Tohu Bohu

Last week, Your Humble Blogger saw two movies. These two movies came out in the last couple of years, and they have a lot in common. The central character in each movie is played by a former child/teen actress; the characters are in their early twenties, and are both former college hotshots who have taken jobs that were not what people expected them to take. Their bosses are played by film-acting legends, both as outrageous larger-than-life comic forces. In each case, the boss offers the young woman an unusual career path; in each, the young woman is reluctant to take it. The major question in each film is what career path with she choose?

One of the movies I liked, and the other I loathed. I loved one of the film-legend performances and loathed the other. The movies, of course, are The Devil Wears Prada and Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.

I hated Devil and I loved Magorium; I loved Meryl Streep’s performance and hated Dustin Hoffman’s.

When I say I watched them, I missed the middle third or so of Devil, because I couldn’t take it. Watching the sadistic abuse of the poor young woman and her associates was a horrible experience which I could not willingly prolong. Fortunately, I was in my own home, and my Best Reader was willing to sit through the middle bit. I eventually rejoined her and finished it out. I missed a few minutes of Magorium, too, but not very much. The sadism in that, though, was limited to a kid running around with a lemur on his head, and that was brief and I think out of focus.

In the days since, I’ve come to think of the theme as being an interesting one. Women my age (YHB is thirty-glob at the present time) must have that as a common experience they weren’t entirely prepared for. Women my parent’s age were unlikely to be hotshots headed for a rewarding career. Those few that were, well, I would guess that most of them either actually followed that career or left work altogether. Women born into the 1970s, though, were more likely to be prodigies headed for a brilliant career of one kind or another. Most of their lives didn’t turn out like anybody expected. Most people’s lives don’t, after all.

There are a lot of movies (and books and so on) in the 30s and 40s and 50s about men who find themselves in soul-less jobs, having nearly abandoned their dreams. Other movies are about the dangers of ambition. The issue is attacked in a variety of ways, comically, poignantly, violently. But the question comes up, again and again: my life is not what I thought it was going to be, so now what? By the time my father was at that point in his life, he probably had internalized enough of the stories to be able to include it in his perception of the universe. It’s still hard, but we have stories, so we can deal with it.

Many of those stories are still available to women, of course, but it makes perfect sense that the absence of those stories about women’s lives is a void that is currently being filled. Not only are there aspects that are wildly different (there’s the baby thing, of course, but also a vast difference in the romantic expectations both from the woman and her partner, as well as other differences related to societal expectations), but there’s the simple fact that it’s easier to apply stories to yourself if the character is ‘like you’ in ways that are important to you. So the earlier stories about men’s career choices, or the ones still being filmed, don’t fill that void.

It seems to me that have been, over the last decade or so, an increasing number of movies that involve a female protagonist’s career path, but that most of those still had as their fundamental plot question which guy will she choose? The lead in The Devil does make romantic and sexual choices, and those choices (like her fashion choices) help the audience understand her predicament, but they are contributory. In Magorium, there is a sort of romantic choice, not between two men but whether to take one or stay single, but again that shows us aspects of her fundamental choice (of career), rather than being the focus of the movie.

But then, Magorium is a kid’s movie, and as such isn’t likely to have a lot of sex in it. And for all I really know, there have been lots of movies over the last two decades to deal with this issue, and I don’t know anything about them because I don’t see very many movies, and when I do pick movies, I’m much more likely to pick a romance (or romantic comedy) than to pick a movie about a young woman facing a career choice. I’m arguing that from two movies that the theme is popular, and I’m arguing that it’s newly popular without evidence of any kind. But I’m right anyway, aren’t I? Or am I? What movies (or best-selling books) help me and which hurt me?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Your Humble Blogger ran across the name Thea von Harbou today, for the first time, as far as I know. What an interesting person.

She was from an aristocratic family, became a writer and then an actress in Germany before the first World War, and then wrote for the movies. She married Fritz Lang and became one of the most prominent screenwriters in Weimar Germany. Then she joined the Nazis (I think there’s a fair line to be drawn between those like Frau von Harbou who joined the party before Hitler took power and those who joined after), split with Mr. Lang, and remained a prominent part of German movie-making under the Nazis.

After the war, she is held as a collaborator. The story is that she directed a production of Faust while in prison. She cleared rubble from the destroyed cities of her homeland, and then worked doing German-language dubs of American movies. In 1954, she attends a showing of one of her early films, and afterward slips, falls and is dead a few days later.

I think you could make a hell of a movie out of that. Now, you’d have to make it clear how evil she was, which might make it a trifle less Oscary, but still.

The images. She wrote a novel called Metropolis, which she later adapted into a movie that is … um, quite well-known. Oh, and a thing called M. The things you could do with those images.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The awarding of the Oscars reminded me that I have not yet done my traditional reckoning of my experience of the years’ movies. It won’t take long. Your Humble Blogger has been out to the movies three times this year. Stardust was wonderful, Pirates mostly stunk, with some good bits, and Charlie Wilson’s War was perplexing, good but by virtue of straddling a line between nearly great and nearly awful. My Best Reader and my Perfect Non-Reader went to see Rattattaatatttoouille without me, which was fine, but it means it’ll be a while before I get around to seeing it.

We also saw several movies at home, largely courtesy of Red Box, although the library assisted as well. Two of those (Surf’s Up and The Transformers) Your Humble Blogger watched from the other room, wandering in and out and generally failing to engage. Of those, Surf’s Up actually looked better than I had expected, although too long and not charming enough, and The Transformers appeared to stink on ice. Speaking of stinking on ice, what happened with the Harry Potter movie? Was it really as bad as it seemed, or were we just in lousy moods and unable to enjoy it? Now, Order of the Phoenix was my least favorite of the books, so that may well have entered in to it, but seriously. No fun was had.

Things get better. I’m not really that cranky. Honest. It’s cool.

I enjoyed Music and Lyrics quite a bit, and although I would have written it with substantial changes, particularly to minor characters, it was a success. Amazing Grace (which is about the abolition of the slave trade in England) had some substantial weaknesses, but on the whole was enjoyable and moving, Romola Garai was lovely (as was Rufus Sewell, but that goes without saying, yes?), and Michael Gambon and Albert Finney got to have juicy bits and go home early. Hot Fuzz was good, and I enjoyed it, although not having actually watched a lot of Hammer Horror or modern action flicks seemed to be a drawback. And Waitress was a good movie, but it was not a romantic comedy, and so when we snuggled in to watch it, we wound up disappointed. We enjoyed it despite that, so it’s clearly an excellent movie. But expectations needs must be managed.

And that’s it. Ten movies, so far, from the year. And unlike in previous years, not so many box office smashes or Oscar nominees. Ah, well. These things, they happen. I blame the Youngest Member.

We also caught up a bit on 2006 movies, through the magic of the shiny disc. In addition to the six I saw on the big screen (and the one we saw on an airplane, and I didn’t watch all of that), we have now seen eleven flicks from 2006. To categorize quickly, I liked Pan’s Labyrinth, Children of Men, History Boys and Stranger Than Fiction, kinda liked Casino Royale, The Prestige, The Holiday and Nanny McPhee, and didn’t like Superman Returns, My Super Ex-Girlfriend or Nacho Libre.

I’ve occasionally thought I should blog all the movies I watch, just like I blog my books, although (a) that is beginning to seem a lot like work, and (2) I am largely just blogging books to build a list of Things I’ve Read, and I don’t honestly care about a list of Movies I’ve Seen, this post, last year’s post, the one from the year before and the one from the year before that notwithstanding.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

All right, so there’s this movie that opens today called Definitely, Maybe that had one of the worst trailers I have ever seen in my life. I mean, fairly frequently, my Best Reader or I will respond to a trailer by naming the amount of money we would need to be paid to sit through the full movie, but this was … priceless. I felt as if I had already sat through the whole movie by the end of the trailer.

The plot, which was extensively detailed in the trailer, is that there’s the fellow, and his daughter, and she’s all precocious and cute and all, and is starting to ask uncomfortable questions about sex and love. So to distract her, he tells her the story of how he met her mother. Only—this is the clever part—instead of actually telling that story, he will tell her three stories, about three women that he met, obscuring their identities, and she will have to guess which one is her mother. Doesn’t that seem as natural as all get out?

The mother, bye-the-bye, isn’t dead. Why would you think she was dead? No, the family is just undergoing a brutal and bitter divorce. Ha, ha. What fun! Nothing like a little family law to make a rom-com sparkle.

Anyway, within the movie are three romantic stories, with three different actresses playing names-have-been-changed-to-protect-the-people-who-will-undoubtedly​-have-to-give​-depositions-in-the-visitation​-rights-matter-and-I-hope-to-Betsy​-that-they’ve-lawyered-up, and neither the audience nor the girl knows which woman will be the True Love (until the papers are served).

So, fine. It’s not the worst movie ever made. The worst movie ever made may well be Kate and Leopold. The thing that makes the whole idea of this flick tolerable is the obvious plot twist that at the end, all three of the women are her mother, that people grow and change, that he fell in love with her all over again and over again and over again, very sweet, Happy Arizona Statehood Day.

Only none of the reviews I’ve skimmed appear to hint that there is a plot twist at all. So either they are being very discreet or the film-makers have missed the only possible point to the movie. And the thing is that I have no easy way of telling which is the case without actually seeing the movie, which as I say is not to be contemplated. So, if some Gentle Reader wants to take one for the team, all I’m saying is, better you than me.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

In the last few weeks, Your Humble Blogger has watched the movie of My Fair Lady, read the play Pygmalion, and then watched the 1938 film of Pygmalion. I’ve seen My Fair Lady a zillion times, of course, and seen it performed on stage at least once. I’ve read Pygmalion many times as well, although I’ve never seen it performed. And I had never seen the 1938 film.

In order to keep them clear, I’ll call the 1913 playscript the play, the 1938 film and its screenplay the film, and the 1964 movie of My Fair Lady the musical. This leaves out the book and lyrics of the stage version of the musical, but I have the impression that it is largely identical to the movie, with no major added or missing scenes. Yes? The play, the film, the musical. Created in that order.

I started with the musical, as most people do. I may, in fact, have started with a live performance, but I saw the movie when I was quite young, and had the album and so on. Wonderful songs, wonderful music. Wonderful characters. Wonderful show.

A little later, probably in my early teenage years or even as a pre-teen, I read the play, along with lots of other George Bernard Shaw. I advise people to read Mr. Shaw’s plays when they are young, to have the opportunity to be excited by the ideas, before you come across them elsewhere. Anyway, I adore the play, despite the loss of the wonderful songs. And in many ways I prefer the play to the musical. The play is in five acts: Act One is in Covent Garden, during which the main characters all meet; Act Two is in Henry Higgins’ses house, during which Mr. Higgins takes on the task of passing Eliza Doolittle off as a Lady; Act Three is in Mrs. Higgins’ses house on an at-home day, during which the phonetic success is revealed to be woefully inadequate to changing Ms. Doolittle’s apparent class; Act Four is in Mr. Higgins’ses house again, following the successful imposture at the ball; and Act Five is in Mrs. Higgins’ses house again, with the final confrontation between our Pygmalion and our Galatea. It ends with Mr. Higgins, self-deluded, maintaining that Ms. Doolittle will return to his house, while Ms. Doolittle leaves with all the other supporting characters.

This differs from the musical in several minor and three major ways. I won’t go into all the minor ones, such as moving Act Three from Mrs. Higgins’s’s to Ascot, or moving Mr. Doolittle’s scenes back to Covent Garden, but the major ways are all interesting, and I think all detrimental. First, the musical has the famous “Rain in Spain” scene, or rather, several scenes showing Mr. Higgins actually training Ms. Doolittle to speak loik a laidee ’na flahr shup. The second is the addition of a scene at the ball itself, showing the triumphant pretense. The third is the addition of a scene at the end, where Ms. Doolittle does return to Mr. Higgins. The first and third occasion wonderful songs, and the second adds a wonderful minor character, so I understand thinking they are worth it. But they aren’t.

The second one is the least troublesome. It isn’t necessary, really, other than to introduce Zoltan Koparte, a Hungarian blackguard who declares that Ms. Doolittle is a Hungarian Princess. Yes, yes. It’s funny, but it takes away from the whole task, and essentially means that Mr. Higgins has failed to pass Ms. Doolittle off as a Lady. There is something not quite quite about her. It’s a triumph, yes, but it’s not the triumph that they were looking for. That goes unnoticed in the excitement, and it’s true she isn’t “found out”, but I think it takes away, just slightly, from the point of the play. Not a big deal, but then the scene isn’t that great either, is it?

The third is the most obviously problematic. Mr. Shaw, in his essay that tells what happens to the various characters after the curtain, has Ms. Doolittle marrying Freddy Eynsford-Hill, and setting up a flower shop and greengrocer. They remain friends with Colonel Pickering, who supports them in the shop for years before they are able to make a profit at it, and more or less with Henry Higgins, although Ms. Doolittle and Mr. Higgins are always bickering whenever they are together, and so don’t socialize as much as they might. I think that’s true to the story and the situation. Having Ms. Doolittle return to Wimpole Street immediately after the play’s Act Five is clearly a capitulation. If she isn’t entirely repentant and contrite, she certainly isn’t independent and strong. Mr. Higgins, of course, hasn’t changed at all. It’s impossible for me to be happy with her return; she won’t be happy with him, and even if he is happy with her, it’s not a healthy sort of happiness, but a transfer of his childish petulance from his mother to Ms. Doolittle. If we are to believe that he will treat her with any consideration or thought at all, there is nothing in any version to show it.

And the first… it could be done well, I suppose, but in the musical it’s mostly done with a sort of sadistic glee at just how nasty and vicious Mr. Higgins is. It makes the audience complicit in the abuse, verbal and emotional, and invites them to join in the general amusement at Ms. Doolittle’s victimization. Her exhaustion and misery are lovingly depicted for the delectation of the audience, and for Mr. Higgins as well. And all of that, to me, heightens the disturbing nature of the new ending. It’s a depiction of the Stockholm Syndrome, more than anything at that point, a retreat into the hell she knows rather than the outside world, and (distressingly) a sense that she really doesn’t think she deserves to be treated any better than that.

So. I’ll repeat at this point that Your Humble Blogger loves the musical. It’s wonderful. But the major changes from Mr. Shaw’s play are, to my mind, detrimental to the work and reveal a more disturbing attitude toward Eliza Doolittle (and by implication, women generally).

So. There I was, secure in my notion that, despite the wonderful songs, the musical had (in some sense) ruined Mr. Shaw’s play, or at least violated the distinctive Shavian sensibility. And then I saw the film. The film, you see, already has all three of the major changes between the play and the musical, as well as many of the minor ones (down to dialogue, blocking and bits of business). And the screenplay is adapted by George Bernard Shaw. Oh, there were other writers, too—Mr. Shaw isn’t solely responsible for the changes. But he signed off on them. He left his name on the thing, and didn’t kick up a fuss about it. I think it’s fair to say that those changes were given the Shavian Stamp of (perhaps-grudging) Approval. So that explodes my whole sense of the thing.

I still maintain that the changes are detrimental; if I were offered the chance to put on the show, I would put it on the way it was originally written. If I saw a production that incorporated the changes in the film, even another film or television production, I would complain about the changes. And when I watch the musical again, I will sing along with all the songs.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Y’all have had the opportunity to watch the will.i.am Obama video that has been turning up all over the place. I think it’s a terrific video, but I thought I’d just set down for Gentle Readers my experience of it.

I came to it through the link from Eschaton, to a site called dipdive, which at the time had essentially no text, simply the video with no explanation. And, here’s the thing: I’m old. I stopped acquiring new music (as opposed to old music) at least ten years ago. I stopped watching broadcast television around that time, too. I still watch the occasional movie, but of the umpty-’leven movies that come out in a year, I generally see fewer than a dozen, including watching at home the next year or the year after. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve been on a bit of a movie-watching binge, what with being sick and all; I watched Topper, King Solomon’s Mines (the 1937 one), Torn Curtain, Shall We Dance, Pride and Prejudice (the 1940 one) and My Fair Lady.

So. I do know know what will.i.am looks like. I more or less know who he is, and I can’t swear that I haven’t ever listened to his music, although, again, the last ten artists on the shuffle I’m currently listening to are Carmen McRae, the Hi-Fives, Duke Ellington, Kate Bush, the Kingston Trio, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Mabel Mercer, Paul Simon, The Who, Eurythmics and Lena Horne. Or is that eleven? Anyway, I’m (a) old, and (2) not interested in keeping up with music. And white, which plays a part in it, too. But what I’m saying is that my first thought the beginning was not That’s will.i.am but That’s some black dude with a great look. And then as the thing progressed, I was in the frame of thinking that whoever had put this together had got a bunch of people with great looks together to do this thing, making a sort of Mosaic of America kind of thing. That framework prevented me from, for instance, recognizing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar other than as a guy that looked kinda like Kareem. Nor did I recognize Scarlett Johansson, other than as a conventionally pretty young thing. I did notice that many of the people were unusually good-looking, but that seemed like a normal sort of thing. Here’s the point: Your Humble Blogger totally failed to recognize any of the celebrities in the video. Zero. On the first time through. None. At all.

And I loved it. I thought is was wonderful on half-a-dozen levels, a magnificent thing, really moving, and I hoped that with people like Atrios pushing it, the video would get a lot of play and go (as they somewhat disgustingly say) viral. Then I found out who the dude at the front was, and that it had debuted on Good Morning America (or whatever), and that they had essentially infinite resources to make the thing, and I watched it again and recognized half-a-dozen of the people (although I must admit that most of the celebrities I did not recognize, and still don’t know what they look like, nor particularly care), and I was disappointed. Really profoundly disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s still a lovely piece. It’s not only moving rhetorically, but it’s interesting artistically, using sampling and riffing in a way I find inspired. It’s certainly not a bad thing for celebrities (whether YHB celebrates them or not) to use their various talents or even just their celebrity to improve the country and its politics. And I love the way that the video lauds rhetoric itself, makes the act of speechmaking not only respectable but essential, transformative in itself. All great. No complaints about the video. But my experience of it was a trifle depressing.

Also, there’s this: I have been meaning to write about the way that YouTube (and to a lesser extent, other video sharing on the web) may be very interesting in this political cycle. I had seen a parody ad “for” Mitt Romney which I thought was absolutely hilarious, and it occurred to me that this is something new. In the last few cycles, say two generations or so, almost everything we saw came from the campaigns, filtered somewhat through the news media, with some added stuff from the late-night television comics (which I wanted to write about as well). I think this year, though, it’s likely (not certain, but likely) that some campaign-related video put together by some goofy kids will go all bacteriological or whatever, and that the Al Gore invented the internet catchphrase of this time around will come from nowhere. And the campaigns have this total loose cannon stuff out there, exploitable but not controllable, and they are in a fascinating bind because of course any particular hilarious video has very likely been put together by some loser with a criminal record who also has been editing together anime porn to the Buzzcocks, so the they can’t link directly to the video, but once it catches on, can the candidate refer to it in a stump speech? In response to a reporter’s question, can she admit to having seen it? Can he admit to not having seen it? Lots of fun to be had. But it turns out that this video has nothing to do with that; it’s a good old-fashioned (if brilliant) campaign song.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

There is nothing more powerful in human motivation than the urge to be on the inside. To be in the know.

Digression:If you have never read C.S. Lewis on “The Inner Ring”, you should; if you have read it in your youth, you should read it again. It is worth reading every ten years or so, I imagine for your entire life. There will be times when you disagree with it (I hope), but there should never be a time when you won't engage with it, when it has nothing to say to you. End Digression.

One of the less dangerous aspects of this desire is the pleasure taken in knowing how things are made. The secrets of construction, the way that the lights are hung to generate that eerie blue glow, the pocket the dove is hidden in before the trick, when they switch the duck for the duct tape. I've read enough about film-making to know something about how films are actually made, and although I get to feel smug about it a lot, it has led to a certain inability to enjoy a few particular aspects of film-making. Such as.

You are warned, you know. I'm going to ruin a bunch of movies for you. Stop reading now, Gentle Reader, and you will avoid that feeling of smug dissatisfaction that will mark you as the possessor of inside information and distinguish from those who simply enjoy the movie. Can you stop reading here? My advice to you, Gentle Reader, is to do so. Nothing you learn from here on in will be of the slightest practical use. Nor am I going to reveal anything that is in the slightest a secret, or that you could not figure out if you put your analytical skills to it. You should, rather, be content with the illusion.

Are you still here? Draw near, Gentle Reader, and I will tell.

So, almost everyone knows that movies are filmed in several takes; the director goes through the scene several times with the camera rolling and then prints those takes that he thinks best captured the scene. Furthermore, in post-production, there's an editing process that indicates when the audience is seeing the actor who is speaking and when the actor who is listening, when the close-up and when the two-shot, etc, etc. Yes? This is all well-known. And it should be obvious that unless there is a continuous shot, different takes can be spliced together to make one scene. This leads to continuity problems, where a pen that was moved, unnoticed, between takes appears in the scene now on the left side of the desk, now on the right.

Nothing sinister so far, you say? True.

Now, in many films there is a scene where two characters are talking, perhaps outside, and much the time we see one character over the other one's shoulder, alternating between the two characters, and (in editing) interspersed with shots where the two are together, seen from a bit further away. If you are filming that way, you can either be very clever indeed with placing the cameras so that the camera over Jane's shoulder will not be visible in the shot from the camera over John's shoulder, or you can simply set the camera over Jane's shoulder, run the scene, and then move the camera to over John's shoulder and run it again. Yes? Much easier. And then run it again with a camera far enough away to give you a sense of their surroundings. Your editor then cuts these three points of view together (perhaps with several takes from each) to come up with the actual scene that an audience sees.

But here's where things go bad: when the camera is over John's shoulder, we can only see Jane, right? And John is played by a Very Important Actor who is not going to stand around “acting” when he's not on camera, is he? No, he's going to go back to his trailer and prepare for his next scene. So there's a stand-in for the blurry shoulder or sleeve, and somebody to read John's lines, and the actress playing Jane does the scene for the camera, and then retires to her trailer while they move the cameras and do it for John and the stand-in and John's drama coach reading Jane's lines.

Not every such scene is shot like that. But enough that a Very Important Actor who is willing to be his own stand-in for such scenes is considered kind and helpful and all that; I've seen it mentioned in more than one memoir. And once you know that, it's hard to forget it. And with astonishing frequency, when I see a scene like that, it is very clear to me that the two actors are not in the same room. Sometimes the lighting is different, and sometimes the sound is different, but mostly I just become convinced that the actors are not interacting, just acting. Usually such scenes are either confrontations or romances; it ruins the scene entirely when I decide that they filmed it separately.

And now, you too, Gentle Reader, will have to think, is Dumbledore really talking to Harry? It sure doesn't seem like it, does it?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger used to watch a lot of Christmas Specials on television, but I kicked that habit (and kicked the television-watching habit generally) and haven’t seen very many in recent years. I understand that there are now half-a-dozen new ones a year, for various channels. I’m wondering if they still follow the same pattern:

• There is a threat to the Christmas celebration of a fairly large number of people, ranging from a part of town to the entire world.


• There is a child, who is either ill, homeless or bereaved.


• There is someone who does not have the Christmas Spirit. That person is often a banker, but could be anyone in a position of authority: a corporate executive, a store owner, or the personification of a supernatural force, or even royalty.


• The Person without Christmas Spirit has an associate or assistant who does, secretly, have the Christmas spirit, but is for most of the plot sufficiently cowed to acquiesce in the PwCS’s plans.


• In the end, the PwCS takes the Christmas Spirit into his (or her) heart, and learns to keep Christmas in his (or her) heart all the year round.


• The child does celebrate Christmas, with more material plenty than ever before.

It’s a syndrome, not a disease. I mean, that there’s a set of symptoms, and if the show has, say, four out of the six symptoms, then it’s got Christmas Special Syndrome, whether it has the other two or not. And of course not all Christmas Specials have the Syndrome, and not all the ones that do have the Syndrome are the worse for it. YHB’s absolute favorite Christmas Specials are How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the original animated special, of course), which is clearly Syndromic, A Charlie Brown Christmas, which is not, and the Vicar of Dibley Christmas episode from the third series, which is also not. At all. Also, The Christmas Carol is Syndromic, I think, as is The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, if you stretch a point.

So, Gentle Readers, what are your favorites, and do they have the Syndrome? And have I forgotten some symptoms?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

The spine of The Shootist caught YHB's eye on the library shelf, mostly because of the movie, of which I had fond memory. For those Gentle Readers who don't remember or didn't see the movie, and don't mind the plot being given away (those Gentle Readers who object to spoilers should (a) probably not be reading these Book Reports unless you have read the book, and (2) stop reading this Book Report at the end of this parenthesis, just after the bit where I mention that both the book and the movie are very good), the Shootist is John Bernard Books, an aging gunslinger who discovers he is dying of cancer in 1901. At the end of the first chapter, not only had Glendon Swarthout informed us that the Shootist is John Bernard Books, an aging gunslinger who discovers he is dying of cancer in 1901, but had given us a gunbattle and some kick-ass dialogue into the bargain. I figured it was a book I wanted to read.

Digression: One of YHB's narrative-fiend habits is to note how much we know at the end of the first chapter (and how long that first chapter is), and then to note when the author is finished setting up the plot and started telling it. There's a way of thinking about storytelling that divides the story into before and after the phrase and then one day... comes up. There were three little pigs who lived with their mother and then one day... There was a hobbit who lived a comfortable life under a hill, and then one day... Now, you could tell the same sequence of events, with that part in a different part, but it wouldn't be the same story. There were three little pigs who left their mother's house to build their own houses. The first little pig made his house of straw, the second little pig made his house of sticks, and the third little pig made his house of bricks. And then one day...

I want and then one day... to make its appearance in the first chapter, preferably in the first 25 pages. Unless I'm reading Dickens of course. End Digression.

Having zipped through the wonderful novel, I went back to watch the wonderful movie. It's the sort of movie called a minor classic. Books is played by John Wayne, in his last movie, not long before his own death from cancer. Lauren Bacall plays Bond Rogers, the tough lady whose boarding house becomes his last home. Gillom Rogers is none other than Little Ronnie Howard, big now, and nearly ready to give up acting altogether. The doctor is Jimmy Stewart, memorable and comfortable. If all that sounds good (and it does to me), its a movie to make sure to see.

On the other hand, watching it again just after reading the novel, I was expecting it to be about John Wayne, not John Books. That, too, could have been a powerful thing—Books is famous, and famous for something that is old-fashioned and now frowned-upon. People thought it was a perfect merging of actor and role. Not so much a merging as the book being submerged under the persona. The opening of the movie uses clips of John Wayne from old movies (was that common? I think of that as all nineties and postmodern and stuff) before the opening gunbattle. Now, in the book, Books is set on by an old claw-handed bandit, who he shoots in the belly. Before he rides off, he offers to kill the bandit quickly, rather than leaving him to die slowly in the desert, but the bandit refuses, and in fact begs Books not to kill him. In the movie, Books tells the (younger) bandit that he won't die, but he'll have a hell of a bellyache. Right away, it's a different character, and a different world. So I was very suspicious.

There is some of that in the movie. Books is twinklier, more sympathetic, and a the roughest edges are taken off. But the main difference, the thing that really changes the movie, is the Ron Howard character, Gillom Rogers. He's the wastrel son of the boardinghouse widow, drinking and cursing and wanting to learn to shoot. He starts out idolizing John Bernard Books and ends up ... well, in the book, he ends up killing him, and enjoying the feeling of killing, and being on his way to becoming a shootist himself. In the movie, he ends up killing the barman who shoots Books, and then throws the gun away. In the book, he keeps the guns. In the book, Gillom is a thief and a liar, and one of the tragic moments comes when Books finds himself so debilitated that Gillom can knock him down. In the movie, Gillom is a goodhearted kid, trying on misbehaviour to see how it fits, and in the end, it doesn't fit at all.

There are other changes, of course. Books spends his last days both fending off other people's attempts to cash in on his fame and cashing in himself, selling his horse, his clothes, his watch, his image and even his corpse to scrape together a few hundred dollars to send Gillom off East to school, his mother's last hope of keeping him out of trouble. In the book, Gillom steals the money. In the movie, we see some of Books gathering the money, and we see him put it in an envelope (if we're paying attention), but that's it.

So the boy's character is changed, and that changes everything else. In the book, John Bernard Books is, finally, a failure; he manages eventually to get himself killed to avoid the agony of cancer's final days, but he never manages to make the human connection he desires, and for all that he makes an attempt at redemption, its practical outcome is that Gillom becomes rich, vicious and (presumably) famous. In the movie, though, it's clear that Books is redeemed. The whole world is turned over—instead of Books (and others) being a remnant of a foul and vicious time, they are shadows of a glorious past. Instead of the modern world being (for all its cupidity and stupidity) showing the possibility of a world without so much violence, it's a pale shadow, less manly for being less violent.

I'd like somebody to remake the movie. It's a grand part, and there's no reason why my vision of it should be the only one, but there's no reason why John Wayne's should be the only one, either. Robert Duvall would be excellent, as would James Garner or Nick Nolte. Each would convey different things, play up the violence or the stubborness or the pain or the age or the regret. If it were a play (and it wouldn't work as a play at all), every American actor would have to try his hand at it sometime in his sixties. As it is, John Wayne—and Ronnie Howard—are all we get.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Perhaps here would be the appropriate place to attempt a comparison of the books and film adaptations of The Princess Bride and Stardust. Sadly, Your Humble Blogger hasn’t time, or really will. I am starting paid employment today, and although it is part-time, raising the Youngest Member is still full-time, and then there’s the Perfect Non-Reader, and my Best Reader, and myself, and there’s this house, too. It’s likely that blogging will be a low priority matter for a little while, until I reach equilibrium again. Or, maybe, work will spark me to greater bursts of energy, which will spill over into the blog. Or the Youngest Member will start sleeping through the night. We’ll see.

At any rate, the essay in question would have to look at the way the framing devices in the book and movie of Bride work, and how the film of Stardust uses narration and the new opening scene in London to invoke an entirely different sense of storytelling. And how characters are pushed and pulled depending on their (perceived) box-office drawing power. In Stardust, particularly, Michelle Pfeiffer would never have bothered to play the character as it was in the book, and Robert DeNiro presumably was enticed to play an All-New Part Written Just For Him. It’s how these things get made. Which is fine. But there it is.

The ending of the Bride adaptation was successfully taken from (one of the) ending(s) in the book fairly directly, in large part I think because William Goldman is a screenwriter who understands about endings. Neil Gaiman has written for the screen, which meant, really, that he didn’t insist that the sweet but low-key ending in the book would work on-screen. Personally, I liked having everybody all together in the witches’ lair, and the Zombie Septimus swordfight was wonderful, really inventive and clever and preposterous and funny and lovely, but on the whole the Boffo Ending took too long, and the epilogue took too long, as well, since there wasn’t any particular point to it (unlike the epilogue in the book, which I don’t think would have worked better, but at least had a point to it).

On the whole, though, the adaptors successfully (imao) took the risk of adding lots of stuff to a book, while Bride was much closer, in large part because it could do that and still work as a movie. I would love to read (or even someday write) an essay on the details of that, scene by scene. But I doubt it will happen.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I reread The Princess Bride just a bit before David Moles brought it up a couple of weeks ago in connection with the Stardust movie. I wasn’t aware of the connection people were making, or I don’t think I was, but it’s likely that it seeped through into my decision-making as I was looking through my shelves at bathtime.

This isn’t exactly the place to compare (1) the book of The Princess Bride, (1a) the movie of The Princess Bride, (2) the book of Stardust, (2’) the movie of Stardust, but I will say that I vastly enjoyed all four of them, and will almost certainly continue to enjoy all four of them again and again and again and again. That should tell you what sort of person Your Humble Blogger is, I’m afraid.

For whatever reason, on this I found the William Goldman bits less powerfully depressing than I usually do. Perhaps it’s because I am aware that the actual William Goldman does not actually have a son, and that the William Goldman bits are every bit as fictional as the S. Morgenstern bits, that is, every bit as fictional as the good bits. Also, I have a daughter now, and have had the experience of wanting her to like a particular book or movie, and been disappointed. With the movie of The Princess Bride, now that I think of it. And I’ve had moments when I haven’t much liked the Perfect Non-Reader, and know that those moments pass, and that the moments will likely pass with the character in the William Goldman bits.

Another thing that came to mind—at the time that the movie of The Princess Bride came out, the stars were not stars. Cary Elwes was an unknown, having been in a handful of movies, not yet having had a recurring role on the X-Files, a flourishing voice-over career, or the occasional role as a heavy or film-maker in odd independent films. Frankly, he’s still a bit of an unknown, but there it is. Robin Wright had been in a minor soap, hadn’t married Sean Penn, hadn’t played Moll Flanders or Mrs. Forrest Gump. Chris Sarandon was, and is, the first Mr. Susan Sarandon, that guy who was in that movie, and that tv show, and that play. Recognizable, always working, but not a star. Christopher Guest was an SNL alum with one successful movie. Billy Crystal was an SNL alum with one moderately successful movie. Carol Kane was recognizable, but not a star. Wallace Shawn was that guy that Woody Allen called a homunculus, or the guy who had dinner with Andre, or the playwright. His profitable career as a voice actor hadn’t begun, nor had his innumerable television guest appearances. Mel Smith and Peter Cook were known to devotees of British Comedy, but weren’t particularly familiar to American audiences. Fred Savage hadn’t started his Wonder Years. Mandy Patinkin was a Broadway star, but was probably best known for Yentl, by which I mean, he wasn’t well-known at all. He hadn’t kicked himself off two successful television shows. Peter Falk was a star, of course

The thing is that I can’t read the book without thinking of the brilliant casting job they did for the movie, and I forget that most of those actors were not the obvious choices they seem to be in retrospect. Also, when somebody watches the movie now, almost everybody is a well-known character actor, and almost all of them became well-known character actors after appearing in The Princess Bride, and in part because of their roles in The Princess Bride. That’s ... interesting, isn’t it?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

So. Your Humble Blogger doesn’t go out to see a lot of movies, these days. Which means I don’t see a lot of trailers. Now, I could watch a lot of trailers, because they are all on-line, but why would I bother, since I don’t go out to see a lot of movies. All of which is to say that I’m out of the loop on upcoming movies, and was unaware that Ken Branagh was directing another version of Sleuth, this time with Michael Caine in the role of Andrew Wyke. Mr. Caine, of course, played Milo Tindle in the Joe Mankiewicz 1972 film with Laurence Olivier as Andrew Wyke. The play (by Anthony Schaffer) opened in London and then on Broadway in 1970 with Keith Baxter and Anthony Quayle.

What I’m saying, this is not obscure or recent. I could well assume that anybody with any interest in theeyater or mysteries, or both, or even in film or mysteries and certainly both, knows the play/movie, and knows all of the plot twists. Sure, it’s possible that somebody will have heard of the movie or the play but not have read it or seen it, and that a spoiler would utterly spoil it, but it’s not very likely.

Or wasn’t. Now, presumably, there are thousands of people—well, dozens, anyway—who have seen the trailer and have at least a mild interest in someday seeing it, and would enjoy it more if it isn’t spoiled.

And if you are one of those people, now would be an excellent time to stop reading. Well, a couple of paragraphs earlier would probably be even better, now that you mention it.

Everyone that’s still here knows the plot, yes? So I can say that the reason Michael Caine seems to me better suited to play Wyke than Milo is that his voice is one of the most recognizable voices in film, which made it absolutely clear that Inspector Doppler was Michael Caine in a funny wig. I don’t know if Jude Law can pull of Inspector Doppler, but I think he’s got a better shot at it than Michael Caine. On the other hand, Michael Caine is not plausibly homosexual at all (sorry, boys), which will make the last quarter or so of the film difficult. He may prove me wrong. Oh, and I should say that Mr. Caine can swish with the best of them, I just don’t think that he can indicate his growing attraction to this young man. I don’t actually think Mr. Caine portrays that kind of attraction particularly well in any event, now that I think of it. Of course, I haven’t actually seen Alfie, but by report the effect in that is that Alfie is having a bit of fun, but isn’t actually in love with anybody except himself. And other than that, there’s—what—various killers, soldiers, scapegraces and troublemakers. I should watch Hannah and her Sisters again; I remember his crumbling character, but don’t remember his crush on Barbara Hershey. And I should see Deathtrap again, where he does play a man with a crush on another man. And which is a joke on Sleuth, mostly, anyway.

Where was I? Oh, yes, spoilers. So if the first thing to talk about is Michael Caine’s taking on the other role, the second thing is how the new screenplay (by Harold Pinter) will change the plot twists to surprise those of us who know, for instance, that—

OK, seriously, anybody here still going to have the movie, the play or anything else spoiled by revealing detailed plot points? No? Sure? Good.

So there are essentially four quarters to the play. Act One opens with approximately three-quarters of a fuckload of exposition, followed by the Phony Break-in (I). In the first major twist, the Phony Break-In turns out to be a blind for the Murder (II), and the curtain comes down as Wyke gloats over Milo’s dead body. Act Two opens with Inspector Doppler (III) sleuthing out the murder, and it is revealed that Wyke did not, actually, kill Milo, but is somehow being framed for it anyway. The last major twist reveals that Doppler is actually Milo, who has actually framed Wyke for an entirely different murder, and will send him up unless Wyke plays his Gruesome Little Game (IV).

We know from the trailer that Mr. Pinter has kept the Phony Break-in (I), and he appears to have kept the Murder (II). I am assuming that he has kept Inspecter Doppler (III), because if he hasn’t, then it isn’t Sleuth at all. And you could just end the movie at the end of Inspector Doppler (III), but why would you want to? That isn’t clever. No, all I can figure out is that they have found some way to make the Gruesome Little Game (IV) startling and new and different. Or not, you know.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I was rereading In the Frame (the painter one—no, not the Scotland painter one, the Australia painter one) this time, it occurred to me that it would make quite a good movie. Oh, you’d have to change a lot of it, of course. I think I’d make the Australian painter the main character, with the English one the supporting, rather than the way it is in the book. But the main plot would work: a painter discovers a criminal ring that sells mid-to-high quality paintings (say, US $200,000 area, for the movie) to visitors to Australia, finds out the suckers’ addresses and other parts of the collection, and then robs their houses, taking back the (forged) paintings and lots of loot besides.

And the main set piece would work: During the running of the Melbourne Cup, our heroes break into the bad guy’s art gallery to get evidence. They make various efforts to set up an alibi that they are at the racetrack (including buying what turns out to be a winning ticket on a longshot, funding much of the rest of the plot), and take advantage of the city’s near-total absorption in horserace fever to make their daylight raid. It’s lovely, and would work well onscreen.

Which led me to wonder why there haven’t been more Dick Francis movies. In fact, there has only been one theatrical-release movie, a 1974 film of Dead Cert directed by Tony Richardson. There was a six-episode series for UK television in 1980 that adapted some Sid Halley books and I suppose shoehorned Sid into a few others to pad it out. Then there were three movies for Australian TV with Ian McShane, including In the Frame. They all seem to have been pretty weak. And that’s it.

It seems odd to me that there haven’t been more. I mean, yes, Mr. Francis does not need the money or the publicity, so if he doesn’t want to see his things ruined, then he shouldn’t sell them to the flicks. On the other hand, he has sold them to the flicks, a few times. If there were no Dick Francis movies, then I would get that. But to let a few be made for television and not let Hollywood at them seems odd. Of course, it’s possible that he sold the TV rights to some of the early stuff before he was able to tell publishers what to do, and that the stuff that was made in the eighties is the result of that. Still, it seems odd.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger finally got around to seeing Stage Beauty, the film of Jeffrey Hatcher’s play Compleat Female Stage Beauty. I enjoyed it a lot, much more than I had anticipated. There was a bit of annoying Acting! but not as much as there might have been. And there was a lot of very interesting stuff, about the theater, and the audience, and sex, and gender. Mostly about sex and gender. Those Gentle Readers who miss the discussion on Jed’s famous How do you know your gender? thread can start all over again with this movie.

The story is about Ned Kynaston, a Restoration actor who has been trained from youth to play Shakespearian heroines in the old style from before they closed the theaters. The movie opens, more or less, with Othello V,ii. We will see that scene many, many times over the course of the movie, with different actors and characters; it’s the scene where the Moor kills his young bride. “Put out the light, and then put out the light.” Mr. Kynaston is a wonderful Desdemona in that old style, he is a superstar diva with groupies, etc, etc. But the next thing you know the King (Charles the Two, curse him) has put a stop to cross-dressing on the public stage, and Mr. Kynaston is out of a job, etc, etc, women playing women, etc, etc, und so weiter und so fort.

One thing that struck me about the movie is that for a movie with a lot of men who have sex with men, there aren’t any homosexuals, the way that I think of them. Mr. K himself likes to have sex with men whilst dressed as a woman; when asked what men and men do together, he responds that it depends which one is the woman. His primary lover, the Earl of Buckingham, says that he fucks Desdemona and Cleopatra and Ophelia when he fucks Mr. K, and if he is not a beautiful heroine, there is no attraction. Even the ponce Sir Charles Sedley, who is only mildly put off by discovering a street whore is a man, is not attracted to men dressed as men. There are women who are attracted to Mr. K only when he is dressed as a woman, and a woman who is attracted to him in both guises, but they are not (shown as) attracted to women dressed as women. There aren’t any women dressed as men—well, the King’s mistress, Nell Gwynn, is dressed as a man for one rather amazing scene, while the King is dressed as a woman, for amateur theatricals rather than for sex, although it is rather distantly implied that their cross-dressing is a kind of foreplay as well.

And, of course, there’s the fact that for us, watching the movie from our twenty-first century perspective, the lace and ribbons and wigs and makeup and jewelry of a gentleman’s dress appear very, very feminine. Sir Charles, specifically, is crimped and primped within an inch of his life, and is withal the most lecherous man in the show, and perhaps the most masculine. Depending on what constitutes masculinity. And the most feminine? Hard to say. Nell Gwynne is crude and vulgar, but feels a sort of sisterhood that feels culturally womanly, if not necessarily feminine. Possibly it’s Maria, although one of the gags of the movie is that she can’t portray the Compleat Female Stage Beauty properly, the way Ned Kynaston can.

Beauty, femininity, masculinity. The play shows not only how they are cultural constructs, but how they are fluid and ill-defined, only dimly understood and resisted as much as accepted. But powerful, anyway.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, it’s every Gentle Reader’s favorite time, that bit where Your Humble Blogger writes a few lines about a bunch of videos. OK, fine, but look, I could be writing whole entries about this stuff.

• It’s probably a deficiency of some kind, but I think that the Kids in the Hall’s I've lost my indian drum! bit is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on television. I’m not a huge KitH fan, generally, as their most skit-like things often don’t work at all, and their completely bizarre stuff either works or doesn’t, as bizarre stuff does. Oh, and if you don’t find it funny, don’t worry—it’s like Zippy the Pinhead. It’s not that you didn’t get it, it’s that you didn’t think it was funny. There isn’t anything to get.
• Why is it that (in movies, anyway), people think if they can just get onto an airplane with a suitcase full of money, their law-enforcement problems are over? I mean, Your Humble Blogger hasn’t ever worked in an airport, but it’s hard to believe the conversation doesn’t go something like this:

  FIRST SECURITY GUY: Damn, that’s a heavy bag
  SECOND SECURITY GUY: What the hell’s in that?
  1ST: Yeah, let’s open that fucker up!
  2ND: Holy Fuck!

  At which point, either they just take the fucking suitcase or they call some real police in. My guess is they take the suitcase. I mean, here’s you, with a trail of dead bodies behind you (most of them you didn’t kill, I know, but tell it to the judge), and the airline tells you that your luggage seems to be missing, and they can’t explain it, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten onto the airplane back in Wichita Falls. Who are you going to tell that you are owed two million dollars in stolen money? Of course, you could just take it as a carry-on, because certainly nobody is going to question a fifty-pound carry-on that x-rays show contains nothing but bundles of paper the size of dollar bills. Particularly on an international flight. Nope. You get to the airport, you’ll be just fine.
• So, I finally watched Fever Pitch, and even though I had very low expectations, I was disappointed. For one thing, they totally did not show what it’s like to be a baseball fan. All the fans in the movie talk about being fans, but they don’t talk about baseball. Nobody started an argument by saying that Jason Varitek was better then Jorge Posada, or that David Ortiz should be playing first base so that Manny Rodriguez could DH, or that Mo Vaughn was a fat, lazy, overpaid selfish bastard who was a liability on the field and at the plate. I know that Mo Vaughn hadn’t been on the Sox for ten years at that point, but that is what being a Red Sox fan is like. There are guys in the bleachers who will tell you what a bum Harry Hooper was, and how Cy Young was a lazy, overpaid, bastard and they’re glad they got rid of him.

  For another thing, they totally did not show what it’s like to not be a baseball fan in Boston. I know the female lead wasn’t Boston born and bred, but the movie implied that she had been living there for five years, more or less, so when the male lead tells her he’s a Red Sox fan, she should know what he means.

• Ushpizin is a profoundly good movie. I disagree with the main characters religious opinions, and I don’t really trust the ending, but the religious struggle of a man with a vile and violent history and a deeply devotional faith is not only instructive but surprisingly cinematic. I was disappointed that Ben Baruch dropped out of the movie, though, as he was on his way to becoming one of film’s great schnorrers.
• In mentioning good movies, I saw and enjoyed I Know Where I’m Going. It’s true that it goes downhill after the opening titles, but that’s just because the opening titles are so unbelievably wonderful. And the rest of the movie is very good. If you like that sort of thing. If you don’t think that war-time British romance movies are swell, then you’ll probably be annoyed by the annoying things rather than charmed by the charming ones. Also: pipers.
• Your Humble Blogger’s reaction to the movie of the The History Boys, to no-one’s surprise, was primarily frustration that I am too damn cheap and lazy to have gone to see the thing on stage. Well, and it was the right decision, too. But, damn.
• The interesting part of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada was the bit about making the murderer live with the slowly decomposing body of the victim. Very Lorca, if I’m getting that right. Sadly, there was a lot of other movie to fit that in. Ah, well. Lovely scrub brush. Sometimes I miss the desert.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)

While Your Humble Blogger doesn’t feel compelled to note in this Tohu Bohu every movie watched, now and then we watch enough to pile up some comments...

• I was disappointed that Bandidas wasn’t more fun. It was fun, but it wasn’t fun enough. The odd thing, though: if you have Penelope Cruz and Selma Hayek, and the two characters are the elegant European-educated Do�a and the ignorant peasant girl, wouldn’t you cast Ms. Cruz in the former and Ms. Hayek in the latter? Still, they probably had more fun doing it the way they did. The other thing of note is that as a grown-up, I find it awkward to watch the bits in movies like this where they hint that it will degenerate into hard-core pornography, when I know that the movie is rated PG-13. And, you know, I am perfectly capable of renting hard-core pornography, if I so choose, and presumably have chosen this instead. And besides, I’ve seen Frida, I’ve seen Ms. Hayek topless, so the whole is-she-about-to-lose-her-top wink-wink came off very ... actually, very priggish.
• I can’t believe that American Dreamz wasn’t at least watchable. I mean, it’s a brilliant idea—in an attempt to play for ratings, an American Idol-type show pushes an Ay-rab through to the finals, which will have the President of the United States as a guest judge. What they don’t know is that they Ay-rab is, in fact, a sleeper Al-Qaeda agent, activated by his success to get a chance to assassinate the President. Meanwhile, giddy with his own new celebrity, he can’t tell whether he is trying to win for his cause or for his fans. He’ll have to betray one side or the other. It could be played as a suspense thriller or as a farce; either way, it’s a great idea. Lousy movie, though. Or, at least, it seemed like a lousy movie to me. It’s possible that a lot of that wasted time was actually hilarious spoofs of actual reality shows, which YHB does not watch, and so I just didn’t get the joke.
• Good Night, and Good Luck was a lovely film. Seriously, David Strathairn shone with the light of his inner justice, he was wreathed in the luminous cigarette smoke of truth, he squinted into the krieg lights of, well, they were actual krieg lights. It was odd, though, because it seemed to be a call for journalists today to go up against our own McCarthys, and it did a terrible job of explaining who Edward R. Murrow was, and why he could go up against Joseph McCarthy. Or of how powerful Sen. McCarthy really was, or seemed to be. Or of how Sen. McCarthy actually fell, and any connection between that fall and Mr. Murrow’s stand against him. The Senate turned on him because of some corruption unconnected with anything Mr. Murrow was reporting on, and because he was a drunk, and because he hung around with young gay men. Now, you could argue that they felt they could afford, politically, to turn on him because Mr. Murrow gave them cover, but George Clooney doesn’t make that argument, or any other. As a result, it seems like it was just ... out there. A gutsy thing that Mr. Murrow did, that he more or less got away with doing. That’s all.
• I wonder if any brilliant comedian of this time could have anything like the career Peter Sellers had. I just watched Carlton-Browne of the F.O., in which Ms. Sellers plays a corrupt prime minister of a small mediteranean island, a greasy Greek slimeball. It’s a terrible part, and he’s hilarious. Other than being funny, though, what’s astonishing to me is that he gives the impression of being obese, without wearing a fat suit. There’s something about his costumes, and the way he holds his head, and the way he moves, that all give an idea of obesity, to the point that now and then I’d see a full-body view of him and think oh, right, he’s not fat.

  The thing that really struck me, though, is that Peter Sellers is at his absolute best when he is sending up ethnic stereotypes. I’ve seen him playing joke Frenchmen, joke South Asians, joke Americans, joke Chinese, joke Germans, joke Spaniards, joke Mexicans, joke Italians and of course joke Englishmen. Most of these were of course terribly offensive, sure. And I’d rather live in a culture that doesn’t (in general) hire white actors to portray joke Asians in yellow makeup. If that means that we don’t have any more Peter Sellerses, that’s fine. The world is full of tradeoffs, and that one isn’t close. Still, it’s a loss.

• Saw Spiderman 2 and wished I hadn’t. Oh, and since I saw some sort of extended director’s cut on video, was there a bizarre thing in the theatrical release of the movie where the dishonest jerk Peter Parker was hiding from his landlord and not paying rent (because he’d rather play hero than hold down a job), and seemed to be considering banging the landlord’s daughter in lieu of rent? And then the landlord, the landlord malnourished daughter, Peter’s money trouble and Peter’s aunt’s money trouble just drop out of the movie as if there had never been any point in wasting our time with them? How, exactly, was Peter paying his rent?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, here’s an odd question: To what extent do you want a movie (or music or theater) reviewer in a daily newspaper to express his own preferences and interests, rather than her estimation of her audience’s?

That is, say your hometown newspaper’s movie review has a kink for (f’r’ex) women wearing gloves. The correct thing for such a reviewer to do about such a kink is to keep her mouth shut about it, right? I mean, it’s all right to mention it, or even to have it as a sort of running gag, but we don’t want her to review the movies based on how they appeal to her glove fetish. Right? I mean, if when she sees a movie with beautiful black elbow-length ones, she doesn’t want to give it five stars, even if she knows that she’ll be buying this one on DVD and watching it over and over again, with the blinds down. Her personal preferences, in such a case, should be kept as separate as possible from her reviewing job.

On the other hand, take an example of a reviewer who really thinks that (again, f’r’ex) fart jokes are funny. When a new Will Farrell movie comes out, it there are a bunch of good fart jokes, that’s a movie that should get some extra stars, yes? There’s no reason, there, for the reviewer to hold aside her own taste. Why not? Because it’s a taste that lots of the potential movie audience seems to share. So, from these examples, it seems as if the reviewer should consult her own tastes insofar as those tastes represent common ones. But that can’t be right, can it? I mean, if a reviewer appreciates, say, a well-edited movie, and is irritated by a movie where the editing is for crap, should she not take the editing into account in the review, just because most of her readers don’t really understand movie editing at all?

OK, what about good acting. Jane Reviewer likes good naturalistic acting, and Joan Reviewer likes good stylized acting. Does Joan have the responsibility to learn to recognize what Jane would like, and if not appreciate it for herself, up the recommendation because it has good naturalistic acting? What if Joan really can’t tell good stylized acting from ham acting, because it all looks fake to her? Is she automatically a crap reviewer? Would she be a better reviewer if she just panned everything that wasn’t in the naturalistic style?

I’m not talking about good magazine essays, by the way, which aren’t meant (mostly) to persuade the viewer to see or avoid a movie, so much as to persuade the viewer to adopt the writer’s views on that movie, movies generally, and the entire culture. No, I mean the daily newspaper, which reviews two or three movies every week and gives them a certain number of stars, or thumbs, or motion-sensitive laughing pumpkins. You might say that such a newspaper should hire a reviewer that shares tastes with its readers, but (a) how can you be sure either what the applicant’s real tastes are or what the readers’ tastes are, and (2) every reviewer must have some element of her taste that is unusual, if only an appetite for seeing more movies than the rest of us could bear to sit through. And if Jane Reviewer doesn’t start the job with a kink of some kind, surely she will develop one after the first fifty movies, yes?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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As has become more or less the rule, Your Humble Blogger watched six movies in theaters over the last year. I suspect that at least some of the movies in question will not be nominated for any Academy Awards this time.

It's a little hard to decide which was the Bestest Movie of The Year. In my general categories, the top one is unalloyed joy, and I don't think any of the movies really got in there. On the other hand, both Keeping Mum and Rocky Balboa should be in a category called, oh, had a good time, better than I might have expected, really. The category of liked bits of it quite a lot, but was disappointed, a bit contains V for Vendetta and Flushed Away although V should really be in a category of Problematic: fun to talk about without being a good movie, which could also include Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which would keep the latter out of the stunk on ice, even though there were still some nice bits, and it really ought to have been a lot better category, which otherwise contains Over the Hedge.

I also saw Nanny McPhee on DVD, and it was quite good, I thought, although strangely the worst thing about it was the performance and character or Nanny McPhee herself as conceived and executed by the otherwise estimable Emma Thompson. The rest of the cast was excellent, including the children. In fact, they did a very good job of making the children both (a) child-like and (2) different, one to another.

My other DVD watching included another chunk of films from 2005, and when I looked at the list, I was startled to discover that I have watched eight of the ten top-grossing movies of that year. Five of those were on DVD, and I certainly did not pick them by virtue of their success in selling tickets. In fact, I was shocked to discover that Mr. and Mrs. Smith had sold that many tickets. On the other hand, clearly the ubiquity of the advertising for those movies had something to do with my choice, as did the ready availability of those titles, which was due to their ticket-selling success as well. On the other hand, aside from the eleventh-grossing movie (King Kong, which I saw in the theater as part of that gross) and the nineteenth-grossing movie (Million-Dollar Baby, which I saw, if I remember correctly, between Oscar nominations and the Oscar awards), I saw none of the next ten top-grossers, and I doubt that there's that much difference in the availability or advertising presence of the first and second ten movies. Still, sort of odd to see myself in the mainstream there.

To follow up on 2005, I was pleased by Mrs. Henderson Presents and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, two very different movies. Henderson is about WW-II theater/vaudeville, and is very sweet, funny and poignant. Much worth seeing, particularly for yet another reminder of what life during wartime is like when the war is not a minor skirmish on the fringes of the empire. KKBB is funny, knowing and quick, and succeeds in the unusual pursuit of having a genuinely dim-witted protagonist. Robert Downey, Jr., plays a fellow (almost typed felon, which would have worked as well) so far over his head that they would have to drag the reservoir for him, and his stupidity is neither the good-hearted naivete of stock noir protagonists or the lucky blundering of spoof comics but the echt dimness of, well, dimness. They go into the unalloyed joy category for 2005 along with Were-Rabbit and Bride and Prejudice.

Other than that, Your Humble Blogger watched Soap (seasons 1-3), House (season 1), and Doctor Who (season 1), all of which I enjoyed to a greater or lesser extent. Watching television series on DVD works quite well for me, as it turns out, and an hour (with commercials removed) is about how much television I want to watch in an evening. Often we break up a movie over two nights, and there have been several instances where we did not bother to finish what we started. There were also a handful of movies we enjoyed that reach back further than 2005, including the wonderful Triplets of Belleville, the good-but-not-quite-great Billy Elliott and the exactly-what-it-looked-like About a Boy.

Finally, it was not in 2006, but in 2007 Your Humble Blogger watched a film called The Americanization of Emily which appears to have been made in an alternate universe. Can any Gentle Reader explain how it got through to this one? And as its director and lead actor and actress are still alive and working, are they now dopplegangers? I hate to think of who would replace Paddy Chayefsky, but can you imagine a sequel, set in the current state of affairs?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Your Humble Blogger watched the movie The Wrong Guy t'other night. It's a clever little low-budget Canadian comedy from the late nineties, written by and starring Dave Foley and David Anthony Higgins and directed by David Steinberg. It's odd, though, because despite having a good cast of funny people and clever situations and good writing, it's not all that funny a movie. It's a B or perhaps a B-, and I'm not sure why.

The two big gags are that Dave Foley's character believes that he is on the run from the law as the main suspect in a murder, and that David Anthony Higgins' lazy and avaricious policeman is totally uninterested in actual law enforcement. They're both good gags. The first one is a good plot driver, as the semi-fugitive makes his incompetent way to the border, getting himself almost killed a few times and eventually falling in love. The second one isn't a good plot driver, but is funny anyway; when the real killer finally crosses the state line, the cop shows palpable relief that the feds will take over and he can go home. When the feds keep him on the case with an unlimited expense account, he "follows up leads" in New York instead of following the killer. I'm not sure the two gags work well together, though. I mean, the false fugitive would have been perfectly safe had he been a real fugitive, since the cop wasn't interested in chasing him. It throws the thing off.

Also, for some reason, the gags on the way are funnier in concept than they are in the movie. Our hero finds himself in a small town, where he falls in love with a pretty, pure-hearted but poor girl. Her father, you see, is the town banker, but he's being squeezed out by the rich farmers, who are going to force him out of business and plant corn where the bank is standing. A creepy conspiracy theory buff picks up our hitchhiking hero, who of course can't give his name or where he is going. A variety of contrived coincidences where the real killer meets up with our hero in various locations. The hotel clerk who finds our hero's suspicious behavior suspicious, but is totally taken in by the real killer. I don't know why they don't work better than they do, but they don't.

Do you know any movies like that? Movies that seem like they should be good movies, but somehow don't work, and you can't figure out why? Usually, it's either the cast or the writing, for me, although sometimes a really badly edited and directed movie will have ruinously bad pacing. But for those, it's clear why the movie fails. This one, I can't nail down a reason.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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So. Over the last few months, I've been watching DVDs of a couple of television shows featuring the great Hugh Laurie. They are somewhat different. The first is an American drama/soap opera in which Mr. Laurie plays a brilliant and irascible diagnostician (oh, and crazy dope friend); the second is a sketch comedy series he co-wrote and co-starred in with Stephen Fry. Watching the two of them over a shortish period has put me rather in awe of Mr. Laurie as an actor.

House, the medical thing, is an annoyingly terrible show with annoyingly brilliant bits. Mr. Laurie's character is wonderful, mostly wonderfully written, and almost always wonderful to watch. The rest of the characters range from annoying to uninteresting, with occasional good bits for most of them. The show revolves, or ought to, around two kinds of scenes: Doctor House giving snap diagnoses of common conditions based on offhand observations of minute symptoms, and Doctor House coming up with possible diagnoses of extraordinarily rare conditions (or combinations of conditions) based on a whole slew of conflicting and usually disgusting symptoms. I prefer the former, particularly as Mr. Laurie and Doctor House deliver the diagnoses in very funny, terribly rude, and often unexpected ways. The writing and performance mesh perfectly, and his exasperation, misanthropy and arrogance are entertaining to watch, as long as you are not the poor sap in the walk-in clinic who has the doctor glance at your left wrist and tell you that you have glaucoma and besides, your boss is sleeping with your husband. Or whatever. It's a hoot. The other ones are less amusing but are actually engrossing (in addition to being out-grossing) and if they are implausible, they are entertaining enough that I don't mind.

Sadly, the rest of the show is a soap opera about a handful of unpleasant hospital administrators and doctors, who waste my time with their interactions as if I care about them and their fictional futures. La. In addition, the implausibility that works in the show's favor when it turns out that the patient has leprosy (the father, you see, was not actually on secret missions so much as he was tramping around the undeveloped world having indiscriminate sex with whoever he met) works against the show when I am supposed to care whether the ludicrous hospital CEO will be vanquished by the risible chief of surgery. There is an important difference between implausible and fun, and implausible and lame. I surmise that these bits are there to provide opportunities for Dr. House to be inventively and wittily abrasive, except that the setups take up time that could be spent showing Dr. House actually being inventively and wittily abrasive. Ah, well. I am nearly at the end of the first season, something like twenty-'leven episodes, and I don't plan to watch season two.

I was so impressed by Mr. Laurie's performance as Dr. House, though, that I decided to seek out A Bit of Fry and Laurie, which I had known about and never bothered to find and watch. I've seen six episodes of the first series, and they are amateurish, inconsistent, self-indulgent, and very very funny. I was surprised to see that Stephen Fry, for all that he is a very funny man and clearly a terrific writer, is not much of an actor. He plays a very narrow range of characters extraordinarily well, and when he goes outside that range, it's usually a disaster, or at least his performance is. Mr. Laurie, on the other hand, successfully embodies a much wider variety of characters, changing voices, physical habits, classes and rhythms as well as any sketch comedian I've seen (with the exception, I suppose, of Michael Palin, who somehow was always more persuasive in his lower-class characters and madmen than the other Pythons). That doesn't mean that Mr. Laurie is funnier than Mr. Fry, even in my perception. Most of the best bits of Fry and Laurie (so far) have hinged on Mr. Fry, when he is either playing Stephen Fry or one of the overeducated professionals he does so well. Or, particularly, when he is doing both, since the whole show is predicated on an enjoyment of meta-humor, of part of the joke being that Mr. Fry and Mr. Laurie are doing the whole absurd skit comedy thing. They particularly like beginning a skit with an elaborate set-up only to stop the whole thing three or five lines in. There's a classic bit where they apologize for having to leave out a particular skit that was one of their favorites, but it does have a lot of sex and violence in it, such as the bit where Mr. Fry hits Mr. Laurie with a golf club, which wouldn't be so bad, but he does it very sexily. And so on.

One thing that struck me, watching these old shows, was that Mr. Laurie does seem to give Mr. Fry the business quite a bit about being homosexual. Mr. Fry is, as I now know, homosexual, or perhaps (I don't recall, although I have read an essay by him about it) bisexual with a long-term boyfriend. I don't think Mr. Fry was Out when these were broadcast in the mid-eighties, nor do I know if he was out to Mr. Laurie. Still, when Mr. Laurie's character calls Mr. Fry's character a great nancy or a bumboy, it's hard not to read into it a sort of needling that I think they both might have found very funny. Or not. It's hard to read.

Anyway, of the two, I vastly prefer the earlier, funnier works. I have also seen Mr. Laurie in Blackadder (he is a regular in III and IV), Jeeves and Wooster (with Mr. Fry again), Ben Elton's excruciating snoozefest Maybe Baby, Peter's Friends, and small parts in half-a-dozen movies and television shows. He was certainly good in them, funny in many of them, but not startlingly good of the go-out-and-see-what-else-the-man-has-done sort. He is that sort of good in House, which is good, because it got me to the Bits.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus:,
-Vardibidian.

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I am trying to remember if I’ve ever read 84 Charing Cross Road before. I’d seen the movie, years and years ago; it’s a wonderful movie, and YHB highly recommends it. If possible, go back and time and see the movie before seeing Silence of the Lambs; it’s best to not have the stray image of a psychotic cannibal behind the well-mannered clerk. It will also help you enjoy other Anthony Hopkins roles, including the psychotic cannibal, if you start with one of the quiet ones.

Anyway, the book. It’s lovely, but surprisingly slight. It left me unsatisfied. That, perhaps, is the fault of the movie, but still.

I have been to Charing Cross Road, made the pilgrimage to 84, where there was a Burger King, if I remember correctly, and later a wine bar or something. There were a handful of wonderful used bookstores in the Charing Cross Road, and another couple of shops for new books that were wonderful as well, although beyond my pocketbook. Of course, the point of the book (and the movie) is all in not going to London, which in honesty is a magnificent and powerful pastime that is somewhat spoiled by going to London. London is wonderful, don’t get me wrong, and if somebody will pay for us to spend three months there, I’d take it greedily and ache for more, but not going to London, oh, one could spend a whole lifetime doing that, and the ache there is ever so much more pleasurable than the other.

Plus, you simply can’t get a good cup of tea in London.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

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