Choke is not a Chuck Palahniuk movie. It’s based on one of his books; but that’s the closest the film ever comes to touching, in an audiovisual format, the scabrous sort of satire that Palahniuk pioneered years ago. And worse, even with expert brow-wriggling and –mugging by Sam Rockwell, the complexity and unremitting pain of the original’s prose has all but been steamrolled—rib-tickled into a frenetic comedy of the absurd.
Take a step back, though: let’s pretend then that you hadn’t read the cult classic that inspired first-time writer-director Clark Gregg’s project. Now, re-watch the film; let’s argue, for the sake of argument, that the source material—of knowledge of the novel’s premier devastation—taints the movie adapted from it. And…Go.
Anything? Really? Nothing? Oh.
Turns outs that Choke isn’t lightweight because of the book; it just so happens that previous information can highlight how dark it could have been. After all, when you’re dealing with the self-help-self-destruct story of sex addict Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) who runs a restaurant con in which he “chokes” on food in order to be saved (the savior, accordingly feeling connected to Victor, continues to send him money thereafter) and help pay his demented mother’s (Anjelica Huston, looking for all that she tries like the wrong woman in the wrong part) medical bills, well, you’ve got some pretty dark stuff. Dark and riotous—at least in the hands of a skilled, fleet humorist: someone who isn’t afraid to push a joke into tragedy, to stun laughter back down into your throat. Chuck Palahniuk was such a man. And more, he could find—and went looking for—the mania at the root of Victor’s very very very twisted life. He didn’t always succeed, but he created an indelible satiric vision in the process. Gregg has no such luck.
Blame, perhaps, his lack of experience. The veteran actor has only made one movie: this one. And before its production, it’s reported that he worked on the script for six years. Six—you think somewhere in that time he may have grown a little nervous, taken a step back and restructured the uncomfortable into the tamely insane? That said, don’t mistake me; Choke is insane, a bit, and it’ll make you giggle with some of its more finely-crafted sequences (the best part of the whole movie, and its one, ironically, that was almost wholly intact from the source material, is the fake-rape), but it has no weight, no dimension, no darkness or heft. It’s the equivalent of cotton candy comedy: a tastefully sour delight wrapped around a barely-there chewy center. Call it Chuck Palahniuk Lite.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Subliminal Tapes: Product Review
We’ve all been there—you’ve got a problem, a bad habit, say, or a nagging character flaw that you just can’t fix. It could be anything: you’re just the tiniest bit overweight; you’ve still got that weird spider phobia; you feel like your soul-mate is out there, but that you just aren’t doing everything you can to find that person—like you’re being held back. There is a solution. Refreshingly, helpfully, someone has come forward with a product that doesn’t just help…it helps you help you. At www.subliminal-tapes-self-improvement, there are a wide variety of options available, and each of them produces results.
“It’s not magic. It’s not bunk. It’s simply mind over matter,” goes the bold claim on the first page that greets you when you click on over. The statement is bold, but refreshing in its truth. In every subliminal tape, there comes packaged with it the power to change your life. And, after use, change it you will. This stuff delivers.
Shopping is no hassle—the website is cleanly and helpfully organized and arrayed—and your tastes are all catered to. Want custom support? You’ve got it? Feel like this stuff is just for you…but don’t have anything but an iPod? That’s what subliminal mp3s are for. Most importantly: if you ever get hesitant—worried this can’t be true, that you’re too special, too you, to have the product work any magic—have no fear; along with their catalog and order information, the website also has links to their testimonials, words from people who made a conscious choice to get help in helping themselves. And they’re better for it.
One last thing: there’s a guarantee. That’s right. Even after all the customer-friendly stuff they’ve got at your fingertips, there’s still a guarantee. So it’s no risk to try it. Go ahead—what’s to lose? At the very least, the subliminal CDs do nothing more than lull you to sleep. But I’m willing to bet that doesn’t happen… In fact, I’d guarantee it.
“It’s not magic. It’s not bunk. It’s simply mind over matter,” goes the bold claim on the first page that greets you when you click on over. The statement is bold, but refreshing in its truth. In every subliminal tape, there comes packaged with it the power to change your life. And, after use, change it you will. This stuff delivers.
Shopping is no hassle—the website is cleanly and helpfully organized and arrayed—and your tastes are all catered to. Want custom support? You’ve got it? Feel like this stuff is just for you…but don’t have anything but an iPod? That’s what subliminal mp3s are for. Most importantly: if you ever get hesitant—worried this can’t be true, that you’re too special, too you, to have the product work any magic—have no fear; along with their catalog and order information, the website also has links to their testimonials, words from people who made a conscious choice to get help in helping themselves. And they’re better for it.
One last thing: there’s a guarantee. That’s right. Even after all the customer-friendly stuff they’ve got at your fingertips, there’s still a guarantee. So it’s no risk to try it. Go ahead—what’s to lose? At the very least, the subliminal CDs do nothing more than lull you to sleep. But I’m willing to bet that doesn’t happen… In fact, I’d guarantee it.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
The Nines: B+
The Nines has, in reality, little to do with math—save for the omnipresence of its titular number. It is, however, framed by an elegant geometric structure: the narrative being told by three successive short films, each unspooling and spilling into each other as if, instead, they were three concentric circles. This is a movie masquerading as a "tiny" drama with exponentially grand ambitions; a metaphysic puzzle that tickles your heart and brain the bigger, more complex, and more numerous the pieces get. Rarely does meta-filmmaking like this get more authentically, or more hypnotically, engrossing.
Drawing from TMZ, his own life, Lost, and his own life some more, writer-director John August creates a bold and confident cocktail of adrenaline and mystery—a 99-minute (get it: 99 minutes…ooh, creepy) drama about three different men played by one man, stuck between six different women, played by just two. The man is Ryan Reynolds (y'know: Van Wilder? No? Well, ok, but he's talented. Really) and he plays, one after the other, an actor under house arrest, a hot-shot young writer-producer, and a stranded videogame designer. The women are Melissa McCarthy and Hope Davis and who they play never really strays—though, once, McCarthy does place herself…and it's as nifty as it sounds—Davis is always a manipulator with an agenda perfectly hidden by an even-more-perfectly manicured persona, while McCarthy is always Reynolds muse or rescuer or voice of reason. Sitting on his shoulders, metaphorically, the latter is the angel, and the former is the devil with blonde bangs.
…Except that August is a far trickier auteur than he lets on. In each of the short films (starting with "The Prisoner," and then "Reality Television," and then finally "Knowing") the director toys and tricks his audience with fleet ingenuity—imbuing his otherwise middle-of-the-road dialogue with a tone of creeping horror and revelation. Objectively, though, not each of the three slices of his larger head-scratching pie is created equal. "The Prisoner" is alluring but scattered; full of wacked-out images that aren't nearly as entrancing as one originally perceives. "Reality Television," though, is a 30-minute little kick of behind-the-stages fun. In telling of how Gavin (that'd be Reynolds, with Tina Fey-glasses) struggles and manipulates in an attempt to get his show on the air—the big issue is his star: Melissa McCarthy, playing Melissa McCarthy—The Nines gets a much-needed jolt of droll incisiveness, while still ending with a kicker of an image that haunts you all the way down to the third act.
"Knowing" is ostensibly the pilot Gavin made in the second act (and it feels, cleverly, like prime-time television all the way down to its high-class color palette), about a man who loses his family. At this point in the overall scheme, though, the perspective is flipped. No one really is who they seem—least of all our hero. And that sort of instability suits the movie in general, especially when August finally gets his big reveal…and earns his every gasp of shock and surprise. Let me just say: it goes big. I mean big. Like, cosmically big. But, pleasurably, too, can I say it's not a stretch. And it works.
Nothing this intimate could be this good without a great cast; and in most sense, Reynolds and his women (with, on occasion, Elle Fanning as a mute little girl. Who. Knows. Too. Much) are. McCarthy flips through the channels of her brain—bubbly, vulnerable, sincere, funny—with charming dexterity. And Davis gives characteristic shades of gray to a femme fatale who, in the end, is always who she seemed. Reynolds, though, is the real treat. On the surface, he's a National Lampoon's frat boy matured into an A-list hunk, but he exploits his charm to find a gritty callow desperation beneath it. As the maestro floating above them all, John August coolly pulls and tugs on their puppet strings—making for a thrilling show. Ultimately, the pleasure in The Nines bubbles down to its small-scale jabs and quicksilver changes, the beauty of its craft, whether than the occasional opaqueness of its presentation. This is one puzzle that's devilishly accessible—an exercise in illusion that gives way, time after time, to more illusion until, finally, the real thing. And, truly, it is.
Drawing from TMZ, his own life, Lost, and his own life some more, writer-director John August creates a bold and confident cocktail of adrenaline and mystery—a 99-minute (get it: 99 minutes…ooh, creepy) drama about three different men played by one man, stuck between six different women, played by just two. The man is Ryan Reynolds (y'know: Van Wilder? No? Well, ok, but he's talented. Really) and he plays, one after the other, an actor under house arrest, a hot-shot young writer-producer, and a stranded videogame designer. The women are Melissa McCarthy and Hope Davis and who they play never really strays—though, once, McCarthy does place herself…and it's as nifty as it sounds—Davis is always a manipulator with an agenda perfectly hidden by an even-more-perfectly manicured persona, while McCarthy is always Reynolds muse or rescuer or voice of reason. Sitting on his shoulders, metaphorically, the latter is the angel, and the former is the devil with blonde bangs.
…Except that August is a far trickier auteur than he lets on. In each of the short films (starting with "The Prisoner," and then "Reality Television," and then finally "Knowing") the director toys and tricks his audience with fleet ingenuity—imbuing his otherwise middle-of-the-road dialogue with a tone of creeping horror and revelation. Objectively, though, not each of the three slices of his larger head-scratching pie is created equal. "The Prisoner" is alluring but scattered; full of wacked-out images that aren't nearly as entrancing as one originally perceives. "Reality Television," though, is a 30-minute little kick of behind-the-stages fun. In telling of how Gavin (that'd be Reynolds, with Tina Fey-glasses) struggles and manipulates in an attempt to get his show on the air—the big issue is his star: Melissa McCarthy, playing Melissa McCarthy—The Nines gets a much-needed jolt of droll incisiveness, while still ending with a kicker of an image that haunts you all the way down to the third act.
"Knowing" is ostensibly the pilot Gavin made in the second act (and it feels, cleverly, like prime-time television all the way down to its high-class color palette), about a man who loses his family. At this point in the overall scheme, though, the perspective is flipped. No one really is who they seem—least of all our hero. And that sort of instability suits the movie in general, especially when August finally gets his big reveal…and earns his every gasp of shock and surprise. Let me just say: it goes big. I mean big. Like, cosmically big. But, pleasurably, too, can I say it's not a stretch. And it works.
Nothing this intimate could be this good without a great cast; and in most sense, Reynolds and his women (with, on occasion, Elle Fanning as a mute little girl. Who. Knows. Too. Much) are. McCarthy flips through the channels of her brain—bubbly, vulnerable, sincere, funny—with charming dexterity. And Davis gives characteristic shades of gray to a femme fatale who, in the end, is always who she seemed. Reynolds, though, is the real treat. On the surface, he's a National Lampoon's frat boy matured into an A-list hunk, but he exploits his charm to find a gritty callow desperation beneath it. As the maestro floating above them all, John August coolly pulls and tugs on their puppet strings—making for a thrilling show. Ultimately, the pleasure in The Nines bubbles down to its small-scale jabs and quicksilver changes, the beauty of its craft, whether than the occasional opaqueness of its presentation. This is one puzzle that's devilishly accessible—an exercise in illusion that gives way, time after time, to more illusion until, finally, the real thing. And, truly, it is.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Burn After Reading: B-
Satire (n): “The use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.”
What the Coen brothers—Ethan and Joel—have done in their latest film, Burn After Reading, isn’t quite satire; but it looks so much like the real thing the illusion almost sticks. Almost. Together the filmmaking duo skewer a wide variety of comedic tropes (from silly Princeton graduates, to alcoholic ex-spies, to silly gym workers sporting even sillier pompadour haircuts) and arrange the jabs and zingers in such a way as to approximate the shape of a blistering satire, but not the feel of one. Look above—see that definition of “satire” there? In telling the story of how Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt, amiably rocking an even more amiable, buffoonish, and entertaining persona) discover the misplaced notes of a former CIA-agent (John Malkovich, entering ever scene as if from a far better film), the Coens cram a lot of “funny business” (irony, sarcasm) on screen, but they also surround the audience in such a thick layer of smug ridicule as to render irrelevant anything pointed therein useful to be said.
Points to the pair, though, for still being able to score the biggest talent in town; at this point, they’re turning into the neo-hip-Woody Allen: scoring high-class talent for projects not even deserving half that caliber. In Reading you’ve got the aforementioned McDormand, Pitt, and Malkovich, plus George Clooney and Tilda Swinton (who play a couple of married, harried, suburbanites engaged in a love affair devoid of pretty much any affection)—appropriately, the cast mug and shoot-off their lines with all necessary zest. In fact, you wouldn’t be mistaken in, after having finished your viewing experience, longing for the Coens to have constructed a higher quality project around their actors. Because it isn’t the cast (uniformly game, from the biggest role to the smallest, ironically played by even big names, like J.K. Simmons) or, really, the concept; it’s the presentation.
United, for the second time, Ethan and Joel now co-write and co-direct. Famously, last year, this new synergy brought them—rightfully—heaps of praise for No Country for Old Men. But whereas there, the brothers seemed to have found a soul mate in Cormac McCarthy (like, one imagines, a pair of sharks find a well-preserved antique saw to sharpen their teeth on), here they create from their purest of whimsies. Accordingly, throughout the entire 95-minutes, Burn After Reading is presented on the exterior as a straight-laced thriller, full of foreboding African drums and the like. But we know better—those sly Coen kids! We’re in on the joke; oh what fun! Except…not really. Seemingly over-satisfied with just the merest intimation of cleverness in making a caper that doubles back on itself as a farce of the highest-level of incompetence, the filmmakers leave the audience stumbling around in an over-sanitized comedy of manners—sans identifiable characters or intoxicatingly silly situations. They start going, but never quite go far enough; towing the ledge, but never even letting one toe slip over.
Still, I laughed. Ok, let me be more specific: I giggled a lot. (Belly laughs are just not in the cards, folks.) Because beneath all the shallowness, once you can dig past the one-and-a-half dimensions of craft that are presented as three full ones, Burn After Reading can be a not-half-bad romp: full of intricate exchanges, structured engagingly, and—let’s just face it—filmed with the firmest of tongues-in-cheek. Maybe, then, the expectations are let down two-fold. Having seen what they can do with the bleakest of terrific cinematic dramas, as well as with the most finely-imagined of ingeniously witty murder-mysteries (Fargo, of course…speaking of, for anyone who wants to see Frances McDormand be really, really great in a Coen film, rent this), why then do we as an audience get this? Burn After Reading is a barrel of laughs that’s only half-full—a joke dipped in irony, wrapped-up in pretention, and then surrounded by air quotes.
What the Coen brothers—Ethan and Joel—have done in their latest film, Burn After Reading, isn’t quite satire; but it looks so much like the real thing the illusion almost sticks. Almost. Together the filmmaking duo skewer a wide variety of comedic tropes (from silly Princeton graduates, to alcoholic ex-spies, to silly gym workers sporting even sillier pompadour haircuts) and arrange the jabs and zingers in such a way as to approximate the shape of a blistering satire, but not the feel of one. Look above—see that definition of “satire” there? In telling the story of how Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt, amiably rocking an even more amiable, buffoonish, and entertaining persona) discover the misplaced notes of a former CIA-agent (John Malkovich, entering ever scene as if from a far better film), the Coens cram a lot of “funny business” (irony, sarcasm) on screen, but they also surround the audience in such a thick layer of smug ridicule as to render irrelevant anything pointed therein useful to be said.
Points to the pair, though, for still being able to score the biggest talent in town; at this point, they’re turning into the neo-hip-Woody Allen: scoring high-class talent for projects not even deserving half that caliber. In Reading you’ve got the aforementioned McDormand, Pitt, and Malkovich, plus George Clooney and Tilda Swinton (who play a couple of married, harried, suburbanites engaged in a love affair devoid of pretty much any affection)—appropriately, the cast mug and shoot-off their lines with all necessary zest. In fact, you wouldn’t be mistaken in, after having finished your viewing experience, longing for the Coens to have constructed a higher quality project around their actors. Because it isn’t the cast (uniformly game, from the biggest role to the smallest, ironically played by even big names, like J.K. Simmons) or, really, the concept; it’s the presentation.
United, for the second time, Ethan and Joel now co-write and co-direct. Famously, last year, this new synergy brought them—rightfully—heaps of praise for No Country for Old Men. But whereas there, the brothers seemed to have found a soul mate in Cormac McCarthy (like, one imagines, a pair of sharks find a well-preserved antique saw to sharpen their teeth on), here they create from their purest of whimsies. Accordingly, throughout the entire 95-minutes, Burn After Reading is presented on the exterior as a straight-laced thriller, full of foreboding African drums and the like. But we know better—those sly Coen kids! We’re in on the joke; oh what fun! Except…not really. Seemingly over-satisfied with just the merest intimation of cleverness in making a caper that doubles back on itself as a farce of the highest-level of incompetence, the filmmakers leave the audience stumbling around in an over-sanitized comedy of manners—sans identifiable characters or intoxicatingly silly situations. They start going, but never quite go far enough; towing the ledge, but never even letting one toe slip over.
Still, I laughed. Ok, let me be more specific: I giggled a lot. (Belly laughs are just not in the cards, folks.) Because beneath all the shallowness, once you can dig past the one-and-a-half dimensions of craft that are presented as three full ones, Burn After Reading can be a not-half-bad romp: full of intricate exchanges, structured engagingly, and—let’s just face it—filmed with the firmest of tongues-in-cheek. Maybe, then, the expectations are let down two-fold. Having seen what they can do with the bleakest of terrific cinematic dramas, as well as with the most finely-imagined of ingeniously witty murder-mysteries (Fargo, of course…speaking of, for anyone who wants to see Frances McDormand be really, really great in a Coen film, rent this), why then do we as an audience get this? Burn After Reading is a barrel of laughs that’s only half-full—a joke dipped in irony, wrapped-up in pretention, and then surrounded by air quotes.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Southland Tales: C
For some unknowable reason, two years ago, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales captured the cultural zeitgeist—or, rather, some form of it. It was the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, and Kelly’s film was premiering there, for the first time. Ever. Plus, it was a hot ticket: the follow-up to his first film Donnie Darko—a movie that captured both critics and a cult following. Turns out that this second movie, though, got no such happy welcoming; it was, frankly, critically decimated and accordingly blew up a whole storm of negative media (which in its way has a sick fascination, now that the film is available to the masses on DVD). Each and every one of us can now go home and answer for ourselves the question: was it really all that bad?
The answer, I can most objectively report, is yes. Yes, yes, yes. Kelly—who wrote, directed, and produced this sprawling 144-minute tale—sinks so far into his delusions that he not only loses the audience, it would seem as if he loses himself, too. In this cross-cutting story of various inhabitants of Venice Beach, there isn’t even one frame that has a coherent value in a larger scheme of things. Characters walk, run, and shoot at each other. And, on paper, the world they inhabit would seem to give their actions an extra dimension of propulsive satirical weight. (In Tales, for our “amusement”…or to “inform” us…or something, Kelly creates a post-apocalyptic world in which terrorism has run so rampant as to mutate the American government into some Orwellian cast-off in order to combat it). But nothing ever quite works. No, let me clarify: nothing ever quite makes sense.
At the center of the whole thing is Boxer Santoros (Dwayne Johnson), an amnesiac movie star with ties to a Republican politician currently running for President. Spinning around him are Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar looking a bit like she’s wandered onto the wrong set), a porn star struggling to diversify her business model, Roland Taverner (Sean William Scott), a police officer who may or may not have a twin brother who may or may not control the fate of the entire world, and Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake, narrating in a Southern accent so undeniably hollow it about drives your ears to jump right off your head). Each of them, at one point or another, ends up propelling the interests of the two opposing organizations at the heart of the film’s plot: USIDent—a massive informational complex manned by the government to spy on any and every one—and the Neo-Marxist movement, which even in the “near-future” is still pretty much like it always was. But it’s not like it matters, anyway. Though things keep being plotted and intended and re-organized and revealed, the story never clears up.
In fact, Kelly shuffles through so many styles in his filmmaking, so quickly, you may experience a bit of nausea. Alternately, he’s making a science fiction epic, a parody of said epic, a black comedy, a Crash-style drama set in Lower California, and a musical. (About that last one: at one point in Tales, Justin Timberlake goes on a drug trip, and in such a stupor, Kelly stages a sequence crafted around The Killer’s “All The Things I’ve Done,” starting with their ecstatic bridge (you know the one: I’ve got soul/But I’m not a soldier…) and it’s the most powerful moment of the entire movie.)
It would seem as though the director has some schizophrenia, and it would seem as though it seeps into the movie itself. Most nagging of all, though, is that he has a real knack for pulling you through, hook-line-and-sinker, minute-by-minute. Never once, really, was I bored. Just irritated—even, when, in the last hour, the movie seems to cop from some sub-par Mulholland Drive and become about characters writing a movie that’s real but set in the past (since, shocker!, they’re all from the future). You want to know the real truth at the heart of Southland Tales? It isn’t that our world could devolve into a big, demoralizing blob. No, it’s that, in this day and age, someone can still perform a truly aggravating magic trick: Richard Kelly will, in a no time, make your whole day disappear—his movie along with it.
The answer, I can most objectively report, is yes. Yes, yes, yes. Kelly—who wrote, directed, and produced this sprawling 144-minute tale—sinks so far into his delusions that he not only loses the audience, it would seem as if he loses himself, too. In this cross-cutting story of various inhabitants of Venice Beach, there isn’t even one frame that has a coherent value in a larger scheme of things. Characters walk, run, and shoot at each other. And, on paper, the world they inhabit would seem to give their actions an extra dimension of propulsive satirical weight. (In Tales, for our “amusement”…or to “inform” us…or something, Kelly creates a post-apocalyptic world in which terrorism has run so rampant as to mutate the American government into some Orwellian cast-off in order to combat it). But nothing ever quite works. No, let me clarify: nothing ever quite makes sense.
At the center of the whole thing is Boxer Santoros (Dwayne Johnson), an amnesiac movie star with ties to a Republican politician currently running for President. Spinning around him are Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar looking a bit like she’s wandered onto the wrong set), a porn star struggling to diversify her business model, Roland Taverner (Sean William Scott), a police officer who may or may not have a twin brother who may or may not control the fate of the entire world, and Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake, narrating in a Southern accent so undeniably hollow it about drives your ears to jump right off your head). Each of them, at one point or another, ends up propelling the interests of the two opposing organizations at the heart of the film’s plot: USIDent—a massive informational complex manned by the government to spy on any and every one—and the Neo-Marxist movement, which even in the “near-future” is still pretty much like it always was. But it’s not like it matters, anyway. Though things keep being plotted and intended and re-organized and revealed, the story never clears up.
In fact, Kelly shuffles through so many styles in his filmmaking, so quickly, you may experience a bit of nausea. Alternately, he’s making a science fiction epic, a parody of said epic, a black comedy, a Crash-style drama set in Lower California, and a musical. (About that last one: at one point in Tales, Justin Timberlake goes on a drug trip, and in such a stupor, Kelly stages a sequence crafted around The Killer’s “All The Things I’ve Done,” starting with their ecstatic bridge (you know the one: I’ve got soul/But I’m not a soldier…) and it’s the most powerful moment of the entire movie.)
It would seem as though the director has some schizophrenia, and it would seem as though it seeps into the movie itself. Most nagging of all, though, is that he has a real knack for pulling you through, hook-line-and-sinker, minute-by-minute. Never once, really, was I bored. Just irritated—even, when, in the last hour, the movie seems to cop from some sub-par Mulholland Drive and become about characters writing a movie that’s real but set in the past (since, shocker!, they’re all from the future). You want to know the real truth at the heart of Southland Tales? It isn’t that our world could devolve into a big, demoralizing blob. No, it’s that, in this day and age, someone can still perform a truly aggravating magic trick: Richard Kelly will, in a no time, make your whole day disappear—his movie along with it.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
House of Sand and Fog: B
There's a trap lying in wait once you start to watch House of Sand and Fog—and it has nothing to do with the way your sympathies keep being sliced up between the main characters. No, the real problem is that Vadim Perelman's adaptation of the Andre Dubus III novel hovers vaguely in that maddening cinematic gray area: it's a prestige picture that's firmly middlebrow. Everything works for most of the film, but the real surprise is how unpretentious the whole enterprise can be. Never has an "artful" film that feels so artless felt so engaging.
We open on a screen filled with the swirling fog of San Francisco—cut to an ambulance, a house in the background, and a woman who looks like an angel who threw herself from heaven (that'd be Jennifer Connelly, who's like the poor-man's Kate Winslet)—then cut back to who used to live in the house, and then who lived in it after them, and so on. Perelman takes a rote-thriller conceit (at least on paper)—save the homestead from the immigrants!—and structures it like a tragedy in domestic miniature.
Turns out that woman, named Kathy Nicolo, lived alone on a bungalow by the sea, her husband having left some months before, hiding from the family she no longer possesses the emotional strength to face. The house is less her place of rest than her cave in which she's perpetually hibernating. But the county evicts her on some obscure technicality that later proves to be false; but not before an Iranian family, headed by the ex-Col. Behrani (Ben Kingsley, his eyes wide as mirrors, fogged by years of toil), has scooped up the auctioned-off property. What a nightmare for Kathy, even more so because it seems Behrani is intent on selling off the house for quadruple what he paid for it.
Wait! This isn't right! Where's Steven Segal when you need him, to come crashing through the
living room window and drive away those damn terrorists?
Wait! This isn't right either! Much as the two titular substances shift and squirm, entrapping and entrancing in alternate measure, so does Perelman's film (which he directed, produced, and co-wrote). Turns out Behrani's been driven away by the new regime after the Shah was ousted, and he sees in the house both a gateway to more prosperity—there's a great moment early on when you realize ever since he moved to America, he's been slowly and irrevocably going broke—and a chance to reflect back on happier days when he himself owned a bungalow—this time on the Caspian Sea.
This is how House spirals out for more than two hours: two souls flitting around for a spot to rest, fighting over their mutual property. To complicate the formula is a lover of Kathy's—a damaged cop, ironically named Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard)—and the Colonel's wife, Nadereh (Shoreh Aghdashloo), both of whom add layers of tension and heartache. In its best moments, the family and the woman whose house they're living in play off of each other in a cleverly painful pattern of distrust and dislocation, but the overarching themes are a tad too obvious. Perelman fills the screen with beautiful images of light and movement, and his cast—especially Connelly—performs minor feats of miraculous achievement but in its final act, things start hitting the fan with a wet thwack. Looking up from the screen as the end credits roll, it hits you: what was grippingly small and prestige-less grew painfully large and "tragic," completely upsetting the delicate emotional balance that kept the audience so unbalanced to start with. In the end, this House crumbles.
We open on a screen filled with the swirling fog of San Francisco—cut to an ambulance, a house in the background, and a woman who looks like an angel who threw herself from heaven (that'd be Jennifer Connelly, who's like the poor-man's Kate Winslet)—then cut back to who used to live in the house, and then who lived in it after them, and so on. Perelman takes a rote-thriller conceit (at least on paper)—save the homestead from the immigrants!—and structures it like a tragedy in domestic miniature.
Turns out that woman, named Kathy Nicolo, lived alone on a bungalow by the sea, her husband having left some months before, hiding from the family she no longer possesses the emotional strength to face. The house is less her place of rest than her cave in which she's perpetually hibernating. But the county evicts her on some obscure technicality that later proves to be false; but not before an Iranian family, headed by the ex-Col. Behrani (Ben Kingsley, his eyes wide as mirrors, fogged by years of toil), has scooped up the auctioned-off property. What a nightmare for Kathy, even more so because it seems Behrani is intent on selling off the house for quadruple what he paid for it.
Wait! This isn't right! Where's Steven Segal when you need him, to come crashing through the
living room window and drive away those damn terrorists?
Wait! This isn't right either! Much as the two titular substances shift and squirm, entrapping and entrancing in alternate measure, so does Perelman's film (which he directed, produced, and co-wrote). Turns out Behrani's been driven away by the new regime after the Shah was ousted, and he sees in the house both a gateway to more prosperity—there's a great moment early on when you realize ever since he moved to America, he's been slowly and irrevocably going broke—and a chance to reflect back on happier days when he himself owned a bungalow—this time on the Caspian Sea.
This is how House spirals out for more than two hours: two souls flitting around for a spot to rest, fighting over their mutual property. To complicate the formula is a lover of Kathy's—a damaged cop, ironically named Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard)—and the Colonel's wife, Nadereh (Shoreh Aghdashloo), both of whom add layers of tension and heartache. In its best moments, the family and the woman whose house they're living in play off of each other in a cleverly painful pattern of distrust and dislocation, but the overarching themes are a tad too obvious. Perelman fills the screen with beautiful images of light and movement, and his cast—especially Connelly—performs minor feats of miraculous achievement but in its final act, things start hitting the fan with a wet thwack. Looking up from the screen as the end credits roll, it hits you: what was grippingly small and prestige-less grew painfully large and "tragic," completely upsetting the delicate emotional balance that kept the audience so unbalanced to start with. In the end, this House crumbles.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Angels in America: A-
In a work so over-stuffed with ideas as Tony Kushner's Angels in America—an HBO movie adapted from Kushner's own Pulitzer-prize winning drama that liberally runs up to six hours—what more can there be to say of it except that it stuns: continually, unerringly, stubbornly, until your heart and brain swell and ache with the sheer volume of energy presented on screen. The time is 1985, New York City, and everywhere, in Kushner's world, people fret and dart about, sliced up by their interconnected bonds of disease, love, and politics. AIDS has just begun to ravage the city, and the millennium approaches; as many a character doth proclaim, history itself is opening up—"Anything can happen. Any awful thing."
At the center (and about him do the other elements and characters spin like spokes about a wheel) is Prior Walter (Justin Kirk, giving a luminous, ebulliently witty performance bristling with fervor and grace), who has just been diagnosed with the dreaded syndrome…and whose lover of four years, Louis (Ben Shenkman), has just walked out on him because of it—the latter man not being able to handle disease or its deteriorating effects. Alone, save for his friend Belize (Jeffrey Wright, in one of multiple roles, re-defining the stereotype of the ravishing 80s glitter queen by being even more ravishing and delightful), Prior begins to see visions of an angel (Emma Thompson, fluttering and declaiming with hair-raising power) who tells him that he is a prophet. His prophecy? A little irrelevant—save for that Kushner uses the device to probe even the neurosis of the guiding hands in Heaven.
The cast is large, huge even, but portrayed by a handful of principles in multiple roles. Those most important not yet mentioned: Meryl Streep, as the mother of a closeted Mormon (Patrick Wilson) who becomes un- after he falls in with a troubled Louis; Meryl Streep as Ethel Rosenberg, done all up in Kabuki makeup to see Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) off after the homophobe himself dies of AIDS; Pacino, aforementioned, who gives a turn of such startling clarity, eloquence, and stark heartlessness the audience can practically see his career jumpstart before their eyes; Wilson, also aforementioned, who's like Brendan Frasier—from Gods and Monsters—on sensitive-steroids; and Mary-Louise Parker, as Wilson's long suffering wife, Harper.
James Cromwell pops up here and there as Cohn's doctor, and occasionally a wax statue springs to life with a new face, but mostly the same eight individuals keep walking and talking for almost 360 minutes. Their anguish is palpable, and director Mike Nichols—no rookie himself, and a veteran to stage, screen, and stage-to-screen adaptations—frames shots and scenes around their marooning discontent, but the real star is Kushner, who writes speech in no way I've heard before; it's patterned in a way after the rambling Jewish neurosis of Woody Allen, or Allen Ginsburg, but it's also spiked-through with revelation and philosophy.
Kushner would go on to write Steven Spielberg's marvelous 2005 thriller/meditation-on-revenge epic Munich, but in Angels does he most prominently and purely display his gift. Monologues sprout like trees from within each character—organically, and stunningly beautiful; and the fantastical elements that come to eventually power the central narrative are both cooky and believable (aided by Nichols, who aims and succeeds for a tone of cynical hope). Sliced into two three-hour halfs—"Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika"—that have their share of problems, Angels in America is a delectable, miserable, contradictory, exemplary dissection of life on a island, wherein each individual deludes themselves into thinking they are alone, and lonely.
"Perestroika" lags, and grows a bit thematically murky after the clarity and force of "Millennium," but it concludes with a climax of awesome, shattering implication. Confronted by a table of fretting principle angels who implore their prophet to allow himself and his race to "stop moving" in order to allow the world to heal itself Prior doesn't even miss a beat to shake his head in refusal. "Bless me…I want more life." So too, will each viewer after finishing Kushner's masterpiece: more life in this dank, tragic, ecstatic little piece of rock we call Earth.
"There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics," Louis spouts near the end of the first half—and so it may be. But there's also us, humans, vibrant and joyously, messily, alive. Kusher and Nichols, with their cast, make the act of living in this modern century a promise fulfilled.
At the center (and about him do the other elements and characters spin like spokes about a wheel) is Prior Walter (Justin Kirk, giving a luminous, ebulliently witty performance bristling with fervor and grace), who has just been diagnosed with the dreaded syndrome…and whose lover of four years, Louis (Ben Shenkman), has just walked out on him because of it—the latter man not being able to handle disease or its deteriorating effects. Alone, save for his friend Belize (Jeffrey Wright, in one of multiple roles, re-defining the stereotype of the ravishing 80s glitter queen by being even more ravishing and delightful), Prior begins to see visions of an angel (Emma Thompson, fluttering and declaiming with hair-raising power) who tells him that he is a prophet. His prophecy? A little irrelevant—save for that Kushner uses the device to probe even the neurosis of the guiding hands in Heaven.
The cast is large, huge even, but portrayed by a handful of principles in multiple roles. Those most important not yet mentioned: Meryl Streep, as the mother of a closeted Mormon (Patrick Wilson) who becomes un- after he falls in with a troubled Louis; Meryl Streep as Ethel Rosenberg, done all up in Kabuki makeup to see Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) off after the homophobe himself dies of AIDS; Pacino, aforementioned, who gives a turn of such startling clarity, eloquence, and stark heartlessness the audience can practically see his career jumpstart before their eyes; Wilson, also aforementioned, who's like Brendan Frasier—from Gods and Monsters—on sensitive-steroids; and Mary-Louise Parker, as Wilson's long suffering wife, Harper.
James Cromwell pops up here and there as Cohn's doctor, and occasionally a wax statue springs to life with a new face, but mostly the same eight individuals keep walking and talking for almost 360 minutes. Their anguish is palpable, and director Mike Nichols—no rookie himself, and a veteran to stage, screen, and stage-to-screen adaptations—frames shots and scenes around their marooning discontent, but the real star is Kushner, who writes speech in no way I've heard before; it's patterned in a way after the rambling Jewish neurosis of Woody Allen, or Allen Ginsburg, but it's also spiked-through with revelation and philosophy.
Kushner would go on to write Steven Spielberg's marvelous 2005 thriller/meditation-on-revenge epic Munich, but in Angels does he most prominently and purely display his gift. Monologues sprout like trees from within each character—organically, and stunningly beautiful; and the fantastical elements that come to eventually power the central narrative are both cooky and believable (aided by Nichols, who aims and succeeds for a tone of cynical hope). Sliced into two three-hour halfs—"Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika"—that have their share of problems, Angels in America is a delectable, miserable, contradictory, exemplary dissection of life on a island, wherein each individual deludes themselves into thinking they are alone, and lonely.
"Perestroika" lags, and grows a bit thematically murky after the clarity and force of "Millennium," but it concludes with a climax of awesome, shattering implication. Confronted by a table of fretting principle angels who implore their prophet to allow himself and his race to "stop moving" in order to allow the world to heal itself Prior doesn't even miss a beat to shake his head in refusal. "Bless me…I want more life." So too, will each viewer after finishing Kushner's masterpiece: more life in this dank, tragic, ecstatic little piece of rock we call Earth.
"There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics," Louis spouts near the end of the first half—and so it may be. But there's also us, humans, vibrant and joyously, messily, alive. Kusher and Nichols, with their cast, make the act of living in this modern century a promise fulfilled.
Bad Education: B+
In the cinematic universe of Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar, it is pretty safe to say that a tranvestite with a secret is about as innocuous as bubble-wrapped glass -- and that the suspenseful, erotic/romantic/familial tensions created by such a "dreadful secret" are about as weighty as...well...the air said tranny would breath. Almodóvar doesn't create films, building them scene-by-scene; he envisions them -- full of irony and sass, insolence and sexuality, brash swagger and a delicious visual palette -- and they spring like Athena from the head of Zeus: fully-formed and marvelous. Or so is said. They are tricky things, his movies, and I'd be the first to admit I wasn't completely won over by the auteur by what'd I seen of his work. Yet in Bad Education, his noir-set-on-low-simmer crossed with a meta-critique of the Catholic Church, there's finally a discernible depth and passion to his work. Nothing is static...and nothing, I feel quite validated in saying and still remain spoiler-free, is what it seems.
We enter on a prominent Madrid filmmaker, Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) as he's scouring the tabloid headlines for inspiration for his next project. Soon, a man comes into his office by the name of Ignacio (Gael García Bernal), an old school friend of Enrique's back when they went to school with the priests. Ignacio has brought a book he's written -- "The Visit" -- that explores the implications of his bond with those men of God, both when he was a boy and searching further, into a fictitious present. Enrique is curious about the project (we're told Ignacio was the man's first adolescent crush) but he politely dismisses Ignacio anyway, with a promise to read the manuscript. In the ensuing twenty-or-so minutes, "The Visit" comes to life on screen before us, Ignacio's life after he was molested writ large as he morphs into a junkie drag-queen named Zahara, as a film-within-a-head-within-a-film...and we're finally told Ignacio's side of the story. Or are we?
Crafted within the perfect tone of jaded impossibility, Education's unspooling events are never as certain as they seem. Soon after finishing Ignacio's tale, Enrique meets him and agrees there is a film within the tale to be made. But the director doesn't want his old friend to have the prize role: Zahara? Why? It turns out, possibly, Ignacio could not be Ignacio at all...and in that game of shifting identity, the tale of Ignacio's fate similarly shifts. We see his victimization, but also his flame-out, and the utter -- sympathetic, nearly -- fallibility of the man who attacked him. Told in over-lapping tales after Enrique has begun the movie, that is when the audience gets the whole story.
Almodóvar is up to his usual tricks with Bad Education; he hasn't gone so far as to abandon his core tropes. Drag queens (and their smoky, slurring, affectionate-insulting vernacular) are prominent, as is the graphic sexualization of a fine male specimen (in this case, and rightfully so, Bernal is alternately a snarling queen, a hustler in a blonde wig, and a teenager himself -- swimming nervously in his underwear under the wolfish gaze of Enrique). But the director doesn't entrance his audience with his faux-humor; he doesn't seal us off from the events on screen. And in unbottling the truth of his tale, he has presented to his audience the truth (or some version of it, surely) of the crimes of the Catholic Church.
Two years after Bad Education would come Volver...a complete 180-degrees, because where the former had an all-male cast complete with all-star pathos, Volver was outfitted with similarly nuerotic females, an interwoven clan of superstition. The latter film succeeded not because it shifted backwards for its director, tonally, (though it still did) but because of the fierce huzzah of its star: Penelope Cruz. She lit a fire behind the screen, lending -- if not tension -- then a center to Almodóvar's swirling storm of dead mothers, husbands, and ballad-belting latinas. Similarly, there is a center to Education, but it comes not from the cast (qualified as they are; kudos again to Bernal -- who was equally as exquisite as the sexually-uncertain teenager of Alfonso Cuaron's georgeous travelogue Y Tu Mama Tambien) but rather from the writer-director himself. There's finally more than just mandatory cinematic imaginación. There's pasión to go with it. With just a pinch of that key ingredient, his thriller really thrills; the tragedy in his evocation of the snarling bonds of love and blood actually touches, saddens. And the filmmaker himself, for once, authentically astounds.
We enter on a prominent Madrid filmmaker, Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) as he's scouring the tabloid headlines for inspiration for his next project. Soon, a man comes into his office by the name of Ignacio (Gael García Bernal), an old school friend of Enrique's back when they went to school with the priests. Ignacio has brought a book he's written -- "The Visit" -- that explores the implications of his bond with those men of God, both when he was a boy and searching further, into a fictitious present. Enrique is curious about the project (we're told Ignacio was the man's first adolescent crush) but he politely dismisses Ignacio anyway, with a promise to read the manuscript. In the ensuing twenty-or-so minutes, "The Visit" comes to life on screen before us, Ignacio's life after he was molested writ large as he morphs into a junkie drag-queen named Zahara, as a film-within-a-head-within-a-film...and we're finally told Ignacio's side of the story. Or are we?
Crafted within the perfect tone of jaded impossibility, Education's unspooling events are never as certain as they seem. Soon after finishing Ignacio's tale, Enrique meets him and agrees there is a film within the tale to be made. But the director doesn't want his old friend to have the prize role: Zahara? Why? It turns out, possibly, Ignacio could not be Ignacio at all...and in that game of shifting identity, the tale of Ignacio's fate similarly shifts. We see his victimization, but also his flame-out, and the utter -- sympathetic, nearly -- fallibility of the man who attacked him. Told in over-lapping tales after Enrique has begun the movie, that is when the audience gets the whole story.
Almodóvar is up to his usual tricks with Bad Education; he hasn't gone so far as to abandon his core tropes. Drag queens (and their smoky, slurring, affectionate-insulting vernacular) are prominent, as is the graphic sexualization of a fine male specimen (in this case, and rightfully so, Bernal is alternately a snarling queen, a hustler in a blonde wig, and a teenager himself -- swimming nervously in his underwear under the wolfish gaze of Enrique). But the director doesn't entrance his audience with his faux-humor; he doesn't seal us off from the events on screen. And in unbottling the truth of his tale, he has presented to his audience the truth (or some version of it, surely) of the crimes of the Catholic Church.
Two years after Bad Education would come Volver...a complete 180-degrees, because where the former had an all-male cast complete with all-star pathos, Volver was outfitted with similarly nuerotic females, an interwoven clan of superstition. The latter film succeeded not because it shifted backwards for its director, tonally, (though it still did) but because of the fierce huzzah of its star: Penelope Cruz. She lit a fire behind the screen, lending -- if not tension -- then a center to Almodóvar's swirling storm of dead mothers, husbands, and ballad-belting latinas. Similarly, there is a center to Education, but it comes not from the cast (qualified as they are; kudos again to Bernal -- who was equally as exquisite as the sexually-uncertain teenager of Alfonso Cuaron's georgeous travelogue Y Tu Mama Tambien) but rather from the writer-director himself. There's finally more than just mandatory cinematic imaginación. There's pasión to go with it. With just a pinch of that key ingredient, his thriller really thrills; the tragedy in his evocation of the snarling bonds of love and blood actually touches, saddens. And the filmmaker himself, for once, authentically astounds.
Rome: The Complete Second Season: A-
Ancient world history, re-done with a Sopranos twist...and a dash of Entourage, with just a splash of Dynasty and Dallas. Plus a massive-scale set, for flair. That's Rome -- the HBO drama that views a pivotal period of Ancient Roman civilization from an angle that can only be termed meta-modern: fleshed out as grand soap opera, played out over continents and years, and then spiked through with televisual flourishes reminiscent of the last twenty years of backstabbing prime-time bitchery entertainment, Rome is structured like it was thought-up by someone who watched way too much of all the best stuff to be offered by piquant, overstuffed, sensationally engrossing late-night melodramas. Which it probably was. And then they added the violence...and the sex...and the sandals.
Created by Bruno Heller, John Milius, and William J. Macdonald, the series sees in the chronicling of the fall of the Roman Republic and rise of the Roman Empire an elegant symmetry; spliced almost perfectly in half, season one dealt with Ceasar's (Ciarán Hinds, spread wide majestically on wings of noble megolomania) ascent and subsequent assasination. Season two picks up with the aftermath, and carries on through the civil wars over who would populate the power vacuum all the way to the triumph of Ceasar's great-nephew, Octavian (Max Pirkis, as the younger incarnation, and Simon Woods as the elder). Remember that nod to The Sopranos? It's evident in the ever-prevalent jostling for influence and political stability -- and writ large, magnificently, equally on the Senate Floor as in the villa of Octavian's mother, Atia (Polly Walker, turning in a performance of delicious villainy). What about Dynasty or Dallas? Just as both of those soaps follow a cast of rambunctious, morally unscrupulous people tethered together alternately by blood, marriage, money, scheming, or "affection," so too are the lovers, fighters, politicos, and women of this soap. Their shenanigans just take place 2,000 years previous. Huh.
And where's our dash of Entourage? It so happens that our two protagonists (though I apply the term loosely: Rome has a main cast of dozens, and the camera shares time equally) are Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), two ex-soldiers in this Ceasar-less world who have found themselves still bound together, by duty and friendship, their bond strengthened and weathered more and more by the demands of a fractured upper-crust. (Late in the season, Vorenus is forced through pride to ally himself with Mark Antony -- portrayed by James Purefoy in a tour de force of debauchary, emotional immaturity, and sincerity -- while Pullo finds an older acquaintance with Octavian leaves him on the opposite side of the void.) They are us, wide-eyed but (somewhat-) noble in a society going to rot.
And we, the audience, are them. Which is probably the biggest success of Rome, even in its second -- shorter -- season. In a cast of top-tier performers, we sympathize and understand each and every one. From Cicero (David Bamber, whose beady eyes are put to fiendishly clever good use), the Senator who successfully plotted against the power bases of both Ceasar and Antony, to the Newsreader (Ian McNeice), who is as good to a narrator/news announcer/adman as a society several millenium ago was going to get, each character who speaks but one word is rich with care and precision; Rome's cast is a Dicken's dream team made flesh, wonderfully.
The first year was better, but only because it was more reliable; we all know the mechanics behind the character arc of Julius Ceasar. The second year was gloomier, more unstable, which translates in some etheral way to not as good -- denser somehow, murky without being wholly satisfying. Head writer Bruno Heller, who wrote eight of season one's twelve eps, isn't nearly as omnipresent, which could explain things. But really, just don't. Revel instead in a grand historical tapestry that interweaves fiction and fact into a memorable, staggeringly inrresistible, drama. Fatefully, Mere Smith (a former Joss Whedon associate, and a major creative force behind the middle years of Angel) contributes two scripts -- and they're two of the sharpest all series. "Deus Impiditio Esuritori Nullus (No God Can Stop a Hungry Man)" is both the penultimate installment, Smith's better of her two efforts, and perhaps one of the two or three best episodes of Rome, ever. It's scrappy, turbulent, sourly witty, and irrevocably authentic. If the real Ancient Rome wasn't this good -- this violent, or sexy, or frighteningly human-sized -- then it should only aspire to be.
Created by Bruno Heller, John Milius, and William J. Macdonald, the series sees in the chronicling of the fall of the Roman Republic and rise of the Roman Empire an elegant symmetry; spliced almost perfectly in half, season one dealt with Ceasar's (Ciarán Hinds, spread wide majestically on wings of noble megolomania) ascent and subsequent assasination. Season two picks up with the aftermath, and carries on through the civil wars over who would populate the power vacuum all the way to the triumph of Ceasar's great-nephew, Octavian (Max Pirkis, as the younger incarnation, and Simon Woods as the elder). Remember that nod to The Sopranos? It's evident in the ever-prevalent jostling for influence and political stability -- and writ large, magnificently, equally on the Senate Floor as in the villa of Octavian's mother, Atia (Polly Walker, turning in a performance of delicious villainy). What about Dynasty or Dallas? Just as both of those soaps follow a cast of rambunctious, morally unscrupulous people tethered together alternately by blood, marriage, money, scheming, or "affection," so too are the lovers, fighters, politicos, and women of this soap. Their shenanigans just take place 2,000 years previous. Huh.
And where's our dash of Entourage? It so happens that our two protagonists (though I apply the term loosely: Rome has a main cast of dozens, and the camera shares time equally) are Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), two ex-soldiers in this Ceasar-less world who have found themselves still bound together, by duty and friendship, their bond strengthened and weathered more and more by the demands of a fractured upper-crust. (Late in the season, Vorenus is forced through pride to ally himself with Mark Antony -- portrayed by James Purefoy in a tour de force of debauchary, emotional immaturity, and sincerity -- while Pullo finds an older acquaintance with Octavian leaves him on the opposite side of the void.) They are us, wide-eyed but (somewhat-) noble in a society going to rot.
And we, the audience, are them. Which is probably the biggest success of Rome, even in its second -- shorter -- season. In a cast of top-tier performers, we sympathize and understand each and every one. From Cicero (David Bamber, whose beady eyes are put to fiendishly clever good use), the Senator who successfully plotted against the power bases of both Ceasar and Antony, to the Newsreader (Ian McNeice), who is as good to a narrator/news announcer/adman as a society several millenium ago was going to get, each character who speaks but one word is rich with care and precision; Rome's cast is a Dicken's dream team made flesh, wonderfully.
The first year was better, but only because it was more reliable; we all know the mechanics behind the character arc of Julius Ceasar. The second year was gloomier, more unstable, which translates in some etheral way to not as good -- denser somehow, murky without being wholly satisfying. Head writer Bruno Heller, who wrote eight of season one's twelve eps, isn't nearly as omnipresent, which could explain things. But really, just don't. Revel instead in a grand historical tapestry that interweaves fiction and fact into a memorable, staggeringly inrresistible, drama. Fatefully, Mere Smith (a former Joss Whedon associate, and a major creative force behind the middle years of Angel) contributes two scripts -- and they're two of the sharpest all series. "Deus Impiditio Esuritori Nullus (No God Can Stop a Hungry Man)" is both the penultimate installment, Smith's better of her two efforts, and perhaps one of the two or three best episodes of Rome, ever. It's scrappy, turbulent, sourly witty, and irrevocably authentic. If the real Ancient Rome wasn't this good -- this violent, or sexy, or frighteningly human-sized -- then it should only aspire to be.
Breaking Dawn: B+
"...Reason and love keep little company together nowadays," goes the William Shakespeare quote that pops up not even a fifth the way through Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn -- and well they still don't, in this final volume of her vampiric romance novels; it's due to this resolute lack of the twining between the heart and the mind that most of what goes right in the novel does, in fact, go right. Compacted into a radical new structure (say what you will, negative or otherwise about Meyer's books, but each and every previous installment has been concieved and molded into the same pattern), the plot in Dawn has as many twists and kinks woven into it as Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse put together and the majority are born from that chasm between desire and pragmatic function, and they take flight beautifully, if slowly at first, until any reader would be hard-pressed not to be entranced.
Where we left our heroine, Bella Swan, was in that place where she always seems pre-emptively perched: a third the way to heartbreak, and three quarters down the road to joy -- such is her predicament as the sole human girl in the entire Western Hemisphere privy to the supernatural world of vampires, werewolves, and the like. This time, the perpetrator of her distress is Jacob Black, a local werewolf who also moonlights as her best friend; he's sad because he loves her and she loves Edward Cullen, a vegetarian vampire who also moonlights as the cause of her euphoria.
Whatever: save the fancy gothic archetypes for another plot...this is pure harlequin, a love triangle. Not for too long though. Meyer, affable and enchanting as she seems in interviews, is also capable of learning and growing as an author; she powers through the problem poised by the unrequited-ness of her characters' affection pretty early on, setting herself up with more formidable obstacles. Like Bella's mortality (she's gotten Edward to swear to turning her into a vampire after their wedding...a day, surprisingly, not too far off). And the issue of her BFF's "imprinting" (e.g., a werewolf thing that lets its user unconsciously find and devote himself to the love of his life).
Stuff starts to hit the fan in quick order, and what's more, the action is sliced up into three sections -- two narrated by Bella, with a bridge by Jacob. I'm going to go out on a limb (don't hate me) and say this: Jacob's POV is far more entertaining (or rather, less annoying) than hearing Bella in all of her...Bellaness. (It isn't her fault though, blame schizophrenia: she's been described by Meyer in these collective four books as, alternately, clumsy, affable, smart, reliable, emotional, caring, mediocre, average, controlled, and stubborn. Yeesh.) Plus, another leg up for Jacob is that through him, we first glimpse the pivotal hinge of the entire novel, and through him is Meyer's greatest trick realized; with her werewolf as a perfect bridge, she see-saws tonally (delightfully so, might I add) throughout Breaking Dawn, from Rosemary's Baby to that sex scene on the beach in The O.C. back to a grandiose action sequence that feels very much like The Battle of Hogwarts from Harry Potter.
...Which brings up the most interesting point of all, really: improbable as it may seem, and while always keeping the reader off-kilter with new characters and dire threats at every turn, Meyer has found a way to end her Twilight series happily for all involved. And that's her biggest plus. Her biggest minus is that she does such a superb wrap-up while nary exploring the dark, lushly romantic world she's let pour from her skull. Sales wise, she's the inheritor to J.K. Rowling's throne, but artistically? She has imagination, but no accompanying vision -- there's depth but no richness to the acres of her surrounding white canvas.
I'm quibbling; I'll stop. At the heart of Bella's tale, the primal power its allure, has always been its gooey fairy-tale "Awww," factor. Which I didn't so much love. (Really, though, it was the repetition inherent in Meyer's act of shoving such goo down my throat, that irked me.) What I do love is being guided and tricked, pleased and scared, tensed and saddened -- that's the mark of a true storyteller, folks. And Stephenie Meyer is one, even if she is also a resolute fan of her own coyness. (Sex-less sex scenes? Puh-leaze.) Witty when it gets out of its own way, heartfelt and earnest when it comes to any form of any relationship, unexpectedly creepy -- morbid even -- in all the unexpectedly right places, and perfectly structured from opening preface to final chapter, Breaking Dawn is as apt a title as any for this conclusion. Not because it has much Sun involved (Hello kids! Forks is the Rainy Captial of the U.S.), but because the image is perfect for the career of its creator: huge, meteoric in its ascension, and occasionally brilliant.
Where we left our heroine, Bella Swan, was in that place where she always seems pre-emptively perched: a third the way to heartbreak, and three quarters down the road to joy -- such is her predicament as the sole human girl in the entire Western Hemisphere privy to the supernatural world of vampires, werewolves, and the like. This time, the perpetrator of her distress is Jacob Black, a local werewolf who also moonlights as her best friend; he's sad because he loves her and she loves Edward Cullen, a vegetarian vampire who also moonlights as the cause of her euphoria.
Whatever: save the fancy gothic archetypes for another plot...this is pure harlequin, a love triangle. Not for too long though. Meyer, affable and enchanting as she seems in interviews, is also capable of learning and growing as an author; she powers through the problem poised by the unrequited-ness of her characters' affection pretty early on, setting herself up with more formidable obstacles. Like Bella's mortality (she's gotten Edward to swear to turning her into a vampire after their wedding...a day, surprisingly, not too far off). And the issue of her BFF's "imprinting" (e.g., a werewolf thing that lets its user unconsciously find and devote himself to the love of his life).
Stuff starts to hit the fan in quick order, and what's more, the action is sliced up into three sections -- two narrated by Bella, with a bridge by Jacob. I'm going to go out on a limb (don't hate me) and say this: Jacob's POV is far more entertaining (or rather, less annoying) than hearing Bella in all of her...Bellaness. (It isn't her fault though, blame schizophrenia: she's been described by Meyer in these collective four books as, alternately, clumsy, affable, smart, reliable, emotional, caring, mediocre, average, controlled, and stubborn. Yeesh.) Plus, another leg up for Jacob is that through him, we first glimpse the pivotal hinge of the entire novel, and through him is Meyer's greatest trick realized; with her werewolf as a perfect bridge, she see-saws tonally (delightfully so, might I add) throughout Breaking Dawn, from Rosemary's Baby to that sex scene on the beach in The O.C. back to a grandiose action sequence that feels very much like The Battle of Hogwarts from Harry Potter.
...Which brings up the most interesting point of all, really: improbable as it may seem, and while always keeping the reader off-kilter with new characters and dire threats at every turn, Meyer has found a way to end her Twilight series happily for all involved. And that's her biggest plus. Her biggest minus is that she does such a superb wrap-up while nary exploring the dark, lushly romantic world she's let pour from her skull. Sales wise, she's the inheritor to J.K. Rowling's throne, but artistically? She has imagination, but no accompanying vision -- there's depth but no richness to the acres of her surrounding white canvas.
I'm quibbling; I'll stop. At the heart of Bella's tale, the primal power its allure, has always been its gooey fairy-tale "Awww," factor. Which I didn't so much love. (Really, though, it was the repetition inherent in Meyer's act of shoving such goo down my throat, that irked me.) What I do love is being guided and tricked, pleased and scared, tensed and saddened -- that's the mark of a true storyteller, folks. And Stephenie Meyer is one, even if she is also a resolute fan of her own coyness. (Sex-less sex scenes? Puh-leaze.) Witty when it gets out of its own way, heartfelt and earnest when it comes to any form of any relationship, unexpectedly creepy -- morbid even -- in all the unexpectedly right places, and perfectly structured from opening preface to final chapter, Breaking Dawn is as apt a title as any for this conclusion. Not because it has much Sun involved (Hello kids! Forks is the Rainy Captial of the U.S.), but because the image is perfect for the career of its creator: huge, meteoric in its ascension, and occasionally brilliant.
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