Cineanalyst

I kind of want to read former FBI Director James Comey's autobiographical "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership," of all obnoxious titles, just to see if he really did, as depicted in this Showtime two-part series, or TV movie, based on the book, portray himself as an idealistic boy scout with all the faux integrity of a Capraesque-wannabe dropout from the Aaron Sorkin school of politics as it has never existed. I mean, talk about what a couple bad "The West Wing" episodes is "The Comey Rule." Its idea of clever banter hardly extending beyond a montage and motif of G-men responding, "say more," to information they receive. They even cast the guy from Sorkin's HBO series "The Newsroom" to play Comey--Jeff Daniels, an otherwise fine-enough actor when not serving as a mouthpiece for the drivel of Sorkinisms.

What a stupid framing narrative, too, of former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein reading from the book-within-the-book on Comey to the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed bumpkin assistant that's an insulting on-screen stand-in for us, the audience. It's so unbelievably and transparently another device to make Comey, as well as former occupant of Rosenstein's job, Sally Yates, look good by comparison to Rosenstein, who we're supposed to buy as telling a story where he comes across as a tool of a crybaby with poor interpersonal skills. I'm sure we're all now yearning for the warm embrace of a boss who takes the time to ask us what our favorite childhood candy bar was. Get out of town.

Then, there's the lingering look of a wife in the window as her husband arrives home, standing on the walkway to the door, unnecessary underscoring constant as always, reminding one of a Lifetime movie. That whole family dynamic does. Overall, it's merely a soap opera made out of recent political history. And, maybe that wasn't such a bad direction to take. The political junkies that'll be attracted to the project probably won't learn anything new. I didn't. Let alone fall for the hagiographic attempt at cleansing Comey's public image, an apparent political naif who managed to accomplish the rare feat of bringing people from across the partisan divide together in their loathing of his utter mishandling of investigating the campaigns of the two major presidential candidates of the 2016 election, both which monopolized months to years of entertainment news coverage and for both to mostly just fizzle out. Neither candidate was charged with anything, and there were two impeachments during the subsequent presidential term, but neither were for this.

It's not only random people who approach the Comey family or that they overhear in scenes in the series, either, who believe the most consequential thing Comey accomplished was getting Trump elected president. That's not to say there's not countless other factors that obviously go into the result of an election, but take his October surprise of a letter to Congress concerning the reopening of the investigation into Clinton's emails out of the equation, and we're probably talking about President Hillary Clinton. Possibly America's most famous political pollster, Nate Silver, for example, has analyzed and written as much on his fivethirtyeight website. Incredulously, too, the most sound rationale presented here for Comey's decision is that the FBI had already leaked this information to Rudy Giuliani, so why not officially confirm it a week away from a presidential election seeming to be the illogic.

It didn't even matter that he didn't give another grandstanding press conference on the supposed reservoir of trust in the FBI. Are we talking about the same organization derived from J. Edgar Hoover, that historically has routinely violated civil liberties, illegally spied on and attacked American citizens, including against Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, contributed to unrest in Latin America, failed to prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the attack on the U. S. Capitol? But, sure, enormous reservoir of trust there even before--never mind Russian election interference--this nominally non-partisan law enforcement agency of the U. S. government interfered in the election for the most important job in the world. Not only more important than the FBI's reputation, but doing so did that reputation absolutely no favors. The irony that Comey was fired by the man he got elected to be his boss hardly seems so tragic by comparison.

Maybe the best thing this show has going for it is the curiosity to see how newsmakers are embodied by the actors. Whatever appeal the show has certainly isn't for its TV-levels of poor lighting and production values, ugly color correction, and the aforementioned over-scoring, dull dialogue and derivative narrative devices. Indisputably, the star in this respect is Brendan Gleeson's grotesque President Trump, which under mounds of make-up is both terrifying and comical. It's something to behold, all right. Just as a performance, it's quite mesmerizing, but, again, it's not as though it offers a revealing portrait of a public figure that we're all very familiar with already. It does put to shame how little Daniels looks like Comey, though. Even on the height, Daniels is a fairly tall guy, but he's point-guard in the NBA levels of tall, whereas Comey is the height of a forward--look at the photos of him towering over others--and with a more slender frame than Daniels. That's what in reality made him trying to hide from President Trump before the photo-op handshake all the more funny; people being closer to seven-feet-tall than to six-feet-tall finding it challenging to hide while confined in a room.

Additionally, I liked Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X in "One Night in Miami" (2020/2021), but his President Obama looks childish. Sure, for a president, he was young at the age of 47 when elected and, still, at 55 when his second term expired, but that's still a good number of years past the early 30s of Ben-Adir, who here looks very much like a young man in his early 30s. A good rule of thumb should be to cast someone who is actually old enough to meet the age requirement of 35 to be president to play one on TV. Otherwise, it looks ridiculous--like something out of a Saturday Night Live skit, especially when Gleeson is out-doing Alec Baldwin in running caricature circles around you. I suppose that's what Gleeson and his make-up artists leaned into and realized more than everyone else here, that "The Comey Rule" is a grotesque exercise in caricature.

What an odd confection of Roman mythology and Christian fairy tale in this underworld battle, "Maciste in Hell." The film may also be illustrative of the development of a cinema with a target audience of largely boys, with an emphasis on juvenile fantasy and visual effects that extends all the way to the mainstream of "Star Wars" (1977) and, by extension, the comic-book movies that dominate today's market.

First, there are two ports of entry here that I'm familiar with, of which this film is a consequence. Directly, there's the 1914 epic "Cabiria," which introduced the Maciste character, a popular personality of Italian silent cinema. Reportedly, strongman Bartolomeo Pagano (actually, he was a stevedore before entering the movie business) starred in thirteen films as this character between 1915 and 1926, and the giant would continue past the silent era with his revival in the 1960s. "Cabiria" was also the pinnacle of the early feature-length spectacle pictures made in Italy in the early 1910s. The sets and sheer grandeur of it had a direct influence on D. W. Griffith's productions of "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) and "Intolerance" (1916).

The other influence on this is the féeries (fairy films) of Georges Méliès, the original cine-magician who practically invented children's movies, as well as popularizing the early cinema trick effects that still largely comprise the visual effects of "Maciste in Hell," namely multiple-exposure photography and stop-substitution splicing. Méliès also had a flair for theatrical set design, and the production design overall in "Maciste in Hell" is arguably more Méliès than it is "Cabiria," not least because it's simply not that big of an epic.

What the cavernous hellscape here especially reminds me of, though, is the original 1936 "Flash Gordon" serial (although it was a comic first). I could certainly see Flash riding around on a dragon, wrestling demons and trying to rescue damsels whilst often not displaying any outward sexual interest in them. As many I'm sure know, "Flash Gordon" was a major influence on "Star Wars," and this should be quite apparent to anyone who has seen both series. They're both basically chapter-play shoot-'em-up Westerns in outer space--to a large extent, what the Marvel Cinematic Universe is for today's generation.

This is otherwise what I found most dull about "Maciste in Hell." It's a simplistic battle of good and evil. Childishly so. Maciste's spell in Hell best illustrates this point. Being a living being from Earth, he can't spend more than three days in the underworld (because decrees, or something--Hades apparently having its own constitutional monarchy and government institutions). That is unless he commit the gravest sin: kissing a woman. A lot of emphasis in this picture on the dangers of female sexuality. I guess it's one way to get pre-adolescent male audiences invested in the suspense of romantic kissing. When Maciste inevitably surrenders to their feminine wiles, he's punished--now, get this--by hair growing in all sorts of odd places on his body. What a laughable puberty metaphor. He also becomes stronger, or super-strong. Essentially, he's a hairy X-Men mutant or that werewolf from the "Twilight" series, which are all silly adolescent allegories, too. I mean, c'mon, what did you think the teenage Spiderman ejaculating silk from his wrists was supposed to represent?

This isn't "Faust," as Maciste unnecessarily points out--and unflatteringly considering that F. W. Murnau's vastly superior devil-themed film, "Faust" (1926), was released around the same time. Neither is this, regardless of its Italian origins, Dante's "Inferno," which was made into one of Italy's first longer films in 1911. This is also despite the Pordenone Silent Film Festival screening what constitutes a warhorse print by comparison to the other new restorations they program ("Maciste in Hell" being restored back in 2009, as based on one from 1993, and the film already being fairly accessible, including existing in various shapes on YouTube) ostensibly in celebration of the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri. No, this is kiddie stuff.

That's not to say it's not well made and sometimes entertaining, lackadaisical though the plot may be. Although the trick effects aren't much of anything new, some of them are pretty good and sometimes used as scene transitions. A bit with a dismembered head when Mastice first enters Hades looks good. I especially like the film-within-film visions for the underworld to watch life on Earth, although such visions, too, are a multiple-exposure trick extending back to early cinema. Their use as surveillance is relatively novel, though. The editing, especially early on, is choppy, but that's kind of refreshing compared to the snail pace of little to no scene dissection in the early Italian epics such as "Cabiria." Plus, it's evident the print is pretty beat up, with scratches and cuts and other marks flashing on screen here and there. For obvious reasons, there's considerable red tinting and pyrotechnics.

As for the underworld battle, there's the Lucifer devil trying to usurp King Pluto, although why the devil brought Maciste down there to fight on the opposing side before starting this civil war seems an enormous blunder. So, it's the old gods versus the new, the two major religions to spring from Rome (albeit both by way of the Levant). Granted, I've read that the film went through some censorship issues over its religious depictions, which reportedly delayed its release in Italy, but I'm just going off the restoration that I saw. Interesting that Roman mythology reigns supreme in Hades here, including guest appearances by the likes of Charon (not just a concierge from the "John Wick" franchise) and Minos, while Christianity seems to have decidedly taken control above, as indicated by the Christmas-theme denouement. Maciste is also decidedly a Hercules figure. Yet, in the end, "Maciste in Hell" specifically frames itself as a fairy tale, alluding to its true origins in those Méliès féeries--the worship of visions on a wall, the church of cinema.

The third and final one-reeler of the "Vitagraph Japonisme" program from the online edition of the 40th Pordenone Silent Film Festival, which while watching dated cinematic Orientalism is of historical interest, is something of a relief. It's easy to see too much of this sort of thing in one day. The actresses playing the two leads, a privileged upper-class girl and a poor indentured apprentice, are required to pull double duty on this one. Both obviously Caucasians, they're supposed to be Japanese characters, and the child must act more mature than her age while the women is also playing a man. It's a task that they're both woefully inadequate for, as they rely on broad theatrical gestures throughout--lots of holding their arms outstretched to convey emotion in this one.

According to Ben Brewster, for the festival screening notes, the woman may be Florence Turner, the early movie star known as the "Vitagraph Girl." Interestingly, too, the girl, Adele de Garde, played the titular boy in another of these yellow-face productions, "Ito, the Beggar Boy" (1910).

Fortunately, as opposed to "The Love of Chrysanthemum" (1910), chrysanthemums are actually flowers this time. Unfortunately, the girl is named "Morning Glory," which is another flower. It'd be like watching a series of movies based on stereotypes of Westerners where everyone is named Daisy or Rose. Anyways, "Hako' Sacrifice" has the dubious distinction of not only being racist, but also classist, as it's yet another melodrama where the poor character is needlessly sacrificed for the benefit of a rich character--never mind that this sacrifice leaves the poor person is a far worse condition than the rich one would be in if no sacrifice were committed. I doubt it's just me who thinks sacrificing one's freedom to make a child believe they miraculously won a festival contest is an extremely stupid thing to do.