Ron Howard is a resolutely lame filmmaker, a low-rent Spielberg who can successfully film every kind of genre with an equal eye for awfulness. "Far and Away," "Edtv," "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," "The Da Vinci Code," and "Willow" all look and feel exactly right for an epic, a farcical ensemble comedy, a kid's candy movie, a thriller, and a fantasy movie - the visual aesthetics are so perfect - and since each of them are respectively the worst example of their respective genre, Ron Howard can proudly call himself Hollywood's Retard Chameleon.
"Da Vinci Code," his most recent uber-successful crapfest, is a good example: it's darkly lit, there's lots of shaky closeups, the score is by Hans Zimmer, the love interest is a brain-crush-cute brunette actress who's so serious that she only gives the protagonist one kiss the whole movie, and the main character has a flashback-past in which he falls through a hole in the ground. That flashback was specifically added into the movie and rips off a scene from "Batman Begins" (co-scored by Zimmer), which proves that Ron Howard is at least uniquely gifted at stealing from the best.
The weirdest thing about Howard, though, is that no matter how perfectly bad he is at everything else, give him a true-life 20th Century story of everyman heroism and he somehow makes at least half a masterpiece. "Apollo 13," "Cinderella Man," and "Frost/Nixon" all suffer from imperfections, but Howard, who knows how to work with great actors, is confident enough to just set his camera down (even if it's weightless) and watch everyday fellas discover themselves at the epiccenter of history. (You can also throw in the first half of "A Beautiful Mind" into this batch, before the mid-movie twist sends the whole movie spiralling towards the outer reaches of the solar system.)
"Frost/Nixon" is probably the best of the bunch. The film centers on a mesmerizing battle of wits between a joke journalist and a failed President - the interview between David Frost and Richard Nixon which proved historic when Nixon seemed to almost maybe apologize for breaking the law- and the genius of the movie is that both actors seem to be overplaying their parts for the first hour (Michael Sheen's David Frost speaks through a wide grin, and Frank Langella somehow makes you see Richard Nixon's jowls using only his voice), and then the Interview begins and you see their true personalities emerge. Both actors originated their roles onstage, and it's intriguing how, in the first half of "Frost/Nixon," they both play for the people in the back row - more theatrically - whereas, after the interview begins, they become more precise, direct, more cinematic. Sheen plays Frost playing Frost, and Langella plays Nixon playing Nixon, and the film becomes a cat-and-mouse switcheroo.
The film would have been better just focusing entirely on the interview, but this is Ron Howard film, so the essential energy of the two actors' conflict is dampened and homogenized with precisely-honed cliches like The Girlfriend, The Character Played By Oliver Platt, and The Doing-Lots-Of-Stuff Montage. None of these things are particularly bad, and none of them detract from Sheen and Langella, except by virtue of not just letting them Just Be onscreen.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
"Valkyrie"
"Valkyrie" is a minor-key thriller, a story told in whispers and behind closed doors, featuring men who know they're doomed to failure and that failure means death. "Valkyrie" is a WWII movie the way that last year's "3:10 to Yuma" was a western - both movies completely ignore practically everything iconic about their much-belabored genre, settling instead for a resolutely destylized vision (both movies feature lots of interior close-ups and fluid Steadicam movements which refuse to call attention to themselves.) Characters in both films are heroic, but in decidedly non-bullshit ways; in both films, the lead protagonist is an amputee played by a former glamour boy (Christian Bale in "Yuma" had only one leg; Tom Cruise in "Valkyrie" has just one eye and half a hand.) Both movies seem to come straight out of the 1950s, and so they'll probably look much better 50 years from now.
It's difficult to talk about "Valkyrie" without discussing the bad buzz it accrued all during 2008, most of which centered on Tom Cruise, who is still making up for a messy 2005 which proved to everyone in America that he was an insane gay fascist satanist who jumped on couches and probably stuffed gerbils up his ass. Listen, I think Scientology is totally bullshit, but I think the same thing about Catholicism, and as long as Tom Cruise doesn't make the L. Ron Hubbard version of "The Passion of the Christ," we're cool.
People tend to hate on Tom Cruise because he's weird. This reflects a basic misunderstanding of the film business in general and the acting art in particular, because every single actor is completely strange, narcissistic, preachy, egotistical, neurotic, secretly gay, and generally not the kind of person you would like to bring home to mother or even meet casually for a drink. Daniel Day-Lewis may be the weirdest person to ever exist in the universe, which is why he's able to fully inhabit his roles. "There Will Be Blood" would barely be a movie if it starred anyone other than Daniel Day-Lewis, because the whole joy of the movie centers on watching an incredibly bizarre person live and breathe onscreen, and only an incredibly bizarre person could inhabit such a role. Actors need to lie to everyone all of the time. So what if Tom Cruise believes that space ghosts live in human minds?
ANYWAYS, "Valkyrie" was directed by Bryan Singer, who somehow spent ten years making superhero movies before he got around to this one. Admittedly, all three of those movies were good in their own way - "X-Men" kickstarted the comics film revolution by virtue of its not-badness, "X2" was the first great action movie sequel of the modern age, and "Superman Returns" was such a strenuously accurate sequel-remake to the essentially forgotten "Superman 2" that it practically rivals "Grindhouse" for insanely-precise subgenre fetishism. (For a very particular kind of movie geek, the opening titles of "Superman Returns" give a long tall brain hard-on.) "Valkyrie" basically ignores that near-trilogy, and plays like the logical next step from "The Usual Suspects" and "Apt Pupil," combining the measured heist-thrill of the former with the lofty themes of the latter. Not quite awesome but absurdly watchable, "Valkyrie" indicates that Singer might become a thrillingly low-key action filmmaker along late-period Eastwood lines, so long as Warner Brothers keeps him away from "Superman Returns Returns."
It's difficult to talk about "Valkyrie" without discussing the bad buzz it accrued all during 2008, most of which centered on Tom Cruise, who is still making up for a messy 2005 which proved to everyone in America that he was an insane gay fascist satanist who jumped on couches and probably stuffed gerbils up his ass. Listen, I think Scientology is totally bullshit, but I think the same thing about Catholicism, and as long as Tom Cruise doesn't make the L. Ron Hubbard version of "The Passion of the Christ," we're cool.
People tend to hate on Tom Cruise because he's weird. This reflects a basic misunderstanding of the film business in general and the acting art in particular, because every single actor is completely strange, narcissistic, preachy, egotistical, neurotic, secretly gay, and generally not the kind of person you would like to bring home to mother or even meet casually for a drink. Daniel Day-Lewis may be the weirdest person to ever exist in the universe, which is why he's able to fully inhabit his roles. "There Will Be Blood" would barely be a movie if it starred anyone other than Daniel Day-Lewis, because the whole joy of the movie centers on watching an incredibly bizarre person live and breathe onscreen, and only an incredibly bizarre person could inhabit such a role. Actors need to lie to everyone all of the time. So what if Tom Cruise believes that space ghosts live in human minds?
ANYWAYS, "Valkyrie" was directed by Bryan Singer, who somehow spent ten years making superhero movies before he got around to this one. Admittedly, all three of those movies were good in their own way - "X-Men" kickstarted the comics film revolution by virtue of its not-badness, "X2" was the first great action movie sequel of the modern age, and "Superman Returns" was such a strenuously accurate sequel-remake to the essentially forgotten "Superman 2" that it practically rivals "Grindhouse" for insanely-precise subgenre fetishism. (For a very particular kind of movie geek, the opening titles of "Superman Returns" give a long tall brain hard-on.) "Valkyrie" basically ignores that near-trilogy, and plays like the logical next step from "The Usual Suspects" and "Apt Pupil," combining the measured heist-thrill of the former with the lofty themes of the latter. Not quite awesome but absurdly watchable, "Valkyrie" indicates that Singer might become a thrillingly low-key action filmmaker along late-period Eastwood lines, so long as Warner Brothers keeps him away from "Superman Returns Returns."
Thursday, December 18, 2008
"Doubt"
"Doubt" is not quite an amazing movie, although it does have the two most amazing scenes from any movie all year. Weirdly, these two scenes are also the stagiest scenes in this stage adaptation - you can almost see the spotlight falling on the characters, at times. The themes are huge, the dialogues long and wandering, the faces of the fine actors relentlessly impassive - Meryl Streep is forced, by the material and by her own attention to detail, to give a horrendously over-the-top performance, with just a very few hints (including the devastating final line) that it's intentional. The film centers on the conflict between Meryl Streep's head nun and Philip Seymour Hoffman's head priest - she's the pre-Vatican II conservative, he's the progressive liberal who wants to bring some secular music into the chapel - and you can realistically watch the movie rooting for or against either of them.
Usually, after I see a movie that I don't like, my first instinct is to call it the worst movie ever, and my second instinct is to compare it to the movie I saw right before it. So it is that "Doubt" seems to provide the perfect explanation, as I think back on it, on why I so totally despised "Australia" a couple of nights ago. Nothing is worse for a movie than a silly, shallow, one-dimensional motivation. Almost every great movie is built upon a series of characters' wants and needs, and how those desires intersect and oppose each other. In great drama, and great comedy, every desire holds several different levels of meaning, some of them oppositional within themselves. So, in "The Great Gatsby," the title character claims to want Daisy, but also wants what Daisy represents (wealth, glitz, transcendance), and so his defeat comes not at the hands of a rival (although Daisy does not choose him), but rather, from Daisy herself - the object of his affection is also that affection's defeat.
Not every great dramatic desire need be so paradoxically frustrated, but consider an equally fascinating character from a more debased medium: on "The Wire," Jimmy McNulty is a cop trying to put criminals behind bars. On normal TV, cops do this because they want to protect innocent people; on "The Wire," McNulty does it because he wants to stuff his victory in the faces of his superiors, because he believes himself to be better than everyone else, because he enjoys the thrill of it, and because "chasing bad guys" allows him to justify his own perpetual immorality (ignoring his children, cheating on a wife and a girlfriend, drinking enough to fill Ireland.)
"Doubt" may tread heavily on overwrought themes, but in its best scenes, characters hold a number of ideas in their head, all at once. Meryl Streep's Sister Aloysius claims that she's just protecting the children under her care; but, she also hates Hoffman's Father Flynn and wants him gone; and, more generally, she hates what Flynn stands for, the modern age, "Frosty the Snowman." On an even deeper level (and this comes purely from the actors), she may even be attracted to him. When characters claim to stand for something, but their actions prove different, one cannot help but be interested. This is why the underrated "Rome" may age better than any of its HBO contemporaries - it gave the impression of seeing behind the curtain of history, watching its characters sanitize their actions and remove dimensions from their own character.
This is why "Australia," I think, is such a particular bummer. Characters don't really have some deeper, hidden agenda - Nicole Kidman's love for the young half-caste boy in her charge spurs the entire latter half of the movie, and indeed, that love seems to inspire all of Australia (except for Evil Faramir) to de-racistize themselves. There is one scene where Kidman's and Jackman's characters actually seem to dig into each other's nature - it is the most clinical scene of the movie (both discuss their past marriages), but also the most romantic, and worth a million Luhrmann Technicolor sunsets.
Usually, after I see a movie that I don't like, my first instinct is to call it the worst movie ever, and my second instinct is to compare it to the movie I saw right before it. So it is that "Doubt" seems to provide the perfect explanation, as I think back on it, on why I so totally despised "Australia" a couple of nights ago. Nothing is worse for a movie than a silly, shallow, one-dimensional motivation. Almost every great movie is built upon a series of characters' wants and needs, and how those desires intersect and oppose each other. In great drama, and great comedy, every desire holds several different levels of meaning, some of them oppositional within themselves. So, in "The Great Gatsby," the title character claims to want Daisy, but also wants what Daisy represents (wealth, glitz, transcendance), and so his defeat comes not at the hands of a rival (although Daisy does not choose him), but rather, from Daisy herself - the object of his affection is also that affection's defeat.
Not every great dramatic desire need be so paradoxically frustrated, but consider an equally fascinating character from a more debased medium: on "The Wire," Jimmy McNulty is a cop trying to put criminals behind bars. On normal TV, cops do this because they want to protect innocent people; on "The Wire," McNulty does it because he wants to stuff his victory in the faces of his superiors, because he believes himself to be better than everyone else, because he enjoys the thrill of it, and because "chasing bad guys" allows him to justify his own perpetual immorality (ignoring his children, cheating on a wife and a girlfriend, drinking enough to fill Ireland.)
"Doubt" may tread heavily on overwrought themes, but in its best scenes, characters hold a number of ideas in their head, all at once. Meryl Streep's Sister Aloysius claims that she's just protecting the children under her care; but, she also hates Hoffman's Father Flynn and wants him gone; and, more generally, she hates what Flynn stands for, the modern age, "Frosty the Snowman." On an even deeper level (and this comes purely from the actors), she may even be attracted to him. When characters claim to stand for something, but their actions prove different, one cannot help but be interested. This is why the underrated "Rome" may age better than any of its HBO contemporaries - it gave the impression of seeing behind the curtain of history, watching its characters sanitize their actions and remove dimensions from their own character.
This is why "Australia," I think, is such a particular bummer. Characters don't really have some deeper, hidden agenda - Nicole Kidman's love for the young half-caste boy in her charge spurs the entire latter half of the movie, and indeed, that love seems to inspire all of Australia (except for Evil Faramir) to de-racistize themselves. There is one scene where Kidman's and Jackman's characters actually seem to dig into each other's nature - it is the most clinical scene of the movie (both discuss their past marriages), but also the most romantic, and worth a million Luhrmann Technicolor sunsets.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
"Australia"
No one could possibly conceive what Baz Luhrmann would possibly do with a war movie. Turns out he was making the antipodal version of "Pearl Harbor," complete with a pointless series of mini-plots that fritter away two hours of time before a sudden ruthless attack by phantom-like Japanese airplanes attempts in vain to add a sense of depth and historical sweep to what is actually a one-note soap opera shot like a pop art propaganda poster. "Australia," like "Pearl Harbor," centers on an emotional triangle of people whose mutual love is so heavily remarked upon but so little in evidence that after awhile you begin to suspect everyone onscreen suffered partial lobotomies immediately before the film started.
In "Pearl Harbor," the triangle is romantic, which is lame, but involves Kate Beckinsale, which is nice; in "Australia," the triangle is more familial, and centers on the multicultural cross-strata family dynamic which develops between Nicole Kidman (who acts the shit out of her ridiculous role and is awesome but underutilized), Hugh Jackman (who scarcely seems to act but exhudes enough charisma that you almost believe it when his character regularly shifts from Clint Eastwood to Crocodile Dundee to Cary Grant), and Brandon Walters, who carries the whole dramatic weight of the movie's larger themes - institutional racism and the conflict of civilization against the wild are but two college-level topics that get chatted about once or twice - on his tiny shoulders, playing a young half-Aboriginal, half-white kid who occasionally narrates the film but mostly hangs about waiting to find out if the evil white people or the good white people will decide his fate.
The anti-racist message of the film is handled so obliquely, with such a weird blend of naivete and political correctness, that it actually emerges feeling weirdly colonialist, if not, well, racist. Jackman's character is careful to loudly honor aboriginal culture throughout the movie, but the film's vision of aboriginal culture is basically personified by an elder named King George, who, it pains me to inform you, spends the first hour of the movie standing on a hillside dancing by a fire and singing songs with Yoda lyrics which seem to telepathically speak to characters sleeping miles away. (The other primary black character in the film is Jackman's sidekick, who only speaks when spoken to and might as well walk around with a target on his head.)
In "Pearl Harbor," the triangle is romantic, which is lame, but involves Kate Beckinsale, which is nice; in "Australia," the triangle is more familial, and centers on the multicultural cross-strata family dynamic which develops between Nicole Kidman (who acts the shit out of her ridiculous role and is awesome but underutilized), Hugh Jackman (who scarcely seems to act but exhudes enough charisma that you almost believe it when his character regularly shifts from Clint Eastwood to Crocodile Dundee to Cary Grant), and Brandon Walters, who carries the whole dramatic weight of the movie's larger themes - institutional racism and the conflict of civilization against the wild are but two college-level topics that get chatted about once or twice - on his tiny shoulders, playing a young half-Aboriginal, half-white kid who occasionally narrates the film but mostly hangs about waiting to find out if the evil white people or the good white people will decide his fate.
The anti-racist message of the film is handled so obliquely, with such a weird blend of naivete and political correctness, that it actually emerges feeling weirdly colonialist, if not, well, racist. Jackman's character is careful to loudly honor aboriginal culture throughout the movie, but the film's vision of aboriginal culture is basically personified by an elder named King George, who, it pains me to inform you, spends the first hour of the movie standing on a hillside dancing by a fire and singing songs with Yoda lyrics which seem to telepathically speak to characters sleeping miles away. (The other primary black character in the film is Jackman's sidekick, who only speaks when spoken to and might as well walk around with a target on his head.)
We can argue back and forth about Luhrmann's treatment of aboriginal culture - certainly, the film critiques the shallowness of white civilization, and anyone who dares utter a racist remark gets their eventual comeuppance - but the King George character is never allowed to interact with anyone, and seems to float above the fray like a halfway Messiah figure (example: in an eye-popping shot which looks unfortunately like something out of a Michael Bay film, King George stands in the middle of a missile run without being hurt.)
Armchair sociology aside, more than half of "Australia" is much worse than anything you thought Luhrmann was capable of. This is one of those movies, like Wes Anderson's "Life Aquatic" or Michael Mann's "Miami Vice," where a great director's imprint is unmistakable but somehow everything that works so well in their great films works impossibly, terribly, simply not at all. Like those other misfires, this was a film conceived by a director in the throes of passion - Wes Anderson first doodled "Life Aquatic" as sketches in a middle-school notebook, Michael Mann created the original "Miami Vice" and wanted to update and correct its glammy glitz, and Baz Luhrmann seems set on filming THE definitive historical epic of Australia, both the real continent and some fantasyland Oz that exists our dreams, or the dreams of all Australians, or the dreams of Baz Luhrmann.
It took the guy 8 years after "Moulin Rouge!" to make this movie, and in that time, two other films have been made which way stole his thunder. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" was a far more realistic depiction of the Stolen Generation (half-white, half-Aboriginal kids who were taken from their parents and forcibly injected into white society); it was also far more exciting, and its vision of the Outback seemed genuinely frightening, and expansive, and demanding adventure (in "Australia," the Outback plays itself, unconvincingly.) "The Proposition" was a fierce anti-western about order and chaos waging war at the dawn of Australian civilization. It was a totally ludicrous film - like "Australia," it boiled the myriad forces of history down to a few characters prone to speechifying. But unlike "Australia," "The Proposition" seemed to view each of its characters with equal measures of belief and suspicion - there truly was no one in the right.
Here, Kidman and Jackman must represent old-Hollywood romance, contemporary post-feminist love, and politically correct multiculturalist do-goodery. They play nice people falling in nice love, and so the movie is really an epic ode to niceness. Bored my fucking eyes out.
Armchair sociology aside, more than half of "Australia" is much worse than anything you thought Luhrmann was capable of. This is one of those movies, like Wes Anderson's "Life Aquatic" or Michael Mann's "Miami Vice," where a great director's imprint is unmistakable but somehow everything that works so well in their great films works impossibly, terribly, simply not at all. Like those other misfires, this was a film conceived by a director in the throes of passion - Wes Anderson first doodled "Life Aquatic" as sketches in a middle-school notebook, Michael Mann created the original "Miami Vice" and wanted to update and correct its glammy glitz, and Baz Luhrmann seems set on filming THE definitive historical epic of Australia, both the real continent and some fantasyland Oz that exists our dreams, or the dreams of all Australians, or the dreams of Baz Luhrmann.
It took the guy 8 years after "Moulin Rouge!" to make this movie, and in that time, two other films have been made which way stole his thunder. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" was a far more realistic depiction of the Stolen Generation (half-white, half-Aboriginal kids who were taken from their parents and forcibly injected into white society); it was also far more exciting, and its vision of the Outback seemed genuinely frightening, and expansive, and demanding adventure (in "Australia," the Outback plays itself, unconvincingly.) "The Proposition" was a fierce anti-western about order and chaos waging war at the dawn of Australian civilization. It was a totally ludicrous film - like "Australia," it boiled the myriad forces of history down to a few characters prone to speechifying. But unlike "Australia," "The Proposition" seemed to view each of its characters with equal measures of belief and suspicion - there truly was no one in the right.
Here, Kidman and Jackman must represent old-Hollywood romance, contemporary post-feminist love, and politically correct multiculturalist do-goodery. They play nice people falling in nice love, and so the movie is really an epic ode to niceness. Bored my fucking eyes out.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Gasm!
The New World is one of my favorite movies. When it came out, three years ago, I heard rumors of a directors' cut, but figured it was only rumors. Thank You Jesus And All The Angels.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
"Heroes": "I Am Become Death"
Let's get one thing straight: "Heroes" clearly has absolutely no idea what to do with itself. It's original, catchy notion - ordinary people discover they have superpowers - has been completely exploded. Now, you get superpowers by injecting yourself full of superhero juice, or by sipping some savant-African potion and putting on earphones, or by fixing a clock. "Now you have my power," said Future-Sylar yesterday, and apropos of nothing, Peter did! We've now seen three separate future-verses, all of them overexposed in "Minority Report" blue monochrome. The Future in the world of "Heroes" functions roughly the same as the Mirror, Mirror universe in "Star Trek" - every time you go there, everything you know gets completely turned on its head. This is nifty, but "Star Trek" had the courtesy to visit that universe once per series; "Heroes" goes there multiple times in a season.
Cause and effect have become irrelevant as a result. So far this season, Future Peter ruined everything by going into the past and Present Peter ruined everything by going into the future. Hiro traveled to the future and saw Ando betray him, which made him distrust Ando in the present, but his distrust is pushing Ando to betray him. Future Claire killed Future Peter, and then Present Peter killed Future Nathan. Meanwhile, in the two subplots which, so far, don't involve time travel, Nathan can't stop seeing Dead Linderman, and Ali Larter, god bless her, is playing a completely brand new character, thanks to a red-alert plot twist which will henceforth be referred to as the Triplets Protocol.
Anyone hoping that the show would bounce back this season has been disappointed even while they've been blown away. The choice to make time travel the central plotline of this season is ruinous, and genius. Any hope of rediscovering the beautiful simplicity of season 1 - "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" - has been thrown out of the window. In its place is a madcap overcomplexity which competes with "The Wire" in sheer amount of characters, shadowy motives, mysterious connections, and overlapping destinies. The difference is that "The Wire" had a good grasp of every single character - I couldn't tell you what that one bald detective's name was, but boy did I love him (especially when he grew that beard in season 5) - whereas on "Heroes," characters radically self-transmogrify every three seconds.
Mohinder was the sober voice of reason and humanity, until he rashly decided to inject himself full of super juice; Maya used to beg endlessly for a superpower cure, until she started grocery shopping and begging boytoy Mohinder to get out of his stuffy lab; Angela Petrelli was a goofy kleptomaniac mom, before she turned, brilliantly, into Angela Lansbury from "The Manchurian Candidate." Sylar, the most evil man on earth, takes just 4 years to become Gabriel, everyman soccer dad with a son named after his worst enemy.
It's not just that motivations shift. Everything that we understand about character origins keeps changing, too. All it took was one guest starring appearance by George Takei to turn Hiro from a lovable worker drone into the scion to one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. In Season 1, the characters were random, everyday people, slowly coming together. In Season 2, we learned that all the characters' parents used to get together on weekends for bridge and conspiratizing.
This is why the show is imploding, but it's also why this relentless Time Travel gambit makes perfect sense. A couple of futures ago, Parkman had a human wife and a baby; now, he's hitched to the speedster and has a different baby. The whole slapdash aesthetic extends to how people use their powers. Hiro can't control his time/space travel, except when he controls it perfectly; Claire knows she can't die, but still gets freaked out when her real ma gives her a fire-power waterboard session. Tracy Strauss never knew she had any powers until some reporter made her angry, and now she can freeze everything all of the time.
This wouldn't be a problem if the show didn't regularly set up a "Stand-off," like this week, where Claire held a gun on Sylar's son. Now, here's Sylar and Peter, two of the most powerful men ever, who could probably choose 10 different powers to defeat the situation, including superspeed, invulnerability, telekinesis, THE ABILITY TO STOP TIME, etc.
This makes it sound like I'm ragging on the show, but this week's episode was one of my favorite ever. For every ridiculous moment, there's a moment that works wonders, precisely because no other show could ever do it, because no other show has ever been this ridiculous. This is probably the first serialized show that's equally impossible to understand if you're watching it for the first time or if you've memorized every episode. Context does the show no justice, because context is ignored until it isn't. Things which used to seem new have by now become strange plot totems regularly around by everyone. Hiro Nakamura does nothing but try and save the world every episode; he's like the Brain in reverse (with Ando his Pinky.) Peter Petrelli also has no interior life besides world-saving. Nathan Petrelli is a power-hungry politico, until he has a change of heart, until he has another change of heart.
It's all weirdly reminiscent of something "The Daily Show" did with the Iraq war: taking a few clips of Bush talking about Iraq and reversing them chronologically, so that the narratives goes from a confusing Civil War to an ebbing insurgency to victory to bringing the troops home. Characters on "Heroes" who have seen the future are, bizarrely, even more doomed to repeat that future than characters who haven't. On the 5th year anniversary of Iraq, Bush said, "The decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision early in my presidency; it is the right decision at this point in my presidency; and it will forever be the right decision." Choices in the contemporary world can now be debated separate from the action that follows from that decision, because the choice is the action. Technically speaking, if you believe in time travel, then you have to believe abortion is wrong. Of course, you also have to believe that a planned pregnancy is equivalent to first-degree murder.
Authors like Pynchon and Delillo and Wallace have tried to capture the sheer overwhelmingness of the modern world, but always through a lens of commentary, even subtle. "Heroes" has no commentary, which is why, watched closely, it seems to mean everything. References to current events are dropped in frequently, and a Buster Keaton movie plays in the background, and the Mona Lisa has been stolen. Read the list of offenses Mark Twain's proto-flame of Fenimore Cooper and ponder how "Heroes" violates every single one, every single episode.
If "The Wire" was the perfect portrayal of the modern American reality, "Heroes" is the perfect portrayal of what Americans think reality is. Sylar is a villain until he's a hero; McCain is a maverick until he starts calling himself one and isn't; Obama supports gay marriage but can't say it out loud, or that's what we liberals tell ourselves; baseball players actually did gain superstrength, and it left them looking almost as bad as future Mohinder. It's impossible to say that this show is good, but it's impossible to think of not watching.
Cause and effect have become irrelevant as a result. So far this season, Future Peter ruined everything by going into the past and Present Peter ruined everything by going into the future. Hiro traveled to the future and saw Ando betray him, which made him distrust Ando in the present, but his distrust is pushing Ando to betray him. Future Claire killed Future Peter, and then Present Peter killed Future Nathan. Meanwhile, in the two subplots which, so far, don't involve time travel, Nathan can't stop seeing Dead Linderman, and Ali Larter, god bless her, is playing a completely brand new character, thanks to a red-alert plot twist which will henceforth be referred to as the Triplets Protocol.
Anyone hoping that the show would bounce back this season has been disappointed even while they've been blown away. The choice to make time travel the central plotline of this season is ruinous, and genius. Any hope of rediscovering the beautiful simplicity of season 1 - "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" - has been thrown out of the window. In its place is a madcap overcomplexity which competes with "The Wire" in sheer amount of characters, shadowy motives, mysterious connections, and overlapping destinies. The difference is that "The Wire" had a good grasp of every single character - I couldn't tell you what that one bald detective's name was, but boy did I love him (especially when he grew that beard in season 5) - whereas on "Heroes," characters radically self-transmogrify every three seconds.
Mohinder was the sober voice of reason and humanity, until he rashly decided to inject himself full of super juice; Maya used to beg endlessly for a superpower cure, until she started grocery shopping and begging boytoy Mohinder to get out of his stuffy lab; Angela Petrelli was a goofy kleptomaniac mom, before she turned, brilliantly, into Angela Lansbury from "The Manchurian Candidate." Sylar, the most evil man on earth, takes just 4 years to become Gabriel, everyman soccer dad with a son named after his worst enemy.
It's not just that motivations shift. Everything that we understand about character origins keeps changing, too. All it took was one guest starring appearance by George Takei to turn Hiro from a lovable worker drone into the scion to one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. In Season 1, the characters were random, everyday people, slowly coming together. In Season 2, we learned that all the characters' parents used to get together on weekends for bridge and conspiratizing.
This is why the show is imploding, but it's also why this relentless Time Travel gambit makes perfect sense. A couple of futures ago, Parkman had a human wife and a baby; now, he's hitched to the speedster and has a different baby. The whole slapdash aesthetic extends to how people use their powers. Hiro can't control his time/space travel, except when he controls it perfectly; Claire knows she can't die, but still gets freaked out when her real ma gives her a fire-power waterboard session. Tracy Strauss never knew she had any powers until some reporter made her angry, and now she can freeze everything all of the time.
This wouldn't be a problem if the show didn't regularly set up a "Stand-off," like this week, where Claire held a gun on Sylar's son. Now, here's Sylar and Peter, two of the most powerful men ever, who could probably choose 10 different powers to defeat the situation, including superspeed, invulnerability, telekinesis, THE ABILITY TO STOP TIME, etc.
This makes it sound like I'm ragging on the show, but this week's episode was one of my favorite ever. For every ridiculous moment, there's a moment that works wonders, precisely because no other show could ever do it, because no other show has ever been this ridiculous. This is probably the first serialized show that's equally impossible to understand if you're watching it for the first time or if you've memorized every episode. Context does the show no justice, because context is ignored until it isn't. Things which used to seem new have by now become strange plot totems regularly around by everyone. Hiro Nakamura does nothing but try and save the world every episode; he's like the Brain in reverse (with Ando his Pinky.) Peter Petrelli also has no interior life besides world-saving. Nathan Petrelli is a power-hungry politico, until he has a change of heart, until he has another change of heart.
It's all weirdly reminiscent of something "The Daily Show" did with the Iraq war: taking a few clips of Bush talking about Iraq and reversing them chronologically, so that the narratives goes from a confusing Civil War to an ebbing insurgency to victory to bringing the troops home. Characters on "Heroes" who have seen the future are, bizarrely, even more doomed to repeat that future than characters who haven't. On the 5th year anniversary of Iraq, Bush said, "The decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision early in my presidency; it is the right decision at this point in my presidency; and it will forever be the right decision." Choices in the contemporary world can now be debated separate from the action that follows from that decision, because the choice is the action. Technically speaking, if you believe in time travel, then you have to believe abortion is wrong. Of course, you also have to believe that a planned pregnancy is equivalent to first-degree murder.
Authors like Pynchon and Delillo and Wallace have tried to capture the sheer overwhelmingness of the modern world, but always through a lens of commentary, even subtle. "Heroes" has no commentary, which is why, watched closely, it seems to mean everything. References to current events are dropped in frequently, and a Buster Keaton movie plays in the background, and the Mona Lisa has been stolen. Read the list of offenses Mark Twain's proto-flame of Fenimore Cooper and ponder how "Heroes" violates every single one, every single episode.
If "The Wire" was the perfect portrayal of the modern American reality, "Heroes" is the perfect portrayal of what Americans think reality is. Sylar is a villain until he's a hero; McCain is a maverick until he starts calling himself one and isn't; Obama supports gay marriage but can't say it out loud, or that's what we liberals tell ourselves; baseball players actually did gain superstrength, and it left them looking almost as bad as future Mohinder. It's impossible to say that this show is good, but it's impossible to think of not watching.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
"Heroes" Premiere
Old television was about situations - you're a detective, you're a married couple, you're working woman in Philadelphia, you're a doctor with overly dramatic patients. Old TV had scenes, but not very much atmosphere. The individual situations changed, but the Situation never did. Perry Mason never didn't go to court in an episode. There were exceptions, like "The Fugitive," the first TV show with a genuine beginning and an ending (even if it was mostly a go-nowhere middle.)
Most great new TV is less about situations than about settings, and about how different characters interact within that setting. There aren't any obvious links between "Battlestar Galactica," "Rome," "Deadwood," "Lost," or "Gossip Girl" in one single ongoing plotline, but, viewed as as portraits of contested environments, it becomes clear how similar the shows really are. In every show, there is a clearly defined political and social hierarchy which, as the series begins, has been destroyed or corrupted. As society seeks to rebuild that hierarchy, almost every character jockeys for control. On every show, leadership is hotly contested and often fleeting; Roslin loses an election to Baltar, Julius Caesar begats Octavian Caesar, Jenny replaces Blair in the popular clique, Al Swearengen fights to build and destroy Demoracy in the mining camp of Deadwood, and everyone on the island fights anyone else.
With all of these shows, there is no single basic plot through line. "Rome" is not about any particular set of characters, and the few who do survive the whole series are in drastically different places, both geographically and politically, than they were at the beginning. At the same time, part of what's fun about the shows is that no two episodes are alike. Each show pushes the boundaries of time and space - an episode of "Rome" could take place over the course of an evening, or years; "Lost" can flash back to someone's life before the island, or to their birth, or flash forward to their death. "BSG" uses the same free-floating perspective - it's a bit reminiscent of how Virginia Woolf's prose could adopt different characters' stream of consciousness from one paraph to the next - and does so far more subtly.
These are just examples - you could throw in "24" (which focalizes all of modern-day America into Los Angeles - without fail, the worst plotlines on that show are those which shift focus away from Southern California), or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (where Sunnydale, a pleasant suburban town built over the mouth of Hell, became the farcical fantasy '90s answer to Grover's Corners), or even "Grey's Anatomy" (in the first three seasons, the hospital setting was energized by the ongoing contest of "Who Will be the New Chief"; the show has wandered ever since it abandoned that plotline.) The point is that, no matter how wacky serial TV is, it's always firmly rooted to one single setting.
So give this to "Heroes" - it's a show which breaks every rule. Whereas "BSG" and "Lost" are showlength active verbs ("We need to find earth," "We need to get off this island"), the concept for "Heroes" is essentially passive - "People have superpowers." Whereas other shows present a microcosm of humanity by bringing people from every race and culture and placing them in one claustrophobic arena, "Heroes" is humanity-as-macrocosm - in this season's premiere, we skipped around 4 separate continents. You could argue that the show's center is Manhattan, like LA in "24," but Manhattan, in season 1, was more of an ultimate destination than an overarching setting; after all, every character converged for the first time in Las Vegas, and the events in Odessa, Texas, are still the most compelling in the series.
Simply put, "Heroes" is a show which is purely about events. The events are not directly tied into an ongoing concept - it can be a detective show, an adventure series, a horror flick, a (probably mawkish) romance, a medical thriller, a buddy comedy, or a family melodrama. A show like "Lost" could lose momentum and still be incredibly interesting. You can draw comparisons between season 2 of that fantasy thriller and "Heroes." Both had a first season that was all about breakneck mystery - characters moved so quickly you could hardly breathe. Both had a second season that, by comparison, seems incredibly static. "Lost" settled down to typing numbers; "Heroes" spread its characters across space and time, and didn't bother to come up with any obvious convergence.
You could draw a through line from nearly every action taken by every character in "Heroes" season 1 down to the finale, but in season 2, Claire was testing her powers by cutting off toes, and Nathan Petrelli was a sad lonely drunk, and little Micah was living with his cousins in New Orleans. Some of this stuff was interesting, and, in the hands of someone like Matthew Weiner, who can make great drama out of John Slattery enjoying a stolen cigarette, it might have played well. But there was no center. In "Lost," there's always the island, carrying us through the series with its mystery. When "Heroes" stopped to take a breath, the whole thing seemed to come crashing down.
With that in mind, the 2-hour premiere this week was nothing short of genius - more things happened more interestingly in the first 15 minutes than happened all during season 2. It's unfortunate that the show felt the need for another future apocalypse, but there was an energy in this premiere that hasn't been seen since, well, season 1 of "Heroes." This show stuffs itself full of plotlines. Back when it first debuted, and "Lost" was in the middle of a slow season 3, the sheer quickness and pace of "Heroes" was enough to turn it into a legend.
The show did not have a big debut, not even close. It's got to be a huge failure for NBC; there was a moment, in the summer of 2007, when practically everything on the network seemed to revolve around "Heroes," when it was paired up with "Bionic Woman" and when there was word of a spin-off or three. Those plans failed; "Bionic" flopped, season 2 stunk, and the writers' strike ended the 2008 TV season. I'm guessing the show will be a hit with the Hulu-iTunes demographic, but can such an expensive broadcast show subside off of that? It may be that this is the beginning of the last season of "Heroes," which is not such a bad thing; a show this fast, this fueled, this dynamic deserves to die young.
Most great new TV is less about situations than about settings, and about how different characters interact within that setting. There aren't any obvious links between "Battlestar Galactica," "Rome," "Deadwood," "Lost," or "Gossip Girl" in one single ongoing plotline, but, viewed as as portraits of contested environments, it becomes clear how similar the shows really are. In every show, there is a clearly defined political and social hierarchy which, as the series begins, has been destroyed or corrupted. As society seeks to rebuild that hierarchy, almost every character jockeys for control. On every show, leadership is hotly contested and often fleeting; Roslin loses an election to Baltar, Julius Caesar begats Octavian Caesar, Jenny replaces Blair in the popular clique, Al Swearengen fights to build and destroy Demoracy in the mining camp of Deadwood, and everyone on the island fights anyone else.
With all of these shows, there is no single basic plot through line. "Rome" is not about any particular set of characters, and the few who do survive the whole series are in drastically different places, both geographically and politically, than they were at the beginning. At the same time, part of what's fun about the shows is that no two episodes are alike. Each show pushes the boundaries of time and space - an episode of "Rome" could take place over the course of an evening, or years; "Lost" can flash back to someone's life before the island, or to their birth, or flash forward to their death. "BSG" uses the same free-floating perspective - it's a bit reminiscent of how Virginia Woolf's prose could adopt different characters' stream of consciousness from one paraph to the next - and does so far more subtly.
These are just examples - you could throw in "24" (which focalizes all of modern-day America into Los Angeles - without fail, the worst plotlines on that show are those which shift focus away from Southern California), or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (where Sunnydale, a pleasant suburban town built over the mouth of Hell, became the farcical fantasy '90s answer to Grover's Corners), or even "Grey's Anatomy" (in the first three seasons, the hospital setting was energized by the ongoing contest of "Who Will be the New Chief"; the show has wandered ever since it abandoned that plotline.) The point is that, no matter how wacky serial TV is, it's always firmly rooted to one single setting.
So give this to "Heroes" - it's a show which breaks every rule. Whereas "BSG" and "Lost" are showlength active verbs ("We need to find earth," "We need to get off this island"), the concept for "Heroes" is essentially passive - "People have superpowers." Whereas other shows present a microcosm of humanity by bringing people from every race and culture and placing them in one claustrophobic arena, "Heroes" is humanity-as-macrocosm - in this season's premiere, we skipped around 4 separate continents. You could argue that the show's center is Manhattan, like LA in "24," but Manhattan, in season 1, was more of an ultimate destination than an overarching setting; after all, every character converged for the first time in Las Vegas, and the events in Odessa, Texas, are still the most compelling in the series.
Simply put, "Heroes" is a show which is purely about events. The events are not directly tied into an ongoing concept - it can be a detective show, an adventure series, a horror flick, a (probably mawkish) romance, a medical thriller, a buddy comedy, or a family melodrama. A show like "Lost" could lose momentum and still be incredibly interesting. You can draw comparisons between season 2 of that fantasy thriller and "Heroes." Both had a first season that was all about breakneck mystery - characters moved so quickly you could hardly breathe. Both had a second season that, by comparison, seems incredibly static. "Lost" settled down to typing numbers; "Heroes" spread its characters across space and time, and didn't bother to come up with any obvious convergence.
You could draw a through line from nearly every action taken by every character in "Heroes" season 1 down to the finale, but in season 2, Claire was testing her powers by cutting off toes, and Nathan Petrelli was a sad lonely drunk, and little Micah was living with his cousins in New Orleans. Some of this stuff was interesting, and, in the hands of someone like Matthew Weiner, who can make great drama out of John Slattery enjoying a stolen cigarette, it might have played well. But there was no center. In "Lost," there's always the island, carrying us through the series with its mystery. When "Heroes" stopped to take a breath, the whole thing seemed to come crashing down.
With that in mind, the 2-hour premiere this week was nothing short of genius - more things happened more interestingly in the first 15 minutes than happened all during season 2. It's unfortunate that the show felt the need for another future apocalypse, but there was an energy in this premiere that hasn't been seen since, well, season 1 of "Heroes." This show stuffs itself full of plotlines. Back when it first debuted, and "Lost" was in the middle of a slow season 3, the sheer quickness and pace of "Heroes" was enough to turn it into a legend.
The show did not have a big debut, not even close. It's got to be a huge failure for NBC; there was a moment, in the summer of 2007, when practically everything on the network seemed to revolve around "Heroes," when it was paired up with "Bionic Woman" and when there was word of a spin-off or three. Those plans failed; "Bionic" flopped, season 2 stunk, and the writers' strike ended the 2008 TV season. I'm guessing the show will be a hit with the Hulu-iTunes demographic, but can such an expensive broadcast show subside off of that? It may be that this is the beginning of the last season of "Heroes," which is not such a bad thing; a show this fast, this fueled, this dynamic deserves to die young.
Friday, September 5, 2008
"Princess Mononoke" and "The Last Unicorn"
It's difficult to believe that for practically the entire 20th century you couldn't mention animation without mentioning Disney. It was the only game in town - sure, the Looney Toons over at Warners were much liked, but there was always something fundamentally unlovable about Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd. They were never a family - in nearly every Looney Toon, one character is actively trying to kill another one, and sometimes the cross-currents of backstabbing wrap themselves into spirals towards madness. How many times does Daffy betray Bugs, only to be himself betrayed? There's something dark and weird in the Warner Bros cartoons - morality is regularly undercut, laws of physics are betrayed, and characters run off the film strip with shocking regularity, a trick Bergman would borrow for "Persona."
So, if you were to go back and read the vast majority of reviews written about animated movies before this decade, you'll invariably find some reference to Disney - how the movies are different, how they are more violent, how they are less beautiful, how they are decidedly un-Disneylike. Now, of course, animation is practically more common than real-life, and there are so many different legitimately beautiful artistic options - "South Park," "Frisky Dingo," and the magnificent opening of "Kung Fu Panda" are just a few examples of how seemingly stripped down, unbeautiful animation can dazzle just as much as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves," and with lots of funny, to boot.
Thus, I suspect it's much easier for Americans to appreciate a movie like "The Last Unicorn" (from the very early 80s) and "Princess Mononoke" (from the late 90s) for what they are, as opposed to what they are not. Because both films are many things, but one thing they decidedly are not is even remotely Disneylike.
"Princess Mononoke" is an epic masterwork, and "The Last Unicorn" is a bizarro curiosity. Both films come from creators with a genuine house style that's completely singular. Miyazaki is an unqualified genius, and his 2-D animation breathes with life - in some group shots, you can actually see people in the background inhaling and exhaling, so precise is the master's attention to detail. It's hard to describe this, maybe because it's difficult to describe what breathing looks like - your body doesn't move at all, and yet everything about it moves; your grow around the midsection, but shrink in the shoulders.
"The Last Unicorn" couldn't be more different - it comes out of the Rankin/Bass animation studio. All but forgotten now, Rankin/Bass produced practically every Christmas animation special two generations of kids grew up watching - "The Year Without A Santa Claus," "Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July," and of course, the stop-motion "Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer." Still, they're probably best known now in very hermetic circles of reformed nerdlingers as the company that produced "The Hobbit," the animated adaption of Tolkein's first book.
Funnily enough, though, the two films share a common DNA: "Unicorn" was animated by a studio called Topcraft, which also worked on Miyazaki's "Nausicaa" before mostly reforming into Studio Ghibli, responsible for all of his later works - "Mononoke" among them. Thus, although the two films could not look more different, there is something weirdly similar about how people move - not quite as smooth as in early Disney (say, "Snow White"), but nor as plastic as in late-period 2-D animation, with computer cels and weirdly stolid waxwork people.
It's difficult to describe the magic of watching "The Hobbit" as a child, even more difficult to describe it having watched it again as an adult. The 2-D animation in the Rankin/Bass fantasy catalogue - besides "Hobbit," they produced a version of "Return of the King," a forgotten tale called "The Flight of the Dragons," and "The Last Unicorn" - is clunky in a way that most 2-D animation hasn't been clunky in years. In old Disney cartoons, people seem to breathe; in old Warner Brother cartoons, nobody breathes because they don't have time to, because they're on the move constantly in zip-zap-zoop motions; in the Rankin/Bass films, you can see the blips between cels.
When people talk, they almost always make the same strange movement, which is hard to describe but noticeable in all their fantasy films - their eyes stay wide open, but their bodies seem to pivot back and forth, as their shoulders lean in and then lean out. You get the overall impression that they're leaning in for an important secret, but then leaning out to make a pronouncement. Nearly every line of dialogue in these films is exposition - characters are constantly explaining who they are and what their quest is, sometimes immediately before their quest ends. The echo-tunnel quality of the dialogue isn't helped by the fact that voices tend to run in three directions - annoyingly goofy (for the underdog hero), stoutly athletic (for the knight in shining armor), or high-pitched prom queen (for the inevitably angelic female characters.) One character will inevitably be voiced by one of the three most baritoned actors ever - in "Dragons," it's James Earl Jones; in "The Hobbit," it's John Huston; and here, in "Unicorn," it's Christopher Lee.
What's aged the worst, though, are the musical interludes. "South Park" parodied this strange stylistic quirk in the classic Lemmiwinks episode. It's difficult to describe the genre of music these songs fall under - they sound a bit like songs you might find in a nightmare jukebox musical about the period of history between Led Zeppelin and The Outfield. The lyrics are painfully sincere - they tend to describe the plot of the movie, but take the curious tactic of often seeming to speak directly to the characters. The fact that they're inevitably sung by performers who sound a little bit like Bob Ross only adds to the weird vagueness. This opening credits sequence captures everything awkward yet perversely wonderful about the Rankin/Bass musical interlude - immensely hummable, painfully sincere, ridiculously hokey yet eventually mythic.
The Rankin/Bass films DO hold up, viewed again for adults, largely because they go so far beyond strange into the outright surreal. Dream logic pervades everything about "The Last Unicorn," giving the episodic plot the quality of a Bunuel film that thinks it's a Ray Harryhausen fantasy shocker. At the beginning of the story, two men are on horseback inside of a forest. One man says, "This is a unicorn's forest." The other man says, "Really?" The first man points out how green and wonderful the forest looks, and then says, apropos of nothing but the movie's title, "Surely, she is the last unicorn." The men ride away.
Cut to stage right: there's our unicorn, looking uncomfortably feminine, and suddenly, we hear her brain voice, and it sounds just like Mia Farrow: "The Last? Me? Really?" The whole engine of the plot is set in motion, as she decides to find the rest of her race. However, there's a long interlude - it feels like almost half the movie - where she's captured by a witch, voiced by Angela Lansbury. The witch has a zoo filled with mythic creatures - manticore, dragon, Midgard serpent. They're all fakes, except the unicorn, and a particularly grotesque Harpy, which is half-vulture and half-breasts. After escaping the zoo, the Unicorn runs into a group of Robin Hood-like thieves, who are adamant about their non-Robin-Hood-ness. After escaping the thieves, the Unicorn, now with two friends in tow - a woman named Molly and a wizard named Schmendrick, whose attempt to prove himself a real magician forms the only significant ongoing subplot in the whole movie - finds herself in a castle with a potentially crazy old King, a handsome young prince voiced (and painfully sung) by Jeff Bridges, and, somewhere in the depths, a gigantic, massively evil thing which is and is called The Red Bull.
I should mention that, at this point, the Unicorn has been turned into a human lady. There's some talk about how, if she stays human for too long, she won't be able to turn back into a unicorn. I hope that none of this is making sense, because it shouldn't - the plot contortions are freaky beyond belief. One second, you think you're watching a movie about eco-consciousness; the next, about spirituality; the next, about libertarianism. Like a great B-Movie, "The Last Unicorn" draws a strange amount of power from its own imperfection. It sticks with you. And it helps that it gets better as it goes along - or perhaps you're just more drawn into the world.
"Princess Mononoke" exemplifies what "The Last Unicorn" barely grasps at - the ability to build an entire sense of a fantasy world out of just a few, relatively tiny settings. Middle-Earth in "Lord of the Rings" feels very believable, but only because, by the end, you've seen practically all of it - at more than 10 hours, and with an incredible amount of location photography and settings whose whole ecosystems were transformed for making the trilogy, "Lord of the Rings" feels like the pastoral counterpoint to "The Wire," so completely are its various levels mapped out. (We even get the sense for the different ethnic traits - the Horse-Lords are Aryan viking blonde, the men of Gondor are dark-haired and pale, the hobbits are small and curly-haired, and all the bad guys are black and cockney.)
In "Mononoke," after an opening scene in a tiny village, practically the whole movie divides its time between just a couple of recognizable settings - an enchanted pond in the forest, and a burgeoning city of industry at the base of a hill. "Unicorn" begins in the Unicorn's forest, and then departs through the plains, but there's no real sense of particularity - the zoo is mobile, and seems to just stop along the road; so, too, the band of thieves, who hide out in the darkness; and finally, there is the castle perched on a coastline, suggesting a bird of prey on its roosts, a suicidal feat of fascist architectural engineering, and Castle Elsinore:
It's in this castle where the movie spends its final and most strange, and most disturbing, scenes. "Mononoke" is a much better movie - almost perfect, certainly more consistent, and far more openly ambiguous - but then, you have to watch this scene, and let Christopher Lee's voice wash over you:
I admit that I'm presenting the video out of context, but context doesn't really explain anything about this scene. At this point in the movie, it's not very clear whether the Unicorn is suffering from amnesia, if she's too busy falling in love with the prince to worry about her original goal, or if her original goal - to discover what happened to her fellow unicorns - was just not very important to begin with. This scene reveals that the King is the film's villain, but nothing really follows directly from it - he receives his just desserts at the end of the film, but there's never a sense of genuine reckoning (His last words in the movie are victorious - "I knew! I knew you were the last!")
This scene reminds me, for vague reasons, of a scene from Orson Welles' last film, "F for Fake," where he meditates on Chartres cathedral, on notions of authorship, on humanity, space, time, and existence. Both films are openly episodic, the plot less a series of events than a barely linear series of riffs. Neither film makes a lick of sense. Yet both stick in your head, and both contain scenes which, when surgically removed from the movie around them, seem to contain some hidden equation for understanding something deeper.
Perhaps it's just proof of the incredible allure of baritone-voiced soliloquies. You could listen to Orson Welles in "F for Fake," Christopher Lee in "Unicorn," and Keith David in the english dub of "Mononoke," and almost imagine that this is what it must have been like for Abraham or Muhammad or Heracles to hear some higher power speaking just to him.
So, if you were to go back and read the vast majority of reviews written about animated movies before this decade, you'll invariably find some reference to Disney - how the movies are different, how they are more violent, how they are less beautiful, how they are decidedly un-Disneylike. Now, of course, animation is practically more common than real-life, and there are so many different legitimately beautiful artistic options - "South Park," "Frisky Dingo," and the magnificent opening of "Kung Fu Panda" are just a few examples of how seemingly stripped down, unbeautiful animation can dazzle just as much as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves," and with lots of funny, to boot.
Thus, I suspect it's much easier for Americans to appreciate a movie like "The Last Unicorn" (from the very early 80s) and "Princess Mononoke" (from the late 90s) for what they are, as opposed to what they are not. Because both films are many things, but one thing they decidedly are not is even remotely Disneylike.
"Princess Mononoke" is an epic masterwork, and "The Last Unicorn" is a bizarro curiosity. Both films come from creators with a genuine house style that's completely singular. Miyazaki is an unqualified genius, and his 2-D animation breathes with life - in some group shots, you can actually see people in the background inhaling and exhaling, so precise is the master's attention to detail. It's hard to describe this, maybe because it's difficult to describe what breathing looks like - your body doesn't move at all, and yet everything about it moves; your grow around the midsection, but shrink in the shoulders.
"The Last Unicorn" couldn't be more different - it comes out of the Rankin/Bass animation studio. All but forgotten now, Rankin/Bass produced practically every Christmas animation special two generations of kids grew up watching - "The Year Without A Santa Claus," "Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July," and of course, the stop-motion "Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer." Still, they're probably best known now in very hermetic circles of reformed nerdlingers as the company that produced "The Hobbit," the animated adaption of Tolkein's first book.
Funnily enough, though, the two films share a common DNA: "Unicorn" was animated by a studio called Topcraft, which also worked on Miyazaki's "Nausicaa" before mostly reforming into Studio Ghibli, responsible for all of his later works - "Mononoke" among them. Thus, although the two films could not look more different, there is something weirdly similar about how people move - not quite as smooth as in early Disney (say, "Snow White"), but nor as plastic as in late-period 2-D animation, with computer cels and weirdly stolid waxwork people.
It's difficult to describe the magic of watching "The Hobbit" as a child, even more difficult to describe it having watched it again as an adult. The 2-D animation in the Rankin/Bass fantasy catalogue - besides "Hobbit," they produced a version of "Return of the King," a forgotten tale called "The Flight of the Dragons," and "The Last Unicorn" - is clunky in a way that most 2-D animation hasn't been clunky in years. In old Disney cartoons, people seem to breathe; in old Warner Brother cartoons, nobody breathes because they don't have time to, because they're on the move constantly in zip-zap-zoop motions; in the Rankin/Bass films, you can see the blips between cels.
When people talk, they almost always make the same strange movement, which is hard to describe but noticeable in all their fantasy films - their eyes stay wide open, but their bodies seem to pivot back and forth, as their shoulders lean in and then lean out. You get the overall impression that they're leaning in for an important secret, but then leaning out to make a pronouncement. Nearly every line of dialogue in these films is exposition - characters are constantly explaining who they are and what their quest is, sometimes immediately before their quest ends. The echo-tunnel quality of the dialogue isn't helped by the fact that voices tend to run in three directions - annoyingly goofy (for the underdog hero), stoutly athletic (for the knight in shining armor), or high-pitched prom queen (for the inevitably angelic female characters.) One character will inevitably be voiced by one of the three most baritoned actors ever - in "Dragons," it's James Earl Jones; in "The Hobbit," it's John Huston; and here, in "Unicorn," it's Christopher Lee.
What's aged the worst, though, are the musical interludes. "South Park" parodied this strange stylistic quirk in the classic Lemmiwinks episode. It's difficult to describe the genre of music these songs fall under - they sound a bit like songs you might find in a nightmare jukebox musical about the period of history between Led Zeppelin and The Outfield. The lyrics are painfully sincere - they tend to describe the plot of the movie, but take the curious tactic of often seeming to speak directly to the characters. The fact that they're inevitably sung by performers who sound a little bit like Bob Ross only adds to the weird vagueness. This opening credits sequence captures everything awkward yet perversely wonderful about the Rankin/Bass musical interlude - immensely hummable, painfully sincere, ridiculously hokey yet eventually mythic.
The Rankin/Bass films DO hold up, viewed again for adults, largely because they go so far beyond strange into the outright surreal. Dream logic pervades everything about "The Last Unicorn," giving the episodic plot the quality of a Bunuel film that thinks it's a Ray Harryhausen fantasy shocker. At the beginning of the story, two men are on horseback inside of a forest. One man says, "This is a unicorn's forest." The other man says, "Really?" The first man points out how green and wonderful the forest looks, and then says, apropos of nothing but the movie's title, "Surely, she is the last unicorn." The men ride away.
Cut to stage right: there's our unicorn, looking uncomfortably feminine, and suddenly, we hear her brain voice, and it sounds just like Mia Farrow: "The Last? Me? Really?" The whole engine of the plot is set in motion, as she decides to find the rest of her race. However, there's a long interlude - it feels like almost half the movie - where she's captured by a witch, voiced by Angela Lansbury. The witch has a zoo filled with mythic creatures - manticore, dragon, Midgard serpent. They're all fakes, except the unicorn, and a particularly grotesque Harpy, which is half-vulture and half-breasts. After escaping the zoo, the Unicorn runs into a group of Robin Hood-like thieves, who are adamant about their non-Robin-Hood-ness. After escaping the thieves, the Unicorn, now with two friends in tow - a woman named Molly and a wizard named Schmendrick, whose attempt to prove himself a real magician forms the only significant ongoing subplot in the whole movie - finds herself in a castle with a potentially crazy old King, a handsome young prince voiced (and painfully sung) by Jeff Bridges, and, somewhere in the depths, a gigantic, massively evil thing which is and is called The Red Bull.
I should mention that, at this point, the Unicorn has been turned into a human lady. There's some talk about how, if she stays human for too long, she won't be able to turn back into a unicorn. I hope that none of this is making sense, because it shouldn't - the plot contortions are freaky beyond belief. One second, you think you're watching a movie about eco-consciousness; the next, about spirituality; the next, about libertarianism. Like a great B-Movie, "The Last Unicorn" draws a strange amount of power from its own imperfection. It sticks with you. And it helps that it gets better as it goes along - or perhaps you're just more drawn into the world.
"Princess Mononoke" exemplifies what "The Last Unicorn" barely grasps at - the ability to build an entire sense of a fantasy world out of just a few, relatively tiny settings. Middle-Earth in "Lord of the Rings" feels very believable, but only because, by the end, you've seen practically all of it - at more than 10 hours, and with an incredible amount of location photography and settings whose whole ecosystems were transformed for making the trilogy, "Lord of the Rings" feels like the pastoral counterpoint to "The Wire," so completely are its various levels mapped out. (We even get the sense for the different ethnic traits - the Horse-Lords are Aryan viking blonde, the men of Gondor are dark-haired and pale, the hobbits are small and curly-haired, and all the bad guys are black and cockney.)
In "Mononoke," after an opening scene in a tiny village, practically the whole movie divides its time between just a couple of recognizable settings - an enchanted pond in the forest, and a burgeoning city of industry at the base of a hill. "Unicorn" begins in the Unicorn's forest, and then departs through the plains, but there's no real sense of particularity - the zoo is mobile, and seems to just stop along the road; so, too, the band of thieves, who hide out in the darkness; and finally, there is the castle perched on a coastline, suggesting a bird of prey on its roosts, a suicidal feat of fascist architectural engineering, and Castle Elsinore:
It's in this castle where the movie spends its final and most strange, and most disturbing, scenes. "Mononoke" is a much better movie - almost perfect, certainly more consistent, and far more openly ambiguous - but then, you have to watch this scene, and let Christopher Lee's voice wash over you:I admit that I'm presenting the video out of context, but context doesn't really explain anything about this scene. At this point in the movie, it's not very clear whether the Unicorn is suffering from amnesia, if she's too busy falling in love with the prince to worry about her original goal, or if her original goal - to discover what happened to her fellow unicorns - was just not very important to begin with. This scene reveals that the King is the film's villain, but nothing really follows directly from it - he receives his just desserts at the end of the film, but there's never a sense of genuine reckoning (His last words in the movie are victorious - "I knew! I knew you were the last!")
This scene reminds me, for vague reasons, of a scene from Orson Welles' last film, "F for Fake," where he meditates on Chartres cathedral, on notions of authorship, on humanity, space, time, and existence. Both films are openly episodic, the plot less a series of events than a barely linear series of riffs. Neither film makes a lick of sense. Yet both stick in your head, and both contain scenes which, when surgically removed from the movie around them, seem to contain some hidden equation for understanding something deeper.
Perhaps it's just proof of the incredible allure of baritone-voiced soliloquies. You could listen to Orson Welles in "F for Fake," Christopher Lee in "Unicorn," and Keith David in the english dub of "Mononoke," and almost imagine that this is what it must have been like for Abraham or Muhammad or Heracles to hear some higher power speaking just to him.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Really Real
Human existence strikes you two ways: you're just one among many millions, or you're the only one that counts. You walk between those two roads your whole life, and where those two roads intersect, you've got synchronity, coincidence, fate - the grasping sensation that everything is connected. When I was traveling in Eastern Europe, I read a copy of Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" that I borrowed from my brother. One day on a train, I put aside the book, picked up a magazine, turned a few pages, and found a reference to Bulgakov nestled into a sidebar. (It was "The Economist," natch.) Five days later, drunk and wandering for my life in Unpronounceable Ljubljana, I snapped a picture of the poster for a new opera that was just about to hit town:
This kind of thing happens all the time when you get older. Two weeks ago, I signed up for a free trial membership to World of Warcraft. The following week, I started reading Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash," a book which roughly invented the term "avatar" and certainly was a seminal work in the conception of a digital playspace that would be only slightly more hyperrealistic than our own overcrazy reality. Like most near-futures, the book is cagey about dates, but since the 35-year-old protagonist claims a birthday in the 70s, you could frankly conclude that the book takes place in 2008 - and, barring a few turns of the crazy wheel, you could equally argue that Stephenson's vision has more or less come true.
One of the many sidelong tangents which "Snow Crash" throws at the world of tomorrow involves the creation of genuine digital faces - how it took the invention of genuine, as opposed to plastic, digital emotion in order to make the digital world as palpable as the real one. The same week I read "Snow Crash," this video hit the internet.
Books that you like have a strange quality of seeming wholly necessary to the specific time of life in which you read them. Let me rephrase. It's impossible for me to imagine reading "Snow Crash" at any other time - it's focus on digital reality, its vision of a world happily ruled by corporations rather than governments, feels directly linked to my own concerns of the moment. But I first picked up "Snow Crash" three years ago, off of a friend's recommendation; read the first two chapters and then stopped right away, not because they were bad, but because the first two chapters of "Snow Crash" are so breakneck that the third chapter hits you like an instant comedown (a good friend once argued that the whole book never lives up to its opening, although sometimes I think you could arguet that about everything besides "The Great Gatsby.")
Similarly, right now I'm powering through a graphic novel series called "Transmetropolitan," a vaguely dystopic urban future which follows the travails of journalist Spider Jerusalem, a slightly britified Hunter S. Thompson. In Book 3 of "Transmetropolitan," Spider begins following the Presidential Election, which is pitting a fat shifty capitalist incumbent stooge against a bright shiny younger contender, who's nickname and general political platform are the same: "The Smiler." Spider despises the incumbent President, a thuggish cigar chomper out of the Warren G. Harding school. Yet he comes to despise his opponent even more, because, despite his call for change, he essentially offers the same gruesome money politics as before.
Meanwhile, in present-day reality, Matt Taibbi, often compared to Hunter S. Thompson though more like a modern-day H. L. Menken, just wrote a column in which he unblinkingly and unhappily points out how achingly similar Obama's fundraising tactics are to those who've come before - people named Clinton, but also people named Bush.
The real world is endlessly complicated. In the World of Warcraft, I created a new character, an Elf named Mcarthur. That puts me on both sides of the ongoing Horde/Alliance war. This strikes me as a wholly sane method for living two lives, although now I can't help but wonder if, when I'm not playing, my characters are dreaming of each other.
This kind of thing happens all the time when you get older. Two weeks ago, I signed up for a free trial membership to World of Warcraft. The following week, I started reading Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash," a book which roughly invented the term "avatar" and certainly was a seminal work in the conception of a digital playspace that would be only slightly more hyperrealistic than our own overcrazy reality. Like most near-futures, the book is cagey about dates, but since the 35-year-old protagonist claims a birthday in the 70s, you could frankly conclude that the book takes place in 2008 - and, barring a few turns of the crazy wheel, you could equally argue that Stephenson's vision has more or less come true.One of the many sidelong tangents which "Snow Crash" throws at the world of tomorrow involves the creation of genuine digital faces - how it took the invention of genuine, as opposed to plastic, digital emotion in order to make the digital world as palpable as the real one. The same week I read "Snow Crash," this video hit the internet.
Books that you like have a strange quality of seeming wholly necessary to the specific time of life in which you read them. Let me rephrase. It's impossible for me to imagine reading "Snow Crash" at any other time - it's focus on digital reality, its vision of a world happily ruled by corporations rather than governments, feels directly linked to my own concerns of the moment. But I first picked up "Snow Crash" three years ago, off of a friend's recommendation; read the first two chapters and then stopped right away, not because they were bad, but because the first two chapters of "Snow Crash" are so breakneck that the third chapter hits you like an instant comedown (a good friend once argued that the whole book never lives up to its opening, although sometimes I think you could arguet that about everything besides "The Great Gatsby.")
Similarly, right now I'm powering through a graphic novel series called "Transmetropolitan," a vaguely dystopic urban future which follows the travails of journalist Spider Jerusalem, a slightly britified Hunter S. Thompson. In Book 3 of "Transmetropolitan," Spider begins following the Presidential Election, which is pitting a fat shifty capitalist incumbent stooge against a bright shiny younger contender, who's nickname and general political platform are the same: "The Smiler." Spider despises the incumbent President, a thuggish cigar chomper out of the Warren G. Harding school. Yet he comes to despise his opponent even more, because, despite his call for change, he essentially offers the same gruesome money politics as before.
Meanwhile, in present-day reality, Matt Taibbi, often compared to Hunter S. Thompson though more like a modern-day H. L. Menken, just wrote a column in which he unblinkingly and unhappily points out how achingly similar Obama's fundraising tactics are to those who've come before - people named Clinton, but also people named Bush.
The real world is endlessly complicated. In the World of Warcraft, I created a new character, an Elf named Mcarthur. That puts me on both sides of the ongoing Horde/Alliance war. This strikes me as a wholly sane method for living two lives, although now I can't help but wonder if, when I'm not playing, my characters are dreaming of each other.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
"Yacht Rock" at the Rickshaw Stop
A live event honoring a youtube series ("web TV" is naive and faintly rude, like calling a comic book a "Graphic Novel" or referring to a beatnik as a "white negro") gives the strangest kind of evening. The overall emotion is somewhere between seeing a Night Ranger reunion concert and witnessing the arrival of Dennis Quaid's palooka has-been baseball coach finally getting to play in the major leagues at the end of "The Rookie." Notice that neither event is particularly glorious - Quaid's playing for the Devil Rays, and unless they play "Sister Christian" on repeat for two hours the concert's 99 percent filler - but both have the low-rent appearance of actual glory. Layer in a dollop of considerable retro-post-irony - the double-back ability to appreciate a thing for its awfulness while loving it for its awesomeness - and you've got the special Yacht Rock screening at the Rickshaw Stop.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
The Ineluctable Accrual of Time and Fantastical Experience: A Meditation on the Hills of Mulgore
I have no idea why I signed up for a 10-day trial for World of Warcraft on Friday. I would like to say that I was bored, but the truth is I'm bored all the time at my job, and I usually manage to coax my boredom (or perhaps harness it) by writing (a long email to friends and family), or reading (a novel, or the newest Taibbi), or sometimes even addicting(games.) Maybe it was because I'd had such a good work week - a great forward leap in all my many schemes had taken place. So, in much the same way that I feel good about eating sloppy and drinking nasty after a full week of Whole Foods and 24 Hour Fitness, so perhaps, after a week of such peak efficiency, I saw no reason not to delve into that wide world of personal inefficiency, video games.
Or maybe it was because I visited home last week - briefly. About a year ago, I put away my Playstation 2 and all my video games into a box, and that box was put into our new storage shack out back, which looks a little bit like a gigantic dollhouse, and so full of dust. But I was home, and I was bored, and I realized that I had never beaten the last level of "Kingdom Hearts." Like an addict discovering an unspent hypo, or perhaps more happily like a retired badman coming out of retirement for one last score, I put the fragile CD game (how long can those things last? Are they like fairies, dying away when no one's left to believe in them?) into the even more fragile PS2 (those things used to look so new and chic; now, they look like the wreckage of Manhattan in the background of the "Escape from New York" poster.)
Hooked again, I barely managed to stop myself at 2 in the morning from quitting right before an apt-to-be-hours-long final battle began. But the feeling stuck around. I don't know what that feeling is - I'm talking about why it's so fun to play video games in general, but why it's especially fun to play a gigantic fantasy game, with the bizarre set of reality-dominating rules, the steady build-up of yourself and your abilities and your outfit, and the inevitably horde of dragons.
But maybe that was going through my head, on Friday, when I pulled my desk against the wall and darkened my screen so that no passersby could see when I entered in my screen name and password.
Here's the thing: Warcraft works in a way that's somewhat different from any other game I've ever played. I'm not talking about what's specifically happening, since almost all of the specifics fade from memory almost immediately unless you're a complete mouthbreather, and even mouthbreathers who play Warcraft aren't usually monobrained enough to actually care if you kill Ramshackle Stirling of the attacking Beetlebum Castratos who reside in Tweedlepork Canyon or whoever the fuck was the chief of that tribe of weird man-beasts I killed in hour 4 of my great experiment.
No, the reason Warcraft works - at least at first, and I think also over time - is the steady accrual of spectacle and experience. When you begin, you're in a tiny little village - 4 or 5 little huts. You get sent out to fight annoying little birds and fearsome coyote things. After a little while, you kill enough coyote things to buy a new weapon. You think, "This weapon is the coolest fucking weapon ever." Using that weapon, you go after a new target: humanoid things. Along the way, you run into those birds and coyote things, and you kill them so much easier now, you can't believe they were ever a problem. The humanoid things are harder to kill, though: maybe, at one point, you get attacked by two at a time. You manage to kill them, though. Your village elder tells you: it's time to go to the next village.
You think: Well, what the hell, I get it. But the next village is bigger, and the enemies are fiercer, and slowly, you begin to get a sense for the deeper story. I'm a Minotaur-looking creature residing in a valley of Minotaur creatures - that's just about the whole world that I know now. But the whole valley keeps being attacked from all sides - dwarves to the west, goblins to the east, and I think I ran into a couple of centaurs at one point, appearing in my tiny little world like monstrous giants in Lilliput.
I can remember a similar kind of feeling in one of my favorite games ever, Final Fantasy VII. Early in the game, although for me it was many weeks in, you come upon this gigantic moat. Inside the moat, you can see a gigantic shape moving around. You go into the moat, and the shape comes towards you. You go into battle mode, and you're facing off against the largest creature you've ever seen - a gigantic sea serpent. If you're lucky, it kills your whole party in one move; if you're not lucky, you have long enough to get one hit in, which barely dents him.
Here's the thing: much later in the game, when your party has swelled, when you've gone through any number of new weapons and armor, when you've basically crisscrossed the world seven times and gone to hell and back, you may find yourself back at that little moat. And you step in there, and the shape comes towards you. And there you are again, facing the gigantic sea serpent. And if you strike first, no shit, you kill it completely. In one. And if it strikes first, it barely even dents you. The master become the pupil. The serpent become a lamb.
Here's another picture of my boy:
Or maybe it was because I visited home last week - briefly. About a year ago, I put away my Playstation 2 and all my video games into a box, and that box was put into our new storage shack out back, which looks a little bit like a gigantic dollhouse, and so full of dust. But I was home, and I was bored, and I realized that I had never beaten the last level of "Kingdom Hearts." Like an addict discovering an unspent hypo, or perhaps more happily like a retired badman coming out of retirement for one last score, I put the fragile CD game (how long can those things last? Are they like fairies, dying away when no one's left to believe in them?) into the even more fragile PS2 (those things used to look so new and chic; now, they look like the wreckage of Manhattan in the background of the "Escape from New York" poster.)
Hooked again, I barely managed to stop myself at 2 in the morning from quitting right before an apt-to-be-hours-long final battle began. But the feeling stuck around. I don't know what that feeling is - I'm talking about why it's so fun to play video games in general, but why it's especially fun to play a gigantic fantasy game, with the bizarre set of reality-dominating rules, the steady build-up of yourself and your abilities and your outfit, and the inevitably horde of dragons.
But maybe that was going through my head, on Friday, when I pulled my desk against the wall and darkened my screen so that no passersby could see when I entered in my screen name and password.
Here's the thing: Warcraft works in a way that's somewhat different from any other game I've ever played. I'm not talking about what's specifically happening, since almost all of the specifics fade from memory almost immediately unless you're a complete mouthbreather, and even mouthbreathers who play Warcraft aren't usually monobrained enough to actually care if you kill Ramshackle Stirling of the attacking Beetlebum Castratos who reside in Tweedlepork Canyon or whoever the fuck was the chief of that tribe of weird man-beasts I killed in hour 4 of my great experiment.
No, the reason Warcraft works - at least at first, and I think also over time - is the steady accrual of spectacle and experience. When you begin, you're in a tiny little village - 4 or 5 little huts. You get sent out to fight annoying little birds and fearsome coyote things. After a little while, you kill enough coyote things to buy a new weapon. You think, "This weapon is the coolest fucking weapon ever." Using that weapon, you go after a new target: humanoid things. Along the way, you run into those birds and coyote things, and you kill them so much easier now, you can't believe they were ever a problem. The humanoid things are harder to kill, though: maybe, at one point, you get attacked by two at a time. You manage to kill them, though. Your village elder tells you: it's time to go to the next village.
You think: Well, what the hell, I get it. But the next village is bigger, and the enemies are fiercer, and slowly, you begin to get a sense for the deeper story. I'm a Minotaur-looking creature residing in a valley of Minotaur creatures - that's just about the whole world that I know now. But the whole valley keeps being attacked from all sides - dwarves to the west, goblins to the east, and I think I ran into a couple of centaurs at one point, appearing in my tiny little world like monstrous giants in Lilliput.
I can remember a similar kind of feeling in one of my favorite games ever, Final Fantasy VII. Early in the game, although for me it was many weeks in, you come upon this gigantic moat. Inside the moat, you can see a gigantic shape moving around. You go into the moat, and the shape comes towards you. You go into battle mode, and you're facing off against the largest creature you've ever seen - a gigantic sea serpent. If you're lucky, it kills your whole party in one move; if you're not lucky, you have long enough to get one hit in, which barely dents him.
Here's the thing: much later in the game, when your party has swelled, when you've gone through any number of new weapons and armor, when you've basically crisscrossed the world seven times and gone to hell and back, you may find yourself back at that little moat. And you step in there, and the shape comes towards you. And there you are again, facing the gigantic sea serpent. And if you strike first, no shit, you kill it completely. In one. And if it strikes first, it barely even dents you. The master become the pupil. The serpent become a lamb.
Here's another picture of my boy:
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
"The X-Files" and "The Train"
It's not fair to say that the new X-Files movie (variously described as a sequel to the first movie, a bigscreen adaptation of the TV show, and the hopeful beginning for a new franchise) is bad, because that's missing the point. It's actually the worst movie of the year, but more than that - it's one of the worst movies of any year, and joyfully so.
Follow here: the TV show ended with Mulder and Scully on the run from the FBI and the aliens and perhaps also the Flukeman. The movie begins with Scully working in a hospital run by Catholics, treating a boy named Christian for an incurable disease. Mulder has been hiding out in a house in the middle of nowhere, cutting out newspaper articles which hint at the fantastical events, and pinning them on the walls, ceiling, and floor of his study. He may be investigating these mysterious events, but that's left vague. He's called back to work for the FBI by a special agent played by Amanda Peet, an actress who's been nearly famous for almost a decade now. (Her partner is played by Xzibit, who shouldn't even keep his day job.)
The reason that he's called back - the reason why the FBI is willing to pardon him for crimes which are left vague in the movie, partially so franchise newcomers won't be confused, but also because those crimes were vague to begin with - is that one of their agents has been abducted in Virginia, and a local man claims to be having visions of said woman. That's it: some guy in Virginia says he's a telepath, and the FBI has no one to turn to but Fox Mulder. Movie, Go!
I should point out that said telepath is a former Catholic priest who's also a convicted pedophile. This is potentially interesting, but the movie obscures his crime behind a PG-13 veil of moral indignation and murky plotting. Everything about the movie is vague. In the middle of the movie, Scully and Mulder are lying in bed together - are they sleeping together, or living together, or what? Their relationship used to be predicated on will-they-or-won't-they; now, it's more like are-they-or-aren't-they, which would be an interesting tone if the creators even realized it existed.
Nothing about this fucking movie makes even shitty sense. People appear randomly in countryside that might be Virginia, in a city that might be Washington DC, and in other settings which all look like Canada. I'm not downing the fact that they shot in Vancouver - in fact, everything that's memorable with the movie has to do with the exteriors, with people walking and driving through gigantic snow drifts. You begin to wonder what could be buried under the snow, and what it might dig up.
The problem is that everything ABOUT this movie is snow. After 90 minutes, I still don't really know much more than I knew from watching the trailer. There's a character who's obviously the villain, because he's played by Leoben from "Battlestar Galactica" and is the kind of guy who hangs around pools and grins at pretty girls while holding his breath under water. Because this is "The X-Files," you're waiting to find out something cool about this guy - is he a ghost? A merman? A werewolf? A Wendigo? None of the above - not even close. The reveal is so anticlimactic as to make you doubt whether this movie actually happened.
How can I put this? No one involved in this movie understands how to write a screenplay or how to film a movie - yet, even worse, no one seems to understand what made "The X-Files" such a great show. There's not one single moment in the entire movie which comes close to capturing the magic of an episode from the show's boom years. There is a strange and utterly non sequitur moment early in the film - Mulder and Scully are back in the FBI Headquarters, and while they stand in the hallway, they notice a picture of George W. Bush. The camera lingers on him, and the theme music - not even the theme music, just the little whistle - sounds on the soundtrack. The camera moves right, and lingers on another picture - that of J. Edgar Hoover.
It's a silly moment - so ambiguous that it's not really offensive to anyone - but it reminds you that the "X-Files" was, above all, a funny show, built less on the two leads' eventual romance than on their simple exasperation with each other. Neither of them were really noble - Mulder was a closet psycho more concerned with proving aliens exist than saving people from them, and Scully was officially trying to get Mulder fired and unofficially trying to talk some sense into him. The movie buys Mulder's argument hook, line, and sinker. It's right there in the title: "I Want To Believe." That's not the theme - that's the whole entire thesis.
Belief is an interesting idea, but the way that the movie plays it is farcical. Part of belief - particularly Christian belief, and particularly Catholic belief, and this movie is so Catholic you'd think the Reformation never happened - comes from faith in something that can't be proved - "Blessed are they who believe and have not seen," the Messiah told Doubting Thomas. Well, in this movie, some random guy manages to track down bodies and limbs buried in the middle of the Virginia/Vancouver Icecap using nothing but vibes; he also cries blood, and does a few other things outside the ken of reality, also. What's not to believe in? The show was mysterious; the movie is just purposefully undefined, and by the end you're demanding a huge twist just as an explanation for why nothing makes any sense.
I was thinking about this awful movie while I watched a movie from the 1960s, "The Train," a trim little actioner by John Frankenheimer which has the distinction (according to Frankenheimer, at least) of being the last action movie filmed in Black and White. (I'm not counting "Sin City," because a) it had color, and b) I remain unconvinced that it's not just a fancy star-ridden screensaver.) "The Train" is not great. It's set towards the end of World War II, and features characters who are French and German, but everyone speaks English, especially Burt Lancaster, who doesn't even bother to affect a French accent in his leading role. The film moves slowly and deliberately - it takes awhile for the central plot to kick in, and even then, you're not totally convinced that you're not watching a B-grade heist movie with a semi-serious theme (towards the middle of the movie, one character even says, "This is the last job.")
Yet "The Train" is a movie - you get absorbed by the shots even when you're watching it on a TV screen, whereas most of the shots in "The X-Files" movie are so dull and rote and chopped together as to make you stare directly the ceiling of the movie theater. There's a weird magic to the way that Frankenheimer shoots actors - it's the black and white, it's the wide angle lenses with deep focus backgrounds, but it's also how effectively he hints at the turbulent emotions going on behind their brows.
Follow here: the TV show ended with Mulder and Scully on the run from the FBI and the aliens and perhaps also the Flukeman. The movie begins with Scully working in a hospital run by Catholics, treating a boy named Christian for an incurable disease. Mulder has been hiding out in a house in the middle of nowhere, cutting out newspaper articles which hint at the fantastical events, and pinning them on the walls, ceiling, and floor of his study. He may be investigating these mysterious events, but that's left vague. He's called back to work for the FBI by a special agent played by Amanda Peet, an actress who's been nearly famous for almost a decade now. (Her partner is played by Xzibit, who shouldn't even keep his day job.)
The reason that he's called back - the reason why the FBI is willing to pardon him for crimes which are left vague in the movie, partially so franchise newcomers won't be confused, but also because those crimes were vague to begin with - is that one of their agents has been abducted in Virginia, and a local man claims to be having visions of said woman. That's it: some guy in Virginia says he's a telepath, and the FBI has no one to turn to but Fox Mulder. Movie, Go!
I should point out that said telepath is a former Catholic priest who's also a convicted pedophile. This is potentially interesting, but the movie obscures his crime behind a PG-13 veil of moral indignation and murky plotting. Everything about the movie is vague. In the middle of the movie, Scully and Mulder are lying in bed together - are they sleeping together, or living together, or what? Their relationship used to be predicated on will-they-or-won't-they; now, it's more like are-they-or-aren't-they, which would be an interesting tone if the creators even realized it existed.
Nothing about this fucking movie makes even shitty sense. People appear randomly in countryside that might be Virginia, in a city that might be Washington DC, and in other settings which all look like Canada. I'm not downing the fact that they shot in Vancouver - in fact, everything that's memorable with the movie has to do with the exteriors, with people walking and driving through gigantic snow drifts. You begin to wonder what could be buried under the snow, and what it might dig up.
The problem is that everything ABOUT this movie is snow. After 90 minutes, I still don't really know much more than I knew from watching the trailer. There's a character who's obviously the villain, because he's played by Leoben from "Battlestar Galactica" and is the kind of guy who hangs around pools and grins at pretty girls while holding his breath under water. Because this is "The X-Files," you're waiting to find out something cool about this guy - is he a ghost? A merman? A werewolf? A Wendigo? None of the above - not even close. The reveal is so anticlimactic as to make you doubt whether this movie actually happened.
How can I put this? No one involved in this movie understands how to write a screenplay or how to film a movie - yet, even worse, no one seems to understand what made "The X-Files" such a great show. There's not one single moment in the entire movie which comes close to capturing the magic of an episode from the show's boom years. There is a strange and utterly non sequitur moment early in the film - Mulder and Scully are back in the FBI Headquarters, and while they stand in the hallway, they notice a picture of George W. Bush. The camera lingers on him, and the theme music - not even the theme music, just the little whistle - sounds on the soundtrack. The camera moves right, and lingers on another picture - that of J. Edgar Hoover.
It's a silly moment - so ambiguous that it's not really offensive to anyone - but it reminds you that the "X-Files" was, above all, a funny show, built less on the two leads' eventual romance than on their simple exasperation with each other. Neither of them were really noble - Mulder was a closet psycho more concerned with proving aliens exist than saving people from them, and Scully was officially trying to get Mulder fired and unofficially trying to talk some sense into him. The movie buys Mulder's argument hook, line, and sinker. It's right there in the title: "I Want To Believe." That's not the theme - that's the whole entire thesis.
Belief is an interesting idea, but the way that the movie plays it is farcical. Part of belief - particularly Christian belief, and particularly Catholic belief, and this movie is so Catholic you'd think the Reformation never happened - comes from faith in something that can't be proved - "Blessed are they who believe and have not seen," the Messiah told Doubting Thomas. Well, in this movie, some random guy manages to track down bodies and limbs buried in the middle of the Virginia/Vancouver Icecap using nothing but vibes; he also cries blood, and does a few other things outside the ken of reality, also. What's not to believe in? The show was mysterious; the movie is just purposefully undefined, and by the end you're demanding a huge twist just as an explanation for why nothing makes any sense.
I was thinking about this awful movie while I watched a movie from the 1960s, "The Train," a trim little actioner by John Frankenheimer which has the distinction (according to Frankenheimer, at least) of being the last action movie filmed in Black and White. (I'm not counting "Sin City," because a) it had color, and b) I remain unconvinced that it's not just a fancy star-ridden screensaver.) "The Train" is not great. It's set towards the end of World War II, and features characters who are French and German, but everyone speaks English, especially Burt Lancaster, who doesn't even bother to affect a French accent in his leading role. The film moves slowly and deliberately - it takes awhile for the central plot to kick in, and even then, you're not totally convinced that you're not watching a B-grade heist movie with a semi-serious theme (towards the middle of the movie, one character even says, "This is the last job.")
Yet "The Train" is a movie - you get absorbed by the shots even when you're watching it on a TV screen, whereas most of the shots in "The X-Files" movie are so dull and rote and chopped together as to make you stare directly the ceiling of the movie theater. There's a weird magic to the way that Frankenheimer shoots actors - it's the black and white, it's the wide angle lenses with deep focus backgrounds, but it's also how effectively he hints at the turbulent emotions going on behind their brows.
Frankenheimer had one of the strangest careers in Hollywood history, but for about two decades there, he was making eye-popping little films with bigtime stars who were neverbetter. Frank Sinatra in "The Manchurian Candidate," Lancaster here, Rock Hudson in "Seconds," Gene Hackman in "French Connection II" - all of these roles are, in one way or another, about men trying to figure themselves out. Sinatra is brainwashed; Rock Hudson is an old man in a young man's body; Hackman is a celebrity cop who turns into a junkie; and, most subtly yet perhaps most effectively, Lancaster in "The Train" is a man who's just trying to do his awful, awful job, and somehow that job turns him into a hero.
Here's the setup - the Nazis are leaving Paris, and one Colonel wants to take the great art of France with him on the titular Train. The opening credits sequence sets the tone perfectly - soldiers arranging boxes with names like "Miro," "Picasso," "Dali," "Renoir," etc. The stakes are simple - that art is the glory of France, and it can't be taken. Not to worry - you don't have to like art to enjoy this movie, since Lancaster, as the rebel leader, definitely doesn't. (He regularly suggests blowing the train up.) The movie wanders around in its opening hour - the Nazis are trying to leave Paris, and Lancaster, as the railway inspector, is trying to delay them long enough so that the Allies can come in and bomb them all to hell.
More things happen - I don't want to go into detail, not because the movie is particularly twisty, but because the tiny aspects of plot are so essential to how this movie becomes what it becomes. More or less just by not being blown up earlier, the train with the art onboard becomes a strange kind of MacGuffin - nobody who's protecting it particularly wants to protect it, and everyone who tries to ends up dead. The person who most appreciates the art is the Nazi Colonel who's willing to kill everyone - even his own men - to keep the art for Germany.
The movie flows along organically, partially because, at the beginning, no one's role is particularly clear. Whereas all of the characters in "The X-Files" feel like mouthpieces for a particular theme, here the characters are normal people in doubly fantastic times - because of the War, which is actually getting worse the closer it gets to the end, and because of the Train, which supposedly holds the glory of France. ("Have you ever seen the paintings?" Lancaster's friend asks him, right before they go off to sacrifice themselves yet again. "When we're finished, I think we should take a look.")
The last twenty minutes of "The Train" are some of the most tense of any movie. And yet, they're desperately slow. Lancaster is hobbling - he's been shot in the movie, and in real life he suffered a knee injury while playing golf. The tension is unbearable. At the end of "The X-Files," Mulder is also hobbling from an injury or two, but I think there's one main difference. In "The Train," we see exactly where Lancaster is - he's climbing over a hillside, and there's a shot that's so wide that you have to watch it two or three times before you notice the tiny little moving Lancaster dot. We can feel every step, because we're there for every step, or at least it feels like it. In "the X-Files,' Mulder emerges from a wreck and then starts runwalking. We cut, and he's somewhere else, doing some more runwalking. At one point, he's attacked by dogs, but the film cuts away from him just as the dogs attack. We cut to inside the evil secret lair, where people hear dogs barking and run outside. There, they find a dog which appears to have two heads, and one of the heads is dead.
It's an intriguing image, but why don't we get to see Mulder fighting the dog? Well, because Mulder needs to magically appear inside at that very moment. Surprise! Christopher Nolan is good at this sort of thing, but he's the exception - and since his characters almost always have secret identities, perhaps he's the exception that proves the rule.
What I'm saying is that there's hardly any magic in any single shot of "The X-Files," and "The Train" is full of magic. Why is that? Why is it that an old slow movie with hardly any memorable characters somehow, in its final moments, turns into one of the greatest standoffs in movie history? Why is it that such a movie can be much more fine-tuned than a movie whose creators have had more than a decade to finesse the character dynamic, to figure out what stories work and what stories wouldn't?
Here's the setup - the Nazis are leaving Paris, and one Colonel wants to take the great art of France with him on the titular Train. The opening credits sequence sets the tone perfectly - soldiers arranging boxes with names like "Miro," "Picasso," "Dali," "Renoir," etc. The stakes are simple - that art is the glory of France, and it can't be taken. Not to worry - you don't have to like art to enjoy this movie, since Lancaster, as the rebel leader, definitely doesn't. (He regularly suggests blowing the train up.) The movie wanders around in its opening hour - the Nazis are trying to leave Paris, and Lancaster, as the railway inspector, is trying to delay them long enough so that the Allies can come in and bomb them all to hell.
More things happen - I don't want to go into detail, not because the movie is particularly twisty, but because the tiny aspects of plot are so essential to how this movie becomes what it becomes. More or less just by not being blown up earlier, the train with the art onboard becomes a strange kind of MacGuffin - nobody who's protecting it particularly wants to protect it, and everyone who tries to ends up dead. The person who most appreciates the art is the Nazi Colonel who's willing to kill everyone - even his own men - to keep the art for Germany.
The movie flows along organically, partially because, at the beginning, no one's role is particularly clear. Whereas all of the characters in "The X-Files" feel like mouthpieces for a particular theme, here the characters are normal people in doubly fantastic times - because of the War, which is actually getting worse the closer it gets to the end, and because of the Train, which supposedly holds the glory of France. ("Have you ever seen the paintings?" Lancaster's friend asks him, right before they go off to sacrifice themselves yet again. "When we're finished, I think we should take a look.")
The last twenty minutes of "The Train" are some of the most tense of any movie. And yet, they're desperately slow. Lancaster is hobbling - he's been shot in the movie, and in real life he suffered a knee injury while playing golf. The tension is unbearable. At the end of "The X-Files," Mulder is also hobbling from an injury or two, but I think there's one main difference. In "The Train," we see exactly where Lancaster is - he's climbing over a hillside, and there's a shot that's so wide that you have to watch it two or three times before you notice the tiny little moving Lancaster dot. We can feel every step, because we're there for every step, or at least it feels like it. In "the X-Files,' Mulder emerges from a wreck and then starts runwalking. We cut, and he's somewhere else, doing some more runwalking. At one point, he's attacked by dogs, but the film cuts away from him just as the dogs attack. We cut to inside the evil secret lair, where people hear dogs barking and run outside. There, they find a dog which appears to have two heads, and one of the heads is dead.
It's an intriguing image, but why don't we get to see Mulder fighting the dog? Well, because Mulder needs to magically appear inside at that very moment. Surprise! Christopher Nolan is good at this sort of thing, but he's the exception - and since his characters almost always have secret identities, perhaps he's the exception that proves the rule.
What I'm saying is that there's hardly any magic in any single shot of "The X-Files," and "The Train" is full of magic. Why is that? Why is it that an old slow movie with hardly any memorable characters somehow, in its final moments, turns into one of the greatest standoffs in movie history? Why is it that such a movie can be much more fine-tuned than a movie whose creators have had more than a decade to finesse the character dynamic, to figure out what stories work and what stories wouldn't?
In "The Train," characters rarely talk about anything but how much they want to survive, and the movie somehow feels filled with ideas. In "the X-Files," characters rarely talk about anything but ideas, and the movie somehow feels emptied of everything. Why is that?
Sunday, July 20, 2008
"The Dark Knight"
The Dark Knight solves crime. The Dark Knight cures diseases. The Dark Knight prevents sunburn. The Dark Knight investigates Abu Ghraib. The Dark Knight turns bad mofo Staten Island men into geeksturbating incoherent sad-happy undevirginized men. The Dark Knight creates the sun, the moon, and the stars, Encolpio. The Dark Knight was one opening night, on IMAX, in capital letters, for two and a half hours, playing at six AM, for the first time ever, in CAPITAL LETTERS, because you can't say it enough. The Dark Knight fights fascism. The Dark Knight is what you talk about when you're around people you don't know and you need to talk about something. The Dark Knight makes you attractive. The Dark Knight works wonders. Wonders beyond our human ken. The Dark Knight is Christian Bale. He has three voices in the movie. One is a loud whisper, which he uses when he's wearing the mask, except for one little moment, which you only notice when you see it the second time (and yes, you have to see it the second time.) One is the douchebag billionaire voice, which when he uses you remember that he is a british fellow talking American, but it's okay, because every syllable the man named Bruce Wayne uses is so practiced (because every moment he lives he is imagining himself as someone else [because he, a character conceived by two people about 70 years ago, when his name had a hyphen, and the Great Depression was, you know, happening, just so happen to be the very image of a modern man)]. One, the final one, is the voice he uses when he is speaking to someone who knows that both of the above voices are fake - his butler Alfred, usually, and occasionally his galpal Rachel, who is his affair of the heart, who was played by Katie Holmes and is now and forever played by Maggie Gyllenhall, who is too good for this movie (her role is an awful, awfully noticeable downer in this great movie about men trying to do good and thus[ly] betraying everyone they tell themselves they love.) This is the greatest performance Christian Bale has ever had - impressive, when you consider that he also blew your mind in the preview for the new "Terminator" that played before this audio visual global event, and that he was competing with the image of Dr. Manhattan in the trailer for "Watchmen," which, unless that movie is capable of defeating this one in being the greatest ever, will be fundamentally disappointing (because the "Watchmen" trailer is, for some of us, the greatest not-the-actual-thing thing, ever, in all history, of humankind, ever.) And even more impressive, when you consider that Batman is the fifth or sixth lead in "The Dark Knight," which (we all didn't notice until we saw the movie) is a film with "Batman" not even remotely in its title.
Yes, this is a movie about Harvey Dent - played awfully by Tommy Lee Jones, and briefly by Billy Fucking Dee Williams, and now perfectly wonderfully endlessly by Aaron Eckhart - who says his own epitaph (which actually happens often in bad movies but here happens quitely in the greatest movie), "You either die a hero, or live long enough to become a villain." And it's also about Morgan Freeman, in a real role ("The Dark Knight" helps us all understand that "Wanted" is dogshit.) But wait, you're forgetting Gary Oldman, who frankly make you cry, with happiness, again, and again. And again. He's so good that you could call the movie Jim Gordon, and it would be the greatest crime sequel since French Connection II. Which it is. Except erase sequel, and crime, and underline greatest, in bold, with gold.
The Dark Knight opens up China to the west. (True.) The Dark Knight has a brief yet immortal scene in Hong Kong. The Dark Knight involves a Hong Kong controversy. Tangentially. Abstractly. It's conversation worthy. Every line in this movie is conversation worthy. There will be discussions about cadence. There will be agonizations over missed chances for The Sequel. (Spoiler alert - the Joker does not die. Spoiler alert - he will live forever.) "There Will be Blood" - and by the way, this movie is utterly that movie with superheroes. What I mean is that you feel the same way watching it. Horrified. Yet laughing, endlessly, horribly (because you're laughing at Armageddon), splendidly (because you laugh about the same jokes twice and thrice and whatever word rhymes with those two that means a billion million), and wonderfully (because this movie makes you believe in movies, and comic books films, and life after death, and fiction.)
Yes, this is a movie about Harvey Dent - played awfully by Tommy Lee Jones, and briefly by Billy Fucking Dee Williams, and now perfectly wonderfully endlessly by Aaron Eckhart - who says his own epitaph (which actually happens often in bad movies but here happens quitely in the greatest movie), "You either die a hero, or live long enough to become a villain." And it's also about Morgan Freeman, in a real role ("The Dark Knight" helps us all understand that "Wanted" is dogshit.) But wait, you're forgetting Gary Oldman, who frankly make you cry, with happiness, again, and again. And again. He's so good that you could call the movie Jim Gordon, and it would be the greatest crime sequel since French Connection II. Which it is. Except erase sequel, and crime, and underline greatest, in bold, with gold.
The Dark Knight opens up China to the west. (True.) The Dark Knight has a brief yet immortal scene in Hong Kong. The Dark Knight involves a Hong Kong controversy. Tangentially. Abstractly. It's conversation worthy. Every line in this movie is conversation worthy. There will be discussions about cadence. There will be agonizations over missed chances for The Sequel. (Spoiler alert - the Joker does not die. Spoiler alert - he will live forever.) "There Will be Blood" - and by the way, this movie is utterly that movie with superheroes. What I mean is that you feel the same way watching it. Horrified. Yet laughing, endlessly, horribly (because you're laughing at Armageddon), splendidly (because you laugh about the same jokes twice and thrice and whatever word rhymes with those two that means a billion million), and wonderfully (because this movie makes you believe in movies, and comic books films, and life after death, and fiction.)
The Dark Knight makes critics write the greatest reviews of their lifetimes. Go here. Read this. Read it out loud. Read it on the street. Read it until you memorize every word. Why haven't you seen it? What is going on in your unfortunate head? Why aren't you and I talking about The Dark Knight right now, together, you quoting your favorite line and me quoting mine (no doubt initially being words spoken by Heath Ledger, who is amazing, who is not dead, because he lives on, today, in theaters, not just everywhere but more everywhere than ever before.)
This movie solves problems. This movie examines modernity. This movie recreates situations recognizable from unenjoyable new broadcasts. This movie features news broadcasts. This movie involves Anthony Michael Hall, and Cillian Murphy, and the guy who played Zeus in "Friday." If I tell you he gives the best performance in the whole film, will you believe me? What if I tell you that he's only onscreen for maybe three minutes? And what if I tell you that that means that the same guy who played Prisoner #2 in the third Austin Powers and who voiced a role in that fucking 50 Cent shitfest game has now given the greatest role in the greatest film ever made?
The Dark Knight is it. The Dark Knight makes you cry. The Dark Knight makes you laugh. But only at dirty bad things. The Dark Knight ends perfectly. It does lots of other things perfectly, too. It can't help it. It's the greatest movie ever. Made. Conceived. Performed. Filmed. Edited. Scored (you will love the violins [I insist.]) Released. The Dark Knight is its own industry. The Dark Knight is its own country. The Dark Knight is itself. It's wonderful. It's memorable. It's a sequel. It's the "Chinatown" of superhero movies. It's the "Chinatown" of this decade. It's "Chinatown" with a Bat-cycle. It's "Chinatown." Forget it, Jake, this is Gotham City. Every movie that came before can't compare. Every movie that comes after will try to. They will all fail, and miserably. Because this is it. You can tell. Because you see it twice, and still want to see it. Again. Again. Again. Please.
This movie solves problems. This movie examines modernity. This movie recreates situations recognizable from unenjoyable new broadcasts. This movie features news broadcasts. This movie involves Anthony Michael Hall, and Cillian Murphy, and the guy who played Zeus in "Friday." If I tell you he gives the best performance in the whole film, will you believe me? What if I tell you that he's only onscreen for maybe three minutes? And what if I tell you that that means that the same guy who played Prisoner #2 in the third Austin Powers and who voiced a role in that fucking 50 Cent shitfest game has now given the greatest role in the greatest film ever made?
The Dark Knight is it. The Dark Knight makes you cry. The Dark Knight makes you laugh. But only at dirty bad things. The Dark Knight ends perfectly. It does lots of other things perfectly, too. It can't help it. It's the greatest movie ever. Made. Conceived. Performed. Filmed. Edited. Scored (you will love the violins [I insist.]) Released. The Dark Knight is its own industry. The Dark Knight is its own country. The Dark Knight is itself. It's wonderful. It's memorable. It's a sequel. It's the "Chinatown" of superhero movies. It's the "Chinatown" of this decade. It's "Chinatown" with a Bat-cycle. It's "Chinatown." Forget it, Jake, this is Gotham City. Every movie that came before can't compare. Every movie that comes after will try to. They will all fail, and miserably. Because this is it. You can tell. Because you see it twice, and still want to see it. Again. Again. Again. Please.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
"Sex and the City" - Season 3
Samantha meets a male version of herself twice in Season 3. At a nightclub, she runs into Tom Reymi, "the male Samantha," who utters the immortal line, "We know the same people, we should go to dinner, blah blah. Wanna fuck?" (Another great Tom Reymi utterance from ten seconds later - "You haven't fucked till you've fucked in the swing.") Later in the season, she meets "Sam Jones," who's not so much a cross-gender duplicate as he is a bizarro-world altar ego: young, obsessive, and virginal. Gender twisting is everywhere in season 3: Carrie briefly gets cast adrift in a subculture of pansexuality (meeting her boyfriend's ex-boyfriend, kissing Alanis Morrissette); Miranda becomes the man in her relationship with Steve, choosing when it starts and when it ends; Charlotte, meanwhile, just becomes a man, for a photo series made up entirely of women dressed up to look like men (she looks remarkably like Orlando Bloom.)
"Sex and the City" always flirted with the weird flimsiness of modern gender - recall, in the very first episode, when Carrie says she wants to have sex "like a man" - and so it's worth pondering a simple question: What is the male version of "Sex and the City?"
This is why, beginning with season 3, the real "male version" of "Sex and the City" becomes, undoubtedly, "The Sopranos." (Preface: It's true that "Sopranos" had its share of main female characters, but the show was always focused on a man's world. Notice how, whenever a woman tries to stand against the preconceptions of the mob men and of the show itself, the male hierarchy forces her back in - Adriana gets killed, Melfi gets raped first by a man and then by the system, Carmela tries to divorce Tony but gets trapped by him at every turn. Even Angie Bonpensiero gets absorbed - in season 2, she's talking about leaving her deadbeat husband; by season 6, she's "one of the boys.")
On one level, the two shows shared a basic thematic characteristic - they were all about analysis, and specifically, a pointed analysis of modern gender roles. "The Sopranos," for most of its run, got its main power and focus from the scenes between Tony Soprano and his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi. Their ongoing dialogue put everything else on the show under microscopic examination - Tony's relationships, Tony's work, Tony's self-image, Tony's dreams. Those scenes were the gateway towards the show's dissection of modern America, and you can learn nearly everything you have to know about contemporary manhood from six and a half seasons of "The Sopranos." In season 1, Tony wonders, "What happened to Gary Cooper?" as he considers the sad state of his own medicated, manic depressive generation; by season 6, he's admitting, "I hate my son," when he considers the overstimulated, intellectually undernourished, lazy generation represented by his son.
True, Carrie only goes to see a psychiatrist once, but I would argue that, where Tony requires a a (female) psychiatrist as a medium in order to examine himself, Carrie needs only her Apple Computer. Those scenes of her, alone in her room smoking a cigarette, while Narrator-Carrie rhapsodizes on the soundtrack, serve the same function as the Dr. Melfi scenes - they take you, briefly, one step back from the show, into the MST3K-style audience, to consider, well, what it all means.
The two shows come to radically different conclusions about "what it all means," but they follow remarkable similar avenues for getting there. Both shows improved throughout their entire run, until a certain point (probably season 5 of "Sex" and season 6 of "Sopranos") where the shows became steadily more intelligent but also steadily darker, and weirder, and much less fun. Season 6 of Sopranos features an endless amount of funerals; by the end of the show, there's scarcely anyone left of the old gang. Similarly, by the end of "Sex and the City," the show has morphed completely from a show about single women to a show about women in relationships (two are even married!)
This is a natural progression, and for TV it is a decidedly modern one (nothing ever really changed in 20 years of "Gunsmoke"), but it also makes both shows far more difficult to like. Just as it's easier to enjoy "Sex" when it's all glam and one-night stands, it's easier to like "Sopranos" when it's all guns and fights and drugs. Yet the endings of "Sex" and "Sopranos" could not be more different - the modern-fairy-tale ending of Big and Carrie is miles removed from the ambiguous, bleak ending of "Sopranos" (which isn't, technically, an ending at all.)
Of course, there's an important difference between "Sopranos" and "Sex and the City," although I think it may say more about the difference between women and men than between the two shows' styles. Tony's analysis on "Sopranos" circles endlessly around his parents - first his mother's horrible emotional abuse, and then his father's even more horrible moral abuse. It's an openly Catholic notion - sins of the father, original sin, dicks dicks dicks. So much weight is given on the show to where people have come from - the interlocking family relations match the importance of "family" in the real-life and movie mob.
On "Sex," conversely, Carrie only mentions her father once. It's in season 4, when she starts working at Vogue, and reveals to a man her father's age that her dad left when she was only 5. This is thrown out at the end of season 4, and I've read at least on review that calls this as a left-field revelation, but it's not handled that way, really.
After 7 seasons of the show, it's remarkable how little we know about any of the girls and their lives before 1999. Miranda's mom dies so quickly that they didn't even hire an actress to play her; we never catch a whiff of Charlotte's or Samantha's parents (perhaps they were born at the beginning of the creation and split in two, yin and yang, slut and prom queen.) We get occasional tidbits of background - Samantha lost her virginity when she was 12, Charlotte was in Kappa Kappa Gamma and rode horses- but those tidbits merely confirm what we'd already expected.
What I'm saying is that, for these characters, for their lives in New York, their past simply doesn't matter. This is a show with its focus entirely on the present; and it is also a show with a profound understanding of its own bullshit. It is telling, I think, that Carrie decides that going to a psychiatrist is not for her after one episode, EVEN THOUGH her psychiatrist was right; comparatively, Tony Soprano spends seven years hating psychiatry, often leaving or threatening to leave (or threatening his psychiatrist), before finally pleading, when Melfi kicks him out, "We're making progress!"
So perhaps when we are talking about the show's feminine quality, we are talking about it's uniquely feminine strength - the way in which disappointments are conquered, and sins are forgiven, and cancer itself fades away over the coffee table with friends.
And so perhaps the "male version" of "Sex and the City" is a show with the exact opposite quality - uniquely male weakness - in which the sins of the past, and particularly the sins commissioned by parents upon their children, are revisited over and over again in the present, with the implication that the future will never be any better. Whereas "Sex and the City" has the quality of constantly starting over - a new column, a new man, a new chance to find love, a new apartment in the Meatpacking district, a new marriage for Charlotte, new shoes for Carrie, a new guest appearance by Miranda's Steve - this other show would have the quality of endless repetition, of fighting the same battles. Like "Sex," this show would also be essentially analytical, attempting to discover some essential "truth" (with any number of tertiary truths along the way) - but unlike on "Sex," where the women are ultimately as confused as ever, this show would focus, fetishistically, like Oedipus, on the search for that truth, and it would keep going, no matter that every new answer resulted in a hundred other questions.
And whereas "Sex" is set in the modern city - New York in the new millenium, with a truly infinite array of relationships to form and social circles to navigate - this male "Sex" would strip down its worldview to primordial society, away from the thousand distractions. A world where men can be men, where the individual reigns supreme, where everyone starts out equally and can become King. Unlike "Sex," there would be considerable eye candy - in fact, the eye candy would be the protagonists - but also unlike "Sex," there would be precious little actual Sex. Just as "Sex" evolves, in its run, from focusing on the women's relationships with men to focusing on their relationships with each other, this other would would steadily focus in on its male characters, and their fathers, and the games they play with each other.
At the very beginning of season 3, Carrie and friends stare at Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry. Someone says, "Who would've thought that an island that tiny would be big enough to hold all of our old boyfriends?"
Is "Lost" the male version of "Sex and the City?"
"Sex and the City" always flirted with the weird flimsiness of modern gender - recall, in the very first episode, when Carrie says she wants to have sex "like a man" - and so it's worth pondering a simple question: What is the male version of "Sex and the City?"
The question itself holds a wealth of implicit gender assumptions which the show either broke down or built up, depending on your perspective and which season we're talking about. Is "Sex and the City" really a women's show? People talk dirty and make jokes about things you aren't supposed to make jokes about. There's copius female nudity and at least two or three sex scenes per episode - in fact, all that anyone seems able to talk about is sex and, more to the point, fucking.
From Charlotte: "Don't you ever want to be just pounded hard? Like when the bed is moving all around, and it's all sweaty, your head is knocking the headboard and you feel it might blow off? Dammit, I just really want to be fucked. Just really fucked!"
How is this not a schoolboy fantasy come to life?
Sure, women are the stars, but from start to finish, this is a show about men - landing them, screwing them, figuring them out, trying to ignore them, and ultimately loving them. (That's with the noteworthy exception of the strange, flawed, short, boring, yet kind of wonderful Season 5.) In the same episode where Samantha and the world meets Tom Reymi, Carrie is struggling with her conscience - she's cheating on nice-guy Aiden with bad-guy Big. Desperate for a happy ending, she tells Samantha, "You've heard stories about affairs where people realize how great their other relationship is and end it without anyone being the wiser."
Samantha retorts, almost angry, "I don't watch 'Lifetime Television for Women.''"
If this is a "women's show," then you have to point to Quentin Tarantino as the pre-eminent "women's director" of the last decade. Sure, he became famous for two guy's guy art flicks - the all-male cast of "Reservoir Dogs," the testosterone-ridden palookas firing guns and bible verses in "Pulp Fiction" - but "Jackie Brown" is all about Pam Grier, and "Kill Bill" features a cavalcade of strong, albeit twisted, female types (Vivica A. Fox is the suburban mom making war in her kitchen; Lucy Liu is a business woman who rises to the top of the most male-dominated business in the world, the Tokyo Yakuza; Uma Thurman is the knocked-up girl burnt by her ex who seeks vengeance on his new girlfriend and ends up as a mother to his child), and "Death Proof" is basically two episodes of "Sex and the City" plus a twenty-minute car chase.
But the show did become a true cultural phenomenon for women (and an anti-phenomenon for men.) And, in some ways, I think that Season 3 is the last time you can really watch the show as itself and not as its phenomenon - in fact, there's a point in the season where the show explicitly deconstructs its own cultural impact, and I don't know if it ever fully recovers (that would be Matthew McConaughey, playing himself as no one else can, begging Carrie to let him turn her column into a movie.) The first twelve episodes of the season, from the fireman's fashion show through Charlotte's wedding in the show's 42nd installment, represent the absolute peak of the show's powers - after the wedding, the gang flees to Los Angeles, and settles in for three more seasons of diminishing returns.
Truly, this is the Golden Age of "Sex and the City" - after all, this is the beginning of Carrie's relationship with Aidan, and more importantly, the Aidan/Big duality which dominates Carrie's personality and may, in fact, essentially symbolize women's relationship to the male race. When people think about "Sex and the City," I would venture to assume that they aren't thinking about the later seasons, when everyone is in long-term relationships and everyone has health problems and Baryshnikov tries acting; nor, for that matter, are they thinking about the early seasons, when Carrie talked to the camera but almost never mentioned shoes.
All TV shows that last several seasons, especially those which can be said to change the face of television, are really radically different within themselves. Usually, they're at least three different pieces, loosely but obviously divided across the show's run. The first season of "Sopranos" is completely different from the last season of "Sopranos" - the whole visual look of the show has changed into something more noirish, half of the supporting cast is dead, Anthony Jr. is a main character, no one ever has any fun, and Tony has become the villain. "Lost" is also miles away in season 4 than where it was in season 1 - in its primary narrative and thematic concerns, in its main characters (how could the show last so long without Ben?), in the length of its seasons and the level of production design. Even "Entourage," an ode to SoCal decadence, has become radically different in scope - less about Hollywood glamour and more about Hollywood business.
Yet still, we consider a TV show to be a single work, and when we think about the show in abstract, I would argue there is some precise period in the show's history which we consider. And this is it, right here, the vague eternal moment we talk about when we talk about "Sex and the City," the exact point when the show was equally funny and serious, equally about long-term relationships and one-night stands, equally focused on the women's relationship with their men and their relationship with each other. The show was occasionally better, but it was ever quite as perfect again.
This is, after all, the season in which Carrie asks "Are We Sluts?" That question (which is also the title of that great episode) is never quite answered by Carrie, and it's rarely repeated when people talk about the show, which is ironic, since most of the columns which criticize "Sex and the City" (especially ones like this, which draw comparisons or contrasts between the show and the fall of Hillary Clinton) are basically dancing around an answer: Yes You Are.
Are they sluts? That's a loaded word - like bitch or cocktease or whore or the c-word, you can make the argument that, because there's no similar derogatory term for men, the word is patently unfair, and should not be used in reference to anyone. Several vague statistics were thrown around the talkosphere after the Sex and the City Movie came out, to the effect that, although Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte sleep with more men in the show's run than the average American female, they sleep with the exact average amount of men for a New York woman. (Which doesn't really change the question - fundamentalist preachers and investment bankers would argue that that just proves that ALL New York Women are sluts.)
This all brings us back to the question - what is the male version of the show? The usual shorthand is to point to shows about a group of male friends having and talking about sex - "Queer as Folk," "Big Shots," and most specifically, "Entourage." After all, "Entourage" is basically the great American young male wet dream - hanging out, smoking weed, playing video games on a bigscreen projector, getting bottle service in clubs, hooking up with Mandy Moore, and best of all, getting to call it all Work.
Certainly, "Entourage" has been as much an essential Los Angeles monument as "Sex" was for New York; certainly, the interplay of the four friends on that other show seems to mirror the interplay of the four friends on this one. Vince is Carrie, the head of the group and the face of the show, who's also the least interesting character played by the least talented performer; Eric is Miranda, the most realistic character with an actual job and realistic relationship troubles, played with rueful sarcasm by the most subtle and poker-faced actor; Johnny Drama is Charlotte, lovably old-fashioned and lusting for an impossible dream (fame for Drama, true love for Charlotte); Turtle is Samantha, the extreme personification of the show's already extreme treatment of its respective gender (he: chubby, stoned, freeloading, unshaven, talks like he's listened to too much hip-hop; she: thin, fashionable, independent, endlessly sexual, refusing to age past 35.)
But the comparison doesn't quite hold. "Sex and the City" focuses its eye closely on every new man who comes into each girls' life, even if it's only to explore one particular detail; the women on "Entourage" are essentially the same hot early-20s model wannabes, except for those rare occasions when they're actually models. The relationships on "Sex and the City" are all about flirtation, where most of the relationships on "Entourage" skip straight to the sex. More generally, "Sex and the City" asks big questions - about gender, about city life, about modern day America - where "Entourage" lives in a zone of blissful ignorance. You could argue that it's precisely these differences that makes it "the male Sex and the City," just as you could argue that those differences make it "The West Coast Sex and the City."
In the middle of the third season of "Sex and the City," the whole gang goes to Los Angeles. They hang out at wild parties and meet famous Hollywood actors playing themselves (Matthew McConaughey) and playing other people (Vince Vaughn as a Hollywood douche, Sarah Michelle Gellar as a Hollywood douchette). Everyone they meet is incredibly good looking. They even go to the Playboy Mansion. Is it any coincidence that this is basically sums up "Entourage?" And it is another coincidence that these are the worst two episodes of the entire series?
Still, beyond the content of the shows, I think they're drastically different in the nature of their evolution. The first season of "Entourage," and especially the second one, is all about lovable decadence - it's not really about anything, and there's never really any major tension (both season finales hint at tension - will the group be broken up? - only to break that tension after a few moments, setting everything back to right.) Oddly enough, as the show become more dramatically intensive - with the ongoing Medellin plotline, with failure for the characters - it became less interesting, as if somehow the whole genius of the show was in its pop escapist vision of a world without consequence. It evolved as a show, but the phenomenon ended.
In Season 3, "Sex and the City" takes a similar move, becoming more dramatically intensive and moving away from the relatively flighty narratives of the first season. Season 3 truly starts to test the nature of the show: Charlotte gets married, the beginning of the end for the show's sexy-singles phase; Samantha and Charlotte quarrel, briefly breaking apart the friendship circle; Samantha gets sick, the first time we've ever seen her demonstrate any real weakness and the first time she ever seems to consider the disadvantages of singlehood; and, most importantly, Carrie sleeps with Big, cheating on Aidan, at the exact moment when everything in her life seems to be perfect.
"Sex and the City" had to evolve to become a true phenomenon, because after Carrie's affair with Big, the show gained an added heft, and a whiff of danger. The glam fashion-show image that tends to be propagated by the media doesn't quite do the show justice; nor, conversely, does the sexual-anthropological-analytical concept (Sex Columnist Debates Modern Female Issues) really get to the core of why the show is a true epic narrative, and not just a fuck-of-the-week. When Carrie sleeps with Big - doing it dirty, first in an elevator, and then in the bedroom, and then lazily smoking tobacco just before the credits roll - she becomes, briefly but effectively, her own show's villain.
This plotline is the show's greatest argument for itself, and also against itself - for once, Carrie's analytical mind (the invisible narrator, the columnist whose columns we never see) is not given the last word. I suspect this is because this is one of the few times that Carrie, or anyone on the show, does something truly dangerous, and sinful, and unforgivable, and yet also touchingly human. This is the first time that Cheating will play a major role in an ongoing plot arc - and considering how little screen time is devoted to Charlotte's dalliance with a gardener and Samantha's uncomfortable top-floor bonus screw with Richard, you could make the argument that this is truly the one Cheating Plot in the show's history. With the Carrie-Aidan-Big plotline, the show didn't just nail modern gender politics - it found a way to question our own preconceptions of the show and the show's initial concept.
I know many people who can't stand Carrie. I can't decide if that's because they don't like her as a character or as a person - that is, if they can't stand her for who she is or for what she does. True, she's a whiner, and so painfully into fashion as to basically ruin her bank account, and in later seasons she's got the most utterly painful habit of talking in cutesy black talk (we get our first taste of this quirk in the season 3 finale, in an exchange with trannie hookers.) All of that is why most men hate her. But she also makes poor decisions, and dates the wrong men, and complains to them without every really solving anything. That's why most women hate her - but only as friends hate friends who do stupid things. In fact, I don't think it's wrong to say that although all the girls on the show make bad decisions often, Carrie makes the worst decisions constantly.
The thing is, Carrie is a writer. Although we never actually get a look at her column, we can extrapolate that it is largely autobiographical. Her voiceover narration often bleeds into the writing; once her book is published, Mr. Big teasingly asks for his own name; at the beginning of season 3, her affair with a politico gets an anonymous tell-all, with the awful title "To Pee or Not to Pee." So she writes about herself and her mistakes constantly, and despite the fact that the end of each show is structured as an epiphany, she essentially learns nothing. She continues to make the same mistakes, in fact, makes even worse mistakes the further she goes (the downward trend from Aidan/Big to greedy ineffectual Berger and finally to the remote Aleksander is fine evidence of that.)
We should not forget that the entirety of "Sex and the City" is set many years after the golden age of these womens' lives. They are no longer in their twenties; it is a long time since sex, or even romance, was something new and unique; their bodies are beginning to fail them, in small ways (cellulite) and in large ways (infertility.) This shines a weird ironic light on all those college girls who idolize "Sex and the City," since the characters on the show hate college girls. (There's a great episode later in the series when Samantha hosts a party for an adolescent socialite who drinks, smokes, and fucks; the result plays like a pre-satire of "Gossip Girl," except played more realistic than anything on that other glam New York show.) The essential themes of "Sex and the City" are loneliness, frustration, confusion, and awkwardness. Girl power!
From Charlotte: "Don't you ever want to be just pounded hard? Like when the bed is moving all around, and it's all sweaty, your head is knocking the headboard and you feel it might blow off? Dammit, I just really want to be fucked. Just really fucked!"
How is this not a schoolboy fantasy come to life?
Sure, women are the stars, but from start to finish, this is a show about men - landing them, screwing them, figuring them out, trying to ignore them, and ultimately loving them. (That's with the noteworthy exception of the strange, flawed, short, boring, yet kind of wonderful Season 5.) In the same episode where Samantha and the world meets Tom Reymi, Carrie is struggling with her conscience - she's cheating on nice-guy Aiden with bad-guy Big. Desperate for a happy ending, she tells Samantha, "You've heard stories about affairs where people realize how great their other relationship is and end it without anyone being the wiser."
Samantha retorts, almost angry, "I don't watch 'Lifetime Television for Women.''"
If this is a "women's show," then you have to point to Quentin Tarantino as the pre-eminent "women's director" of the last decade. Sure, he became famous for two guy's guy art flicks - the all-male cast of "Reservoir Dogs," the testosterone-ridden palookas firing guns and bible verses in "Pulp Fiction" - but "Jackie Brown" is all about Pam Grier, and "Kill Bill" features a cavalcade of strong, albeit twisted, female types (Vivica A. Fox is the suburban mom making war in her kitchen; Lucy Liu is a business woman who rises to the top of the most male-dominated business in the world, the Tokyo Yakuza; Uma Thurman is the knocked-up girl burnt by her ex who seeks vengeance on his new girlfriend and ends up as a mother to his child), and "Death Proof" is basically two episodes of "Sex and the City" plus a twenty-minute car chase.
But the show did become a true cultural phenomenon for women (and an anti-phenomenon for men.) And, in some ways, I think that Season 3 is the last time you can really watch the show as itself and not as its phenomenon - in fact, there's a point in the season where the show explicitly deconstructs its own cultural impact, and I don't know if it ever fully recovers (that would be Matthew McConaughey, playing himself as no one else can, begging Carrie to let him turn her column into a movie.) The first twelve episodes of the season, from the fireman's fashion show through Charlotte's wedding in the show's 42nd installment, represent the absolute peak of the show's powers - after the wedding, the gang flees to Los Angeles, and settles in for three more seasons of diminishing returns.
Truly, this is the Golden Age of "Sex and the City" - after all, this is the beginning of Carrie's relationship with Aidan, and more importantly, the Aidan/Big duality which dominates Carrie's personality and may, in fact, essentially symbolize women's relationship to the male race. When people think about "Sex and the City," I would venture to assume that they aren't thinking about the later seasons, when everyone is in long-term relationships and everyone has health problems and Baryshnikov tries acting; nor, for that matter, are they thinking about the early seasons, when Carrie talked to the camera but almost never mentioned shoes.
All TV shows that last several seasons, especially those which can be said to change the face of television, are really radically different within themselves. Usually, they're at least three different pieces, loosely but obviously divided across the show's run. The first season of "Sopranos" is completely different from the last season of "Sopranos" - the whole visual look of the show has changed into something more noirish, half of the supporting cast is dead, Anthony Jr. is a main character, no one ever has any fun, and Tony has become the villain. "Lost" is also miles away in season 4 than where it was in season 1 - in its primary narrative and thematic concerns, in its main characters (how could the show last so long without Ben?), in the length of its seasons and the level of production design. Even "Entourage," an ode to SoCal decadence, has become radically different in scope - less about Hollywood glamour and more about Hollywood business.
Yet still, we consider a TV show to be a single work, and when we think about the show in abstract, I would argue there is some precise period in the show's history which we consider. And this is it, right here, the vague eternal moment we talk about when we talk about "Sex and the City," the exact point when the show was equally funny and serious, equally about long-term relationships and one-night stands, equally focused on the women's relationship with their men and their relationship with each other. The show was occasionally better, but it was ever quite as perfect again.
This is, after all, the season in which Carrie asks "Are We Sluts?" That question (which is also the title of that great episode) is never quite answered by Carrie, and it's rarely repeated when people talk about the show, which is ironic, since most of the columns which criticize "Sex and the City" (especially ones like this, which draw comparisons or contrasts between the show and the fall of Hillary Clinton) are basically dancing around an answer: Yes You Are.
Are they sluts? That's a loaded word - like bitch or cocktease or whore or the c-word, you can make the argument that, because there's no similar derogatory term for men, the word is patently unfair, and should not be used in reference to anyone. Several vague statistics were thrown around the talkosphere after the Sex and the City Movie came out, to the effect that, although Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte sleep with more men in the show's run than the average American female, they sleep with the exact average amount of men for a New York woman. (Which doesn't really change the question - fundamentalist preachers and investment bankers would argue that that just proves that ALL New York Women are sluts.)
This all brings us back to the question - what is the male version of the show? The usual shorthand is to point to shows about a group of male friends having and talking about sex - "Queer as Folk," "Big Shots," and most specifically, "Entourage." After all, "Entourage" is basically the great American young male wet dream - hanging out, smoking weed, playing video games on a bigscreen projector, getting bottle service in clubs, hooking up with Mandy Moore, and best of all, getting to call it all Work.
Certainly, "Entourage" has been as much an essential Los Angeles monument as "Sex" was for New York; certainly, the interplay of the four friends on that other show seems to mirror the interplay of the four friends on this one. Vince is Carrie, the head of the group and the face of the show, who's also the least interesting character played by the least talented performer; Eric is Miranda, the most realistic character with an actual job and realistic relationship troubles, played with rueful sarcasm by the most subtle and poker-faced actor; Johnny Drama is Charlotte, lovably old-fashioned and lusting for an impossible dream (fame for Drama, true love for Charlotte); Turtle is Samantha, the extreme personification of the show's already extreme treatment of its respective gender (he: chubby, stoned, freeloading, unshaven, talks like he's listened to too much hip-hop; she: thin, fashionable, independent, endlessly sexual, refusing to age past 35.)
But the comparison doesn't quite hold. "Sex and the City" focuses its eye closely on every new man who comes into each girls' life, even if it's only to explore one particular detail; the women on "Entourage" are essentially the same hot early-20s model wannabes, except for those rare occasions when they're actually models. The relationships on "Sex and the City" are all about flirtation, where most of the relationships on "Entourage" skip straight to the sex. More generally, "Sex and the City" asks big questions - about gender, about city life, about modern day America - where "Entourage" lives in a zone of blissful ignorance. You could argue that it's precisely these differences that makes it "the male Sex and the City," just as you could argue that those differences make it "The West Coast Sex and the City."
In the middle of the third season of "Sex and the City," the whole gang goes to Los Angeles. They hang out at wild parties and meet famous Hollywood actors playing themselves (Matthew McConaughey) and playing other people (Vince Vaughn as a Hollywood douche, Sarah Michelle Gellar as a Hollywood douchette). Everyone they meet is incredibly good looking. They even go to the Playboy Mansion. Is it any coincidence that this is basically sums up "Entourage?" And it is another coincidence that these are the worst two episodes of the entire series?
Still, beyond the content of the shows, I think they're drastically different in the nature of their evolution. The first season of "Entourage," and especially the second one, is all about lovable decadence - it's not really about anything, and there's never really any major tension (both season finales hint at tension - will the group be broken up? - only to break that tension after a few moments, setting everything back to right.) Oddly enough, as the show become more dramatically intensive - with the ongoing Medellin plotline, with failure for the characters - it became less interesting, as if somehow the whole genius of the show was in its pop escapist vision of a world without consequence. It evolved as a show, but the phenomenon ended.
In Season 3, "Sex and the City" takes a similar move, becoming more dramatically intensive and moving away from the relatively flighty narratives of the first season. Season 3 truly starts to test the nature of the show: Charlotte gets married, the beginning of the end for the show's sexy-singles phase; Samantha and Charlotte quarrel, briefly breaking apart the friendship circle; Samantha gets sick, the first time we've ever seen her demonstrate any real weakness and the first time she ever seems to consider the disadvantages of singlehood; and, most importantly, Carrie sleeps with Big, cheating on Aidan, at the exact moment when everything in her life seems to be perfect.
"Sex and the City" had to evolve to become a true phenomenon, because after Carrie's affair with Big, the show gained an added heft, and a whiff of danger. The glam fashion-show image that tends to be propagated by the media doesn't quite do the show justice; nor, conversely, does the sexual-anthropological-analytical concept (Sex Columnist Debates Modern Female Issues) really get to the core of why the show is a true epic narrative, and not just a fuck-of-the-week. When Carrie sleeps with Big - doing it dirty, first in an elevator, and then in the bedroom, and then lazily smoking tobacco just before the credits roll - she becomes, briefly but effectively, her own show's villain.
This plotline is the show's greatest argument for itself, and also against itself - for once, Carrie's analytical mind (the invisible narrator, the columnist whose columns we never see) is not given the last word. I suspect this is because this is one of the few times that Carrie, or anyone on the show, does something truly dangerous, and sinful, and unforgivable, and yet also touchingly human. This is the first time that Cheating will play a major role in an ongoing plot arc - and considering how little screen time is devoted to Charlotte's dalliance with a gardener and Samantha's uncomfortable top-floor bonus screw with Richard, you could make the argument that this is truly the one Cheating Plot in the show's history. With the Carrie-Aidan-Big plotline, the show didn't just nail modern gender politics - it found a way to question our own preconceptions of the show and the show's initial concept.
I know many people who can't stand Carrie. I can't decide if that's because they don't like her as a character or as a person - that is, if they can't stand her for who she is or for what she does. True, she's a whiner, and so painfully into fashion as to basically ruin her bank account, and in later seasons she's got the most utterly painful habit of talking in cutesy black talk (we get our first taste of this quirk in the season 3 finale, in an exchange with trannie hookers.) All of that is why most men hate her. But she also makes poor decisions, and dates the wrong men, and complains to them without every really solving anything. That's why most women hate her - but only as friends hate friends who do stupid things. In fact, I don't think it's wrong to say that although all the girls on the show make bad decisions often, Carrie makes the worst decisions constantly.
The thing is, Carrie is a writer. Although we never actually get a look at her column, we can extrapolate that it is largely autobiographical. Her voiceover narration often bleeds into the writing; once her book is published, Mr. Big teasingly asks for his own name; at the beginning of season 3, her affair with a politico gets an anonymous tell-all, with the awful title "To Pee or Not to Pee." So she writes about herself and her mistakes constantly, and despite the fact that the end of each show is structured as an epiphany, she essentially learns nothing. She continues to make the same mistakes, in fact, makes even worse mistakes the further she goes (the downward trend from Aidan/Big to greedy ineffectual Berger and finally to the remote Aleksander is fine evidence of that.)
We should not forget that the entirety of "Sex and the City" is set many years after the golden age of these womens' lives. They are no longer in their twenties; it is a long time since sex, or even romance, was something new and unique; their bodies are beginning to fail them, in small ways (cellulite) and in large ways (infertility.) This shines a weird ironic light on all those college girls who idolize "Sex and the City," since the characters on the show hate college girls. (There's a great episode later in the series when Samantha hosts a party for an adolescent socialite who drinks, smokes, and fucks; the result plays like a pre-satire of "Gossip Girl," except played more realistic than anything on that other glam New York show.) The essential themes of "Sex and the City" are loneliness, frustration, confusion, and awkwardness. Girl power!
This is why, beginning with season 3, the real "male version" of "Sex and the City" becomes, undoubtedly, "The Sopranos." (Preface: It's true that "Sopranos" had its share of main female characters, but the show was always focused on a man's world. Notice how, whenever a woman tries to stand against the preconceptions of the mob men and of the show itself, the male hierarchy forces her back in - Adriana gets killed, Melfi gets raped first by a man and then by the system, Carmela tries to divorce Tony but gets trapped by him at every turn. Even Angie Bonpensiero gets absorbed - in season 2, she's talking about leaving her deadbeat husband; by season 6, she's "one of the boys.")
On one level, the two shows shared a basic thematic characteristic - they were all about analysis, and specifically, a pointed analysis of modern gender roles. "The Sopranos," for most of its run, got its main power and focus from the scenes between Tony Soprano and his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi. Their ongoing dialogue put everything else on the show under microscopic examination - Tony's relationships, Tony's work, Tony's self-image, Tony's dreams. Those scenes were the gateway towards the show's dissection of modern America, and you can learn nearly everything you have to know about contemporary manhood from six and a half seasons of "The Sopranos." In season 1, Tony wonders, "What happened to Gary Cooper?" as he considers the sad state of his own medicated, manic depressive generation; by season 6, he's admitting, "I hate my son," when he considers the overstimulated, intellectually undernourished, lazy generation represented by his son.
True, Carrie only goes to see a psychiatrist once, but I would argue that, where Tony requires a a (female) psychiatrist as a medium in order to examine himself, Carrie needs only her Apple Computer. Those scenes of her, alone in her room smoking a cigarette, while Narrator-Carrie rhapsodizes on the soundtrack, serve the same function as the Dr. Melfi scenes - they take you, briefly, one step back from the show, into the MST3K-style audience, to consider, well, what it all means.
The two shows come to radically different conclusions about "what it all means," but they follow remarkable similar avenues for getting there. Both shows improved throughout their entire run, until a certain point (probably season 5 of "Sex" and season 6 of "Sopranos") where the shows became steadily more intelligent but also steadily darker, and weirder, and much less fun. Season 6 of Sopranos features an endless amount of funerals; by the end of the show, there's scarcely anyone left of the old gang. Similarly, by the end of "Sex and the City," the show has morphed completely from a show about single women to a show about women in relationships (two are even married!)
This is a natural progression, and for TV it is a decidedly modern one (nothing ever really changed in 20 years of "Gunsmoke"), but it also makes both shows far more difficult to like. Just as it's easier to enjoy "Sex" when it's all glam and one-night stands, it's easier to like "Sopranos" when it's all guns and fights and drugs. Yet the endings of "Sex" and "Sopranos" could not be more different - the modern-fairy-tale ending of Big and Carrie is miles removed from the ambiguous, bleak ending of "Sopranos" (which isn't, technically, an ending at all.)
Of course, there's an important difference between "Sopranos" and "Sex and the City," although I think it may say more about the difference between women and men than between the two shows' styles. Tony's analysis on "Sopranos" circles endlessly around his parents - first his mother's horrible emotional abuse, and then his father's even more horrible moral abuse. It's an openly Catholic notion - sins of the father, original sin, dicks dicks dicks. So much weight is given on the show to where people have come from - the interlocking family relations match the importance of "family" in the real-life and movie mob.
On "Sex," conversely, Carrie only mentions her father once. It's in season 4, when she starts working at Vogue, and reveals to a man her father's age that her dad left when she was only 5. This is thrown out at the end of season 4, and I've read at least on review that calls this as a left-field revelation, but it's not handled that way, really.
After 7 seasons of the show, it's remarkable how little we know about any of the girls and their lives before 1999. Miranda's mom dies so quickly that they didn't even hire an actress to play her; we never catch a whiff of Charlotte's or Samantha's parents (perhaps they were born at the beginning of the creation and split in two, yin and yang, slut and prom queen.) We get occasional tidbits of background - Samantha lost her virginity when she was 12, Charlotte was in Kappa Kappa Gamma and rode horses- but those tidbits merely confirm what we'd already expected.
What I'm saying is that, for these characters, for their lives in New York, their past simply doesn't matter. This is a show with its focus entirely on the present; and it is also a show with a profound understanding of its own bullshit. It is telling, I think, that Carrie decides that going to a psychiatrist is not for her after one episode, EVEN THOUGH her psychiatrist was right; comparatively, Tony Soprano spends seven years hating psychiatry, often leaving or threatening to leave (or threatening his psychiatrist), before finally pleading, when Melfi kicks him out, "We're making progress!"
So perhaps when we are talking about the show's feminine quality, we are talking about it's uniquely feminine strength - the way in which disappointments are conquered, and sins are forgiven, and cancer itself fades away over the coffee table with friends.
And so perhaps the "male version" of "Sex and the City" is a show with the exact opposite quality - uniquely male weakness - in which the sins of the past, and particularly the sins commissioned by parents upon their children, are revisited over and over again in the present, with the implication that the future will never be any better. Whereas "Sex and the City" has the quality of constantly starting over - a new column, a new man, a new chance to find love, a new apartment in the Meatpacking district, a new marriage for Charlotte, new shoes for Carrie, a new guest appearance by Miranda's Steve - this other show would have the quality of endless repetition, of fighting the same battles. Like "Sex," this show would also be essentially analytical, attempting to discover some essential "truth" (with any number of tertiary truths along the way) - but unlike on "Sex," where the women are ultimately as confused as ever, this show would focus, fetishistically, like Oedipus, on the search for that truth, and it would keep going, no matter that every new answer resulted in a hundred other questions.
And whereas "Sex" is set in the modern city - New York in the new millenium, with a truly infinite array of relationships to form and social circles to navigate - this male "Sex" would strip down its worldview to primordial society, away from the thousand distractions. A world where men can be men, where the individual reigns supreme, where everyone starts out equally and can become King. Unlike "Sex," there would be considerable eye candy - in fact, the eye candy would be the protagonists - but also unlike "Sex," there would be precious little actual Sex. Just as "Sex" evolves, in its run, from focusing on the women's relationships with men to focusing on their relationships with each other, this other would would steadily focus in on its male characters, and their fathers, and the games they play with each other.
At the very beginning of season 3, Carrie and friends stare at Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry. Someone says, "Who would've thought that an island that tiny would be big enough to hold all of our old boyfriends?"
Is "Lost" the male version of "Sex and the City?"
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