Something to Talk About

Blogging has been scarce lately, and not just because I'm shy. With a dearth of interesting movies (Mongol, a bio of Jenghiz Khan, a half-intriguing exception) and the TV season on hiatus (with one notable exception), it seems like a good time for a breather now and then. And in between, perhaps time for a game of coulda, shoulda, woulda.

I would have been writing more about Battlestar Galactica, but the sad truth is I've been forgetting when it's on. (Friday nights at 10, it turns out.) I did catch last night's half-season finale, however, and it was as exciting as others have opined. I'm not a sci-fi fan by any means, so that this show can capture my interest at all is no small feat. I chalk it up to the actors, a mix of both old reliables (Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell, Lucy Lawless) and captivating performers I don't recall seeing before the series began (Michael Hogan, Aaron Douglas, James Callis). The entire ensemble makes the world of the show dramatic and real.

I should (or so it seems, judging by some of my frothing male colleagues) tell you how much I loathe Sex and the City, but while I haven't see the movie (and probably won't, at least until DVD), the truth is I'm pleased that a film starring women and made for women is cleaning up at the box office. Hopefully this will dispel the actresses-can't-open-a-movie meme that has been making the rounds in Hollywood of late. Relatedly, I also hope to see more female directors get their props. When a proven hit-maker like Amy Heckerling can't get a picture released, or a distinctive talent like Kimberly Peirce gets largely ignored, something is very wrong.

Last and certainly least, I could tell you how much I despise M. Night Shyamalan, how delighted I am to have called him a charlatan even back in his Sixth Sense glory days, but it hardly seems worth the effort anymore. Then again, it is kinda fun. The Happening, his latest pseudo-horror metaphysical crock, may become a hit, but it's already generating the same hostile buzz that greeted The Village and Lady in the Water, so I doubt it. What's aggravating about Shyamalan is he has genuine visual style (most notably in Unbreakable, the movie of his I hate the least), and in the abstract I admire his goal to be a classical storyteller. The problem is his stories suck, at best recycled hash of Twilight Zone episodes or lifted from authors no longer in the American lit canon (e.g., Ambrose Bierce). Another issue is his ego, which even by Hollywood standards had inflated to ridiculous proportions (or at least before The Happening, his first film to reek of desperation). The egregious comparisons to Hitchcock and Spielberg, encouraged by Shyamalan himself, always leave out a vital element: Hitch and Spielberg were/are funny. Even Vertigo and Munich have more bonhomie than the disproportionate gravitas and faux deep thoughts that define Shyamalan's schlock. Entirely fitting that the joke is now on him.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

In one of a few confessions of his undying love for the movie Dodgeball (a guilty pleasure that he and I both share), Anthony Lane once wrote that you can gauge the effectiveness of parody based on whether or not you can continue to take its target seriously. Just as Dodgeball annihilated the underdog sports movie (try watching The Karate Kid with a straight face again, just try), so too Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story lands a few body blows on the music biopic. Directed by Jake Kasdan with almost too much of a professional sheen, with a script by Kasdan and Judd Apatow that vacillates between broad, obvious gags and jokes so subtle they only hit you on the rebound, if at all, Walk Hard isn't a great comedy. Still I loved the movie, maybe because its satire ultimately feels as affectionate toward its targets as I do. (No matter that this exuberant spoof bombed at the box-office last January and received tepid reviews; a long healthy life as a DVD cult hit is assured.) Moreover, it's anchored by a comic tour-de-force from John C. Reilly, who plays Cox from age 14 to 71, and sings a number of songs that showcase his dazzling range. It was obvious, from his memorable "Mr. Cellophane" number in Chicago, that Reilly had good singing chops; but who guessed he could mimic Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Bob Dylan with such devastating accuracy?

The central premise of Walk Hard is that Dewey Cox becomes a singing sensation and stays at the top over several decades by adapting (or, less charitably, plagiarizing) whatever is trendy at the moment. Yet it's never done cynically, and mimicry is really too shallow a description for what Reilly accomplishes. Early in the film, we see him mopping floors at an all-black nightclub, where the customers come to "dance erotically." While an R&B performer (the always wonderful Craig Robinson, in too brief a part) sings and spins, we see Cox off-stage excitedly mirroring the moves. Soon after, when the headliner gets injured, the hopelessly whitebread Cox seizes his big chance and leads a hot number called "You've Got To Love Your Negro Man." The patrons, initially angered, eventually succumb to the heat of the performance. (It may be an imitation, but it's an intensely heartfelt one.) This attracts the attention of powerful talent scouts -- who are, naturally, Hasidic Jews (led by an unrecognizable Harold Ramis) -- leading to a hilarious send-up of the scene in Walk the Line where Johnny Cash incurs the wrath of the recording studio producer. Here, the producer (played by Christopher Guest alum John Michael Higgins), informs Cox, following an ill-advised hillbilly version of "That's Amore!", that his musical career is over -- unless he can sing something that he's never sung before, with backup musicians he's never met before, something so personal that it will change his life forever, right there, on the spot. It is there that the title song, "Walk Hard," is created, and rockets up the charts.

Kasdan and Apatow have a lot of fun with this set-up, and the first half of the movie moves briskly through the cliches it mocks. In addition to The Songs That Derive Directly From Life, there is also The Unsupportive Wife (Kristin Wiig), whose mantra is "You're never gonna make it!" even long after he already has, The Dark Period Of Drug Abuse, where Cox is abetted by his drummer Sam (a scene-stealing Tim Meadows) and The Childhood Trauma That Haunts Him Still. As a boy, Dewey accidentally kills his ostensibly more talented older brother in a machete fight (of course!), which forms a rift between him and his aggrieved father. (I wish Robert Patrick, who played this tiresome archetype in Walk the Line, had been cast here rather than Raymond J. Barry, who doesn't quite hit the right note.) Hope comes in the form of Darlene Madison (Jenna Fischer), a June Carter Cash clone who throws herself onto Dewey and then slaps him for coming on too strong. While I'm not convinced Fischer is leading lady material, she's light on her feet here and deftly conveys her character's mixed signals to the man who falls in love with her (having had plenty of practice on The Office).

This being a Judd Apatow joint (he also served as producer), Walk Hard eventually abandons its raunchy high spirits and becomes an ode to the meaning of family. I don't dismiss this as saccharine hypocrisy the way some critics do. It's clearly an important theme to Apatow, who previously addressed it in The Forty Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, and who here adds the conflict between family and work (or, more specifically, art) that is perhaps a regular source of tension in his own life. Narratively, some of the fun goes out of the movie. Yet Reilly holds it together, with a climactic number that is as wittily self-aware as everything that comes before, while still managing to be moving.

Despite the character's dimwittedness and failings, Reilly makes Dewey Cox a grand synthesis of the greatest performers of country, pop and rock and roll. (I highly recommend checking out the extended versions of the songs on the DVD's special features -- especially the Dylanesque "Royal Jelly," which is flabbergastingly brilliant.) In his more serious films, Reilly has always had a lovable mug that can nicely offset the heavy weather of the scenes. How wonderfully ironic that it's taken his recent forays into comedy to bring new depths and shadings to the surface.

Going Home

The season finales of Lost have always been a mixed bag, and often don't reflect the quality (or lack thereof) of the seasons leading up to them. After the superb, groundbreaking Season 1 on the island, the climactic discovery of the hatch felt like a letdown. The erratic Season 2 finished in a delirious if exhausting frenzy of activity: the meltdown of the hatch; the capture of Jack, Kate, et al by The Others; and the use of Desmond (then a largely unknown quantity) as the focal character for the two-hour arc, a risky gamble that paid off. Season 3 capped itself with the revelation that a few of the crash survivors got off the island, a mindblowing shocker that made up for a deservedly maligned year of narrative fits and starts.

Having learned their lesson, the writers of Season 4 built on the plot devices, storylines and renewed goodwill of viewers from the end of last year. With fewer episodes (already the plan even before the strike), Lost became streamlined, with less time for padding. And the newly incorporated flash-forwards featuring the "Oceanic Six" (Jack, Kate, Sayid, Hurley, Sun, Aaron) who would come to escape the island expanded on the show's universe, offering new themes and dimensions to the more sparingly used flashbacks, which had begun to run dry with (and reach desperately for) new information about the characters. The flashforwards also posed a potential problem for a show that has thrived on plot twists: Would the story hold our interest if we already know what's going to happen?

Season 4's finale, "There's No Place Like Home," made good on the promise of revealing how the six got off the island. At the close of the last episode, with the sextet divided into intriguing combinations, it wasn't entirely clear: Jack was with Frank and Sawyer at the helicopter; Hurley had tagged along with Locke and Ben near the Orchid; Sun and Aaron were on the ship rigged with explosives; Kate and Sayid had been rounded up in the jungle by The Others. Despite a couple of contrivances (why did The Others need Kate and Sayid to free Ben? why did Keamy think Ben would give a shit about the fate of the passengers on board the ship?), "There's No Place Like Home" deftly reshuffled the deck, putting the aforementioned six -- along with Frank and Desmond, and dropping Sawyer, who made a heroic, Spike-like sacrifice -- on the helicopter, narrowly avoiding the explosion on the ship. The journey to and from the boat was as fraught with tension as anything ever dramatized on the show. It was also a good showcase for Matthew Fox, never the most dexterous of actors but very effective at conveying Jack's monomania. Both Fox and the writers showed Jack's ambiguity as both a tragic hero and a sympathetic villain, doing anything to fulfill his goal of leaving the island, whether sacrificing Jin or listening to Locke (for once) and lying about what happened to them once they reach the mainland.

At their best, the flashbacks on Lost provided counterpoint to the events on the island. It was fascinating to see if a character could change his or her destiny or make the same damn mistakes over and over again. The flashforwards offer something more fatalistic though no less supenseful: the question becomes not what is going to happen, but how it happens. Earlier this season, we saw Ben arrive mysteriously in the Arab desert, wearing a winter parka. The finale showed how this came to be -- he went down into the frigid base of the Orchid station and pushed a giant mechanized lever that "moved" the island, though we don't know yet where. Lost is at its most involving in moments like these, when it doubles back on itself. I'm reminded of what Pauline Kael wrote about The Godfather Part II -- that it seems to expand in your head like a bullet.

"There's No Place Like Home" also demonstrated what separates this series from other classic jerk-you-around shows (Twin Peaks, The X-Files, ad nauseam), and that is the empathy it has for its characters. For all the excitement of the episode, the satisfying closures for certain characters (loved Michael's sacrifice on the ship) and the groundwork it paved for others, my favorite moment (recalling a scene earlier in the year with Sayid) was the joy on Kate and Jack's faces at the start of their helicopter ride, played in silence other than Michael Giachhino's dependably excellent score (he's the best TV series composer since Buffy's Christophe Beck). As the helicopter rises and the breeze hits their faces, we're reminded that this is the first time that they have been truly off the island since their arrival. Lost never forgets the human element, and in the best of those moments it soars.

Sydney Pollack: 1934-2008

The tributes for Sydney Pollack -- who passed away earlier this week -- keep coming in, and I want to cite two in particular. Since I regularly razz Stephanie Zacharek, it's only fair that I compliment her for good work when she achieves it. Another favorite target, David Edelstein, rebounded from his atrocious Anthony Minghella piece from two months back and paid his respects to Pollack in a mostly dignified manner. The headline for his piece is a bit inappropriately snarky for the occasion, but the actual content is so heartfelt that I'll give it a pass.

Great as it is to see all the huzzahs for Pollack's second career as an actor, the films he made behind the camera shouldn't be so readily dismissed. True, his later films were busts; but the period from 1969-1982 -- from They Shoot Horses, Don't They? to Tootsie -- was a fertile one for Pollack as a director. He was indeed "Old School" in the best possible sense, coaxing great work out of his performers. As others have noted, actresses especially benefited under Pollack's guidance: Jane Fonda; Barbra Streisand; Faye Dunaway; Sally Field; Jessica Lange; Meryl Streep. (Would any of them have parts quite so meaningful today?) Actors generally fared well too, though he loved casting Redford probably more than he should have. Then again, Pollack got him to hit notes no other filmmaker has since achieved: Jeremiah Johnson remains a fascinating 70s relic; and Three Days of the Condor seems to both encapsulate 70s paranoia and foreshadow our own. (Pollack's taste in jazz scores had a way of seeming out of place, though the bouncy one over Condor's opening credits lulls you into the bloody ambush that kick-starts the film.)

But for me, Sydney Pollack's greatest accomplishment was Tootsie. One of the best comedies of the last 40 years, the movie was put together by a slapdash of disparate scripts and Pollack's clashes with Dustin Hoffman nearly pulled the whole thing apart. (Larry Gelbart, one of the film's screenwriters, quipped, "Never work with an Oscar winner shorter than the statue.") Somehow, everything came together. Pollack directed and edited with crack precision and brought together a remarkable ensemble at the top of their game -- including himself, in a hilarious supporting role as Hoffman's agent. ("You were a tomato!" he bellowed famously. "A tomato doesn't have logic! A tomato can't move!") Given Pollack's obvious flair for comedy, it's surprising and disappointing that he never directed another one. Yet as he began appearing as an actor in more and more films, I always grinned upon seeing him. He had that great voice, and even as he aged he practically hummed with energy. I was going to call him a life-force before Wolcott beat me to it, but what the hell: it's worth repeating. So are the best of his films.

The Voice of Reason

Must-reading for any viewer of the latest Indiana Jones debacle installment: "50 Flaws of Indy IV," whereby Mystery Man, anonymous-yet-perspicacious Hollywood screenwriter extraordinaire, breaks down practically scene-by-scene where David Koepp's sure-to-be Razzie nominated screenplay goes wrong.

Excerpts:

I would submit to you that the entire enterprise felt half-hearted simply because Indy was under-motivated. An Indiana Jones film does not hang its hat on the McGuffin but rather Indy’s motivation. The McGuffin doesn't matter. What matters is how important that McGuffin is to Indy. If Indy wants an artifact more than anything, then the audience will want him to have it more than anything....We cared in Raiders because Indy WANTED the Ark. We cared in TOD because we saw the dying village and Indy WANTED to get the stones for them. We cared in LC because we met his Dad, albeit briefly, in the opening flashback sequence before we learned about his disappearance. [In Crystal Skull], some professor and some woman we never knew and haven’t seen is missing? Who cares?

***
I question the point of Mac’s character. The idea of a double-crossing sidekick is great fun, but he was never put to good use. In fact, they totally gave the game away in the very beginning with Mac's betrayal at the warehouse. He turns on Indy before we ever had a chance to get to know the guy.

***
The exposition in the diner scene was the worst in the franchise. This was the most amateurish rock-bottom handling of exposition that could have been written. It was two talking heads in a diner. That's it. Remember how visual the exposition was in the Raiders setup with the big book and the chalkboard and the talk about the Well of Souls? That's great exposition. That was exciting!....Here, it's just two talking heads....One of the bedrock principles of screenwriting: show, don’t tell.

***
Two problems with Indy finding the skull. First, you make the whole experience and joy of discovery less special (or not special at all) if it’s a tomb that Indy doesn’t discover for the first time and if it’s an artifact that Indy isn’t the first to find. Here, the tomb's already been raided, the artifact was found, taken, and put back for Indy to find later. That’s ridiculous. That pulls the rug out from all the fun of watching Indy do what he does best.

***
Irina Spalko - She was the worst and weakest of the villains....Koepp cock-blocks every opportunity to make her a great villain. First, he should've established early just how BAD she really is. The worst thing she ever did was whip out her sword....Also, why make Spalko a psychic if A) she can’t even read Indy’s mind and B) nothing else develops from it?

***
Oodles more fun to be had. And a welcome tonic to the arguments of some of the film's defenders, who have veered from their initial false equivalencies (e.g., "This is exactly the way it happened in Last Crusade"!) and are now resorting to desperation Hail Marys ("Spielberg made it bad on purpose!"). Good luck with that one, gang.

Bullwhipped

Warning: Spoilers immediately.

Near the end of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, after the aliens have taken off in their flying saucer (now there's a sentence I wasn't expecting to write), the movie hedges its bet and explains that they aren't exactly extraterrestrials, you see, but rather intraterrestrials -- beings from another dimension. "Where are they going," one character asks, "outer space?" Another replies, with helpful gravitas, "No. They are going to the space between spaces." Actually, based on the evidence of this film, the only space is between Lucas and Spielberg's ears.

Crystal Skull owes less to the tradition of afternoon serials and more to Brian DePalma's Mission to Mars: it's already got the apologists tying themselves into rhetorical knots trying to justify it. Stephanie Zacharek believes that "its computer-generated effects are used with relative judiciousness." (Ho ho ho!) Like DePalma's recent string of fiascos, Crystal Skull is governed by a streak of unruly madness that appeals to the Paulettes, the esoterics, and the French at Cannes. I think the movie is a monumental embarrassment, yet I have to admit I wasn't bored for a minute. It's fascinating to watch something simultaneously so eagerly awaited and so spectacularly wrong-headed; I stopped looking at the screen only long enough to scoop my jaw off the floor.

Let's start with the aliens. No, back up a second: let's start with the prairie dogs. Repeated close-ups of cute, cuddly, CGI prairie dogs fill the entire first act of Crystal Skull, set in the Nevada desert, which once again introduces Harrison Ford -- shockingly grizzled, yet sans stud-earring -- as Indy, kidnapped by Cold War Russians disguised as American GIs (the year is 1957) and brought to a secret warehouse that will look familiar to anyone who's seen the end of Raiders. Russkie henchwoman Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett, strangely alluring in a gray jumpsuit) wants Dr. Jones to find a specific crate within the warehouse (not the Ark of the Covenant, alas, though it gets a tossed-off reference), and eventually a big shootout ensues. Indy escapes and arrives at a suburban oasis that's really a nuclear test site. He hides in a refrigerator seconds before detonation, and the blast lifts the fridge miles into the air and deposits him out of harm's way. This sequence, implausible yet enthrallingly satirical and audacious, features Spielberg firing on all cylinders; yet inexplicably, at its end, he cuts to a double-take of a prairie dog. Like the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, they serve no purpose other than to take you out of the reality of the movie. What are they doing there?

A few other early scenes have a casual charm. It's always fun seeing Indy in the classroom, now looking more like a professor than an adventurer; and Ford's first couple of conversations with Shia LaBeouf bring out something in the older, recessive actor. But the problems continue to mount, starting with LaBeouf's character, a young leather-clad biker who naturally goes by the name Mutt, yet never seems to fit within the Indiana Jones universe. LaBeouf may be out of his depth, but Ray Winstone and John Hurt clearly aren't, and their characterizations (a turncoat and a babbling loon, respectively) are even thinner. In what should be a profound moment, Karen Allen shows up midway through the film as Marion Ravenwood, Indy's love interest from Raiders and mother of his illegitimate child Mutt. Allen has always been hailed as the best leading lady in the series, but I found her grating in the first film and practically unbearable in this one. There's a rusty, distracted air to her performance, and she's ill-served by Spielberg, who stages her entrance and subsequent scene in quicksand (or "drysand," whatever) in which a snake is used for a rope with all the verisimilitude of Corky St. Clair.

Whatever good will that is established in the first hour (or brought to the theater by the audience) melts faster than Ronald Lacey's face in the second, with Indy, Mutt, Marion and the others pursued by Irina's Russians, all the while lugging around the titular cranium that is one of the most idiotic MacGuffins in movie history, and as visually unappealing as the Ark, the Grail, and even the Sankara Stone were resonant. The WTF-moments start piling up, my favorites being Mutt swinging like Tarzan through the trees with an army of allied monkeys (monkeys hate communists!) and a legion of killer ants who appear to be close cousins of the scarabs in The Mummy movies.

And then there are the aliens. I know aliens are near and dear to the filmmakers' hearts. But do they belong in an Indiana Jones movie? Aren't they just a wee bit out of place?

Unswayed by such distractions, the apologists have trotted out their best friend, Mr. False Equivalency: What about the supernatural elements in the earlier movies? they ask; what about their implausibilities? Ah, but those films took pains to establish the ground rules of their worlds (even Temple of Doom has a whirling-dervish logic) and forged a mostly internal consistency with each other even as they expanded with new characters and adventures. All three accomplished this in varying degrees of quality, but all did it far better than this one.

David Koepp's script for Crystal Skull is an atrocity, yet like others who have noted this before me, I detect the distinct stench of George Lucas in the air. Revisionists at heart, and affluent enough to have the artistic freedom to do pretty much whatever they please, Lucas and Spielberg have never had qualms going back and tinkering with their films (Han Solo shooting after Greedo, E.T. running with an extra spring in his step). This would appeal more to the editor in me were their alterations ever consistent, justified or of evident quality; too often they coast on the emotional collateral of their fans. One can invest considerable energy in semantic gamesmanship -- calling extraterrestrials intraterrestrials, quicksand drysand, a snake a rope, or a terrible movie a good one -- but it won't make The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull an adventure worthy of Indiana Jones. Only in another dimension are its creators victims worth defending.

In the Vein

By guest-blogger Helen

There’s a heart racing out of control at the bottom of Heartbeat Detector (La Question Humaine) but you have a long journey to take before you find it -- its depiction of contemporary corporate culture is timely and chilling. Simon Kessler (Mathieu Amalric) is a human resources department psychologist in the Paris branch of SC Farb, a German petrochemical company, but, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that his job is mainly about eliminating weak employees, not at all about providing therapy services to help them cope or improve. There is an ominous overall darkness to the film, a visual sense of foreboding, and the deeply-toned midnight blue suits that everyone seems to wear are a part of this.

Another thing that sets the stage for a sense of imbalance or something being amiss is the unsettling contrast between scenes of conversations and interactions between people—these are dense and closely cropped and include unwavering and intense eye contact—and the way these scenes are relieved by strong doses of silence and of open space surrounding them. A large part of the story is told with non-verbal communication and body language.

Partly an intriguing thriller that includes a complex chain of suspicions of mental instability and anonymous letters disclosing Nazi connections among three top executives of the company, what makes Heartbeat Detector interesting is the way it remains ambiguous throughout; you’re not ever sure what is real and what is a conspiracy. Kessler, who is considered to be one of the company’s model "acolytes," who moves coolly and unblinkingly through his intensely demanding and complex world, and who has recently been responsible for choosing who would be let go in the company’s massive downsizing, comes completely unraveled when he digs into the situation and begins to make the connections—when the film’s theme of the monstrous parallels between fascism and the 21st century corporate machine emerges. You can't stop watching Kessler as he takes this dark journey and his experience is emotionally intense, deeply personal, and riveting.

The style shifts abruptly at the end and this film that told so much of its story non-verbally or with brief bursts of highly-coded conversations closes with a lengthy monologue on the insidious evils of bureaucracy and the loss of individual sense of responsibility. And that is followed by a long recitation: the reading of a death camp engineer's cold and technical notes on his solutions for solving various problems handling the "units" and the "cargo." While Kessler is reading this to us, echoes of the equivalent corporate terminology—words like "downsizing" and “la question humaine”—ring loudly in his mind. Suddenly, at the end, it’s all about language, how we use words to protect ourselves from pain, about how easily innocent words can hide the truth, about how easily we all buy the story, the superficial sense of these words, and how Kessler, once he sees through the language that shielded him from the painful reality of what he did to individual people’s lives, is set completely adrift.