Served

There have been few TV shows this year that I'd been looking forward to seeing more than Party Down (which I finally did via Netflix). It's the brainchild of Rob Thomas and his minions, who previously created the superb teen mystery series Veronica Mars. It's a comedy with a promising premise -- an L.A.-based group of D-list actors and writers forced to eke out a living in the catering business. It features a cast of terrific cut-ups, an astounding number of whom appeared on Veronica. It premiered this past spring on Starz, a cable network allotting more creative freedom than the mainstream networks. It got great reviews from Alan Sepinwall and strong support from a small yet enthusiastic fan base. Why then do I find it so....repulsive?

Party Down is the kind of show that pops up every now and then (Buffalo Bill a classic example) that illustrates a good lesson: don't make all your characters assholes. Or, if they're not going to be likable, then at the very least they should be interesting. Even the bar-setter for discomfort humor, the original British The Office, had, behind David Brent's squirm-inducing shenanigans, a pair of sympathetic characters in Tim and Dawn; and the American version has the best sitcom ensemble currently on the tube, with an even more fully realized love story at its heart (reimagined as Jim and Pam). Party Down attempts to follow the Office template by focusing almost entirely on what happens on the job, leaving personal lives to what we overhear or to our imaginations; and it sets up a similar work-romance between caterers Henry (Adam Scott) and Casey (Lizzy Kaplan). The difference, though, is that we give a damn about the people on The Office, whereas Party Down, after its first season, hasn't given us a reason to care.

The casting of the leads was a fatal mistake. Henry, the frustrated actor whose fifteen minutes of fame (from a beer commercial where he uttered the catchphrase, "Are we having fun yet?") may be already up, was initially to be played by Paul Rudd. It's easy to see how Rudd's charm (or even John Krasinki's) would have fit the part like a glove, but movie stardom beckoned. (Rudd has remained one of the show's executive producers.) Adam Scott, who specializes in what Sepinwall would call "douchebaggery" (he guest-starred as a predatory teacher on an episode of Veronica Mars), has a handsome, low-key quality that doesn't completely translate into a human being. He makes Henry a passive narcissist, unable to connect with anyone else onscreen (or viewers offscreen). Lizzy Kaplan's more abrasive style, well-utilized in supporting roles in films like Mean Girls and Cloverfield, is borderline unbearable here. It's a bold stroke to make your leads unlikable -- and to have them hit the sack by the third episode -- but it can turn a twenty-eight minute episode into a long slog.

The supporting players don't fare much better. Jane Lynch, who has stolen many a scene in the films of Christopher Guest and Judd Apatow, is appallingly off-key as one of the older, more experienced caterers with an irredeemable resume of Porky's-type retreads. (Lynch, who had to leave the cast early due to a commitment on Glee, was replaced by Jennifer Coolidge, who is equally unimpressive.) Ditto Martin Starr, so funny and touching on Freaks and Geeks and in Adventureland, yet tone-deaf grating as the screenwriter-wannabe who, when he isn't catering, runs "a prestigious blog." Best by a mile is Ken Marino, who popped up semi-regularly as sleazy detective Vinnie Van Lowe on Veronica Mars but successfully creates a totally different character in the needy and insecure Ron Donald, team leader of the "Party Down" catering service who dreams of one day running a Soup-R-Crackers (say it fast) restaurant. Marino manages to walk Steve Carell's tightrope act of squirmy pathos, desperately wanting to earn his underlings' friendship and respect and receiving neither.

Of course any actor is ultimately only as good as his or her script, and the ten episodes of Party Down show Thomas and his co-creators in an especially mean-spirited mood. What would possess the people behind the sensitively-rendered sexual-assault arc on Veronica Mars to write a joke about a porno star being raped by her uncle? Do they think that drug use (Ecstasy, mushrooms, etc.) is inherently funny, devoid of any context? Even the best episode to date, "Celebrating Ricky Sargulesh," where the crew caters a Russian mafia gathering honoring the acquittal on a murder rap of one of their family (an uproariously menacing Steven Weber), trafficked in denigrating stereotypes without unearthing the humor that comes from surprising us with something new. Kristen Bell (Veronica herself) achieved this in the season finale, guesting as Uda, uber-competent head of the rival "Valhalla" catering service. Clad in Teutonic black, a Bluetooth perched over one ear, Bell spat vicious barbs like sunflower seeds, only to let down her guard and amusingly ask Henry out on a date. ("I'm normally not this abrasive....I like movies....I have a kid....But he's quiet.") Renewed for a second season, Party Down still has potential; dialed just to the left or right, its farcical situations might actually be funny. But the show needs to follow Bell's lead in realizing that for comedy to work, it needs to be shaken fresh to keep from curdling. "Are we having fun yet?" Why, no, not really. 

Nina & Sita

(Note: Since this post keeps getting more comments, and because the subject could use a little more air-time, I've moved this back to the front page. I hope you see it and add to the discussion! -C.)

How in the name of Rama do I describe Sita Sings the Blues? For starters, it's a dizzyingly imaginative retelling of the classic Hindu text The Ramayana. (Pause while I pretend to have always known what that is.) It's a semi-autobiographical tale of heartbreak from writer-director Nina Paley. It's a testament to the enduring value of cultural ephemera ranging from the Jazz Age to traditional (pre-Pixar) animation. It's a provocatively subversive take on patriarchal society, women's roles, and all that is sacrosanct. It's a fascinating case study in copyright law and the possibilities for online reincarnation.

Perhaps the best method of description is the old-reliable "cross-between," as in: Sita Sings the Blues is a cross between Monty Python's Life of Brian and Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven. The film's Pythonesque vibe is my own observation (though I'm sure I'm hardly the first to have noticed it), and is most explicit in the sections narrated by three shadow puppets (voiced by Aseem Chhabra, Bhavana Nagulapally, and Manish Acharya), who tell The Ramayana -- a tragic love story about Sita, the beautiful wife of Prince Rama, who is kidnapped by an evil demon king, rescued and then ultimately rejected by her husband, who suspects she is now "impure" as a result of her abduction (isn't that always the way?) -- not in the somber tone of John Huston's adaptation of The Bible or George Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told but informally and irreverently, interrupting each other and disagreeing on the finer details. But it was N.P. Thompson, a film critic whose tedious rantings I normally have no use for, who perceptively noted the similarities in Paley's use of Annette Hanshaw's moody 1920s jazz solos to Potter's (and Herbert Ross's, in the 1981 movie version starring Steve Martin) employment of Depression Era songs in Pennies from Heaven. Periodically the movie stops for musical interludes synching Hanshaw's vocals to the animation, and it's in these sequences that Sita Sings the Blues becomes wildly original and emotionally resonant, much more so than had it gone the usual route of splashy Bollywood numbers.

Nina Paley clearly is out to challenge myths like The Ramayana that reinforce gender stereotypes and self-justify male dominance along with female servitude, and at times the movie is almost as bracing to watch as would be a musical revival of The Satanic Verses. (Hindu extremists have been angered by the film.) Yet what saves Sita from being unduly flip is the connective tissue Paley finds by paralleling the story of Sita and Rama with that of a contemporary married couple -- Nina and David -- whose relationship disintegrates when David leaves Nina in New York and embarks on an extended trip to India. (Cruelly, he breaks up with her by email.) Paley is hardly the first filmmaker to attempt to modernize a sacred text (and piss off people while doing it); but she achieves the thematic parallels between Nina's story and Sita's through a pop sensibility -- rather than avant-gardism -- that makes the ancient relevant.

As if courting religious controversy weren't enough, Sita Sings the Blues also became embroiled in a complex copyright skirmish involving the use of Hanshaw's songs, of which the long and short of it left the film without a theatrical distribution. Sita might have vanished entirely if not for critical championing by not only Thompson but Roger Ebert among others. (Anyone who still finds Ebert irrelevant these days needs to think again.) Fortunately, for us if not her pocketbook, Paley has made the film in its entirety available online. It's a joy to behold, and pure in any form.

Missing Links

In the spirit of summer housecleaning I have removed to the left a couple of no-longer-functioning links. "Newcritics," begun by Tom Watson, Lance Mannion and a all-star cast of extras, closed up shop a few weeks ago. It was an interesting experiment that attracted plenty of talented people, but by and large I enjoy their political writing a lot more than their cultural criticism. (Where, frankly, as in the case of Mad Men, they don't know what they're talking about.) Additionally, with deep regret, I removed Larry Ardylette's "Welcome to L.A." and am too exasperated to add any further incarnations. For those not in the know, Larry is a fine and engaging writer with a perverse habit of deleting his blogs without warning, starting up a new one, then abruptly nuking that one too. (Before "Welcome to L.A." he was "The Shamus," and he should have stopped there.) I suspect this may be Larry's profound postmodern social experiment that means to explicate for us the slippery tenuousness that is life, but in practice it's just fucking annoying. No mas. In their place, I added Hokahey's (friend of Jason B.'s) fine "Little Worlds." 

Assuming the video comes back up (it's vanished for some reason), Matt Zoller Seitz's latest vid-essay on Do the Right Thing is worth a looksee. I remember vividly the controversy surrounding the film when it came out, which prompted thunderous acclaim (see Roger Ebert's original review) and hysterical denouncements more or less equally across the board. (I saw it a year later at my university, sitting in the second row of a packed house with a few friends, one of whom had his view hilariously obstructed by an African-American gentleman seated directly in front of him wearing a giant cowboy hat.) My favorite howler remains Steve Vineberg's negative review in No Surprises, Please, his anthology on 80s cinema (really a blow-by-blow parroting of Pauline Kael's criticism from the same decade), where the author claims that Do the Right Thing had "coded" for the black community a secret message of violence and intolerance. (And if anyone can crack that code, it's a white upper-middle-class theater professor from Holy Cross.) I'd say Ebert nailed it better then, and MSZ nails it now. It's a movie that's looking more timeless and essential with each passing year.

Gunned Down

(Warning: Spoilers follow.)

Michael Mann's pickup techniques don't work as well for me as they do for the stars of his movies. Years ago, after seeing Heat, I acted all gruff and paranoid with a friendly woman trying to strike up a conversation about a book I was reading, and she bolted. Another time, I recalled Daniel Day-Lewis's heartfelt words in The Last of the Mohicans and promised my girlfriend, "No matter how long it takes, no matter how far, I will find you!" but she ditched me in an Office Max. And there I was the other night at a jazz establishment, when I spied a luminous half-French half-Native-American coat-check gal across the room. I followed Johnny Depp's example in Public Enemies to no avail: when I tried ordering her around and demanded she come with me, she laughed derisively; when I barged in on her at work and beat up a guy who had the gall to ask for his coat, she called the cops; and when I told her that I like "baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, and you," I should have stopped there before accidentally segueing into Kevin Costner's big speech in Bull Durham. It's easy to get the two confused.

But then Mann's movies are never about reality (except for The Insider, ironically his best film.) Like Tarantino, he's a cinema junkie fascinated by the stimuli created by artifice (especially, but not exclusively, screen violence); unlike QT, however, he's not too interested in exploring (or exploding) the border between the real world and that artifice. A Mann film plays by its own rules and is set entirely within its own universe. Viewers who can give themselves over to it find his movies overwhelmingly hypnotic and sensual. Those who don't -- like me, at least, for his latest -- might find Public Enemies a snooze.

I confess to struggling to stay awake for roughly the first two-thirds of this 140-minute movie, despite subject matter that has strong pulp appeal. Our first glimpse of John Dillinger (Depp) is of the notorious gangster breaking in to a prison in order to break his gang out. Our introduction to the unfortunately named Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) features the intrepid Fed shooting Pretty Boy Floyd in the woods. This is a potentially good set-up for the kind of parallel-track cops-and-robbers saga that Mann pulled off in Heat, only imagine Al Pacino's role reduced and Robert De Niro's enlarged and you have an idea of which character is emphasized at the expense of the other here. Even less distinctive are Dillinger's gang of thugs and Purvis's team of agents. In Heat, Mann employed an effective shorthand to add color to De Niro and Pacino's respective crews. In Public Enemies, the only two semi stand-outs are Stephen Graham's psychotic Baby Face Nelson and Stephen Lang's taciturn Agent Winstead. Lang, who has one of those great faces Mann loves to linger on, makes an impression despite possibly less than fifty words of dialogue. Nearly all the other players on both sides of the law (except for an unrecognizable Billy Crudup as a blandish J. Edgar Hoover and Bill Camp as a Frank Nitti whose semi-respectability would seem even more a departure from the ludicrous cartoon version in De Palma's The Untouchables without the unfortunate Hitler mustache) aren't individualized and come across as interchangeable with each other in their suits and fedoras and tommy-guns as the identically-attired soldiers in the first two or three episodes of Band of Brothers.

If nothing else, it's a relief to see Depp as Dillinger, and not just because he wears a fedora well. While not a great performance, it's still light-years from the fey bullshit the actor shovels as Jack Sparrow (enough, please) or in encores as Tim Burton's tortured-martyred-misunderstood-artist stand-in. (We know, Tim: you have scissors for hands. Get over it.) The last time Depp portrayed a gangster -- actually an undercover cop pretending to be one -- was in the terrific Donnie Brasco (which also incidentally featured Pacino's last truly committed performance). Unfortunately here, Depp doesn't get the chance to wade in waters nearly as deep. Even when wooing his favorite coat-check girl Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, faring better than Gong Li in Miami Vice but worse than Madeleine Stowe in Last of the Mohicans or Amy Brenneman in Heat), he's no more than glittering surface; and Purvis is even less, though no fault of the acting playing him. At the risk of dimestore psychology, I interpreted Bale's meltdown on the Terminator: Salvation set as a cry for help from a Method actor committing himself to yet another role unworthy of his talents. (My first reaction was, You already have Batman to guarantee your marketability; why waste your time with this piece of crap?) Possibly Bale saw Public Enemies as a chance to work with a major filmmaker without the pressure of a true leading role weighing on his shoulders. He seems content to surrender the spotlight this time around (not only to Depp but also Lang, who figures more prominently at the climax); what Bale needs now is a role that loosens him up into enjoying acting again (and I'm not sure working with the thuggish David O. Russell on the director's next project, the aptly-named The Fighter, is the way to go). 

Public Enemies comes to life in the final act, beginning with a crisply staged nighttime ambush and culminating in the gunning down of Dillinger outside a movie theater playing a Clark Gable mob picture. It's in the latter sequence that Mann finally focuses on what should have been his subject all along -- how Dillinger saw himself as more of a movie-star than a criminal. (There's a hint of this in an amusing earlier scene, also set in a movie theater, when a warning to be on the lookout for Dillinger airs before the start of a movie, and then audience looks left and right like attendees at a tennis match.) Yet because Mann never distinguishes between the real world and the world of cinema, there are no layers of meaning, no tension, no sense of urgency that develops.

The most recent of Michael Mann's movies that I enjoyed was the witty and entertaining Collateral, featuring an undervalued performance from Tom Cruise -- who, as a graying hitman, contorted his gleaming smile into shark's teeth -- that was a far more incisive deconstruction of celebrity stardom. (It's no accident that Mann had Cruise's villain killed on a subway train, a mode of transport that played a key role in the film that made him famous, Risky Business.) Miami Vice, though, was a visually arresting yet narratively tedious adaptation of the 80s television series; and I found Public Enemies a hollow echo of Heat, which was in itself a remake of Mann's original made-for-TV movie L.A. Takedown. Hitchcock and other auteurs have proven that the results can be fascinating when an obsessive filmmaker repeats himself; but with Public Enemies Mann is repeating himself in a genre that's already been done to death. He isn't offering a fresh spin on his subject, beyond using fancy digital cameras with mixed results (great for evening shots; less striking in the harsh light of day). Public Enemies is just more of the same macho posturing in a man's world, with women who, unlike the cunning and resourceful female protagonists in Tarantino's Death Proof and Jackie Brown, are confined to the sidelines rather than used by the director to challenge his own (and the audience's) assumptions, to upset the status quo. I admire Mann, as I do almost any filmmaker, for having grand obsessions; I just wish I shared them.

Valentine's in July

In the immortal words of Dr. Frasier Crane, I would rather a tarantula lay eggs in my ear than be within a hundred yards of a theater showing Nia Vardalos's I Hate Valentine's Day. (And exactly why is this being released mid-summer? Counter-programming? Or, with that regrettable word "Hate" in the title, just, um, programming?) Stephanie Zacharek's amusing pan is the closest I am willing to get, as it contains this laugh-out-loud turn of phrase: "Vardalos works so hard at being flirty, fun and charming, that at times you almost feel cajoled into buying her shtick: She's like a department-store cosmetics saleswoman who insists on spritzing you with perfume even as you try desperately to scurry past her." John Corbett always acts like a good sport, and evidently he's a far better one than I.

Besides, with the concurrent release of Public Enemies, an esteemed filmmaker's latest mash note to What It Means To Be A Man, there's no shortage on romance at your local cineplex. A testosterone-fueled report coming soon.

What They Did During the War

Bereft of HBO, I missed out on Band of Brothers (along with so many other of now all-time favorite shows) when it first aired in 2001, catching up to it a few years later on DVD. I took my time checking it out, for a number of reasons: the initial reviews were mixed; the author of the original book was facing heated accusations of plagiarism (albeit not, to the best of my knowledge, for that particular book); and the timing -- between 9/11 and Iraq -- made me weary of war, especially the kind of romanticized depiction that Stephen Ambrose was (in)famous for. Years earlier I had flipped through Ambrose's D-Day, a lively read with impeccable detail undercut by a sense of overidealized machismo. Ambrose got knotted up between wanting to show the very human sacrifices of these men and an impulse to depict them as Men straight out of Greek mythology. (Women don't exist in Ambrose's world, except to give birth to soldiers.) Steven Spielberg revealed a similar weakness in Saving Private Ryan (a film for which Ambrose served as a consultant): as Tom Carson pointed out in a very astute critique for Esquire, the technical proficiency of the "real-time" Normandy landing sequence was nonetheless problematic in creating the impression that the beach was stormed by American warrior-gods in little over twenty minutes. Throughout the entire movie (the most morally confused picture he has ever made), Spielberg wants to have it both ways, never more so than in the depiction of Jeremy Davies's Cpl. Upham, a bookish pacifist shamed into becoming a cold-blooded killer. Despite admiring some of the performances, I disliked Saving Private Ryan pretty intensely, resented the bullying tone the film's supported took to the slightest whiff of criticism (the ridiculous implication being that if you didn't like the movie then you hated America too), and was pleased by its surprise defeat at the Oscars -- like Pauline Kael noted, "as if they deserved awards for serious intentions."

Although Spielberg, as an executive producer, was closely involved in the making of Band of Brothers -- along with Ryan star Tom Hanks, who also executive-produced as well as directed one of the ten episodes -- the vast superiority of the enterprise suggests a more collaborative and complex vision. Band of Brothers the series follows the paratroopers of Easy Company from basic training to their pivotal role on D-Day to the failure of "Operation Market Garden" to the Battle of the Bulge to their capture of Hitler's "Eagle's Nest" at the end of World War II. While I haven't read the source material, it's safe to assume that the series, while reportedly a faithful adaptation, also understands the difference between visual and literary mediums. (The invariable demand by readers to simply "film the book" makes about as much sense as suggesting to play one on the piano.) Some episodes are relatively straightforward, while others employ flashback structures; some play like docudramas, while others are more artistic; a handful of the early episodes are spread out over a large ensemble, while a few of the later ones focus on specific characters. The result is the most pluralistic depiction of the Second World War (or any war) I have ever seen onscreen (any screen).

Alan Sepinwall, the best TV critic bar none, is winding down his current tour through Band of Brothers, and without stepping on his toes too much I want to offer some of my own impressions, having recently looked at the series again. My first thought is that this is a show that looks much stronger now than it did eight years ago, one that rewards repeated viewings. One of the original main criticisms -- and it still has validity -- was it takes a few episodes to sort out all the characters. While there are a few standouts in the crowd, namely central protagonist Richard "Dick" Winters (Damian Lewis), Lewis Nixon (Ron Livingston), Buck Compton (Neil McDonough), Carwood Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg), and Bill Guarnere (Frank John Hughes), many of the other actors are hard to tell apart in their identical uniforms. The second time around, it's easier to tell who's who and devote your concentration on the narrative.

Another thing that struck me was just how vividly Band of Brothers captures the ambiguity of war. Having ten hours to do this is a benefit that a feature film lacks, and the series takes advantage of this with several sequences that seem to indicate a particular stance on a topic only to then show a different point of view. A G.I. makes out with a Dutch woman during the celebratory liberation of a city in Holland, then shortly afterward this same woman is apprehended by her fellow citizens, who shave her head and mark her with a swastika. (It's explained that she, among others, slept with Nazi occupiers.) At Bastogne, a grunt is told not to complain about the incompetent new C/O (it's bad for morale), but then we see officers Winters and Nixon doing the same thing. Humanizing these men doesn't dilute their sacrifices and accomplishments; it elevates them, so that the war scenes never lose sight of the fragility of the lives involved.

And these scenes are among the most magnificent ever staged. One that Sepinwall discusses at length (in the fourth episode, titled "Replacements") features an elaborate set-piece involving a crawling soldier and a runaway tank that Spielberg in his hey-day would have been proud to make. There are several intense battles over the course of Band of Brothers, many of them examples of urban warfare (like the siege of Toye), a few in more rural or unpopulated areas (like a "turkey shoot" surprise attack on a couple of German companies). Yet my favorite moment in the entire series occurs early in episode two, "Day of Days," when Winters leads the jump out of his company's airplane, and in an unbroken shot the camera follows his parachute through the gun-battle and explosions down to the ground. It's a textbook example of staying focused on the human element amid the most sophisticated special effects.

There are a few problems with Band of Brothers, notably a lingering Ambrosian romanticism in the depiction of Lt. Spiers (Matthew Settle), the company's mystery man, rumored to have gunned down several German POWs after offering them cigarettes. (We see the latter moment but are not privy to the former.) Spiers has a moment of glorious bravado in arguably the best episode (#7), "The Breaking Point," where he rescues the company by running right past an astonished German force, then astonishes further by running safely back. But the impact of a key moment in an earlier episode (#3, "Carentan"), where he advises a terrified soldier that the only way to survive is to accept the fact that you're already dead, is dulled by the fact that it's bullshit. (The soldier who takes his advice ends up seriously wounded, whereas men of conscience, like Winters and Lipton, survive and enable others to do the same.) Spiers gets his edges somewhat softened without ever becoming fully humanized; he's the only character that Band of Brothers -- even when showing him looting later on -- wants us to see as both man and god.

Fortunately, the selfless and heroic Winters, played breathtakingly well by the British actor Damian Lewis, is always regarded on a human scale. (He's not above a little looting, either.) And the human cost of the war, on display throughout the series, comes to the forefront in the penultimate episode, appropriately titled "Why We Fight." From the perspective of its most jaded character, the wealthy, alcoholic Lewis Nixon, we follow Easy Company's liberation of a concentration camp, a turning-point that shakes Nixon out of his detachment. Before arriving at the camp comes a scene where Nixon, breaking into a Nazi officer's household (he's looking for booze), is shamed by the wife's steady glare of contempt. (Livingston, best known as the star of Mike Judge's satire Office Space, gives a lovely, understated performance.) At the end, the townspeople are ordered into the camp to bury the bodies; and in a reversal of the previous scene, Nixon's accusatory gaze shames the same woman into bowing her head. I've never experienced warfare, and with any luck never will. But in clear-eyed moments like this, Band of Brothers offers the closest glimpse many of us from subsequent generations will likely ever get to seeing it.

Posts with the Most

Your ever-traveling correspondent finally returned home the other day, from a trip to the gorgeous campus with the above statue of a cute kitty-cat. Looking forward to relaxing on terra firma for a while and catching up on posting. (If any movie releases prove the least bit enticing -- maybe a few coming in July.)

In the meantime, I highly recommend checking out Jason Bellamy's excellent Pauline Kael Week wrapping up over at The Cooler, as well as Alan Sepinwall's revisiting of HBO's ambitious World War II miniseries Band of Brothers, which debuted to mixed reviews in 2001 but is looking more and more like a modern classic. I hope to add some reflections here relatively soon.