Category Archives: Movies

What if I’d come back in 2013? Would I have been impressed? I think not…

Some seemed to doubt the premise of the preceding post about how static and dull and lifeless popular culture has become (or at least, to discount the importance of it). But to someone who was young in the ’60s, there’s something very weird about living in a time when a photograph of people 20 years ago would look no different from a photo today (assuming you could get them to look up from their smartphones for a second during the “today” picture).

As I said in a comment on that post…

I’ve written in the past about how enormously exciting I found American pop culture when I returned here in 1965 after two-and-a-half years in South America without television. My words in describing it are probably inadequate. It was so amazingly stimulating, as though all my neurons were on fire. It was like mainlining some drug that is so far unknown to pharmacology, one that fully engages all of your brain.

If I had returned at that same age in 2013 rather than ’65 — meaning I had left the country in March 2011 — I doubt it would have been such a huge rush. It would be like, “Oh, look: The latest iPhone does some minor stuff that the old one didn’t. And now we have 4G instead of 3G. Whoopee.”

Most of the big movies would be sequels of the big movies when I left — or “reimaginings” of Superman or Spiderman. The best things on TV would still be “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” “Firefly” would still be canceled. I’d be disappointed that “Rubicon” had only lasted one season. And I’d marvel at the fact that, with hundreds of channels out there, everything good was on one: AMC. (HBO hasn’t impressed me since “The Sopranos,” and that would have been over years before I left the country.) “The Walking Dead” would be new to me. Again, whoopee.

I just can’t imagine what I’d grab hold of and say, “Wow, THIS is different and exciting…”

But consider this list of things that I saw and heard for the first time in 1965, either immediately when I got back into the country, or over the next few months:

James Bond – who was enormously important to my friends and me, and who did a lot toward defining the decade (just ask Austin Powers), and who embodied much of what “Mad Men” recaptures about the decade. Yes, Bond had been around earlier, but I had never heard of him before the film “Dr. No,” which I actually saw on the ship on my way down to Ecuador. Which I did not enjoy. I didn’t really get Bond, as something that interested me, until “Goldfinger.”
Really exciting new cars that changed dramatically from model year to model year. I had seen ONE Mustang, parked outside the Tennis Club in Guayaquil, and I thought it was awesome. I’d never seen a Sting Ray, and the ’65 model was particularly cool…
Not just the Beatles, but the entire British Invasion – the Stones, Herman’s Hermits, The Dave Clark Five, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Animals, Tom Jones, Petula Clark. Just those few names illustrate the tremendous diversity of styles just within that one category we describe as the “Invasion.”
Folk rock – The Byrds, Chad & Jeremy, Simon and Garfunkel, and so on.
Beach music, West coast – The Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, the Surfaris
Gimmick bands – Paul Revere and the Raiders, Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, etc.
One-hit wonders – Much of the vitality of the era was personified by such groups as ? and the Mysterians, the Standells and the Troggs (OK, all three of their hits were technically in ’66. But consider such one-time hits of 1964 and 65 as “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Eve of Destruction,” “Keep on Dancing,” “Land of 1,000 Dances”…)
Ordinary guys wearing (relatively) long hair. Yes, we’d heard of The Beatles by this time in South America, but the fashion had not caught on.
Beach music, East coast – Yeah, this music had been around, and white kids had been listening to this “black” music, but it didn’t have the kind of profile where I could hear it until this point. I think Wikipedia rightly cites the heyday as being “mid-1960s to early 1970s.”
Color TV – It had existed, but I hadn’t seen it.

OK, taking off on that last one, let’s just take a quick run-through of the TV shows, icons of the era, that were either new in 1965, or new to me because I’d been out of the country:

Gilligan’s Island
Green Acres
I Spy
Hogan’s Heroes
The Wild, Wild West
The Smothers Brothers Show
Lost in Space
Bewitched
Daniel Boone
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Get Smart
The Munsters/The Addams Family
Shindig!

I want you to especially note the variety in those shows — they weren’t all manifestations of the same cultural phenomenon, the way, say, “reality TV” shows are today. (A phenomenon that would not be new to me at all from a two-year absence.)

I’d like to include “The Beverly Hillbillies,” but it actually premiered shortly before I left the country, and I’d seen it once or twice. And I won’t cite the ground-breaking “Batman” because it premiered in January of 1966 – which was still within my first year back in the country. Also, I never saw “The Andy Griffith Show” before my return, but that was my fault — it had been out there for a year or so before I left.

This may all seem silly and superficial to y’all, but I think it’s actually significant that our popular culture is so static and unchanging today. Someone, trying to dismiss this, said on the previous post that I was ignoring the fact that the dynamism of popular culture in previous decades was just a First World, affluent-society phenomenon.

No, I wasn’t. In fact, that is sort of my point. I had come from an unchanging, static culture in the Third World into one of the most exciting cultural moments in the life of the most affluent country in human history. I would even go so far as to suggest that the dynamism of the popular culture is related somehow to economic dynamism.

And maybe the economic stagnation that is the New Normal today is related to cultural stagnation. We could feel our economic horizons expanding in past decades. No longer…

The Rolling Stones – Live in Shindig! (1965) by Vilosophe

Anyone remember Space Family Robinson? I do…

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Over the weekend, I denied being a “geek,” at least according to the parameters that Amazon set out.

However, I admitted that I may be such a geek that normal geek-dar doesn’t pick me up on the screen, in that my enthusiasms are slightly more esoteric.

For instance, I denied being a Trekkie, and that was true. But I was into the even lower-quality “Lost in Space.” I thought it great that TV had turned a comic book I was into — “Space Family Robinson” — into a prime-time show.

Anybody remember that? It was published by Gold Key Comics. For that matter, anyone remember Gold Key comics?

I was originally attracted to the comics by the obvious play on “Swiss Family Robinson,” a movie I had enjoyed (I never read the book). I haven’t touched a copy in nearly 50 years (I wasn’t foresighted enough to keep them until they grew in market value), but I still remember one edition causing me to think about how immense space was. There was a story in which the Robinsons received a signal from about 20,000 miles away, and one of the kids said, “That’s practically right next door!” Which is really trite, except to a kid.

Of course, no one has ever evoked the vastness of space as well as Douglas Adams:

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space…

As someone at the BBC wrote, that should be in every science textbook.

SC GOP chairman doing what party chairmen do

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That’s Matt Moore, second from right, with some other modern SC politicos and some fugitive from the early 19th century, at a political forum last fall.

You’ve probably seen this silliness:

COLUMBIA, SC — The chairman of South Carolina’s Republican Party says he will not allow CNN or NBC to broadcast debates of Republican presidential candidates in South Carolina unless the networks refuse to air a documentary on Hilary Clinton, a possible Democratic nominee for president.

NBC plans to broadcast a miniseries starring Diane Lane as Clinton, the former First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State. CNN has also announced plans for a feature-length documentary on Clinton’s career.

Monday, Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, sent letters to NBC and CNN telling them he would ask the RNC to ban any Republican candidates from participating in presidential debates hosted by NBC or CNN unless the two networks agree to not air the programs.

Matt Moore, South Carolina’s newly elected Republican Party chairman, said he agreed with Priebus…

Matt Moore is doing what party chairmen do — inspiring ire toward the opposition (and, if you’re a Republican, toward media, which is perceived by the most ardent loyalists as the opposition), inspire the constituency to say “hell, yeah!,” and keep them giving money.

Making sense is not a job requirement.

It is extremely unlikely that I will watch either of those programs, mainly because the chief reason I have a TV is to have something to watch movies on. These programs do not seem to fit into the category of things I deem worth spending time on.

But it seems to me that given the far less interesting and compelling figures who have inspired docudramas in the past, Hillary Clinton certainly qualifies as legitimate fodder. I found it interesting to see what Emma Thompson did with the Hillary-inspired character in “Primary Colors” — a movie that, by the way, was far from laudatory.

People make too much of such things. And they ignore the fact that these things can do as much harm as good to candidates. I’m mindful of the how media overexposure (much of it on her terms) eliminated Sarah Palin from consideration for the presidential nomination in 2012, despite her popularity for a year or so after the 2008 contest.

People have always made too much of such things. I vividly recall the way full release of “The Right Stuff” was delayed to avoid charges that the filmmakers were boosting John Glenn’s chances in the 1984 Democratic nomination process.

If only they had been able to do so. If that awesome film (which never got the attention it should have, due in large part to its on-again, off-again release) could have gotten him elected or even nominated, I would have been much happier than I was with the choice available to us that November.

I figured Dennis Farina was too tough to die; I was wrong

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When I looked back upon hearing of Dennis Farina’s death at 69, the opening credits of “Crime Story” weren’t quite as awesome as I thought. Maybe because that aspect of television has evolved into a higher art form in recent years. When you’ve seen the opening of “The Sopranos,” it looks very pedestrian, very mid-80s.

But at the time, it seemed very cool. Part of it was the evocation of the early, pre-Beatles ’60s. Mind you, this was several years before the same period was explored in “Goodfellas,” and long, long before “Mad Men” reminded America of that era of skinny ties, martinis and songs like Del Shannon’s “Runaway.”

I enjoyed that short-lived show, and was really impressed by the cop-turned-actor who starred in it, Dennis Farina. He really had that character — the hard-boiled type who could be either cop or crook — down, and could play it in a variety of vehicles, from the hip “Snatch” to the comic “Get Shorty.”

I’m sorry to hear the news.

‘Man of Steel’ turned out to be pretty good; critics were wrong

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Given the box office returns, it seems that I wasn’t the only one ignoring the critics over the weekend and going to see “Man of Steel” anyway.

Good thing, too, because most of the warnings I’d read turned out to be wrong:

It didn’t really take itself too seriously. Yes, the production was visually darker than the 1978 version, but I didn’t see any more of a messianic theme than we’ve come accustomed to. Yes, like Jesus, Clark Kent is raised by an adoptive father (which has been true since the earliest iterations of the characters), and has a real father who speaks to him in apparent defiance of the natural order (the norm since the 1978 version), and Russell Crowe’s character does predict that his son will be “like a god” to the people of Earth. But we are forgetting what Jor-El said in the 1978 version, perhaps because we just expected Marlon Brando to talk like that: “Live as one of them, Kal-El, to discover where your strength and your power are needed. Always hold in your heart the pride of your special heritage. They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you… my only son.” I mean, come on. Russell Crowe’s Jor-El was quite down-to-Earth compared to that.
OK, so it was sort of a modernized version, but that came out mostly in the 21st-century production values, and the costume (and don’t ask me how Jor-El managed to get a perfectly-fitted Superman costume, complete with the family crest, onto a ship that was sent to Earth 18,000 years ago; it’s just one of those suspension-of-disbelief things, like, you know, a man being able to fly) had a very updated feel to it. But the reports I heard that the name “Superman” was never uttered in the film were false. And there’s a great flashback scene to Clark as a little boy playing with a makeshift red cape out by Ma Kent’s laundry waving in the Kansas wind that is about as traditional, simple, innocent all-American as you can get. In fact, Superman directly contradicts the reports that he is a sort of “internationalized” version of the hero by telling an Army general (and I’m reconstructing this from memory, not being able to find the quote online), “I grew up in Kansas. How do you get more American than that?”
Finally, I don’t think the action was overdone. Which is saying something, coming from me. I thought the bams and booms and crashes were about what you’d expect from two Kryptonians having a fistfight among the skyscrapers of a modern city. Neither too much, nor two little.

My main criticism — and this is more a business consideration for Warner Brothers — is that I don’t see how they top themselves after this, plotwise. (And obviously, they intend sequels — after all, Clark doesn’t go to work for The Daily Planet until the last scene.) General Zod doesn’t show up until the second installment of the Christopher Reeve version, and that seems smart to me. First, you establish that Superman has these abilities far greater than those of Earth men. You have him save people falling from helicopters, and having a run-in with Lex Luthor. After you’ve established that nobody can touch this guy (without Kryptonite), you say, yeah, but… what if he faces a threat from another Kryptonian? And it’s at that point that you trot out General Zod and his minions.

Speaking of Zod, one of the updates is that he is conflicted. He is truly devoted to the interests of his own people, the remaining Kryptonians, and his evil arises from his complete indifference to the fate of Earthlings. I sort of miss the unconflicted Terence Stamp version: “Kneel before Zod!”

‘Man of Steel’ gets some pretty rough reviews

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But I intend to go see it anyway. Every interpretation of Superman has had its flaws. Nevertheless, my younger son and I go to all the new superhero movies (most recently, “Iron Man III”). Every sincere effort deserves its chance.

Still, I go forewarned. Both reviews I read this morning — one by Joe Morgenstern at the WSJ, and the other from my app for The State (from McClatchy-Tribune News Service, of course, since The State hasn’t had a reviewer in many a year) — were pretty brutal. Others I glanced at weren’t much more encouraging.

The flaws they point out were predictable ones.

First, there’s the matter of taking itself too seriously. There are a number of mentions out there of the rather blunt ways that this Kal-El is presented as a Christ figure. Well, we’ve seen that done in quite a few good flicks — “On the Waterfront,” “Cool Hand Luke,” the Lord of the Rings trilogy — as well as some awful ones, such as David Lynch’s execrable “Dune.” Basically, it’s the most compelling narrative we have in Western culture, which is why it crops up in everything from Arthurian legend to Harry Potter and “The Matrix.” But Superman/Clark Kent, properly understood, is an unassuming sort, for all of his power. The character in the comics, at least in my day, didn’t venture into the realm of blasphemy, even for dramatic effect.
Second, the production “seeks to reboot and modernize the world’s most famous superhero.” Morgenstern refers to “the darkly revisionist premise,” which immediately makes me want to groan. The two-bit philosophers of Hollywood are constantly trying to “improve” perfectly fine old stories with a “modern” twist. Because, of course, we who live in the 21st century are so much wiser, hipper, more moral, more honest, more realistic, than those benighted saps who lived in previous times. “Darkness,” you see, is hip and smart; lightness is hopelessly passé. Which, to use the edgy language of our better, hipper times, is utter bull___t. Superman, properly understood, is square. And that’s a good thing. He’s a small-town American boy (that’s how he was raised by Ma and Pa Kent) with extraordinary abilities and a code of conduct that would have done credit to a knight in the age of chivalry. (Superman is supposed to be very much like the unassuming, all-American Roy Hobbs in the movie version of “The Natural,” not the cynical version in Bernard Malamud’s original novel.) His decidedly unhip Clark Kent persona is a large part of who he is, not a false front like those of Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel. Truth, Justice, and the American Way — without a trace of irony. Yes, I’m influenced in this by having come up in the Silver Age of DC comics, but that is a tradition that needs to be respected. I know DC has a huge inferiority complex because Marvel has always been cooler. But hip and ironic are what Marvel is, not what DC is, and DC should own its squareness. This production is said to be too cool even to use the name, “Superman.” Which is irritating.
Finally, there’s the empty, soulless, overdone action, which is compared unfavorably in one of the reviews to the “Transformers” movies, which I have thus far successfully avoided. I’ve gotten to where, even in enjoyable films like “The Avengers,” I tend during the more extreme action sequences to want to do the hand-rolling gesture that means, yes, yes, I know, stupendous action, yadda, yadda, let’s move on. The more extreme the effects, the more bored I tend to be. (I like what Jackie Chan does, and hate “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”) Movie action reached its height in 1963 when a stand-in for Steve McQueen (alas, the rumors that Steve did it himself were not true) jumped over that barbed-wire barrier at the Swiss border in “The Great Escape.” That was awe-inspiring because a real person really did it, and as impressive as it was, it was in the realm of believability that a real man, desperate to escape, really could have done that. Barry Pepper’s skilled sniper, who occasionally missed when rushed in the final battle scene of “Saving Private Ryan,” is impressive because you can believe it. What Superman can do, of course, is meant to be beyond human abilities as we know them. But they’re more “super” if they occur against a backdrop of human scale — which is too seldom the case in “action” flicks today. The “Bourne” movies with Matt Damon did an excellent job of portraying action that is impressive but still believable. Most “action” movies today consider the height of excitement to be tremendous (and unrealistic) explosions that give the multiplex speakers a workout. It sounds like this latest “Man of Steel” is in the latter category.

But hey, they say that the “S” on this Man of Steel’s costume is actually a Kryptonian symbol meaning hope. So I’ll hope this is way better than the reviews say (even though that pretentious “it’s not an ‘S'” conceit is just the kind of thing that makes me groan).

Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Superman, properly understood.

Where have I seen that ‘postman’ before?

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This morning, I was walking from the kitchen toward the front entrance of ADCO, and passed a guy who had just walked in the front door and was heading confidently toward the back. I was trying to place him when I spotted his truck out front. Oh, yeah — he’s with a vendor we do business with, and knows his way around our building.

Normally, no one enters the building without being challenged — that is to say, without being asked how we might help him or her. This got me to thinking about the few exceptions, such as this one, or the postman, who walks straight in, picks things up from the front counter, drops stuff off, and goes.

Which in turn makes me think of a movie I saw on TV a few months ago…

Did you see “Safe House?” No, not the 2012 movie with Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds (which was pretty good, if you can handle the extreme level of violence in it), but the 1998 film starring Patrick Stewart.

I started watching that, a little it into it, on the tube several months back, and it took me awhile to figure out what was going on. As Wikipedia summarizes it, it went like this: Stewart was a retired agent for the DIA who “believes his life is in danger from his former boss who is now running for President of the United States.”

So he barricades himself in his suburban home, set up as a fortress, and posts damaging information about the candidate on the Internet in a way that it will automatically be distributed to multiple national media outlets unless he personally stops that distribution by entering a password only he knows every 24 hours. This is his ultimate defense.

Complicating things is the fact that he is suffering from the early onset of Alzheimer’s, and is being treated for it, and everyone in his life sees his security concerns as being in his imagination. You, the viewer, are left confused as to whether they are right, especially since he occasionally engages in extreme behavior in reaction to threats only he perceives.

Anyway, at some point in all of this, an assassin comes to his home disguised as a postman (or does he?), and gains access to the house by pretending a package has to be signed for, and that his pen is out of ink…

And right away, I recognize him as the assassin/postman with the submachine gun in his mailbag in “Three Days of the Condor”! (Remember, the guy who helps wipe out the office where Robert Redford works, and then later tracks him down to Faye Dunaway’s apartment, to which he gains access by having a parcel that needs to be signed for, and his pen doesn’t work, so he has to come inside…) The same actor (Hank Garrett), playing the same part in the same way!

Remember this guy?

On one level, that was one of the neatest esoteric movie references I’ve ever seen. On another, it adds to the sense of unreality in Stewart’s character’s perception of danger. You realize that he is imagining that the guy from “Three Days of the Condor” is trying to kill him…

Very cool, all around.

Anyway, I was just wondering whether anyone but me noticed it…

The desperate fight in Faye Dunaway’s apartment.

3D food printer, circa 1956

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On my previous post about space travel and 3D printers, mention was made of the Star Trek “food replicator.”

But I seemed to recall that sci-fi had imagined this device much earlier than that.

Indeed, in the 1956 classic “Forbidden Planet,” starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and Leslie Nielsen, there is a robot that has a sort of miniature 3D food printer built into its torso.

I couldn’t find a clip showing that from the actual film, but I did find this promotional short in which the robot explains how it is able to replicate food of any kind, in any amount. All that is needed is a small sample of the food — which I suppose makes it more of a 3D food copier than printer.

But whatever. I thought I’d share it. Also, I refer you to a story Burl brought to our attention, about how a 3D printer saved a baby’s life.

This is just astounding technology…

Robbie the Robot, a pre-comedy Leslie Nielsen, and pre-“Honey West” Anne Francis (who showed her gams a LOT in this one).

‘Groundhog Day’ in South Carolina’s 1st District

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Our regular Silence, who apparently is way too chipper in the early morning, posted at 7:08 a.m.,

Here it is folks, the big day, the main event! Who will be the champ, and who will be the chump?

To which I responded that most likely, Mark Sanford wins. Again. As he has been expected to do since the beginning, in spite of some polls giving his opponent hope along the way.

But you know, it would be nice to see something different, something new, happen in South Carolina. Getting stuck with Sanford again is SOP here; we expect no better.

I’m reminded of what Bill Murray says at the end of “Groundhog Day,” when a new and different day finally dawns. He notices something that varies from all the previous days, and says, with cautious optimism, “Something is… different.” Andie MacDowell says, “Good or bad?” To which he replies, “Anything different is good.”

Had the film been set in her native South Carolina rather than Pennsylvania, Ms. MacDowell might then have said, “Nothing different ever happens here.” Which would have ruined the movie, but would have been depressingly true. We are famous for our ruts.

I don’t know that Elizabeth Colbert Busch is the electoral equivalent of getting Andie MacDowell in the end. I don’t know enough about her. But I know it would be different. And when the status quo is this well known, different is good.

Here’s hoping for a happy ending in the 1st District. The alternative is another 18 months of Sanford jokes at South Carolina’s expense.

The thoughtful hedonist: Russell Brand on Thatcher

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You probably don’t want to watch it with your mom, or with your children for that matter, but I have seen few things funnier in recent years than Russell Brand in “Get Him to the Greek.” From his first line, “I’m Aldous Snow, the rock star,” his embodiment of an out-of-control hedonist is so devastatingly spot on, you come away convinced that that is who he really is (of course, his personal biography isn’t that far distant from Snow’s).

But messed up as he may be, he’s a bright guy who can actually be fairly thoughtful (interestingly, there were flashes of that in the Aldous Snow character, tucked among the Jeffrey-induced outrages). He showed that in a piece he wrote for The Guardian a couple of days back. Excerpts:

One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. It’s kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel, established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose garden; which I never promised you.

My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. “What’s going on there, mate?” John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. “Maggie Thatcher,” he said. “Comes here every week to water them flowers.” The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn’t until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon…

The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there’s no such thing as society, in the end there isn’t. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn’t sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she’s all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and “follow the bear”. What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people’s pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate…

Rough stuff. But then there are bits like this:

When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. It’d be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. “I thought I’d be overjoyed, but really it’s just … another one bites the dust …” This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher’s ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one’s enemies…

I found it interesting because it gave me insight into the attitudes of a young Brit growing up in the Thatcher era — someone whose life wasn’t politics. I think he probably speaks for a lot of people in his generation, those who aren’t inclined to engage in the execrable “Ding-Dong” celebrations, but aren’t at all interested in fitting her with a halo, either.

I was also intrigued by the bits of communitarianism that crept into the writing of this young man best known in this country for playing a narcissist, such as “If you behave like there’s no such thing as society, in the end there isn’t.”

I share it as something from an unexpected quarter that broadened my understanding a bit.

The overshadowed passing of Annette

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Long before there was a Cher, or a Madonna, or a Sting, there was Annette, who preceded them all in needing no surname. Even “Elvis” had “Presley” attached more than Annette used “Funicello” in the early days.

That’s because she was the most famous of the Mouseketeers, and I mean the original, real Mouseketeers, not the latter-day imitations.

We expected the passing of Margaret Thatcher; that movie with Meryl Streep made it seem imminent. But Annette, leaving us at 70, was more of a shock.

I suspect you have to be almost exactly my age — one whose preschool years were entirely contained within the ’50s — to get this completely. Later, seeing her in the beach movies, I’d form another picture of her, and that one probably stuck better — that of a young woman rather than a child, although still a squeaky-clean image. (Alas, she was not my favorite character in those films; that honor belonged to Eric Von Zipper.)

John Updike used a passage, early in Rabbit Run, in which Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom watches the “The Mickey Mouse Club,” which comes across as a way of assuring us that this is, indeed, a quintessentially American novel. But Harry could never connect with the Mouseketeers the way we did. Harry was spoiled goods; he wasn’t one of us. Harry, in that and subsequent novels (OK, so I really only made it through Rabbit Redux before I gave up on him), was always too old for the cultural passages he was experiencing. Yet he plunged through them anyway, which for me imbued him with a certain falseness.

How did we get on Updike? Oh, yeah, Annette…

The Mouseketeers, Elvis, Mickey Mantle and Andy Devine were my first celebrities. It was years and years before I learned from Dumas there had been something in history called a musketeer, which at first looked to me like a misspelling.

Annette! If only once more we could see her standing by Jimmie as he led us through:

M-I-C (see you next week!)
K-E-Y (Why? Because we LIKE you!)
M-O-U-S-E

… and know, with a child’s certainty, that yes, we would see them next week, and that they did indeed like us as much as we liked them…

The passing of Roger Ebert, a great movie critic

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33ebert

This from his paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, a few minutes ago:

For a film with a daring director, a talented cast, a captivating plot or, ideally, all three, there could be no better advocate than Roger Ebert, who passionately celebrated and promoted excellence in film while deflating the awful, the derivative, or the merely mediocre with an observant eye, a sharp wit and a depth of knowledge that delighted his millions of readers and viewers.

“No good film is too long,” he once wrote, a sentiment he felt strongly enough about to have engraved on pens. “No bad movie is short enough.”

Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland.

He
lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity…

Ebert had announced a few days ago on his blog that cancer had struck again, and that he would be taking a “leave of presence,” dialing back his own involvement and running mostly reviews from others on his website. “I am not going away,” he said.

If only he could have kept his promise.

I had come to appreciate Ebert more than ever in recent years, as I embraced social media. He was an avid practitioner, Tweeting all hours of the day and night on all topics, using the new medium to make up for his inability to speak. I thought it great that he could do that, and not be cut off from the world.

But now he has been cut off from it. That’s sad news, and I thought I’d share it.

Top Five (and other) Cold War Movies

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Richard Burton as Alec Leamas in “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold”

Bryan Caskey has drawn up his Top Five Cold War Movies over at his blog, and I feel compelled to answer it. My perspective is a little different from his, because I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, giving me not only different cultural touchstones, but a different feel for the Cold War itself.

Here’s my Top Five:

The Spy Who Came in from The Cold — This defines the genre. Starts and ends at the Berlin Wall. A lot of bad movies were made from good books in the ’60s, but this wasn’t one of them. It did a great job of capturing the atmosphere, the moral ambiguity and the deception-within-deception-within-deception plotline of LeCarre’s book.
Dr. Strangelove — I was torn between this and Fail-Safe, which was the same story without the comedy. But this was such an awesome piece of film-making, it had to go on the list. Strangelove got us to laugh at the things that caused our hair to stand on end in Fail-Safe. The link is to my favorite scene: “Now, then, Dimitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb…”
Our Man in Havana — I’m going for satirical again with this spoof of the spy genre. Both Alec Guinness and Ernie Kovacs. How do you beat that? Based on Graham Greene’s most enjoyable “entertainment” (which is what he called his less serious novels), which inspired le Carre’s The Tailor of Panama.
The Mouse That Roared — Yes, I’m going for the more obscure reference because Barry in High Fidelity (the ultimate authority for the science of Top Five lists) would sneer at any Top Five list that didn’t have one that no one else would think of. I’ll even admit that the movie wasn’t very good — although I enjoyed the book. This is about a tiny country with a medieval military capability that becomes the world’s greatest power by stealing a Doomsday Machine from the U.S. For Strangelove fans, this also has Peter Sellers in multiple roles.
The Manchurian Candidate — Paranoia is a huge part of what the Cold War was about, and this is the classic of that genre.

Another Five, in case you’d like a Top Ten:

Seven Days in May — In a way not really about the Cold War, except for the paranoia thing.
Fail-Safe — I initially had this in the Top Five, trying to be cool by picking on the less-obvious choice. I was going to say that “Awesome as it was, Strangelove was more about a sort of smartass 60s cultural sensibility than it was about the way real people felt about nuclear annihilation.” But I changed my mind.
The Ipcress File — Perhaps the all-time best Michael Caine vehicle, based on Len Deighton’s very best novel. Deighton’s book is breezily ironic, very hip, yet far more realistic than Bond.
The Lives of Others — A look at what life was like on the other side of the curtain.
WarGames — More of a movie about the then-new phenomenon of computer hackers than about the Cold War, but it still fits in the genre. Ferris Bueller meets Fail-Safe.

Also-rans, in no particular order:

The Third Man — This might have made the list, but I think it’s more about postwar black-marketeering than about the Cold War proper.
Stripes — Great fun, but too silly to make the Top Five list.
The Right Stuff — Not what you think of as “Cold War,” maybe, but what was it all about? Trying to prevent the godless Russkies from being able to drop nukes on us from space, like rocks from a highway overpass. An amazing job of turning a book that is mostly about the narration into an engaging film.
Red Dawn — A high school kid’s fantasy of World War III. I mean, wouldn’t every adolescent boy like to see the boredom of school interrupted by a shooting war in which he is the hero?
Twilight’s Last Gleaming — Didn’t we see Burt Lancaster play this character before, in “Seven Days in May”?
The Quiet American — The jaded European view of Americans as blundering do-gooders.
Blast from the Past — Bomb-shelter anxieties transformed into romantic comedy.
2010 — The sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, this one wrongly guessed that we’d still be goin’ toe-to-toe with the Russkies nine years later. Best parts: Both Dave and Hal show up.

Ernie Kovacs playing minibottle chess in "Our Man in Havana."

Ernie Kovacs playing minibottle checkers in “Our Man in Havana.”

REALLY? Netflix thinks these are ‘like “Zero Dark Thirty”?’

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Some fret that the algorithms that surround us know too much about us. I don’t. Not yet.

Over the last few years, I’ve rated 2,383 movies on Netflix — so I really think I can claim to have given this thing a chance — and the service still doesn’t have a clue what I’m likely to like.

I guess there are just too many variables in what makes a motion picture enjoyable.

I find that Pandora does a somewhat better job of throwing me an occasional song I haven’t heard before, but like upon hearing. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not batting 1.000 or anything. But every once in a while, something I didn’t ask for makes me think yeahhh. It manages this more often than Netflix does. At least it seems that way. I haven’t kept a spreadsheet on it or anything.

Really, I like Netflix very much. It’s a great service, for what it does (both the DVD and instant sides). But what it does not do is understand my preferences. And I hold out little hope of it achieving that feat when it doesn’t have a clue what sorts of movies are “like ‘Zero Dark Thirty’.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. “Universal Soldier?” “Batman Forever?” “Kinky Boots?”

Here are some movies I would say are actually like “Zero Dark Thirty:”

“Black Hawk Down” — A true story featuring U.S. Special Forces troops in action.
“Body of Lies” — Also fictional, but it involves dusty, gritty intelligence work on the ground in the same region. It even has torture scenes, as I recall.
“Green Zone” — Much in the same genre as “Body of Lies.”
“Homeland” — OK, it’s TV and not the big screen, and fictional, but the main female character has a lot in common with the lead in “Zero,” and may actually be based on the same real-life woman.
“The Hurt Locker” — Same director, also set in the region, very similar feel (and a better movie, although “Zero” is good).

See where I’m going with this, Netflix? Probably not. Anyway, I see little reason to worry, based on this at least, that machines are reading my mind…

Regret is hard to live with, even for a storm trooper

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Just thought I’d share this image, which I ran across while looking for a link for an earlier thread.

Regret is indeed hard to live with. Which make me wonder how Lucas can stand himself after making Episodes I-III…

Sorry, but ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ wasn’t Best Picture

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The Wall Street Journal editorial board has been upset with U.S. senators Feinstein, Levin and McCain for criticizing the makers of “Zero Dark Thirty” for making it look like torture was essential to getting Osama bin Laden.

Now, the editors blame the senators for the movie’s poor showing at the Oscars:

As no one should forget, Senators Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain wrote letters to Sony Pictures and the CIA charging that “Zero Dark Thirty” was a “grossly inaccurate and misleading” portrayal of the interrogation of al Qaeda detainees. Ms. Feinstein’s intelligence committee opened an inquiry into what the CIA told the filmmakers, and the letters coincided with a media attack led by those great believers in artistic free expression at the New Yorker magazine.

Well, mission accomplished. The film was among the best reviewed of 2012 and has done well at the box office. But the attacks had their desired effect of intimidating Hollywood. Director Kathryn Bigelow was denied an Oscar nomination and the film won only a single (shared) award for sound editing. The Oscar ceremonies were Sunday night.

A day later, Reuters reported that the Senate is dropping its investigation of the film and CIA cooperation with the filmmakers…

The WSJ’s reasoning seems to go like this: Feinstein and Levin are liberals (McCain and his experienced-based objections to torture are conveniently forgotten). Hollywood is full of liberals. So Hollywood was cowed into stiffing ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ by fear of straying from liberal orthodoxy. Or something.

But the editors are ignoring something: “Zero Dark Thirty” didn’t deserve Best Picture honors, or Best Director. It was good, even important (important enough that I don’t blame senators at all for taking a political stand on it). But Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” which did win the Best Picture honor in 2009, was a more impressive, highly original film.

And the torture scenes? Speaking artistically and not politically, they went on too long. Long enough that it’s perfectly understandable that someone who doesn’t want our national defense to depend on the mistreatment of prisoners to think a political point was being made, and to object to that point. If this had been a work of fiction, devoid of political content, I think most critics would say the interrogations scenes were a drag on the storytelling.

I actually think the point being made by the filmmakers was neutral. I don’t think they were saying torture is good or necessary. I thought they were just saying (oversaying), it happened. And it sorta kinda maybe helped find bin Laden. It’s something to throw into the mix of how we feel about all that. War, including asymmetrical war, is filled with moral ambiguities.

I think they thought it would have been dishonest to leave out that part. Maybe they were right. In any case, they did not make this year’s best picture. Not this time.

Now, changing the subject slightly — what should have been Best Picture? Well, I can’t judge that, because I haven’t seen “Argo.” But I can say with all confidence that I wouldn’t have given it to “Zero Dark Thirty” in the same year that “Lincoln” came out. And if a director was slighted this year, it was Steven Spielberg.

Macfarlane on the Oscars: Funny, offensive, both, or neither?

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Everyone’s buzzing about Seth Macfarlane’s performance hosting the Academy Awards last night. Such words as “sexist” and “racist” have been used.

But what did anyone expect? If anything, his material was significantly toned down from the stuff you can hear, and see depicted in cartoon form, on “The Family Guy” before prime time each evening. To call Macfarlane’s brand of humor sophomoric is to promote it several years past its middle-school level. That is, it’s the kind of humor you’d hear from a middle-schooler who was demonically quick and witty. Admittedly, Macfarlane’s material is the sort that makes people laugh, even if they’re feeling guilty while doing so.

Racism (we are all invited to laugh at Brian, the racist dog), graphic violence involving children, incest, and mockery of religion are pretty much standard fare on “The Family Guy.” (And at this point, I’m feeling pretty embarrassed for knowing all that.) Ditto with “Ted” — it’s funny, but don’t be fooled into letting the kids watch it just because it’s about a Teddy bear.

So explain to us why anyone would be shocked at his “We Saw Your Boobs” bit last night? From him, that’s pretty mild stuff.

At one point, a joke was made about how it would have been better to have engaged the services of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who co-hosted the Golden Globes. Hey, no joke — they would have made people laugh without cringing.

But seriously, if you engage the services of Seth Macfarlane, this is what you get, at the very least. No sense moaning about it afterward.

Your ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ scoreboard

‘Lincoln’ is one of those rare films you really must see

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The nitty-gritty of greatness.

Over the weekend, I experienced the polar opposites of cinematic achievement: First, AT&T was having a free weekend for premium channels, and while I recorded a number of films I expect to enjoy, one of those channels also showed David Lynch’s execrable “Dune.” I had not watched it since that bitterly disappointing night in 1984 in a Jackson, TN, theater when it first came out. Those few minutes I watched over the weekend convinced me that it wasn’t just that my expectations had been so high at the time. This actually was the worst film I’ve ever seen in my life. Every line of dialogue, every visual touch, every gratuitous plot change from the book (“weirding modules”? Are you kidding me?), was so bad it had to be as intentional as those revolting pustules the make-up people put all over the Baron Harkonnen’s face (something else that wasn’t in the book). Every aspect of it was horrible.

So it was very nice, Sunday evening, to wipe that away by seeing one of the finest new motion pictures I’ve seen in years: “Lincoln.”

Everyone should see this. Every American should, anyway, because it tells so much about who we are and what led to our being what we are. And it tells us something I think we’ve forgotten, which is that great things can be accomplished through our system of representative democracy, even when the barriers and stakes are far greater than anything we face in Washington today.

I could go on and on about the way Daniel Day Lewis inhabits Abraham Lincoln and eerily embodies everything I’ve read about him, or how Spielberg has honed his craft to the very limits of film’s ability to tell a coherent story, while simultaneously making you feel like you’re looking through a time portal at the actual events.

But I’ll just zero in on one thing that contributed to making it so good: The political realism. Most specifically, the way the film not only avoids the temptation to make everything appear to be morally black or white, but rubs your nose in the messiness of real decisions made in a real world.

The main narrative has to do with Lincoln, after his second inauguration, pulling out all the stops to get the House to pass the 13th Amendment, which made slavery unconstitutional. To get the two-thirds, he needs at least 20 more votes even if every Republican supports the measure. This means not only peeling off some Democrats, each defection like pulling teeth out of a dragon, but somehow keeping the peace among the radicals (such as Thaddeus Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones) and conservatives (such as Preston Blair, played by Hal Holbrook) in his own party.

Every stratagem is used, starting with the hiring of some sleazy political operatives (I was amazed to realize after I saw the film that that was James Spader playing lobbyist W.N. Bilbo) to employ every trick they can come up with, starting with raw political patronage and moving on from there. (A key part of the strategy involved offering jobs in the second Lincoln administration to lame-duck members of the other party who had just lost their bids for re-election, but not left office yet.) The Lincoln team even stoops to a half-truth — told by Honest Abe himself — at a critical moment to keep the coalition from blowing up.

It’s very, very messy. No plaster saints here, and feet of clay all over the place. Yet through it all, the ultimate nobility of what is being done, in spite of all the odds, shines through irresistibly. We see how politics, with all its warts, can accomplish magnificent things. At a moment when Democrats and Republicans can’t even seem to do a simple thing like keep from going over a “fiscal cliff” with their hands around each others’ throats, we see how politicians (and they evince all of the worst things we think of when we use that term) can accomplish something great, even when (or perhaps, because?) the stakes are so much greater.

This film not only doesn’t flinch at moral complexity; it wallows in it, to wonderful effect. An excellent example is the scene in which Lincoln muses aloud before his team about all the convoluted, mutually contradictory, logical and constitutional boxes he put himself and the nation in when he decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. And the tension builds as we come to fully understand why the Amendment — which would fulfill the dream of freedom that the Proclamation could not — must be passed NOW, before the war ended. And we share Lincoln’s intense, focused urgency.

No significant aspect of Lincoln’s public character is missing from this portrait, including the delight that both he and his audiences took in his jokes. (But not all the people all of the time — Secretary of War Edwin Stanton storms out rather than listen to a funny story at a tense moment.) And at the end, after all the deal-making and maneuvering and fiddling and pushing and pulling and playing to venality and petty egos — one is left believing that Abraham Lincoln was a greater man than any marble statue could ever convey. I don’t know how to explain to you how the film achieves that; it just does.

I suppose there will be some people who just don’t get it — black-and-white, concrete thinkers who will be disturbed at the honest portayal of the messiness of politics as it was practiced in 1865. The neo-Confederates who think the Lincoln would originally have kept slavery if he could preserve the Union is some sort of great “gotcha” won’t get it. Nor will those like the local political activist who, a few days ago, said on Facebook that “Lincoln was not a good man” because his attitudes about racial equality weren’t a perfect match for those of a 21st-century “progressive.”

But seeing “Lincoln” may be among the best chances they’ll ever have to see that reality is broader, and often more inspiring, than their narrow perspectives on it.

No-holds-barred 19th-century lobbying in all its grubby glory.

bradwarthen.com

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