those five years (couldn't do it now, way too hard) and then the phone started ringing again.
This is why it stopped in the first place.
There is a famous and amazingly racist World War I cartoon that showed two soldiers fighting in a trench. One was German, the other an American Negro who had just swiped at the German's throat with his straight razor. (When I say racist, I mean racist.) The caption went like this:
German Soldier: You missed.
American Soldier: Wait'll yo' turn yo' head.
The point being, in terms of my screenwriting career, I never turned my head. Looking back, there was no real reason to. I was on my hot streak then. I was a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval in those years. Between '73 and '78 this is what I wrote:
Three novels:
The Princess Bride (1973)
Marathon Man (1974)
Magic (1976)
And six movies:
The Great Waldo Pepper (1975)
The Stepford Wives (1975)
All the President's Men (1976)
Marathon Man (1976)
A Bridge Too Far (1977)
Magic (1978)
If you had told me, that 1978 November day when Magic opened, that it would be nine years before my next picture appeared, I doubt I would have known what language you were speaking.
It wasn't as if I'd stopped writing screenplays after Magic. But the lesson I was about to learn was this: studios do not particularly lose faith in a writer if a movie is terrible. Producers do not forget your name if a movie loses lots of money. Because most studio movies lose lots of money (they survive on their hits). If, say, they chose directors who had only hits, they would be choosing from a practically nonexistent list. All anybody wants, when they hire you, is this: that the movie happen.
The change came after A Bridge Too Far.
Joseph E. Levine, the producer of that film, thought of me as a kind of good luck talisman. His career was not exactly rocketing the years before Bridge, and when that movie brought him back close to the fire, he attributed a lot of it to me. And he wanted to go into business with me. He bought my novelMagic, made that movie, and then proposed a three-picture deal: I would write three original screenplays for him, pretty much of my own choosing. I had never signed a multiple deal before, never thought I would. But I jumped at it. The work experiences with him had been so decent, unlike a lot of the standard Hollywood shit we all put up with.
One thing that made Mr. Levine unique was that he was the bank. He made his movies with his own money, took no studio deals until late in the game, when he had something to show. He was gambling that he would find movie studios who would want to buy, and he had gotten rich that way. Bridge had cost him $22 million. An insane gamble in today's world, nuttier back then. But the day it opened it was $4 million in profit. Mr. Levine sold the movie everywhere, Europe, Asia, country by country, territory by territory; he had collected $26 million by opening day.
Typical of his bravery was one day when he was in a hospital in New York after surgery. I was visiting him, and the director, Richard Attenborough, called from Holland. They were shooting the crucial parachute drop, and the weather had been dreadful. The parachutists were willing to work the next day, a Saturday.
Attenborough requested that extra day. It would cost Levine seventy-five thousand of his own dollars. Levine screamed at Attenborough for even suggesting such a thing. Attenborough repeated his request. Levine asked if he had sufficient footage for the sequence as it was. Attenborough said he had more than enough but it was all drab-looking. Levine screamed at him again. It was a ridiculous request. Attenborough held tough, saying the extra day might make all the difference. Levine then asked what was the weather report for Saturday. Attenborough admitted it was for more of the same: dreary.
Now Levine really let fly. You limey bastard, on and on, and he finally hung up on Attenborough. But not before he agreed to the extra day. The weather turned glorious and almost the entire wonderful drop sequence comes from that extra day.
Try getting a studio to do that.
So the fact that Mr. Levine did not need studio backing, that he cared not at all for studio money or thinking, was a huge factor in my agreeing to the three-picture deal.
It turned out to be a huge contributor to my downfall.
The Sea Kings was the first of the three-picture deal. A pirate flick. Came from a great snippet of material. In the early 1700s, the most famous, and most lethal, pirate was Blackbeard. At the same time, living on the island of Barbados, was a fabulously wealthy planter, Stede Bonnet.
Bonnet had been a soldier but had never seen action. He had a monstrous wife. Had almost died the previous winter. And, in a feat of great lunacy unmatched just about anywhere on earth, Bonnet decided to become a pirate. He commissioned a ship—the only such one in history, by the way. Pirate ships were always stolen.
So off he sailed.
And met, for a blink, Blackbeard.
They did not sail together for very long, but the idea of these two strange and remarkable men knocked me out. So I wrote The Sea Kings about them. (Butch and Sundance on the high seas, if you will.)
The decision that I made was this: Bonnet, rich beyond counting and miserably unhappy, a student of piracy, wanted one thing more than any other: an adventure-filled life (and if that included death, so be it). Blackbeard was sick up to here with his adventure-filled life. Piracy was getting tougher and tougher, and he was broke, as all pirates (save Bonnet) were. What he wanted was a long, comfortable life and a sweet death in bed.
So I wrote a movie about two men who were each other's dream.
It was filled with action and blood and double crosses and I hoped a decent amount of laughter. When I was done, I gave it to Mr. Levine.
Who just loved it.
The Year of the Comet was my second original, a romantic thriller, about a chase for the world's greatest bottle of wine, and you can read all about it in the chapter with its name on it. I will add only this here--
—Mr. Levine loved it too.
I wrote the part of Blackbeard for Sean Connery, and Mr. Levine got the idea of casting the two James Bonds, having Roger Moore play the more elegant Bonnet. Another casting notion was the two Moores: Dudley (10 had happened) as Bonnet, Roger shifting over to Blackbeard.
In the wine movie, he wanted Robert Redford in the Cary Grant part.
Obviously, you did not see these movies.
What happened?
When Mr. Levine had come to me for A Bridge Too Far, he was pushing seventy, and he hated being out of the loop, was willing to take almost any gamble. Now that Bridge and Magic had helped restore him, his needs were lessened.
He was also older now.
But most critical: the price of movies had begun to skyrocket. So the fact that he was his own bank, so wonderful earlier, was now a huge problem—he was rich, but not that rich. Some research was done on the cost of constructing that everyday little item, the pirate ship.
You don't want to know.
Stars' salaries.
You don't want to know.
He had chances to lay the scripts off to studios but he couldn't do that, y'see, because then he'd be just like everybody else, taking shit from the executives. When he was the bank, he gave shit. I heard him blow studio heads out of the water. I saw him sit at his desk, smiling at me, while he hurled the most amazing insults at these Hollywood powers--
—and they had to take it--
—because he had movies they wanted.
That was the fucking staff of life for the old man. His ego would not allow him to be just like everybody else. He didn't need it.
So both scripts just lay there. (They very well may have been unusable scripts—always a very real possibility when I go to work—but that was not the governing principle here.) I never wrote the third original—Mr. Levine and I parted company.
I was O for two.
The Ski Bum began as an article in Esquire by Jean Vallely. Briefly, it concerned a ski instructor in Aspen who led a very glamorous life. Wealthy and famous clients, the kind of romantic existence most of us only moon about.
That's by day.
By night he was aging, broke, scraping along in a trailer with a wife and little kid.
I thought it would make a terrific movie.
The producer had bought the underlying rights. I signed on, went to Aspen, noodled around, did my research, went to work on the screenplay. Got it to the producer and the studio, Universal.
The producer loved it.
Alas, Universal's studio head hated it. When the producer left for another studio, he asked to buy it back, take it with him. Universal said no conceivable way. We hate this piece of shit and we are going to keep it forever, thank you very much.
I always thought that was strange. If you hate something so much and you're offered a fair price to unload it, why keep it around? I did know, of course, the most usual reason—fear of humiliation. What if a studio gives up a piece of material that turns into Home Alone (happened) or E.T. (happened)?
But this was all company stuff, taking place far far above my head.
Dissolve, as they say (they really do), Out There.
It's a couple of years later and another executive has come to power at Universal. The guy who hated it so much is still above him, but this secondary power likes the screenplay and wants to see the movie made. We met and his first words to me were these: "You don't have the least idea what happened, do you?"
I didn't then.
I do now.
The producer had been, at the time, relatively new in the picture business. But he was a gigantic figure in the music business: Name a superstar singer, he handled him.
Well, Universal owned an amphitheater and needed talent to fill it. So the very great Lew Wasserman made a deal personally with the producer to handle the amphitheater and also have a movie-producing deal. Anything he wanted to make was an automatic "go."
With one teensy proviso: it had to cost less than an agreed-upon amount. Anything that cost more, Ned Tanen, the head of Universal Pictures, would have to agree to.
The Ski Bum, which needed stars and snow and all kinds of other expensive stuff, obviously needed Tanen's okay.
This presented kind of a problem for the picture because, decades ago, Tanen and my guy had been together in the mailroom at William Morris, where so many great careers were launched.
And they had hated each other with a growing passion since then.
Not only that, Tanen was pissed that the producer had gotten a movie deal at his company by going over his head to Wasserman.
So there it was.
Tanen, of course, rejected it. And, of course, rejected any attempt to buy the screenplay back.
The new executive and I tried an end run. Tanen never budged.
O for three.
The Right Stuff came next. A ghastly and depressing saga (recounted in magnificent detail inAdventures in the Screen Trade, so I won't repeat it here). I left the project angry and frustrated. These were bad times in America—the hostages had just been taken in Iran—so I had wanted to write a movie that might have a patriotic feel. The director wanted something else.
O for four.
On Wings of Eagles was not called that when I got involved. The famous Ken Follett book and the miniseries were still in the future.
But Ross Perot, who controlled the material, was interested in making a movie about the wonderful time when he masterminded breaking his employees out of an Iranian prison. I still had my patriotic need. I signed on.
The problem with this material was always very simple: it was an expensive action film but the star, the main guy, Perot's hero, "Bull" Simons, was not a young man. And Perot would never have betrayed the basic reality by allowing a younger man to do it.
There was only Eastwood. Had to be Eastwood. No one else but Eastwood. Dead in the water without Eastwood.
He took another military adventure movie, Firefox.
I was the one dead in the water now.
Until late in 1986, when the telephone rang . . .
(C) 2000 William Goldman All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-375-40349-3
Let me explain what that means: the phone stopped ringing.
For five years, from 1980 till 1985, no one called with anything resembling a job offer. Sure, I had conversations with acquaintances. Yes, the people whom I knew and liked still talked to me. Nothing personal was altered in any way.
But in the eight years prior to 1978, seven movies I'd written were released. In the eight years following, none.
I talked about it recently with a bunch of young Los Angeles screenwriters, and what I told them was this: If I had been living Out There, I don't think I could have survived. The idea of going into restaurants and knowing that heads were turning away, of knowing people were saying "See him?—no, don't look yet, okay, now turn, that guy, he used to be hot, can't get arrested anymore," would have devastated me. In L.A., truly, there is but one occupation, the movie business. In New York, the infinite city, we're all invisible.
Example: my favorite French bistro is Quatorze Bis, on East Seventy-ninth. Best fries in town, great chicken, all that good stuff. Well, I was there one night last year when another guy came in, and we had each won two Oscars for screenwriting, and we lived within a few blocks of each other--
—and we had never met. (It was Robert Benton.)
Impossible in Los Angeles. But that kind of thing was my blessing during those five years.
My memory was that the leprosy didn't really bother me. I asked my wonderful ex-wife, Ilene, about it and she said: "I don't think it did bother you, not being out of Hollywood, anyway. But one night I remember you were in the library and you were depressed and I realized it was the being alone that was getting to you. You always enjoyed the meetings, the socialness of moviemaking. You were always so grateful when you could get out of your pit."
I wrote five books in those five years (couldn't do it now, way too hard) and then the phone started ringing again.
This is why it stopped in the first place.
There is a famous and amazingly racist World War I cartoon that showed two soldiers fighting in a trench. One was German, the other an American Negro who had just swiped at the German's throat with his straight razor. (When I say racist, I mean racist.) The caption went like this:
German Soldier: You missed.
American Soldier: Wait'll yo' turn yo' head.
The point being, in terms of my screenwriting career, I never turned my head. Looking back, there was no real reason to. I was on my hot streak then. I was a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval in those years. Between '73 and '78 this is what I wrote:
Three novels:
The Princess Bride (1973)
Marathon Man (1974)
Magic (1976)
And six movies:
The Great Waldo Pepper (1975)
The Stepford Wives (1975)
All the President's Men (1976)
Marathon Man (1976)
A Bridge Too Far (1977)
Magic (1978)
If you had told me, that 1978 November day when Magic opened, that it would be nine years before my next picture appeared, I doubt I would have known what language you were speaking.
It wasn't as if I'd stopped writing screenplays after Magic. But the lesson I was about to learn was this: studios do not particularly lose faith in a writer if a movie is terrible. Producers do not forget your name if a movie loses lots of money. Because most studio movies lose lots of money (they survive on their hits). If, say, they chose directors who had only hits, they would be choosing from a practically nonexistent list. All anybody wants, when they hire you, is this: that the movie happen.
The change came after A Bridge Too Far.
Joseph E. Levine, the producer of that film, thought of me as a kind of good luck talisman. His career was not exactly rocketing the years before Bridge, and when that movie brought him back close to the fire, he attributed a lot of it to me. And he wanted to go into business with me. He bought my novelMagic, made that movie, and then proposed a three-picture deal: I would write three original screenplays for him, pretty much of my own choosing. I had never signed a multiple deal before, never thought I would. But I jumped at it. The work experiences with him had been so decent, unlike a lot of the standard Hollywood shit we all put up with.
One thing that made Mr. Levine unique was that he was the bank. He made his movies with his own money, took no studio deals until late in the game, when he had something to show. He was gambling that he would find movie studios who would want to buy, and he had gotten rich that way. Bridge had cost him $22 million. An insane gamble in today's world, nuttier back then. But the day it opened it was $4 million in profit. Mr. Levine sold the movie everywhere, Europe, Asia, country by country, territory by territory; he had collected $26 million by opening day.
Typical of his bravery was one day when he was in a hospital in New York after surgery. I was visiting him, and the director, Richard Attenborough, called from Holland. They were shooting the crucial parachute drop, and the weather had been dreadful. The parachutists were willing to work the next day, a Saturday.
Attenborough requested that extra day. It would cost Levine seventy-five thousand of his own dollars. Levine screamed at Attenborough for even suggesting such a thing. Attenborough repeated his request. Levine asked if he had sufficient footage for the sequence as it was. Attenborough said he had more than enough but it was all drab-looking. Levine screamed at him again. It was a ridiculous request. Attenborough held tough, saying the extra day might make all the difference. Levine then asked what was the weather report for Saturday. Attenborough admitted it was for more of the same: dreary.
Now Levine really let fly. You limey bastard, on and on, and he finally hung up on Attenborough. But not before he agreed to the extra day. The weather turned glorious and almost the entire wonderful drop sequence comes from that extra day.
Try getting a studio to do that.
So the fact that Mr. Levine did not need studio backing, that he cared not at all for studio money or thinking, was a huge factor in my agreeing to the three-picture deal.
It turned out to be a huge contributor to my downfall.
The Sea Kings was the first of the three-picture deal. A pirate flick. Came from a great snippet of material. In the early 1700s, the most famous, and most lethal, pirate was Blackbeard. At the same time, living on the island of Barbados, was a fabulously wealthy planter, Stede Bonnet.
Bonnet had been a soldier but had never seen action. He had a monstrous wife. Had almost died the previous winter. And, in a feat of great lunacy unmatched just about anywhere on earth, Bonnet decided to become a pirate. He commissioned a ship—the only such one in history, by the way. Pirate ships were always stolen.
So off he sailed.
And met, for a blink, Blackbeard.
They did not sail together for very long, but the idea of these two strange and remarkable men knocked me out. So I wrote The Sea Kings about them. (Butch and Sundance on the high seas, if you will.)
The decision that I made was this: Bonnet, rich beyond counting and miserably unhappy, a student of piracy, wanted one thing more than any other: an adventure-filled life (and if that included death, so be it). Blackbeard was sick up to here with his adventure-filled life. Piracy was getting tougher and tougher, and he was broke, as all pirates (save Bonnet) were. What he wanted was a long, comfortable life and a sweet death in bed.
So I wrote a movie about two men who were each other's dream.
It was filled with action and blood and double crosses and I hoped a decent amount of laughter. When I was done, I gave it to Mr. Levine.
Who just loved it.
The Year of the Comet was my second original, a romantic thriller, about a chase for the world's greatest bottle of wine, and you can read all about it in the chapter with its name on it. I will add only this here--
—Mr. Levine loved it too.
I wrote the part of Blackbeard for Sean Connery, and Mr. Levine got the idea of casting the two James Bonds, having Roger Moore play the more elegant Bonnet. Another casting notion was the two Moores: Dudley (10 had happened) as Bonnet, Roger shifting over to Blackbeard.
In the wine movie, he wanted Robert Redford in the Cary Grant part.
Obviously, you did not see these movies.
What happened?
When Mr. Levine had come to me for A Bridge Too Far, he was pushing seventy, and he hated being out of the loop, was willing to take almost any gamble. Now that Bridge and Magic had helped restore him, his needs were lessened.
He was also older now.
But most critical: the price of movies had begun to skyrocket. So the fact that he was his own bank, so wonderful earlier, was now a huge problem—he was rich, but not that rich. Some research was done on the cost of constructing that everyday little item, the pirate ship.
You don't want to know.
Stars' salaries.
You don't want to know.
He had chances to lay the scripts off to studios but he couldn't do that, y'see, because then he'd be just like everybody else, taking shit from the executives. When he was the bank, he gave shit. I heard him blow studio heads out of the water. I saw him sit at his desk, smiling at me, while he hurled the most amazing insults at these Hollywood powers--
—and they had to take it--
—because he had movies they wanted.
That was the fucking staff of life for the old man. His ego would not allow him to be just like everybody else. He didn't need it.
So both scripts just lay there. (They very well may have been unusable scripts—always a very real possibility when I go to work—but that was not the governing principle here.) I never wrote the third original—Mr. Levine and I parted company.
I was O for two.
The Ski Bum began as an article in Esquire by Jean Vallely. Briefly, it concerned a ski instructor in Aspen who led a very glamorous life. Wealthy and famous clients, the kind of romantic existence most of us only moon about.
That's by day.
By night he was aging, broke, scraping along in a trailer with a wife and little kid.
I thought it would make a terrific movie.
The producer had bought the underlying rights. I signed on, went to Aspen, noodled around, did my research, went to work on the screenplay. Got it to the producer and the studio, Universal.
The producer loved it.
Alas, Universal's studio head hated it. When the producer left for another studio, he asked to buy it back, take it with him. Universal said no conceivable way. We hate this piece of shit and we are going to keep it forever, thank you very much.
I always thought that was strange. If you hate something so much and you're offered a fair price to unload it, why keep it around? I did know, of course, the most usual reason—fear of humiliation. What if a studio gives up a piece of material that turns into Home Alone (happened) or E.T. (happened)?
But this was all company stuff, taking place far far above my head.
Dissolve, as they say (they really do), Out There.
It's a couple of years later and another executive has come to power at Universal. The guy who hated it so much is still above him, but this secondary power likes the screenplay and wants to see the movie made. We met and his first words to me were these: "You don't have the least idea what happened, do you?"
I didn't then.
I do now.
The producer had been, at the time, relatively new in the picture business. But he was a gigantic figure in the music business: Name a superstar singer, he handled him.
Well, Universal owned an amphitheater and needed talent to fill it. So the very great Lew Wasserman made a deal personally with the producer to handle the amphitheater and also have a movie-producing deal. Anything he wanted to make was an automatic "go."
With one teensy proviso: it had to cost less than an agreed-upon amount. Anything that cost more, Ned Tanen, the head of Universal Pictures, would have to agree to.
The Ski Bum, which needed stars and snow and all kinds of other expensive stuff, obviously needed Tanen's okay.
This presented kind of a problem for the picture because, decades ago, Tanen and my guy had been together in the mailroom at William Morris, where so many great careers were launched.
And they had hated each other with a growing passion since then.
Not only that, Tanen was pissed that the producer had gotten a movie deal at his company by going over his head to Wasserman.
So there it was.
Tanen, of course, rejected it. And, of course, rejected any attempt to buy the screenplay back.
The new executive and I tried an end run. Tanen never budged.
O for three.
The Right Stuff came next. A ghastly and depressing saga (recounted in magnificent detail inAdventures in the Screen Trade, so I won't repeat it here). I left the project angry and frustrated. These were bad times in America—the hostages had just been taken in Iran—so I had wanted to write a movie that might have a patriotic feel. The director wanted something else.
O for four.
On Wings of Eagles was not called that when I got involved. The famous Ken Follett book and the miniseries were still in the future.
But Ross Perot, who controlled the material, was interested in making a movie about the wonderful time when he masterminded breaking his employees out of an Iranian prison. I still had my patriotic need. I signed on.
The problem with this material was always very simple: it was an expensive action film but the star, the main guy, Perot's hero, "Bull" Simons, was not a young man. And Perot would never have betrayed the basic reality by allowing a younger man to do it.
There was only Eastwood. Had to be Eastwood. No one else but Eastwood. Dead in the water without Eastwood.
He took another military adventure movie, Firefox.
I was the one dead in the water now.
Until late in 1986, when the telephone rang . . .
(C) 2000 William Goldman All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-375-40349-3
Colour Me Kubrick
One of the funniest lines I've heard in some time was uttered in a strangely touching comedy called Color Me Kubrick (2005). The line is delivered by one Alan Conway, a fellow who is impersonating director Stanley Kubrick. The fellow is bemoaning the insipidness of which he imagines Hollywood to be rife and says "The studio didn't think John Malkovich could carry the film." The reason this line evokes such a gut-warbling guffaw is that the actor saying the line is Mr. Malkovich himself.
Part of the irony spins on the fact that chances are pretty good you've not heard of this excellent film, just as chances are excellent that you do not know the story behind it, a condition that says very little about you personally but which speaks with terrible clarity about the condition of the popular media itself. Even the metal-heads and roustabouts in this movie know who Stanley Kubrick is--or was, now. Indeed, they know a great deal more about him than does Mr. Conway, the man who in real life went about during the filming of Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, impersonating the director in order to get the believers to pay for his lifestyle, one that includes substantial amounts of vodka, a contributing factor to Conway's ultimate demise.
Written by Anthony Frewin and directed by Brian W. Cook, Color Me Kubrick utilizes many of Kubrick's own devices to give us the giggles, although the laughter is probably reserved for those in the crowd familiar with the man's work. So, for instance, in the opening scene, we have a couple punk boys in the employ of a bar rounding a corner to the strains of music we recall from A Clockwork Orange, a music which has conditioned us to expect trouble. Sure enough, the boys are headed off to potentially commit some horrible ultra violence against an upper class couple. "I wonder who that could be?" the society man inquires of his wife at the ring of the doorbell. In other words, this devilish little comedy is simply chock full of self-referential bits that, again, will squeeze laughing fits from fans of the late auteur and should even woo the novices into checking out some of the director's great film. You know, like The Shining, Lolita, Spartacus, Judgment at Nuremberg. Pardon me? What's that? You say Kubrick did not direct Judgment at Nuremberg? You say that was Stanley Kramer who did it? Well, one can't be expected to know everything, now can one, especially since Conway didn't know it either and blew a gig when he was hitting on a gay young man who actually did know it.
Is Conway crazy? I don't think so. He did manage to get himself locked up in lieu of going to jail for his fraudulent activities. Indeed, he left the mental institution to go dry out at a nice resort-like facility frequented by the likes of actors and rock stars. He tells his boyfriend it's all an act to stay out of the slams. But we aren't certain. We remain unconvinced in part because Malkovich does carry the film so well that the ambiguity trembles on the vine. By the time we near the end, we're not even certain the man is gay, much less that he didn't have the whole thing planned from the start. Still, we don't want any harm coming to this phony because we keep getting hints that the real Conway does not much like himself and has adopted his felonious lifestyle for just that reason. If his masquerade comes undone, the reality of his life may be a bit more than he can bear and his tentative hold on reality may tumble and crash.
We would not like that.
Funny enough, about eight years ago I found myself in a similar situation. I had gone through a tremendous amount of money in an attempt to avoid coming to grips with the death of my loved ones and one day found myself with two nostrils filled with dried cocaine residue, a liver throbbing from alcohol abuse, and skin that more than anything else needed a touch of a suntan. I drove a car I had reported stolen to get the insurance money from Arizona to Ohio where I ingratiated myself among a group of people who believed me to be a psychiatrist. Fooling them was easy because they were actual psychiatrists themselves and they found my narcissistic personality to be quite appropriate to the occupation. I maintained this little masquerade for six weeks and was only revealed for a liar due to my unfortunate habit of talking in my sleep, no doubt the remnants of a guilty conscience. I share this bit of personal experience because (a) I think it's time to come clean about it, lo these many years, and (b) because even though I admit I took matters to more than an extreme, I certainly conned no one out of any money but rather simply occupied myself with the intellectual discussions that I probably would have never encountered had I actually been what I pretended to be.
I think Alan Conway may have been after something similar. Granted, he knew very little about the real Kubrick and looked almost nothing like the man. However, I suspect he was simply lonely and figured that people would like him if he were famous, which they did.
I told you it was a touching comedy.
Part of the irony spins on the fact that chances are pretty good you've not heard of this excellent film, just as chances are excellent that you do not know the story behind it, a condition that says very little about you personally but which speaks with terrible clarity about the condition of the popular media itself. Even the metal-heads and roustabouts in this movie know who Stanley Kubrick is--or was, now. Indeed, they know a great deal more about him than does Mr. Conway, the man who in real life went about during the filming of Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, impersonating the director in order to get the believers to pay for his lifestyle, one that includes substantial amounts of vodka, a contributing factor to Conway's ultimate demise.
Written by Anthony Frewin and directed by Brian W. Cook, Color Me Kubrick utilizes many of Kubrick's own devices to give us the giggles, although the laughter is probably reserved for those in the crowd familiar with the man's work. So, for instance, in the opening scene, we have a couple punk boys in the employ of a bar rounding a corner to the strains of music we recall from A Clockwork Orange, a music which has conditioned us to expect trouble. Sure enough, the boys are headed off to potentially commit some horrible ultra violence against an upper class couple. "I wonder who that could be?" the society man inquires of his wife at the ring of the doorbell. In other words, this devilish little comedy is simply chock full of self-referential bits that, again, will squeeze laughing fits from fans of the late auteur and should even woo the novices into checking out some of the director's great film. You know, like The Shining, Lolita, Spartacus, Judgment at Nuremberg. Pardon me? What's that? You say Kubrick did not direct Judgment at Nuremberg? You say that was Stanley Kramer who did it? Well, one can't be expected to know everything, now can one, especially since Conway didn't know it either and blew a gig when he was hitting on a gay young man who actually did know it.
Is Conway crazy? I don't think so. He did manage to get himself locked up in lieu of going to jail for his fraudulent activities. Indeed, he left the mental institution to go dry out at a nice resort-like facility frequented by the likes of actors and rock stars. He tells his boyfriend it's all an act to stay out of the slams. But we aren't certain. We remain unconvinced in part because Malkovich does carry the film so well that the ambiguity trembles on the vine. By the time we near the end, we're not even certain the man is gay, much less that he didn't have the whole thing planned from the start. Still, we don't want any harm coming to this phony because we keep getting hints that the real Conway does not much like himself and has adopted his felonious lifestyle for just that reason. If his masquerade comes undone, the reality of his life may be a bit more than he can bear and his tentative hold on reality may tumble and crash.
We would not like that.
Funny enough, about eight years ago I found myself in a similar situation. I had gone through a tremendous amount of money in an attempt to avoid coming to grips with the death of my loved ones and one day found myself with two nostrils filled with dried cocaine residue, a liver throbbing from alcohol abuse, and skin that more than anything else needed a touch of a suntan. I drove a car I had reported stolen to get the insurance money from Arizona to Ohio where I ingratiated myself among a group of people who believed me to be a psychiatrist. Fooling them was easy because they were actual psychiatrists themselves and they found my narcissistic personality to be quite appropriate to the occupation. I maintained this little masquerade for six weeks and was only revealed for a liar due to my unfortunate habit of talking in my sleep, no doubt the remnants of a guilty conscience. I share this bit of personal experience because (a) I think it's time to come clean about it, lo these many years, and (b) because even though I admit I took matters to more than an extreme, I certainly conned no one out of any money but rather simply occupied myself with the intellectual discussions that I probably would have never encountered had I actually been what I pretended to be.
I think Alan Conway may have been after something similar. Granted, he knew very little about the real Kubrick and looked almost nothing like the man. However, I suspect he was simply lonely and figured that people would like him if he were famous, which they did.
I told you it was a touching comedy.
Great Directors
As if to make up for the disappointing documentary about certain screenwriters, Tales from the Script, we certainly found some needed luck today when we came upon the unimaginably titled yet aptly named film Great Directors (2009). Director, actor and writer Angela Ismailos, a former political science graduate student and exciting filmmaker, pulls together interviews she conducted with some genuinely fascinating movie directors who indeed deserve the adjective "great." She talks with Bertolucci, Lynch, Cavani, Breillat, Sayles, Stephen Frears, Agnes Varda, Ken Loach, Todd Haybes and Richard Linklater. These men and women are not the people who direct the latest throw in some idiot franchise and they most likely have the supreme decency to have absolutely no idea who either Adam Sandler or Seth Rogan are. These men and women understand that everything people do has a political aspect, even if that aspect is to avoid being political. Bertolucci, who directed Last Tango in Paris, was an avowed communist. Catherine Breillat, who acted in Tango, is a fiery novelist and director who kicked down the sexual barriers to women in French films with her own brilliant A Real Young Girl (1976), a movie so disturbing it took twenty-three years for the film to be released. Ken Loach has been making great socialist realism films since the 1960s and yet chances are good you can't quite place either his name or some of his best pictures, including Which Side Are You On?, one hell of a fine documentary about police abuses and the spirit of youth, among other things. Ultimately, the two big Hollywood names here, John Sayles and David Lynch, get their due as rebels with cause; yet it's the so-called lesser-known talents who really pull us in and make us want to experience their films.
Ismailos earned any drink you'd care to buy her just for getting these people on camera.
Ismailos earned any drink you'd care to buy her just for getting these people on camera.
The Pledge
One of the true joys of watching a movie can be the way we forget that we are watching a movie. The people who ran the cameras, the actors, the writers, the lighting specialists, the grip, the best boy, the script doctors, the casting directors, the make-up artists, the folks in charge of marketing: these people and dozens more go into the creation of a film. Yet, sometimes, if everyone involved soars and we are blessed with some dandy fine luck, the movie pulls us in while we project ourselves onto a character on screen and next thing you know, we are no longer watching a picture. We are on the edges of something real.
For most of the 2001 film, The Pledge, that is exactly what is happening. Director Sean Penn brought together some of the great talents of modern film, hooked them onto a script based on a novella by Friedrich Durrenmatt, and exercised what feels like the patience of the guy who wrote the story of Job in showing us a tale that hits on more than a few levels, some emotional, some cerebral, some artistic.
Jack Nicholson plays Jerry Black, a retiring police detective working in Nevada. With six hours left on the job and during his retirement party, Jerry offers to assist in an investigation of the brutal murder of a young girl. The police have a witness to the immediate after effects of the crime, a young boy who never says much, but who admits he has seen a tall Native American in a maroon truck leaving the scene of the crime. The police pick up the suspect, a man who turns out to be mentally retarded.
Here is where this movie becomes occasionally fascinating. Just when we suspect that we know (from our experience as viewers of many a police drama) just what is going to happen, we encounter all these whacked out characters. First we meet Stan, a competent, competitive pretty boy played by Aaron Eckhart. We suspect he is a foil for Jerry, yet he does the retired detective favors above and beyond the call of duty, suggesting that Stan has, at a minimum, a grudging respect for the old timer. Then we meet Annalise Hansen, otherwise known as Vanessa Redgrave, and we can't decide if the old woman is crazy as a loon or simply in awe over the death of her grandchild. In turn, the child's parents feel a bit deranged, although, again, we can't be sure. Indeed, throughout the film, it becomes more and more challenging to work out in our collective minds whether we are seeing the characters the way they are or the way Jerry sees them.
It turns out that some strikingly similar crimes have been committed over the previous few years and Jerry, though retired, becomes obsessed with keeping his promise to the murdered girl's mother that he will solve the case. He meets with Mickey Rourke, who plays the institutionalized father of one of the other victims. He buys a gas station from Harry Dean Stanton, who takes his family to Arizona. And he meets a charming bartender named Lori, played to positive perfection by Robin Wright. Lori has a young daughter who reminds Jerry of the victim.
It is Jerry's obsession with the crime and the way this obsession parallels his own apparent psychological disintegration that moves the movie along. Well, that and the fact that we are privileged to encounter some of the finest acting talent all in the same motion picture, even if Rourke and Stanton are not given all that much to do. Ultimately, it's Nicholson and Wright who lock up the magnificence of this film by appearing to be the farthest thing in the world from "movie stars." It's hard work being this good and everyone involved shines without yielding to the impulse to sparkle.
We get clever camera work that does not announce itself as such. We get a chase scene that involves cattle. We get nothing that we expect and everything we want.
Mostly what we get is characterization, probably the most difficult thing to pull off in a movie, where time constraints demand that a mere gesture imply things about the person on screen. Nicholson, who elsewhere on occasion has merged nuance with mugging for the camera, is as unself-conscious here as in any role he has ever done. When he meets Lori the bartender, we hope they will get together, and despite a certain contrived approach to this, we feel satisfied when it happens and never question any of their motives.
Still, the dead girl's parents show up in this new town.
The boy who saw the Indian leaving the scene of the crime rides by in a parade.
And Jerry meets a psychiatrist who asks him if he hears voices.
A few items never quite get resolved, most of them involving the dead girl's family, as well as the real identity of the killer, although here we are given enough information to make a very good guess. Maybe that doesn't matter anyway because this movie does not focus on facts so much as it does perceptions: those of the actors, the characters they play, the way we in the audience see them. Perceptions are all we have, as human beings. We can never be much more than dutiful agnostics, knowing that we can't know anything for certain, yet doomed to exist in a world that demands we pretend to be sure of everything. It's just that kind of tug between forces that drives a man like Jerry Black to madness. It may even be something we recognize in ourselves.
For most of the 2001 film, The Pledge, that is exactly what is happening. Director Sean Penn brought together some of the great talents of modern film, hooked them onto a script based on a novella by Friedrich Durrenmatt, and exercised what feels like the patience of the guy who wrote the story of Job in showing us a tale that hits on more than a few levels, some emotional, some cerebral, some artistic.
Jack Nicholson plays Jerry Black, a retiring police detective working in Nevada. With six hours left on the job and during his retirement party, Jerry offers to assist in an investigation of the brutal murder of a young girl. The police have a witness to the immediate after effects of the crime, a young boy who never says much, but who admits he has seen a tall Native American in a maroon truck leaving the scene of the crime. The police pick up the suspect, a man who turns out to be mentally retarded.
Here is where this movie becomes occasionally fascinating. Just when we suspect that we know (from our experience as viewers of many a police drama) just what is going to happen, we encounter all these whacked out characters. First we meet Stan, a competent, competitive pretty boy played by Aaron Eckhart. We suspect he is a foil for Jerry, yet he does the retired detective favors above and beyond the call of duty, suggesting that Stan has, at a minimum, a grudging respect for the old timer. Then we meet Annalise Hansen, otherwise known as Vanessa Redgrave, and we can't decide if the old woman is crazy as a loon or simply in awe over the death of her grandchild. In turn, the child's parents feel a bit deranged, although, again, we can't be sure. Indeed, throughout the film, it becomes more and more challenging to work out in our collective minds whether we are seeing the characters the way they are or the way Jerry sees them.
It turns out that some strikingly similar crimes have been committed over the previous few years and Jerry, though retired, becomes obsessed with keeping his promise to the murdered girl's mother that he will solve the case. He meets with Mickey Rourke, who plays the institutionalized father of one of the other victims. He buys a gas station from Harry Dean Stanton, who takes his family to Arizona. And he meets a charming bartender named Lori, played to positive perfection by Robin Wright. Lori has a young daughter who reminds Jerry of the victim.
It is Jerry's obsession with the crime and the way this obsession parallels his own apparent psychological disintegration that moves the movie along. Well, that and the fact that we are privileged to encounter some of the finest acting talent all in the same motion picture, even if Rourke and Stanton are not given all that much to do. Ultimately, it's Nicholson and Wright who lock up the magnificence of this film by appearing to be the farthest thing in the world from "movie stars." It's hard work being this good and everyone involved shines without yielding to the impulse to sparkle.
We get clever camera work that does not announce itself as such. We get a chase scene that involves cattle. We get nothing that we expect and everything we want.
Mostly what we get is characterization, probably the most difficult thing to pull off in a movie, where time constraints demand that a mere gesture imply things about the person on screen. Nicholson, who elsewhere on occasion has merged nuance with mugging for the camera, is as unself-conscious here as in any role he has ever done. When he meets Lori the bartender, we hope they will get together, and despite a certain contrived approach to this, we feel satisfied when it happens and never question any of their motives.
Still, the dead girl's parents show up in this new town.
The boy who saw the Indian leaving the scene of the crime rides by in a parade.
And Jerry meets a psychiatrist who asks him if he hears voices.
A few items never quite get resolved, most of them involving the dead girl's family, as well as the real identity of the killer, although here we are given enough information to make a very good guess. Maybe that doesn't matter anyway because this movie does not focus on facts so much as it does perceptions: those of the actors, the characters they play, the way we in the audience see them. Perceptions are all we have, as human beings. We can never be much more than dutiful agnostics, knowing that we can't know anything for certain, yet doomed to exist in a world that demands we pretend to be sure of everything. It's just that kind of tug between forces that drives a man like Jerry Black to madness. It may even be something we recognize in ourselves.
Trumbo
Their names have shadowed into crystalline mist, vanishing into the morning sunrise. Yet, on some of the quieter dawns, we can still hear the whispered screams: Bertolt Brecht. John Garfield. Herbert Biberman. Lester Cole. Albert Maltz. Adrian Scott. Samuel Ornitz. Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr. John Howard Lawson. Alvah Bessie. Dalton Trumbo. Twelve names in all. Brecht answered HUAC's questions, then fled to Europe. Garfield was never seriously considered, despite having been a member of the Group Theatre. The remaining Hollywood names became grouped as one: The Hollywood Ten. The most celebrated of these was Dalton Trumbo.
HUAC was the House un-American Activities Committee, a group of some of the members of the 83rd U.S. Congress who, in 1947, began investigating--along with the diabolic head of the Motion Pictures Industry Council Roy Brewer--members of the Hollywood community, particularly those whose work was important enough to cause their political affiliations to be of concern to the committee.
Friendly witnesses such as Elia Kazan decided to name names. What names? The names of people they knew or suspected to be members of the Party. Usually the question would come like this: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party? The reason this question was so problematic was that if the person being asked it were to say yes, then the follow-up question would be: Who else do you know in that capacity? and that was a question none of the Ten wanted to answer. Rather than seeking a Fifth Amendment remedy to the question, the Ten relied on the First Amendment, believing that their right to freedom expression and concomitant right to join together in private were protected under the first addendum to the Constitution. The Supreme Court felt otherwise and the Ten were found guilty of contempt of Congress.
A lot of good works have been made about this despicable time in post-war America. None have hit the point as well as the book Naming Names by Victor Navasky and certainly no film has captured the horrors of this period as well as Trumbo (2007). Regarding the book, the best review ever written about it comes from Alvah Bessie, which you can read here.
Trumbo, the movie, is an amazing visual document, with no less than nine great actors playing the part of Dalton Trumbo, author of Eclipseand Johnny Got His Gun, and screenwriter for Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, Roman Holiday, The Brave One, Spartacus, Exodus, and Papillon, among many others. They sent this man to prison for Contempt of Congress. When you hear people such as Michael Douglas, Joan Allen, Donald Sutherland, Brian Dennehy, Nathan Lane and Liam Neeson read Trumbo's letters as if they were Trumbo, you will begin to grasp the agonizing horror that was committed against these ten people, against the country of the United States, and against children who--like myself, probably like you--had not even been born at the time.
While I would not be so rotten as to betray one line of this film's dialogue and risk robbing from you the opportunity to be blown away by the words and their amazing deliveries, I do think that a couple of quotes from outside the film are in order. These two remarks regard democracy.
"Democracy means that people can say what they want to. All the people. It means that they can vote as they wish. All the people. It means that they can worship God in any way they feel right, and that includes Christians and Jews and voodoo doctors as well."
And:
"Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for."
HUAC was the House un-American Activities Committee, a group of some of the members of the 83rd U.S. Congress who, in 1947, began investigating--along with the diabolic head of the Motion Pictures Industry Council Roy Brewer--members of the Hollywood community, particularly those whose work was important enough to cause their political affiliations to be of concern to the committee.
Friendly witnesses such as Elia Kazan decided to name names. What names? The names of people they knew or suspected to be members of the Party. Usually the question would come like this: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party? The reason this question was so problematic was that if the person being asked it were to say yes, then the follow-up question would be: Who else do you know in that capacity? and that was a question none of the Ten wanted to answer. Rather than seeking a Fifth Amendment remedy to the question, the Ten relied on the First Amendment, believing that their right to freedom expression and concomitant right to join together in private were protected under the first addendum to the Constitution. The Supreme Court felt otherwise and the Ten were found guilty of contempt of Congress.
A lot of good works have been made about this despicable time in post-war America. None have hit the point as well as the book Naming Names by Victor Navasky and certainly no film has captured the horrors of this period as well as Trumbo (2007). Regarding the book, the best review ever written about it comes from Alvah Bessie, which you can read here.
Trumbo, the movie, is an amazing visual document, with no less than nine great actors playing the part of Dalton Trumbo, author of Eclipseand Johnny Got His Gun, and screenwriter for Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, Roman Holiday, The Brave One, Spartacus, Exodus, and Papillon, among many others. They sent this man to prison for Contempt of Congress. When you hear people such as Michael Douglas, Joan Allen, Donald Sutherland, Brian Dennehy, Nathan Lane and Liam Neeson read Trumbo's letters as if they were Trumbo, you will begin to grasp the agonizing horror that was committed against these ten people, against the country of the United States, and against children who--like myself, probably like you--had not even been born at the time.
While I would not be so rotten as to betray one line of this film's dialogue and risk robbing from you the opportunity to be blown away by the words and their amazing deliveries, I do think that a couple of quotes from outside the film are in order. These two remarks regard democracy.
"Democracy means that people can say what they want to. All the people. It means that they can vote as they wish. All the people. It means that they can worship God in any way they feel right, and that includes Christians and Jews and voodoo doctors as well."
And:
"Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for."
God Bless America
Here's what happens. As you get older, you notice that the society around you is not a part of you any more, if it ever was. At first you conclude you are merely jaded because you are getting older. After some reflection, however, you realize that the only thing age has to do with it is that being older has freed you of your illusions. Most things are just as bad as we pretend they are not. Willful ignorance, hostility, ridicule, tastelessness, gluttony, and a general sense that other people are just no damned good and that they like it that way, technology substituting for reality, openness perceived as weakness, honesty experienced as simple-mindedness, hope as a disease: these observations ricochet in your head until the pounding is unbearable. But most of all you notice that many other people are simply not very nice.
A child throws a fit because she was given a Blackberry instead of an Android.
A teenager curses out her parents because she wanted an Expedition instead of a Volt.
Grown human beings gleefully endure any type of embarrassment TV network bosses can think up just so long as those executives allow them on television.
A guy takes up two parking spaces and dares you to say something about it.
Christians attend funerals of dead soldiers and bid those soldiers a welcoming in hell because those soldiers loved who they wanted to love.
A gasbag right wing entertainer uses his daily radio broadcast to announce his view that a nervy woman who does not share his views on contraception is a slut.
And then you notice that, yes, while you are old, or older than you once were, you are not completely alone. True, you still have your memories of Alice Cooper records, of Art Fleming hosting "Jeopardy," and of people coming together over the first moon walk. But your memories also sort of torture you because they are memories, things unconnected to the moment. And in this moment you notice that there are some people a good bit younger than you who are watching what you are thinking, reading your thoughts on your face, nodding in agreement with your disgust. In that flash of insight, you see that they understand what you have lived through and while they themselves may never have known a time without cell phones, they know that something is very wrong with their society and as they clap their hands and stomp their feet you see that they are with you, urging you on, lifting you up, steadying your aim.
You cannot win with the movie God Bless America (2011) and that is one of the reasons I like it so much. You cannot win because even though you will likely agree with many of the visceral and even intellectual reactions that Joel Murray as Frank displays, you probably will not be in favor of killing everyone who offends you so much. Then again, maybe you will. I'm sure that some people do.
Yet you will find your inner self--your Me--cheering him on, just as you will applaud his unwillingness to take sexual advantage of Roxy, played to absolute perfection by Tara Lynne Barr. Frank is a moral man, or at least a man with a sense of morality. The fact that he and Roxy come at their anti-societal (as opposed to anti-social) proclivities from different worlds only serves to bond them all the more.
A child throws a fit because she was given a Blackberry instead of an Android.
A teenager curses out her parents because she wanted an Expedition instead of a Volt.
Grown human beings gleefully endure any type of embarrassment TV network bosses can think up just so long as those executives allow them on television.
A guy takes up two parking spaces and dares you to say something about it.
Christians attend funerals of dead soldiers and bid those soldiers a welcoming in hell because those soldiers loved who they wanted to love.
A gasbag right wing entertainer uses his daily radio broadcast to announce his view that a nervy woman who does not share his views on contraception is a slut.
And then you notice that, yes, while you are old, or older than you once were, you are not completely alone. True, you still have your memories of Alice Cooper records, of Art Fleming hosting "Jeopardy," and of people coming together over the first moon walk. But your memories also sort of torture you because they are memories, things unconnected to the moment. And in this moment you notice that there are some people a good bit younger than you who are watching what you are thinking, reading your thoughts on your face, nodding in agreement with your disgust. In that flash of insight, you see that they understand what you have lived through and while they themselves may never have known a time without cell phones, they know that something is very wrong with their society and as they clap their hands and stomp their feet you see that they are with you, urging you on, lifting you up, steadying your aim.
You cannot win with the movie God Bless America (2011) and that is one of the reasons I like it so much. You cannot win because even though you will likely agree with many of the visceral and even intellectual reactions that Joel Murray as Frank displays, you probably will not be in favor of killing everyone who offends you so much. Then again, maybe you will. I'm sure that some people do.
Yet you will find your inner self--your Me--cheering him on, just as you will applaud his unwillingness to take sexual advantage of Roxy, played to absolute perfection by Tara Lynne Barr. Frank is a moral man, or at least a man with a sense of morality. The fact that he and Roxy come at their anti-societal (as opposed to anti-social) proclivities from different worlds only serves to bond them all the more.
This is a powerful movie and not merely because director Bobcat Goldthwait shoots for cheap laughs (none here) or phony sentiment (again, none). It's not even because the violence becomes almost cartoonish in its spontaneity. It's a powerful movie because it dares to say something about the societal forces that unintentionally conspire to drive a reasonable person calmly and cooly insane.
You will like this movie because it accomplishes what Falling Down started to accomplish before it fell apart.
Another reason you will like this movie every bit as much as I did is because you will get around to wondering if all the Paula Abdul-lookalikes and mindless self-parodies in this movie actually recognize themselves as such. God Bless America is about ideas far more than it is about physical violence and somehow I suspect that the young woman in the reality TV show that Frank watches who throws a tampon at her girlfriend in a fit of rage--somehow I have a hunch that the actress who played this idiot may not quite have realized that we were appalled by her and by the uses to which her type of nonentity is being put. Yes, there are a few speeches in this movie and on occasion the film threatens to become a polemic. But funny enough, that doesn't bother me at all. Nope, in fact that feels highly appropriate because all the stupidity that gets manufactured and distributed as "entertainment" usually guises itself in the cloak of Drama or the gown of Comedy. So, yes, it's actually a bit refreshing once in a while to have a guy like Frank go off on a tangent, as he does here.
You will like this movie because it accomplishes what Falling Down started to accomplish before it fell apart.
Another reason you will like this movie every bit as much as I did is because you will get around to wondering if all the Paula Abdul-lookalikes and mindless self-parodies in this movie actually recognize themselves as such. God Bless America is about ideas far more than it is about physical violence and somehow I suspect that the young woman in the reality TV show that Frank watches who throws a tampon at her girlfriend in a fit of rage--somehow I have a hunch that the actress who played this idiot may not quite have realized that we were appalled by her and by the uses to which her type of nonentity is being put. Yes, there are a few speeches in this movie and on occasion the film threatens to become a polemic. But funny enough, that doesn't bother me at all. Nope, in fact that feels highly appropriate because all the stupidity that gets manufactured and distributed as "entertainment" usually guises itself in the cloak of Drama or the gown of Comedy. So, yes, it's actually a bit refreshing once in a while to have a guy like Frank go off on a tangent, as he does here.
Yep, Frank is you. Frank is me. But Frank is not Everyman or else he would not need to exist.
This is not about how educated you are because universities are jam packed with highly educated bigots. This isn't about what kind of job you have or your position in the company because there is hatred aplenty on the loading dock as well as in the executive restroom. And this sure as hell is not about "political correctness," which is a very clever pair of code words for "I'm about to say something geared to hurt an innocent person's feelings and you better not call me out for it." What God Bless America is about is outstanding understated acting. It is about the beautiful audacity of Goldthwait to write and direct this masterful period-piece. It is even about something more rare than a great movie: It is about that thing that drives decent men and women, and even decent boys and girls, to do some very bad things.
What is that thing, you ask?
Go ask Alice. I think he'll know.
This is not about how educated you are because universities are jam packed with highly educated bigots. This isn't about what kind of job you have or your position in the company because there is hatred aplenty on the loading dock as well as in the executive restroom. And this sure as hell is not about "political correctness," which is a very clever pair of code words for "I'm about to say something geared to hurt an innocent person's feelings and you better not call me out for it." What God Bless America is about is outstanding understated acting. It is about the beautiful audacity of Goldthwait to write and direct this masterful period-piece. It is even about something more rare than a great movie: It is about that thing that drives decent men and women, and even decent boys and girls, to do some very bad things.
What is that thing, you ask?
Go ask Alice. I think he'll know.
7 Psychopaths
7 Psychopaths is that rare motion picture that aims for the intelligent adult market while at the same time seeking to have tremendous amounts of fun. It succeeds on both counts.
Colin Farrell plays Marty McDonagh, a screenwriter who happens to be the person who actually wrote and directed 7 Psychopaths. Marty, like his namesake, is a fun and peace-loving Irish drinker who wants to have some useful experiences before he finishes writing the movie he's working on, a movie that goes by the title 7 Psychopaths. The problem is that he has this friend named Billy, played by Sam Rockwell (an actor who, until I saw this wonderful movie, I would have sworn could not act and who was, as far as I used to be concerned, a very poor man's Dana Garvey--an assessment I am deliriously happy to admit I was correct about, up until this movie). Billy is an actor who has a hard time getting a gig because he's a bit prone to violence, which makes him an interesting foil for Marty. Billy can't buy the bacon with his acting skills, so he takes a job as a dog kidnapper. His boss is Hans, played to mesmerizing limitless horizons by Christopher Walken. I forget what Hans' original calling was, but he has been reduced to this criminal line of work to help pay for the medical treatment for his wife Myra, also known as Linda Bright Clay, a woman who will steal your heart right from the movie screen. Anyway, Billy makes the mistake of stealing a Shih Tzu from Charlie, a gold chain-wearing mafia type played by Woody Harrelson. Charlie's cursed with something of a short fuse and he makes it his life's work finding out who stole his dog.
To tell you more about the plot of 7 Psychopaths would be to chance ruining it for you and that I will not do. I will admit that this is the best new movie I have seen this year. Few films are able to pull off the Herculean task of commenting upon themselves while the movie is in process, as Billy does when he and Marty and Hans are on their way somewhere to come up with an idea for the film.
To tell you more about the plot of 7 Psychopaths would be to chance ruining it for you and that I will not do. I will admit that this is the best new movie I have seen this year. Few films are able to pull off the Herculean task of commenting upon themselves while the movie is in process, as Billy does when he and Marty and Hans are on their way somewhere to come up with an idea for the film.
One of the other cool and self-referential aspects of 7 Psychopaths is that Hans/Christopher Walken points out along the way that Marty hasn't written any strong women into the script. Marty admits this and reckons that it's hard being a woman. Still, we get a true heroine in the form of Helena Mattsson, as well as a psychotic Quaker played--guess!--by Harry Dean Stanton and an even crazier psychopath played by Tom Waits (who never sings a note in the movie, oddly enough).
This movie is funny, profane, exhilarating, a little sexy, and contains the only dream sequence I've ever seen in a movie in this century that actually works for the betterment of the film.
The only thing that could have made 7 Psychopaths better--and even this may just be picking gnats out of horse manure--would be if we in the audience had been given some basis for the friendship among Marty, Billy and Hans. As it is, we have to rely on the formidable acting skills of these three (which is more than adequate, naturally), when what we might have liked would have been to drawn in more of their humanity in between the snappy patter. Nevertheless, it is impossible to recommend this film too heartily.
This movie is funny, profane, exhilarating, a little sexy, and contains the only dream sequence I've ever seen in a movie in this century that actually works for the betterment of the film.
The only thing that could have made 7 Psychopaths better--and even this may just be picking gnats out of horse manure--would be if we in the audience had been given some basis for the friendship among Marty, Billy and Hans. As it is, we have to rely on the formidable acting skills of these three (which is more than adequate, naturally), when what we might have liked would have been to drawn in more of their humanity in between the snappy patter. Nevertheless, it is impossible to recommend this film too heartily.
Let the Right One In
It's that time of year again. Halloween, they call it, that fun-loving place on the calendar when grandma chases you down into the darkened basement waving cat entrails over her head while screaming curses in Nahuatl and grandpa mixes up his patented treat of dolomitic lime brownies with ear wax frosting. Huh? I'm revealing a little too much personal history? Okay, have it your way. Just don't say I didn't warn you about the oldsters in your midst.
Funny enough, that makes for a decent segue into our very special Halloween movie review. The movie in question is called Let the Right One In (2008) and it has earned this year's honor for scariest vampire movie of all time. Please don't confuse this intoxicating masterpiece with a sub-par English remake two years later called Let Me In. That latter flick was good, I suppose, but for a really tingling experience the way vampire movies are supposed to be, you need the Swedish. Now, if you're anything like me, you probably didn't even know that they made major motion pictures in Sweden, at least not since the days of Ingmar Bergman. It turns out there's all kinds of first rate Swedish filmmakers. Who? Well, there's Roy Andersson and Ulf Malmros, and there's Lukas Moodysson and Thomas Alfredson, the latter gent being the genius mind behind tonight's flick of the jugular.
Let the Right One In, or, as they called it back home, Låt den rätte komma in, is the story of two adorable twelve year olds, Oskar and Eli. The time is Fenruary 1982. The location is a town called Blackeberg, which is near Stockholm. Oskar is a somewhat studious young boy who gets bullied by a trio of idiots. Eli is new in town and even though she assures Oskar that they can never be friends, he charms her with various puzzles, such as a Rubik's cube and Morse code, and before long, the two find themselves going steady. The only real problem in their relationship is that Eli cannot quite remember her own birthday. I mean, hell, it has been two hundred years and a gal forgets these kinds of things, especially when the gal is a vampire.
Eli charms Oskar in return. The object of her affections is a lonely boy and the fact that Eli has no specific genitals or that she's cold as a gravestone is not going to deter young Oskar from hooking up with the love of his life. Wouldn't you know it, though? Even at twelve, or two hundred twelve, there's always got to be some damned conflict to get in the way of the plot. In this case, the conflict is of the vampire versus human variety, in that the local drinkers in Blackeberg have observed that some most unfortunate things have been happening to the less sober in their midst, most of these things being the result of a bungling Familiar named Hakan. This guy has been sent out by Eli to drain blood out of the people he strings up. But you should never send a grown-up to do the work of a kid. He ends up committing a very strange version of seppuku(harikiri), an act of extreme contrition that speeds up the film considerably.
Probably the best element in this movie, aside from the acting, which is amazing, and also aside from the scenery, which is so beautiful you'll forget how cold it looks, is the fact that Eli inspires Oskar to become stronger than he is when we first meet him. Oh, he's not exactly a coward to begin with, but he just doesn't know what to do when the bullies come after him. "Hit back hard," Eli advises him. "But there's three of them." "Hit back even harder."
This is a major movie and the fact that it didn't take the Oscar for best foreign film in 2009 speaks to the narrow-mindedness of that arcane institution. It lost out because of its genre and just possibly because the very real romantic tension between Oskar and Eli made certain members of the academy a trifle uncomfortable. The viewer gets just as hung up on this relationship as the two protagonists do and I suspect that fact made certain glorified pornographers in the Academy a bit uneasy. There's nothing trite or exploitive going on in Let the Right One In. It's a real love story, one with cosmic implications.
Lina Leandersson, who at seventeen should have an amazing career ahead of her, lures Oskar (given understated magnificence by Kare Hedebrant) to his own salvation throughout this movie, chock full as it is with some of the most seductive scenery you're ever likely to see in a vampire picture.
Let the Right One In, or, as they called it back home, Låt den rätte komma in, is the story of two adorable twelve year olds, Oskar and Eli. The time is Fenruary 1982. The location is a town called Blackeberg, which is near Stockholm. Oskar is a somewhat studious young boy who gets bullied by a trio of idiots. Eli is new in town and even though she assures Oskar that they can never be friends, he charms her with various puzzles, such as a Rubik's cube and Morse code, and before long, the two find themselves going steady. The only real problem in their relationship is that Eli cannot quite remember her own birthday. I mean, hell, it has been two hundred years and a gal forgets these kinds of things, especially when the gal is a vampire.
Eli charms Oskar in return. The object of her affections is a lonely boy and the fact that Eli has no specific genitals or that she's cold as a gravestone is not going to deter young Oskar from hooking up with the love of his life. Wouldn't you know it, though? Even at twelve, or two hundred twelve, there's always got to be some damned conflict to get in the way of the plot. In this case, the conflict is of the vampire versus human variety, in that the local drinkers in Blackeberg have observed that some most unfortunate things have been happening to the less sober in their midst, most of these things being the result of a bungling Familiar named Hakan. This guy has been sent out by Eli to drain blood out of the people he strings up. But you should never send a grown-up to do the work of a kid. He ends up committing a very strange version of seppuku(harikiri), an act of extreme contrition that speeds up the film considerably.
Probably the best element in this movie, aside from the acting, which is amazing, and also aside from the scenery, which is so beautiful you'll forget how cold it looks, is the fact that Eli inspires Oskar to become stronger than he is when we first meet him. Oh, he's not exactly a coward to begin with, but he just doesn't know what to do when the bullies come after him. "Hit back hard," Eli advises him. "But there's three of them." "Hit back even harder."
This is a major movie and the fact that it didn't take the Oscar for best foreign film in 2009 speaks to the narrow-mindedness of that arcane institution. It lost out because of its genre and just possibly because the very real romantic tension between Oskar and Eli made certain members of the academy a trifle uncomfortable. The viewer gets just as hung up on this relationship as the two protagonists do and I suspect that fact made certain glorified pornographers in the Academy a bit uneasy. There's nothing trite or exploitive going on in Let the Right One In. It's a real love story, one with cosmic implications.
Lina Leandersson, who at seventeen should have an amazing career ahead of her, lures Oskar (given understated magnificence by Kare Hedebrant) to his own salvation throughout this movie, chock full as it is with some of the most seductive scenery you're ever likely to see in a vampire picture.
A vampire movie needn't be exploitive of teenage emotion (Twilight) or even stupid (Lost Boys) or even campy (Fright Night). This, friends of goth and foes alike, is one for the ages.
Sacco and Vanzetti
Politicians and economists can save their breath yakking about financial crises as long as people continue to mass together in fist fights over obsolete junk at Walmart the day after Thanksgiving. When no one shows up at China Junior to do their mindless bargain safaris on what some idiot savant decided to call Black Friday, then and only then will I be interested in how previously spoiled Americans are having a hard time making ends meet.
There actually have been times in this country when survival was a daily struggle for millions of people. Those were the years immediately preceding World War I and throughout much of World War II and including the so-called roaring twenties when the only things that kept the U.S. economy from being permanently dead were war, public works, more war and other conservative uses of liberal reform. The very nature of democratic politics and a capitalist economy requires that the illusion of pluralism be maintained while resources get gobbled up by a self-described elite (and genuinely small) segment of the populace at the expense of the ever-growing majority into which pours an immigrant class that is lured here with the promise of mercy and freedom only to discover that mercy means slave labor and freedom means a nightstick across the teeth.
In the early years of the first world war, a lot of European immigrants came to the United States because in their home countries the economies were receding into a strange type of class feudalism. With hatred and barbarism the only way up at home, the United States with its promises of advancement looked pretty appealing. Just as a few years later in America, the absence of mass communication would make it possible for the propertied class to entice the displayed and ruined farm workers to flock from the dust bowl to California while each family remained unaware that everyone else was heading in the same direction, so did the placards and scuttlebutt of the day encourage the mass migration from countries such as Italy and Ireland into the land of milk and honey, even though the milk was sour and the honey caked with flies.
Into this quagmire strolled a shoemaker and fish salesmen, both from Italy and both evidently fans of an Italian anarchist named Luigi Galleani. Many anarchists of the 1910s were nothing more than glorified bomb-throwers with a political agenda. However, some of the more thoughtful in their midst sought an economic and political system freed from the tyranny of both large government and large business. These thinkers agreed with the syndicalists that what was needed was a world divided into small and interdependent enclaves that would provide sufficiency for everyone. These men and women were not Bolsheviks, although by the time of the Red Scare of 1918 and 1919, they would be lumped into that particular pot along with liberals, progressives, and socialists.
The Galleanists did utilize bomb attacks against what they believed to be holders of inherently corrupt positions in the U.S. government, including an attempted bombing of the notorious Red Scare leader, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. One such attack went haywire and ended up killing the perpetrator instead. An associate of the Italian anarchists, a man named Andrea Salsedo, was picked up by the Justice Department. He met his end after falling from a fourteenth floor window in the building from which he was in all likelihood pushed.
Salsedo had been arrested by the Bureau of Investigations (the precursor to the FBI) on suspicion of involvement in the April 15, 1920 robbery of the payroll at the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts. A security guard and paymaster were both murdered by the perpetrators of this robbery.
Nicola Sacco and Bertolomeo Vanzetti were arrested on May 5, 1920. When picked up by the cops, they were found carrying guns and anarchist literature.
An ambitious judge and even more ambitious prosecutor thrust themselves into the case. The prosecutor, Frederick Katzmann, secured a conviction against Vanzetti in Judge Webster Thayer's court on a charge of an attempted robbery that had occurred the previous Christmas Eve. But the real trial was yet to come.
In 1971, an Italian filmmaker named Giuliano Montaldo made a film that focused heavily on the second trial. In a fresh and exciting documentary fashion, Sacco & Vanzetti opens in stark black and white, giving a fast recap of the events leading up to the robbery and murders. Watching the movie today, it is easy to see the influence of this filmmaker on a young Oliver Stone when the latter created JFK twenty years later. We witness actions by the players in this real life drama from the point of view of the director, as well as from other participants, the narrative running ahead and slamming brakes, hopping back and spinning wildly, yet holding together through the nearly exhausting talent of the actors on the screen. Riccardo Cucciolla plays Sacco. Since that name probably means nothing to you, perhaps think of a young Tony Shalhoub. His character's timidity and outrage make him simultaneously sympathetic and dangerous without the raving sentimentality or melodrama those terms normally imply. The closest we get to cheap emotion is when Sacco's wife is looking for their son Dante while Nicola is being herded into a paddy wagon. We perceive his helplessness and feel his relief when the boy turns up wandering through the crowd.
It is, however, the fierceness of actor Gian Maria Volonte who, as Vanzetti, draws in the camera on every scene in which he appears. Tall, with a lecherous mustache, he also exhibits a sophistication that his character apparently did indeed possess. This is a man who would frighten people like Palmer and Edgar Hoover just by walking down the street on a sunny day.
Montaldo's film does an amazing job of recreating the flamboyant racism of Katzmann's prosecution of the two Italians as defense witness after witness is discredited due to a language barrier or nationality.
The components of the actual evidence were hardly demonstrative in and of themselves to warrant the conviction and subsequent death sentences handed down by the incompetent judge. But matters went far beyond mere incompetence. The firearms evidence was consistently tampered with and the only way this kind of nonsense could happen in America today would be if we were in the midst of some type of war on terrorism that resulted in American lives being at risk overseas, or with special renditions, or with the accused being denied proper legal representation. That, of course, is the source of the continuing relevance and downright popular fascination with this case.
In 2006, director Peter Miller released a real documentary about the case. This film, Sacco and Vanzetti (without the ampersand), gives us moving voice-overs by Tony Shalhoub and John Turturro reading letters written by the title characters from their prison cells. But the real force of this presentation comes from the historians, of all people. These folks, especially Howard Zinn and Mary Anne Trasciatti, tell the story in a way that makes contemporary the grief of the travesty of justice that resulted in the execution of these two men. The audience is also struck by the courage of Sacco and especially Vanzetti as they face a future they cannot help but understand all too well.
One of the most ironic elements in the film comes near the end when the daughter of one of the robbery victims recalls how she was in a college English class when the professor handed out poems for the members of the class to read aloud. She was given--apparently by accident--a poem written by Edna St. Vincent Mallay called "Justice Denied in Massachusetts." After class, one of the daughter's classmates told the instructor who the young lady was. His horror can only be imagined.
Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot
conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.
Let us go home, and sit in the sitting room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,
Beneficent upon us
Out of the glittering bay,
And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea
Moving the blades of corn
With a peaceful sound.
Forlorn, forlorn,
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.
And the petals drop to the ground,
Leaving the tree unfruited.
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed
uprooted--
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.
What from the splendid dead
We have inherited --
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued --
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.
Let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting-room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
Leaving to our children's children the beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.
There actually have been times in this country when survival was a daily struggle for millions of people. Those were the years immediately preceding World War I and throughout much of World War II and including the so-called roaring twenties when the only things that kept the U.S. economy from being permanently dead were war, public works, more war and other conservative uses of liberal reform. The very nature of democratic politics and a capitalist economy requires that the illusion of pluralism be maintained while resources get gobbled up by a self-described elite (and genuinely small) segment of the populace at the expense of the ever-growing majority into which pours an immigrant class that is lured here with the promise of mercy and freedom only to discover that mercy means slave labor and freedom means a nightstick across the teeth.
In the early years of the first world war, a lot of European immigrants came to the United States because in their home countries the economies were receding into a strange type of class feudalism. With hatred and barbarism the only way up at home, the United States with its promises of advancement looked pretty appealing. Just as a few years later in America, the absence of mass communication would make it possible for the propertied class to entice the displayed and ruined farm workers to flock from the dust bowl to California while each family remained unaware that everyone else was heading in the same direction, so did the placards and scuttlebutt of the day encourage the mass migration from countries such as Italy and Ireland into the land of milk and honey, even though the milk was sour and the honey caked with flies.
Into this quagmire strolled a shoemaker and fish salesmen, both from Italy and both evidently fans of an Italian anarchist named Luigi Galleani. Many anarchists of the 1910s were nothing more than glorified bomb-throwers with a political agenda. However, some of the more thoughtful in their midst sought an economic and political system freed from the tyranny of both large government and large business. These thinkers agreed with the syndicalists that what was needed was a world divided into small and interdependent enclaves that would provide sufficiency for everyone. These men and women were not Bolsheviks, although by the time of the Red Scare of 1918 and 1919, they would be lumped into that particular pot along with liberals, progressives, and socialists.
The Galleanists did utilize bomb attacks against what they believed to be holders of inherently corrupt positions in the U.S. government, including an attempted bombing of the notorious Red Scare leader, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. One such attack went haywire and ended up killing the perpetrator instead. An associate of the Italian anarchists, a man named Andrea Salsedo, was picked up by the Justice Department. He met his end after falling from a fourteenth floor window in the building from which he was in all likelihood pushed.
Salsedo had been arrested by the Bureau of Investigations (the precursor to the FBI) on suspicion of involvement in the April 15, 1920 robbery of the payroll at the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts. A security guard and paymaster were both murdered by the perpetrators of this robbery.
Nicola Sacco and Bertolomeo Vanzetti were arrested on May 5, 1920. When picked up by the cops, they were found carrying guns and anarchist literature.
An ambitious judge and even more ambitious prosecutor thrust themselves into the case. The prosecutor, Frederick Katzmann, secured a conviction against Vanzetti in Judge Webster Thayer's court on a charge of an attempted robbery that had occurred the previous Christmas Eve. But the real trial was yet to come.
In 1971, an Italian filmmaker named Giuliano Montaldo made a film that focused heavily on the second trial. In a fresh and exciting documentary fashion, Sacco & Vanzetti opens in stark black and white, giving a fast recap of the events leading up to the robbery and murders. Watching the movie today, it is easy to see the influence of this filmmaker on a young Oliver Stone when the latter created JFK twenty years later. We witness actions by the players in this real life drama from the point of view of the director, as well as from other participants, the narrative running ahead and slamming brakes, hopping back and spinning wildly, yet holding together through the nearly exhausting talent of the actors on the screen. Riccardo Cucciolla plays Sacco. Since that name probably means nothing to you, perhaps think of a young Tony Shalhoub. His character's timidity and outrage make him simultaneously sympathetic and dangerous without the raving sentimentality or melodrama those terms normally imply. The closest we get to cheap emotion is when Sacco's wife is looking for their son Dante while Nicola is being herded into a paddy wagon. We perceive his helplessness and feel his relief when the boy turns up wandering through the crowd.
It is, however, the fierceness of actor Gian Maria Volonte who, as Vanzetti, draws in the camera on every scene in which he appears. Tall, with a lecherous mustache, he also exhibits a sophistication that his character apparently did indeed possess. This is a man who would frighten people like Palmer and Edgar Hoover just by walking down the street on a sunny day.
Montaldo's film does an amazing job of recreating the flamboyant racism of Katzmann's prosecution of the two Italians as defense witness after witness is discredited due to a language barrier or nationality.
The components of the actual evidence were hardly demonstrative in and of themselves to warrant the conviction and subsequent death sentences handed down by the incompetent judge. But matters went far beyond mere incompetence. The firearms evidence was consistently tampered with and the only way this kind of nonsense could happen in America today would be if we were in the midst of some type of war on terrorism that resulted in American lives being at risk overseas, or with special renditions, or with the accused being denied proper legal representation. That, of course, is the source of the continuing relevance and downright popular fascination with this case.
In 2006, director Peter Miller released a real documentary about the case. This film, Sacco and Vanzetti (without the ampersand), gives us moving voice-overs by Tony Shalhoub and John Turturro reading letters written by the title characters from their prison cells. But the real force of this presentation comes from the historians, of all people. These folks, especially Howard Zinn and Mary Anne Trasciatti, tell the story in a way that makes contemporary the grief of the travesty of justice that resulted in the execution of these two men. The audience is also struck by the courage of Sacco and especially Vanzetti as they face a future they cannot help but understand all too well.
One of the most ironic elements in the film comes near the end when the daughter of one of the robbery victims recalls how she was in a college English class when the professor handed out poems for the members of the class to read aloud. She was given--apparently by accident--a poem written by Edna St. Vincent Mallay called "Justice Denied in Massachusetts." After class, one of the daughter's classmates told the instructor who the young lady was. His horror can only be imagined.
Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot
conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.
Let us go home, and sit in the sitting room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,
Beneficent upon us
Out of the glittering bay,
And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea
Moving the blades of corn
With a peaceful sound.
Forlorn, forlorn,
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.
And the petals drop to the ground,
Leaving the tree unfruited.
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed
uprooted--
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.
What from the splendid dead
We have inherited --
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued --
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.
Let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting-room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
Leaving to our children's children the beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex
I believe it was in 1981 that I first met some people who identified themselves as members of the Red Brigade. This small group of people were not directly connected with the Italian paramilitary organization that had kidnapped Aldo Moro. They were, however, sympathetic to the militant left wing internationalist cause and one fine afternoon at Marshall University these fifteen folks decided to call attention to themselves by holding up a long banner outside the student union. I was quite friendly with a couple of these young people and even though their approach to revolution was far too accepting of violent means of actions than my own, I nevertheless felt bad for them when the far larger crowd of students responded to the brief speech by one young protester by chatting "Bullshit!" and then by singing "America the Beautiful." The looks on the faces of those kids who were shouted down still haunts me because that look said that they knew they were not in their element, that they had no hope of converting anyone, and that their dreams of amounting to something useful in the war against oppression had been dashed to bits, at least for the afternoon.
Early this week, in the ugly month of January 2013, a young woman, probably a member of Code Pink (although I don't know that for certain), interrupted the confirmation hearings of nominee for Secretary of State, John Kerry. She shouted that she was tired of her friends in the Middle East being killed. Authorities carted her away with haste.
The following evening on "The Rachel Maddow Show," the host of the program mentioned in passing that in Washington DC, nobody pays much attention to protesters. She then went on to imply that Kerry was a good guy because he did make mention of protesters.
Ms. Maddow appeared to affect a glib tone in her remarks, a glibness that very much unsettles me. I am disturbed, not so much by her opinion but by my own hunch that she is unfortunately correct.
When we do not listen to protesters--even those with whom we have fundamental disagreements--we contribute to terrorism against ourselves. People in positions of power tend to use that power to promote bad things, such as the war against the Vietnamese people, the control over the Iranian people through the use of a Shah, the mining of Latin American harbors, the financing of the Taliban as a hedge against Soviet aggression. When people voice their objections to these and other things, we have a social responsibility to work out our own cognitive biases and get down to whether or not the angry whelps might just have a point, however clumsily that point might be offered, particularly when that point acts against the powerful and in favor of the weak.
When we reject peaceful protest out of hand, we are pissing off certain people. There are, rest assured, lots and lots of power freaks on the left as well as the right, and when we demonstrate that peaceful assembly is ineffectual and automoatically ignore it, we are fanning the flames of hatred of people who are quite happy to use violence as a justification for their own "greater" causes.
The RAF, or Red Army Faction, is the topic of tonight's movie, The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008). The phenomenon referenced in the film's title refers to a tendency to discover some new thing and to suddenly perceive that new thing everywhere while also assuming that it is not only new to you but new to everyone else as well. This happens a lot in politics. Some kid finds a copy of Das Kapital, somehow manages to read it, and decides that he's the first person to recognize the truth in his own lifetime. Simultaneously, he observes for the first time that capitalism does indeed victimize vast segments of society and that since its demise is a logical position in future history, it only stands to reason that an elite group (such as one which contains himself) must fight to bring about that revolution. It's also an effective way to push other people around.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex takes place in Germany from roughly 1967 through the late 1980s. Ulrike Meinof was a journalist disillusioned by the misogyny in her lover's political behavior. As she sympathetically reported on the German RAF, she met up with Andreas Baader and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin. The film portrays Meinof as a well-intentioned dupe and Baader as something of a thrill-seeking sociopath. I have no idea what these folks were personally. I will tell you that most of the actions conveyed in this remarkable movie really happened and the explanation the film offers (to the extent that it offers one; there's nothing overt in commentary) is that ego-maniacal, self-aggrandizing leaders often adapt the mask of urban guerrilla for no other purpose than to emulate the little tin gods they claim to despise.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a film with more genuine excitement, more historical relevance than any documentary you'll ever watch, probably because it is not a documentary, although it has more specificity than any movie I've ever seen. This near epic shows the connections between the European left and the various Arab causes, anti-antisemitism being one suggested villain here. While the intellects of the participants portrayed here are often limited, there is nothing stunted in the recent history this fast action movie conveys. More to the point, it shows the dangers in failing to pay attention to the criticisms offered by young people against a staid social system. We ignore the arguments of the Occupy Movement at our own risk. When the G-8 conferences are met with traditional public defiance, we better start thinking about what those kids are saying. Today's protester can inadvertently launch tomorrow's terrorist attack. Or are we all so certain of the propriety of our our national (and international) actions that we can only wither or vomit at the suggestion that just maybe our perfections contain rust?
Early this week, in the ugly month of January 2013, a young woman, probably a member of Code Pink (although I don't know that for certain), interrupted the confirmation hearings of nominee for Secretary of State, John Kerry. She shouted that she was tired of her friends in the Middle East being killed. Authorities carted her away with haste.
The following evening on "The Rachel Maddow Show," the host of the program mentioned in passing that in Washington DC, nobody pays much attention to protesters. She then went on to imply that Kerry was a good guy because he did make mention of protesters.
Ms. Maddow appeared to affect a glib tone in her remarks, a glibness that very much unsettles me. I am disturbed, not so much by her opinion but by my own hunch that she is unfortunately correct.
When we do not listen to protesters--even those with whom we have fundamental disagreements--we contribute to terrorism against ourselves. People in positions of power tend to use that power to promote bad things, such as the war against the Vietnamese people, the control over the Iranian people through the use of a Shah, the mining of Latin American harbors, the financing of the Taliban as a hedge against Soviet aggression. When people voice their objections to these and other things, we have a social responsibility to work out our own cognitive biases and get down to whether or not the angry whelps might just have a point, however clumsily that point might be offered, particularly when that point acts against the powerful and in favor of the weak.
When we reject peaceful protest out of hand, we are pissing off certain people. There are, rest assured, lots and lots of power freaks on the left as well as the right, and when we demonstrate that peaceful assembly is ineffectual and automoatically ignore it, we are fanning the flames of hatred of people who are quite happy to use violence as a justification for their own "greater" causes.
The RAF, or Red Army Faction, is the topic of tonight's movie, The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008). The phenomenon referenced in the film's title refers to a tendency to discover some new thing and to suddenly perceive that new thing everywhere while also assuming that it is not only new to you but new to everyone else as well. This happens a lot in politics. Some kid finds a copy of Das Kapital, somehow manages to read it, and decides that he's the first person to recognize the truth in his own lifetime. Simultaneously, he observes for the first time that capitalism does indeed victimize vast segments of society and that since its demise is a logical position in future history, it only stands to reason that an elite group (such as one which contains himself) must fight to bring about that revolution. It's also an effective way to push other people around.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex takes place in Germany from roughly 1967 through the late 1980s. Ulrike Meinof was a journalist disillusioned by the misogyny in her lover's political behavior. As she sympathetically reported on the German RAF, she met up with Andreas Baader and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin. The film portrays Meinof as a well-intentioned dupe and Baader as something of a thrill-seeking sociopath. I have no idea what these folks were personally. I will tell you that most of the actions conveyed in this remarkable movie really happened and the explanation the film offers (to the extent that it offers one; there's nothing overt in commentary) is that ego-maniacal, self-aggrandizing leaders often adapt the mask of urban guerrilla for no other purpose than to emulate the little tin gods they claim to despise.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a film with more genuine excitement, more historical relevance than any documentary you'll ever watch, probably because it is not a documentary, although it has more specificity than any movie I've ever seen. This near epic shows the connections between the European left and the various Arab causes, anti-antisemitism being one suggested villain here. While the intellects of the participants portrayed here are often limited, there is nothing stunted in the recent history this fast action movie conveys. More to the point, it shows the dangers in failing to pay attention to the criticisms offered by young people against a staid social system. We ignore the arguments of the Occupy Movement at our own risk. When the G-8 conferences are met with traditional public defiance, we better start thinking about what those kids are saying. Today's protester can inadvertently launch tomorrow's terrorist attack. Or are we all so certain of the propriety of our our national (and international) actions that we can only wither or vomit at the suggestion that just maybe our perfections contain rust?
The Secrets of Scientology
Here's my pitch for a movie I'd love someone to make: A corrupt international religious organization is exposed by a corrupt investigative news organization and vice versa. In other words, while the news program people attempt to reveal the underside of the Church, an investigative arm of the Church reveals the unscrupulous behavior of the activists at the news program. In the end of this proposed film, the two formerly opposing sides join forces, although, as in Orwell's Animal Farm, there arises an inevitable conflict: "There were shoutings, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials. The source of the trouble appeared to be that Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously." As the final credits roll, the Church is using the news program as an arm of its propaganda division to dumb down society into becoming prospects for plucking while the news program garners fantastic ratings under the guise of exposing the "final truth."
Perhaps someday such a project will be undertaken. As we await this occasion, we are free to enjoy the next best thing: a war between the Church of Scientology and a program by the BBC called Panorama. In 2007 the investigative news programme (their spelling) sent out a reporter named John Sweeney to gather information about L. Ron Hubbard's greatest achievement. They called the special programme "Scientology and Me." Sweeney narrates the half hour show with a tone not unlike that of Robin Leach of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" monotony. Indeed, the way Sweeney lingers over the word "stars" allows him to extend the word into no less than five syllables. It has been my observation that anyone using more than three syllables with the word is fawning. But that's a subjective assessment.
In his expose, Sweeney uses for narrative consistency the plot that Scientology officials are spying on him as he performs his due diligence. One official of the Church, a man named Tommy Davis, does show up quite often, usually in a snit over the BBC showman referring to his community as a cult. It turns out the religious organization is a mite testy about the use of that word and Davis reacts by stating that if Sweeney is looking to stage a conflict, he has succeeded. Davis says something to the effect that if Sweeney uses that word one more time, he, Davis, cannot be held responsible for his actions. This is quite juicy meat for the Panorama people, as they spend considerable time filming employees of the Church filming them.
When Sweeney isn't suggesting that the Church has been referred to as a cult by disaffected members, he is tossing around the word "brainwashing." (At this point it seems only sporting to mention that certain words in the English language have, through imprecise usage over long periods of time, lost specificity and gained both ambiguity and a vagueness that renders those words meaningless. On a list of such terms or phrases I would include "church," "cult" and "brainwashing." A new euphemism has gained ground with social scientists and others regarding the word "cult," one which is abbreviated NRM, standing for New Religious Movements. Even that expression has potential to be offensive, especially if one is speaking of a religion that thinks of itself as being very old. Sweeney and his producer surely were aware their language was offensive. Ah, but that makes better television.) While bandying about these terms at Celebrity Centre, a couple of the rich and famous blow a fuse, among them Anne Archer and Kirstie Alley, the latter turning the question around by asking if Sweeney would put the same question to a Jew.
While Panorama was filming the Scientologists, employees of the Church were indeed filming them back. As was made quite clear (pardon the expression) both by a Scientology movie called "Panorama Exposed" and by a follow-up of Sweeney's called "The Secrets of Scientology," Tommy Davis, Mike Rinder and others with the Church were employing what the Church at one time referred to as Fair Game tactics, in this case attempting to discredit the people who were trying to discredit them. In the follow-up to the Panorama broadcast, Rinder and a chap named Marty Rathbun explain that Davis had set up Sweeney and even provoked him into exploding on camera. One of the interesting tactics they used was to call out Mr. Sweeney as a "bigot," an emotionally charged word and one which they could be sure would antagonize the reporter. Another tactic was to constantly interrupt the reporter and to simply never let him get a word in without being interrupted, the goal being that Sweeney's emotions would bottle up and eventually come bursting out, as they in fact did.
Scientology's response film, "Panorama Exposed," in many ways comes off as vastly more professional than the programme it sought to discredit. They bring in all sorts of presumed experts in objective journalism to mention that it is standard procedure to get all sides of an issue rather than to begin with a preconceived notion and seek to only use video that supports that notion, or to stage events while presenting them as fact. The implication is that Sweeney routinely deviated from these standards of excellence. Speaking only for myself (and as someone who has little good to say about Scientology), it appears as if Sweeney was employing the shabbiest form of journalism, one formerly popularized by Mike Wallace and others.
There are several good reasons why the merging of these attempts at wrecking one another's careers would make a fascinating motion picture. First, I believe there is an impulse among the public at large to be disposed unfavorably about the Church of Scientology and its offshoots. Much of that distrust and suspicion may be well-earned. However, that does not negate the fact that many members of the organization have been involved in humanitarian projects across the planet. The Church's professed opposition to the field of psychiatry--famously espoused by actor Tom Cruise to a stunned Matt Lauer on "The Today Show"--may at least bear some consideration rather than being dismissed out of hand.
Second, the suspicion among many people that the news media as a whole is comprised of maggots who benefit the global power structure by anesthetizing the brains of the public has some basis in fact, as even a casual conversation with regular viewers of reality television quickly reveals.
Third, the thought that someday these two enemy groups--each accusing the other of brainwashing their followers--will join forces to deplete the souls of humanity may at first blush feel ridiculous, although I doubt it's more ridiculous than the idea that Lord Xenu hurled Thetans into volcanoes millions of years ago. As a matter of fact, one could call the premise of this proposed film "speculative religious fiction," or sort of a "divine what if" scenario that becomes more probable as in our day-to-day lives more and more insidious behavior of those in power is unearthed by those others in power.
Perhaps someday such a project will be undertaken. As we await this occasion, we are free to enjoy the next best thing: a war between the Church of Scientology and a program by the BBC called Panorama. In 2007 the investigative news programme (their spelling) sent out a reporter named John Sweeney to gather information about L. Ron Hubbard's greatest achievement. They called the special programme "Scientology and Me." Sweeney narrates the half hour show with a tone not unlike that of Robin Leach of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" monotony. Indeed, the way Sweeney lingers over the word "stars" allows him to extend the word into no less than five syllables. It has been my observation that anyone using more than three syllables with the word is fawning. But that's a subjective assessment.
In his expose, Sweeney uses for narrative consistency the plot that Scientology officials are spying on him as he performs his due diligence. One official of the Church, a man named Tommy Davis, does show up quite often, usually in a snit over the BBC showman referring to his community as a cult. It turns out the religious organization is a mite testy about the use of that word and Davis reacts by stating that if Sweeney is looking to stage a conflict, he has succeeded. Davis says something to the effect that if Sweeney uses that word one more time, he, Davis, cannot be held responsible for his actions. This is quite juicy meat for the Panorama people, as they spend considerable time filming employees of the Church filming them.
When Sweeney isn't suggesting that the Church has been referred to as a cult by disaffected members, he is tossing around the word "brainwashing." (At this point it seems only sporting to mention that certain words in the English language have, through imprecise usage over long periods of time, lost specificity and gained both ambiguity and a vagueness that renders those words meaningless. On a list of such terms or phrases I would include "church," "cult" and "brainwashing." A new euphemism has gained ground with social scientists and others regarding the word "cult," one which is abbreviated NRM, standing for New Religious Movements. Even that expression has potential to be offensive, especially if one is speaking of a religion that thinks of itself as being very old. Sweeney and his producer surely were aware their language was offensive. Ah, but that makes better television.) While bandying about these terms at Celebrity Centre, a couple of the rich and famous blow a fuse, among them Anne Archer and Kirstie Alley, the latter turning the question around by asking if Sweeney would put the same question to a Jew.
While Panorama was filming the Scientologists, employees of the Church were indeed filming them back. As was made quite clear (pardon the expression) both by a Scientology movie called "Panorama Exposed" and by a follow-up of Sweeney's called "The Secrets of Scientology," Tommy Davis, Mike Rinder and others with the Church were employing what the Church at one time referred to as Fair Game tactics, in this case attempting to discredit the people who were trying to discredit them. In the follow-up to the Panorama broadcast, Rinder and a chap named Marty Rathbun explain that Davis had set up Sweeney and even provoked him into exploding on camera. One of the interesting tactics they used was to call out Mr. Sweeney as a "bigot," an emotionally charged word and one which they could be sure would antagonize the reporter. Another tactic was to constantly interrupt the reporter and to simply never let him get a word in without being interrupted, the goal being that Sweeney's emotions would bottle up and eventually come bursting out, as they in fact did.
Scientology's response film, "Panorama Exposed," in many ways comes off as vastly more professional than the programme it sought to discredit. They bring in all sorts of presumed experts in objective journalism to mention that it is standard procedure to get all sides of an issue rather than to begin with a preconceived notion and seek to only use video that supports that notion, or to stage events while presenting them as fact. The implication is that Sweeney routinely deviated from these standards of excellence. Speaking only for myself (and as someone who has little good to say about Scientology), it appears as if Sweeney was employing the shabbiest form of journalism, one formerly popularized by Mike Wallace and others.
There are several good reasons why the merging of these attempts at wrecking one another's careers would make a fascinating motion picture. First, I believe there is an impulse among the public at large to be disposed unfavorably about the Church of Scientology and its offshoots. Much of that distrust and suspicion may be well-earned. However, that does not negate the fact that many members of the organization have been involved in humanitarian projects across the planet. The Church's professed opposition to the field of psychiatry--famously espoused by actor Tom Cruise to a stunned Matt Lauer on "The Today Show"--may at least bear some consideration rather than being dismissed out of hand.
Second, the suspicion among many people that the news media as a whole is comprised of maggots who benefit the global power structure by anesthetizing the brains of the public has some basis in fact, as even a casual conversation with regular viewers of reality television quickly reveals.
Third, the thought that someday these two enemy groups--each accusing the other of brainwashing their followers--will join forces to deplete the souls of humanity may at first blush feel ridiculous, although I doubt it's more ridiculous than the idea that Lord Xenu hurled Thetans into volcanoes millions of years ago. As a matter of fact, one could call the premise of this proposed film "speculative religious fiction," or sort of a "divine what if" scenario that becomes more probable as in our day-to-day lives more and more insidious behavior of those in power is unearthed by those others in power.
Flight
The most exciting airline flight in the history of cinema is far and away a great reason--in and of itself--to watch Flight (2012). Director Robert Zemeckis kept the cameras inside the plane for the duration of the problem that Denzel Washington's character resolves, creating a genuinely disturbing sense of claustrophobia that is so strong it's actually painful. Only after the plane has landed do we get a sense as to how the plane appeared to those on the ground. Denzel, as pilot Whip Whitaker, handles the situation with more self-control than anyone since Ed Harris helped land the Apollo 13 spacecraft. Part of what makes this so amazing is that Whitaker has smoked marijuana, snorted a fat line of cocaine, drunk two (or three) airline bottles of vodka, and ingested a couple hits of oxygen. All this adds to our fascination, as well as our overwhelming tension during the flight.
This is one of the three great aspects of the movie.
Another is the perfect manner in which all the people involved in the film create the sense of substance abuse on the part of Whip. From the vacillating volumes of the music to the facial reactions when situations tighten up the pressure, from the repeated lies to others to the inherent self-deceptions, every last detail of addiction is represented here so well that anyone personally familiar with the problem will become very uncomfortable. Given the preponderance of substance abuse, the chances are that if you yourself don't have the problem, you love someone who does.
The third great thing is actor Don Cheadle.
Unfortunately, those are the only three great things about the movie, other than the fact that the filmmakers decided to address the subject at all.
John Goodman, as drug dealer Harling Mays, reminds us of his appearance in Arachnophobia, meaning that while his character is intended as comic relief, what he really accomplishes is an exercise in overreach that is occasionally downright embarrassing to watch. Goodman's a damned fine actor. It's a pity his overacting wasn't reigned in here.
Another problem with acting comes in a different form. The remarkable Melissa Leo as investigator Ellen Block doesn't get nearly enough screen time, resulting in leaving us to wonder what her actual feelings are about the possibility that Whip was unfit to pilot the passenger airplane. The same thing rings true with Peter Gerety, a very gifted actor whose character's motivation seems to be a paycheck rather than anything we can latch onto.
The biggest problem with Flight is that the movie--apparently consciously--left too many matters unresolved. How many bottles of vodka did Whip actually drink? What happened to his wife? What happened to his former heroin-addicted girlfriend? And perhaps the most frustrating problem is the identity of the other alcoholic among the flight crew. We meet a woman at the beginning of the film who is undressed for an extended period of time. She is Whip's overnight guest in a hotel. This woman may or may not be a member of the flight crew, a woman who dies during the plane landing, the woman who also had a drinking problem. Yes, I know I could check it out on IMDB or elsewhere. The point is that I shouldn't have to check it out. I ought to know by watching. I don't, probably because during the nude scene I wasn't exactly watching the woman's face if you know what I mean and I think you do. I'm not alone in my uncertainty either. Just ask my female roommate.
As a film that runs a little over two hours, Flight, it might be argued, didn't have time to give Leo and Gerety more time on camera, or explain every little nitpicking detail. That would be true if the movie didn't waste a great deal of time on items that fall outside the purview of the three elements that serve a visualized story. Oh, you aren't familiar with those three elements, as I so highfalutinly call them? In order to be valid aspects of a movie, a scene must either further the plot, further character development, or further the aesthetic appeal of the film. Time spent on a back porch yakking it up about the old days or hanging out in a stairwell at a hospital further none of these things and indeed are boring as hell.
If you want to watch Denzel in one of the most amazing performances of his career--which is to say one of the best acting jobs anywhere--then you will like this movie. Even that won't be enough for you to love it.
This is one of the three great aspects of the movie.
Another is the perfect manner in which all the people involved in the film create the sense of substance abuse on the part of Whip. From the vacillating volumes of the music to the facial reactions when situations tighten up the pressure, from the repeated lies to others to the inherent self-deceptions, every last detail of addiction is represented here so well that anyone personally familiar with the problem will become very uncomfortable. Given the preponderance of substance abuse, the chances are that if you yourself don't have the problem, you love someone who does.
The third great thing is actor Don Cheadle.
Unfortunately, those are the only three great things about the movie, other than the fact that the filmmakers decided to address the subject at all.
John Goodman, as drug dealer Harling Mays, reminds us of his appearance in Arachnophobia, meaning that while his character is intended as comic relief, what he really accomplishes is an exercise in overreach that is occasionally downright embarrassing to watch. Goodman's a damned fine actor. It's a pity his overacting wasn't reigned in here.
Another problem with acting comes in a different form. The remarkable Melissa Leo as investigator Ellen Block doesn't get nearly enough screen time, resulting in leaving us to wonder what her actual feelings are about the possibility that Whip was unfit to pilot the passenger airplane. The same thing rings true with Peter Gerety, a very gifted actor whose character's motivation seems to be a paycheck rather than anything we can latch onto.
The biggest problem with Flight is that the movie--apparently consciously--left too many matters unresolved. How many bottles of vodka did Whip actually drink? What happened to his wife? What happened to his former heroin-addicted girlfriend? And perhaps the most frustrating problem is the identity of the other alcoholic among the flight crew. We meet a woman at the beginning of the film who is undressed for an extended period of time. She is Whip's overnight guest in a hotel. This woman may or may not be a member of the flight crew, a woman who dies during the plane landing, the woman who also had a drinking problem. Yes, I know I could check it out on IMDB or elsewhere. The point is that I shouldn't have to check it out. I ought to know by watching. I don't, probably because during the nude scene I wasn't exactly watching the woman's face if you know what I mean and I think you do. I'm not alone in my uncertainty either. Just ask my female roommate.
As a film that runs a little over two hours, Flight, it might be argued, didn't have time to give Leo and Gerety more time on camera, or explain every little nitpicking detail. That would be true if the movie didn't waste a great deal of time on items that fall outside the purview of the three elements that serve a visualized story. Oh, you aren't familiar with those three elements, as I so highfalutinly call them? In order to be valid aspects of a movie, a scene must either further the plot, further character development, or further the aesthetic appeal of the film. Time spent on a back porch yakking it up about the old days or hanging out in a stairwell at a hospital further none of these things and indeed are boring as hell.
If you want to watch Denzel in one of the most amazing performances of his career--which is to say one of the best acting jobs anywhere--then you will like this movie. Even that won't be enough for you to love it.
Argo
Science fiction author Roger Zelazny wrote the novel Lord of Light in 1967 and the following year the book was deservedly awarded the Hugo for Best Novel. Roughly seven years later, a genuine whiz kid named Barry Ira Geller bought the rights to Zelazny's novel and wrote a screenplay based on the novel. According to Geller's version of events, he also acquired the rights to something called the Science Fiction Land, an amusement park that would be developed, the proceeds from which would help finance the projected movie. Illustrator Jack Kirby came in to do the storyboards. Buckminster Fuller lent some ideas. Ray Bradbury drove in to advise. As talk of the theme park became more and more loose, investors grew nervous and the screenplay remained just words on a bunch of pages.
On November 4, 1979, student militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran. Six American employees escaped and assumed residence with Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor. Fifty embassy personnel were held captive by the Iranian government for 444 days.
The six escapees were Cora Lijek and her husband Mark, Joe Stafford and his wife Kathy, Bob Anders and Lee Schatz. The method of their ultimate escape and return to the United States is all the more fascinating because most of the details did not come out until Bill Clinton's presidency, when the specifics had been declassified.
Ben Affleck directed and starred in the movie Argo. You may have heard of it. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture. What you may not have heard is that a great deal of the story is true, which is to say it is based on fact, rather than married to the facts. In some quarters, a certain amount of hoohaa has been raised about the so-called distortions of fact (the role of the Canadian government was substantially greater than the film indicates, the Alan Arkin character never really happened, the Revolutionary Guard weren't actually at the airport, etc.), but those objections fail to appreciate Mershon's Law of Cinematic Historical Responsibility. In case some of you were snoozing when you should have been taking notes, I will repeat for your benefit the complete text of this supreme dictum. It goes like this: The maker of a film about real historical persons and events is obliged to tell the truth. The exception to this is when the use of "dramatic license" enables the film maker to tell the truth better than the facts themselves can do.
With Mershon's Law of Cinematic Historical Responsibility in mind, there can be no valid objections to this movie on the basis of sticking to the facts. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd might spend a little more time thinking about the difference between facts and truth, but then again her paper's editors probably don't know the difference either. Just ask Judith Miller.
But getting back to the escapees. . . There was a need to get them out of Iran. The idea came about that a-least-of-all-possible-bad-ideas would be that the six Americans were actually Canadians who had been in Iran scouting out some land for possible shooting sequences for the space opera which by now was going by the name Argo. And that's essentially what happened. Barry Geller's screenplay (but not Jack Kirby's illustrations) were used as part of the cover for the escape mission. Sometimes life imitates art. Other times life puts art to work.
The principal actors in this movie--Affleck, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman and Alan Arkin--are nothing short of amazing. Affleck avoids the typical Tom Cruise super spy melodrama and instead gives us a staid and thoughtful character whose reactions to the fantasy world of Hollywood are as revealing and ironic as anything we've seen in years. Goodman's character is rooted in good-natured cynicism and self-confidence and unlike his performance in Flight, Goodman provides the exact amount of ridiculousness without becoming a self-parody. Arkin once again plays the crusty wise man with a biting sense of humor. He plays that better than anyone since Walter Matthau and Arkin actually is better at it than Walter was. And Walter was damned good.
The ticking clock device gets a lot of use in this movie, as when the embassy employees have one hour to destroy classified documents before the students storm the compound, or when the escape simply must take place on a given date and time despite bureaucratic obstacles, or when it turns out the plane the Americans board to fly to Canada is second in line for take-off as the Revolutionary Guards are in hot pursuit. But again, this is a thriller, so we kind of expect a certain amount of contrivance just to keep us glued to the edges of our seats.
The only criticism of this movie I've read with which I can agree is that there was a decided lack of character development. On this point I at least partially agree. I mentioned the names of the six escapees earlier in this piece for a reason. My suspicion is that the overwhelming majority of the people who have watched Argo would be unable to name even one of those real life people, not because the audience wasn't paying attention--the movie almost forces us to notice every last detail, which in this case is good, but--because we basically have no reason to care about any of these six people for any other reason than that they are Americans. Since this is a movie that recounts events which tend to stir up patriotic memories, the fact that they are Americans might actually be enough, were it not for the first three minutes of the movie, during which we hear a female narrator--possibly the Canadian embassy's housekeeper--provide a succinct and accurate description of what happened in Iran between 1960 and 1979. Once we are reminded, or rediscover, that our government had provoked the hostage crisis by supporting the Shah of Iran against the well-being of the Iranian people, simply being an American is somehow insufficient when it comes to giving us a reason to care about a person. The only real transformation or development in the viewpoints of these six is when one of the men who had resisted the assistance of U.S. operative Tony Mendez (Affleck) finally reaches across a row of airplane seats to shake his hand. That's it. Since the movie's tension depends upon the safe escape of these six people, and since we already know in advance that they do escape, the only other reason to care about them is if we have some glimpse as to who they are. As my roommate pointed out, the best opportunity for this much needed development was when the six were studying their cover roles (director, cinematographer, and so on.) This would also have been a great place to add to the contrived tension by having one person flub his or her drilling in a substantial way so that the others could panic over the possibility of being detected.
The theatrical film version ran precisely two hours. Apparently there is an extended version somewhere that added ten minutes. Maybe those ten minutes accomplished what was sorely needed. I'd love to see those ten minutes.
Otherwise, Argo provides a public service as well as fine entertainment by addressing itself not only to the "Canadian caper" but to the hostage crisis itself. Those 444 days were very much a turning point in the United States. After the revelations about Vietnam, Watergate, the Church Committee, as well as the assassinations of so many progressive leaders, a mood of alienation had settled onto this country like a winter that seems to never end. I think a lot of that pall was actually healthy. We need to be reminded of our own faults in order to irradiate them. But on November 4, 1979, the Iranians became the bad guys, the dirty rotten foreigners out to destroy us. Their motivation didn't matter. Even American college students who weeks before had protested again SAVAK (the Shah's secret police force) began to wave the flag and hate Arabs just on general principle. With a new bunch of baddies burning our flags, parading our hostages like the Soviets did their ICBMs, and probably stealing "our" oil, it wasn't long before whatever lessons we might have learned over the previous twenty-odd years had for the most part been forgotten. In one of the most objective and uneditorialized telling of events I've ever had the joy of watching, Argo tells the truth of what happened during the most pivotal time in the last forty years. And unlike so many other versions of the work of "heroes," this one accomplishes its telling without rockets red glare or bombs bursting in air. It tells the story and leaves. A significant achievement.
On November 4, 1979, student militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran. Six American employees escaped and assumed residence with Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor. Fifty embassy personnel were held captive by the Iranian government for 444 days.
The six escapees were Cora Lijek and her husband Mark, Joe Stafford and his wife Kathy, Bob Anders and Lee Schatz. The method of their ultimate escape and return to the United States is all the more fascinating because most of the details did not come out until Bill Clinton's presidency, when the specifics had been declassified.
Ben Affleck directed and starred in the movie Argo. You may have heard of it. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture. What you may not have heard is that a great deal of the story is true, which is to say it is based on fact, rather than married to the facts. In some quarters, a certain amount of hoohaa has been raised about the so-called distortions of fact (the role of the Canadian government was substantially greater than the film indicates, the Alan Arkin character never really happened, the Revolutionary Guard weren't actually at the airport, etc.), but those objections fail to appreciate Mershon's Law of Cinematic Historical Responsibility. In case some of you were snoozing when you should have been taking notes, I will repeat for your benefit the complete text of this supreme dictum. It goes like this: The maker of a film about real historical persons and events is obliged to tell the truth. The exception to this is when the use of "dramatic license" enables the film maker to tell the truth better than the facts themselves can do.
With Mershon's Law of Cinematic Historical Responsibility in mind, there can be no valid objections to this movie on the basis of sticking to the facts. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd might spend a little more time thinking about the difference between facts and truth, but then again her paper's editors probably don't know the difference either. Just ask Judith Miller.
But getting back to the escapees. . . There was a need to get them out of Iran. The idea came about that a-least-of-all-possible-bad-ideas would be that the six Americans were actually Canadians who had been in Iran scouting out some land for possible shooting sequences for the space opera which by now was going by the name Argo. And that's essentially what happened. Barry Geller's screenplay (but not Jack Kirby's illustrations) were used as part of the cover for the escape mission. Sometimes life imitates art. Other times life puts art to work.
The principal actors in this movie--Affleck, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman and Alan Arkin--are nothing short of amazing. Affleck avoids the typical Tom Cruise super spy melodrama and instead gives us a staid and thoughtful character whose reactions to the fantasy world of Hollywood are as revealing and ironic as anything we've seen in years. Goodman's character is rooted in good-natured cynicism and self-confidence and unlike his performance in Flight, Goodman provides the exact amount of ridiculousness without becoming a self-parody. Arkin once again plays the crusty wise man with a biting sense of humor. He plays that better than anyone since Walter Matthau and Arkin actually is better at it than Walter was. And Walter was damned good.
The ticking clock device gets a lot of use in this movie, as when the embassy employees have one hour to destroy classified documents before the students storm the compound, or when the escape simply must take place on a given date and time despite bureaucratic obstacles, or when it turns out the plane the Americans board to fly to Canada is second in line for take-off as the Revolutionary Guards are in hot pursuit. But again, this is a thriller, so we kind of expect a certain amount of contrivance just to keep us glued to the edges of our seats.
The only criticism of this movie I've read with which I can agree is that there was a decided lack of character development. On this point I at least partially agree. I mentioned the names of the six escapees earlier in this piece for a reason. My suspicion is that the overwhelming majority of the people who have watched Argo would be unable to name even one of those real life people, not because the audience wasn't paying attention--the movie almost forces us to notice every last detail, which in this case is good, but--because we basically have no reason to care about any of these six people for any other reason than that they are Americans. Since this is a movie that recounts events which tend to stir up patriotic memories, the fact that they are Americans might actually be enough, were it not for the first three minutes of the movie, during which we hear a female narrator--possibly the Canadian embassy's housekeeper--provide a succinct and accurate description of what happened in Iran between 1960 and 1979. Once we are reminded, or rediscover, that our government had provoked the hostage crisis by supporting the Shah of Iran against the well-being of the Iranian people, simply being an American is somehow insufficient when it comes to giving us a reason to care about a person. The only real transformation or development in the viewpoints of these six is when one of the men who had resisted the assistance of U.S. operative Tony Mendez (Affleck) finally reaches across a row of airplane seats to shake his hand. That's it. Since the movie's tension depends upon the safe escape of these six people, and since we already know in advance that they do escape, the only other reason to care about them is if we have some glimpse as to who they are. As my roommate pointed out, the best opportunity for this much needed development was when the six were studying their cover roles (director, cinematographer, and so on.) This would also have been a great place to add to the contrived tension by having one person flub his or her drilling in a substantial way so that the others could panic over the possibility of being detected.
The theatrical film version ran precisely two hours. Apparently there is an extended version somewhere that added ten minutes. Maybe those ten minutes accomplished what was sorely needed. I'd love to see those ten minutes.
Otherwise, Argo provides a public service as well as fine entertainment by addressing itself not only to the "Canadian caper" but to the hostage crisis itself. Those 444 days were very much a turning point in the United States. After the revelations about Vietnam, Watergate, the Church Committee, as well as the assassinations of so many progressive leaders, a mood of alienation had settled onto this country like a winter that seems to never end. I think a lot of that pall was actually healthy. We need to be reminded of our own faults in order to irradiate them. But on November 4, 1979, the Iranians became the bad guys, the dirty rotten foreigners out to destroy us. Their motivation didn't matter. Even American college students who weeks before had protested again SAVAK (the Shah's secret police force) began to wave the flag and hate Arabs just on general principle. With a new bunch of baddies burning our flags, parading our hostages like the Soviets did their ICBMs, and probably stealing "our" oil, it wasn't long before whatever lessons we might have learned over the previous twenty-odd years had for the most part been forgotten. In one of the most objective and uneditorialized telling of events I've ever had the joy of watching, Argo tells the truth of what happened during the most pivotal time in the last forty years. And unlike so many other versions of the work of "heroes," this one accomplishes its telling without rockets red glare or bombs bursting in air. It tells the story and leaves. A significant achievement.
The World's Fastest Indian
Let's go into this with our eyes open. I liked Anthony Hopkins in Nixonand in a TV movie about the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. I never liked--not even a little bit--the Hannibal Lector movies, except for the one with Ed Norton in it and then it was Ed whom I liked. It has seemed to me that often enough Hopkins overdoes the intensity with that look of supreme intellect in the same way that, say, Jack Nicholoson often overdoes the mugging for the camera.
I lay this out up front because I hope that you will take from this that my love of Hopkins in The World's Fastest Indian (2005) perhaps is all the more significant in that Anthony, if anything, underacts here, something which in turn emphasizes the genuine humility of the real life character of Burt Munro. Even though the real life Hopkins has claimed that playing Munro was one of the easiest gigs of his professional life, I don't buy that for a minute. Why? Imagine the difference between playing a wild-eyed, sinister type of smartass cannibal and that of playing a humble man of modest means who combines being blunt with being charming while struggling to place the emphasis on his motorcycle rather than on himself. That emphasis, in turn, quite naturally inverts the emphasis onto the Munro character. And what a character he is. Strolling into a desert bar, he mentions to a middle-aged woman barfly that smoking isn't necessarily healthy, or explaining to a state trooper who has awakened him parked by the side of the road that he is sorry for having broken the law--it's just that he was recovering from a heart attack, or that he doesn't see the need for a parachute on the back of his cycle because, after all, he's more concerned with going fast than with stopping, which is one reason his 1920 Indian motorcycle doesn't have much in the way of brakes.
Ever since the horrors of September, 2001, the media--and filmmakers, in particular--have obsessed over the idea of the hero, especially how everyday people rise up and save the day in some sensational manner. That's fine and it really is fantastic that fire fighters selflessly run into blazing buildings and that cops jump off the tops of buildings to apprehend the ne'erdowell. However, the term hero reaches a point where it comes to signify everything and hence loses meaning altogether. Hopkins' version of Munro (and I suspect Munro's version of himself) is of a self-effacing gentleman who likes the people he encounters throughout his journey to the Bonneville Salt Flats, whether it's the woman who runs an auto-repair shop or the Vietnam aircraft pilot who defoliates the Vietnamese jungles. Because Hopkins steals the scenes through understatement, we have a chance to love these support actors too, whether it's Diane Ladd as the lovelorn widow or any of the tertiary characters who so far haven't quite paved a star on Hollywood's walk of fame. Hopkins has his. With this movie, there can be no argument as to why.
I lay this out up front because I hope that you will take from this that my love of Hopkins in The World's Fastest Indian (2005) perhaps is all the more significant in that Anthony, if anything, underacts here, something which in turn emphasizes the genuine humility of the real life character of Burt Munro. Even though the real life Hopkins has claimed that playing Munro was one of the easiest gigs of his professional life, I don't buy that for a minute. Why? Imagine the difference between playing a wild-eyed, sinister type of smartass cannibal and that of playing a humble man of modest means who combines being blunt with being charming while struggling to place the emphasis on his motorcycle rather than on himself. That emphasis, in turn, quite naturally inverts the emphasis onto the Munro character. And what a character he is. Strolling into a desert bar, he mentions to a middle-aged woman barfly that smoking isn't necessarily healthy, or explaining to a state trooper who has awakened him parked by the side of the road that he is sorry for having broken the law--it's just that he was recovering from a heart attack, or that he doesn't see the need for a parachute on the back of his cycle because, after all, he's more concerned with going fast than with stopping, which is one reason his 1920 Indian motorcycle doesn't have much in the way of brakes.
Ever since the horrors of September, 2001, the media--and filmmakers, in particular--have obsessed over the idea of the hero, especially how everyday people rise up and save the day in some sensational manner. That's fine and it really is fantastic that fire fighters selflessly run into blazing buildings and that cops jump off the tops of buildings to apprehend the ne'erdowell. However, the term hero reaches a point where it comes to signify everything and hence loses meaning altogether. Hopkins' version of Munro (and I suspect Munro's version of himself) is of a self-effacing gentleman who likes the people he encounters throughout his journey to the Bonneville Salt Flats, whether it's the woman who runs an auto-repair shop or the Vietnam aircraft pilot who defoliates the Vietnamese jungles. Because Hopkins steals the scenes through understatement, we have a chance to love these support actors too, whether it's Diane Ladd as the lovelorn widow or any of the tertiary characters who so far haven't quite paved a star on Hollywood's walk of fame. Hopkins has his. With this movie, there can be no argument as to why.
The Hoax
The Hoax (2006) has a lot going for it. First, it stars actor Richard Gere as writer Clifford Irving. Gere holds the look, arranges the quirks, and portrays himself as a more or less sophisticated con man without a cause. The actor's transformation into his character's metamorphosis into Howard Hughes jumps over the block of believability and lands squarely onto the precipice of sinister possession. Second, the movie gives us Stanley Tucci as Shelton Fisher, the chairman of the board of McGraw-Hill. Tucci pulls off the role of the outwardly relaxed and inwardly stressed out executive as well as anyone who ever lived. When we watch Fisher confront Irving, we get moved into the corner of Irving's soul and genuinely want the thief to wiggle his way out.
The movie has those two very strong elements, both of which save the film from the slagheap where it might otherwise have been more comfortable.
The real story itself is more than important. It is fascinating. In 1969 Clifford Irving wrote a good biography of famed art forger Elmyr de Hory, a painter whose forgeries were occasionally superior to the originals. Two years later he was up to his nose working on the autobiography of Howard Hughes, a book that did not quite meet the criteria of an autobiography in the sense that the subject not only did not authorize the book, he had nothing to do with the work and did not even know about it until news of the book's eventual release reached Las Vegas. Irving sold the idea that he had Hughes' cooperation to McGraw-Hill.
One of the many places in which this movie goes horribly wrong is with the treatment of investigative reporter James Phelan. This problem is complicated, so hang on tight. In the movie, Eli Wallach plays Noah Dietrich, a guy who has written a biography of Hughes. In the real world, the writer was Phelan. In the movie, Dietrich is a rich hack. In reality, Phelan was the farthest thing from a hack. He had a weird connection to the Jim Garrison investigation of the John Kennedy assassination--ultimately a successful effort to discredit the New Orleans District Attorney. He also had written a then-unpublished biography of Hughes, one which Irving evidently got hold of and used for research purposes in his fake book. The Dietrich character, in the film, provides a strange connection to a $205,000 loan Hughes made to Donald Nixon, brother of the future President. In the movie, this revelation is happening in real time. In reality, the details of the loan were made public by Phelan as far back as 1962, ten years before the events in our movie take place. Why is this important? It's important because the movie makes it sound as if Nixon's paranoia over the facts of the Hughes' loan was the basis for ordering the break-ins at the Watergate, the crimes that began the unraveling of Nixon's regime. As someone with more than a passing interest in the Watergate affair, I have, of course, heard the rumors that Nixon was worried that Hughes had turned incriminating information over to the Democratic National Committee as a way of forcing Nixon into using presidential influence to forge a favorable path for the reclusive billionaire on his way out of a mire with the Justice Department. The film, however, distorts the facts of this history more severely than Irving ever did. The title of the film threatens to become unhappily ironic.
Regardless of motives, the biggest drag this film produces is in its failure to even once confront the central issue that it half-heartedly initiates: the intoxicating lure of the illusion of the swindle. With all due respect to public fascination with computer animated mischief, the brilliance of fakery reached its zenith in the early 1970s, a point at which most people began to recognize that most of what they saw, heard or smelled was actually something else entirely. They could look upon the visage of a man like Nixon, know for a fact that he was evil beyond comparison, yet feel completely righteous in supporting the man all the way to the bridges of hell. How could it be possible that the sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation could be monstrous enough to destroy much of Southeast Asia? How could the country that had said NO to fascism turn around and jelly-burn innocent children? Answer: Nothing up my sleeve--presto! You have a new set of eyeballs, the kind that Little Red Riding Hood could've used to her own advantage.
That The Hoax doesn't even acknowledge the possibility that people want to be deluded as a way of easing their own cognitive dissonance is a far greater offense than anything Clifford Irving ever attempted.
The movie has those two very strong elements, both of which save the film from the slagheap where it might otherwise have been more comfortable.
The real story itself is more than important. It is fascinating. In 1969 Clifford Irving wrote a good biography of famed art forger Elmyr de Hory, a painter whose forgeries were occasionally superior to the originals. Two years later he was up to his nose working on the autobiography of Howard Hughes, a book that did not quite meet the criteria of an autobiography in the sense that the subject not only did not authorize the book, he had nothing to do with the work and did not even know about it until news of the book's eventual release reached Las Vegas. Irving sold the idea that he had Hughes' cooperation to McGraw-Hill.
One of the many places in which this movie goes horribly wrong is with the treatment of investigative reporter James Phelan. This problem is complicated, so hang on tight. In the movie, Eli Wallach plays Noah Dietrich, a guy who has written a biography of Hughes. In the real world, the writer was Phelan. In the movie, Dietrich is a rich hack. In reality, Phelan was the farthest thing from a hack. He had a weird connection to the Jim Garrison investigation of the John Kennedy assassination--ultimately a successful effort to discredit the New Orleans District Attorney. He also had written a then-unpublished biography of Hughes, one which Irving evidently got hold of and used for research purposes in his fake book. The Dietrich character, in the film, provides a strange connection to a $205,000 loan Hughes made to Donald Nixon, brother of the future President. In the movie, this revelation is happening in real time. In reality, the details of the loan were made public by Phelan as far back as 1962, ten years before the events in our movie take place. Why is this important? It's important because the movie makes it sound as if Nixon's paranoia over the facts of the Hughes' loan was the basis for ordering the break-ins at the Watergate, the crimes that began the unraveling of Nixon's regime. As someone with more than a passing interest in the Watergate affair, I have, of course, heard the rumors that Nixon was worried that Hughes had turned incriminating information over to the Democratic National Committee as a way of forcing Nixon into using presidential influence to forge a favorable path for the reclusive billionaire on his way out of a mire with the Justice Department. The film, however, distorts the facts of this history more severely than Irving ever did. The title of the film threatens to become unhappily ironic.
Regardless of motives, the biggest drag this film produces is in its failure to even once confront the central issue that it half-heartedly initiates: the intoxicating lure of the illusion of the swindle. With all due respect to public fascination with computer animated mischief, the brilliance of fakery reached its zenith in the early 1970s, a point at which most people began to recognize that most of what they saw, heard or smelled was actually something else entirely. They could look upon the visage of a man like Nixon, know for a fact that he was evil beyond comparison, yet feel completely righteous in supporting the man all the way to the bridges of hell. How could it be possible that the sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation could be monstrous enough to destroy much of Southeast Asia? How could the country that had said NO to fascism turn around and jelly-burn innocent children? Answer: Nothing up my sleeve--presto! You have a new set of eyeballs, the kind that Little Red Riding Hood could've used to her own advantage.
That The Hoax doesn't even acknowledge the possibility that people want to be deluded as a way of easing their own cognitive dissonance is a far greater offense than anything Clifford Irving ever attempted.
S1m0ne
Writer and director Andrew Niccol concerns himself with the nature of reality in his comedy S1m0ne (2002). This issue remains timely, despite the alleged technological advancements in the years since the film's tepid release. On a personal note, I've recently reacquired certain books that escaped my grasp over the years, in particular a cool one called Godel, Escher, Bach (1979) by Douglas Hofstadter, a book which--among other things--explores the nature of reality viz a vis Zeno's Paradoxes and computer programming. In any case, Niccol takes aim at the audience appetite for celebrity over substance in this occasionally humorous but mostly angry film that does not quite hold up and wouldn't even bear mentioning except for the decent performances of Al Pacino and a guy named Elias Koteas, respectively playing Viktor and Hank, the former a movie director, the latter a computer geek with an obsession for the former's films.
Pacino has never excelled in comedic roles, as anyone who remembers Author! Author! (1982) will attest. As one of the most emotionally expressive performers of our age, Pacino is too empathetic to be funny for an extended period of time. In other words, the audience seizes upon his humanity from the first line of dialogue and cannot help but hurt, even when Niccol wants us to experience satire. The best example of this comes in the final third of the movie. Viktor has created a virtual actress named Simone. His creation is so in keeping with the shallowness of the times that the public convinces itself that she is real. Once Viktor can no longer cope with the pressures his Frankenstein has made for him, he attempts to discredit her by having her come out in favor of wearing fur, smoking cigarettes and eating dolphin. Instead of being horrified, the public fawns for her because of her lack of pretension, Time magazine even naming her--ironically--Person of the Year. That is funny on the written page. However, it's only visually funny if you are the kind of person who thought that the townsfolk trying to kill the monster in Mary Shelley's novella was laughable.
The other big problem with the movie is that the most interesting character--Hank, the geek--gets killed off far too soon, even though it is his genius that starts the wheels spinning. To that end, most of the people who we want to fixate upon get far too little time on camera, especially Winona Ryder as an over-the-top diva with more ego than talent. Far too much time is given to Catherine Keener (as Viktor's ex-wife), an actor whose odds of captivating our emotions lies somewhere between slim and none--and Slim is on vacation.
The biggest problem of all is that we've seen all this before. Nothing gets added to the sense that our society is just a liquid turd. All we learn is that we like being conned, something that this movie does nothing to rectify.
Pacino has never excelled in comedic roles, as anyone who remembers Author! Author! (1982) will attest. As one of the most emotionally expressive performers of our age, Pacino is too empathetic to be funny for an extended period of time. In other words, the audience seizes upon his humanity from the first line of dialogue and cannot help but hurt, even when Niccol wants us to experience satire. The best example of this comes in the final third of the movie. Viktor has created a virtual actress named Simone. His creation is so in keeping with the shallowness of the times that the public convinces itself that she is real. Once Viktor can no longer cope with the pressures his Frankenstein has made for him, he attempts to discredit her by having her come out in favor of wearing fur, smoking cigarettes and eating dolphin. Instead of being horrified, the public fawns for her because of her lack of pretension, Time magazine even naming her--ironically--Person of the Year. That is funny on the written page. However, it's only visually funny if you are the kind of person who thought that the townsfolk trying to kill the monster in Mary Shelley's novella was laughable.
The other big problem with the movie is that the most interesting character--Hank, the geek--gets killed off far too soon, even though it is his genius that starts the wheels spinning. To that end, most of the people who we want to fixate upon get far too little time on camera, especially Winona Ryder as an over-the-top diva with more ego than talent. Far too much time is given to Catherine Keener (as Viktor's ex-wife), an actor whose odds of captivating our emotions lies somewhere between slim and none--and Slim is on vacation.
The biggest problem of all is that we've seen all this before. Nothing gets added to the sense that our society is just a liquid turd. All we learn is that we like being conned, something that this movie does nothing to rectify.
About Schmidt
About Schmidt (2002), I at first thought, is satire of a subtle order. Upon reflection I have realized it is more of an indictment. Against what? Well you might ask.
Near where I live, the city government spends money to improve the quality of the street pavement so that the drug dealers who live nearby will not be unduly inconvenienced by flat tires, rusty nails and pot holes. The local government then spends other money to have that improved street smashed to smithereens in order to improve the quality of the water lines, the gas lines, and the electric lines. This improvement requires that the recently improved paving job on the street be undone in as severe a manner as possible. The ultimate--though not final--irony jumps up and taps us on the shoulder when it happens that the construction workers who come back around to re-repair the re-destroyed street are using their trucks for multiple purposes, including home construction. Since the construction of homes occasionally mandates the placement of nails, those nails bounce off the flat beds and end up in the tires of the drug dealers, the latter at least having the consolation of knowing that the guys who work at the local tire replacement store are very good customers.
The guys who install and maintain the sprinkler heads at our complex make sure that the spray hits the sidewalk, especially when it's raining.
If you need credit to survive, you will be devoured. If you need credit to do the devouring, you will get all you need.
Someone working at CNN gets a Tweet from an occasionally reliable source saying that a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing has been arrested. She mentions this information to her boss, adding that this data has not been confirmed. The boss is under tremendous pressure to get out in front of the story, so he tells his crew to go ahead with the unconfirmed story. Three anchors on that news network dutifully recite the story, leading hundreds of Bostonians to charge the police department, the site of which encourages other networks to repeat the false story. NBC decides to check out the reports, cannot confirm them, and makes a big point of denying the accuracy of the non-event. Another channel decides that the president of the United States is somehow linked to the crime. They lead with that fiction. No one watching at home has the slightest idea what's going on. The young lady at CNN is discharged with extreme prejudice. The whole thing smacks of what happened to poor Richard Jewel back in 1996 in Atlanta.
Life, in other words, is often a big fat Greek butt fucking.
Meanwhile, Warren Schmidt goes to a dinner to celebrate his retirement. Everyone there who speaks on his behalf lies. The whelp who takes Warren's place lies when he encourages Schmidt to stop by the office any time. Warren's longest and oldest friend lies when he talks about how loyal he feels toward Schmidt. The wives all sit and smile. No one brings any lubrication.
This amazingly understated film was written and directed by Alexander Payne. The movie did well at Cannes. According to the Festival de Cannes website, Alexander Payne was raised in Omaha, Nebraska, where much of our story takes place. "[He] earned his MFA in Film at The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He made his feature film debut with Citizen Ruth (1996) and followed up with Election (1999), which won Best Screenplay from the Writers' Guild of America and the New York Film Critics Circle, as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. About Schmidt (2002), premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival and opened the New York Film Festival. Both Sideways (2004) and his latest film, The Descendants (2011), won Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay and were nominated for four others, including Best Picture and Best Director."
If you want the world to stop resembling the mess that it is, I suggest you make your own version of events and submit it to Cannes. This year the Festival will be happening from May 15 through the 26, so you'd better get a move on, especially considering that the deadline has already passed. The process isn't quite as taxing as you might think.
To submit a film, you need to:
1. Comply with the Preselection Conditions.
2. Fill out the online Entry Form.
3. Send in your film to the address indicated at the bottom of the Entry Form.
4. If your film is selected, you'll have to comply with the Rules and Regulations. Films can be selected for the The Official Selection: Competition (features and shorts), Out-of-Competition or Un Certain Regard. However, the Selection Committee decides which section a film can participate in.
As I mentioned, submissions to this year's festival have already closed. But there's always next year, unless you happen to pass away in the meantime.
Warren Schmidt hasn't any interest in making a film. What he does want is to find meaning in his life, something that all the lies and recriminations do nothing to manifest. He's been married to the same woman forty-two years and has gained little more from it than a Winnebago that he doesn't especially want. Schmidt would sort of like to disentangle his relationship with his daughter, but since she's planning on marrying a schmuck, that doesn't appear too promising.
Most reviewers have quite properly written about the magnificence of Jack Nicholson's work in the title role. That's almost a disservice to the other actors in this extraordinary motion picture. Hope Davis plays Warren's daughter Jeannie, for instance. It's one thing to play a likable character. It's another to play a sympathetic villain. Jeannie is neither of these. She is simply unlikable altogether. Unlikable, stupid, and programmed to be precisely the way she is. Yet Davis brings this person to life to the extent that we are not at all surprised to find that we can anticipate her reactions, at least approximately. The same is true of Warren's future son-in-law, Randall Hertzel, played to understated perfection by Dermot Mulroney. Randall's a flake and the son of flakes, yet he is not without a certain underlying charm, mostly as a consequence of his cynical naivete. The parents in this case are played by Kathy Bates and Howard Hesseman, two folks who play opposite ends of the self-absorbed spectrum--yet remain endearing throughout their screen time.
As a director working with such phenomenal talent, Payne should feel honored to have successfully evoked such terrific performances from these actors, any one of whom being more than capable of slipping over the edge into absurdity or mayhem.
About Schmidt is a marvelous film, right on a par with the best work of Orson Welles. See this movie.
Near where I live, the city government spends money to improve the quality of the street pavement so that the drug dealers who live nearby will not be unduly inconvenienced by flat tires, rusty nails and pot holes. The local government then spends other money to have that improved street smashed to smithereens in order to improve the quality of the water lines, the gas lines, and the electric lines. This improvement requires that the recently improved paving job on the street be undone in as severe a manner as possible. The ultimate--though not final--irony jumps up and taps us on the shoulder when it happens that the construction workers who come back around to re-repair the re-destroyed street are using their trucks for multiple purposes, including home construction. Since the construction of homes occasionally mandates the placement of nails, those nails bounce off the flat beds and end up in the tires of the drug dealers, the latter at least having the consolation of knowing that the guys who work at the local tire replacement store are very good customers.
The guys who install and maintain the sprinkler heads at our complex make sure that the spray hits the sidewalk, especially when it's raining.
If you need credit to survive, you will be devoured. If you need credit to do the devouring, you will get all you need.
Someone working at CNN gets a Tweet from an occasionally reliable source saying that a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing has been arrested. She mentions this information to her boss, adding that this data has not been confirmed. The boss is under tremendous pressure to get out in front of the story, so he tells his crew to go ahead with the unconfirmed story. Three anchors on that news network dutifully recite the story, leading hundreds of Bostonians to charge the police department, the site of which encourages other networks to repeat the false story. NBC decides to check out the reports, cannot confirm them, and makes a big point of denying the accuracy of the non-event. Another channel decides that the president of the United States is somehow linked to the crime. They lead with that fiction. No one watching at home has the slightest idea what's going on. The young lady at CNN is discharged with extreme prejudice. The whole thing smacks of what happened to poor Richard Jewel back in 1996 in Atlanta.
Life, in other words, is often a big fat Greek butt fucking.
Meanwhile, Warren Schmidt goes to a dinner to celebrate his retirement. Everyone there who speaks on his behalf lies. The whelp who takes Warren's place lies when he encourages Schmidt to stop by the office any time. Warren's longest and oldest friend lies when he talks about how loyal he feels toward Schmidt. The wives all sit and smile. No one brings any lubrication.
This amazingly understated film was written and directed by Alexander Payne. The movie did well at Cannes. According to the Festival de Cannes website, Alexander Payne was raised in Omaha, Nebraska, where much of our story takes place. "[He] earned his MFA in Film at The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He made his feature film debut with Citizen Ruth (1996) and followed up with Election (1999), which won Best Screenplay from the Writers' Guild of America and the New York Film Critics Circle, as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. About Schmidt (2002), premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival and opened the New York Film Festival. Both Sideways (2004) and his latest film, The Descendants (2011), won Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay and were nominated for four others, including Best Picture and Best Director."
If you want the world to stop resembling the mess that it is, I suggest you make your own version of events and submit it to Cannes. This year the Festival will be happening from May 15 through the 26, so you'd better get a move on, especially considering that the deadline has already passed. The process isn't quite as taxing as you might think.
To submit a film, you need to:
1. Comply with the Preselection Conditions.
2. Fill out the online Entry Form.
3. Send in your film to the address indicated at the bottom of the Entry Form.
4. If your film is selected, you'll have to comply with the Rules and Regulations. Films can be selected for the The Official Selection: Competition (features and shorts), Out-of-Competition or Un Certain Regard. However, the Selection Committee decides which section a film can participate in.
As I mentioned, submissions to this year's festival have already closed. But there's always next year, unless you happen to pass away in the meantime.
Warren Schmidt hasn't any interest in making a film. What he does want is to find meaning in his life, something that all the lies and recriminations do nothing to manifest. He's been married to the same woman forty-two years and has gained little more from it than a Winnebago that he doesn't especially want. Schmidt would sort of like to disentangle his relationship with his daughter, but since she's planning on marrying a schmuck, that doesn't appear too promising.
Most reviewers have quite properly written about the magnificence of Jack Nicholson's work in the title role. That's almost a disservice to the other actors in this extraordinary motion picture. Hope Davis plays Warren's daughter Jeannie, for instance. It's one thing to play a likable character. It's another to play a sympathetic villain. Jeannie is neither of these. She is simply unlikable altogether. Unlikable, stupid, and programmed to be precisely the way she is. Yet Davis brings this person to life to the extent that we are not at all surprised to find that we can anticipate her reactions, at least approximately. The same is true of Warren's future son-in-law, Randall Hertzel, played to understated perfection by Dermot Mulroney. Randall's a flake and the son of flakes, yet he is not without a certain underlying charm, mostly as a consequence of his cynical naivete. The parents in this case are played by Kathy Bates and Howard Hesseman, two folks who play opposite ends of the self-absorbed spectrum--yet remain endearing throughout their screen time.
As a director working with such phenomenal talent, Payne should feel honored to have successfully evoked such terrific performances from these actors, any one of whom being more than capable of slipping over the edge into absurdity or mayhem.
About Schmidt is a marvelous film, right on a par with the best work of Orson Welles. See this movie.
Side Effects
Because I do not require that movies make sense in order to get enjoyment from them, I find that I liked Side Effects (2013), Steven Soderbergh's release from earlier this year, recently made available on DVD. As a matter of fact, trying to force rationalism upon this fine product would do not only the film but the viewer a monumental disservice, in large part because--to the extent that the movie reflects what's going on in behavioral health today--everyone we meet in the picture is crazy.
In a motion picture, crazy can be fascinating. Unbelievable is not nearly as much fun.
Take for instance, the character of Emily Taylor, as played by Rooney Mara. Her rather nondescript husband Martin, played by Ken Doll of the Week Channing Tatum, gets out of prison after serving four years on an insider trading offense. Rather than being approximately happy about this reunited family affair, poor Emily sinks into a cancerous quagmire of depression. You might rightly suspect that getting back together with anyone as plaid and boring as Martin Taylor would be enough to lead a person to suicide, but that would be unfair to the people who staged the lighting in the party scene so that we could take it in the artificial glitz-amid-gloom dichotomy. Imagine looking at a person through those old orange negatives that used to accompany processed Kodak film and you'll get the flavor.
Emily decides she simply cannot withstand the struggle of rebuilding her life with this man and so straps herself into a nice shiny car and rams into the wall of a parking garage. Enter Dr. Jonathan Banks, otherwise known as Jude Law. He's a smart psychiatrist, working multiple hospital shifts while holding onto his practice with two senior partners in a Manhattan office. As the shrink on duty the evening of Emily's attempted suicide, he decides that Emily suffered a lapse in judgment and probably will not constitute a potential harm to herself or others and so releases her on the promise that she will visit his office within the next few days.
After an initial evaluation, Dr. Banks prescribes some Select Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors for his new patient. She suffers the not uncommon side effects of decreased sexual arousal, sleep walking, insomnia, and nausea. Or at least she appears to have these reactions. Eventually Emily "talks to her doctor" about a new medication called Ablixa, a controlled substance that is the most authentic element of the movie. Martin Taylor comes home from looking for work, sees the table set for three, finds his wife chopping tomatoes, and receives a rather fatal chop in the midsection. To borrow a line from Macbeth, nothing so became this character's life as his leaving it.
We never really get a clear picture as to why Emily had set the table for three, just as we never get an explanation as to why she felt the need to snatch a line from William Styron or why we keep hearing about a friend of Emily's named Julia or whether that friend actually exists. Answering these and many other pressing questions would risk jamming Side Effects into that nasty jar of Reason and that, ladies and germs, Soderbergh steadfastly refuses to do. Please do not misunderstand my sarcasm for total disapproval. This is an occasionally highly intelligent movie, one with twists and turns that are marvelously formulated, if not convincingly executed. It's just that all four main characters here are wackadoos and not especially sympathetic wackadoos, either. These people all exhibit symptoms that would get them their own section of Axis II disorders in the DSM-V and the director wasn't about to take chances with the integrity of his production.
Never mind that Catherine Zeta-Jones takes Buck Owens suggestion to "Act Naturally" to unprecedented depths or that every woman in this movie (except for a clerk in the hospital, and even then you never can tell) is set up to be either a shrew or a swindler. Never mind that when Dr. Banks apparently sleeps with Emily, it is Emily and her earlier shrink, Dr. Seibert (Zeta-Jones), who are made to look conspiratorial, whereas one might suspect that some ethical brouhaha would result from a doctor conjugating his patient with such a dangling participle. "But that's just the way things work these days," you say and of course you are correct. All Soderbergh was doing was satirizing the lousy morals of his audience by giving it just what it wanted.
Unless he actually does think that all women are either sadistic dominatrices or fawning housewives. I wouldn't want to suggest that possibility, despite reports that he looked upon Fatal Attraction as one of his big influences in making this film. After all, the auteur director here is doing a public service by showing us the cold world of modern pharmaceuticals. Certainly he would never exploit the genuine agony of mere mortals just to turn a lousy buck. The very suggestion is, I guess, irrational.
In a motion picture, crazy can be fascinating. Unbelievable is not nearly as much fun.
Take for instance, the character of Emily Taylor, as played by Rooney Mara. Her rather nondescript husband Martin, played by Ken Doll of the Week Channing Tatum, gets out of prison after serving four years on an insider trading offense. Rather than being approximately happy about this reunited family affair, poor Emily sinks into a cancerous quagmire of depression. You might rightly suspect that getting back together with anyone as plaid and boring as Martin Taylor would be enough to lead a person to suicide, but that would be unfair to the people who staged the lighting in the party scene so that we could take it in the artificial glitz-amid-gloom dichotomy. Imagine looking at a person through those old orange negatives that used to accompany processed Kodak film and you'll get the flavor.
Emily decides she simply cannot withstand the struggle of rebuilding her life with this man and so straps herself into a nice shiny car and rams into the wall of a parking garage. Enter Dr. Jonathan Banks, otherwise known as Jude Law. He's a smart psychiatrist, working multiple hospital shifts while holding onto his practice with two senior partners in a Manhattan office. As the shrink on duty the evening of Emily's attempted suicide, he decides that Emily suffered a lapse in judgment and probably will not constitute a potential harm to herself or others and so releases her on the promise that she will visit his office within the next few days.
After an initial evaluation, Dr. Banks prescribes some Select Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors for his new patient. She suffers the not uncommon side effects of decreased sexual arousal, sleep walking, insomnia, and nausea. Or at least she appears to have these reactions. Eventually Emily "talks to her doctor" about a new medication called Ablixa, a controlled substance that is the most authentic element of the movie. Martin Taylor comes home from looking for work, sees the table set for three, finds his wife chopping tomatoes, and receives a rather fatal chop in the midsection. To borrow a line from Macbeth, nothing so became this character's life as his leaving it.
We never really get a clear picture as to why Emily had set the table for three, just as we never get an explanation as to why she felt the need to snatch a line from William Styron or why we keep hearing about a friend of Emily's named Julia or whether that friend actually exists. Answering these and many other pressing questions would risk jamming Side Effects into that nasty jar of Reason and that, ladies and germs, Soderbergh steadfastly refuses to do. Please do not misunderstand my sarcasm for total disapproval. This is an occasionally highly intelligent movie, one with twists and turns that are marvelously formulated, if not convincingly executed. It's just that all four main characters here are wackadoos and not especially sympathetic wackadoos, either. These people all exhibit symptoms that would get them their own section of Axis II disorders in the DSM-V and the director wasn't about to take chances with the integrity of his production.
Never mind that Catherine Zeta-Jones takes Buck Owens suggestion to "Act Naturally" to unprecedented depths or that every woman in this movie (except for a clerk in the hospital, and even then you never can tell) is set up to be either a shrew or a swindler. Never mind that when Dr. Banks apparently sleeps with Emily, it is Emily and her earlier shrink, Dr. Seibert (Zeta-Jones), who are made to look conspiratorial, whereas one might suspect that some ethical brouhaha would result from a doctor conjugating his patient with such a dangling participle. "But that's just the way things work these days," you say and of course you are correct. All Soderbergh was doing was satirizing the lousy morals of his audience by giving it just what it wanted.
Unless he actually does think that all women are either sadistic dominatrices or fawning housewives. I wouldn't want to suggest that possibility, despite reports that he looked upon Fatal Attraction as one of his big influences in making this film. After all, the auteur director here is doing a public service by showing us the cold world of modern pharmaceuticals. Certainly he would never exploit the genuine agony of mere mortals just to turn a lousy buck. The very suggestion is, I guess, irrational.