Thursday, June 19, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
"Sex and the City" - Season 1
One approaches the complete series of "Sex and the City" with trepidation, even when it comes to you by way of an East Asian bootleg box, with its photoshopped, chronologically mismatched, delightfully un-chic packaging (Chinese bootleg DVDs always reminds you just how fetishistically overdesigned American packaging has become - dig that Criterion collection, with its clear-plastic slipcases, or the "Alien Quadrilogy" megapack, which unrolls into 9 DVDs like a xenomorph's vaguely phallic prehensile tail.) For nearly as long as I have been absorbing pop culture (I usually mark the date with the 1997 end-of-the-year issue of Entertainment Weekly, although the true frenzy didn't begin until 1999, when I started to save and reread every issue) "Sex and the City" has been a phenomenon. I was hermetically sealed off from it in a number of ways while it was still playing - I didn't have HBO, I didn't date, I went to an all-boys school and so never met or spoke to girls outside of speech tournaments and impressively awkward summer camps.
So it wasn't until the series finale, in February 2004, that I learned "Sex and the City" was some kind of rallying cry for young women everywhere. I was in a freshman dorm, and I magically suddenly knew all kinds of girls - hippie chicks with soft drug stashes, New York club kids with hard drug issues, type-A personas on the dance team and the student government, environmentalists, pre-meds, a softball superstar, a cheerleader, an heiress to software mega-fortune, and the daughter of a man who various sources claimed practically owned an entire African nation - and for a few days, they were all talking about "Sex and the City." This is how I knew Mr. Big's name was John, before I knew he was Mr. Big.
That's not quite true - I had skimmed enough articles on the show to be able to speak intelligently about its Emmy chances, or to point out that it had gotten less fun in the last few seasons. I knew Miranda had a baby, that Charlotte was the nice one, that Samantha had tons of sex and had briefly dated another woman (just the thought of that coupling was enough to make me incapable of following any classes for days.) I knew there was some guy named Aidan, and that Baryshnikov was in the show somewhere. Maybe I knew less - I didn't know much more.
It's all kind of jumbled up now, because in May, after over four years of putting it off, I watched the entire "Sex and the City" - all six and a half seasons, plus one movie. The cumulative effect of so much "Sex" - 94 episodes, spread over seven years, vividly portraying late-90s wandering and post-9/11 PTSD, steadily moving from standalone episodes into epic twisted love affairs, asking any number of questions about gender and sexuality and metropolitanism, teetering constantly between boundary-busting invention and perversely old-fashioned romance, refashioned and reconsidered but still defiantly retro. Like any great TV show, "Sex and the City" only seems like a glorious whole when you consider it from a distance.
Viewed all at once, it can feel like you're in the middle of a typhoon, as the show simultaneously drifts forward into its golden age and backward into its years of intriguing decline. That's true of nearly every great show that lasts long enough and becomes popular enough to attract new fans just as it's attracting a backlash - "The Simpsons," "The Sopranos," "The X-Files," "Seinfeld" and "Friends" all lasted (or, in the Simpsons' case, is still lasting) long enough to basically remake TV culture in their image, which simultaneously made them ill-fit to continue in a world that they themselves created. (Based on its lackluster recent season, "South Park" may be the most recent victim of this syndrome - last season's "Imagination Land" three-part masterpiece is looking more and more like a magnum opus series finale.)
The hot thing to do when talking about the complete series is to begin by pointing out how messy the first season is. True, Sarah Jessica Parker talking to the camera gets pretty old pretty fast, although it is kind of funny that her hubby Matthew Broderick got famous for doing exactly the same thing in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Still, it was funny how, whenever I told any woman that I was watching the whole series, they would always, like clockwork, point out that I really had to suffer through season 1 to get to the good stuff.
Actually, I enjoyed the first season. True, the episodes are more openly formulaic than they would be later in the series. Especially in the latter half of the season, it goes like this: Carrie and Big have an awkward moment which only Carrie seems to notice, at which point she talks to her three friends about the awkward moment and then embarks on a column which turns that moment into a question of high societal philosophy; the four women then embark on misadventures with men which all rotate around that question. Like dominos in a row, the subplots all wrap up in time for Carrie to suddenly express her frustration/anxiety/anger to Big, at which point he vaguely apologizes and they hug. (The exemplary episode of this structure of "Three's a Crowd," where the friends suffer through emotional, physical, psychological, and romantic 'threesomes.' This means that Carrie's narrated double entrendres are simultaneously soft-core lame and Time-Magazine meaningful.)
Here's the thing - I actually like these formula episodes. True, they're neither as funny, as groundbreaking, or as emotionally involving as later seasons, but these first twelve episodes have two things going for them ahead of the later seasons. On one hand, the show is not yet a phenomenon; there's an unhurried, unfussy looseness in the structure. Whereas later season would focus more attention on the friendship of the four women, here in Season 1 Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte are just friends who hang out and chit chat in between relationships. Their ongoing dialogue, over coffee and cosmos, would eventually turn into an era-defining Greek Chorus - here, though, the focus is a bit more on the action and less on their gab.
What I mean is that each girl seems to be in their own world - there isn't a whole lot of overlap in their storylines. It's as if they're all dating in their own individual parallel universe New Yorks (which, given the one-joke premise of many of their relationships - "the guy who films sex," "the guy who paints vaginas," "the angry guy on anti-depressants who can't keep it stiff anymore" - may actually form a genuine metaphysical thesis for the show.) The episode which violates this structure most is "The Baby Shower," which hints at the depths of the womens' friendship as surely as it hints (in the character of Laney, partygirl turned suburban mom) at the dark weirdness in store for the later years of the show, when one-night-stands were replaced by marriage and children and other necessary unfun early-middle-aged things.
At the same time, these early episodes strike me as being "Sex and the City" at its purest, and not just because it was all brand new. Because there were no real ongoing storylines besides Carrie and Big (remember, this was before TiVo, iTunes, and "24" made the world safe for serial narratives), each episode seems free to focus itself more on a topic than on a story - Season 1 feels most like the column which the show portrays, and least like a TV show. Because there are no long-term relationships (again, besides Big), there is a literal parade of men each episode, each one vaguely representative of something both sexually contemporary and classically boorish; you also get the funny cutaways to random New Yorkers, which probably played much worse before "Family Guy" and "Arrested Development" made cutaways popular and genius, respectively.
From reading about "Sex and the City," I figured I had a firm grasp of the characters - Carrie the thinker (or, among men talking, the whiny one), Charlotte the romantic one (or the uptight prude WASP), Samantha the sexual one (or the slut queen), and Miranda the working woman (or the "isn't she a lesbo in real life?" one.) And although I freely admit I grew obsessed with the tribulations of all of these characters over one month and six seasons, I don't think my initial impressions of any of them were remotely wrong.
Except for Miranda, who, right from the start, manages to explode every stereotype of women, even the ones "Sex and the City" created. Dry-witted yet desperate, unfussy yet neurotic, violently unstylish, a woman in the workplace who hates being treated differently yet who isn't below faking a lesbian romance in order to get invited to her bosses' couples parties, Miranda's weird duality is established right in the first episode. Watch her play off Skipper, the pre-nerd-chic loser with the whiny voice, and whiny glasses, and whiny hair. She completely cuts him down, like Samantha would so many men throughout the run, yet she also recognizes some inherent sweetness in the guy, like Charlotte. But whereas both of those characters always seem more like mouthpieces for two particular and often oppositional worldviews, Miranda is just a city gal who wants to get laid and maybe enjoy it, if she's lucky. She so often sleeps with the least attractive guys, like Skipper (or his bespectacled brother beta-male Steve) - not so much because she settles as because, in her alternate-universe New York, men look pretty much like they do in the real world - normal, if not ugly.
One final thought - near the end of the very first episode of the series, there's a moment which fascinated me the first time through and which beguiled me throughout the series. A guy who pops up throughout the first episode, first in cutaways and then on a chaste date with Charlotte, has found himself back in his room with Samantha. They make out, and he starts to take her clothes off. He tells her that he has to work early in the morning, so she can't stay the night. She says "Okay," with that lusty purr Kim Cattrall puts on practically every syllable. He takes off her top - I forget, but I think these might be the first pair of serious tits we see in the show. He moves out of the frame, and for just a second, a look passes over Samantha's face. What is it? Sadness? Frustration? Disappointment? It's only there for a moment, and then it turns back into a smile (clearly, the guy is doing some work below the camera), but much more than Carrie's narration, it seems express the show's essential ambiguity.
You're a working woman, you've just been brought home by a man, and he's just informed you that after you two are done fucking like overcaffeinated probably-inebriated potentially-drugged out thirtysomethings, you have to put your soiled clothes back on and take the walk of shame back home. Is this glamour? Is this the way things are supposed to be? Is anyone on this show happy?
So it wasn't until the series finale, in February 2004, that I learned "Sex and the City" was some kind of rallying cry for young women everywhere. I was in a freshman dorm, and I magically suddenly knew all kinds of girls - hippie chicks with soft drug stashes, New York club kids with hard drug issues, type-A personas on the dance team and the student government, environmentalists, pre-meds, a softball superstar, a cheerleader, an heiress to software mega-fortune, and the daughter of a man who various sources claimed practically owned an entire African nation - and for a few days, they were all talking about "Sex and the City." This is how I knew Mr. Big's name was John, before I knew he was Mr. Big.
That's not quite true - I had skimmed enough articles on the show to be able to speak intelligently about its Emmy chances, or to point out that it had gotten less fun in the last few seasons. I knew Miranda had a baby, that Charlotte was the nice one, that Samantha had tons of sex and had briefly dated another woman (just the thought of that coupling was enough to make me incapable of following any classes for days.) I knew there was some guy named Aidan, and that Baryshnikov was in the show somewhere. Maybe I knew less - I didn't know much more.
It's all kind of jumbled up now, because in May, after over four years of putting it off, I watched the entire "Sex and the City" - all six and a half seasons, plus one movie. The cumulative effect of so much "Sex" - 94 episodes, spread over seven years, vividly portraying late-90s wandering and post-9/11 PTSD, steadily moving from standalone episodes into epic twisted love affairs, asking any number of questions about gender and sexuality and metropolitanism, teetering constantly between boundary-busting invention and perversely old-fashioned romance, refashioned and reconsidered but still defiantly retro. Like any great TV show, "Sex and the City" only seems like a glorious whole when you consider it from a distance.
Viewed all at once, it can feel like you're in the middle of a typhoon, as the show simultaneously drifts forward into its golden age and backward into its years of intriguing decline. That's true of nearly every great show that lasts long enough and becomes popular enough to attract new fans just as it's attracting a backlash - "The Simpsons," "The Sopranos," "The X-Files," "Seinfeld" and "Friends" all lasted (or, in the Simpsons' case, is still lasting) long enough to basically remake TV culture in their image, which simultaneously made them ill-fit to continue in a world that they themselves created. (Based on its lackluster recent season, "South Park" may be the most recent victim of this syndrome - last season's "Imagination Land" three-part masterpiece is looking more and more like a magnum opus series finale.)
The hot thing to do when talking about the complete series is to begin by pointing out how messy the first season is. True, Sarah Jessica Parker talking to the camera gets pretty old pretty fast, although it is kind of funny that her hubby Matthew Broderick got famous for doing exactly the same thing in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Still, it was funny how, whenever I told any woman that I was watching the whole series, they would always, like clockwork, point out that I really had to suffer through season 1 to get to the good stuff.
Actually, I enjoyed the first season. True, the episodes are more openly formulaic than they would be later in the series. Especially in the latter half of the season, it goes like this: Carrie and Big have an awkward moment which only Carrie seems to notice, at which point she talks to her three friends about the awkward moment and then embarks on a column which turns that moment into a question of high societal philosophy; the four women then embark on misadventures with men which all rotate around that question. Like dominos in a row, the subplots all wrap up in time for Carrie to suddenly express her frustration/anxiety/anger to Big, at which point he vaguely apologizes and they hug. (The exemplary episode of this structure of "Three's a Crowd," where the friends suffer through emotional, physical, psychological, and romantic 'threesomes.' This means that Carrie's narrated double entrendres are simultaneously soft-core lame and Time-Magazine meaningful.)
Here's the thing - I actually like these formula episodes. True, they're neither as funny, as groundbreaking, or as emotionally involving as later seasons, but these first twelve episodes have two things going for them ahead of the later seasons. On one hand, the show is not yet a phenomenon; there's an unhurried, unfussy looseness in the structure. Whereas later season would focus more attention on the friendship of the four women, here in Season 1 Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte are just friends who hang out and chit chat in between relationships. Their ongoing dialogue, over coffee and cosmos, would eventually turn into an era-defining Greek Chorus - here, though, the focus is a bit more on the action and less on their gab.
What I mean is that each girl seems to be in their own world - there isn't a whole lot of overlap in their storylines. It's as if they're all dating in their own individual parallel universe New Yorks (which, given the one-joke premise of many of their relationships - "the guy who films sex," "the guy who paints vaginas," "the angry guy on anti-depressants who can't keep it stiff anymore" - may actually form a genuine metaphysical thesis for the show.) The episode which violates this structure most is "The Baby Shower," which hints at the depths of the womens' friendship as surely as it hints (in the character of Laney, partygirl turned suburban mom) at the dark weirdness in store for the later years of the show, when one-night-stands were replaced by marriage and children and other necessary unfun early-middle-aged things.
At the same time, these early episodes strike me as being "Sex and the City" at its purest, and not just because it was all brand new. Because there were no real ongoing storylines besides Carrie and Big (remember, this was before TiVo, iTunes, and "24" made the world safe for serial narratives), each episode seems free to focus itself more on a topic than on a story - Season 1 feels most like the column which the show portrays, and least like a TV show. Because there are no long-term relationships (again, besides Big), there is a literal parade of men each episode, each one vaguely representative of something both sexually contemporary and classically boorish; you also get the funny cutaways to random New Yorkers, which probably played much worse before "Family Guy" and "Arrested Development" made cutaways popular and genius, respectively.
From reading about "Sex and the City," I figured I had a firm grasp of the characters - Carrie the thinker (or, among men talking, the whiny one), Charlotte the romantic one (or the uptight prude WASP), Samantha the sexual one (or the slut queen), and Miranda the working woman (or the "isn't she a lesbo in real life?" one.) And although I freely admit I grew obsessed with the tribulations of all of these characters over one month and six seasons, I don't think my initial impressions of any of them were remotely wrong.
Except for Miranda, who, right from the start, manages to explode every stereotype of women, even the ones "Sex and the City" created. Dry-witted yet desperate, unfussy yet neurotic, violently unstylish, a woman in the workplace who hates being treated differently yet who isn't below faking a lesbian romance in order to get invited to her bosses' couples parties, Miranda's weird duality is established right in the first episode. Watch her play off Skipper, the pre-nerd-chic loser with the whiny voice, and whiny glasses, and whiny hair. She completely cuts him down, like Samantha would so many men throughout the run, yet she also recognizes some inherent sweetness in the guy, like Charlotte. But whereas both of those characters always seem more like mouthpieces for two particular and often oppositional worldviews, Miranda is just a city gal who wants to get laid and maybe enjoy it, if she's lucky. She so often sleeps with the least attractive guys, like Skipper (or his bespectacled brother beta-male Steve) - not so much because she settles as because, in her alternate-universe New York, men look pretty much like they do in the real world - normal, if not ugly.
One final thought - near the end of the very first episode of the series, there's a moment which fascinated me the first time through and which beguiled me throughout the series. A guy who pops up throughout the first episode, first in cutaways and then on a chaste date with Charlotte, has found himself back in his room with Samantha. They make out, and he starts to take her clothes off. He tells her that he has to work early in the morning, so she can't stay the night. She says "Okay," with that lusty purr Kim Cattrall puts on practically every syllable. He takes off her top - I forget, but I think these might be the first pair of serious tits we see in the show. He moves out of the frame, and for just a second, a look passes over Samantha's face. What is it? Sadness? Frustration? Disappointment? It's only there for a moment, and then it turns back into a smile (clearly, the guy is doing some work below the camera), but much more than Carrie's narration, it seems express the show's essential ambiguity.
You're a working woman, you've just been brought home by a man, and he's just informed you that after you two are done fucking like overcaffeinated probably-inebriated potentially-drugged out thirtysomethings, you have to put your soiled clothes back on and take the walk of shame back home. Is this glamour? Is this the way things are supposed to be? Is anyone on this show happy?
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.)
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.
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.
"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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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