The World At War

I've been watching again the massive BBC Second World War documentary, The World At War (1974). A huge historical undertaking, the series was commissioned in the late '60s for TV and features 26 hour-long episodes plus half again as many related documentaries and special features.

It's quite too much to review like a movie, but a number of impressions stand out for me: these events, the fact of the war, what brought it on and how it unfolded; this is all a story so grand and terrible and glorious as to captivate me beyond any other story in life. The endless shades between absolute good and absolute evil, the terrible consequences riding on so many decisions (and the heartrending loss of life to dead-end decisions and bungling), the sickening baseness and heart-stopping courage and bravery, all demonstrate the full range of at least one part of the human experience.

Many times I've said that Hitler is the most fascinating of stories to me, and so he remains in this series. Outwardly very ordinary, there is something fantastically lurid in the heroic mythology that was constructed around him and in the diabolical and megalomaniacal character that lived inside such a mundane wrapper. And that this could all unfold to such a dark and unforgiveable place in such a civilized and educated part of the world is--it must be said--a truth stranger than fiction.

Naturally, I have a special interest in America's entry into the fracas. There really is a sense (despite plenty of evidence of darkness) of a fairly innocent country sending its troops and materiel to aid in the plights of others that is remarkable and moving. To see the US and Britain ramping their manufacturing up to and beyond maximum capacity and see the massive output of planes and ships and tanks and arms and everything else is to witness the rarity of whole societies pulling together for a common goal--something not often seen, and something far removed from today's world.

What must it have been like to be in a group of 156,000 men making a mass invasion of France? I imagine Eisenhower and his group assigning various tasks to this and that division or corps, knowing that the first wave would take very high casualties. How to reconcile yourself to looking at individuals as a statistic, knowing that with 70% casualties we'll need to throw, say, 11,000 men at this particular problem? And what was it like to walk among those men before the invasion began, knowing that many of them would have to die or be horribly maimed for life? And what other choice was there except to let Hitler keep killing and destroying? There are few things in our lives that play out with these consequences.

Thinking about the gigantic D-Day invasion, there's such a sense of the extraordinary difficulty of the task and of the huge resources marshaled to make it happen. I love that artificial harbors were conceived and built (knowing that no natural harbors would be available until they were conquered--and then rebuilt), plus all the tons and tons of stuff needed to make them function. When horrible weather heavily damaged the harbors shortly after the invasion--threatening the entire mission--additional resources were marshaled to quickly repair the damage and get the invasion back under way. And there are a zillion such stories, all a scale that's almost unimaginable now. This "can-do" sense in horrid conditions is inspiring.

What was it like to have your whole country conquered, overrun by brutality and murder and torture? If you collaborated, you may survive, but at the cost of sending others to the camps and to death. If you resisted, you would surely be tortured and killed if caught. At the war's end, survivors had to answer for what they had done. What a horrible calculus.

The scenes of some of these occupied countries as they are being liberated by the Allies bring quite a lump to the throat. What a deliverance! To have been under such a yoke as the Nazis imposed--the total destruction of personal liberty to be replaced by a brutal simulacrum of civilization--and to see soldiers from foreign nations who have come at unbelievable expense and with the highest sacrifice to give you your humanity back; well, it just doesn't get more moving than this.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler had written "Even if we cannot conquer, we shall drag the world into destruction with us." Fascinating to see how German citizens swung from euphoria at the Wehrmacht's long string of victories at the war's beginning to despair and shame as their fortunes turned. The bombing of cities and civilians is only what Hitler himself unleashed against everyone else; there was no grounds for objecting to the Allies' annihilation of everything they encountered. In so many scenes as the war turned against the Germans one sees this realization in their eyes: we have earned any brutality that awaits us; we have no foothold to ask for humane treatment or clemency.

The series covers the war in the Pacific as well, though I've always had a harder time sinking my teeth into this part of the conflict. The settings are so foreign and everything seems reduced simply to two warring bands, each trying to best the other. The comparative lack of political intrigue or close political alliance--to say nothing of cultural roots--just make this an ugly part of the war that had to be won with brute force.

The production is fine, though it has a made-for-TV aura about it. Laurence Olivier narrates throughout, and Carl Davis has written a memorable theme song. I do find myself a bit tweaked at the foley work. In all the vast footage from the war, sound effects have been dubbed in to everything: horse hooves on cobbles, men traipsing through muck, motorized vehicles, the sound of guns and artillery, everything. And once it becomes clear that none of it is authentic to the footage being watched, I couldn't stop thinking about how contrived it sounded. Better than silence, I suppose, or, worse yet, than "mood music."

But I'd still recommend it to anyone with even a remote interest.

And A Follow-On...

...to Thursday's post.

An AFP news article yesterday talked about the row that has resulted from an ad in the Washington, D.C. subway system that says:

Barack Obama wants politicians and bureaucrats to control America's entire medical system.  Go to hell, Barack.

The ad is promoting a film, Sick and Sicker: When Government Becomes Your Doctor, a documentary warning us about adopting a Canadian-style health care system.  A little poking on my part failed to uncover who produced and funded the film but I find I'm suspicious of their motives.

Quite apart from the ad line's dubious--at best--claim, it's disgraceful that this has become the tenor of our public discussion.

Even more astounding to me than the tone of this subway ad is what the undeclared entity is incensed at: the Democratic-led, and Obama-sanctioned, push to get health care coverage for all Americans! For this he is told to "go to hell." I might expect this reaction if he were, say, taking folks' health care away (or maybe depriving people of their legal rights or spying on them without a warrant or kidnapping people in foreign countries and flying them to another country for "interrogation" or things of this sort), but for trying to get them health care? How does this goal raise such a murderous rage? How does the plan Obama proposed--which closely mirrors Republican proposals from the recent past--become so odious that people bubble over with hatred for the man?

Or is it a question of hatred first, rationale second?

I honestly don't know enough about our byzantine health care system to advocate very strongly for anything. But I'd argue that people are pissed and at rope's end because millions of dollars are being spent telling them they should be. They're being told this generally by the right wing media and on this topic I would not be surprised to find a money trail back to the health insurance lobby in Washington. Matt Taibbi has written that the real flaw of Obamacare is that it doesn't tackle the basic systemic problems in our health care system. It's basically a blank check to insurance companies--which are most of what's wrong with our system. Obamacare basically places no strictures on insurance companies to control costs--no allowing of foreign pharmaceuticals, no standardization of paperwork, no single-payer provisions. All these things guarantee continued huge profits for these insurance companies and higher costs for consumers. And I think more and more people are aware of this, which is why there is such a furious campaign being waged to convince us that government involvement in health care is deadly (despite the examples of Medicare and Medicaid) and to label Obama's efforts as satanic and un-American.

But Jesus, what a depressing outcome. The aforementioned article on Yahoo News has, as of this writing, garnered 9,000 comments, many of them really shocking in their extremity and hatred. Obama's Kenyan heritage and Muslim-sympathies (!) are constantly being trotted out, as is his Communist leaning and the unfortunate color of his skin. Is this the real America? When the ad itself tells the President of the United States to go to hell for working up an (admittedly flawed) plan for getting his citizens health care, maybe it's not surprising that the comments get worse from there.

But why? What does this vitriol and organized hatred get us? What problems are being solved by it? What we're seeing is the direct result of a couple decades of the kind of fear- and anger-based quasi-news coverage specialized in by Fox News. The comments for this news article contain plenty of left-wing snark and anger as well--which doesn't help anything. But I'd argue there is no organized leftist machinery manufacturing hate in the way that Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter are making a full-time job of it--not even close. (The ad might have said--and with more justice, I'd say--"Insurance companies want to control the entire American health care system... Go to hell, insurance companies.") And this news story tells us what to expect when fear and anger take the place of "the better angels of our nature."

The Butterfly

There have been a bunch of films over the years where women kick serious ass. Hanna, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and Haywire are the latest in this genre. Tonight's film was a revisit of an earlier entry to that genre, Luc Besson's 1990 film La Femme Nikita.

From a script by Luc Besson, La Femme Nikita tells of a drug-addicted 19-year-old girl on the streets of Paris who is involved in a robbery that turns into a bloodbath. She is officially killed off for her sins--newspaper story, public funeral and all--but in actuality someone takes note of her innate skills and she is secreted off to a special prison / school where she is given a chance at redemption by being extensively trained--reprogrammed--as a government assassin. After a rocky and rebellious beginning, she settles in to her training and, having a natural flair for violence, takes to the routine quite naturally. This takes the first half of the film to effect. The latter half involves her attempts to set up a normal life in Paris--something she's never had-- after her training and to integrate that normal life and its mundane joys and delights with the sporadic demands for her violent talents.

The film was remade almost right away in an English language version, directed by John Badham and titled Point Of No Return (1993), and it has gone on to spawn a television series. (It apparently also spawned a Chinese-language version in 1991 called Black Cat.) I've never seen the television series, nor, of course, the Hong Kong film; but I've seen Point Of No Return and thought it fine but unnecessary when the original which it seeks to copy is so good and readily available.  And it is good. La Femme Nikita has all the ingredients for a first-rate pot-boiler, with sex (a little) and violence and tears and drama and tightropes. It's nice enough looking and tightly directed. But it's one of those films that relies almost entirely on the screen magnetism of its central character.

Nikita is played here by the fantastic Anne Parillaud, a French actress that hasn't done much else that played Stateside (I see she was in The Man With the Iron Mask some years back). Luc Besson seems to have a thing for gamine characters. I remember falling in love with Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element, and my reaction to Parillaud's Nikita is similar: you instinctively want to take them home--provided they don't kill you first, that is. Seemingly equal parts Lisbeth Salander and Audrey Hepburn, Parillaud gives us a wonderfully damaged creature who can turn off her vulnerability and turn on a lethality apparently at will. Beyond the expected ass-kicking scenes, the movie's pull comes from her transformation: from such depraved beginnings, we see her blossom as a person who has been given the most mundane--yet most sublime--of gifts: a normal life.

Or at least it seems normal enough until her work interferes.

The movie's key emotional relationship is not between Nikita and the man she begins dating once she's out on her own, but rather between her and Bob, her handler (Tcheky Karyo). They don't have an affair, but he alone knows her real story, and he alone can judge just how deep a hole she has climbed out of. For her part, she knows that Bob had faith in her and staked everything on her at a time when no other person on earth would lift a finger for her--on the contrary, the system wanted her dead and gone. So from that angle, she owes everything to him.  They are like soldiers who have been through battle together. But Bob had faith in her candidacy for a distasteful job; so he's also the connection to the thing that becomes her torture, the thing that threatens to keep her from what she finally can see and want. As Besson tells it, it makes for a compelling story.

There are a couple noteworthy supporting roles as well. Beyond Tcheky Karyo, there are small parts for Jeanne Moreau and Jean Reno, both fabulous and versatile French actors. Jean-Hughes Anglade does a fine job as Nikita's boyfriend. Everybody else is pretty much a cardboard cutout. But Parillaud is awesome, and that's pretty much all that matters here.

Grade: A-

A Biliary Stent

We live in a polarized world. NPR had an article the other day about how many issues the country seems to divide about 50/50 on. It makes for an environment where it can be difficult to see a way forward.

Part of the issue--a big part, I think--is that we have evolved a media model where people get their news from television, and only controversy and spectacle gets covered there. Sometimes the spectacle is real and unavoidable; think the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan. But so much of our news coverage seems invented to garner an audience, and an audience that has been weaned on controversy at that. (I think back to Paul Harvey, who for years loved to find the fringe and outrageous in the news and present this as somehow representative of The World At Large.)

I had a rare political conversation with a coworker the other night in the cockpit. Rare not in that politics came up, but rare in that we had an actual conversation. In very rare circumstances I find I'm working with someone who shares my views--this is maybe a once-a-year occurrence. The other times are divided between guys who speak their very conservative views forcibly and unbidden and, failing to get much of a response from me, the topic dies; and guys who just don't have much to say about politics (though the topic inevitably comes up at some point, and even the politically-taciturn types are almost always of a single stripe).

This guy with whom I flew the other night held the usual views: Obama is ruining the country; Congress specifically and Washington generally need to be nuked; people are working specifically to destroy our nation, etc., etc.  When I poke gently at these sores, I find his iron-clad convictions are almost diametrically opposed to mine.

But many of us will tend to cool our fervor if we learn that others are not of a like mind, and what's interesting is that he went on to talk about his general vision of America--and in THAT we were not very far apart at all. And he stated as much: he said he had some very liberal friends, and when they sat and talked they found a large area of overlap. Indeed, as we talked I think he and I also found large areas of overlap (even if we might order them differently): there needs to be a strong national defense; there should be a functional safety net; we should provide stewardship of our planet and its natural resources.

Now, we may diverge sharply again the moment we move from the what to the how, and indeed there is still much of the what that we cannot agree on. He cites the Constitution as the reason there should be no universal health care, and I cannot accept this as valid reasoning; he thinks the federal government needs to get out of education and it be left to the states, and I cannot agree with this; he thinks regulation and government meddling is killing business, and I think big business is effectively unregulated and is getting all its own way, and quite to the detriment of We the People.  But the larger lesson remains: that almost all of our national discussion is now occurring by shouting from our entrenched positions over a vast middle ground, a middle ground that we might otherwise be occupying together. He and I agreed that we were not being well served by television news, but he was hesitant to join me in my observation that the big news outlets are corporate-owned and are doing the bidding of those corporations. He agreed with me that our government is now doing the bidding of lobbyists and big money interests, but could not join me in impugning the motives of those interests. Again, I don't know that we're irreparably separated (not that there is ever a chance to build on these conversations).

***

Surely some of the gulf between my coworkers and me is that we're each working with our own facts. And this, I contend, is the point of failure in our news media, and, by proxy, a failure of the citizenry. My coworker, unusually, expressed a desire to commit himself to plans of action that are actually shown to work. This is, I think, sensible and pragmatic and entirely correct. But partisan news outlets by definition are selling a point of view, and they tend to give us sanitized talking points so that we're often armed for one side of an argument. I tend to get most of my news from NPR and from my Twitter feed of the Associated Press, the New York Times, and a series of other news-related outlets (including a number of liberal blogs). But I contend that NPR and the Times are a very far cry from Fox News, even if they are held as evil by the Fox crowd. There is nothing on Fox--ever--that corresponds to the reasoned search for truth and meaning that characterizes almost all of NPR's programming.

I got a feed item from Rolling Stone about the political blogger Matt Taibbi speaking yesterday at the Occupy Wall St. rally in New York. There wasn't a lot of info there, but there were some pictures of the crowd and of Matt speaking. What I found striking was the sporadic excoriating comments to the article that dismissed Taibbi as being an unworthy journalist. This is to be expected, I suppose, when the subject matter is controversial, and especially when one writes with an incendiary style (as Taibbi does). Taibbi pulls no punches, and his language is what you'd expect to hear from a good (if very well-informed) buddy during a pub conversation.

But mostly I think the rancor is a partisan lashing-out in the face of a damning indictment. Taibbi has written some pretty scathing things about John Boehner and Michelle Bachman and the Tea Party and indeed about the Republican Party in general, but the bulk of his writing and his expertise is in financial matters; and from his book Griftopia and numerous articles that have followed it, every person in this country (in my opinion) should be bloody mad as hell at what the financial services industry have done to us. He may often show a partisan bent (though the Republicans have rarely floated a more fantastically-deficient slate of candidates bent on pursuing a more schizophrenic series of mutually-exclusive goals than we're seeing now), but the crime perpetrated by Wall St. is a crime against all of us, red and blue alike. It's a crime that has occurred through administrations of both parties, and neither party has even hinted at holding anyone accountable (Obama is given no free ride in any of this by Taibbi).

So I quite expect to see hate mail when Taibbi demolishes Michelle Bachmann, but I think the vituperation is misplaced on the subject of Wall St. Chances are the commenters have been as sorely misused as the rest of us, but they're not getting the right facts.

I rode in a crew van a couple days ago where the driver had the local Louisville news playing, and there was coverage of a disruptive Occupy protest in the city which police had broken up and made some arrests. The other pilot in the van had piped up that "all those [Occupy] protesters should be shot." "Yeah, how DARE those sons-a-bitches exercise their First Amendment rights!" I responded. And from this I learned that A) they're all unemployed, and B) THAT (non-) fact should deprive them of their First Amendment rights.

OK, so not all of us are going to shake hands on the middle ground.

Louisville, February 2012

Just a post of some photos I snapped while driving around Louisville this morning. I've often noted that Louisville feels old in that major thoroughfares tend to follow geographical features or ancient footpaths rather than obey a grid system. Downtown does have a grid, or rather a collection of grids which are joined higgledy-piggledy, betraying the lack of any master plan for the city.  The lack of consistent straight lines gives it a certain charm, but also makes it a pain in the ass to try and get from point A to point B on intuition alone.

I spent a couple hours this morning driving around the old city to the West and North of downtown. This area contains poor residential neighborhoods and the detritus of light industry nestled in the crook of the Ohio River to the North and West as it bends Southward. Much of this neighborhood feels unchanged from what it must have been 100 years ago. Well, apart from 100 more years of degradation. There are a lot of intriguing old industrial buildings here in a variety of conditions: some are still in use (though almost never for their original purpose), others abandoned and dilapidated beyond recall, and a whole bunch sitting empty but imploring. The desirability of these properties hinges on what one wants to pay for rent and how far out of the zone of fashionability one is willing to go. On the East side of downtown to the South of the river these industrial buildings and warehouses are gradually being converted into hip loft spaces and shops and restaurants. But this development is a long way from the West Side as of yet.

The semi-famous Ouerbacker Mansion. I did a post about this place a few years back. Despite numerous attempts to salvage it, or even to protect it from further degradation, it seems like it's now being left to the elements. It's now in too rough a neighborhood for anyone to put the million-plus dollars into rescuing it. Such a shame. (A Google search for "Ouerbacker Mansion" yields a treasure trove of photos--like these of the interior that make me kind of tear up.)

A big factory of some sort, knocked down but not yet cleaned out. This takes the better part of a city block.

Portland Printing and Fax Service. Sitting alone now on a forlorn lot in a decayed neighborhood by an elevated freeway.

A very intriguing old house on the corner of Portland Ave. and 20th St. 

Toilet Articles. The Google Street View pictures from August, 2007 show the building in considerably better shape, though still boarded up. I wonder how much is vandalism and how much is just five more untended years in the elements. It's clearly beyond any redemption now, but didn't necessarily look so five years ago (though of course I don't know).

The garage.

"No copper." 

An old building right on the edge. Any day now the heat and water will be turned off and the door will be locked for the last time. The area is rife with buildings just on either side of this line.

Dancer Exotic Wear.

The Empire Builder

I'm not in the habit of promoting television. My antipathy for broadcast TV is one of my worst-kept secrets, * and so promoting any television show is reflexively difficult for me.

But I've never claimed there is nothing of value to be found on television. Currently I'm working my way through two series that have made waves, Season One of HBO's Boardwalk Empire and the first season of the British series Downtown Abbey. I was taken enough by the first two episodes of Downtown Abbey that I've stopped watching until Susan and I can watch together. And now I've finished the first season of Boardwalk Empire.

Boardwalk Empire comes from producer Martin Scorsese, who also directed the very ambitious pilot episode--which allegedly cost $18 million to produce (more than the budget for Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). The pilot was a big hit, and the season continued with another 11 episodes.

The story, for the uninitiated, plunks us down in Atlantic City, NJ during Prohibition. The city is under the control of its treasurer, one Enoch "Nucky" Thompson. His real job--which is how a treasurer runs a city--is boss of the criminal enterprises in Atlantic City, and especially the now-illicit liquor trade. In this he must deal with / struggle against competing criminal elements from New York City just to the North and Chicago further distant. While Nucky Thompson is a fictional character loosely based on an actual crime boss "Nucky" Johnson, many of the other criminals in the story are actual historical figures: Al "Scarface" Capone, "Lucky" Luciano, Arnold Rothstein, Johnny Torrio.

I suppose I'm more likely to get sucked into this series than others because I have a particular love of this era of history. Prohibition especially (as Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's recent three-part PBS documentary shows) had a transforming effect on American culture, making criminals out of very many people and introducing vast waves of money and corruption where they did not previous exist much. This brought out a huge and colorful array of characters of myriad talents. The era of flappers and jazz and women's suffrage and Art-Deco-themed cross-country trains and stills in the woods and Tommy guns and fedoras. The era of organized crime.

This is all engaging enough in itself, and makes for a most compelling backdrop; but the series really soars on the strength of several key characters. Steve Buscemi plays Thompson, a powerful man but one who can be maddeningly hard to pin down. As the head of a criminal enterprise, he is not squeamish about harsh measures; and yet he is generous and can be soft-hearted. He seems common and approachable, both friendly and amiable and also a bit short-fused. And yet he is measured and confident as the need arises. His second-in-command is one Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt), a kind of surrogate son to Nucky who served in WWI and returned to work for him. But Jimmy's ambitions soon place him on Nucky's bad side. Nucky, who is unmarried, has an affair with a young Irish immigrant widow in Atlantic City, Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald). And Nucky is constantly under investigation by Prohibition agent Nelson Van Alden (Michael Shannon), a "good guy" who is pretty deeply fucked up.

I love that none of the characters is a single, pure substance. The bad guys are varying degrees of bad, with everyone having their humanity mingled with the necessary brutality. And the good guys are inevitably fallible, some egregiously so. And some are just a question mark, staking out territory on neither side of the line. This sets up a war of expectations in the viewer, a constant tension between what we expect and what actually happens--which as often as not differs quite considerably.

It is the relationship between Thompson and Margaret Schroeder that seems the most fascinating and well-drawn to me. Kelly Macdonald might almost be a young Meryl Streep, able to brilliantly do accents and to project a very broad range with complete conviction. I think of her as being kind of mousy in No Country For Old Men, (where her thick Scottish brogue was blithely replaced with a Texas trailer-trash twang) but she plays a much more nuanced character here. A member of the Women's Temperance League and a very pious woman married to a violent and abusive man, she is very far from Nucky Thompson's world as the story begins. When he begins an affair with her, she only dimly--and reluctantly--sees who and what he is, exactly. And this takes, well, the whole season to effect. By turns she becomes reconciled to things that were anathema to her not long before, and Macdonald manages this in remarkable fashion, neither surrendering Margaret's will nor making her foolish or indecisive. There's something deeply human in her character that is thrilling to watch. Likewise the great enigma of Nucky himself. Buscemi (who won an Emmy for the role) plays a complicated character, a back-slapping politician who runs his world behind closed doors with an irascible iron hand. I don't want to give anything away, so I'll just say that I was surprised many times at the writing and the character.

One other intriguing character--a smaller character--is Jimmy's friend and deputy Robert Harrow (played by British actor Jack Huston). Jimmy meets Harrow, another WWI vet, at a VA hospital where both have gone for treatment. Harrow sustained severe facial damage in the war, and he wears a tin mask over nearly half his face--his left eye, nose and half his mouth. The mask makes for a nearly-normal face (I'm especially taken by the fact that half of Harrow's moustache is depicted on the mask side), but the effect is strangely ghoulish; it's impossible not to stare at him. But Harrow seems an upright, if severely tested, man. Jimmy is taken by something in Harrow's pure but knowing nature, and befriends and recruits him. Masks are not a new mechanism, I know, but its effect here is to keep us continually off balance. Harrow speaks with difficulty and a croaking voice, but he is a skilled marksman and he has seen terrible things.

Despite very high marks for the series, there has been some criticism that it's slow-moving. But I reject this out of hand. One can get only so far with gun battles, and it is the (mostly) quiet interaction between characters that drives everything here. I was shocked at how quickly I dispensed with 12 episodes and was distressed that there were no more available. Season Two is in the can and will see a DVD release later this year. Season Three has been commissioned, and presumably production is underway. All credit to a story well-told that I'm anxious to see what will unfold with this cast of characters.

______________________

* About my tiresome antipathy toward network television: I'm convinced that if I could somehow eradicate television altogether society would benefit handily from it--the things of value we'd lose, and the impact they have, would be far outstripped by all the bad shit that went away at the same time. Much of what ails us in this life stems, I think, from the influence of big money and unchecked market forces working on the collective human psyche--inevitably working for the benefit of others. And with a step back we can see that television exists almost exclusively as a tool for players in these big-money fields. It is a key weapon in the commercialization of society, a  propaganda tool for manipulating the thoughts and desires of a mass market (the largest market possible before the internet came along). It tells us what is news (and what isn't), we're supposed to want--and THAT we're supposed to want, what behaviors our friends will find hip, who we should listen to, what we should think about ourselves and what we should value; all the things we historically got from our community.

TV shows are vehicles for selling things. Make shows spectacular and lurid so we'll watch; watch the shows so you'll see the ads--the ads are really the whole banana. It now strikes me as positively harmful to let kids sit in front of the thing, or to have it blathering inanely in the background, filling our heads with jingles and catch phrases, all carefully engineered to sell shit that we might not otherwise buy. Some of it is stuff we need and which actually benefits us; but as with political ads I'm sure television is not the way for us to suss out what is true from what we're told is true. I steer clear of the whole mess by never watching live TV in any circumstances, and by waiting for series to be vetted by critics before renting or buying the DVDs later (I'd much rather pay for the shows themselves than let the advertisers pay and then make me watch the ads). In this manner I've watched all of Ken Burns's documentaries, and some of the dramatic series The Sopranos and The Tudors and Rome. I sampled a bit of Dexter and Weeds, and--wandering further afield--I've long been a fan of the original Law & Order.

Essentially these are my convictions. But I know there's nothing intrinsic to the medium of television that prevents it being used for profound communication or artistic expression like film; it's just that in practice these higher-brain values take a back seat to the tremendous money-making potential in the titillation of a carefully-cultivated mass audience (a phenomenon that has worked its way into film as well).


Even to me my fervor seems a bit paranoid and nutty at times. But since I haven't watched network TV for 15 or 20 years, I'm appalled now every time I run across it. It really is base and horrid, looking like something out of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

The Listmakers

Dbackdad reminds me that it's Oscar Time (OK, him plus the fact that I emerged unwittingly from the L.A. subway Monday right onto a closed Hollywood Boulevard and into the middle of red carpet preparations in front of the Kodak Theatre--I had honestly forgotten all about it). Despite seeing a fair number of this year's nominees, I found myself unable to fill out the New York Times's sample ballot--there are just too many key performances I have not seen. But I can certainly come up with a list of my favorite films of 2011.

I thought it was a pretty good year for films. Not great, but good. I began writing this post by ranking this year's reviews by letter grade, but I found after the dust had settled that I rather liked some films better than others despite their grades not reflecting this. (I suppose there's a question in there about quality and craftsmanship and artistry versus entertainment.)  But no matter: I think the lists done either way contain mostly the same films, just ordered slightly differently.

Probably the best film of the year was Tate Taylor's The Help. A moving story full of engaging and likeable characters, and one that reflects an actual dynamic in American life, one mostly--though not completely--past.

Andrew Rossi's documentary about the New York Times, Page One, was another particular favorite. I care about the newspaper business, and I revere the Times. It's fascinating to meet some of the characters that bring us this brilliant news coverage, and to see how the sausage is made, as it were. And all during a period of great moment for the institution.

Michael Hazanavicius's The Artist is a special achievement. A movie about movies and the history of this particular form of storytelling, it's engrossing from beginning to end and a constant surprise.

I loved Simon Curtis's My Week With Marilyn, mostly for a couple riveting central performances by Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh. Marilyn Monroe is an icon and an enigma, a beautiful race horse run off a cliff. The film does a service keeping the spark of her alive for future audiences.

David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method makes my list of favorites. A tight ensemble piece for three main characters, it's brilliantly written, cast, and acted. Engrossing, and based in historical fact.

As is Clint Eastwood's biopic J. Edgar. Leonardo DiCaprio is great, and the film tells the story of one of the more notorious and fascinating characters in modern history.

David Fincher's The Girl with Dragon Tattoo did not get my highest letter grade, but I anticipated this film more than any other (this year and most others). I'm quite in love with Stieg Larsson's novels and with the excellent Swedish films they spawned. But Fincher has given us his own take on the gripping story, and done so in a way that makes me hunger for the next two films to come.

Woody Allen's lovely Midnight In Paris is whimsical and quirky and punctuated with little profundities. And we get the glory and almost painful beauty of Paris. Maybe Allen is not to everyone's tastes--I'm warming to him more and more as years pass--and this film will not change minds already made up about him. But it's a lovely film by its own measure and an entrancing two hours.

I really enjoyed Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, a solid conventional story that offers a couple twists. An action / double-crossed spy story, it's of a very popular genre and sports a strong cast. But Soderbergh's treatment raises the genre film up above--and beyond--the norm.

Likewise Hanna, Joe Wright's film about teen-aged programmed killer. An action film with a touch of sci-fi, Hanna takes a standard genre and puts an unexpected variation up on the big screen--and pulls it off. Unexpectedly engaging.

Honorable mention goes out to Shame, The Iron Lady and The Beginners.

So what did I miss?

***

PS: I typically review most of what I see in theaters in a year, but I see looking at a list of 2011 releases that there are a bunch of things I've seen and not reviewed: Crazy, Stupid Love, Contagion, 50/50, Thor, Hugo, Super 8, Source Code, Bridesmaids. None of these would make my top films list, but I enjoyed several of them: Hugo for a rich immersion into a kids' fantasy; Thor for good, splashy fun; Bridesmaids for Melissa McCarthy.

And I wish I had seen Melancholia.

This Is Not America

This is just... stupefying.

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I cannot add anything to this discussion, nor voice my stunned outrage as eloquently as these two do here, but WOW. I just never believed anything like this could happen here. Jesus H. Christ: these people are MANDATING that the government basically rape women who exercise a legal right to control their own bodies. The people promoting this should be jailed for tyranny.

(Dahlia Lithwick covers the same topic in Slate.)

I mean, honestly: who would support such a measure? No sane woman, certainly. But what man would support it? And what woman would want anything to do with such a man? How does a party at war with 51% of the population (and a sizeable chunk of the other 49% who support the 51%) remain viable? How can we possibly be having this discussion in 2012 America?

I have never in my lifetime witnessed anything more outrageous than this.

(And why are men never the focus of these draconian tactics? Why, for example, are not the fathers of the--presumably--illegitimate children not imprisoned and forced to pay for the children they've fathered?)

I keep thinking it can't get worse, and I'm shocked and ashamed almost daily to see how wrong I am.

Mirror, Mirror...

I'm just finished with Barbara Tuchman's 1978 book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. The book is a rather exhaustive look at the life and times of the French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy (1340-1397). Rather than a biography per se of Coucy, Tuchman uses his unusually well-documented life (for the time) as a backbone for a more general survey of life in the 1300s. 

A book like this one is a reminder that if history feels stuffy and boring then we're doing it wrong. Tuchman is particularly good at illustrating how daily life has changed in the 700 years since Coucy, concentrating on what was involved in a person's daily life--what they wore, what they ate, what courtship was like, how they made their money--and examining the hierarchical social network that was perhaps the defining feature of life. Exploring these differences big and small makes the book almost like an exercise in time travel: the people of the time are fully recognizable to us, but the trials that face them and their reactions to them are of a very different period. That little spark of recognition seems the perfect gift of history.

As it happens, our man de Coucy was a rare beacon of enlightenment and gentility--well, within reason; he did after all spend much of his life doing his sovereign's business, which was not always rainbows and puppies. But he displayed less brutality and more largesse and magnanimity than most of his contemporaries. And he seems to have been especially gifted at diplomacy, accomplishing quite an impressive list of thorny negotiations where good outcomes were achieved and all sides felt and spoke highly of him. By the end of his life he had garnered a deep and widespread admiration that was rare for the time.

I'm particularly struck to see how brutal life was in the 1300s (and certainly before and for quite a while after). People, whose lifespans were already short and very uncertain, were routinely killed for all manner of infractions real or imagined, for things that by today's standards just don't seem very offensive. And not just killed, but tortured and their hacked-off bits and massacred carcasses put on barbaric display. Royal policies were not uncommonly enforced by the threat of death and torture for anyone who spoke out against them--thought crime. Nobles were allowed to kill common people without much accountability, and tales abound of torture and cruelty practiced as a kind of rich man's sport.

And--surprise!--the church was right there in the dirt. 14th Century France was almost monolithically Catholic, at least in written history, and the institution reflected every weakness and folly of the wider society in which it lived, routinely meting out barbarity and committing every conceivable crime in pursuit of very human desires: sex and luxury and power and wealth. (Far from demonstrating the holy and supernatural, it provides a perfect proof of the absence of supernatural intervention in this brutal life.) Those not of the fold--Jews and Muslims--were routinely persecuted and slaughtered by the faithful, as were any who failed to toe a very whimsical line of obedience (like "witches" or "infidels," often deemed such so as to make their torture and murder legal or ethical). Maybe that's to be expected, since people were--usually with the church's insistence--completely uneducated and class-bound and they lived lives rife with fear and prejudice. But even I am a little surprised at how base and brutal and violent the very upper reaches of the church leaders were. Indeed, it was almost universal. (Speaking of absolute power and absolute corruption... Christopher Hitchens used always to urge us to remember exactly how the church has behaved throughout history when there were no restraints on its power. They may come with their cap in hand now, he'd say, but remember how they've behaved when they thought they could get away with it). 

The organized church vied for power over the masses with the royal houses who nominally controlled the country--usually themselves claiming divine sanction--but these authorities seemed always to be in flux and the whole business, looked at up close, was ugly and violent and brutal. I found the papal schism of 1309-1417 to be particularly entertaining (though for those who lived through it it may have lacked entertainment value), as theft and murder and brutality on a massive scale was carried out on behalf of two very mortal men, each claiming to have a singular mythically-sanctioned dominion over everyone else. The hypocrisy looks comical now. The lower classes--of course--found themselves under the chance control of one or the other of the warring factions, while the other side's marauding bands burned and raped and pillaged the "infidels." Ordinary people lived in terror of being made heretics or of their prayers not being heard or of dying without having received "proper" last rites, etc., etc. The unwashed were constantly told absolute and terrifying things--by people whose confident assertions hadn't the tiniest whiff of legitimacy but certainly played to their grab for power.

Religion poisons everything indeed. (But we're all better now, right?) How horrible is a world without science.

With the almost indiscriminate killing and the ravages of constant war and the horrors of the plague (as mentioned before) and other infectious diseases, one wonders how we managed not to dwindle right out of existence. And indeed by the end of the 14th Century, the plague had reduced Europe's population by almost half.

Barbara Tuchman is masterful. Her command of language is perfection itself for this kind of writing--she's like the Jane Austen of history. I'm now trying to add her other works to my to-read pile.  Her linguistic skills are enhanced in this case by the narrator Nadia May (a.k.a. Wanda McCaddon), who might have the perfect, authoritative English spoken voice.  (Judging by her massive catalog of works, I'm clearly not the first to conclude thus.) This is especially fortunate, in that this book covered some 27 hours of audio time. It's entirely to Tuchman's credit that I wished it were more.

Get Ye Back to the Stone Age!

The Repuglican shit tsunami keeps rollin' in.

First, their relentless quest to undermine science in an effort to mandate their silly made-up iron-age tale of barbarity as the law of the land is about to submerge children from the sorry state of Indiana in the sewer of enforced stupidity.

Indiana Senate Passes Bill Putting Religion in Science Class

You may WANT it to be true, Beavis; you may WISH it carried the weight of fact; but no amount of insistence and chicanery and quoting of King James gobbledygook can make TRUE what is manifestly a loose compendium of man-made oral stories from an ancient, scientifically-ignorant, tribal people. Pack the juries however you like. But the facts don't give a shit about what you think of them. All you're accomplishing by calling your fictional story "science" is to condemn the children of Indiana to a profoundly flawed education, which will hang like an albatross around their necks for the rest of their lives. Good job.

But this is the world conservatives would have us live in: a world of ignorant serfs and half-citizens creating the wealth on which the very few live like kings. We've made huge steps in that direction in the past 30 years, and the right wants to continue with a vengeance. Take, for example, the path the presumptive party nominee for president has committed to treading if elected:

Romney's Concern for the Poor

Jesus.  Maybe the reason the country is so polarized today is because the right is so fucking far out into wacko looney-land that compromise with any sensible person is impossible. Obama needed these smelling salts from Day One and maybe he wouldn't have given away the store to these wackos.

I hate most of the world they're trying to make, a world devoid of compassion and civics, a world without art and creativity, an Orwellian world of Darwinian cruelty and rampant inequality, and all of it fed from a gigantic propaganda machine of which Joseph Goebbels would be proud.

Count me out.

/rant

A Rarer Problem

I recently read New York times media and culture reporter David Carr's autobiographical book The Night Of The Gun. I liked the book, or maybe it would be more accurate to say I was intrigued by it. Carr himself is an interesting case study in human foibles and capabilities. I was going to say a kind of window into the darker parts of the psyche, but I think this phrase kind of bangs me into the big rock which is blocking my path: we all have our foibles and failings, but Carr's particular struggles with drug and alcohol dependence only resonated to a limited degree with me. The rest was lurid spectacle.

And so it is with Steve McQueen's film Shame. Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, a Manhattan businessman struggling with sex addiction. The film is a stark look at classic addiction behavior, Brandon's daily life revolving around an unending series of orgasms got through a variety of means. When his sister Sissy (Cary Mulligan) finds herself without a place to live and no means of supporting herself, she moves in with the reluctant Brandon, which severely impedes his freedom to pursue his addiction. As he is not savvy to his problem even to himself, let alone to his sister, the resentment at the enforced behavior modification builds quickly. His world begins to unravel, a situation not helped by Sissy's own instabilities. She's not a sex addict, but her life is characterized by an ongoing string of bad decisions, mostly concerning men. Brandon is none too happy to have her living on his couch in any circumstance, and her messiness and inconsideration quickly make life intolerable for Brandon. They're both in a bad place in life, and neither is really equipped to help the other, or indeed to accept help if it came knocking.

While gripping enough to watch, I confess I struggled to find empathy for Brandon's problem. Not toward addiction per se: while I have always steered clear of the things that are likely to get me into trouble--i.e. drugs and alcohol--I think I can recognize elements of my personality that might contribute to compulsive behavior. Food is indeed a lifelong issue for me, one that feels very like managing an addiction.  But I don't know how much that fact enables me to relate to the addictive struggles of another. I suppose we all have our self-destructive tendencies, but few of us are full victims do those tendencies. David Carr's demons very nearly did him in, and the glory of his story is the climb he managed out of so deep a hole.

Brandon's addiction to sex is as difficult to relate to, despite its familiarity in parts. He is an attractive (and enviably proportioned) guy, someone to whom women seem drawn like moths to flame. That's one set of perhaps distancing characteristics; for most of we mortals, this is more the stuff of fantasy than reality. But other elements are maybe less foreign: most guys have some familiarity with the black hole (sorry!) of internet porn, and most of us are aware of the magnetic allure of a beautiful young woman in a restaurant or on a subway train. But the extent of Brandon's issues--the degree to which these passing-normal things have overrun any semblance of a normal existence--make them so clearly pathological, that I'm surprised he would not have sought help prior to the time of this story. And without an ability to say "I've been there; I know that place," the movie was more like witnessing a train wreck than anything else. But that's the story, as it were, even if its subject matter is more obscure and discomfiting than the standard fare.

Briton McQueen is a newcomer to feature films, and this one is beautifully shot on location in New York City. Both Fassbender and Mulligan are excellent in their roles, as are the supporting roles. Though not a pleasant story, it's a well-made and moving film. I expect we'll hear more from McQueen.

Grade: A-

A Dangerous Time

Back during the TBM era (that is, Time Between Marriages) I had a date or two with a woman who was a fan of Carl Jung, specifically his thoughts concerning dreams. She dutifully kept a diary at her bedside and wrote long, detailed descriptions of every dream. What she did with these I never learned. Myself, I almost never remember my dreams; this is a faculty which can be developed with exercise, she said. I could just never muster any enthusiasm for acquiring the skill. To what end would I want to learn the "inner meanings" of my dreams? Is there any reason to believe dreams have meaning? I guess I'm just a hopeless literalist.

My familiarity with Sigmund Freud is even more scant (if that's possible). As a freshman in college I made an appointment at the University of Minnesota's Eating Disorders Clinic to discuss why I was fat and whether I was destined to remain so. (FWIW, I was told that I did not have an eating disorder per se, and that what was needed was obesity counseling which, frankly, was unlikely to work. Thanks, dude.) At the end of my brief meeting with the psychiatrist I asked a rather non-sequitur question about the current regard for Freud among mental health professionals (I must have been reading something related at the time). He said that Freud was revered as an outside-the-box thinker, but his methodology was not considered relevant nowadays.

I've had occasion to chew this cud over the years when thinking about the interface between science and medicine. For many in the general public, medicine IS science since this is one of the chief ways they interact tangibly with the products of science. But I'm often reminded that doctors are not scientists, even if the fields overlap somewhat. Most doctors are in the business of applying the fruits of science to sick people in an attempt to ward off existing sickness or disease or injury. Clinical trials of drugs or therapies are a kind of scientific research, but it's muddied up with a lot of stuff that pollutes pure science. (Our man Jeffy would have plenty to say about all this, both as a science-minded person and the husband of a doctor of public health.)

These questions of science and medicine arise inevitably from David Cronenberg's new film A Dangerous Method. Set in the early 1910s, the film purports to tell the true story of Carl Jung (played by the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender) and one of his patients, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley). Spielrein comes to Jung in a highly-disturbed state and Jung applies Freud's psychoanalytical method to help bring her back to health. Spielrein goes on to earn her medical degree and become a proponent of psychoanalysis back in her native Russia. In the course of her treatment by Dr. Jung, the two begin an affair which is to torment them for the rest of their lives. And prominently interwoven with this storyline is the growing strain and eventual break between Jung and Freud, complicated by Spielrein's devotion to Jung the man and to Freud the medical theorist and practitioner.

It's actually a lovely and nicely self-contained story. The screenplay is by Academy Award-winner Christopher Hampton (Atonement, The Quiet American, Dangerous Liaisons) and is based on his 2002 stage play The Talking Cure, which in turn is based on a 1993 novel by John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: the story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. This chain of origin does not of course guarantee a good film, but a successful book and play would seem to foretell good source material.

And I found it quite gripping indeed. It's a mostly quiet, talky story, but we identify with the protagonists: Sabina Spielrein is a damaged but highly intelligent and eminently redeemable person; and Jung is a talented and scrupulous, if fallible, physician. Viggo Mortensen plays Sigmund Freud, who is kind of the father figure of the story, but also one protective of his ideas and eager to manage the development of the theories he originated. Jung felt that Freud's thinking was a great starting point but that one had to branch out; Freud felt they were already a long way from public acceptance, and moving from a sexual basis for most psychosis to the possibility of supernatural or extrasensory explanations was sure to be the movement's death knell.

Again, it feels like there's a kind of fumbling proto-science going on here, with both men seeming (to me) to be trying to move their field forward by way of some wild-ass guesswork. And yet at its essence science is about observing reality against a theoretical backdrop to see what fits and what doesn't, and altering the theoretical backdrop accordingly. This is where knowledge comes from. Mostly, this is all the framework for telling a slightly unconventional love story, and I thought it all worked fabulously. Mortensen and Fassbender give quiet, subtle performances, and if Knightley has a less subtle role to play, she must also cover a much broader range. She's wonderful. (I must give credit to the beautiful woman who is secure enough to be so... ugly--at times, anyway.) The previews tend to hint of a highly sexualized story, and there is a frank discussion of the masochism that lies at the root of Spielrein's problems. But it's tamer than I expected; it earns its R rating, but no more than that.

It appears David Cronenberg has generally played in more turbulent waters than these. I haven't seen much of his, though I liked Eastern Promises (and was about to rewatch, now that I think of it).

But this one is an excellent film. Grade: A-

Artistic License

Beyond the inevitable Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton clips, I cannot recollect ever having seen a silent film. So Michael Hazanavicius/s new film The Artist may be a first for me.

 It certainly feels like something new. It's really a film about silent film, a story set amid, and deeply enmeshed with, the overthrow of the silent film by the rapid rise of the talkie in the late '20s. The French actor Jean Dujardin plays George Valentin, a god of the silver screen and the mega celebrity of his time. We meet him in 1927 at he peak of his fame, as he mugs and hams his way across the screen and even through his live promotional appearances--presumably because this is what was deemed necessary to tell a story on a screen--any screen--without sound. At one of these promotional appearances a young woman stumbles into the scene, and Valentin's hamming at the mishap gets a similar and well-received response from the woman and voilà!: star is born. The woman, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo, who happens to be the director's wife), goes on to make the transition a couple years later to talkies, while Valentin, despite his being her "discoverer" and mentor, finds his days pretty much over. This is the broad outline over which our story unfolds. (One of the things that blurs without spoken dialog is nationality: I love that both actors are French--Bejo is French / Argentine--but the subject and the setting convinces you that they're American.)

What's especially lovely about Hazanavicius's film, apart from its gorgeous black and white picture, is the chance it affords us to reflect on how stories are told and how film communication works. The silent film represents the birth of film, our first stab at this storytelling technology. But people haven't changed in the scant 90 years since then, even if tastes and conventions surely have. The death of the silent film was swift and total. But lots of techniques and styles have come and gone over the years, yet a good film is still a good film. The story must be told through facial expression and setting and props and the occasional dialog card--though not many of these. Obviously, a modern spy thriller like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy could never be told this way; so the medium is not suited to any and every genre of story. But for an intimate story between two people, a silent film lets us immerse in the 85% of communication that's not verbal. The emotional content of George and Peppy's story is pretty garden variety, especially to a present-day audience, but it says something that it's still a compelling story without sound. (Well, there IS sound in the form of an orchestral score, which is as indispensable for a silent film as it is for a modern one.)

Both our leads here are beautiful to look at and have expressive faces (and are both excellent dancers!). Dujardin especially looks exactly like you'd expect a dashing, swashbuckling film star of the 1920s to look with a mischievous but radiant smile and a pencil mustache. They are joined by a fine cast which includes some heavy hitters: John Goodman, James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller, Malcolm McDowell. John Goodman especially seems made for silent films; he excels at the larger-than-life gesture that this world requires.

Special mention must be made for Valentin's costar in all his silent films, and his companion in life, a little Jack Russell terrier named Jack (played by rising canine superstar Uggie). Jack is in almost every scene, and brings much of the film's comedy relief; and he actually carries a fair bit of the story's emotional content as well. I can't help chewing on this a bit, since animals are always silent film stars, as it were, and they're also a pretty surefire way to make an emotional connection. I can't help wondering if this is a calculated mechanism by Hazanavicius to keep us engaged emotionally when we might otherwise be kept at arm's length by the antiquity of this style of storytelling.

But however it works, it works. This is a one-off, a film in its own category. It's not a trend that's likely to catch on, and there's no place for a sequel or prequel. But as a snapshot of a particular moment in history and as a moving story of two human beings caught up in that moment, this is a great achievement and a wonderful entertainment.

Grade: A

Root Canal

Steven Soderbergh has had an amazing career. I remember being bowled over by his first film Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989--for which he also wrote the screenplay). That seemed a genuinely innovative film, and even now I cannot imagine anyone other than James Spader in the lead role. What a start to a director's career.

Since that time his output has been all over the map, including The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Oceans 11, 12, and 13, The Informant, Contagion; and a couple of my personal favorites, Solaris and The Good German. And quite a few others, including the rather bizarre The Girlfriend Experience (which I watched recently and can't corral my thoughts enough to review it.) The only thing this output seems to have in common is his name on the letterhead.

The latest addition to his canon is Haywire, a very Jason-Bourne-like story about defense contractor Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) who must exact revenge on her employer (think Xe, née Blackwater) when they inexplicably turn on her. Beginning in the present day, we flash back to Mallory's recent series of jobs handled in a couple different locations out of the country, the last of which turned sour when her work partner had tried to kill her. This puts Mallory on the run. Why? Who wanted this outcome? And for what purpose? Trusting no one, she sneaks back into the US, where she sniffs her way to the root of the evil. And how she gets to the root of things is, well, it's why we love these kinds of movies. (As we hear Ewan McGregor say during the preview in a conversation with an unknown man, "Oh, don't think of her as a woman. That would be a mistake.")

This is the era of the female ass-kicker, it seems, with Lisbeth Salander on everyone's radar. And while Haywire doesn't rewrite the rules of the genre it gives another very engaging take on the Bond / Bourne theme of the super-competent agent having to fend for herself. What's different here is not only that the special agent in question is a woman, but that Soderbergh has cast a woman who is absolutely believable in the role and filmed her accordingly. Not that there isn't plenty of artistic license taken in the film, but Soderbergh has managed to tell a pretty typical spy thriller kind of story with less movie magic than is typically employed; and the film is better for it.

And it's all possible because of his star Gina Carano, who is recently retired from a career as a top-rated MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fighter and TV "gladiator." This is Carano's first major role. She acquits herself extremely well, I'd say, though whether she's suited to a broad range of styles remains to be seen. Perhaps, my wife suggest, I'm just made soft in the head by her; she is built like the proverbial brick shithouse (as her Maxim pictorial attests). Unlike Rooney Mara, Carano is built to a very sturdy specification and is unquestionably able to fend for herself. The film has plenty of fight scenes, and for once the moves do not appear to be solely the output of movie magic. There is much less camera work involved to capture the action, presumably because the action is (mostly) really occurring.

The supporting cast is all excellent: Ewan McGregor (playing a rare baddie as an Erik Prince impersonator--no wonder revenge tastes so sweet when such a lowlife scum gets what's coming to him), Michael Douglas (great to see him rebounding from his cancer so well), Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Bill Paxton, Antonio Banderas.

Here's yet another genre tackled deftly and satisfyingly by this most chameleonic of directors. Things have been clearly left open for a sequel, and I would gladly pony up to see Mallory Kane's further adventures.

Grade: B+

Brother, Can You Lend Me $450 Million?

Like much of the rest of the world, I've been absolutely mesmerized by the January 13th sinking of the Costa Concordia off the coast of Italy.

Susan and I have done a bunch of cruises over the years, so one naturally places oneself in this setting; and yet this is completely anathema to every experience we've had on a cruise ship. All of our cruises have been with Holland America, and they've never put a foot wrong. Everything is friendly but quietly professional at every turn. Quite apart from the initial, showboating mistake of the Concordia's captain, I feel confident that no Holland America crew would allow such disarray and mayhem once an incident had occurred.

But that's of little help to the passengers of the Concordia. The pictures of the ship, still lit up like a christmas tree, listing to one side next to the island of Giglio have a huge fascination / horror factor, especially when followed a short time later by the half-submerged ship laying on its side.

Of course one's heart aches for those who did not make it off, and for their friends and loved ones who will suffer their loss. But after that initial pain, I'm fascinated at the prospect of what they'll do with the wreck from here onward. They can't just drag it into deeper water, nor, I suspect, can they cut it up where it lies, at least if they want to preserve the pristine setting where this all occurred. I'm also taking it as a given that the ship is beyond salvage, so that no attempt to save it for refitting will be involved. I could be wrong on all these counts, of course.

One article I read said that the ship would likely be moved, once the fuel is off-loaded, by first patching the hole then surrounding it with flotation and rolling it to an upright-but-mostly-submerged state. And then the water pumped out. I would pay money for a front row seat to witness such an operation. I wonder if it's ever been tried before?

Regardless, someone will have to do something about the wreck. I'll be watching eagerly to see what is decided.

An L.A. Times article from a couple days ago addresses some of these questions.

Iron Depletion

The recently-departed (and much-lamented) Christopher Hitchens said that the worst sin for a writer was to be boring. By this standard I fear I'm a sinner of the first water, and there is hardly a more egregious observation I could make than to say that Meryl Streep is a goddess. But sometimes the truth hurts, and there's just no getting around the fact that the woman can do anything. She has played a huge range of characters over her long career, and has hit more out-of-the-park homers than anyone has a right to. And beyond critical success, her characters are invariably a great treat for the film lover. What a list: the deliciously evil Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada; her magnificence as Karen Blixen in Out Of Africa (one of my favorite films); her turn as Julia Child in Julie and Julia (would that the whole film were about her); Doubt, Silkwood, Kramer vs. Kramer. Like a musical virtuoso, it's worth the price of admission just to see her work.

It's especially fun to see her tackle accents (at which many actors recoil, or should), and yet to see her interviewed you'd never guess she has such a facility. She has a certain statuesque beauty but it's mingled with a kind of everywoman aspect, and she seems remarkably down-to-earth; if there's a diva in there, it's well-hidden. Her chief ambition just seems to be to have fun on the set (in interviews she cannot tell a story without making sound effects and laughing most endearingly at her own jokes).

The role of Margaret Thatcher is one for which Streep seems perfectly suited. Larger than life, brimming with conviction and charm, yet possessed of a rather uncompromising, even casually unfeeling, underpinning; the former Prime Minister is the perfect kind of role for Streep to sink her teeth into. Thatcher remains a controversial figure, and I confess I'm not necessarily predisposed to enjoy any biopic about her, mostly because I cannot look forward to two hours' immersion in these survival-of-the-fittest politics where the common workers are smashed underfoot and their due given to the "fittest" who were never so bad off to begin with. I don't know enough of history to determine whether this "tough love" approach was really necessary or effective, but there is no dearth of footage showing folks getting ruined by these policies. (Come to think of it, there are a few parallels to our modern times. I guess there really are just so many stories in life.)

Having seen Phylidda Lloyd's new film The Iron Lady, I don't think my reservations were unfounded; there's no telling Mrs. Thatcher's story without letting her espouse her politics (whether we want to hear them or not--though there will be those for whom they resonate). But I'm also reminded that I should not underestimate the Goddess Streep to deliver a deeply moving and richly satisfying portrayal regardless of the source material.  Not that Margaret Thatcher's story is not fascinating. From modest beginnings, she rose through the rough-and-tumble, male world of British politics to improbably become the leader of the ruling Conservative party, and thus the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the country's first woman to hold the title. And from that position of power she undertook a bold--you could say brutal--reordering of society, crushing unions and privatizing a number of key industries in England, which made her extraordinarily unpopular, at least for a time.

And yet this is not exactly the storyline of Lloyd's film. We revisit these events, certainly, but in the context of an aged and feeble Lady Thatcher in her waning days reliving in memory the key events of her life. Her husband, Dennis Thatcher, is long since dead and one of her two children lives half a world away. She has a staff and a daughter that look after her, but dementia is setting in and hers is a life characterized by all that is behind her. True, this is the inevitable condition of the aging process, especially for one who has lived a rich and eventful life; all of us will reach this point, and the mighty have further to fall. But it seems questionable to put so much of the great lady's decline on the screen as though the loss of her faculties were as interesting as her accomplishments when still hale and hearty. I've heard Meryl Streep defending this part of the story as the simple truth of Thatcher's life, and it's true so far as it goes. But surely the decline and death that awaits every one of us is not what makes Thatcher's story an interesting one (even if there will be plenty who are happy to see her too hobbled to harm any more people). Lloyd's approach is not disrespectful, I'd say; it's just pointless to devote so much screen time to what makes her exactly like every other person.

Having said that, I totally see why Streep was itching to play the role. She gets to age about 40 years on screen and to be a person (the aged Thatcher) who is most challenging to play. And we can see her revel in all the little details that bring the character to life, for her and for us. It's another grand slam for Streep.

It strikes me now that maybe the reason Director Lloyd had focused so much on Lady Thatcher's decline is to bring some variety in what might otherwise come off as her monolithic persona. There's strength and eloquence and resolve and an unwillingness to compromise in abundance here, but it might be a bit cloying to watch two-plus hours of that without a little relief. But the character Streep gives us is so nuanced and so fully human that we'd be sucked in no matter the subject. The film covers Thatcher's whole life, but focuses mostly on her time in politics (and her final days). For the younger scenes the young British actress Alexandra Roach portrays her, and Streep covers the rest, ranging age-wise from mid-30s or 40 to the end. I disliked this technique of using two actors to play a single character in John Madden's film The Debt, but for whatever reason found it unobjectionable here. Ms. Roach quite holds her own, though the meatiest stuff is naturally reserved for Streep. And she is quite reason enough to see the film. It's a chance to see our greatest living film actress doing a brilliant, larger-than-life role whatever you may think of the subject.

Grade: B

The Tin Eye

Today: Steven Spielberg's holiday treat, The Adventures of Tintin.

Previews for this film began showing up around Halloween, and it promised to be a rollicking good adventure and yet another step for computer animation on the continuum of stick figures on the one hand and absolute realism on the other.

The character of Tintin comes from a series of Belgian cartoons which ran from the 1930s to the 1960s plus or minus. Tintin is a young journalist who gets embroiled in adventures and solves puzzles. He is helped by his genius fox terrier Snowy, whose intellect appears to surpass that of many humans in the stories. (Even the journalist status of Tintin is a bit of whimsy, as he appears too young to have graduated from school, let alone attended college; but this is the stuff of fantasy: what child does not dream of her / himself in adult adventures?)

In Spielberg's film (produced by Peter Jackson--quite an adventure pedigree!), Tintin comes across a model of an old three-masted sailing ship at a street market and purchases it. He's immediately overrun with offers to buy the ship and warnings that the model is a dangerous implement that he would do well to avoid. When the ship is shortly stolen from his house, he and Snowy are off on a grand adventure around the globe to recover the model and discover the root of its mysterious power.

Animation over time has occupied a strange place in the world of entertainment. Many cartoons, especially TV cartoons, are aimed squarely at kids--TMNT, Scooby-Doo--and adults have a difficult time sitting still for them. But throughout the history of the cartoon, there have been many with a distinctly grown-up, or dual, appeal. Looney Tunes, for example, or The Pink Panther or Woody Woodpecker or Popeye, and later Ren and Stimpy or Beavis and Butthead. (Others are aimed primarily or entirely at adults, like Archer or Family Guy or South Park.)

Pixar has continued very much in the Looney Tunes vein, making features that capture the fancy of most kids while making fans of their parents as well. The Adventures of Tintin is not a Pixar project, but it carries on in the stream Pixar has helped feed now for 20 years.  The previews for Tintin made it look almost like animated characters plunked into photographic settings. And indeed everything here that is not animate is rendered virtually in photo-realism. It's an absolute treat for the eyes throughout, combining the tactile, 3-D sense of the real world with the whimsy and no-limit possibilities of animation. Only the people (and Snowy) are rendered with a degree of cartoon distortion, but even this is highly variable. Tintin himself (voiced by British actor Jamie Bell) is pretty realistically drawn. You won't mistake him for a real person, but he's very close to that and his cartoon-ness quickly fades, as does that of Tintin's nemesis Sakharine (voiced by Daniel Craig). Others are more broadly made to varying degrees, and all are at least entertaining to look at. Voice talent is first-rate. There is still just a bit of stiffness to the human characters' movements. The realism of the backgrounds exacerbates this, since there is so much realism surrounding the action.

But that segues me into my chief complaint. One expects action and mayhem in a globe-trotting adventure, and the previews make this look almost like an installment in Spielberg's Indiana Jones franchise. That is very much its flavor. But after the initial setup and a chance to revel in the magnificent world Spielberg has created for us, I found myself a bit overwhelmed by the amount of screen time devoted to action scenes. It wasn't nonstop, but for long stretches one lengthy and frantic chase or fight scene follows hard onto another, and I wished for some breaks in the action, some quiet moments to chew on, you know, the plot. Both my wife and I left the theater with the senses a mite frazzled by all the explosions and whizzing cameras and shouts and gunfire. Overstimulation. With this I fear Spielberg will leave much of his adult audience behind (though I don't imagine kids will object). And all this action comes at the expense of a bit more detailed character development. We just don't get inside anyone's head enough to really care about them, and ergo it's hard to care much about the tale. This seems especially unfortunate, as all the dominoes are set up to make a really grand story, and it just feels like someone failed to exercise a little prudent restraint.

That leads us to that old style-versus-content conundrum, and we always get the same answer: technology and style can be fabulous things, but only insofar as they assist the telling of a compelling story. And it's worth remembering that it's possible to make a compelling cartoon with stick figures. It's all about story. To my mind, this lesson was lost sight of in The Adventure of Tintin, even if just a little. There's room here for improvement.

Grade: C+