Tohu Bohu

Well, and as Your Humble Blogger is still thinking about the Oscars, I might as well write my response to Kim Elsesser’s Op-Ed at the times suggesting Gender-Neutral Oscars should be extended to the acting categories. My initial response was that it was a terrible idea, practically speaking, as the nominees for Best Actress were generally from obscure movies that would not, if it weren’t for the Oscars, ever be seen by anybody other than critics. But when I went to give examples from this year, it turned out to not be so true: two of the five nominations were in mainstream popular movies, and one of the other three was the sort of controversial film that might have made a splash in the absence of a potential Oscar nominee. The remaining two (Carey Mulligan in An Education and Helen Mirren in The Last Station) were the sort of things I was thinking of, but were roughly equivalent to two of the Best Actor nominees (Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart and Colin Firth in A Single Man). In fact, while only two of the five films that had Best Actress nominees were Best Picture nominees, that was true of Best Actor as well. So it was roughly even this year.

To make the language easier on myself, I’m going to make up a term for a particular kind of movie. This is the movie that gets made largely because there is one great role, that either never gets wide distribution or fades very quickly from it. There is an Oscar push, not only because the performance is terrific but because that is the only chance to make any money from a deserving flick. If there were no awards, no-one would ever hear about these movies. I’ll call them Actress Movies—and I’ll keep calling them Actress Movies even when talking about the ones for male actors (such as Crazy Heart and A Single Man) because (a) I think they fall into the same category, and (2) I think, before doing the research, that there are way more of these for Actresses than Actors. OK? So, having found essentially two Actress Movie nominees on each side for last year, I am left wondering if that assessment is right.

Last year, I count Kate Winslet in The Reader, Angelina Jolie in Changeling and Melissa Leo in Frozen River. Of those, The Reader got a Best Picture nomination, and Changeling was a Clint Eastwood picture, so you could argue them, but I count them. On the left side, Richard Jenkins in The Visitor and Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, neither of which got Best Picture nominations. Hm.

The year before: Laura Linney in The Savages, Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth I part II, Julie Christie in Away from Her and Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf. Four out of five. Total tickets sold: five. On the left, Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises and Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah. I don’t count the Daniel Day-Lewis, but you could, although you have to note the Best Picture nomination.

Another year back: three at least on the women’s side, and the men’s side very difficult to count. Oddly enough, and I didn’t notice this at the time, the Best Actress, Best Actor and Best Picture nominees comprise 14 different films with only one overlap (Helen Mirren in The Queen). I wonder if there has ever been a year with no overlap at all.

We’re in the Oscars for 2006 now, and it’s clearly 3 out of 5 Actress Movies on the right and either one or two on the left (I wouldn’t count Capote as an Actress Movie, but it’s close). Another year back and it’s three of five for the women (including Annette Bening in Being Julia, which may be the canonical example of the Actress Movie) and maybe one on the men’s side. And another: four out of five, and one for the men. The 2002 films are tricky—is Frida an Actress Movie? I’m going to say not, which leaves one real Actress Movie on that side, and on the men’s side, at least two and arguably as many as four. That’s the first time we’ve seen it tip that way, isn’t it? Let’s just finish up the decade, though: 2001 films have two on each side and the 2000 films have two for women and three for men. So for those years, it was pretty even, or even tipped toward the men, but overall I think I was right about my instinct.

The point, essentially, is that I think that there are a limited number of slots for those nominations, and if there was one category for Best Acting, the Actress Movies would lose out. Except, thinking about it, that I’m not sure they would—the Academy might focus even more strongly on those, leaving the Best Director and Best Picture nominations for more popular movies. Hm. Perhaps I’m wrong about this.

By the way, a quick trivia question: What is the most recent movie to have performances nominated for Best Actress and a Best Actor both? When was the most recent year there were two such movies, and what were the movies?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As the Oscars passed me by, I thought it might be time to do my Year in Movies 2009, in which Your Humble Blogger details all the movies I have seen so far that came out in that year. I had been thinking, last night, that it was Not a Good Year for movies for YHB, but that turns out not to be so true. Here are the flicks, as best as I can remember them.

• Coraline: Certainly the creepiest movie of the year, and a strong contender for Most Disturbing Movie Ever. Of course, that’s a personal thing, mostly because the great Neil Gaiman and the great Henry Selick happened to hit my sensitive subjects: needles, eyeballs, spiders. Ick. And definitely would have been my top animated pick over Up (see below), but then I haven’t seen Ponyo or The Fantastic Mr. Fox yet.
• District 9: My comment about halfway through this one was that it was more like the specfic I had been reading lately than most specfic movies are. There were some flaws, sure, but I enjoyed it a lot. I was pleased to see that they avoided the scene where the infected human lead and his wife meet and, well, that wouldn’t have been a good scene however it went.
• Invictus: This was enjoyable, although I was disappointed in the portrayal of the rugby, which was the last four or five hours of the movie. Also, I felt that it was a mistake for the stadium people to install a digital clock that makes a really loud thud noise whenever the display changes. On a more serious note, I was irritated by the pointless ghost scenes of Mandela in prison, and was very impressed with the supporting actors. Also? Needs Moar Cricket.
• Julie and Julia:Too much Julie. Stanley Tucci was brilliant (as he so often is), and Meryl Streep was a hoot. On the whole, I didn’t find the movie as annoying as the book, mostly because of the bits that were based on the other book.
• Inglourious Basterds:What a mess. Good bits, but it sure seemed like it aspired to profundity without wanting to make any actual statements. Yes, I see, we-the-viewers are contemptuous of the Nazis in the movie theater as they cheer for the soldier on screen killing Americans, and then we cheer for the Americans on our screens killing Nazis. Yes. It is possible to construct highly self-referential situations at once reductive and regressive. But all of that was distracting from the fun, which this movie promised me and did not deliver.
• Love Happens: Was I on a plane? I can’t remember why I saw this, but it was terrible.
• Monsters v. Aliens: This was quite close to being a good movie, but it never happened. It just didn’t.
• Up: A lot of fun, with some really brilliant bits at the beginning. I never really warmed to the boy, though, and it is probably one of my more serious character defects that I fear and loathe dogs, so that kinda detracted from the experience for me. I mean, a good movie, all in all, but not a Great Movie. Loved the beginning, though.
• Watchmen: See, here’s the thing. YHB inadvertently picked up from the local public library not the theatrical release, which I probably would have thought was too long, nor the Director’s Cut for people who have lots of time, but the Ultimate Unending Uncut Version, where they threw in extra footage of people standing around and some extra stuff they had in a can in the shed, and I think they may have just shown some clips of people looking at each other more than once, and, and, well, all of this in addition to the acting being terrible, just terrible, and, the point is, I gave up during the prison riot. Maybe if I had seen the short version, I would have enjoyed it, particularly if I had seen it in the theater, but not this version. As a side note, I also shut off Zack Snyder’s film of 300, which makes me two-for-two on his. And I don’t give up on movies that often.

That’s it for the year. So far, anyway—I do most of my watching at home now, so it’s likely that I will see more 2009 movies over the next few years. There are half-a-dozen or so I really do want to see at some point. The only ones I saw in the theater were Coraline and Invictus, by the way.

It seems I never did a 2008 list, either. I won’t go back and fix it, but for y’al’s information, the movies I have so far seen from 2008 are Bangkok Dangerous, The Bank Job, Be Kind, Rewind, Burn after Reading, Death Race, Hellboy II, Hulk, Igor, In Bruges, Leatherheads, Milk, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, The Tale of Despereaux, Tropic Thunder (much of it, anyway), and Wall-E. I think Wall-E stands out as my favorite, but Miss Pettigrew was wonderful, and both Milk and Be Kind, Rewind were good as well. The others range from has-good-bits to oh-dear-me.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Gentle Reader will remember that I am peculiarly fascinated by adaptation, particularly the adaptation of written fiction to stage and screen. One of my contentions is that it is possible to make a good movie that is close to the work it is taken from, but that it is probably easier to make a good movie that departs from the original quite a bit. Fidelity becomes an obstacle, one that can be overcome, certainly, but often at tremendous cost. I think it’s a fascinating task for a writer, and when I spot an occasion where it is done well, I always want to find out how the writer went about the process of adaptation, how the decisions were made, how the writer understood the pressures of the medium, and to what extent the adaptor is satisfied with the finished adaptation as his work, as well as the original author’s.

In some cases, of course, it’s the same person, which makes it even more interesting, and in at least one case, the writer wrote a book about it. That’s John Irving, who wrote My Movie Business about the adaptation of The Cider House Rules into a movie. I knew the book existed, vaguely anyway, and when I reread the book last summer I finally got off my bottom and went to look for the book. I had to ILL it, actually, but thank goodness my ILL librarian is wonderful.

Alas, the book was not as wonderful as I had hoped. Too much of a build-up, I guess. There is a lot of good stuff, and he did talk a lot about the essential question I had, which was how did he decide what to keep? Because what they wound up doing was ditching three-quarters of the book or more, and compressing the rest into a short period (fifteen years into one, etc), and taking out lots of stuff here and there. And it works as a movie, and as an adaptation of the novel, which is pretty incredible. So it’s interesting to read Mr. Irving’s rumination on the various drafts and versions. Evidently for a long time (the movie took twenty years or so to make) the screenplay had no love interest for Homer at all; when he brought back the character of Candy, he tried to make her unsympathetic to increase sympathy for Homer (who needs it). It’s a good choice, but not the only choice, and there’s a sense of some regret throughout the book there and in similar situations he was compelled, ultimately, to make a single good choice and leave behind all the other possible choices.

So there was some good stuff in the book. The book as a whole wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be, though. It was more a collection of anecdotes than a book about adaptation. Some of the anecdotes were terrific and some not so terrific. And it made John Irving himself seem like one of those people who doesn’t quite realize how unusual it is to be a Best-Selling Novelist, somebody who is popular and critically acclaimed and reasonably well-compensated and all. Just as an example, here’s a bit from page 121: “Imagine writing a novel and having someone else, without your approval, design the jacket. But that’s how it is in the movie business.” That’s how it is in the novel business, too, for most people.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A copy of Strange Interlude just passed over the counter here, and as always, whenever that play (or indeed any of Eugene O’Neill’s plays) comes to mind, I think of Groucho Marx pointing with his cigar, waggling his eyebrows, and saying Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.

It got me thinking about how often I become familiar with a spoof or parody or even a reference to a thing before I encounter the thing itself, and how that colors my experience of the thing. I mean, I saw Young Frankenstein before I saw Frankenstein; I learned a bunch of opera motifs through Gilligan’s Island. I think I probably saw Prufrock before I read the one that starts “Let us go then, me and you/when the evening has dropped like an old shoe/the first of what must inevitably be two”, but I honestly don’t remember. I saw Murder by Death before watching any of the Charlie Chan movies, and I think before watching any of the Nick and Nora movies, although I had seen (and I think read) both Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Can’t remember whether I had seen The Maltese Falcon, by then. I definitely saw The Maltese Falcon before watching The Cheap Detective, but I hadn’t seen To Have and Have Not or The Big Sleep, or even Casablanca.

I don’t think my enjoyment of Casablanca or Frankenstein was ruined by that experience. I’m not sure about the Charlie Chan movies; there is so much that makes those a truly guilty pleasure that Peter Sellers being screamed at by the moose head on the wall is probably small potatoes. And if there are a few songs that have been ruined for me by a filk or parody, well, they are just songs, anyway. So maybe it’s just Eugene O’Neill. I was thinking there were more, but now I come to write the note, I can’t think of any.

Are there movies or books or plays that were ruined for you by exposure to the parody first? Tarzan? Michael Jackson? How Doth the Little Busy Bee?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So. Your Humble Blogger has finally managed to watch the King Lear I was hocking about a couple of weeks ago. And it was… ok.

Sir Ian McKellen was very very good in places, although somewhat less impressive in others (in my arrogant opinion, of course). The rest of the cast was much less impressive. I did like Sylvester McCoy’s Fool, most of the time, although the effect of actually hanging him on-stage (as it were) is dramatically lessened by the transfer to television. Not his fault, really. Monica Dolan’s Regan did an excellent job of differentiating her character from Frances Barber’s more cookie-cutter Goneril, although the idea of playing it as Tracey Ullman-plays-Helena-Bonham-Carter-as-an-alcoholic-Sloane-Ranger was a trifle irritating. Still, I have seen enough performances where the sisters are indistinguishable from each other or from other performers in other productions; this was memorable and effective. Romola Garai’s Cordelia was luminously beautiful, really startlingly gorgeous, but (a) so what, and (2) that doesn’t really justify shoving her breasts into the camera all through I,i. Again, probably not her fault, really. I didn’t like Kent at all, I didn’t like Gloucester at the beginning, and although I liked him more once he was blinded, it wasn’t enough. I didn’t like Edgar or Edmund.

I hated the costumes. First of all, the similarity made it hard to tell one male from another; they were all black, white and grey, except King Lear at the beginning, but of course we didn’t have any trouble telling which one was King Lear. And the costumes were just bad; the worst was the Duke of Albany wearing a fucking bathrobe into combat. No, I’m serious. Lots of gold braid and medals and comfy, comfy terry cloth. And when the Fool gets stripped of his outer stuff, he seriously appears to be wearing contemporary slacks and a shirt; it was incongruous and distracting. And the sets, too, I didn’t like them, either. Again all grey and black, with nothing to really distinguish the atmosphere of the various castles. There was no way to tell at a glance that we were back in Albany, or in Gloucester, or where. Nor were they the same place, so it wasn’t some sort of thematic or metaphorical point. They were just similar, and confusing.

But I don’t really want to emphasize the things I dislike. It’s just easier to describe them and talk about them; I often will see a show I like and spend several hours talking about the aspects that failed to work. The character, Sir Ian’s Lear, is wonderful and tremendously effective. Less so on the heath (where also the sound mixing problems were particularly bad; it was difficult to make out what anybody was saying with all that rain); more so (as I expected) after the storm. His Lear was not as serene in those final scenes as some interpretations have him; he maintains a certain asperity, a certain impatience, a certain imperiousness. Do not abuse me he says to Kent, at the end, and it snapped out like, well, like a king. And I was weeping, just a trifle, at the recognition scene; I always weep at that.

The thing about Sir Ian is his incredible physical inventiveness. He delivers the verse extraordinarily well, of course, but there are others who might do it even better; nobody does the physical stuff better than him. It’s not just that he is good at the naturalistic part of physical acting, or that his body is capable of expressive gestures, not just with his face or his hands but his legs, his shoulders, his torso. It’s that he clearly is fiendishly good at coming up with bits of business, of physical acting, and then investing them with meaning and performing them with strength and care, which ultimately (for me) add up to a kind of mesmerizing reality for the character that I have never seen anyone equal. It was astonishing on-stage, of course; seeing his Richard III remains the best theatrical experience I’ve had. But in films, as well. Good ones as well as bad.

In this Lear, there’s an ongoing bit with a handkerchief that is wonderful. He seems at several points to be on the verge of a seizure; I was worried that he was going to go all the way, have a stroke on the heath in the storm, and then perform the rest of the play with the left side of his face limp and drooping. That would have been heavy-handed. What actually happened was not: his increasing stiffness, an increasingly drippy nose, and (I think) some increasingly broad gestures with his arms. “I am not ague-proof” he says, sniffling into that handkerchief, which will soon become a rather disgusting white flag. But in between, he cradles poor blind Gloucester like a baby, and then puts felt on his back hooves and steals up on his sons-in-law, stamping and rearing.

There is always a temptation for an actor to give a character some little fun physical attribute: a limp, a twitch, a habitual gesture, a stiff knee. It’s fun to put on, and it can seem so meaningful. And, you know, it can be. But what Sir Ian does (imao) goes way beyond that. I’m not altogether sure how to describe it. I can identify good physical actors, sometimes (in movies both Nicolas Case and Keanu Reeves are inventive physical actors, when they aren’t phoning it in, as is Johnny Depp, of course) but I don’t know that I could tell you what exactly makes for good physical acting.

I suppose, for me, it’s invention; it’s figuring out what to add to the words without detracting from the words. I’m not terribly good at it, myself, although I wish I were. I try to remember about it, give my character a walk, a way of standing, a way of sitting. But the thing is that I have to walk, and stand and sit (so far; I haven’t had to play a part whilst in a neck-high urn yet). I was able to talk my director for Liaisons into having Valmont and his valet cross swords during a bit of a conversation, just for a thing to do, and I think that worked. And there are sometimes little things; in April, my character trailed his fingers in a fish pond that was actually several mirrors. That’s an easy bit of visual trickery, as by folding the fingers under, it looks a bit like they are sinking under the surface, and then I pick them back up and shake them out a bit.

I try to think of things like that, but my imagination is usually limited to minor stuff, bits with my hands, a funny walk, fiddling with props. The bit where Sir Ian takes the bit of cheese from his pocket and lays it gently on the ground, and then stamps on it with his bare heel—well, that’s not even one I particularly liked, and I’m saying that I couldn’t have come up with it, or with anything like it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sorry so quiet lately at this Tohu Bohu. Busy, busy, busy. Enchanted April opens on Thursday, for one thing, and there are all kinds of other things as well.

Here’s a quick thing to pass along from rehearsal last night: one of the two-person scenes was going slowly, and our Dear Director diagnosed the problem as the actors listening, then thinking, then speaking. That is, person A would speak (I have a thorn in my foot), and person B would listen, process the information, decide how to respond, and then speak (a thorn?), followed by person A listening to the response, considering and then speaking (yes, I did say a thorn), followed again by person B considering and responding (well, I didn’t stick it there) and so on. Although all of the considering and so on was fine acting, she said, it was slowing down the scene.

This, of course, is one of the difficult things about acting to a script; the audience wants both (a) not be carried along by the dialogue without having to wait while the actor/character thinks, not a very entertaining spectator sport, and (2) to believe, at least temporarily, that the dialogue mimics actual conversations that actual people have (assuming it’s that kind of show). Actually, I think it’s a bit more complicated than that (who guessed?), and that the audience wants to believe that the dialogue is the dialogue that they would have, if they were in those conditions, because they are really that clever and funny and impassioned and persuasive and poetic, underneath.

But anyway, what I wanted to ask y’all about was your reaction to the Director’s next statement about that pacing and acting: that would be great on film, said she, but not it doesn’t work on stage. Now, on one level, I was just impressed by this as actor-handling, as both of the actors in that scene have worked in film. Still, I was wondering if it made real sense. I mean, when I say that thinking isn’t a spectator sport, clearly lots of people like those shots in film where a person is thinking, acting with her forehead and the corners of the mouth. The reaction shot. I’m always a bit irritated with them, honestly, although I don’t mind watching Person A while Person B is speaking, or watching Person A do that forehead-and-corners-of-the-mouth thing whilst carving the roast or manipulating the cards. But I recognize it as a thing that Great Film Actors win lots of awards for doing.

On the other hand, I think (I think) that in a dialogue, the pauses for thinking in between lines would be excruciating, however foreheady the actors were. Or is that just me?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

So. I used to really enjoy the Oscars. I mean, not so much the show itself—it’s supposed to be awful, as far as I can tell, although not as bad as what I watched for a while last night. But I used to enjoy the awards, the discussion about which films and performances would be nominated and which would be robbed, and which would win, and the whole thing. Somehow, not so much anymore. I figure it’s largely because I see so few movies these days, and very very few in the theaters.

It came as a surprise to me, actually, when I discovered that I had seen three of the five nominees for Best Original Screenplay. Gentle Readers may remember that I spoiled In Fucking Bruges, and then I saw Milk on Xmas Eve, and WALL-E on video. I liked all three of them, actually, and although I enjoyed WALL-E the most, and it was really well-written, I would have enjoyed a Martin McDonough victory the most. And presumably there is some question whether Mr. McDonough will make more films, which Andrew Stanton, not so much. Of course, there’s another sense in which I want Martin McDonough to get disgusted with film and go back to the theater, but then, I’ll get to see any of the films, eventually.

The winning screenplay was for Milk, and I don’t mind, because it was a good screenplay, as far as I could tell, although I have a sense that I would have been weeping all the way through it even if it stunk on ice. My complaint about the movie is that I wanted more Moscone and less White; I have never really had a sense that I got Mayor Moscone in any of the versions of the story I have read or seen. Perhaps that’s just me, as certainly other people seemed to be happy with the amount of Dan White, as Josh Brolin was nominated for the role despite the performance being, to my eyes, perfectly good but not terribly interesting. Ah, well.

In the other writing category, I found it interesting that two of the five nominees were playwrights adapting their own successful stage plays. Although, oddly enough, Peter Morgan was a succesful screenwriter (and television writer) who decided to write a play, Frost/Nixon, which became a huge success and then was adapted for the screen; this is the opposite of Mr. McDonough. As for Mr. Shanley, he of course won for Moonstruck and was inexplicably passed over for Joe versus the Volcano, as well as having a long (although not notably award-filled) career as an Off-Broadway playwright before Doubt took off. David Hare was another nominee; he has recently had more success in film than theater, but I still think of him as a playwright. Mike Leigh, on the other hand (we’re back in Original Screenplay again), I think of as a film director, although of course he started as a playwright.

But the point is that I saw three of the five nominees for Best Original Screenplay. And two of the five for Short Animated Film. And that’s it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger finally saw In Bruges, Martin McDonagh’s first movie. Mr. McDonagh, if you remember, is the fellow who wrote The Cripple of Inishmaan, as well as The Beauty Queen of Linnane and The Pillowman and other blood-drenched plays of recent acclaim. I’d been wanting to see the movie partly because of Mr. McDonagh’s genius at dialogue, partly because of the cast, and partly because of the medieval architecture. You know, Bruges. Or fucking Bruges; I’m guessing that somebody somewhere along the line said “Martin, lad, you can’t call the fillum In Fucking Bruges, they won’t be able to put it on the fucking marqee, will they?” And presumably Mr. McDonagh agreed to cut the title down to its current state, and the signs were printed, and all. I’m not sure why they bothered. I mean, I loved the movie. But as my Best Reader asked at the end of it, who did they think was going to buy tickets to this?

I don’t suppose any of y’all saw it. It’s too bad. Not that I think many of you would have liked it, I suppose. But it would be nice to chat about it.

There are a lot of things I’m interested in particularly that Mr. McDonagh is playing with. For one thing, as a playwright making a movie, the questions around the basic differences between the forms come up, whether he wants them to or not. And as a playwright, and one with a gift for dialogue, he naturally has a lot of the drama come from conversations between his main characters. And as a moviemaker, he also has those characters shoot at each other. I had been about to write that it was cinematic in being very much in Bruges, with a substantial sense of place. Thinking about it, though, I could imagine a good theatrical production providing a substantial sense of place, and of the movement through the old city, in a way that might be even more effective. No, the thing doesn’t feel like a filmed play, but I think that has more to do with the guns than the scenery.

Another thing is the poetry of profanity, the rhythm and feel of it. The fine gradation of abuse. There’s a lovely scene, near the end, when the old hit man and the boss are sitting at an outdoor table of a bistro (is that the right word? I might call it a cafe, but that seems wrong. They serve food, and coffee, I’m sure, but most of the patrons are having beer or liquor) discussing, well, the old hit man was supposed to kill the young hit man but he didn’t, and now the boss has to kill the old hit man for disobeying him, and the old hit man is trying to explain why that’s all right. Anyway, the old hit man, whose name is Ken by the way, is talking to Harry, his boss, and saying that the young hit man is, you know, young, and although he is terribly, terribly guilty, there is the possibility of redemption in his future, while for Ken and Harry, not so much.

Ken: Harry, let’s face it. And I’m not being funny. I mean no disrespect, but you’re a cunt. You’re a cunt now, and you’ve always been a cunt. And the only thing that’s going to change is that you’re going to be an even bigger cunt. Maybe have some more cunt kids.
Harry: Leave my kids fucking out of it! What have they done? You fucking retract that bit about my cunt fucking kids!
Ken: I retract that bit about your cunt fucking kids.
Harry: Insult my fucking kids? That’s going overboard, mate!
Ken: I retracted it, didn’t I?

OK, but I really liked it. And keep in mind, Ken is not going to live through the night, and he knows it.

That basic idea, by the way, of change, redemption, guilt, all that, is the heart of the film. As writers do, he’s brought it to a froth by raising the stakes beyond our ordinary lives. I mean, for one thing, they are all killers. Ray (the young hit man) has earned the wroth of Harry because when he killed a priest (on Harry’s order), he accidentally killed a little boy as well. Harry’s code of honor says that you don’t walk away from killing a little boy, so Ray has to be killed. When Ken refuses to kill him, Harry’s code of honor says that Harry has to go and kill Ken, and what’s more, do it himself, rather than sending yet another hit man. Harry’s relentless honor results, of course, in more deaths than just the two hit men he’s aiming for, and he has to abide by the results of that in his code as well. Ken believes in the possibility of redemption, although not for himself. Ray doesn’t really believe in the possibility of redemption, although he doesn’t know what he believes, and is coming (I think) to regret not knowing what he believes, as he has nothing to tell him how to behave. He isn’t able to adopt Harry’s inflexible code, but he doesn’t have anything to replace it with that might provide him with some structure.

Lastly, speaking about the inflexible code that the hit men live with (or can’t live with), the three of them are unbelievably homophobic. I’m not sure that homophobic is even the right word. There is a thing, gayness, that doesn’t so much have anything to do with sexual attraction between men, but deviation from the Code or the expectations of manliness in any way. Light beer is referred to as “gay beer”, for instance. For another, a punk who gets his gun taken away from him is referred to as gay, by virtue of his having had his gun taken away from him. It’s not absolutely clear that he isn’t gay, or at least interested in having sex with men. Of course, having sex with men isn’t necessarily gay, particularly if the sex is rough and/or non-consensual. I’m not saying that there isn’t homophobia at the bottom of it, what with the idea of homosexual men being a fundamental violation of the rightness of things, but the homophobia is curiously divorced from the actual homosexual men or actual homosexuality and transferred to light beer and incompetence.

Well, and it’s probably obvious to Gentle Readers that I want to go on and on about this movie, ideally to people who have seen it and all. But I doubt that’ll happen.

I also say a movie called Seducing Dr. Lewis, which turned out not to be a bad porno but a rather sweet, gentle French Canadian movie along the lines of Brassed Off or Waking Ned Devine. I’d enjoy chatting about that one, too (the class issues don’t get resolved so much as dropped, what’s up with that?), but I figure there’s really no chance anybody will have seen that.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

OK, a quick question for those of my Gentle Readers who have seen both The Illusionist and The Prestige. For those who haven’t, the rest of this is chock full o’spoilers. On the other hand, it’s just about possible that people who have no interest in seeing either will be interested in the general topic of which my quick question is the specific.

Ready?

Both movies are about nineteenth-century stage magicians (this is false; The Prestige straddles the century’s edge and The Illusionist could be after the turn, if only just), and both depict dramatic moments on-stage. In The Prestige, the filmmakers chose to present the stage magic more-or-less realistically; in The Illusionist the filmmakers chose not to. That is, we in the film audience (with our sensibilities) watching the film of the performance of The Illusionist can tell that post-production trickery was used. In fact, they make rather a big deal out of the fact that there was simply no way that a performer of that time could have done those tricks.

The main trick in The Illusionist is the projection of three-dimensional insubstantial moving images onto the stage and into the aisles. I rather doubt this could be done effectively now (at a profit, that is), but certainly at the time it would not have been possible. In addition, the orange tree trick, which could have been done mechanically, was clearly and obviously done with CGI. The other trick I remember is with the Crown Prince’s sword, which would have been easy to do if he could have got to the building in advance with his stuff, but the plot would seem to prevent that. Anyway, that’s not the important one; the important one is the projection.

By contrast, in The Prestige, every trick is presented as if they were done by skillful stage magicians. There is only one trick that is clearly done with editing, and that’s the central trick of the movie, the Transported Man, and once we discover the trick to the trick, it becomes obvious how the magicians can do on stage what requires editing in the film. Borden can do it because there are two of him, and Danton can do it because he has Tesla’s duplicator. In both cases, film is making up for the shortcomings of real life as compared with the fictional world of the movie: there is only one Christian Bale, and Nicola Tesla never made a duplicator. The presentation of the tricks, though, is consistent with the world, even though there is some trickery involved; we see what the audience would see.

In the world of The Illusionist, there is no magic. Yes, it’s a fictional world in that the historical figures of the Duchess and the Crown Prince didn’t exist, but there are no inventions or supernatural powers. Except that part of the intent of the filmmakers (I think) is that the audience is supposed to be in suspense as to whether Eisenheim really does have some sort of supernatural power. And then at the end we discover he doesn’t, that it was all a trick.

Just as a side note specific to the movie, the plot involves Eisenheim palming jewels off the hilt of the Crown Prince’s sword at a point well before any of the rest of the plan could have been arranged. Was he stealing jewels on spec? Did he have a plan for what to do if the Crown Prince noticed that the jewels were missing? That’s the sort of thing that I complain about as working backwards, as an explanation for why the jewels were found where they were, but not forwards. But that’s not what I’m on about here.

What I’m on about is the question of showing the stage illusions as plausible stage illusions or as obvious film trickery. I was very put off by the film trickery, as I assumed that there would be an explanation for it, and there never was. But it has been suggested to me that the idea might have been to make the film audience be as wonder-struck as the stage audience of its time would have been, which you can’t do with the tricks of the time. Imagine that you were transported in time to a magic show in 1900; you know enough about stage magic that you wonder how the trick is done, not if it is a trick. You are impressed, perhaps, with the slight of hand, the technical expertise (particularly given the limitations of materials), and the stagecraft, but you won’t be seeing the same things the audience of the time sees. You have been changed by movies and television and technical advances in stagecraft. So showing you (in your twentieth century movie-watching audience capacity) what a stage audience in 1900 would have seen is not going to cut it.

I find that a really interesting idea, but I don’t buy it. Maybe because I didn’t think of it myself. But I’m wondering if any Gentle Reader saw the movie and is willing to comment. Should we see what the audience saw? Or what the audience thought they saw?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So. My Best Reader and I had been looking forward to watching Enchanted, which looked clever and fun. And it was clever and fun, and we both enjoyed it. But nobody wants to hear about that. You all want to hear me rant and complain, don’t you? Look what we’ve come to. We can’t just enjoy a perfectly good movie without becoming incensed, and then, to cap it all, we can’t just enjoy a perfectly good incensation, but have to spread it around Blogovia. Well, fine. I was incensed, OK?

Before the incensage, here’s the plot. OK, never mind the plot. It doesn’t matter. Devil Bunny needs a ham, and for reasons not entirely clear, thinks it will obtain one to take a Disney Heroine out of an animated movie and plunk her into the modern world. Go it? The climax of the movie is at the Kings and Queens Ball, where the modern folk dress up like storybook kings and queens, and it’s held at the top of some tall Manhattan building, because they quite rightly let the art director make the plot decisions at that point, and besides, Devil Bunny still needs that ham, and maybe the ham is at the top of the Empire State Building. Why else would those people be climbing up the outside of the building? Look, you’re not focusing on the incensedom. All you need to know is that there’s a Ball, and a Disney Princess type, unfamiliar with the real world, and—one more thing—the Guy Figure has a young daughter. Eight years old? Something like that. OK? Got it? Question? You, the one wearing a shirt. Yes? No, the Guy Figure has no distinguishing characteristics of any kind. That would ruin the movie. Can we get back to the incensement?

The Disney Princess (who I’ll call Giselle, because that’s the name they gave her in the movie, although, you know, not real important to becoming incensified) goes to the Precocious Girl and says I’m going to the Ball! However shall I prepare? and the Precocious Girl pulls out a fucking credit card, and there follows a montage of the two of them going shopping in fancy Manhattan salons, and getting her hair and nails and makeup done. And then, unsatisfied with this, there follows a tearful heart-to-heart between the Disney Princess (who I guess I’m not going to call Giselle, even though it’s her name, because it would ruin the rhythm of my ranting, unlike, for instance, a bunch of rambling parenthetical met remarks) and the Precocious Girl, where they reveal that neither has ever gone shopping with a mother, and yes, it really is the best thing in the world for a mother and a daughter to buy expensive luxuries on credit.

I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. Neither am I making this up. I’m really not. It’s a very cute, sweet movie, and then wham! a paean to consumerism. And, may I just add, one which has no actual place or meaning in the story. I mean, there is supposed to be some sort of idea that when we get to the ball, all the real, modern folk are dressed as storybook characters, and that the storybook character is dressed like a real, modern woman. Only what she is actually wearing is an unflattering schmatte that, like all modern gowns, is obviously made with storybook princesses in mind, so it doesn’t work. But even if it did, it would work much better to simply have the Disney Princess arrive, unexpectedly, in modern drag, right?

But even if the plot necessitated such a scene, the correct thing to do would be to rewrite the plot so that it no longer necessitated such a scene, because the inclusion of such a scene is obscene and wrong. And I am calling it obscene and wrong without even knowing whether the stores portrayed in the movie as containing the Secret to Life’s Happiness are fictional or real, with Disney making back a large portion of the production cost from the product placement. I’m guessing the latter, but I neither shop in Manhattan nor do I watch much television, where (I’m told) shopping in Manhattan is a frequently depicted activity. Although not, generally, in children’s television. At least, that I’ve noticed.

And then, perplexingly, the Kings and Queens Ball was clearly planned to climax at midnight with the Kings and Queens Waltz, for which the attendees were instructed to find a partner other than the one they had come with. And if that sounds preposterous, I assume its preposterousness was designed to distract the viewer from noticing that the Kings and Queens Waltz was in four-four time. But it was a good movie, and all, other than that sort of thing. So that’s all right, Best Beloved. Do you see?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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

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.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

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.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

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.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Your Humble Blogger has, for one reason and another, seen a fair amount of movies over the last n days.

• I enjoyed Billy Elliot a lot, but there was far too much acting. When I say that, what I mean is a scene or lengthy part of a scene where the actor is given nothing whatsoever to actually do but just look at the camera (or worse, away from the camera) and indicate his or her rich inner life. Please. The acting is generally done very well, more’s the pity, because if the actor sucked, it would be edited out and the movie would be ten minutes shorter and ten points better.
• I suspect no Gentle Readers have seen Serendipity, because it was a huge hulking great floperooski of the first order, but it’s worth seeing. John Cusack is all John Cusack-y, which he does very well, and Jeremy Piven is incredibly Jeremy Piven-y, which nobody does better. The plot, if you must know, involves Him and Her meeting briefly, sparking enough chemistry to rival Dow, and then separating without knowing last names, addresses or telephone numbers. They muddle through their lives for a few years, and then, just before entering into loveless marriages, decide that the One For Me was that person I met that one time, and embark on serious searches for each other. The cleverness lies in all the ways that they very nearly find each other during the search. Unfortunately, the plot requires that Him and Her do not meet again until the final scene, so no more chemistry, sorry about that.

  Oh, another thing about Serendipity. The main characters are all absurdly wealthy urbanites. I mean, the sort of person for whom spending a couple of thousand bucks on a fruitless search is an annoyance, rather than actually impossible or even an ongoing disaster. I was totally alienated by that, again and again during the movie. I mean, not a big deal that they buy gloves at Bloomie’s, but getting married at the Waldorf-Astoria? Heck, going to Manhattan and staying at the Waldorf? Without thinking about it? Damn.

• I’m just getting around to Season One of the new Doctor Who. You know, there was a time when I was a fanatic. I have knitted more than one Doctor Who scarf. I wound up dropping out of fandom while I was in college, when it didn’t seem worth the effort, and I never got back into it. So I have seen (I think) a total of three episodes with the previous two Doctors, and have seen perhaps two-thirds of the Peter Davison era. So when I decided to go ahead and watch some Doctor Who again, it seemed wrong somehow to skip all the stuff that everybody thinks is lousy and go to this modern revision. You know, like a n00b. I still find it strange, and may very well go back and watch all the crap episodes, not because I think I’ll enjoy them, but because, um, you know. Being a fan isn’t meant to be enjoyable, you know. As for the new episodes, I’m enjoying them a lot, although there is Too Much Acting.
• I watched most of Arthur, and what struck me as I was watching (and enjoying) it was that if it had been a play, it would have been revived twice on Broadway by now, and every community theater in the country would have had a go at it. Since it was a movie, it would clearly be a Bad Idea to remake it, and the remake (fortunately hypothetical) would suck. Why is that? It’s just how it is.
• Bob le Flambeur was OK, but it wasn’t all that good. But then, I’m like that. If I’m watching a heist movie, I want it to be about the heist. Not only did the movie not really care about the heist, the main character himself forgets about the heist entirely on the morning in question. I know, I know. It’s like Gosford Park, it’s shooting down the whole idea of the movie being about the heist, or the murder, or whatnot; it’s about the ordinary lives of the people who happen to be caught up in the plot. Only, me? I like heist movies because of the heist. I’m old-fashioned that way.
• It occurred to me whilst watching Flushed Away that the most entertaining bits of the movie were the flashes of brilliant set decoration and other background gags, and that even if I get the thing on DVD in a year’s time, my little screen will not repay close watching. Even worse, it would really require frame freezing, which would be lame on our television, and not really practicable in the movie theater. Still, Gentle Reader, if you do go see it in the theater, I advise you before you begin to ignore the main characters (who are, fortunately, uninteresting, badly voiced and generally doing dull things in the service of a dull plot) and focus on what’s behind them, which is very entertaining.
• If you only see one movie about serial murderers living as vicar’s housekeepers this year, make it Keeping Mum. Heck, if you weren’t planning on seeing any movies at all on that fascinating subject, it may be time to rethink your lifestyle. On the other hand, there is a lot of cognitive dissonance involved. At the same time as the viewer is thinking “Rowan Atkinson is doing a fine job here, funny but not over-the-top”, one is also thinking that at any minute he is going to inadvertently sexually assault a sheep or something. Similarly, it’s hard to watch Patrick Swayze (who does a fine job as well, very funny and nicely loathsome) without thinking “That’s Patrick Swayze? Eargh. He didn’t age well, did he?” Fortunately, all you need to think about when watching Maggie Smith is something like “How wonderful to live in a universe with Maggie Smith in it!” Of course, since she could equally play the sweet little old lady that she seems to be playing and the hilarious maniac she really is playing, and has often played both, there’s no real need to worry about it, is there?
• I know you all know this already, but Chicken Run really is one of the best movies in recent history.
• Do you think there’s an alternate history universe where the script for Mr. and Mrs. Smith was made into a movie? Seriously, has there ever been a better movie for the game of trying to deduce what the script writer had actually intended, a long, long time ago in a factory far, far away? I’m convinced that there was an early draft where there was an actual character with lines directing the assassination attempt. Also, there was presumably some reason why the big shoot-out was in a department store, probably involving the chief assassin and some bit of cleverness involving the products.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 6:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger had never read The Day of the Triffids before, nor seen the movie. I know, I know. Ambulatory plants that spit poison and kill. Why hadn’t I read it when I was fourteen? Why wasn’t it at Shlock some year? Now that I think about it, it very well might have been at Shlock some year, and I just didn’t go.

Anyway, the book is wonderful. Yes, there are bits where the plots stops while the characters discuss theories of community, but those bits are fairly short. Much shorter than in Heinlein, for example. In fact, the book read a lot like a Heinlein, only better and less annoying.

The opening is particularly magnificent. Our Hero, Bill Mason, is in hospital with his eyes bandaged. We don’t yet know that an ambulatory plant spit poison at him, but we know that today is when he gets the bandage off and finds out if he can see. Only there’s something wrong. Nobody came to wake him up and give him breakfast. Everything outside is eerily quiet, too. He wants the doctor to come and take his bandages off. Just the night before, there was a startling meteor shower, and everybody was watching, oohing and aahing, rubbing his nose in his possibly-permanent blindness, which just increased his anxiety. Now, what does he do?

That’s a fantastic beginning. The next bit—can this be a spoiler for anybody else? I hadn’t known it. But then, Gentle Readers are warned in general that I will throw spoilers in these notes if I feel like it. And, of course, the book is fifty years old, and likely you have all seen the movie—is that Bill takes off his bandages, and he can see, but everybody else has been blinded by the green meteor light. OK, they’ve been blinded by the magic plot stick, fine? Feel better? The polarity of their neutron flow has been reversed, and their dilithium crystals are cracked, their Necklin rods are bent and they have lost mitochondrions. Anyway, they’re all blind. Pretty nifty start, eh? And if it’s downhill from there, at least it’s starting a good way up, and coasts at a pretty good speed.

I’ll mention one other thing that struck me, which is that Mr. Wyndham uses as a plot device a thing that seems to have been a pretty common feeling in the fifties, that the Soviets were Up to Something, and we had no idea what. The Iron Curtain was going to stay down for decades, and nobody would ever be able to get information out. Now, of course, in these post-Soviet days, that bit is just quaint, but I think even when I was growing up, there was lots of cultural and scientific exchange. The Soviets were the Evil Empire, sure, but the Iron Curtain was more of a decorative grillwork (sadly, electrified). So that idea of secret scientific advances had pretty much died twenty years or so after this book. I always think it’s a bit humbling to read old science fiction, to be reminded that the obvious future is not what actually occurred, and that the future that’s obvious to us probably won’t occur, either. If we’re lucky.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In the middle of Anthony Lane’s nastily hilarious review of The DaVinci Code movie, he observes, “Movie history is awash, of course, with fine pictures that have been made from daft or unreadable books; indeed, you are statistically more likely to squeeze a decent movie out of a potboiler than you are out of a novel of high repute.”

Oddly enough, Your Humble happened to see a couple of very bad movies this past week, and I had a not altogether unrelated observation to make: Why do people remake excellent movies, but never crappy ones? There are loads of movies that had perfectly good concepts, but which were badly written or badly executed or badly performed, and you would think that a good film-maker would take one look at a movie like that, see where they went wrong, and be able to make a much better movie, a good movie in fact. Taking a movie where the writing, the performances, and the direction, are all magnificent and making even a halfway decent remake seems much much harder.

Take The Ladykillers. The basic premise is only OK: A group of criminals rents a room from a little old lady, steals a massive amount of money and then they split on each other and the little old lady thwarts them, resulting in the criminals getting killed and the little old lady winding up with all the loot. It’s a good concept, but it’s obvious on first glance that the movie depends on the execution. In the 1955 movie, written by William Rose and directed by Alexander Mackendrick, the wonderful performances by Alec Guinness and particularly Katie Johnson are untouchable. The screenplay is wonderful, the pacing is superb, and the supporting performances are all quite good, and have moments of brilliance. So even if a filmmaker is an absolute genius, and gets the perfect cast (which he wouldn’t), and all the money in the world, and everything goes absolutely perfectly, and every wild vision of the remake gets onto the screen just as it was in his head, you will end up with ... a disappointing, but pretty good movie.

Now, the Coen Brothers/Tom Hanks remake does not have all those things coming into place. Well, at least not in the first half-hour, after which I stopped watching. It wasn’t awful, it just wasn’t really ... no, it was awful. I like the Coen Brothers, or at least I absolutely adore about half of their movies, and I like Tom Hanks, but blech.

But my point isn’t really about this, as for all I said above I can’t really blame the Coen Brothers or Tom Hanks for wanting to remake the movie, and they clearly had a lot of fun with it, and a fair amount of people seemed to think it was good. No, my point is about the other lousy movie I saw last week: Mr. 3000. Now, this is actually a very clever idea for a movie: a baseball player who is a self-centered jerk quits in the middle of a pennant race when he gets his 3,000th hit, telling the assembled sportswriters that they can all go fuck themselves, now, because they have to put him in the Hall of Fame. Nine years later, he’s five votes short when the Archive discovers that a three-hit game got counted twice (don’t worry about it, it’s plausible enough for a movie) and he retired with 2,997 official hits. Faced with having to buy a ticket to get into the Hall, and his self-identity as “Mr. 3000” crumbled, he makes a comeback at 47 with his old team, now in the cellar, to try to get 3 more hits in September. Along the way he learns humility, teamwork, and all that he missed when he was in the game.

Bernie Mac plays the aging jerk, and he’s actually terrific, as far as he goes, but the movie is so badly written and paced and slapped together that it just doesn’t work. Even the good ideas (Paul Sorvino as the silent stone-faced manager, and Michael Rispoli as the sidekick) are butchered or buried. And even Mr. Mac isn’t so good that I couldn’t imagine somebody else, ten years from now, being even better. Worst of all, I have no sense that anybody connected with the movie liked baseball or baseball movies in the slightest. In other words, a remake would not only almost certainly be better than the original movie, but could very easily be a really good movie. But will anybody make it? No. Because nobody remakes crappy movies.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

OK, I’ve never been a big fan of Mick LaSalle, but surely his review of X-Men: The Last Stand takes the proverbial. I don’t expect to like the movie much, myself, but surely it’s a little ... insane ... to object to it because mutants are bad.

No, seriously, his main objection to the movie is not that it’s “noisy and busy” and “grim and self-important”, although he does make a point of that. No, in almost every paragraph of the review, Mr. LaSalle emphasizes that “mutants and Homo sapiens not only can't get along but shouldn't get along”, and that the movie’s bogus tolerance is what is really wrong with it. Now, perhaps Mr. LaSalle was attacked by mutants as a child, and is now entirely incapable of rational thought on any tangentially related subject, but ...

Quite aside from the absurdity of the argument (are even the X-Men that much more dangerous than people with guns?), there’s the basic idea that a summer blockbuster should be graded on its socio-political premise in a newspaper review. Sure, if the Nation wants to examine the subtleties of the summer blockbuster, they should go ahead (and they do a much better job of it than Mr. LaSalle, putting the thing into, you know, cultural context), but this is a newspaper review. Get the proverbial grip.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Every now and then, the fact that people are different, one to another, and perceive different universes, still manages to surprise Your Humble Blogger. Manohla Dargis, in a New York Times review of Firewall called An Aging Action Hero With a Flair for Computers and a Family to Protect, says that “It's not a little painful, then, to watch Mr. [Harrison] Ford in "Firewall," a rote retread of the kind of family-in-jeopardy flicks that helped define his career.”

Now, I’m not commenting on “Firewall”, which I ain’t seen and ain’t going to see. Nor is this a vendetta against the New York Times Arts and Leisure section, which as you are aware, Gentle Readers, gets right up my nose on occasion, but still forms an enjoyable part of my readload. No, it’s just that my immediate reaction was that Mr. Ford’s career is defined by Indiana Jones, and may possibly have been redefined by “The Fugitive”, and that neither of those were family-in-danger movies. And when I mentioned to my Best Reader how preposterous it was that somebody might say that Mr. Ford’s career was defined by family-in-danger movies, she immediately said “Witness”. I dismissed it as a minor movie, but you know, that was wrong. Sorry, Best Reader.

That is, I think it’s perfectly plausible to consider an actor’s first Oscar nomination as, in some sense, a defining role, even if I think the movie is forgettable and forgotten, and if it pretty obviously ranks no higher than tenth of his movies’ Pop Culture strength. That is, behind three Indy movies, three Star Wars movies, Blade Runner, the Fugitive and American Graffiti. And no, I don’t count the last Indy movie as a “family-in-danger” movie; the old man was doing fine on his own. Nor does the Fugitive count, as the family is not so much in danger as dead. Of course, one could argue that “Witness” isn’t a “family-in-danger” movie, either, as the family in danger isn’t his, but that seems stretching.

More to the point, Mr. Ford has saved his movie family in, if I’m not missing any, “Witness”, “Patriot Games”, “Air Force One” and possibly “Mosquito Coast”, although in the latter movie they are primarily in danger from his character. I saw Mosquito Coast in 1986, and “Witness” in, probably, 1988 or so, and haven’t seen the other two, so my view of Mr. Ford is pretty much entirely missing that aspect of his career. So I kinda just forgot about it. In fact, I haven’t seen any of the last five movies Mr. Ford has carried. The one I saw was a romantic comedy, which wasn’t terribly successful, and didn’t help define his career at all. In fact, as it turns out, I count 26 movies in which Mr. Ford has either been the star or a major supporting role, and I’ve seen, um, 16. If I’m counting correctly. Mostly from the beginning of his career, meaning I have seen fourteen of the fifteen movies made up through 1990, and two of the eleven made since. And I was all upset that somebody was defining his career all wrong. Um, perhaps I’m not so much an authority as I thought.

I’m just saying. My perception of the universe is incomplete. Sometimes I forget that. It’s good that I’m reminded of it. Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded in the context of a topic that doesn’t matter at all.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know, Your Humble Blogger hardly ever does this, but what the hell. Metasilk made a pretty out of movie posters (well, and DVD boxes), so here’s mine. Note that I am not defending these as the Bestest Dozen Ever, but they are movies of which I am fond, movies I’ve seen more than once and enjoyed more than once.

By the way, should you feel inclined to create your own similar image table, the source comes from Hot Free Layouts, which does the searching for images and table creation for you, free (as they imply in their name), with only a handful of smallish textish ads. This does not constitute an endorsement of their site.

The images are Amazon’s, hosted on their server, which I understand is Not The Thing, really, but I would guess that Amazon doesn’t mind. Certainly we are unlikely to overwhelm their servers. Of course, I usually go to some effort to avoid linking to Amazon, but that’s mostly because I would encourage y’all to buy books from either bookstores with shelves and all or from on-line sellers with nicer plans for world domination. Should y’all choose to purchase any of these films

Actually, now I think about it, there are several troubling things about this whole business. Still, I’ve done it. To help me get over it, Gentle Readers, tell me about movies. Have you seen all twelve of my grid? Did you dislike any of them? What’s the matter with you? Have you no taste?

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, and the Oscar noms are out, and Your Humble Blogger has seen six—six!—of the nominated films. Oh, none of the ones nominated for Best Picture, and none of the nominated acting performances, or directing, or writing, but then who saw any of those? No, I have seen two of the three Animated nominees, and am still bitter about not getting to see the third, and I have seen a movie with nominations in sound editing, sound mixing visual effects and art direction, one with nominations in makeup, one with nominations in costume design, and one with nominations in makeup, sound mixing, and visual effects. That’s eleven nominations, in all. Not bad, particularly considering that those six movies were the only 2005 movies YHB saw in theaters. Yep, a clean sweep; every movie I saw last year got an Oscar nom.

Well, and that isn’t quite true. In addition to those six, I saw five movies on DVD that were released earlyish in 2005. Ah, Netflix. Technically, that means I have eleven 2005 movies, totaling only eleven nominations, but still that ain’t too shabby.

Of those eleven, my favorite was clearly Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, with Bride & Prejudice coming a surprisingly close second. The problem is that those were the only two movies that were unalloyed joy. The category of liked bits of it quite a lot, but was disappointed, a bit includes The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, King Kong, The Corpse Bride, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The category of stunk on ice, even though there were still some nice bits, and it really ought to have been a lot better included Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Rock School, Millions, Madagascar, and The Brothers Grimm. And that’s the whole year in movies.

Oh, I suppose one more thing. Since the 2004 Movie Wrap-up in this Tohu Bohu, YHB saw Very Long Engagement, which was rather nice but not as wonderful as I wanted it to be, and the first half of Life Aquatic, which was not unpleasant, but which didn’t make me want to see the rest, and as much of the unwatchable Merchant of Venice as could be stomached.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, and Your Humble Blogger saw Kong. And it was ... long. Really, really long. It wasn’t tedious; there was a lot of stuff in there, and most of it was entertaining and well-made, but by the time Kong stands on top of the Empire State Building and beats his enormous gorilla chest, I was exhausted and fidgety. I wasn’t cheering. I wasn’t yawning, mind you, and I wanted to be cheering, but my head kinda hurt, and I was ready to get out of the movie and breath fresh air.

It’s a matter of sitzfleish, of the ability to sit still and watch a movie for three hours. I don’t have it. I was thinking that the thing was made more or less like a miniseries, with a big dramatic build-up and a big, slow ending for each of the three hours, and if I had the DVD on, I would know when to stop the thing and pick it up the next evening, or even just stop for a stretch and a top-up on my tea mug. There was lots of suspense, and lots of wow, and really by the time they got Kong in a net, I was all done with suspense and wow. I didn’t want any more. The rest of the movie was annoying to sit through, not because it was annoying as such, but because I was all done with it. I mean, how many minutes did we watch the writer watching his play? I recognize that those scenes served a purpose, and one purpose that they served was that they drew out the tension before we saw Kong again. Yep. But mostly they were between me and the exit, and I just wanted the monkey to climb the tower and get shot by biplanes.

While I’m whining, I should mention that one thing I thought Mr. Jackson and company did remarkably well was individuate Kong. That is, Kong was not just a twenty-five foot tall ape, he was Kong. I had the sense that if, later in the movie, we met another twenty-five foot ape, I would recognize that it was not Kong. At least as easily as I recognized that the blonde screamer wasn’t the lead. I’m not talking about believing that there really was a big monkey; I’m always ready to do that. I’m talking about believing that this particular big monkey is Kong, and not just Big Monkey. Of course, it doesn’t do to think too much about what life on Skull Island was like before Our Heroes arrived, but then I didn’t demand that sort of thing from the movie.

The other thing I noticed was that Mr. Jackson (and his colleagues) did a lot of rather marvelous looking lighting, early in the movie, that was totally not naturalistic, and was not intended to look naturalistic. I was thinking, at the time, that this was probably setting us up not to notice when the special effects required some odd lighting later on, but if that was true, it worked, and I didn’t notice it. Also, the juggling looked totally fake.

Other than that, I enjoyed the movie, at least for a couple of hours.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 7:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Your Humble Blogger finally saw De-Lovely. If y’all had forgotten, or more likely never heard, about De-Lovely, it was last year’s Cole Porter bio-pic, the one with Kevin Kline, the one that was trashed for using a variety of theatrical techniques. I was terribly excited about it when it came out. I’m a huge fan of Cole Porter’s songs, I’m a huge fan of Kevin Kline’s acting (and singing), and I am a fairly big fan of the sort of theatrical techniques that the reviews seemed to dislike. I was also interested to see how the movie would handle Mr. Porter’s bisexuality; the idea that the topic is controversial was absurd, but it’s a matter of some interest to me personally.

So it’s too bad that the movie stunk so much.

When I talk about the theatrical techniques, I’m talking about the sort of thing I think would work much better on stage, and I’m not sure why that would be. The basic frame is that Mr. Porter, at the moment of his dying, is greeted by ... Death? The Lord? Gabriel? ... a faintly ominous but courteous and not overtly threatening director/producer, who takes Old Cole (if you will) into a theater where he is beginning rehearsals (or something) for, well, for the movie we’re watching. Old Cole complains, suggests, and acts! as he watches various scenes from his life played out, sometimes naturalistically and sometimes in one or another non-naturalistic style. It’s not always easy to tell what’s what.

The bio-pic part begins with young Mr. Porter meeting his wife-to-be at a party in Paris. This is terribly confusing. There’s no way to know when it is, other than how people are dressed. Kevin Kline is middle-aged, with enough makeup to make him plausibly youngish, but we can’t really tell how old he is, and besides, we don’t know when he was born. Then he and his buddy (who are playing the piano and singing) go into “Well, Did You Evah”, and the audience/partygoers respond as in a musical, joining in on the chorus in practiced harmonies and taking solos in turn. Actually, he meets Linda Thomas in 1918, when he’s twenty-seven or so, and he doesn’t write “Well, Did You Evah” until 1939. If you don’t know anything about Mr. Porter, you won’t know that, but also won’t know whether Mr. Porter is, at that stage, a professional songwriter, a well-known amateur songwriter, or just a fellow who has written a few songs. In fact, he was a well-known amateur songwriter, which is a difficult thing to imagine, but there it is.

The thing that’s really confusing is that although there are elements of a musical (everybody immediately knows the words and has lovely voices, and when they sing, they sing in harmony, as if they’ve been rehearsing for weeks) but also elements of the movie-with-music (the characters are at the instruments, and have a reason to be singing rather than the song being a mode of expression). In the next number, again Mr. Porter plays the piano and sings (anachronistically) to Ms. Thomas (Ms. Porter to be), but this time when he gets up from the piano to dance, there is still piano music. On the other hand, the dancing belongs to the movie-with-music genre; it’s a goofy guy dancing in a park, out-of-the-ordinary behaviour. It’s difficult to settle into the movie, because it’s hard to tell what kind of movie it is. The devices don’t seem to have any real logic to them, or even any compelling sort of illogic. They just happen, and sometimes they work and more often they don’t.

Similarly, the use of recognizable performers (Elvis Costello sings at one party, Robbie Williams at another, Alanis Morrisette appears as an ingénue, etc, etc) doesn’t work, partly because they aren’t terribly good or interesting renditions, but partially because they were out of place without there being much point to the out-of-place-ness. Was it a comment on how influential Mr. Porter’s music remains? Was it a comment on how we in the audience bring our own cultural frames to the story and to the music? Was it a cynical grab for publicity? I dunno. I would have been satisfied with the last, by the way, had it been handled with skill and grace.

In the end, then, there were a lot of Film! touches that failed to dazzle me, which leaves me with the characters, plot and acting. The plot was haphazard; they (I assume deliberately) chose to tell the story as if the audience all knew it already, and didn’t force it into a narrative. Which is too bad for me, but there it is. The characters were, well, Cole Porter was the genius-who-can’t-really-love sort of character, and Linda Porter was the wife-who-needs-love character. I found his promiscuity annoying, and I found her passive-aggressive reaction annoying, where she tells him that it’s fine but then sulks. There wasn’t much made of the fact that he sleeps with men, particularly, other than that it opens him up to blackmail. I mean, he was in the little secret society of gay theater people, but he was in that because he was in the theater, anyway, and nothing was made of what it is like to be in that society. Certainly there was no sense that he disliked any aspect of it. And other than Mr. and Ms. Porter, there were no other characters worth mentioning. The men were pretty but faceless, the buddies were buddy-like, the stooges were stooge-like. Not even entertainingly written—I was particularly disappointed in Monty Woolley, who they barely bothered to write at all. As for the acting, well, and it was good. Kevin Kline, particularly, was likeable in an unlikable part, wearing old-guy makeup and being all wistful an stuff. Ashley Judd was also good, although she had much less to do.

The frustrating thing is that it might have been really good. The idea of having Old Cole make a musical about Cole Porter, using his own music, and having an interfering Director/Producer battle him for creative control, well, I think that’s actually a good idea. Lee Blessing could really do something with that. I might have Old Cole want to tell the ‘true story’ and the Director just want butts-in-seats. Or make Mr. Woolley the Director, maybe, wanting the show to be about homosexuality, while Old Cole wants to keep the closet door closed. Something. Anyway, allow the major characters, particularly Ms. Porter, to comment on their roles and how they want to play them, and what they want to sing. It could be really good. It would only work on stage, I think, although that may be my own bias.

And, of course, it might stink. I mean, somebody thought this movie was the way to go, and it sure sounded good to me. Ah, well. There’s always another movie.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, and Your Humble Blogger has finished watching the television adaptation of Angels in America. I thought we could go over it a little, because I’m still struggling.

First of all, I think the play is one of the greatest theatrical works of a generation or more. It’s an amazing piece. I saw the national touring company of Part One (Millenium Approaches) ten years ago or so, and shortly afterward I saw a very good college production in a small black box theater. I’ve never seen Perestroika on stage. I have read them both several times. I enjoy reading plays, tho’ I don’t do it much these days. I usually find it easy to imagine a staging as I read, even for plays such as Angels that have a lot of stuff to imagine.

Back when the plays were coming to Broadway, YHB was still hoping to become a professional stage actor. I hoped to play Roy Cohn someday. Of course for ten years or so I was working on my acceptance speech for the Antoinette Perry award for Featured Actor in a Play (I also kept updating and polishing my acceptance speech for the nomination of the Democratic Party for the office of President of the United States and the Charge to the Graduating Class at Swarthmore College; they are all three somewhat out of date at present, but I don’t think I need to work on them). My point is that these plays were Big Deals back then for Theater People (or Theatre People, the bastards). I don’t know what they are now.

Anyway, I was wondering if any Gentle Readers had seen the video without first seeing or reading the plays. I wonder how much my own response to the film is rooted in it being not-a-play, and how much is in the specific interpretation on film. I do think that the marvelous special effects take away from the power of the thing; when the Angel looks like every other woman-with-wings in any movie that has women-with-wings, it’s hard to invest her with angelness, but when she is hanging from a wire harness with obviously phony wings, she is an angel. As one of the characters says, it’s the magic of the theater.

Also, the fact that they could, and did, film all around the City meant that there was a tremendous amount of space. Things happened where they happened, in people’s apartments, or on the street, or in the hospital, or in Antarctica, or in heaven. In the theater, it all happens on stage, which means it all happens in the same place. There’s a sense of closeness. Early on, when Prior and Harper hallucinate together, and then start talking to each other, it’s an amazing moment, because I (in the audience) am shocked into a perceptual shift between the two scenes sharing the stage and there only being one scene. Similarly, there’s an amazingly powerful (and brutal) scene in Part One where the two couples are fighting, the lines interleaved, one couple in a hospital room, one in an apartment, but they are commenting on each other’s fight, and on each other, although they don’t know it. On stage, when I saw it first, Prior was in a bed up left, Harper was standing down right, and Joe and Louis (who have just found each other, although they won’t admit it) pace and circle. They walk in and out of each other’s space, they dance, unknowing, they leave their partners and match each other in their anger, and it’s magnificent and heartbreaking and it can’t be done on film.

Now, there are lovely bits of filmmaking that the theater couldn’t do. The precision of the lighting, the incredible makeup work. But then we need the film to do that stuff, because we can’t supply it ourselves. If the makeup isn’t perfect in the movie, we don’t fill it in ourselves, we complain. If the rabbi is clearly a woman in drag, well, that’s not really a problem in the theater, but for the movie they had to get it right. Which they did. Although I’m cross that they cut the rabbi’s scene in part two, but there it is. They had to get the thing down to six hours, and they didn’t want to rush the gorgeous scenery, of which there was plenty. They cut Roy Cohn in Hell, too. And some other stuff. Did they leave in the line about how we are all Reagan’s children now? I loved that speech.

I don’t know. It was good, it was brutal and funny and heartbreaking, and despite not liking Al Pacino’s choices as Roy Cohn (he reminded me of Big Boy Caprice, which may be my favorite of his roles) or particularly liking Meryl Streep’s Ethel Rosenberg (although her Hannah Pitt was excellent), when she sang tum balalaika I cried like anything, and when she helped (Ben Shenkman as) Louis say kaddish I cried again. Oh, it’s a beautifully written play. It’s a magnificent play, with magnificent language. It’s a play that should be read, although after you see it, I think. I would call it Shakespearean, only it isn’t, it’s Kushnerian, it’s its own thing, sui generis. It takes into itself how people actually speak day-to-day (as with a wonderfully stunted, almost Mamet-like conversation between Louis and Joe in a bathroom in the federal courthouse) without limiting itself to naturalism. People in the play speak the way they ought to speak, the way we might be able to imagine them speaking. That’s easier to accept on stage, I think. But then, all of this is pretty much me saying ‘play good, movie bad’, and although I think there is a good deal of truth to that, it isn’t a helpful bit of simplicity.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here’s a question, Gentle Readers. You know how Help! and A Hard Day’s Night are both brilliant movies? I mean, even if you don’t particularly like The Beatles, these are funny, funny movies. I suspect you could forward through most of the songs and still enjoy the movies enormously. They aren’t just good because of the Beatles, or because the Beatles are good actors (although Ringo is a very funny man, John is wicked, and George is, well, George). So, has there been any band since that time for whom making a movie was a good idea?

I mean a movie like Help!; not a documentary or a concert movie, but a movie where the main characters are band members playing fictional versions of themselves, and that has a plot of some kind. The closest I can think of is Tommy, which is sui generis, and although the band appears, they aren’t playing the band. And, honestly, I’m not altogether sure that the movie of Tommy was a good idea after all, but I don’t think there was a better way to get the soundtrack made. The Spice Girls made Spiceworld, which I haven’t seen but have heard was actually nearly watchable, but was generally agreed to be a bad idea. The Pogues movie was clearly a bad, bad, bad idea, and if any Gentle Reader has the soundtrack on CD I will give them an absurd amount of money for it right now (For that matter, do any of you have in digitizable format the Pogues cover of “Wild Rover” that appeared on the B-side of “Sally MacLennane”? That must be mine, and soon).

The various members of the boy bands have been in various movies, but that’s not the same thing. Nor is it the same thing when the band exists for the purposes of the movie, such as the Monkees (OK, it was for the TV show, but still) or Josie and the Pussycats or The Commitments. I mean, why isn’t there an REM movie, or a Pretenders movie? I can’t believe that the guys in, oh, Queen never said “Hey, let’s make a movie like Help!” I know Sting wanted to be in the movies, why not a Police movie? Could the Dixie Chicks not have hired any (lefty) writer and director they wanted?

My Best Reader suggests that video killed the movie star, at least for that sort of thing. Every band needs to make movies, three-minute movies, but movies, and any successful band makes dozens of them. Maybe that gets it all out of their systems. Or maybe they all discover that actual movie-making is tedious and unrewarding, except the ones that decide they want to be Actors! and make actual movies where they play thinly disguised versions of their stage personas but without the band. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that movies really are crap these days, and with the music business what it is, and the movie business what it is, and Richard Lester dead and all, it really is a bad idea. But you’d think ...

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

So, rereading Cold Comfort Farm reminded YHB what a great job the filmmakers did creating the movie of the book. I'm very interested in the problem of adaptation, generally. I think it's one of the great challenges of our technological and social moment, when people want different versions of things in different formats, and there may be a real demand for a particular story, world and characters in the form of a book, a movie, a videogame, a website, an audio production of some kind, a DVD (which may be identical to the movie, but may not) and possibly others. I know, much of this is not new, and adaptations are as old as the theater, but the combination of a proliferation of forms, and a more or less discrete consituency for each form makes it both quantitatively and qualitatively different.

Anyway, that's all musing, but it does bring up a question as old as the moving picture: should an film adaptation of a book or short story be "faithful" to the original, or should the film makers cut loose? The answer, of course, is that either way can work, and that it depends on the book, the movie, and the team involved. That's a lame answer, but it's the right one. Luckily, though, the answer can evoke another question, or even better, a couple of Top Fives.

Top Five Close Adaptations:

• Cold Comfort Farm: Book by Stella Gibbons, film directed by John Schlesinger and written by Malcolm Bradbury. Not only do they keep almost all the plot, but almost all the dialogue is taken directly from the book. They do combine several minor characters, and cut out two or three sub-plots. Mostly what makes this perfect is the realization of the characters by brilliant, brilliant actors, primarly the magnificent Eileen Atkins as Judith, Ian McKellen as Amos, and Freddie Jones as Adam. Oh, and Rufus Sewell is the perfect Seth. The look of the thing is great, but mostly it is the book come to life, which is pretty much the definition of the category, right?
• The Maltese Falcon: Book by Dashiell Hammett, film directed and written by John Huston. It's good. It's very good. Oddly enough, Humphrey Bogart isn't much like Sam Spade (tho' he is wonderful), and Mary Astor isn't convincingly slick, but everybody else nails it. Again, it's the characters and actors that make this work so well, particularly Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo, Sydney Greenstreet as Caspar Gutman, and Elisha Cook as the gunsel, Wilbur. They chicken out at a key point, but they didn't have much choice, since it involved nudity and it was 1939 or so.
• The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: Book by A. A. Milne (and The House at Pooh Corner), film directed by John Lounsbery and Wolfgang Reitherman and written by eight or ten people under the aegis of Walt Disney. I'm aware that some Gentle Readers will object to this film's presence on the list. Yes, there are songs (by Sherman and Sherman, and they are quite good) and some of the chapters have the plot all wrong, but on the whole they get the characters and dialogue very nearly right. They take a few liberties (the gopher is, as he says, not in the book), and most notably they get Tigger out of the tree in a way that is unique to animation. Still, the bulk of the movie (or movies, as it is really a series of shorts) is just a realization of the stories, and it works very well indeed.
• Scrooge: Short Story (A Christmas Carol) by Charles Dickens, film directed by Brian Desmond Hurst and written by Noel Langley. It’s been perhaps ten years since I saw the movie, and longer than that since I read the story (I think I’ll dig it out this year), but my recollection is that it’s quite a close adaptation. It works, in part, because Alistair Sim is so wonderful as Scrooge, but also because Dickens’ writing is incredibly cinematic, both in character and in atmosphere.
• The Shawshank Redemption: Short Story by Stephen King, film directed and written by Frank Darabont. This is one of a very few instances where I read a story, liked it, and then saw the movie adaptation and loved it.

By the way, I’m not considering adaptations of plays, obviously, and as with all Top Fives I am almost certainly forgetting something that ought to be on the list.

Top Five Free Adaptations:

• Field of Dreams: Book by W.E. Kinsella (Shoeless Joe), film directed and written by Phil Alden Robinson. They took the basic idea of the baseball field in the corn and undead evil pirate ballplayers (ok, undead dishonest White Sox ballplayers) and made an entirely different story around it. The book is about the protagonist's desperate and crazy attempt to be with his father again, and all the plot points are leading up to the father's appearance, and the closure that brings. The movie is about the fellow discovering that he needs closure with his father, and discovering that he really is a father at heart, too. And, of course, saving the farm. Anyway, by having different (but related) concerns than the book, the movie works, and brings something new to the nearly identical plot points.
• The Wizard of Oz: Book by L. Frank Baum, film directed by Victor Fleming and written by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Wolf. Teenage Dorothy and ruby slippers and singing, and the whole thing being a dream after all, but really the bulk of the movie is taken right from the book. Well, except for all the bits they left out, and the new bits. And what makes the movie, after all, is E.Y. Harburg's song score. That's the most creative, and what makes the movie a new and wonderful thing.
• Fistful of Dollars: Book by Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest), film directed by Sergio Lione and written by Victor Andres Catena and Jaime Comas Gil. I know that this is more directly inspired by Yojimbo, which was also very freely adapted, but I haven't seen Yojimbo yet. Anyway, what both films do is take Mr. Hammett's basic idea of an unnamed outsider coming in to a corrupt and violent town and eventually cleaning it up by pitting all the gangsters against each other, and place it in another place and time. Some of the plot points are still there, in a way, but mostly the filmmakers just took the idea and ran with it. Of course, that's what they did with Last Man Standing, too, and that was dreadful.
• The Princess Bride: Book by William Goldman, directed by Rob Reiner and written by William Goldman. Perhaps it's cheating to have the screenplay by the author, but it works. Mr. Goldman writes himself a new frame, totally changing the audience's view of the story, and cuts mercilessly at the plot. At the same time, the actors do a marvelous job of bringing the characters to life, particularly Andre the Giant, Mandy Patankin and Wallace Shawn as the Gang of Three. Much of how well the change-of-frame works is due to Peter Falk as the grandfather, but the part is written to play to his strengths.
• The Big Sleep: Book by Raymond Chandler, film directed by Howard Hawks and written by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman. They make a total hash of the plot, and the whole thing is turned into a sort of screwball comedy, but dang, does it work. In fact, they make a good movie from an OK book, which is hard to do.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

YHB happened to be watching television the other day (for the next month or so, I will be with satellite television and without broadband; for the last year I had broadband but barely had broadcast TV. I prefer the other way. There are way more channels on the internet.) and saw one of those home-improvement shows about selling a house. In this show, they take a house that hasn't been selling, and spend a couple of days and a few hundred dollars to make it much more attractive to buyers. The thing that struck me that was more sort of generalizable out of house-selling (there were some very odd things about house-selling, but there it is) was how tricky it is to do game-playing with people who are not rational. Which is most people.

Selling the house is actually not bad; there are four or five components of the buyers' decision that you can probably more or less identify: location, layout, condition, space, light. Different buyers will place different weights on each of those components, of course, and in fact each of the components could be broken down into components, which different buyers give different weights to. Still, you can probably identify, highlight and possibly improve some of the components, and can probably (perhaps with the assistance of an expert) price the house to more or less maximize your payoff. On the other hand, in addition to the four or five components that make a lot of sense, there are probably four or five components for each buyer that are completely wacky and may be unpredictable. Things like a room that reminds the buyer of his childhood bedroom, or a neighborhood like that one in that movie.

Now, two of my close friends have recently been in situations where they really wanted specific people who they didn't know to react in a particular way. In each of those situations, there were clearly a few components of the strangers' choice preferences that could be estimated, and possibly improved. On the other hand, there were clearly other components, and we couldn't tell what they were, much less how to deal with them. One of the situations was fairly easy, and it was clear that the rational stuff was going to play a big role in the choices. In the other, the stranger on the other side of the metaphoric gameboard persisted in a strategy that made no sense to anyone.

You see, I like to play games. I'm not a heavy-duty strategy gamer, but I do like to play the odd game of Settlers, El Caballero, or Anti-Monopoly. I play cards a lot, particularly Hearts and Gin. And I used to play a lot of poker. The thing with all these games is that you need to predict what other people will do. You also use actual moves to extrapolate what their choices were, and thus what their choices will be in the future, and thus which choice they will actually make. All of this is based on an understanding of the people you are playing with. It's easier if that opponent is rational, but a consistent and predictable pattern of specific irrationality works just as well. A fellow who stays in with an inside straight can be beat, and if you know that he stays in with an inside straight you can beat him bad.

There's a sort of grey area there, between rational and crazy. It's understandable behavior, doing the wrong thing, but for a reason. The smell of cookies in an open house will put a lot of people in a good mood, and people in a good mood will be more likely to buy the house. Of course, some people will get all cranky; you can't win 'em all. But there are some pretty basic ways to manipulate people's semi-rationality. In fact, that grey area is pretty much where games are played. You try to shape that area for other players, and they try to mess with yours. This is also true, if not voluntarily, in the games that make up real life. But what do you do when the other people leave the grey area and head out for left field?

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Post Script: Still carrying a floppy to the library. They tell me broadband is two weeks away.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

YHB doesn't see a lot of movies, or at least hasn't seen very many in the last few years. I did see the Tim Burton Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, though. I'm a big fan of Mr. Burton's flicks, and of Mr. Dahl's books, and it seemed to me that Mr. Burton was ideally suited to Charlie. Mr. Burton's particular strength, amazing strength, is in coming up with astonishing visuals and then bringing them to the screen so perfectly that they appear to have been printed directly out of his dreams. I'm thinking here of the enormous and ominous tree in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, of the Giant lifting the tilting house in Big Fish, of the dance with the Joker in the pale moonlight in Batman. The ability to first imagine Mr. Willy Wonka's factory, and then execute that vision seemed to me to be central to a movie version. In fact, although Mr. Burton does a magnificent job with the factory (and more particularly, with the Buckets' house), that doesn't carry the movie.

What Mr. Burton (and his screenwriter, and Johnny Depp) failed to do, sadly, was to strike the proper balance in the character of Mr. Willy Wonka himself. It's a tricky balance, as I've said before, in making Mr. Wonka (who is, in some sense, the villain in the piece) just the right combination of scary and silly. In the book, his eccentricity is charming, and although he is clearly not just indifferent to the fate of the naughty children but gleeful about their comeuppance, there is no question that he is, on the whole, kindly. The movie of my youth has Gene Wilder portray a forbidding but charming eccentric; the viewer wants to be on his side, even in the startling and marvelous scene in which he explodes with fury and throws Charlie out of the factory with nothing. This movie has a Willy Wonka who is dangerously psychotic, even when he is charming. He gives the impression that he might at any moment go for your neck. It's a riveting performance, magnificent in a lot of ways, but it ruins the movie.

Well, it doesn't ruin it. I enjoyed the movie. It was fun, and there were a lot of wonderful things (in particular, David Kelly totally nails Grandpa Joe, and is a wonder to watch throughout the first part of the movie, when he has something to do). On the whole, though, it wasn't a lovable movie, and without being a lovable movie, what was it?

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger had forgotten how short James and the Giant Peach is. That's not bad, actually; I prefer a skimpy book to a padded one. Other things I had forgotten about James include the Cloud Men (who take up three or four chapters), the Glow-Worm, the bunch of lies James tells in New York, and the nastiness of the squabbling between the Earthworm and the Centipede. I did remember, well and vividly, loathsome Aunt Sponge and detestable Aunt Spiker. Somehow, I particularly remembered Spider's grandfather being stuck to the ceiling with paint, and the family bringing him fresh flies from the web, although the occasion for the anecdote was the Cloud Men throwing paint at the Peach Gang after they smashed the rainbow, and I had totally forgotten the Cloud Men.

I wonder whether what I remembered and what I forgot was influenced by the brilliant movie version. The book is better, of course, and more ... booklike. I read the book umpty-'leven times as a child, and adolescent and a grown-up before seeing the movie, so it would be odd and disturbing if my memory of the movie replaced my memory of the book. I'm aware it did to a certain extent. The little man at the beginning who gives James the crocodile tongues looks in my mind like Pete Postethwaite, rather than like the bald, bearded, pointy-eared fellow in the Nancy Ekholm Burkert drawing. The rhinoceros that kills the Trotters looks like the mechanical rhinoceros from the movie. That's more or less OK with me; the visuals matter a lot less than the plot. It's much more troubling if the plot from the movie (mostly the same, but without the Cloud Men and with undead pirates) took over my head.

Still, it's a great movie, and a great book. And that ain't bad. chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Post Script: Sorry about the lack of link, Gentle Readers, but I'm in Dial-up world for the nonce.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Richard Whiteley has died. Now that might not mean much to you, Gentle Readers, but it gives me a chance for a bit of a Puff Piece, such as been sadly lacking round these parts. In addition to being the answer to a terrific trivia question (who was the first person shown on a Channel 4 broadcast), Mr. Whitely personified (to YHB at any rate) one of the facets of English television that I like so much.

Countdown was forty-five minutes (with one commercial interruption, if I remember correctly) of minor manipulation of letters and numbers. There were two games: a letters game and a numbers game. In the letters game, one contestant asks for either a consonant or a vowel, which is flipped off a stack and put onto a board, then ask for another, then another, and so on until nine letters have turned up. Then there’s thirty seconds of music and scribbling, after which the two contestants reveal the longest word they made from those letters, usually seven or eight letters, usually two or three letters longer than the longest word I found. Then we go to the panel, two people, one of whom is actually a lexicographer, who may have come up with a longer word, or may not have, depending. They do this three or four times in a row. Seriously. Just “May I have a consonant, please? A vowel? A consonant? Another consonant. A vowel, please. Another consonant, a vowel, a consonant and a final consonant please.” Then a comment or two, thirty seconds of music, then “What did your come up with, then, Jim?” “A six, Richard.” “Ah, and how about you, Sarah?” “A seven, actually.” “Excellent, well, let’s start with Richard.” And so on. Three or four times in a row.

Then, for a break, they do a numbers game. The contestant picks numbers, again off two stacks. This time, there’s a stack of small numbers and a stack of large ones (25, 50, 75 and 100), the contestant gets six of them. Then there’s a random three digit number revealed, which is the target number. The contestants have thirty seconds (with the theme playing, of course) to combine their six numbers using the four basic functions to get as close as they can to the target number. So, for instance, if the numbers are 3, 6, 4, 2, 25 and 50 and the target number is 742, you could do, um, [(6+4)(25+50)] - 4 - 3 for 743, right? I never ever ever ever get these. In thirty seconds, I usually can’t get within thirty, much less within five. The contestants always are within five, and often hit the button. Anyway, they see who gets closest, and then (I’d forgotten about this) the girl who flips over the letter part comes up with a better way, and then back to the letters game.

They do the letters game eleven times, and the numbers game three times, and there’s a tiebreaker nine-letter anagram that goes to the first one to get it. That’s it. It’s a simple, difficult game, and they get contestants that are very good at it. And they play it over and over again.

And this is the clever bit—they don’t fuck it up. They just bring on the contestants, play the game, bring on more contestants, play the game again, come back tomorrow and we’ll play it again. They didn’t make it easier, or harder, they didn’t add a third game, they didn’t make it more visual, or double the money. Actually, I can’t remember them talking about prize money at all. I suppose there must be prize money involved, but I have no idea if it’s in the thousands or if it’s twenty quid and coach fare. All they do is play the game.

And, you know, if you don’t like it, there are three other channels.

As for YHB, well, if it were on tv here, I suspect I would not only arrange my afternoon so I could watch it (or else invest in some of that new-fangled automated recording technology) but stop everything else and sit with a pad of paper scribbling and humming the music.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I’ve had a soft spot for the late Anne Bancroft ever since I happened to see An Audience with Mel Brooks on cable in 1983. He was pushing his new film, To Be or Not To Be, which as it happens may have been the last of his movies to be really good, but anyway he did an hour of stand-up, taking questions from the audience full of famous actors. And plants. In fact, the whole audience may have been planted. The questions were obviously plants. At one point, a woman wearing dark glasses and a scarf asks “Is it true you are married to the most beautiful woman in the world?” “Certainly not,” says Mr. Brooks, “I’m married to Anne Bancroft.” The woman was, of course, Ms. Bancroft, who then came forward and did a bit of shtick of some kind with her husband, I forget what. Anyway, I thought it was great, particularly for a woman of a certain age, once glamorous, to participate in that sort of joke about herself. Of course, I was pretty young at the time. On the other hand, I still think it’s a good bit.

Anyway, despite my affection for her, I’ve never really been knocked out by her films, with the sole exception of 84 Charing Cross Road, a real three-hankie job. Yes, yes, the Graduate. I wasn’t knocked out. Yes, yes, the Miracle Worker. I wasn’t knocked out. I kinda liked her in Torch Song Trilogy, although by 1988 I considered myself hip enough to disdain the movie version. I was vaguely interested in seeing her play an updated Miss Haversham, although as I pointed out at the time, you knew she could do it, and you knew Robert DeNiro could do Magwitch, and it would be far more interesting to see them switch parts.

Well, there it is. I can’t help thinking that she was about to do one more brilliant role, that there was one more fantastic part left for her, and she never got around to it. Still, I suppose there’s hardly any good actor you can’t say that about, and those that you know didn’t have one more role left in them, well, that’s even more depressing, isn’t it?

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, Gentle Reader, I’m sure that you have already decided that you have better things to do than to worry about that essay everybody keeps blogging, where Orson Scott Card debunks the Force. Or something. His conclusion appears to be that “it might not be such a good thing if the Star Wars films become the first movies to lead to a real-world religion.” Ohhhhhh-kay. Let’s put that to a vote, shall we? Everyone who agrees with that, go out through that door, and everyone who thinks it would be just swell for the Star Wars films to lead to a real-world religion go through this door over here, and wait in the padded room until the nice man in the white coat comes with lunch.

No, really, what he’s examining is why people call themselves Jedi. That is, he notes that some people have filled in “Jedi” on census reports and, according to Mr. Card, consider the Force their personal savior. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh-kay. I’m putting the over-under at, oh, let’s be generous, twenty. Everybody who thinks that there are fewer than twenty people in the world who realio trulio think of themselves as Jedi and consider the Force as their personal savior, go out through that door, and everybody who thinks there are more than twenty such people go through this door over here, and wait in the padded room until the nice man in the white coat comes with dinner.

Well, now, I think that’s the end of that issue, yes? Oh, no, I forgot, I was going to mock Mr. Card a trifle more. You see, Mr. Card refutes the Force, or its followers, or whatever the fuck he’s talking about, with lots of references to RatS. So, now, Gentle Readers, what to you figure is a fair over-under for number of people who relio-trulio think of themselves as Jedi, and came to do so only after watching RatS, but before Mr. Card’s column on or around the 21st of the month? Let’s see, think think think ... would one be too high? Is it possible that somebody might seriously think that more than one person seriously adopted the Jedi faith due to its portrayal in EpiThree? No, it isn’t possible. No, I can’t really imagine that Mr. Card thinks that, either.

So, um, what was he thinking, exactly?

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

OK, so one of the things about being a nerd, is that when Your Humble Blogger looked at the results of the Oscars, the immediate thought was “how often does that happen?”, followed by research to see whether the perceived departure from pattern is real or illusory. And it turns out that, in fact, in 76 years, only once before has a film been awarded an Oscar for Best Picture, for its lead actress, and for its director, while that director was nominated for his lead performance, but lost. Seriously, though, it seemed unusual to me that the Best Actress role was in the Best Picture, but that the Best Actor was not, so I looked it up. And it turns out that not only is that pattern unusual, but it’s unusual that the Best Actress role was in the Best Picture. I mean, I was sort of aware of that pattern, but not how entrenched it is, or for how long.

The last time a lead actress won the Oscar for a role in a Best Picture was ... can you guess? Do you remember? Yes, it was 1998, when Gwyneth Paltrow won for Shakespeare in Love. Joseph Fiennes was not nominated for his role, and the director, John Madden, lost to Stephen Spielberg for Saving Private Ryan. It retrospect, of course, Mr. Fiennes had far more to do with the success of the movie than Ms. Paltrow, but there it is.

The previous instance was seven years earlier, when Jodie Foster won for The Silence of the Lambs. Her support in that instance was Anthony Hopkins, who won for Best Actor, and the director, Jonathan Demme, won as well. Two years before that, Jessica Tandy won for Driving Miss Daisy, which won Best Picture despite its male lead and supporting actors losing, and its director not even being nominated. In 1983, Shirley McLaine and director James L. Brooks won for Terms of Endearment, Jack Nicholson won for his supporting role, which would now almost certainly have been nominated in the lead category.

In 1977, as I mentioned above, Diane Keaton and Woody Allen take home Oscars for Annie Hall, but Richard Dreyfuss gets the Lead Actor award for The Goodbye Girl. Two years before that, everybody wins for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Then there’s a bit of a dry spell, going back to ... guesses? Come on, don’t be shy ... 1942, when Greer Garson wins for Mrs. Miniver. William Wyler, the director, wins, but James Cagney (Yankee Doodle Dandy) beats out Walter Pidgeon.

In 1939, that year of years, Vivian Leigh, Victor Fleming and Gone with the Wind beat the stiff competition, but Robert Donat beats Clark Gable (and Jimmy Stewart, and Lawrence Olivier, and, um, Mickey Rooney). In 1936, it’s The Great Ziegfeld and Louise Rainer, but William Powell isn’t nominated (Paul Muni takes it for his Pasteur) and Robert Z. Leonard loses to Frank Capra (for Mr. Deeds). And then there’s 1934, when It Happened One Night to Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable and Frank Capra.

And that’s it. Out of 77 Best Pictures, eleven won Oscars for their leading actresses. That’s up against twenty-seven times the Best Picture has won for a leading actor. And if you take out the three sweeps, it’s twenty-four to eight, or three to one. On the other hand, you could look at it like this: out of 77 Best Pictures, only 35 have won an Oscar for either of their leads.

All of this, by the way, is cobbled together by hand, so I may well have missed some or gotten some wrong. The database is not user-friendly; I can’t send a query to just show me the information I’m looking for. They claim that they will have some sort of statistical search at some point, and presumably this sort of nonsense would be easier at that point. Which would let me do a similar search for writers; I suspect that about half of Best Pictures haven’t won Oscars for writing, either. A quick look shows four out of the last ten, right?

As for the films and roles, I think it’s interesting to what extent the eight movies really have female protagonists. I still think that Million Dollar Baby is about Frankie, with Maggie providing the motion of the plot, but there are plenty of reasons my own biases would lead me to that view of it, and other people to see Maggie as the protagonist. I also think Shakespeare was about, you know, Shakespeare, and Ziegfeld about Ziegfeld. I also think Annie Hall wasn’t the protagonist of Annie Hall, but I haven’t seen it in years. Miniver, Endearment, and Wind all definitely have female protagonists. I haven’t seen Daisy, but she’s the lead in the play. For the doubles, Ellie supports Peter, and Nurse Ratched supports McMurphy, but Lecter supports Clarisse. Well, not supports. You know.

Thank you,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger should remember to do puff pieces with much greater frequency; I’m not really as cranky as I seem on-line. And, as it happens, my Perfect Non-Reader is learning to read Between the Lions.

Now, just the title works really well for me. The lions in question are not, however, Patience and Fortitude, but Cleo and Theo, and their cubs Lionel and Leona. They do inhabit the Barnaby B. Busterfield III Public Library, and they host a show about learning to read. Well, cute little announcer bunny is the emcee, but that isn’t important.

Anyway, if you have fond memories of Sesame Street, the show is far more like Sesame Street than Sesame Street is these days. It also has something of the old Electric Company about it, and it also has a touch of the Reading Rainbow. Lots of little segments wrapped around a goofy storyline involving reading a book. In addition, each episode focuses on a particular vowel sound, and words that contain it. Those words and sounds show up in the main segment, and also in the segments with Martha Reader and the Vowelles, the Adventures of Cliff Hanger, Chicken Jane, Gawain’s Word, the incredibly catchy song with all the names, and, of course, the trouser-defying magic of the Great Smartini.

The whole thing is extremely silly, and seems to have a words-can-be-fun attitude, which is my attitude as well, of course. They have a liberal helping of Stuff for Parents (frankly, I hope my Perfect Non-Reader never does come to understand why I laughed when the Baha Men took the dog books out of the library) and general silliness. The adventures of Sam Spud, Par-Boiled Detective always end with a distressed viewer. “Mom! The talking potato with no mouth is back, and his incessant wordplay is making me queasy.” “It’s educational television, dear,” says the mother, absently, from the next room. “I’m sure it’ll help you in school. Somehow.”

The web site is also tremendous. In addition to having about a billion songs and clips and things to print and so on, they have half-a-dozen recommended books to go along with each of the seventy episodes. Not bad.

                           ,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)