Friday, May 30, 2008

Lost: "There's No Place Like Home," Part 2 and 3

What is a TV Movie, exactly? Just this year, that strange form has reappeared in a number of strange permutations. You have the movies that sprout from the "BSG: Razor" genus, a 90 minute standalone story meant to whet viewer appetites during long inter-season breaks. "24" is jumping on this train, too, with a two hour season 7 prequel airing this Fall. How the mighty have fallen; just a couple years ago, there was talk of a big screen "24" movie, which, like "South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut," "X-Files: Fight the Future," and "The Simpsons Movie" would have taken place in the negative zone between seasons where production values are higher but plot resolutions are vague enough so as to lead purely abstractly into the following season. The new "X-Files" movie is a different breed altogether: the Franchise-Begging Spin-Off Sequel (see also "Sex and the City" and, after all, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"). There's also the subgenus of Animated Direct-to-DVD Multi-Episode Spin-Off Movies, represented by "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story" and "Futurama: Bender's Big Score."

Of course, I don't think any of those items would prefer the nomenclature "TV Movie" - for people born after 1980, that phrase has meant only bad, with its overtones of Lifetime "issue" stories and Sunday evening literary adaptations that weren't good enough to make the big screen. Lacking the narrative weight of television because of its standalone nature, and lacking the gravitas of movies because of low budget and short production time and commercial interruption, the TV Movie is, really, neither TV nor Movie. It's a mongrel concoction, much less than the sum of its parts. I'm not even sure what you would call a TV movie: is it a genre, or a style, or a form? Nothing really seems to fit.

HBO has done its part to renovate the reputation of this bizarre mishmash thingamajig, turning original movies like last weekend's "Recount" into starstudded events, yet I think that has more to do with HBO's singular reputation, and its fearlessness in terms of defining just what television is: its seasons might be 8 episodes or 20 episodes, so that it's often hard to tell the difference between a miniseries like "John Adams" and a one-season wonder like "John from Cincinnati."

Of course, you may as well ask what is TV and what is a Movie, in this strange day and age where TV shows like "The Wire" or "The Sopranos" have told stories that formed beginnings, middle, and ends, while in superhero Movieland, whole franchises tug along in an eternal act 2, where no ending appears without the promise of a sequel or a spin-off. Hell, even the terms "TV" and "Film" don't really apply anymore. I watch most of my TV on my computer; in the next few years, most Films will be shot in high-quality digital video, and projected digitally

Still, the terms persist. They mean something. Watching TV feels inherently different from watching a movie. There is something grand in the genetic code of the word "Film," even if you're watching it on your iPod; there is something familial about the word "TV," even when its widescreen HD. Films have endings; TV has a "To Be Continued" sign.

"Lost" has neither, of course. The creators have never bothered with the old "To Be Continued," and I'm willing to bet that we've already seen the ending, or at least some version of it. What is great and mesmerizing about the show is not simply how it constantly breaks down our expectations of narrative progression - of Beginning, Middle, and End - but also how, like its spiritual progenitor "Memento," it always finds a way to return to that linear (emotional if not chronological) order.

Consider "There's No Place Like Home," which was separated into three parts but which, at a total of two hours minus commercials, was really as close as "Lost" has come to making a movie out of itself; it flowed along like on cohesive whole, save for the non sequitur (yet awesome) cross-cutting slow-motion music montage which ended the first part. "There's No Place Like Home" began in what used to be the future: the Oceanic Six landing in Hawaii (yes, after four years of standing in for Australia, Korea, Tunisia, Tikrit, and practically every state of the Union, Hawaii finally played itself in an episode of "Lost.") They were reunited with their family members: look, there's Sun's dad, and Hurley's Cheech dad, and Jack's mom! Awww!

In any other show, this moment would have been the grand finale: the slow motion, the happy-sad Giacchino theme. In fact, it used to be: many episodes in the first season ended with a scene like this. Here, though, it played like a necessary storytelling evil; as lame and cheesy as it was, thinking about that scene now, considering where the Oceanic Six were coming from and where they ended up, it plays as tragic, even darkly funny. By the end of the finale, two futures became the present: the near-future, with the Oceanic Six's arrival back in civilization (we saw a picture of it at the press conference, and then saw the event itself two hours later), and the practically dystopian flashforward future, where Sayid is an assassin, Hurley is a mental patient, Sun is her father, Kate is a fake mother, and Jack is a bearded drugged out wreck.

I don't mean to argue that the "reunion" scene was good. It wasn't. It was sloppily shot, and it fell back on an old network TV crutch of letting slow-mo and high-tempo music cover dramatic failings. Wouldn't you have liked to hear what everyone was saying to everyone? What's great about "Lost" is not that the show is perfect, but rather, that the show knows its own weaknesses.

Consider the first episode of season 4, "The Beginning of the End," which was the worst episode of the season. It was easy to miss when it first debuted: the sheer fact that "Lost" was back, and the revelation of the "Oceanic Six," and Jorge Garcia's pitch-perfect performance, and the series-redefining moment when Jack pulled the trigger on Locke, smoothed over the rough edges of an oddly sputtery debut episode. ("Lost" always has trouble with its season premieres; ironic, for a show with such a boffo pilot.)

There was the oddly congenial, even jokey atmosphere: Rose telling Claire that she better show Charlie a good time back on the beach (a scene which might have come out of the third season of "The OC"); Bernard telling Hurley, with all the mock authority of a part-time actor essaying the role of Father Knows Best, that he should go and jump in the water; Hurley's slow-mo run into the water, as painfully over-the-top as Eric Bana's bad-sex terrorism flashback at the climax of "Munich"; and, worst of all, the clips of Charlie's death that were interspersed with Hurley's final speech. "Lost" has largely eschewed big speeches since Jack's "Live Together, Die Alone," and wisely so - it will always be difficult for TV to really suggest the breadth of people in a listening mob. And the clips? Charlie's death was one of the most moving moments in the show's history; to replay it less than one episode later felt like the lowest form of TV hell.

But that first episode plays strikingly well, when you understand just how effectively it was setting up everyone for the fall. I've written before about the cynical, darkly comic energy that the flashforwards injected into the show: how moments of on-island triumph segue painfully into off-island tragedy. "There's No Place Like Home" took that one step further: we saw the climax right at the beginning, when they arrive in Hawaii. We already knew that things would turn out badly; we knew that right from the first flashforward, with Jack yelling "We have to go Back." Usually "Lost" has two narrative threads; "There's No Place Like Home" had three. They were:

1: How they got off the island
2: What happened between getting off the island and "We Have to go Back!"
3: What happens next

Time travel, according to the show, follows a basic model of course correction. There are very important things which are supposed to happen, such as death. There are myriad other things which might happen along the way, but the outcome is never in doubt. Of course, this is EXACTLY how the creators of "Lost" have written the show - Lindelof and Cuse, in discussing shortening eight episodes to five after the strike, pointed out that they knew where everyone had to end up, and it was just a matter of getting them there. And it is also how we experience the show. We KNEW that Sawyer was going to stay behind on the island, but we didn't know how, or when, or why.

So, when he was the odd man out on the helicopter, and it was running low on fuel, we all knew exactly what he was going to do; the surprise wasn't in what happened, but in immediately before it happened, when the cruel inevitability of fate, and of continuity, demanded he jump out of the helicopter. I'm calling it: this was the most swooningly romantic moment that the show has ever given us, as urgent as Desmond's trans-hemispheric Christmas morning phone call to Penny but with the added benefit of the kiss, of Josh Holloway's scruffy grin, of Sawyer the former nihilists self-sacrifice, and of Jack's painfully awkward, spurned stare; you could see how the jealousy would fester in him, years later, when Sawyer was not there and so Sawyer seemed to be everywhere.

So, too, with Ben. When he said "I'm getting changed," you might have sensed that he would put on a Dharma jacket with a nametag that said "Halliwax"; when he fell down the ladder, you knew exactly how the wound would look in his arm. Still, who could have expected a giant gear, simultaneously suggesting Atlas (holding the world up with his shoulders), "Atlas Shrugged" (is Ben not a strangely Ayn Randian protagonist?), and the gearshift technology of "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis."

For some people, this may be the moment when "Lost" finally goes too far. For me, this was yet another moment where "Lost" took me in its arms, kissed me with tongue like some superpowered Amazonian princess, then slapped me unconscious, slung me over its shoulder, and mumbled "Don't worry, I'll take care of you," right before running straight into the middle of a tornado in a volcano inhabited by giant man-spiders with ray guns. It made no sense, yet it made perfect sense.

And then, in a moment so unexpected yet so perfectly correct, the sky was bleached and sound like a repressed sonic boom sputtered throughout the island, an exact replica of the purple-sky event from the end of season 2. Which is funny, because except for a few scant references in season 3, that even hasn't even been referenced all season. How wonderful, that there is now a recurring motif of even-numbered seasons ending with that strange electromagnetic implosion. Who wants to place bets on Season 6?

Yet I was most moved last night by Jin, running out onto the deck of the freighter and waving at his pregnant wife, and Sun, screaming "We have to go back!" How wonderful that it was Jack who told her that they couldn't? For practically years, Yunjin Kim was the best actress on the show with the least to do; now, she's just the best actress, period. (Sorry, Elizabeth Mitchell.) That was raw, and true, and depended not at all on narrative trickery or sci-fi wackness, but just good old-fashioned righteous female fury (the sort of thing that has become BSG's stock in trade.)

Is anyone as interested as I am in just how "Lost" episodes are made now? From circumstantial evidence (ie, wikipedia), it would seem that the shorter amount of episodes means more production time per episode (and a larger budget?) Certainly, the show just felt more juiced this season - never more so than last night, when Sayid was fighting Keamy. This was a real fight; intriguingly choreographed, surprisingly graphic, not quite "Bourne" but man was it close!

Above all, I'm fascinated by one Jack Bender. He's directed every season finale so far. Even more impressive, he directed such series standouts as "Walkabout," "One of Us," "The Cost of Living," and two episodes from this season which may just be the best hours of story that network TV has given us, "The Constant" and "The Shape of Things to Come." In looking up Bender's resume, I noticed something amazing: he was also the director of "Blackout," the greatest episode of the horrifically forgotten early 2000s show, "Boomtown," which featured one of the truly memorable scenes in TV history: David McNorris, alcoholic DA, swilling his mouth full of whiskey while he considers wiping blood off of his windshield. He had awoken from a blackout to find that he had hit something, and later discovered there'd been a hit-and-run nearby that left a homeless man dead. While Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns, and Money" plays in the background, McNorris delivers an imaginary, slurry closing argument (to the jury, to the judge, and the God.)

Neal McDonough was the actor, but he's never been as good. Surely Mr. Bender had something to do with that? Usually, the role of the TV director has been downplayed, but clearly Bender has something going on here. (He also directed "...To Save Us All From Satan's Power," a flashback episode of "The Sopranos" - clearly, the guy has a thing for time jumping.)

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Big Crap, Little Crap

I can remember a few years ago, when I was in Hollywood, I came across one of the crappiest scripts that ever existed. This was right around the time that "Garden State" was emerging from its shit-encased chrysalis and spreading its wings in theaters, which means it was the absolute peak of the "Garden State" wave. Go back and watch the teaser, and you can completely understand why the movie was such a cultural event in the Spring of 2004. It still gives me tingles - the music, the Andersonian visuals (wide angle lens, symmetry, slow-motion, one non-white character), the odd feeling of generational discovery. Of course, it was all just a tease - all of the fun stuff from the movie, even the last shot, is in the preview.

The script that I came across was named after a geographic region of coastal land. It featured a listless twenty-something upset about life who didn't get along well with his authoritarian father, who decided to run away from his problems by hanging out with people who lived like Henry David Thoreau, except replacing Thoreau's immense talent and strenuous philosophy with drugs. The twenty-something guy has a rugged friend with immense plans, the kind of guy who can only be played by Peter Sarsgard four years ago (when he was a young guy who looked old, and not an old guy who looks like evil.) The one difference from "Garden State" was that, right at the end, the screenplay morphed into some kind of action movie, with DEA helicopters flying all about.

NOW IT'S A MOVIE!

Fascinated, I read through the reviews from the debut of "Humboldt County" at SXSW, which range from rave to aimiable. Not gonna lie: based on the trailer, this movie looks like indie crap, overridden with serio-cuteness and renegade niceties. I suspect that people who like and hate this preview will focus in on the same line: "I think it's nicer than beer," says the cute little adolescent stoner rebel earth child named "Charity" unironically. If you like it, that line captures the movie's quirky charm; if you don't like it, that line captures the movie's quirky badness.

As a gemini, I have the remarkable and annoying ability to see both sides of an argument. You would think this would have made me the best debater on my high school team, since I could easily believe in either side of the case. Instead, it made me the worst; whenever I tried to come up with an argument in my favor, I could instantly see the response to that argument. So has gone most of my young life. I like almost anything, yet find reasons to hate almost everything. I hate Republicans but can't stand liberals and think independents should just pick a side, already. According to iTunes, my favorite kinds of music are sad-loud techno and indie rock hit singles, yet I despise people who like indie rock and hate dancing anywhere but my room with the door closed and the windows covered.

And so it is that I can never really decide which I absolutely fucking despise more: big-budget crap like "Made of Honor" or "10,000 BC," emptyheaded bullshit that wastes millions of dollars on shittily designed camera angles, poor acting, vague plotlines, and not even enough material to float a semi-decent trailer; or tiny-budget crap like "Garden State" and "The Science of Sleep," emptyheaded bullshit which floats and hums along on the whimsical winds of whim, following the slapsticky-yet-meaningful exploits of a protagonist (usually a wealthy young man with nothing substantive to worry about) adrift in a sea of local eccentrics, all of it set to a vaguely rebellious beat (parents suck; jobs crush souls) and indie pop rock.

I should make it clear that I hate both kinds of movies, but that it's much more fun to hate the latter, perhaps for the same reason that it's fun to beat baby dolphins with a cricket bat. I think it's because the big movies are just decadent, caustic enterprises; studios don't even bother with critics anymore, knowing that critics will hate their dull prequel-ready rehashes. Whereas teeny little indie movies pull the shirt off their back, pull their heart from out of their breast, hold it out to you, and beg you, plead with you, to wuv them. What I think it comes down to is one simple truism: big studio movies are bad in exactly the same bloated, overlong way, but teeny little indie flicks are each bad in their own particular, undernourished way.

Much like "Humboldt County." I doubt the movie will be good (except for Brad Dourif who was the Doc from "Deadwood" and Grima Wormtongue from "Lord of the Rings" and any number of other great little roles that form a chronicle of quiet genius), but then again, I thought "The New World" was going to be the worst movie ever and now I go through life daydreaming about watching it on the big screen while listening to its soundtrack on repeat. Which proves that nobody knows anything until the movie plays.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Numbers

I don't mean to be as asinine as I look when I point out that, just one week after the White House angrily clarified Bush's typically unclear statement by publicly chastising NBC, Bill Clinton, formerly smooth as silk and just as sexy, has reiterated and restated his family's complaints about the media.

"She is winning the general election today and he is not, according to all the evidence," he points out, aimlessly referencing ambiguous polls. "If you notice, there hasn't been a lot of publicity on these polls I just told you about. Is it the first time you've heard it? Why do you think that is? Why do you think? Don't you think if the polls were the reverse and he was winning the electoral college against Sen. McCain and Hillary was losing it, that would be blasted on every television station? You would know, wouldn't you? It wouldn't be a little secret. And there is another Electoral College poll that I saw yesterday that had her over 300 electoral votes."

I'm going to type this in capital letters, but I want to make it clear that I'm not just hitting the CAPS lock. I'm holding my left pinkie on the left shift key, so as to better restrain the full-body muscle spasm which erupts as I type the following:

BILL, THE REASON WHY THE PRESS HASN'T BEEN PAYING ATTENTION TO THE STATISTICS THAT YOU'RE VAGUELY REFERENCING IS THAT THEY'RE PAYING MORE ATTENTION TO THE ACTUAL VOTES MADE BY ACTUAL PEOPLE IN ACTUAL PRIMARIES, NOT THEORETICAL ELECTIONS, AND IF YOU WERE PAYING ANY FUCKING ATTENTION TO SAID ACTUAL FUCKING NUMBERS (WHICH DERIVE FROM ACTUAL VOTES, UNLIKE THE NUMBERS IN THE POLL YOU MENTION, WHICH DERIVE FROM FAIRY DUST), YOU WOULD NOTICE THAT YOUR WIFE IS CURRENTLY LOSING.

Matt Taibbi says it best, as usual. You know what's funny? Nearly every article that I've read about Hillary's current campaign plan - codenamed "Lose Until We Win" - references the fact that, if she holds on for just a little longer, Barack Obama may just suffer another controversy that could put her over the edge. What cynical politics.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"

It hurts less when you pull the band aid off quickly: "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is awful. To the Law of Odd-Numbered "Star Trek" Sequels, which states that an excellent "Wrath of Khan" or "The Voyage Home" must be followed by a wretched "Search for Spock" or "The Final Frontier," we can now add a hyperlink addendum: the Law of the Even-Numbered "Indiana Jones" Sequels, in which we find Indiana Jones cradling a glowing artifact (it may be a skull-shaped stone, or it may be a stone-shaped skull), hanging out with a much-younger sidekick, and getting lost amid a retro-colonialist vision of the natural world that plays like an unfun mash-up of "Aguirre, The Wrath of God" and "Son of Kong."

You might argue that it's not supposed to be a great movie - just a fun time. Nonsense. Making a fun movie is the hardest thing in the world. Hitchcock didn't wear a suit every day of his life because suits are the most comfortable thing for a portly English gentleman to wear. He was a man who had a job to do. To all apologists, I would urge you to go back and rewatch "Raiders of the Lost Ark," which made having fun feel like the hardest, most rewarding work ever. Spielberg was coming off of "1941," a movie overstuffed with Hollywood bloat and misfired pseudo-comedic energy, and there is a relentless sense of getting back to basics in "Raiders." Not one thing is wasted in that movie. The stone stops rolling, but Indy never does.

In sad fairness, "Crystal Skull" gets off to an interesting beginning. When we first see Indy, he's being unloaded out of the trunk of a car, while Russians flank him on all sides with machine gun rifles. Russians in this movie always "chick-chick" their guns in perfect melodic unison - damn that commie conformity! Cate Blanchett appears. You can tell she's the villain, because she speaks with a perfectly ridiculous accent, while modelling tight Soviet soldier wear and trim nightmare-50s black hair.

I love Cate Blanchett, but there is something queasy about her first appearance. For one thing, she doesn't really look Russian. In fact, nothing about her in the entire movie will be particularly Russian. Actually, nothing about her will be particularly particular. You could kind of believe that the Nazis just wanted power for the sake of power, but it's a bit harder to accept the Russians as such faceless evildoers, and Spielberg and Lucas don't really go out of there way to pencil in any real motivation.

The problem with Blanchett's character is that they never quite figure out why she wants what she wants (nor do they ever figure out exactly what it is that she wants, but more on that later.) At times, she resembles the evil German villain from "Raiders of the Lost Ark," who lusted after the power of the Ark of the Covenant in order to conquer the world. (This is a very silly motivation, but it is a motivation.) Blanchett's Russian wants the power of the Crystal Skull because, well, it's powerful. (This may be an anti-narrative riff on the meaninglessness of the Cold War, but boy is it boring.)

Yet at other times, she more resembles the evil financier from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," lusting after the incredible wisdom and knowledge to be gained from uncovering the hidden artifact. Indeed, at the absolute climax of the movie, which nearly resembles the end of "2001" but actually resembles the end of "Mission to Mars" and makes even less sense than both movies genetically combined in a wormhole, she bravely announces, "I want... to KNOW!"

I should tell you that that assertion leads her to achieve absolute physiological transcendence, which, in this movie's frame of mind, means that she dissipates into a ball of pure energy. Yes, it makes me tremor with sad glee to inform you that, like Ang Lee's "Hulk" (and, curiously, "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis," the classic adventure game from LucasArts), this is a story in which the climax of the movie sees the villain painfully transmogrify into a gigantic ball of gaseous neon.

Back to the beginning. Indy has been captured by the evil Russians, who want him to find something buried in the government's warehouse of secrets. Said warehouse resembles the warehouse at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," because, would you believe it, it IS that warehouse! We know this, because in a few minutes, after Indy has driven several trucks through several thousand boxes (no doubt destroying the Philosopher's Stone and the map to Xanadu in the process), we briefly see one box open, and inside is the Ark of the Covenant.

This is a tiny little throwaway shot - a gift to the fans - yet it hit me in my stomach. It was like the moment in T3 when Arnold visited a strip club and got his classic biker outfit off of a male stripper. It was funny, yet it seemed to violate what little reality can exist in a story about an evil robot from the apocalyptic future.

What happens next, though, basically pushes the movie from too-late sequel into epic self-parody. Indy runs through the desert and finds himself in what appears to be a tiny town populated entirely by crash test dummies. He finds a ticking clock. In the distance, a nuclear missile is fired. What to do? Indy jumps into a lead-lined refrigerator. The missile blows everything up. And, in a moment which sounded the death knell of my childhood, out of the gigantic mushroom cloud blows the refrigerator, unharmed, and out rolls Indy.

What in the fuck madness is going on in this scene? The earlier Indy movies were always funny, but they were also dangerous, and brutal, and just a teeny bit real. That was the whole joy of the Indiana Jones character - he got beat up by practically everyone, but he just kept on going. With this scene, Lucas and Spielberg essentially announce that anything and everything is possible. This is a subtle preparation for later in the movie, when... well, I won't tell you what happens exactly, because it's so unexpected and so far outside whatever tiny rules of reality still existed in the Indy-verse that essentially anything could have happened. If the climax of the movie featured a parade of dancing hippopotami emerging from a pentagon-shaped spacecraft while Cole Porter and Frank Sinatra serenaded them with the Canadian national anthem, it would have made nearly as much sense, plotwise.

As the sixth season of "24" proved, once you've exploded a nuclear bomb, there's really nowhere else to go. The movie settles in for an endless second act in which Jim Broadbent and John Hurt and Ray Winstone play excellent British actors utterly wasting their talent on dogshit roles. This film is such an embarrassment of riches; of money, of acting talent, of untapped possibility.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas could have made any kind of movie they wanted to, as long as they called it "Indiana Jones." In the last ten years, Tom Stoppard, Frank Darabont, and M. Night Shyamalan all took turns writing an "Indiana Jones" (those unfilmed scripts will someday make a wonderful all-digital trilogy.) You would have hoped that this would have felt like one of Steven Spielberg's latter-day triumphs - "AI," or "War of the Worlds," or "Munich," or "Minority Report," pulpy big flicks that subtly twist post-millenium, post-9/11 fears in a palatable, genre-inflected, imperfect yet watchable cocktail. But no, instead this feels like one of George Lucas's prequels - all the great actors and wondrous special effects that money can buy, and not one single idea in his empty, bearded head.

Here's the thing. Nestled inside of this awful, awful movie is one of the best scenes that any bloated summer blockbuster has come up with in years. For most of the middle section of the movie, Indiana Jones pals around with Shia LaBoeuf, who essays the role of a greaser with a striking professionalism that indicates two possible things: 1) LaBoeuf had complete confidence in his director, his producer, and his fellow actors and so thought that he was playing a part to rival Hamlet, or 2) LaBoeuf realized that the only way to come out clean from this shambling mishmash of a movie was to keep his head down and do his job. The two men engage in what feels like hours of exposition and then head down to South America, where they go into a temple and find a glowing Crystal Skull. This takes approximately half an hour. Then they get captured by the Russians.

And then, bless the world, Marion appears. Karen Allen and Harrison Ford had chemistry to last a lifetime in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and the moment she comes onscreen, you can feel Ford coming out of the depressive monotone shell that's scarred just about every movie he's done since "The Fugitive." He's chitting, she's chatting, he's zipping, she's zapping; they're having FUN. They escape the Russians, but Indy and Marion get caught in quick sand. While Shia goes off to find a stick, they talk. Surprising nobody, Marion reveals that Shia is actually Indy's son. Bazongo! As Indy tries to recover from this information, Shia extends a stick to him. Except it's not a stick; it's a gigantic snake!

This is the giddiness that we remember - toppling one thing right on top of another, in a nice and subtle way. (Note to all aspiring screenwriters - a nuclear bomb going off will never be subtle.) But then they get out of the quicksand, and I have to tell you, the movie never once stops to just let them talk, this funny new family unit, except for one tiny instance when they're tied up. Yup, they get recaptured. So many people get captured so often in this movie, only to escape again, only to be recaptured. It's a plot arc that resembles a seismograph, appropriate considering how often the earth itself shakes.

I'm not asking that Indy and Marion spend the whole movie walking and talking through Vienna, but look at "Iron Man." In just a few well-placed scenes, you get such a wonderful romance between Downey and Paltrow. Bless them for bringing back Karen Allen, but curse them for wasting her - there's nothing in this film to match the moment in "Raiders" when, in the middle of a gunfight, she pauses to drink some liquor that's pouring out of a bullet hole. It was those little touches that made all the difference. It's those little touches that are utterly missing.

I'm giving Spielberg a pass on this one, because the movie is directed about as well as the shittiest movie ever made can be directed. With "Crystal Skull," George Lucas has officially shat all over our collective childhoods one more time. It's not ending anytime soon: the preview for the all-digital "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" was greeted with utter silence followed by giggles.

Monday, May 19, 2008

3 Ways "Prince Caspian" Might Change Film History for the Better

1) No more Prefab Decade-long Franchises. "Chronicles of Narnia" was supposed to be the next "Harry Potter" series - a seven-part series based on beloved childrens' books that could stretch out over an entire decade, guaranteeing dirty large grosses with its four-quadrant appeal, the kind of franchise that basically justifies an entire studio's existence, even with years between movies. (See also: Sony and "Spider-Man")

The main problem with this plan was obvious to everyone who had ever actually read the Narnia books. The "Harry Potter" series forms a coherent, overarching narrative story - the Narnia books are more haphazard, shedding main characters along the way (two of the stories, "The Horse and His Boy" and "The Magician's Nephew," introduce brand new main characters who never return except for occasional guest appearances.) In addition, unlike Rowling's novels, which pleased nearly everyone of all ages, the Narnia books really just appeal to children. They're full of imagination but lean on vocabulary, and the unambiguous presentation of good and evil can't help but seem adolescent compared to the shifting moral compass of the Potter books. Some of the later books are wonderful, dark, and weird (like "The Silver Chair," which few people remember specifically except as a subterranean pulpy nightmare), but at least one of them, "The Last Battle" is essentially unfilmable as a fantasy adventure film, since it's basically a series of speeches and a mindbending final twist. (Antonioni, Altman, or hell, Kevin Smith could work wonders with a novel like this, but who would give any of them a budget that big?)

After the crash of "Speed Racer" and the mediocre debut of "Prince Caspian," it's looking like this could be the summer when big budget prefab franchises finally hit a dead end. I don't mean that franchises should end - I love the "Indiana Jones" movies, and the second installments of "X-Men" and "Spider Man," and even can't wait for the second "Hellboy," but is anyone excited to see a third "Mummy? The first "Hulk" had the worst second weekend percentage drop of any film in history - what better indication could there be that people were tremendously excited about the movie, and that the movie itself was received so poorly? What could be less exciting than a sequel/reboot, so soon afterwards? It's as if the good people at Marvel, having made such wonderful plans for a "Hulk" franchise, want to prove that we, the people, were wrong - that "Hulk" should be a franchise, no matter how crappy the movie was.

This is the main problem with the post-Batman blockbuster era, as regaled in Tom Shone's genius, deviously straightforwardly-titled "Blockbuster." Starting with "Batman," the studios no longer had to wait and see what people liked (nobody saw "Jaws" coming) - now, they could make such a huge public to-do over a movie that they could tell people what they would like. I think that we may be seeing an end to this ploy. I'm more excited than anyone to see "X-Files" and I'm hastily running through the entirety of "Sex and the City" in time to see the movie, but can't we all agree that the later seasons of both shows weren't that great? What reason, then, is there for either movie to be created, except that studio executives see franchise possibility?

Prefab franchises - that is, franchises based on existing sources, with built-in fanbases - have been a part of the scene since at least "Lord of the Rings," when New Line made the crazy decision to greenlight three movies at once. That series was lightning in a bottle. Nothing that has come after it has been nearly as good, as epic, or as dangerous. After the shitty performance of "The Golden Compass," can it be that we're almost at the end of an era when studios dictate franchises, rather than audiences?

2) A resurgence, in a highly modified and far more meritocratic form, of the Star System. For my money, there are two reasons why "The Incredible Hulk" trailer has been received with shrugs (and why, I'm willing to bet anyone two dollars, the movie will underperform considerably), whereas the "Iron Man" trailer had people nearly choking on the awesomeness for a year in advance. That reason is a great actor and good, sarcastic script. Robert Downey, Jr, became a Hollywood star in the "Iron Man" trailer, with this one scene:

Reporter: You've been called the Da Vinci of our time, what do you say to that?
Downey: Absolutely ridiculous, I don't paint.
Reporter: What do you say to your other nickname - the Merchant of Death?
Downey: That's not bad.

Right away, you could tell that this movie was going to be fun, and different - this was not mopey Tobey Maguire, or fierce Christian Bale. This was darkly funny Robert Downey, Jr. This was a great actor, lifting good B-material into great audience fodder. (And it wasn't like the trailer gave away all the good points - it left out the end of the scene with the reporter, when they jump into bed; and it only hinted at the next scene, when Paltrow makes the wondrously subtle line about "taking out the trash.") There is not a single moment like this in the "Hulk" trailer - nothing that doesn't hit every bland note.

I think you can directly compare Downey's role in "Iron Man" to Johnny Depp's role in "Pirates of the Caribbean" - two great, very distinctive, very improvvy characters, being given the keys to the kingdom and the chance to show an audience of millions just how much fun they were having. I think that what happened to the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise is one of the great wastes (of talent, of money, and of narrative possibility) in film history. You could have made a sequel for half the money, at two-thirds the running time, focused entirely on Johnny Depp's character (who was, really, the only person anyone cared about), made exactly the same amount of money, and, as a partial bonus, ended up with a much better movie.

What does this mean? Well, despite rumors to the contrary, Hollywood still needs stars, but they need actors who can make instantaneous impressions - actors who can give performances which you can tell, even from tiny little trailer bits, will be wonderful. This sounds like I'm being vague. I'm not. There is absolutely a way to quantify how good an actor is. Look at how many movies he has starred in, how much range he has shown. Professionalism, dammit! Television has already figured out that the right underappreciated, hardworking actor in a good role can make an icon (see: James Gandolfini, Keifer Sutherland, Alec Baldwin)

3) The Painful Death of Walden Media. This tiny production company has made its name off of churning out kids' movies, usually based on beloved works of children's literature, and replacing all of the wonder with catchy digital effects. They somehow managed to take "Bridge to Terabithia," a wondrously low-fi tale of friendship, and make it look like the next Narnia/LOTR in its trailer. They also made "The Waterhorse" and "The Seeker" and "Nim's Island," all vapid kiddie flicks trying desperately to capitalize on the fantasy wave which, coincidentally, ended with the arrival of shitty movies like "The Waterhorse," "The Seeker," and "Nim's Island." (It also created "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporioum," and "Around the World in 80 Days," which bled money the way hemophiliacs bleed blood - all the way to deathtown.) Walden Media is also at fault for the upcoming "Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D," which may be lucky enough to be only the second worst Brendan Fraser adventure picture opening this sumer.

Walden Media essentially exists because it owns the rights to "Chronicles of Narnia," and their continued existence is directly linked to the franchise's success. (Much like United Artists, for many, many years, essentially depended on a new James Bond megablockbuster every couple of years.) Their exit strategy, if Wikipedia is telling me the truth, is to become the one-stop shopper for Brendan Fraser Action-Adventure 3-D movies (in addition to "Journey 3D," there's also something called "An Adventure in Prehistory 3-D" coming out in September - I can't find this movie anywhere else online, and it seems too bad to be true, but then again, this is Walden Media.)

(Aside: the trailer for City of Ember kind of looks sweet.)

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Lost: "There's No Place Like Home," Part 1

Tonight's "Lost" was merely part one of a three hour event, and so it's hard to talk about it the way that we usually talk about "Lost." The secret genius in the show's basic structure is that it's simultaneously a serial drama - the events in one episode build on the previous and look toward the next - and a series of standalone stories. It takes the twin DNAs of its cult-pop predecessor, "The X-Files" - the mythology episodes and the monster-of-the-weeks - and combines them together. This means you can track the show in terms of characters' movements throughout the season (movements over geography, shifting power status), while at the same time separating each chapter into a distinctive, glorious whole: a Jack episode, a Locke episode, a Jin/Sun double flash, a Desmond time spin, a Tailie chronicle. People never used to review individual episodes of television. "Lost," I would argue, practically invented (or at least popularized) the notion that every episode could be radically different (in style, in tone, in perspective) without sacrificing the through line of an overarching story.

You could argue, I think, that "Lost" is little more than "The Twilight Zone" with continuity. Rod Serling's opening narration for that show explicitly described a specific place, a destination - "a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge." In later seasons he would expand on his description - "A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind," he added in season 2. By season 4, he'd decided that the zone was also "a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas."

For Serling, the "Zone" was more a state of storytelling mind, filled with pseudo-scientific twists and apocalyptic turns. But imagine if he had actually made the Twilight Zone a place - a tiny snowglobe world, wherein beautiful women were ugly in a world of pigmen, and the monsters were due on Maple Street, and a sane man flying in an airplane could see an awkwardly costumed Gremlin. Where else could he set such a world, but an island on the edge of forever?

Continuity might be the great new artistic pursuit of our popular narrative age. Whole magnificent works of comic book art have been constructed out of archaeological endeavors to create an infrastructure between existing works of literature. Alan Moore turned "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" into less of a story saga than a graphic narrative mash-up of every work of literature in the Western World from Beowulf to Frankenstein; a wax museum with a pulse, to quote Vincent Vega. (His latest volume, "Black Dossier," threw in dystopic literature, 50s spy movies, 60s spy shows, Kerouac novels, and nearly every pre-Norman mythology you can think of.) In Moore's world, Nemo hangs with Dr. Jekyll, who turns into Mr. Hyde, who kills the Invisible Man, who was making a Faustian bargain with the aliens from "The War of the Worlds."

Elsewhere in the comics world, Don Rosa wrote "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck," the great undiscovered American novel of the 1990s. Stitching together a thousand throwaway backstories from the canon of Carl Barks, who wrote dozens of Uncle Scrooge stories (without credit) in the middle of the 20th century, Rosa created a work of narrative art that was unimpeachably impeccable, yet with a truly singular structure - two thirds rising action, one third plateau. You can't quite call "Life and Times" original, since it used characters and ideas created before Rosa was born, yet the very nature of the piece - watching characters growing older (this is the one and only time in a Disney comic that you will see a dying Duck), seeing dreams turn into reality turn into nightmares - added an unimaginable weight, a narrative oomph, to what were really just childrens' tales, written for the third-tier medium in a global empire.

(Just to make this not gigantic, I want to establish that I'm talking about narrative continuity - although there is an entire thesis to be written about visual continuity, or discontinuity, in major motion pictures that film in multiple worldwide locations. [Which is why the Gotham of "Batman Begins" can feel simultaneously like art-deco Chicago and post-modern London, or why Orson Welles in "Othello" can start a scene walking through a doorway in Venice and end a scene walking through a room in Morocco.] No, I'm talking specifically about the world within the screen, or behind the words - the world which we believe in, even if we don't quite believe the writers' sentences or the cinematographers' camera angles.)

What's funny about continuity, when you mean it as consistency between constituent parts, is that it essentially only applies to works of serial artistry - comic books, TV shows, internet cartoons. Unlike novels or movies, these media thrive on story cycles that are conceived in advance and then produced in spurts - one episode or one issue at a time. It has always been difficult, and certainly always been somewhat wrongheaded, to attempt to review a comic book saga in the same way you'd review a novel, just as it doesn't quite make sense to review a season of a TV show the way that you'd review a movie. For one thing, they tend to be much longer. For another thing, whereas, say, "No Country For Old Men" was written all at once, directed all at once, and edited all at once (by essentially the same people), season 3 of "The Sopranos" was written by at least 12 people, directed by 7 people, and edited by many more people, in fits and starts, by committee and by individuals and by individuals arguing before a committee.

That's why it's so wonderful that there are so many TV shows now that are essentially built, from the ground up, off of continuity. This is most literally true in "24," which made one basic promise seven years ago - "events occur in real time." The time bomb used to be a storyteller's crutch - do you think a real bomb was ever actually attached to a gigantic ticking clock? "24" turned it into a defining aesthetic. "Lost" also made the passage of time its central aesthetic - we're with the castaways every day, in every way, and so there's never really any sense of off-camera comfort. On older TV shows, the six days between episodes were a resting period for both the viewer AND the viewed. Not so on "Lost," where on occasion three episodes have gone by with nary a day forward on the island.

But continuity doesn't need to be so blatant. At its core, I think that narrative continuity simply comes down to an acknowledgment, within the narrative, that was has gone before did happen, and that the characters are as aware of it as we are. So, when Adriana, in a throwaway line in season 4 or 5 of Sopranos, mentions that Tony had some ducks in his pool once, we who have watched from the beginning can remember those ducks - and recall how, in their strange way, they were the catalyst for the whole series. "The Sopranos" is still years ahead of the competition - watch the closing episodes again, and notice how both Tony and AJ mutter "Poor You!" and remember old Livia Soprano yelling that phrase in season 1, sending her mobster son off to therapy.

Continuity, at its core, manifests itself in the simplest of terms: the characters take a break from talking about the plot, and instead talk about their shared past. The best, and most blissfully perfect, example that I can think of comes from the end of the first season of "Deadwood." Al Swearengen (the tavern owner) and Seth Bullock (the new Sheriff) stand up on Al's deck. Both men hate each other - Al has been working most of the season to gain control of the claim of a rich Widow in town (he killed her husband), and Seth has been working most of the season to protect that claim (along with accidentally falling in love with the widow.) The two men stare out over their town, and notice the Widow in the window, right across the street. Swearengen notes, apropos of nothing, that he has never actually met the widow. In "Deadwood," this is almost unthinkable - the town is barely bigger than two streets, so everyone meets everyone. But it's true - somehow, for an entire season, David Milch has managed to juggle any number of characters, without every letting the two oppositional forces so much as meet.

Continuity largely manifests itself in the serial arts. Movies are one-offs, and rightfully so. Too much reference backward can seem awkward - see the second and third "Pirates of the Caribbean," which piled on nobody's old favorites from the first movie (the evil Commodore! the funny pirate with one eye!), when we would have all been completely happy with just Jack Sparrow doing his crazy thing. Yet continuity is the essential pleasure of the third "Bourne" movie, which stitches itself between the penultimate and final scenes of "Supremacy," digs backward into the hidden depths of "Identity," and ends up being a deeper and fuller experience than either one. When Julia Stiles says "It was difficult for me, with you," with tears in her eyes, we all finally realize why Julia Stiles is still in this trilogy after two movies' worth of uselessness, and when she gives herself a Franka Potente haircut, the romance is so right, and so twisted.

To be continued, natch.

When McCain Was McCain

Whose reputation has been more ruined by this campaign? Rudy Giuliani, who went from "America's Mayor" to "America's Least Favorite 9/11-humping GOP candidate?" Reverend Jeremiah Wright, head of a magnificently large congregation, who was unfairly lambasted in the media for a few scant seconds of video footage, and was then fairly lambasted in the media for a horrific, implosive, supernova-like speech at the National Press Club? Bill Clinton, who used to represent the long-lost promise of the pre-Bush era? His performance these past few months - the "Fairy Tale" comment, linking Obama's primary win to Jesse Jackson, his endlessly inaccurate retelling of Hillary's retelling of the sniper myth - was an end-of-innocence eye-opener, on par with seeing your parents have sex or watching Aeris die, for kids of my generation who spent years of this decade huddling for warmth missing the 90s. It's not just that it was all horribly mean-spirited; it was so obviously mean-spirited, as if Slick Willie had run out of lubrication after years in the doghouse. Where was the grinning wonder who could debate the definition of "is" with a smiling face?

I think it's going to be John McCain. I'm counting my chickens and knocking on wood, since he may yet ascend to the highest office in the United States. But ever since he started winning, McCain has stopped being McCain and has become someone - hell, something - very much else. Maybe he's just getting older. Maybe the thrill of the fight - being the underdog, racing against his own party - kept him young, so the second that he became the anointed one, all the energy just sapped out. (Something similar happened to McCain's fellow right-wing hero, Jack Bauer, who spent about four seasons chasing viewers, one season wowing them, and then one season chasing them away.) Or maybe he's just always been a bigtime douchebag, and it's only now, when there no other douchebags around to absorb media attention, that it's all coming out.

I don't think so. I can remember 2004, an ugly time in history, reading about McCain and the Gay Marriage Ban. This was a campaign season without any real inspiration for the Democrats - John Kerry was essentially running on "I'm Not Bush" campaign (to this day, I will defend John Kerry, but only because of a speech he gave three decades before he ran for President.) The thing is, as little rhetoric as Kerry really had, the core of his campaign - stressing what he wasn't - filtered down to we campus liberals, who couldn't really define ourselves as anything except for Republican haters.

Because there were no real ideas to debate - Kerry was too timid to talk ideas, and Bush was a retard chimpanzee - the whole campaign basically came down to a game of "Fuck you!" Here's how you play: one person tries to talk, while the other person yells "Fuck you!" at the top of his lungs, then the two people trade places, and you keep playing for the rest of your natural life expectancy. The first person to quit loses. And that was basically my vision of Republicans - they said "Fuck You" to us, so I said "Fuck You" to them. Thank you, Karl Rove.

Anyways, what always struck me about John McCain's words about the Gay Marriage ban was that he didn't say it was wrong, he said it was "antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans." In a world where the President was talking about defending the institution of marriage from activist judges - which is kind of like defending the institution of spelunking from firefly ninjas (or defending the institution of friendship from Hitler) - this was like the voice of a loving relative talking you out of a coma nightmare, reminding you that there was a real world where Republicans stood for things and Democrats stood for things and they could argue about those things until the end of time, but that all of those things had a basic ring of truth. McCain wasn't the Republican who Democrats could love; he was the Politician who Sane People could love, cutting through the endless bounds of bullshit and trying to just, well, talk to people. That was straight talk, and no bullshit.

Now, he's all bullshit, all the time. Gag. Arthur C. Clarke's "2010" was a more likely vision of the future than John McCain's "2013."

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Battlestar Galactica - "Faith"

(I use vivid about a billion times in the following. I'm sick today.)

Am I the only one who thinks that "Caprica" is a bad, bad idea? Science-fiction epic prequels have a bad track record - see "Star Wars," yes, but also "Star Trek: Enterprise," the last misbegotten iteration of a bloatedly overwrought mythos before the emergency Abramization; "The Magician's Nephew," the Narnia book that nobody ever remembers; "The Silmarillion" and the great bulging heap of posthumous work by Tolkien which forms the history of untold millenia of Middle-Earth and proves that nothing else ever happened there that was nearly as interesting, or as dramatic, as what happened in the year-plus-change that forms "The Lord of the Rings"; "Prelude to Foundation" and "Forward the Foundation," sequels written forty years after the original that follow the classic bad sequel rule of featuring the name of the original book, a conjunction, and a bland noun or verb; the dueling prequel versions of "The Exorcist," which proved that no matter what kind of filmmaker you hired (what two directors have less in common than Paul Schrader and Renny Harlin?) a prequel was bound to suck; and "Young Hercules," a fascinating curio spin-off that replaced Kevin Sorbo with, of all people, Ryan Gosling.

The problem is that prequels always seem like such brilliant ideas when you're talking about science fiction or fantasy. "The Silmarillion" is a good example. "The Lord of the Rings" is full of throwaway lines about old epic battles - who wouldn't want to see them? And there are so many wonderfully fascinating cities (Cities on mountains, cities in mountains, cities by the sea, cities on the sea) - who wouldn't want to see how they were built?

The thing is that cities get built by being built - slowly and surely, without much in the way of fascinating drama. Maybe that's unfair - certainly, there must have been a splendid amount of bureaucracy involved in the building of Moria, with building inspectors accepting graft from certain large mining cooperatives to ensure they got the deepest mineshafts, and artsy dwarves petitioning Durin to spend more money on public schools and less money on gigantic rows of columns, and all the money flowing in from levies at Khazad-Dum.

But this is storytelling on the David Simon level, requiring a storyteller who can make vivid drama out of abstract concerns and bureaucracy, and Tolkien, whose leaden prose depended on epic action and fanciful visuals, was just kind of boring writing from the remove of the mass-historical tone. I have friends who enjoy "The Silmarillion," but I could never get through it - just skipped ahead toward near the very end, when, in a few little pages, Tolkien describes the action of "Lord of the Rings" as if it were just a tiny skirmish between longtime adversaries the Elves, the Wizards, and the Dark Lord, when even a preschooler could tell you that the most important people were the Hobbits.

True, "Battlestar Galactica" itself was an out-there idea (remake of a crappy 70s tv show, financed by the crappiest channel ever? SIGN ME UP!) But part of the reason why BSG has been so much more narratively successful than any other work of science-fiction - and the main reason why it has been so embraced outside of science-fiction circles - is the very vivid sense in every episode that this story is the most important story in the universe. The show has been very good about portraying the different aspects of life on the fleet, but it always enters those different arenas at a point of pulpy drama - we learn about organized crime only after the Commander of the Pegasus gets strangled to death; we get a Saggitaron sociology lesson, but only because they're being mysteriously murdered in sick bay; we saw two Cylons, Caprica Six and Boomer, decide to take their race in a new course, but that was while they were standing in the wreckage of a resistance bomb, after shooting one of their own people.

That last one is a good example of just how well served the show has been by television's need to compartmentalize, to mark decisive turns in the show's overall mythology with vivid details of plot. Compare that decision to the morbidly slow politicking of the "Star Wars" prequels. There is a dynamic feel to politics in "BSG," like nothing else on TV except "The Wire" (which was far more realistic) and "The West Wing" (far less so.) Other shows have had some say in the abortion debate, but BSG is the one platform where abortion can genuinely be described as a danger to the future of humanity. Such dilemmas are explicitly moral, but more importantly, they are explicitly dilemmas - when there's only a few thousand humans left in the universe, they better start fucking, fast.

I'm not counting out "Caprica," but so much of what's great about BSG is that sense of desperation. It's there in the style of the show - the shaky cameras, the bleak shadows of spaceship back corridors, an alcoholic rationing what's left of his space booze into a measuring cup (and then selfishly drinking the whole thing.) The miniseries provided little more than a sketch of Colonial culture - flying cars here, Tokyo-esque buildings there - but nothing particularly stuck before the nukes went off. Perhaps because I came to it only after watching the first season, I've never been a huge fan of the miniseries - "33" is much more vivid starting point for the series. The destruction of colonial civilization is such a breath of fresh air precisely because it promises to cut through the all encyclopedic arcana of "expanded universes" that had become a sci-fi hallmark. In those mushroom clouds, you can see practically see a decade of Star Wars spin-off books and Star Trek comics and everything Stargate go "boom!"

The great thing about BSG is that, for the most part, it still feels as vivid as ever - now more than ever, perhaps, because it's so close to the endgame. I think it's because Ronald D. Moore and his genius brigade have so closely adhered to the "Lord of the Flies" meets John Rawls promise inherent in the original concept - the notion of building an entire civilization out of the bare ruins of a previous one. Rather than adding in dramatic new elements, they continually re-examine what they've already established in order to develop the essential dramas of the show even further.

As an example, take a plot point from last night which started out horrifically obvious. Starbuck is leading a tiny mission. With her are Boomer, Anders, Leoben, and some random. That's four characters with magnificent importance to the overarching mythology of the show - two sleeper agent Cylons, one original Cylon, and whatever Starbuck is/has been/will be - and, well, someone expressly introduced for this dangerous mission. Wonder what's going to happen to her? (Aside - I'm holding back the urge to check the episode's IMDB page, but knowing how good the writers usually are about this sort of things, I wouldn't put it past them to have taken a character who has appeared briefly in the past for this role, but even if that's true, then I think my argument still stands, because she wasn't even a random character we kind of care about, like Selix or Hot Dog.)

In bare outline, what happened next is basically the same thing that always happened to red shirted security people on Star Trek - the away team runs afoul of the hostiles, and the guy that's not Kirk, Spock or McCoy gets shot. But what actually happened was mesmerizing, because, even though neither character had a past on the show, the specific reason why they came into conflict had tremendous roots in the show's recent, and distant, history.

The Six - a softspoken, physically timid iteration of a model that once seemed to represent little more than seductive evil and evil seduction - approached the Random Woman almost nervously, but what she said carried force - "You killed me back on New Caprica." The Random Woman was merciless - "Yeah, and I'd do it again." And then the Six hit her - just a few times was all that was necessary, when it's a human head between a superstrong android fist and spaceship metal. In what was a death worthy of "Full Metal Jacket" (or at least "Apocalypse Now"), Barolay (that was the Random Woman's name - I broke down and checked wikipedia, and yes, she's been around since season 2) stumbled, stood up, mumbled "All right," as if preparing to counterattack or to break up a schoolroom scuffle, then fell down, dead.

What ensued was a standoff that seemed just suspenseful - IS ANDERS GONNA SHOOT HER ROH MY GOD! But then, something incredible happened. The Six described how Barolay had killed her - not professionally, not honorably, but mercilessly, watching her drown, maybe even laughing at her. I think this is the first time that the false death of Cylons - the one with rebirth on the other end - has been presented as a genuine trauma, as opposed to a minor inconvenience. Maybe Cylons don't dream of electric sheep, but they clearly do PTSD as well as any human soldier.

(Then something deeply weird happened - Tricia Helfer kissed herself - proving that BSG, not Lost, is the real inheritor of the Twin Peaks mantle of "strangest show on TV.")

As random as she was as a character (although all props to this show for keeping their third-stringers around - it makes pointless deaths all the more meaningful, in a meaningfully pointless way), I like Barolay, because I think her whole attitude speaks volumes about just how precisely this show has changed in three and a quarter seasons. At least in its presentation of Cylons, the show has morphed delicately, but purposefully, from a right-wing nightmare dream to a left-wing dream nightmare. Let me explain. When the show first started, the Cylons were shadowy yet infinite creatures, able to pop up in massive numbers at any time, launch nuclear missiles by the hundred, who literally destroyed all civilization. The fact that they were so shadowy made it even more frightening when one of them would show up - with dynamite wrapped around their chest, or worse, when they turned out to be the people closest to us.

Back then, the jocky cameraderie of the pilots was enjoyable - as were their slang terms, like "toaster." Something changed, though, and it's hard to tell when - maybe it was when Boomer, the central tragic tortured character of Season 1, got shot by Cally (and the killer's face showed nothing but abject hatred and mindless betrayal, while the killee's face was all sadness, and confusion, and resignation); maybe it was when we saw Gina, the much abused, probably oft-gang-raped Six on Pegasus (that was the first real sign that Tricia Helfer could create so many radically different characters, often onscreen at the same time); certainly our minds were changed a little in "Downloaded," when we realized that the Cylons were just as confused as the humans.

Its not just that we gained a deeper understanding of the Cylons - although that has always been the main genius of the latter years of BSG (its upperclassmen years, if you will), that it's somewhat fearlessly plunged us into Cylon culture. It's that we gained an understanding that the Cylons were, above all, a curious people - and moreover, that they were capable of regret, and of recrimination (they decided, after all, that destroying humanity was not a good decision.) Yet the humans maintained their antipathy to the Cylon race - even coming up with new epithets, like "Skin Jobs," which sounds like a nasty sex act, and which I hope to use someday to describe people I know and hate who got plastic surgery. There was something so tiny about the pilots, who were still known to mutter "Frakkin' Toasters" under their breath - while meanwhile, over in the Base Star, those Frakkin' Toasters were trying to find God.

That's why, in its own small way, the short unhappy tale of Barolay the Red Shirt may just be the turning point in the show - because, after the Six described her first inconceivable death, then welcomed her second one, I couldn't help but feel as if I was more on her side than on Barolay's.

In a nutshell: when BSG began, it was post-9/11, when everyone was united against a common enemy that was everywhere. It's a nightmare scenario, yet some kind of a dream for those people who dream of a simple, uncomplicated world where all you have to do is kill the bad guy. I called them "right wing" earlier, but that's not really fair - it wasn't just right wing people who gave Bush a huge support percentage after 9/11, it was practically everyone. Yet by now, when we're post-post-9/11 in the show, we have seen the enemy tortured behind any shred of dignity (and thus, have seen "our people" lose their own), and we have also come to understand their culture. We have come to hate our own people, and come to love and cherish the enemy. This is an absolute dream for liberals everywhere - that we can understand the enemy, and love them, even - yet it is, in its own way, almost suicidally sincere, overly diplomatic, the sort of thing that can only emerge from a world of complete chaos.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Lost: "Cabin Fever"

When you watch the pilot episode of "Lost" now, two things strike you about the man who would turn out to be John Locke. The first thing is that he barely even appears at all in the episode (the angry-sibling stylings of hottie Boone and hottie Shannon - remember them - jockey for supporting time with Michael's awkward-father act.) The second thing is that he looks old - wearing a white collared shirt and brown slacks, the kind of formal yet comfortable outfit that defines old people of a certain pastoral-suburban temperament. His only real dialogue in the first episode is an exchange with Walt, on backgammon - "Two players. Two sides. One is light... one is dark." Everything about Locke's presentation in the scene - his Buddha-Yoda position with his legs crossed, his philosophical lecture tone, the fact that he's speaking to a ready, willing student - places him as a prototypical Wise Old Man, a suspicion which is enhanced by what he says next: "Do you want to know a secret?"

Who was Locke? A mystery man in a plane full of mystery people. Some kind of outdoorsman, clearly with Special Forces training - maybe a government agent? Did he know something about the island - was that the secret that he told Walt? Of course, back then, we didn't even know if the island was an island, so maybe he was something greater - an angel, say, or some chess-playing baldheaded God Himself. (He had a gash over his eye, suggesting Odin One-Eye, overlord of the Norse pantheon who sacrificed an eye to gain the Wisdom of Ages.) He was played by Terry O'Quinn, who was the dark overlord of the digital world in "Harsh Realm" and a shadowy FBI Director on "Alias" (I actually never saw the show, but knowing JJ Abrams I would imagine that any FBI Director was probably shadowy); he also had three separate guest-starring roles on "The X-Files." Was Locke this show's Smoking Man - the guy with all the answers?

"Walkabout" confirmed those suspicions - the flashback begins with a phone call to Locke, a voice calls him "Colonel" and tells him to meet at the "usual rendezvous point" - and then dashed them completely. Locke was a complete loser, working in cubicle in a box company, with an asshole boss. His one source of joy was playing strategy board games with an ugly co-worker. He spent hours talking to phone sex operators and even asked one to travel with him to Australia. He was in a wheelchair. "Walkabout" was the first "Lost" episode that people called "great."

Terry O'Quinn was fearless in that episode, and has remained so - his Emmy last year was well-deserved, because a lesser actor have been creamed by all the dark, weird places they've taken John Locke. O'Quinn has a tough bald head, a slight twinge of a folksy accent, and craggy features that probably made him look old when he was still in high school. It was the first sign of the show's genius, I think, to cast him in a role which initially seemed exactly natural for his type - strong, silent hunter with secret - and then completely twist the role in the opposite direction, revealing what a fragile, naive, even childlike man John Locke had been before the crash. For my money, the show has only rarely matched the moment at the end of "Walkabout" when John wakes up to the devastation of the plane crash, finds that he can stand up, and, with loud noises of shredding metallic death screams on every side, laughs so hard that you can see his happy tears.

Since that episode, Locke has always seemed much younger to me - and I think this speaks to just what an original character the Lost boys created here. Here's a man who is middle-aged - we learned in "Cabin Fever" that he was 48. But man, he looks much older - and I don't just mean because Terry O'Quinn is 55. Brad Pitt is 45; George Clooney is 48; Tom Cruise is 46; hell, Mel Gibson is 52, and even post-rehab, you can't tell me that you think he actually looks 52. Hell, Terry O'Quinn practically looks older than Al Pacino. I don't mean that as an insult. Like Tommy Lee Jones (who looked sixty long before he actually turned 60), O'Quinn wears his years without a hint of vanity. I think that, in the modern age, because life is so much longer, and because guys like Brad and George and Tom still get photographed in t-shirts for the covers of men's magazines, we're used to thinking of the 40s and even the 50s as being a second youth for men.

Not so for John Locke, whose life looked just about over before he was lucky enough to crash on an island on the ocean. Or was it just luck? That's been one of the central questions of the show - destiny versus coincidence versus choice, etc etc - and Locke has always fallen hard on the side of abject and trusting belief. This has bitten him in the ass over and over - it means he keeps trusting Ben, for one thing - yet "Cabin Fever" seemed to indicate that coming to the island was his destiny. Or at least, certain very powerful immortal men made it his destiny.

There were, by my count, at least 15 moments in "Cabin Fever" which made me and my friend Carlos react in a manner which is, I believe, unique to viewers of "Lost" - it's when something happens that is both a surprise and a long-awaited revelation, something you didn't know was coming until literally a moment before it happened, and you make a noise that's somewhere between screaming and laughing and gagging (because you are fitting many different emotions into a millisecond, because you don't want to talk and miss something), while your body manages to convulse without your ass leaving the seat. The biggest one, I think, came when you saw Richard - eternally young Richard - staring at preemie baby Locke's smoking grandma. Except that there may have been an even bigger one later in the episode, when you realized (almost immediately, certainly long before the camera bothered to show his impeccable face) that the orderly pushing John back to his room was Matthew Abaddon.

Are these two men working together, or working in opposition? Why do they care so much about some bastard child who was born months premature, lived in foster homes, got stuffed into lockers, and met his biological father later in life only to have the man steal his kidney, ruin his almost-marriage to Katey Segal, and then throw him out the window?

For me, I think, this episode (and, in many ways, much of this show's history) all came down to the scene in Locke's high school, when perhaps the nerdiest science teacher to ever appear in narrative filmmaking told Locke that he had a tremendous scientific gift, and that he would be wrong to squander that by trying to be a sportsman - the subtext, I think, being, "Son, you're a nerd, and jocks are going to be stuffing you into lockers for the rest of high school, and if you try to be a jock, if you try to be popular, then you'll still be unpopular and you'll still get stuck in lockers, but you won't get good grades like a nerd and you won't go to college and you'll probably end up working at a box company when you're old and bald and all alone." The teacher was basically telling Locke not to try to be some other person - that the person he already was was enough.

When we first met Locke, we all thought he was a violent man, a frontiersman, some kind of soldier or cowboy knight. It's clear that Locke fashioned himself that way. Here, courtesy of Lostpedia, is what Richard laid in front of 5-year-old John Locke, asking him which already belonged to him. A baseball glove, a book called the "Book of Laws,' a vial of greyish material that could have been seeds (or maybe gunpowder), a brass compass, a comic book, and a knife. Each of these items has all sorts of resonance - we remember how much Walt loved comic books, and we try to remember who on the show has used a compass (Locke, Michael, and Sayid, not to mention all the various discussions this season of "following the precise bearing" back to the island) - but who was surprised when John, who over four decades later would throwstab Naomi in the back, picked the knife? And who wasn't surprised when Richard, like an embarrassed grail knight, told John that he'd chosen poorly? Is Locke supposed to be a hero? How does a man move an island, exactly?

"Cabin Fever" caps a true unbroken stretch of brilliance for the show - throw this one in next to last week's "Something Nice Back Home" and Ben's The Shape of Things To Come," and you've got a genuine trilogy, of sorts. Together, they form a panoramic portrait of the show's three protagonists, Ben, Jack, and Locke - three men who epitomize the warring themes and factions on the island, who each consider themselves heroes, who find themselves often betraying (and betrayed by) everything they hold dear.

Prediction: We've got three hours of "Lost" left this season, and it's still not quite clear to me what kind of hours they are - because the last hour was only added on a few weeks ago, which would seem to indicate that the creator already had a plan for the last hour and it kept on expanding. Before this episode, I had made the prediction that this year's season finale was going to follow on the heels of season 2 and season 3 - focusing in one single character (I predicted Locke. WRONG!) I still believe that we are going to get, with this season finale, an island flashforward - that is, in the midst of the final battle of the season - (between Keamy's men and the castaways - god, don't you love Keamy? I bet he's this year's Henry Gale - a character hired for a tiny story arc who will expand in importance the next couple years. Is that too much to hope for? With only about 35 episodes left, is there no more room for awesome new characters?) - we are going to cut to the final battle of the series, which will end with the Oceanic Six set adrift in the middle of the ocean. Who is the final battle between? Hell, who would even be participating? The castaways, sure; the freighter folk, if there's anyone left; the Natives, sure; the Smoke monster, if it's even a monster at all.

Is it possible that this year's finale would actually be more similar to season 1 - flashforwards for everyone? We still don't know what happens to half of the cast in the future - are Sawyer, Jin, Juliet, Rose, Locke, Bernard, Miles, Faraday, Charlotte, and Lapidus still on the island? Could there be a huge group flashforward to life after the Oceanic Six, when some of the castaways live in seclusion in the caves (led by Sawyer), and Charlotte and Faraday live with the natives studying the island, and Locke leads his own merry band of true believers (wouldn't Rose believe in him?), and Juliet lives off in the jungle like Rousseau, trapped forever on the island she hates?

Or am I completely on acid? The two castaways who haven't had episodes yet - Claire and Sawyer - each offer their own fascinating possibilities. My brother pointed out something that I hadn't thought about - that seeing Claire in the cabin with her perhaps-dead father felt right for the character, that they had finally gotten that baby-shaped lodestone off her neck, and with it, the air of tragic self-importance that has dogged her for years. Is she already dead, as many have theorized? I don't think so - that would break the creators' own rules. (People who die on the island die; dead people who are brought to the island, on the other hand...) I do think that she is moving to some higher state of island existence - and that an hour with the new Claire, perhaps chatting with Christian, would make for hellishly awesome television.

My money is on some kind of group flash, either forward or back or more likely some combination of the two. I am a bit fascinated, however, by the choice to leave Desmond on the freighter. Something about his assertion that he was never going back to the island felt quite final. I've written before about how distant Desmond's storyline is from the other characters, and it seems like this new development will only strengthen that distance. Before, I had expected that the freighter would be sinking, Titanic style, by season's end, but now I wonder if Desmond isn't going to spend next season as the offshore King of Freighterville, mediating between island and outside world, not wanting to leave his friends but at the same time wanting nothing more than to fix those engines and set sail for Fiji, as quick as possible.

You have to love this show - you not only don't know what's going to happen in the season finale, you also don't even know in what style the season finale will be told.

Here's crazy thought - what if it's a Christian Shepard flashback?

Thursday, May 8, 2008

"Made of Honor"

I have only come really close to having a panic attack twice while watching a movie. The first time was watching "Hostel Part II," which took all the jokey twists of the first "Hostel" and untwisted them, leaving just half-backed sadism with all the portentous ritual of a well-acted porno – during the first big torture scene, when Heather Matarazzo is hung upside down, naked, screaming, gagged, while a non sequitur torture queen comes inside, disrobes, lays down in a bathtub beneath Matarazzo, picks up a scythe, and, well, fills the bathtub, I became utterly nauseous.

Not because the scene was so gory - Cronenberg has done worse. (Hell, "Happy Tree Friends" has done worse.) It was because of Eli Roth's complete assault on everything that we value about movies - his ridiculous abuse of a fine actress (not that she was naked, nor that she was hanging upside down, but because he never even gave her character a chance; right from the moment she was conceived, she was just a fleshy blood bag.); his complete inability to fill a disturbing scene with any sense of suspense, or of rising action, or of any real forward narrative motion; his concurrent inability to give a character who's about to die any dialogue beyond screaming for long minutes on end; above all, it was his dull sympathy with the nameless naked woman performing the torture, a non-character cipher briefly introduced and never to return.

Don't get me wrong. I fucking love violence in movies, and I used to spend hours driving around Vice City and San Andreas running people over and then getting out of my car and hitting them with a baseball bat. Hell, I even used to love the torture scenes on "24," before they got so repetitive. Of course "24" has consequences, and the reason why "No Country For Old Men" won Best Picture was because it made cool violence look artsy, but also provided us with a memorable character performing the violence, and some consideration of the bleak moral landscape that could create such a character.

Roth is too lame of a filmmaker to realize that everyone can make a good torture scene, but the real key to winning people over is surprise. He doesn't trade in surprises. He prefers that you don't care enough. Great filmmakers - hell, even crappy filmmakers - know that the best way to make people less bored is to spring a surprise on them, to shift their expectations. Roth just gives you exactly what you're expecting, which is why his movies (and the whole torture porn genre) are never as much fun as they sound.

That's also why a movie like "Daredevil" is so much less fun than a movie like "Iron Man" - they tell more or less the same story, but the latter feels loose, like the actors were really trying to stretch, whereas the former feels rote, over-directed, rushing from one plot point to the next without any time to dally on chemistry, on dialogue, on any of the tiny little abstract bits of humanity that make the film Quentin Tarantino and Judd Apatow feel so much larger than they are.

That's also why, towards the end of "Made of Honor," I could feel the world spinning just a little bit and had to lean forward in my chair, so that if I vomited I wouldn't dirty my new white shoes and if I projective vomited I would have two inches of a better chance to cover the filth on the screen. What occurs in the offending scene would be the climax if the movie had any real sense of narrative progression - that is, if what had followed before it had any sort of rising action, or characters I believed in for half a second (rather than monotonous automaton clones the movie kept telling me to like). But whereas the original version of this movie, "My Best Friend's Wedding," had all sorts of complications that built up to its bittersweet, inevitable, and utterly perfect conclusion, this movie basically establishes its ripped-off concept then dawdles around for two hours waiting for itself to end.

"Made of Honor" begins with a bit of oddly topical humor - at a frat party in 1998, a guy in a suit stumbles around, wearing a Bill Clinton accent and speaking in an eerily perfect Bill Clinton accent. Watching this anonymous drunk stumble around and grope women dressed like Monica and run off from a woman dressed like Hillary Clinton, two things came to mind:

1) The 90s really were the lamest decade ever.

2) This movie has somehow stumbled into topicality - we saw it the day after the most recent batch of primaries - but only by making a joke that's ten years out of date.

3) There's no way that the guy under the mask can be Patrick Dempsey, because that's clearly not his voice.

Wrongo! Not only is it Patrick Dempsey - it's a weirdly de-aged Patrick Dempsey, either heavily made-up or digitally botoxed in order to look 22, though instead he looked more like the Ben Affleck synthoid from the crappy "Final Fantasy" movie.

Dempsey-Affleck-Clinton goes into a girl's room, mumbling "Monica" over and over, and gets into bed next to her - except, wait, would you believe it, it's the wrong girl! And she sprays him in the face, not with Mace but with designer perfume, lest you think she's some butch anti-man freak.

Here's the dialogue that ensues between them, written from memory:

She (clearly intelligent): "You've slept with half the people on my floor!"
He: "Half the people on your floor were women!"

I have a confession - I fucking love Patrick Dempsey on "Grey's Anatomy." He's fast-talking, he's full of himself, he's utterly romantic. Because movies no longer believe in romance, he's just fast-talking and full of himself in "Made of Honor," a fact which becomes even more clear when he (and the movie) tries to turn himself into a romantic. What is it about the transfer from television to the big screen that can turn so many great, complex leading men into such one-note blandies? Matthew Fox and Kiefer Sutherland cram so many layers into single hours of "Lost" and "24" - is it Hollywood's fault for saddling them with such uni-dimensional roles (both have played government agents in the last couple of years, poorly, in "Vantage Point" and "The Sentinel"), or their own for choosing such awful action movies?

In "Made of Honor," along with Dempsey, you also get to see the wasted talents of Kevin McKidd, who was a ridiculously complex ancient-accented antihero on "Rome" and a tortured, confused American-accented everyman on "Journeyman," playing a Scottish-accented other man. McKidd's role as the third man in a triangle, according to modern rules of shitty romance cinema, is to be basically perfect with a few minor particular imperfections that make him less perfect than Dempsey, and sure enough, McKidd is a Scottish Duke who can throw a tree twenty feet and dunk a basketball, but he also shoots animals for sport. What an asshole! What a shitty fucking movie!

By the way, here's how we learn about McKidd's demonic predilection for hunting: after an interminable second act in which Dempsey's character tries to prove to his betrothed best friend that she really loves him (he invented the coffee collar, which means he is yet another modern cinematic protagonist so rich that he doesn't need a job and so does nothing but hang around and live the high life), the entire cast sets off for McKidd's ancestral castle, where the wedding is going to take place.

(The ancestral castle is a composite character - the outside, my lovely fellow filmgoer informed me, is played by one of the oldest castles in Scotland, while the inside is played by Broughton Castle, a famous landmark in England, which also co-starred in "The Madness of King George" and "Shakespeare in Love." I was lucky enough to visit Broughton Castle on beautiful summer day in 2002, on a day trip from a summer program at Oxford. The hosts were a kindly old pair of nobles, related by blood to Ralph Fiennes, who hopefully made a considerably amount of British currency from letting this train wreck of a film despoil their castle's film career.)

Anyhow, everyone sits down for a big dinner. Now, I should let you know about the female protagonist, played by Michelle Monaghan, who is yet another young actress whose breakout role was also her only good role - since "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," she's unsuccessfully tried to spark chemistry with Tom Cruise in "M:iIII" (her largely silent performance in the film's penultimate scene - firing a gun and performing CPR - was pretty much the only exciting moment in the film), scarcely existed as the gal pal pet dick in "Gone, Baby, Gone" (with one great scene - coincidentally, the one scene where she gets to string more than three sentences together), and tried to spark chemistry with the ever-hammier Ben Stiller in "The Heartbreak Kid."

Anyways, Michelle is playing a museum worker. That's not a real job, but I have no idea what she actually does, and neither does the movie. Her barely-defined occupation takes her to Scotland, where she meet-cutes with Kevin McKidd. In the middle of a rainstorm, he rides in from the middle of nowhere on horseback, sweeps her off her feet, and takes her to a local pub, where they have an awful dinner. A whirlwind romance ensues - they take trips together (even though she's supposed to be working). After one month, he pops the question. She agrees.

I should point out that all of this is very interesting, and it all takes place offscreen. While Michelle is meeting the most amazing man in the world, striking immediate sparks, and traveling all across Europe, the movie dawdles back in America with Patrick Dempsey, who is really kind of bummed out that his best friend is gone, and who decides, suddenly, that he's actually in love with her. This is "Made of Honor" in a nutshell - completely ignorant of real romance, real comedy, real humanity.

So, anyways, Michelle and Kevin decide to get married after one month. This almost never happens in the real world and rings particularly false here, since she has been established as such a whipsmart no-bullshit type, and he is, well, a fucking Duke who could probably have anyone and everyone he would ever want. (I bet Dukes get more action than Kings do. I bet Dukes get more ass than anyone except Emperors and Sultanesses. Sultani?) But hey, Nick and Mariah just got hitched, so let's roll with this and give the movie a break. They decide to get engaged after a month. Okay.

But here's the kicker! Not only are they getting engaged after one month of knowing each other - they're getting married about three weeks after they get engaged. (One of my cousins just got engaged and is planning her wedding a year and a half in advance.) Not only that, she agrees to leave behind her entire life and move and live with him in Scotland. "It's a new chapter in my life!" she explains to Patrick Dempsey.

You might think that, well, you wouldn't know everything about a person in such a short span of time. Which is where the whole "your future hubby shoots cute animals!" revelation comes into play. Everyone sits down for a big dinner. Patrick Dempsey is at the end of the table, with a look on his face that would be melancholic if he wasn't the asshole who was trying to ruin his best friend's wedding in order to keep her for himself, after ten years of sleeping with a different woman every night and telling said best friend all about his favorite sluts the next day. (At one point in the movie, Dempsey and his fuck-stupid friends start a chant: "Steal the bride! Steal the bride!" This could be darkly funny, but it's presented without irony during a chirpy music montage - actually, this whole movie is basically a chirpy music montage - and so it's relentlessly disturbing. All of "Made of Honor" is like this - so horribly offtempo, so utterly cutesy about utterly meanspirited people, that if it were less boring and just a bit more sucktacular it would be our generation's rom-com "Plan 9.")

Michelle and Kevin are sitting together, natch. The waiters bring out the meat. It's meaty! Michelle is freaked out. I think she might be a vegetarian, although the movie is vague about that. Actually, I think she just dislikes anything that is embarrassingly Scottish, which makes you wonder why she's marrying a Scottish Duke and why she's agreed to move and live with him in Scotland, where presumably Scottish people do all kinds of Scottish things like eat Scottish food and drink Scottish Scotch and sing Scottish songs.

"Kevin shot that!" Kevin's mom informs her when she stares frightfully at the big hunk of Scottish meat. (Kevin McKidd's character actually has a name in the movie, but I don't want to give the "Made of Honor" IMDB page any excess traffic by trying to look it up what that name was.) "Kevin shot all of this!" She gestures around the room. "Kevin loves shooting." Michelle is horrified.

How can such an intelligent, worldly art-history major museum worker react like such a 50s schoolmarm to the notion that a Duke goes hunting? How can such a kindhearted, understanding Duke not know that his fiancé is a bit freaked out by hunting animals? When, outside of arranged marriages, do you learn so many obvious things about your husband-to-be the night before he becomes your husband-who-is?

The worst part of this movie, which is actually filled with worst parts from start to finish, is the romantic climax. As part of a Scottish tradition, Michelle has to wear a strange sash and accept kisses from the townspeople for money on the night before her wedding. (Although a crappy romantic comedy, "Made of Honor" makes an impressive Scottish social anthropology docudrama.) Dempsey pays her for a kiss. It's a passionate kiss, but it comes out of nowhere - Monaghan has been so starry-eyed over McKidd the whole movie. The fact that she kisses him back makes the movie, briefly, almost interesting - because, for the first time all movie, Monaghan seems to be genuinely conflicted. They have a fight afterwards, these two best friends who would be lovers (we are told by Michelle's mom that her dead father always thought she would marry Dempsey - Awwwww!) Dempsey decides to leave, on the morning of the wedding.

He gets about half a mile away away. (In Scotland, they call "miles" "kilometers," just like they call "girls" "lassies," "basketball" "netball," and "Made of Honor" "American Crap"). A herd of sheep blocks the car. He gets out. He sees a dog. There is a recurring thing in this film (calling it a "motif" would do a disservice to better movies everywhere), where, whenever Dempsey sees a dog, he ruffles its fur and tells the dog, "I love you." He does it again here, and decides, by God, I've got to go and ruin my best friend's wedding! AND HE DOES! HE RIDES ACROSS A LAKE ON HORSEBACK AND RUINS HIS BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING! HOORAY FOR ROMANCE!

Naturally, he walks into the wedding just as the preacher is saying the whole "speak now or forever hold your peace" bit. It's that kind of movie. Except he doesn't walk into the wedding - the horse stops, and sends him flying through the door head first. It's that kind of movie. Michelle turns away and runs to him. In front of everyone, he tells her that he loves her. It's that kind of movie. She tells him he's the worst Maid of Honor ever, and kisses him. It's that kind of movie.

I forgot to mention - the reason the shitty movie is shittily named "Made of Honor" is because she jokingly asks him to be her "Maid of Honor," which leads to not nearly enough gay jokes, in my opinion, because although a Catholic preacher and an old Scottish woman both think that Dempsey is gay, no one ever tries to set him up with an attractive gay Scotsman, and by the end of this movie nothing would have pleased me more than to see Dempsey arm-in-arm with an attractive gay Scotsman. What the fuck does "Made of Honor" mean, exactly? It's without a doubt the most non sequitur title pun ever, of all time. There is no honor in this movie, and thus no one made of it. Unlike, say, "Legally Blonde," the title says nothing about the movie except that one of the three credited screenwriters must have a homophone dictionary. It just means that whenever I think of the title, I always get it confused with "Maid in Manhattan" and "Made in America" and "Men of Honor" and "Medal of Honor," all of which were better movies than "Made of Honor," and "Medal of Honor" wasn't even a movie. (Another, better possible title: "Scotch Frisky.")

Anyways, we've finally reached the point that made the world spin for me, but not in a good way. After finally kissing this man, this wonderful man who has slept with everyone she knows, Monaghan turns around and faces Kevin McKidd, who was about to be, you know, her husband. He has this absolutely crushed look on his face, and suddenly, a character who was barely even sketched in the movie suddenly came into sharp focus.

I realized, at that moment, that, in this movie's worldview, Scottish people are actually happy retard cavemen who live in a state of permanent idiot bliss and actually do fall in love with women in one month or less, and who dream of taking these women to their lovely castles on the coast where they'll spend the rest of their days growing old and happy and having tasteful Old World sex and drinking Scotch whiskey (but only to comfortable excess.)

And Monaghan, in her wedding dress, tells her formerly betrothed:

"Kevin, you're the perfect guy, just not the perfect guy for me."

SELFISH BITCH! YOU COULDN'T HAVE FIGURED THIS SHIT OUT AN HOUR AGO?

This scene - the mid-wedding climax - has been played so many different ways, and I don't mind that this movie is using a cliché. One of my favorite movies, "Love Actually," is basically just a systematic hyperventilation of every romantic cliché ever invented, sometimes several times over. But the cliché isn't even used well here. It's just depressing, because you feel bad for Kevin McKidd, and it's even more depressing, because Monaghan, who has spent the whole movie being an unlikely but quite unselfish and really very thoughtful person, has now become exactly like Patrick Dempsey, completely selfish and utterly thoughtless.

"Gag!" I thought, taking in deep control breaths like my first therapist taught me and imagining the bad thoughts as small waves on the beach running back into the good-thought-ocean, trying to stare away from the screen so as to remind myself that reality wasn't nearly as awful as "Made of Honor" made it look. "What could be worse?"

CUT TO: Another wedding! Dempsey and Monaghan! Presumably getting married about three days later! Hoorah happy ending. But no! Wait! CUT TO: The honeymoon bedroom! They're in bed together, just like they were back at the start of the movie, when Dempsey was wearing a Clinton mask and Digital botox and Monaghan was as semi-believable character.

Dempsey hits the lamp: "I just want to make sure you're the right girl this time."

Monaghan giggles at this sarcastic reminder of the fact that her husband is a walking STD factory. The movie makes her out to be a squeaky-clean vegetarian pacifist virgin messiah figure, but at least she has a sense of humor.

Monaghan: "Oh, Bill!"

Dempsey: "Oh, Monica!"

Oh, romance!