Whisky Prajer

It's been years since I last bothered to watch the Academy Awards, but why should that stop me from reading and contributing my own day-after commentary?

If there was a common note struck by viewers of this year's awards, it was how dismal and shabby it all was. I'll take their word for it. Two appended observations struck me rather forcefully, though. The first was that this year's Best Picture award embodied the “Least Objectionable Viewing” theory that television execs typically run with: i.e., the fella holding the remote control will settle on the program that bothers the fewest people in the room. So in the Academy's case, if the choice boils down to an arty kid's movie and a pleasant but toothless French movie marketed to adults, the French movie gets the vote.

It's a shame, really. I enjoyed the kid's movie — twice — but was rooting for Tree Of Life, a movie I've only seen 10 minutes of. I haven't finished it (yet) because in a house with two teenage daughters Mallick's movie qualifies as the most objectionable viewing. In a sane world, that alone would place it head and shoulders above would-be contenders.

Another commentator said the Academy Awards Show was Hollywood's equivalent of the State Of The Union Address. If this analogy holds true (and I think it does) then the American film industry's fixation on two nostalgic movies about movies suggests a collective mood that swings from denial to depression, and back again.

This theory would also explain why awards shows that include television series have been so much jollier in tone. It's difficult to recoup the blockbuster budgets for series like Boardwalk Empire and Mad Men, but a gazillion PVR hits can't be wrong: this stuff is the destination viewing (more TV-speak) of today's maturing aesthete. When series writers are doing their job right, we get complex story-lines and subtle character development over considerably more hours than we'll ever spend in a theatre. And, as a special bonus, the seats are comfortable, the bathrooms clean, and we don't get bombarded with sound bleed-over from the action flick in the adjoining theatre. Movie critics who pointedly ignore these shows are doing themselves a double disservice: not only do they miss out on some supremely satisfying viewing, they actively pursue their own irrelevancy.

And speaking of arty television series, I finally deliver a few irrelevant critical thoughts pertaining to Carnivàle — tomorrow!

I am bitterly unqualified to comment on the year that was in film. That is why I'm always grateful for the Academy Award nominations, because the list inevitably generates comment, no matter how few flicks I may have seen.

Of the potential Best Pictures, I've seen only three: Moneyball and Midnight In Paris, as well as Hugo, in 3D — twice. Hugo caught me completely off-guard both times: the first time with its artful suspense, and the second time with its emotional depth. Both times I braced myself to be distracted by/impressed with the technical gim-crackery, but was instead distracted from such superficiality by my love for the story.

So I'd declare Hugo the best of those three options. Midnight In Paris was a pleasant 90 minutes in the dark, although too saccharine in its conclusion to be given a second thought. And I simply can't understand how Moneyball makes it onto lists like this. I have no trouble getting caught up in a rousing sports movie — Hoosiers is a favourite in this category. I also have no trouble enjoying an ambivalent sports movie — and who would argue that Slap Shot is not the best in that category? But Moneyball can't decide if it's rousing or ambivalent.

"Uh ... ambivalent?

The script is a mess. At one point the Brad Pitt character gives an older player an inspiring speech about becoming a mature player, and letting go of the 20-year-old kid he no longer is — being a leader, a mentor, someone who passes along some wisdom, etc. Cut to the next scene, and the older player asks a younger player what's going on. The younger player admits he's scared, of everything. The older player shakes his head, says, “Huh.” End of scene. This, and other dropped balls, puts Moneyball into the same league as the team it celebrates: a phenomenon that gives mediocrity a good name.

My favourite movie of the year isn't even on the list: Margin Call gathers a dream cast that teases and stretches suggestion and insinuation to untested lengths.



MINOR SPOILER: one of the early questions in the film is whether or not the Kevin Spacey character will deliver a monologue he's been assigned. By film's end, he does. It is long (and, if memory serves, uncut) and it is among the most riveting monologues that Spacey has done. END SPOILER.

Margin Call does what indy films do best: capitalise on the energy of a necessarily brief moment — in this case a convergence of two brief moments: the assembling of the creative ensemble, precisely as the American economy collapses.

Might I like Tree Of Life more? I'll tell you when I see it. For now, all I can say is I suspect Tree is the better of Pitt's movies to be nominated.

So I've got this twitter-feed, and — what can I say? — I kind of dig it. It's not something I devote more than ten minutes of my day to. I don't have it synced to a phone or anything like that, so I don't catch more than a short burst of other people's on-line chatter. It's the equivalent of wandering into Fran's for a cinnamon bun and coffee, and eavesdropping on the young hipsters before they butt out and trudge off to their dead-end jobs.

Do hipsters have those conversations anymore, those wry back-and-forths that aspire to Oscar Wilde and his salon-set? I haven't been to Fran's in ages, but I sure don't hear that kind of chatter when I step into That Corporate Espresso Outlet. In fact, those places are usually pretty quiet, because everyone is taking advantage of the free wireless — hipster-yakking on-line, I'm guessing.

It almost beggars the imagination, but day-to-day living once defied attempts at quip-like summary. Cafe-talk consisted of a rough feeling-around for a shared DMZ that could withstand another volley or two of good-natured ideological cross-fire. When a subject completely foreign to you rolled around, you shut up and listened, asking the occasional question, and venturing forth an opinion only when you were certain the ground had more or less returned beneath your feet.

That's how we approached the movies, too, in those days. Movies commanded our attention. We sat silently in those cavernous theatres, letting the light and sound wash over us in its attempt to deluge our prepared defenses to the argument being made. And that was the thing: movies were making an argument. Most were modern in their agenda — bourgeois, if not banal — but because the medium was so sensual and the environment so hallowed, the argument was thoroughly revitalized, often flaunting its contradictions with a maddening confidence as it beat the viewer into a defensive rage, or haplessly submissive tears.

In this now-vanished world, we read the critics, the bulk of whom volunteered themselves as the public's first line of righteous defense. This movie was good and sturdy, that movie was shaky, this whole line of movies was little more than a dim shadow of something that had shone masterfully some decades back, etc. It was a rare critic who acknowledged the personal appeal every movie aspired to. That appeal might hold all the comfort and nutrition of Kraft Dinner, or it could be a powerful feast of provocation that demanded a level of attention the viewer was resistant to admit, but either way it was meant to be personal.

No-one took the movies more personally than Pauline Kael, who died ten years ago, and is now receiving her first biography and another culling and collection of her writing. When she critiqued, her launching point was sexual metaphor, after which she explored where a picture's attempted seduction either succeeded or failed. We're told Kael wrote her reviews in longhand, on a lined yellow tablet, more often than not through the night on a tight deadline — sublimation on an epic scale. When the seduction succeeded (Last Tango In Paris being the most notorious instance) her reader could expect to feel the frisson of prurient discomfort; conversely, if the seduction had failed badly, her prose was withering.

Nobody writes like that about the movies anymore, and why should they? These days we can watch movies on our phones, and most of them don't much suffer from the shift in scale. In 1973 a movie that jilted all sensibility to the degree that Blatty's The Exorcist did practically forced the viewer out into the cold, to stumble home, sit down, uncap the pen and write. A movie like 2009's The Human Centipede, on the other hand, begs for — and receives — the South Park treatment: crudely animated circles with a lewd and dismissive point of view. That's the level of argument being made; that's the level of response required.

It's doubtful anyone younger than 45 will find much to take note of in Kael's life and work. It may seem like I'm reminiscing about those heady days when giants walked the earth, but we are living at a time when the attention Kael paid to a movie would seem wildly out-of-place. In a year when Terrence Malick's The Tree Of Life is considered the high-water mark for movies, why should a competing flick like Cowboys Vs. Aliens generate anything longer than a tweet? Pauline wouldn't have bothered with even that.

As we walked out of the TIFF Lightbox, where Cave Of Forgotten Dreams was playing, my wife sighed rather happily and said, “I love Werner Herzog — he's a real character. But there's almost always a point in his documentaries when I think, 'You are so full of shit.'”

Some documentaries more than others, I might have added. As he's aged, those moments are fewer, but he still retains his capacity to test a viewer's bullshit-meter. Cave Of Forgotten Dreams is no exception.

The movie is an intriguing and worthy exercise: escort a limited crew into the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, get footage of the paintings and bring it back — rendered in 3D — to a public for whom this will be their only exposure; keep the pace languid, add some vigorous neo-classical performances to the soundtrack, interview witnesses and professionals and be sure to keep the camera rolling to catch the occasional eccentricity; keep personal commentary to a minimum; then cut and paste it in the editing room and release the final product to a grateful audience.

Does it work? The results are mixed. On a surprisingly primal level, the film is a success. The 3D rendering is the most excruciating I've experienced since the days of blue-and-red paper spectacles, yet it reveals aspects of character in the paintings which a traditional presentation would keep hidden. The lingering camera, the soundtrack's sacred keening and Herzog's wheezy monotone induce a dreamlike state — a desired effect. My wife noted how the commentators all resorted to English as a subsequent language, which brought a blunt simplicity to their analysis — also a desired effect.

At other times, when it seemed like the contours of the cave warped in an unintended reversal, the artifice of the presentation was impossible to ignore. I wasn't in the cave — I wasn't anywhere near the cave. I couldn't smell its mustiness, I couldn't feel the texture of the stalagtites and stalagmites. I was entirely at the mercy of the technology and the crew that employed it. Open the film with a statement like, “We will be the lest people to see these paintings, be-foah the cave iss closed — foah-effah,” and repeat it a couple of times, for emphasis, and resentment becomes part of the viewing experience as well.

I had to wonder if that wasn't also a desired effect. It wasn't as if an excursion to the Chauvet Cave had been a long-standing item on my bucket list, but geez-louise: greater souls than mine have chaffed under sentiments like, “I em hee-ah, where you will neffah be.” Herzog's post-script, in which he ponders just what a herd of albino alligators might make of it all, comes as very welcome comic relief.

There is something profoundly unsettling about these paintings. The mook who slapped his red-painted palm to the cave wall probably had an ego as big as Ozymandias' — or Werner Herzog's. Against all odds his statement has remained intact for over 30,000 years, placed in stark juxtaposition to the awe-inspiring portraits of the thundering forces that surround it. Like Herzog's films, it is as petty, bold, tragic, and comic a statement as anything humanity has put on canvas. God knows you've gotta be pretty full of something to pull off a stunt like that.

The new movie is a bit of a dog’s breakfast, but not so bad as to qualify for Worst Movie Of The Year (Cowboys & Aliens and Captain America would nudge Conan The Barbarian out of competition, and that's just citing examples I've had the misfortune to see). Conan's problems stem from being an origin story, which might seem like the natural place to start, particularly with a hero that most of the public is only vaguely familiar with. But exploring Conan's origins presents challenges unique to the Barbarian.

The obvious challenge applies to all origin movies: making the story contemporary without thumbing your nose at earlier incarnations. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man succeeded by dramatically linking Peter Parker’s “spider” powers to his adolescent sexuality. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins worked because the gothic spectacle of Bruce Wayne’s transformation was greeted with just the right smidgen of irony by movie’s end. And, to cite an example that sits closer to Conan, Disney’s recent incarnation of Tarzan worked (despite the presence of gorillas singing along to Phil Collins) by introducing movie audiences to the exhilarating sense of motion and spatial freedom that Edgar Rice Burroughs' books gloried in (contrast Disney’s tree-surfing with Johnny Weissmuller lazily swinging from one vine to the next). Lately filmmakers have erred on the side of caution, producing musty origin flicks that adhere too closely to stories that are decades old (see Thor or Captain America, for example).

But Conan's marketers also have to consider just which well to draw from: the original pulps, the comics, the Governator movies, the Saturday morning cartoons, the spin-off hack novels? Robert E. Howard's work appeals, since that's the embodiment that first took hold of the public imagination and never let go. But unlike Burroughs, Howard never devoted a novel's worth of print to divulging Conan’s past. Quite the opposite: the only Conan novel Howard wrote (in fact a “Kull” story Howard tweaked in hopes of salvaging a sale) occurs late in Conan’s life, when he’s been deposed from his kingdom. In the short stories when Conan or the narrator refer to the barbarian’s past, the references are perfunctory and oblique.

This isn’t entirely unusual, given the medium Howard was working with. Most pulp writers got their character’s origin story out of the way as quickly as possible, and dove into the action. Howard’s spin on this strategy was uniquely effective: make the action central, and the origin ephemeral. Drop hints, but never explicate.

The new movie explicates big time, a strategy that yields mixed results. The opening scene demonstrates at painful length how the age-old nostrum, "Show, don't tell," should probably have been reversed with respect to, “the boy was born on the battlefield.” Conan’s progress as a young barbarian, however, is successful entertainment: Leo Howard adroitly embodies an adolescent discovering how feral energy can be channeled into disciplined and fluid thrills on the battlefield.

The boy's interaction with his father, however, complicates things. The old man (Ron Perelman) is gruff and unyielding, allowing the audience to see the occasional glimmer of pleasure in his son’s natural ability, but offering no such indulgence to the boy. As I watched I couldn’t help but speculate on another reason why Howard skirted around origin stories: his own were a source of manifest discomfort, to say the least. Howard’s father was a bit of a cold fish. He kept his appearances at home brief, hectoring the young man to quit with the stories already and make something of himself, before disappearing again for days or weeks at a time to make the rounds as a country doctor. Howard’s tubercular mother was slightly more encouraging of his literary efforts, to the extent that she didn’t shut him down when he spent a night hammering and shouting out his stories. But I don’t think it’s out of line to suggest that her own struggles with isolation and alienation and deferred intimacy played themselves out to unfortunate, if unintended, effect in her relationship with her son. When it came time to face the blank page, who could blame REH for skipping origins altogether and fleeing directly to a pulp backdrop where a lone hero can express himself with complete physical, sexual and spiritual abandon?

Which raises another weakness in the movie: we don't get enough such expression. Once the barbaric mum and pop are dispensed with the rest of the flick plays, rather herkily-jerkily, as a revenge narrative. Jason Momoa is as close to a Howard embodiment of Conan as we’ve seen in the movies (personally, I’ve always imagined a juiced-up version of the late Chuck Connors) and the script has flashes of what Howard invested in the character. But as a narrative foil, Conan works best when he’s a sword-wielding trickster — akin to Yojimbo's samurai, James Bond, The Man With No Name, Han Solo and countless others — who struts into a room full of uptight citizens, and announces, “I’m here to show you how things really work.” Conan doesn’t have that environment here. Everything is already unmoored and up for grabs; consequently his dressed-up quest for revenge comes across as an almost petty affair for an epic figure to trouble himself with.

Petty, but not unentertaining. I enjoyed myself, but would advise against 3D. Conan fans and the morbidly curious are encouraged to read Michael A. Stackpole’s novelization(!), which surely aligns closer to the screenwriters’ original vision. While it, too, has flatfooted moments it yields a much more satisfying narrative and motivation than the final on-screen product. Best of all, Stackpole proves himself a capable pulp stylist, embracing its enthusiasms without overindulging its purple excesses. He's got my money if he ever decides to write a follow-up to this adventure.

The movie is likely to do well internationally, where the market for “swarthy” heroes who dispatch extremely white villains is quite large. In the meantime, who knows? Maybe in another 25 years someone will get the mix exactly right.



Logan Hill wrote my favorite review of Conan The Barbarian. Mary Scriver asks, Would You Date Conan? And for more better Conan explication ("'Splication'?"), run, do not walk, to Steve Donoghue's eloquent and incisive Cimmerian 'Stravaganza.

Today is a big deal for Harry Potter fans. For me, not so much. Back when I had the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of Potter mania, I stalled. I bought the first book, but found the author's tone too disagreeable to get me past fifty pages. Years later, when our family faced a lengthy car trip across the Canadian prairie I reached in desperation for the audio recording. To my surprise, Jim Dale's robust performance of the book won me over. He relayed the narrative as if, in fact, its twists and turns were jolly surprises to him. The next few years promised several lengthy car trips, so I bought or borrowed the rest of the series, which we finished last summer.

By then I was more than ready for it to be over. I'd grown weary of the Potter Plotline — begin with Squalid Episode in Harry's adoptive Muggle family; transport Harry to Hogwarts where he and his cohort sneak around to determine why Something Mysterious is happening; conclude with Perilous Quest and wrap it all up with Affirmational Epilogue — which Rowling took increasingly more time to lay out. I still wanted to know where it was all leading, but I tuned out for vast stretches of Dale's performance, often cluing in belatedly after someone in the car gasped with surprise.

Anyone who gets kids excited about reading, though, is someone to hold in high esteem, and J.K. Rowling more than qualifies. The Pottter Plotline worked, but more than that, the characters were compelling, especially to younger readers (again, as the characters grew to be all-too-convincing adolescents, my own interest thinned to near non-existence). But more than that, the magical environment these characters interacted in was entirely beguiling.

Near the end of the series, as the tone of the adventures grew increasingly gloomy, I can recall a critic tangentially lamenting that he hoped there might still be room in the (then) forthcoming books for another Quidditch match or two. It strikes me that this remark cuts closest to what has made those books and movies so successful: a landscape of enchantment, imagination and play that entices the reader to speculate and roam further. A little Googling seems to bear this out. Potter fan-fic is booming, and there are all sorts of folks trying to mount a successful Harry Potter on-line RPG.

RPGs . . . Harry Potter appeared just as Dungeons & Dragons was fading from suburban basements, and shortly before video games became persuasively immersive to both genders. Rowling so fabulously bridged that gap, I have to wonder: what might it look like to approach and weave together the next such nexus?

Whenever a big-bucks high-profile photographer moves to the director's chair, I'm game to give him some time. At the very least, the movie is likely to be a treat to look at, if not enter into.

Anton Corbijn's The American is quite the treat, starting with the retro movie poster.

Note the black/orange contrast: Hollywood seems to have set the blue/red scale to 10, for some reason. I suspect Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita set the standard. In any case, Corbijn nudges the blue/red scale to 11. And it actually works. Glamor is the business of articulating the unattainable, and heightening its allure via artfully composed contrasts. Corbijn's palette imbues the (chiefly Roman) locales with heightened cool exoticism. To say nothing of eroticism. Since George Clooney is already on board with Irina Björklund . . . . . . and Thekia Reuten . . . . . . and Violante Placido . . .

. . . what more needs to be said?

Oh. Story. Right.

I watched Zack Snyder's 300 last night — my first, and (God willing) only, time. If the blogosphere is any indication, 300 has usurped Ridley Scott's Gladiator as the alpha-male-wannabe's movie of choice. I'd say I was equally entertained by both flicks — which is to say, not very. Back when I read the comic book it had never struck me as such a thin retelling of Rob Roy (wp). But there it is.

Alright: on to the ledger. On the minus side: yak, yak, yak/hack, hack hack; humorless cartoon hijinx, self-regarding seriousness way off the charts.

On the plus side: loved the digital texture(!), as well as much of the soundtrack; the script is an endless cornucopia of unintended giggles. And gay men must LOVE this film! Man, this film is gayer than Socrates on a bender in Lesbos! Back up that dump truck, Zack; we'll take those ironies right here!

Lee Marvin is alarmingly at home in The Dirty Dozen. He almost makes its cynical point of view look respectable, not by finding it profound but simply by enjoying himself in a way that amounts to an endorsement. Facing a crop of newbies all eager to go over big — John Cassavetes and Donald Sutherland, for two — he looks as amused by the idea that they can compete with his serene underplaying as an elephant surrounded by chimps. They're all playing murderers and head cases, but to him it's a given that he's more formidably frightening, because he doesn't need to be psychotic to act this way — just to trust his superior acquaintance with how the world works. He sells the movie by finding nothing in it surprising.

"The Big One" by Tom Carson, GQ, April 2005. With fab illo by Tavis Coburn.

It should surprise no-one if I admit that I was one of the original contributors to the meager box-office pot of 1983's galling sci-fi/fantasy mash-up stinker Krull (i).



Youngsters who have been raised in this golden era of Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings and Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica might find this difficult to believe, but 20 years ago the pickings for fans of either genre were so slim, we happily joined the queue. And when the movie was over, we marched over to the video arcade to play the game -- our desperation was just that great.

Having said that, I don't believe even I would have been so desperate as to willingly give myself away in a Krull Wedding promotional stunt. Unbelievable, but true (via boing-boing).

Toy Story 3 opens with a scene familiar to viewers of the previous films: Andy’s toys “being played” through a spectacular cliff-hanger. John Lasseter and Crew are acknowledging the obvious: “Yes, we’ve done this twice before. But let’s see if we aren’t still capable of a few surprises.” And, in fact, it did get me giggling.

Which did surprise me, frankly. Unlike most of the audience, I was not chaffing for a third chapter to this franchise. I thought Toy Story 2 was the best sequel to a brilliant first act since The Godfather II. The Toy Stories explored issues of fealty and yearning and development of character with a surprising degree of nuance, but these introspective moments never jarred in contrast to the larger madcap adventure. That they accomplished this feat twice was nearly miraculous. Why push it any further? Was there any question raised by these films that still needed to be answered?

Then again, most of the questions raised by the films had ambiguous answers tailored to the circumstances. There is a theological irony running through these films: the toys may feel their deepest yearnings fulfilled when they are being played with, but they discover their truest selves when they are separated from their godlike owners. Similarly, the madcap adventures they initiate to get back to Andy are always larger in scale and spectacle, and considerably more emotionally involving, than the zany shorts concocted by the child-god’s brain. In the first movie Woody has to learn to share his owner and be content with the possibility of Andy’s fickle loyalties. In the second, he has to relinquish the prospect of a sterile immortality for the joys of perilous engagement with Andy. What lessons remain?

Turns out Woody has to learn how to let go of the college-bound Andy, a scenario he seemed to be more at peace with at the conclusion of last movie than he is at the beginning of this one. Strangely, after several years of being left entirely to their own devices, Woody is the only toy who isn’t ready to move on. Seeing this, viewers now know the lay of the land: the toys will be separated from their joy, will initiate feats of comic daring-do to get back, during which old lessons of loyalty will be reinforced and the singular new lesson will be learned.

The architecture is dependable (it's a retelling of Toy Story 2, basically), and the emotional revelations have worthy weight, even if some come with the unwanted (for me, at least) freight of blunt sentimentality. But as one wag said after viewing The Godfather III, “We all knew one of these films would have to be third best.” In the case of Coppola’s movies, that was quite a distant third. Not so much for this one, but waiting to see it on the smaller screen at home, where expectations are scaled down accordingly, might have actually been the more rewarding experience.

There is a new toy that hovers at the outskirts of the final scenes: a plushy Totoro. Chances are this is just a little tip of the hat Lasseter is giving his hero, Hayao Miyazaki. But it could also be a sign of things to come. When viewers pay admission for a Miyazaki film, they leave narrative template expectations at the door, because Miyazaki will subvert and thwart them from the moment the lights go down. Day & Night, the preliminary animated short for TS3, was a mini sermon on fearlessly exploring the mysterious and unexpected: is Pixar bracing us for a template change? I truly hope so.

Elsewhere: discarded toys aren't all necessarily fated for the incinerator — meet Bamboo Charlie. Most reviewers are more smitten with this film than I am: Tasha Robinson is probably the clearest voice on their behalf. Plus: do you remember Lego before the Minifigs took over? Do you really? WP Flashback: bitch, bitch, bitch — what is it with me and Pixar, anyway? Is there any reason why I shouldn't just declare Monsters, Inc. to be this generation's Casablanca and leave the rest alone?

I dread trips to the video store. When one child is 13 and the other 11 — and both are daughters — the critical gulf between entertainment values is nearly unbridgeable. So far as the girls are concerned, my choices are knee-jerk, spectacular failures. A recent happy exception, however, has been season one of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (A).

Of course, it's not like the Lucasfilm drones have reinvented the wheel. During the first episode my wife and I exchanged a glance that read, “How many before we get to call it quits?” Each episode averages 25 minutes, so we committed ourselves to three.

Quelle surprise: we got hooked! The writers and directors have cooked up some punchy confections for such a seemingly modest platform. There are tropes aplenty, but any student of commedia dell'arte will tell you tropes are the distractions entertainers wield in order to pull off the necessary surprises. In this regard, and in the visuals (especially impressive on these newfangled flatscreen televisions), season one of The Clone Wars delivers with panache. If you enjoyed any of the films (and I only enjoyed the first two) you will almost certainly find something to enjoy in this series.



President Bush The First famously groused that he wished there were more families like the Waltons and fewer like the Simpsons. I hate to admit it, but as entertained as I've been by Matt Groening's kinetically dysfunctional cartoon family, I actually find myself agreeing with the former President's sentiment.

It was not always thus. In my memory, The Waltons resided as a hokey bastion of conservative (read: “insular”) family values. Imagine my surprise, then, when I unpacked season one (A) and discovered a very conscious and deliberate exploration of liberal values. Pa Walton is an Emersonian mystic, Ma a devout Baptist; the rest of the family runs the gamut. Each is acutely aware of their individual biases and takes pains to put these aside and give due consideration to points of view they might originally find disagreeable, and doing what they can to cultivate common ground with difficult people. The resulting stories are often quite affecting.

This is only the first season, mind you. Given how long the show ran, I'm guessing the knife-edge of acuity eventually dulled into a blunt hammer (“Hamner”?) of sentimentality. But at this point even my 13-year-old is engaged by the thought-provocations of season one. See you tomorrow night, John Boy.

*****

Last but not least, as with directors, there are rock singers I would love to love, but don't. Since Tom Petty has already been raised tangentially, I might as well come out and admit I've generally been cool toward his work. Hard to say why, really. He's aggressive, a trait I very much like in my rock 'n' roll; he's also self-pitying, which can appeal on occasion. Clearly he got the mix right for a great many fans — just not for me.

Enter Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers: Runnin' Down A Dream — a four-hour(!) documentary directed by Peter Bogdanovich, another talent I'd love to love. Given this less-than-promising set of circumstances, it's a wonder I bothered with it at all. But my curiosity got the better of me when I noticed that Q Radio host Jian Ghomeshi asks every single one of his musical guests if they've seen this movie. Obviously Petty and Bogdanovich left quite a thumb-print on Ghomeshi's consciousness. Ghomeshi is a sharp guy with no small insight of his own; I had to wonder what, exactly, was the deal with this doc?

Only when I watched the movie did it finally register with me just who Petty has influenced/worked with/been influenced by — namely, everybody who was anybody in the last 40 years of rock 'n' roll. Even if you're not a fan of Petty's music, the man and his entourage have amassed an enormous quiver full of very entertaining stories, many of which have amusing video footage to match. I've watched this doc twice, and while I could have done without the footage of his current show (a typical late-in-life “extravaganza” where the jumbotron does all the heavy lifting) it remains an engrossing and revealing film about a scene that used to be The Only Show On Earth. Highly recommended, with one small word of advice: break it up into 40 minute installments (A).

“We had to fight to keep this scene” — this is the oft-repeated phrase in the DVD commentaries of both A Scanner Darkly and Crumb, which I sat up to watch last night. At the halfway mark of these movies I had to wonder just what the studio visions would have looked like. I can't imagine the force of will a director has to exert to keep movies like these intact, but directors Linklater and Zwigoff seem to have it in spades, and I'm grateful for it.

A Scanner Darkly: I don't consider myself a Dick-head — I've only read a handful of his many, many books, and A Scanner Darkly isn't one of them — so I was surprised by how little of note was revealed in the conversation. Dick's daughter Isa was the most welcome voice: she's gently frank about her father's social difficulties, but her enthusiasm for his work seems genuine. Linklater wryly notes “how much better the script got when Keanu [Reeves] came on board,” and later observes that everyone in the room is laughing harder as the story on the screen becomes more tragic. (This last point confirms a suspicion I've had that filmmakers can get so caught up in the joyous generation of the illusion that they lose touch with the emotional depth charges their images set off.) I was also startled to hear that the movie's most devastating scene was added by the filmmakers, and wasn't in the novel at all.

Is the commentary recommended? For A Scanner Darkly I'd have to say not particularly. Although eavesdropping isn't a complete waste of time, another viewing of the film without the chatter would have turned up many of the insights the commentary offers. Crumb, on the other hand, is fairly revelatory. Left on his own, Terry Zwigoff's commentary would have consisted chiefly of noting the film's (in his view) many imperfections. Thankfully, Roger Ebert brings his curiosity to bear in a dialog with Zwigoff, and pulls out volumes of back-story that would otherwise have remained obscure. So, for Crumb, yes: commentary recommended.

Actually, the film's marketers seemed to think North American audiences might revolt if they paid for a movie called The Ghost, only to discover a complete absence of paranormal hi jinx, so we get to see a movie re-named The Ghost Writer. Catchy, no? The original title was brilliant, because it worked on at least three different levels; the altered title only works on one, and not very well at that.


Marketing blunder aside, Roman Polanski's recent film is a finely-tuned thriller, so long as you're able to get your thrills watching an almost-charming, almost-innocent doofus sink deeper into a pit of snakes. That would be Ewan McGregor, who finds exactly the right note to play as the unnamed title character, wearing a slightly foggy “What's this really about?” look of perplexity as he persists in questioning his way into further peril. The snakes would be Pierce Brosnan and Olivia Williams, playing the roles of a recently retired couple from the British PMO who need someone to apply a little shine to the former Prime Minister's dodgy legacy.

I was perched on the edge of my seat, even though Polanski is scrupulously faithful to the book by Robert Harris. My wife, who hasn't read the book, said the ending didn't come as any surprise at all, but that that didn't matter because the energy of the narrative consisted entirely in watching this man admit himself into the claustrophobic existential Hell of modern politics. The climax might not be surprising (or plausible, really) but the larger conclusion remains deeply unsettling: we pretty much get the politicians we deserve. This film is terrifically depressing fun.

I found A Scanner Darkly, the Richard Linklater/Philip K. Dick movie from 2006, in the 2-for-$5 DVD bin and took it home. Four years ago the film was covered by WIRED for its technological gim-crackery, but made nary a ripple among the critics. This weekend I gave it a spin, and loved it.



I thought it was trippy, paranoid, funny and deeply intuitively tragic -- the first film to be completely true to Dick, in other words. Not only was the movie worth my while, I also very much look forward to listening to the audio commentary* (A)

*with Linklater, Keanu Reeves, Jonathan Lethem and Dick's daughter Isa.

I recently said my Academy vote for Best Picture would have gone to Up In The Air, because it offered "the most adult pleasures" of the nominees I'd seen -- a summary begging to be taken wildly out of context. What I meant was, out of the films nominated Up In The Air far and away generated the most dinnertime conversation among the adults in my social circle. I've not yet seen An Education, which I suspect was Up In The Air's closest rival (by my reckoning). Precious certainly elicited shudders. And the Coen Brothers and Tarantino have the sort of personality that generates controversy, if not always the sort of movie that sticks to your ribs.

But Up? District 9? The Hurt Locker? Even if you luuuuuuuuurved those movies, what was there to say about them afterwards? These movies asked the questions on behalf of the audience, and then they marched on and answered them, too. As for Avatar, what is there to discuss about a pale imitation of Princess Mononoke -- minus the depth of character, the moral ambiguities, the persuasively recognizable "otherness" of the mythic setting?

Quite a bit, apparently. There's the Ayahuasca connection, for wide-eyed anthro-types. Then there's this, by James Bowman.

Time to re-set the dinner table.

Actually, I can't state with absolute certainty that Clint Eastwood is my mother's favorite director. But in our last few phone conversations she has made mention of how Eastwood manages to bring pleasant surprises to the movies she watches. Even after reading David Denby's analysis of Clint Eastwood, I still consider Eastwood a mostly above average filmmaker. But that capacity to surprise is well demonstrated (and documented), and makes Eastwood someone worth keeping an eye on.

And the award for Best Post-Oscars Commentary goes to ... David Edelstein, for his bitchy blog entry, "Breaking News! District 9 Wins Best Picture!" -- here. Want a quote? Let's see, let's see: there are so many wicked take-downs and back-handed compliments to choose from, but I think I'll go with ... this:

"As someone whose life wasn’t changed by the films of John Hughes (except that I suddenly had to listen to a lot more shitty rock songs in movies), I was struck by the emotional intensity that came through even in those brief snippets of his work."

Coincidentally, I missed the bulk of the Oscars because I was finally getting round to watching District 9 (the opportunity presented itself, so I seized it). Of the Best Picture options, I say D9 was the most intense, funny and depressing of the lot (although I haven't yet seen A Serious Man or An Education). Were I a member of the Academy, my vote probably would have gone to Up In The Air, because it offered the most adult pleasures of the bunch. But another Cameron win would have been difficult to choke down, so I do not begrudge Ms. Bigelow.

Tangentially related: I figure John Travolta begins and ends each day by getting down on his knees and thanking L. Ron Hubbard for Quentin Tarantino. Now I'm wondering if Quentin might not be doing the same, regarding Christoph Waltz.

I've been hankering for some time to see It Might Get Loud. Alas, a plethora of wacky alternative titles tumbled through my mind as the show wore on ....

My wife has gone international again (Haiti, of course). Solo nights + exacerbated insomnia = perfect opportunity to catch up on the movies we'd rather not waste our “together time” on. Today's cases in point:

Knowing, the infamous Alex Proyas/Nicolas Cage vehicle that Roger Ebert loved, despite the nearly universal chorus of contempt sung by the rest of his cohort. Braced for my own indifference, I was instead pleased to find myself beguiled by a story that was emotionally unsettling from beginning to end. Comparisons have been made, appropriately, to M. Night Shyamalan's Signs — both films attempt to explain the ways of God to men — but Knowing is the better film for its use of ambiguous biblical metaphors that raise deeper, more nettlesome questions than the superficial ones they settle. Having said that, neither film is one I'd care to add to my library: a single viewing with friends, family (or youth group) is enough to generate the desired dinner conversation.

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds — if your idea of a well-rounded meal is Skittles and Beef Jerky, this is probably your idea of a great movie. Well-seasoned moviegoers don't need me to articulate just what a po-mo white trash meta-referencing geek Tarantino is — and if that sounds like a bad thing, I don't necessarily mean it to. It's just that by now Quentin's entire ouevre, with only one exception, has the collective feel of a marathon session of, “Why don't you come over to my back yard, and we'll all play 'Let's Pretend'?” (sorry, correction: “Lett's Pritend”) The tropes are all there: the cheery perambulations around a subject of deadly consequence, the Mexican Stand-Offs, etc. Tarantino's true gift lies in who he entices out to play. Say what you will about Tarantino's little-boy games, he sure knows how to get the girls involved: Mélanie Laurent and Diane Kruger bring the emotional content for Chritoph Waltz to endanger. Waltz deserves Oscars and more, as does Robert Richardson for framing it all so beautifully, and Sally Menke for working miracles in the editing room. But none of these people can rescue Tarantino from the grim fact that he was a wunderkind, whose wunder is fading with his status as kind.

Final verdict: Michael Blowhard used to rate the success of a movie by its lack of “fast-forward moments.” Neither flick prompted me to FF, but I was content to leave Basterds running for a few minutes while I took a bathroom break.