Press Badge and Clown Shoes

I suppose it would be a stretch to blame James O'Keefe and his merry band entirely on Michael Moore. Josh Marshall's Taking Points Memo has done stellar work on the story of how the 25-year-old O'Keefe and his co-horts--Stan Dai, Joseph Basel, Stan Dai, and Robert Flanagan, the 24-year-old son of William Flanagan, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana-- all came to be arrested as part of a scheme to mess with the phones in Senator Mary Landrieu's office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in New Orleans, while disguised as the Three Stooges diguised as electricians. TPM noted that these fellows formed their styles in the culture of conservative campus opinion journalism and humor magazines; as The Dartmouth Review proved back in the Reagan era, there's something about the combination of a campus environment and a budding conservative mindset that yields the kind of comedy one used to only be able to get from Hustler magazine. But I can't help but suspect that right-wing mischief makers often start out with the idea that they'd like to co-opt the kind of fun being had on the left, or in the center, ro just by non-partisan sane people. (How many knock-offs of The Daily Show has Fox News attempted now?) Given their extreme youth, the members of the O'Keefe gang have grown up in the shadow of Michael Moore, and they've learned the key lessons of his style: that projecting the right attitude, while making yourself the on-camera star of your own work, will inspire people to embrace you as the last honest, sane truth teller around; that people get less excited by serious, sustained investigative journalism than by seeing their beloved truth teller making some poor sap look venal or ridiculous; that working people who have to be where you show up with your camera crew, because it's their job, are fish in a barrel.

Moore found out that, by making life hell for security guards and lobby receptionists, he could persuade his audience that The Man was deathly afeared of him and had surrounded himself with tacky Nazi zombies to keep him from storming the executive suites in his laundry day finery. O'Keefe first attracted attention last year when, taking off from specious propaganda-news reports that the nationwide community organization group ACORN was some kind of Marxist vote-stuffing operation with close underground ties to then-candidate Barack Obama, he executed a media stunt that firmly established that some of the group's employees, if accosted on a slow day, would choose to be entirely too indulgent of a geeky retard dressed like Doctor Detroit when he barges in demanding that he be shown a route to financial assistance for his stable of 'hos. By giving right wingers a chance to howl that ACORN is a boondoggle for comic strip pimps, O'Keefe's videos completely sidestepped the complaints that had been made about he organization while dropping a heavy hint about why it was that so many angry white folks were sure that there must be something hinky about a place devoted to helping poor families, many of them black, and encouraging them to vote.

O'Keefe's Candid Camera antics got him slurped over to such a degree that he must have been dying to get to his next round of attention. The best clue to where his head is at, and how callow he and his playmates are, comes not from their Halloween antics but from the reported detail that they actually used a cell phone to film themselves committing a felony in Landrieu's office. Since their arrest--O'Keefe has, quite properly, now been sent back to New Jersey where his mommy and daddy can keep an eye on him--their defenders have insisted that the little fellas never meant to commit a crime, which, given that it would be unduly insulting to imagine that they never suspected that assuming false identities to enter a federal building to interfere with someone's phone system isn't illegal, can only mean that they expect people to understand that they didn't think the law applied to them and to regard this attitude with a great deal of sympathy. O'Keefe probably thinks that once you've been anointed as a star by Fox News and Chris Wallace has bestowed upon you the thanks of a grateful nation, you've been given permission to do whatever thou wilst, like Elvis after President Nixon had given him his very own super-secret civilian narc force badge and decoder ring.

I can't help but feel a special affection for this story, being myself a transplanted son of the Pelican State. And the fact that James, Zeppo, and the rest of the boys targeted Landrieu ought to be instructional for all of us as we struggle to navigate our way in this divided country. In the past few months, I've grown accustomed to seeing ol' Mary--the daughter of the much-loved late New Orleans Mayor Moon Landrieu and sister of Mitch, who aims to be the city's next mayor--mentioned more and more often, alongside people like Joe Lieberman, as among the most hated enemies of progress by various leftish bloggers. I can understand their disdain for the woman who Wikipedia labels "among the most conservative Democrats in the U.S. Senate", but I wonder how many of them even know that right-wingers, especially those in Louisiana, still think of her as a cross between Rosa Luxemburg and Hanoi Jane, all rolled together, with your mom's haircut. From the time she was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996 to her last fight for re-election, she has been the beneficiary of votes from Louisiana liberals who are too terrified of the fire-breathing loonies who have invariably dogged her heels to the finish line to worry too much about her own ideological deficiencies. The Fox Pimp Squad seems to have zeroed in on her as a villain worthy of a takedown on the basis of complaints made this past summer by teabagging chuckleheads who organized a campaign to phone Landrieu's office en masse to wail about the evils who health care, then, so great is their mastery of the physics of which way is up, proceeded to shriek that there must be a conspiracy to deliberately ignore their voices because, what with all those idiots jamming the phone lines, it became very difficult to get through. One of the various accounts given so far as to what the A-Team thought they were doing has it that they sought to address the matter of Landrieu's staff ignoring tea baggers' phone calls by disabling the phones, which sure would've learned 'em.

The least amusing, and most ominous part of all this, is the light it sheds on the Pelican Institute, a conservative-libertarian think tank that was founded last year by Kevin Kane. The group, which released its own investigative report attacking ACORN last year, employed Flanagan "to assist with its blog... O'Keefe gave a speech at a Jan. 21 Pelican Institute public luncheon focused on investigative reporting and the use of new media." The Institute's website features links to writing that makes fun of Brad Pitt's organization for building funny-looking houses and quotes residents who need prodding to remember that, oh yeah, now that you mention it there was a hurricane there a few years ago! The general tone is highly reminiscent of those papers written in the 1960s by conservative sociologists who had a special knack for interviewing colored folks who were baffled and upset that outside agitators kept coming down and stirring up bad feelings when the lives they lived were already so sweet, what with having their very own water fountains and all. It also recalls that brief window in the history of post-Saddam Iraq when neoconservatives talked about using the country as a lab in which to build a Utopian paradise, with supply-side economics and flat taxes as far as the eye could see. Does New Orleans really need this shit? Surely Kevin Kane and James O'Keefe have lives closer to home they could be fucking up with their asshole personalities, crackpot theories, and questionable dress sense.

In the Context of No Shit, Sherlock

Standout sentence from the blog post by Paul Shirley that ended his association with ESPN as a "freelance contributor":

"Imagine that I'm a caveman."

Done!

The Last Cartwright

It's funny how people we never met come to serve as points of reference for us, in ways that people of earlier generations could scarcely imagine. For the first six seasons of the TV Western Bonanza, Pernell Roberts played Adam Cartwright, the oldest of the three sons of the rancher Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene). The show began in 1959 and ran until 1973, by which time the best and most endearing actor in the regular cast, Dan Blocker, had been dead for a year. The show went into syndication, which is where I discovered it; I used to watch an episode every weekday afternoon when I got home from school, for what, in my memory, seems like years. By then, Roberts, who died the other day at 81, was remembered by TV watchers everywhere as the guy who walked away from a hit TV series that had half a dozen years to run and was never to be heard from again. There was a general feeling that he must have thought that he had bigger things waiting for him and that he must have come to regret having gotten the big head and thrown away his day job. My parents used to snicker at the sight of him on the TV, and my mother used to make my dad grunt with pleasure by reading aloud items from such magazines as Rona Barrett's Hollywood that took note of the dwindling nature of his celebrity. Among people like my parents, he inspired the kind of schadenfraude that the names of Shelley Long and David Caruso would later set off in their former fans. It was a response born of a feeling that the love object had sent them a message that he could do a lot better than be paid a king's ransom to entertain them in their homes.

This used to make me feel a little uneasy, because I liked watching Roberts on the show, almost as much as I liked Blocker, and a lot more than I liked Greene or Michael Landon. Even by the standards of series TV of that time, the characters on Bonanza were not exactly fluid; they even wore the same costumes every day, as if even their wardrobes were punched out with a cookie cutter, and if one of them happened to get run over by a wagon or taken captive and put to work by a crazy prospector until his clothes turned to rags, he would not see that as reason enough to experiment with a new look in the next episode. Blocker's Hoss was the reliably good-hearted man-mountain; Landon's Little Joe was the cute one, assured of a center layout in Lisa Simpson's Non-Threatening Boys fan magazine. But Adam seemed to have banked fires smoldering away and something gnawing at him. Unlike the other happy campers on the Ponderosa, he came across as if he were trapped somewhere he didn't care to be doing something he didn't much want to do, but felt that he had to stay there out of family loyalty. He frequently had the air of someone trying to be gracious about being condemned to always being the smartest person in the room. There was something arrogant about him. All of this only helped fuel whatever public perception that Roberts himself must have been a titanic prick, but the fact is, they were the same qualities that, as a kid, I thought made him seem, well, cool. To put it in a way guaranteed to cause both of us maximum embarrassment: Adam Cartwright was my Fonzie.

In fact, what I found appealing, and what my parents found vomit-worthy, about Roberts on Bonanza probably had less to do with his acting than with what, of his actual personality, came through loud and clear. He hadn't actually walked off the show in an egomaniacal huff but decided not to continue with the show after his initial, six-year contract expired, after years of sharing freely, with reporters, his shitty opinion about the show itself and TV in general. ("They take a plot and write it six different ways for six different Sundays. One week its lawyers night, next week it's ranchers night. You change protagonist, but it's the same old plot.") Roberts never returned to the show after he left, but it seems that he was not averse to making the occasional guest appearance; it was his former co-stars who informed the writers that they were looking forward to the richly rewarding experience of never having to trade lines with or ever see his face again. (I've never seen it myself, but I've heard that one night, Blocker and Landon, after enjoying a taste of the grape, shared this information with Johnny Carson and the entire viewing audience of The Tonight Show.) No doubt Roberts genuinely felt creatively retrained, and no doubt he could have handled it all better. But the possibility exists that he was happier, doing plays and guest spots on other people's TV shows, than he was having to do the same dumb stuff, in the same dumb clothes, with the same bunch of folks week after week, and it's a possibility that I'd like to bind to me with hoops of steel. (He did later return to series TV, for seven seasons as the star of the unwatchably drab Trapper John, M.D.; presumably, by that time, his contempt for the repetitive nature of the medium had been worn down by his not unreasonable desire for a retirement fund.

I never got to see Roberts on the stage, and this does not nag at me, the way it sometimes nags at me that I'll never get to see Dan Blocker in the two great movie roles that were his for the asking, Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove (his agent is said to have turned Stanley Kubrick's request that he pass along the script because he was so horrified by its political content) and Roger Wade in The Long Goodbye (which was being prepared for him when he died). In his one noteworthy movie appearance, alongside Randolph Scott in Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome (1959), he isn't that different from he was as Adam; he's super-competent and careful and, yes, arrogant, treating Scott with wary respect but treating his own partner, James Coburn, as if he were primed to hear him ask him again to tell him about the rabbits, George. The main difference is that he's defined there as a likable badman. In most of his TV guest appearances that I've seen, he's a dislikable badman, baleful and sardonic--Adam gone over to the dark side. (He was also, just about invariably, unapologetically bald-domed. I think he might have been the first TV leading man turned TV perennial who insisted on flushing his toupee, which would sort of make the Sean Connery of the Quinn Martin Players. Of course, Telly Savalas never went in for hairpieces in the first place--which makes him Yul Brynner.)

In the end, the open secret to Adam Cartwright's cool was that Roberts, powered by his inability to give a shit what anybody thought about him so long as he was working in this shit medium, took full advantage of every trick that normally makes badmen so much more fun to watch than bland good guys, even though he was supposed to be one of the good guys. He wasn't an antihero in any sense--Adam always did the right thing. But he did it with the style of a baddie, and the only indicator that the show itself might have taken notice of this and been in on the joke was that he was costumed every week in the traditional black garb, complete with black hat, of the Western villain. It was as if the show was daring one of those old coots in the back of the saloon to call him on it. Today, lawyers and doctors and cops on TV routinely act like mustache-twirling sons of bitches, with the understanding that they're the good guys; they're just trying to function in this crazy, dirty world they've been dumped in. Roberts stalked through Bonanza like a reformed sinner doing penance, maybe after Pa had sent him into rehab for tying damsels to railroad tracks, determined to use his heightened powers of sarcasm and Method brooding for good instead of evil. ("Hi, I'm Adam, and I'm too hip for this room." "Hi, Adam!") It wasn't quite like anything I'd seen at the time, and it was cool, however hard Roberts may have been to live with in the prime of his charisma. Let it be noted that he went through four wives. Let it also be noted that Wife No. 2, who acts under the name Judith Roberts, played the sultry-eyed lady across the hall who melts into her bed with Henry in Eraserhead. Coolness-by-association points do count for something.

C'mon, People Now, Trash Talk Your Brother!

Nobody uses the term anymore, but South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer's remarks about the evils of feeding poor schoolchildren are an example of down home "compassionate conservatism" in its purest form. (George Bush. Jr., who helpfully fed the media the phrase "compassionate conservatism" to help them explain to the voters why he wasn't anything like those red-meat lunatic Republicans that everyone had gotten so sick of since the Gingrich revolution, best captured the thinking behind upscale compassionate conservatism with his dream of "the ownership society", defined as protecting banks and other financial institutions from any kind of regulations or oversight that might prevent or even discourage them from lending middle-class or upper-working-class people money or cutting them mortgages that were all but guaranteed to eventually wipe them out financially if they didn't win the lottery.) Speaking at a town hall, the man who is Mark Sanford's insurance policy against being forcibly removed from office explained that "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed! You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that." Note the speaker's confidence that anything that oozes from his mouth will be taken for folk wisdom so long as he makes clear that he is extrapolating from the teachings of his grandmother, who, since she wasn't "highly educated" (i.e., corrupted by book learnin'), must have had her every utterance informed by the higher wisdom of the heart. Because of the failure of his own family to prepare him for his moment in the sun by spending their lives sitting by the outhouse eating dirt, George Bush, Jr. had no earthy forbears he could point to and had to prove that, despite his diploma from Yale, he was himself a self-made idiot.

Some spoilsports, ignoring those who'd say that catching a family-values Republican behaving hypocritically is too easy a sport to interest a sentient adult, have pointed out that Bauer himself, coming from a long line of not highly educated people, was himself a beneficiary of school lunch programs. To see anything peculiar in this, let alone see it as a reason to call out, "Gotcha!", is to fail to understand the building blocks of the compassionate conservative mind. It is a mind that grows and develops over time, as one's mind should, taking in new data and reevaluating things based on changing circumstances. In the case of whether one supports or denounces school lunches, the big change is whether one is eating them or paying for them. When Bauer was a little tyke, and he was presented with a tray containing a sandwich and an apple and a little carton of milk by a government storm trooper in a hairnet, I doubt that he spit on it and yelled, "This is socialism in action. J'accuse!" In fact, I'm sure he didn't do that, because if he did, boy, would he be including that information in his town hall sermons. It was only when he grew up and saw other people's children feasting on those sandwiches, in some cases tearing off and discarding the crust of the bread, the little ingrate motherfuckers, that he saw that, all along, he had been on the receiving end of a scheme aimed at getting him to go out and breed to create more little rodents who'd grow up and vote Democratic for their own selfish interests. It was also around that time that he noticed that five of those trays a week, nine or so months out of the year, were not just a gesture at allowing the children to stay conscious through their afternoon classes but in fact added up to an "ample food supply" for each of the little parasites. And you thought Spartacus was set in decadent times!

Compassionate conservatism is the natural province of two groups of people: those who've been in a position to benefit from government programs, like Bauer (and Ronald Reagan, who, when he was a liberal Democrat, liked to talk about his family had been saved by the New Deal, and who, after he became Ronald Reagan, still liked to talk about it, to make the point that being saved from starvation by Big Gummint had destroyed and emasculated his dear pop), or by relaxed social standards, such as Clarence Thomas or the serial adulterer Gingrich or the hike-happy Mark Sanford, and who agree that anybody else who benefits the way they have is some species of vermin or pervert, and those who, like George, Jr., those who've been fantastically privileged all their lives and now want to show those who've known hunger and prejudice that they are welcome to join them at the top of the skyscraper if they'll just agree to wage war on the same people they'd rather not have hanging around the yacht club. In the case of someone like Clarence Thomas, this may mean that the new recruit has to recognize, as Reagan did, that all the breaks he got in life, which were open to others, were actually veiled insults delivered right to his face, for which he will never stop seething--unlike the breaks offered to him by his new friends, who singled him out from all those other candidates for a slot on the team because they could perceive his unique inner qualities.

Let me be clear. Having seen him being interviewed on TV and having looked into his pissed-off crazy red eyes, I think that Thomas really believes that anytime his career was advanced by anyone to the left of P. W. Botha, he was the victim of "Affirmative Action", which he sees as a wicked plot to destroy his self-esteem by taking his skin color into consideration in relation to his overall worth and rightness for a given position. The corollary to this is that he also really believes that, when the only black member of the Supreme Court stepped down, and a Republican president who had terrible relations with civil rights groups and black voters in general selected him as the obvious replacement, this decision had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Thomas was black. On the contrary, a 43-year-old Republican bureaucrat with a thin paper trail who'd spent a whole year on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and who--unless we are to assume that Thomas perjured himself during his confirmation hearings, o impermissible morbid thought!--had never in his four decades on the planet engaged in a serious conversation about abortion and in fact had not yet developed an opinion about it. Thomas did develop an opinion about that, and a lot of other things, at some point between he was confirmed and his first day on the Court, but hey, clearly by then it was time to man up.

The Republican Party is a big tent. It makes room for people who wouldn't have survived to adulthood without government aid who now see children who get free school lunches as rats breeding out of control; for people who use the law degrees that wouldn't have been able to earn without taking advantages of programs and laws designed to help disadvantaged or minority students to make it harder to for poor people and minorities to rise above the station they were born into; for men who, when they aren't delivering brimstone speeches against gay marriage, have to think about catching a glimpse of their old college dorm roommate in the shower in order to endure sex with their wives. This kind of self-serving, probably unconscious hypocrisy has come to seem so natural a part of our political culture that it only really creeps you out now when you see someone who doesn't belong in that culture but has gotten sucked into it to serve someone else's agenda, the way that Paula Jones was, and the way that Bristol Palin has been, now that, by virtue of having had a baby as a teenager, is now the Republican Party's official poster child for sexual abstinence. (She's also the "teen ambassador"--it sounds like the kind of title you'd get for sending in the most cereal box tops to the Davy Jones Fan Club, doesn't it?-- for the Candie’s Foundation, which seeks “to educate America's youth about the devastating consequences of teen pregnancy” and encourages abstinence through such devices as T-shirts with sexy let's-just-wait slogans. It's the most socially aware thing Candies has been involved in since that ad campaign for their shoes that featured Jenny McCarthy parked on the toilet!)




I'm uncomfortable picking on Bristol Palin for the same reason that I was uncomfortable with picking on Sofia Coppola for her performance in The Godfather, Part III: I don't really know the inner details of all this, and I think it's kind of harsh to bash someone who may be just trying to humor a parent she presumably loves, or at least fears. So this piece on Bristol and Ma Palin's joint TV appearance on the abstinence trail is a little snarkier than I can get behind. I agree, though, that the poor kid comes across as someone who "hates her own message." It's not really her message, anymore than all the messages of the various kinds of Clinton-haters who took up Paula Jones's cause had anything to do with her; she just seemed to want some attention and a nose job. It's been a year since the CNN interview in which Bristol said that she wished that she'd waited ten years to have her first child but also claimed to believe that telling kids to just not have sex isn't "realistic at all." Of course, that was also the interview in which many of us, Bristol perhaps included, learned that anytime she shot her mouth off to a reporter, she could count on her mom to swoop in to monitor and/or "clarify" her remarks. A lot of people will probably agree that it would be a terrible thing if Bristol were being forced to live any part of her life in the public eye just because her mother wants to both milk and spin the very part of her life that you'd expect her to most want to keep to herself, but at the same time complain that it's condescending for any outsider to assume that an eighteen-year-old girl can't take care of herself and speak her own mind. But if Bristol Palin is stumping for this message, or stumping at all, for any reason other than that she woke up one morning completely convinced, all by herself, that she had to get out there and testify--if it has anything at to do with Sarah Palin having whispered in her ear, just once, that it sure would be helpful for mommy-- then what's going on with her would constitute child abuse even if she were male and forty years old.

I Am Still a DVR

GO DOWN, DEATH! (1944): This 56-minute "race" movie was directed by Spencer Williams, an actor, musician, and pioneering black filmmaker who's probably best remembered for having played Andy Brown on the TV version of Amos 'n Andy. Williams's best-known work as a director is The Blood of Jesus, a 1941 Christian parable whose script he adapted from a Langston Hughes poem. A major commercial success on the black and religious film circuits, it inaugurated a trilogy, of which Go Down, Death! is the concluding episode. (The middle film, the 1942 Brother Martin: Servant of Jesus, is presumed to be lost.) Go Down opens with Williams, the principal player and, from the looks of things, maybe the only professional actor in the cast, sitting at a table plotting with his flunkies. He is Big Jim, the local one-man mob, and with his natty suit and omnipresent cigar, the spitting image of a country Bunk Moreland. The camera sits trained on him, patient and motionless, as he complains that this new preacher in town has got the locals behaving so righteously that his craps games and other morally questionable gin joint endeavors are under-performing badly. Most of Go Down consists of very long static takes during which Williams gambols through his lines while the other people on screen plod dutifully through theirs. (The camera also maintains its deadpan stare when a couple of dancers kick up their heels at the local drinking establishment, a sequence that means to both give us a taste of decadence and slip in a little actual entertainment.) For once, I found that the primitive filmmaking actual did something for me. It gives the whole movie a documentary feel--that of life, in this case some people enacting a church play, recorded without style or flair or anything else to get in the way. It also makes your head swim all the more when things get really strange.

Plotting to destroy the preacher's hold on his flock, Big Jim arranges to have him photographed in the company of some floozies he's set upon him, but Big Jim's adoptive mother, who everyone calls Aunt Caroline, objects. Praying to a picture of her late husband on the wall, she implores God to help her stop Big Jim from further sullying his soul by hurting the lord' conduit to the local sinners, and the Lord magically tips her that the location of the pictures. But Big Jim comes home to find her about to destroy them, the two of them wrestle, and Big Jim accidentally kills her. Truly the Lord works in mysterious ways. Soon, Big Jim is at the funeral, listening to the preacher invoke Death's white steed, and, in what I think is supposed to be a depiction of what's going on inside Jim's head, the screen fills with a shot of a pleasant-looking, mangy white horse, idly chewing something. It's about the least ominous sight you could imagine, but as shock cuts go, it benefits from being the first evidence we get that Williams knows of the existence of montage.

Badly shaken, Big Jim goes home, sits down, and begins to hear his conscience chew him out, in the form of a voice-over that would fit right in at any Halloween record. Finally, Jim jumps up and starts running, his panic attack captured in an extended traveling shot that includes what looks like an unscripted collision with a tree. At this point, Williams the director beings to intercut his own onscreen freak-out with images of eternal damnation, which were lifted from the work of the silent-film fantasist by Georges Méliès. (They include a hard-to-forget shot of the devil munching a sinner whose body hangs halfway out his mouth.) I just happened to watch the movie right after seeing Copyright Criminals, a documentary about the modern history of sampling in music that aired on PBS as part of the Independent Lens series. The documentary betrays no awareness that there is a history of anything like sampling outside music, but the climax of Go Down, Death! could almost be subtitled "Sampling in the Name of the Lord."



A PERFECT COUPLE (1979):

A couple of months ago, I polished off both Mitchell Zuckoff's Robert Altman: The Oral Biography and Patrick McGilligan's more conventional biography from 1989, Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff. A Perfect Couple was Altman's last film before the 1980 Popeye, after which he mostly stuck to TV projects and filmed plays for a decade; I'd seen it years ago, but I barely remembered anything about it, and McGilligan, at least, made it sound interesting enough that I felt that I ought to look at it again. The movie barely received any attention at the time, probably because it opened just a few months after the more brazen belly flop of Quintet, which ate up most of the oxygen for even hostile responses to Altman that year, and it hasn't gotten much play since, so it would be quite a shame if it were an undiscovered treasure, or even a modest gem. Having seen it again, the best I can say is that, if I'd seen it right after Quintet, I might have been relieved to see the Boss making some kind of effort to once again depict human behavior on planet Earth. But over the long haul, he sure did have better comebacks than this.

A Perfect Couple begins as a romantic comedy about a couple who've been mismatched via computer dating, an idea that had already been well-traveled through the sitcom mills by 1979. Grafted onto this premise is a theme about competing families: the fiftyish hero, played by Paul Dooley, is a Greek-American businessman who, along with the rest of his family, lives under the thumb of his tyrannical papa, played by Titos Vandis, fondly remembered as the Greek farmer who was Gene Wilder's rival for the sexual possession of a sheep in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. The heroine, played by Marta Heflin, is much younger than Dooley's character but seems much wearier; she's part of "Keepin' Em Off the Streets", an oversized rock band that lives communally, travels by bus to its gigs at various venues, and is led by Ted Neeley, the singing savior in the 1973 movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar. Dooley, in what I'm willing to bet was his one fling as a romantic lead, is game and engaging and even touching at times, and in fact the movie's primary historic importance in the context of Altman's career is that it marked the addition of Dooley to the informal Altman repertory company. Somehow, I doubt that even Dooley would expect anyone's pulse to race upon learning this detail.

Heflin, her lips set in a pout and with her eyelids at half-mast, is a much limper brand of rag doll, to the point that, before you've fully formed the basis for wondering if Dooley is the right man to wake her from her trance, the question is already shifting to whether anyone or anything could. The role seems like a natural for Shelley Duvall, but apparently it was conceived for Sandy Dennis, who had to leave the project because Dooley was so badly allergic to the smell of her cats. There's no telling what the movie might have been like if Dennis, who gave a real game-changer of a career performance in Altman's Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, had been in it. But that feels like a moot point, because the rock band, which is amply featured in rehearsal and performance footage, ends up just about taking over the movie. In our first glimpses of them at work and play, Helfin and the other members seem like a cult of recovering substance abusers who are at the mercy of the obnoxious Neeley, who's the kind of guy who looks fairly macho until he opens his mouth and starts having hissy fits. I kept waiting for Altman to develop this side of the movie and finally take Neeley and his pitiable charges apart, but that never happens--presumably because, it turns out, Keepin' Em Off the Streets was a real band that has been organized by Allan Nichols, who appeared in a batch of Altman movies and is credited as A Perfect Couple's screenwriter, as well as its music producer and composer. In the musical sequences, Neeley, Heflin, the singer-actress Heather MacRae, and the others idle around the stage in super-casual fashion, freshly attired after a raid on the Manhattan Transfer's wardrobe case, and spew big band easy-listening rock with a cocktail-jazz base. These scenes, too, amount to a real historical record of something; the movie could just as easily have been called, "Why We Needed Punk."




JEANNE EAGELS (1957): This biopic about a once-legendary, now largely fogotten star of stage and silent film (who died at 39 under mysterious--read "scandalous"--circumstances) stars Kim Novak and was directed by George Sidney, a well-respected industry name who specialized in bad movie versions of classic Broadway musicals (Pal Joey, Bye Bye Birdie, the 1951 Show Boat, etc.) I was curious about it because the script is credited to two (count 'em) novelists with deserved cult reputations, Daniel Fuchs and John Fante, as well as Sonya Levien, whose long lists of hacky-ass credits includes one version or another of The Student Prince, The Merry Widow, Oklahoma!, and State Fair. I have no way of knowing how they divided up their duties, but most of the good writing here is concentrated in the first half hour, when Jeanne joins up with a traveling carnival and becomes the lover of the operator and chief barker, played by the unironic version of John O'Hurley, Jeff Chandler.

Thanks in no small part to Chandler, this section has some seaminess and a little heat to it, though the whole thing goes pretty far afield from the facts of Eagels's life. She actually got her start as a dancer-actress in a traveling theater show. Maybe an early draft of the script stayed truer to things, and then someone had the brainstorm of turning the theater show into a sleazy carnival to make Eagels's rise from the dirt to the lights of Broadway more impressive. When a movie script goes through too many drafts at the hands of too many writers, it can become hard to notice that things that once made sense no longer do, and this would help to account for the baffling scene in the finished film in which Jeanne tells her barker lover that she's tired of dancing cooch shows for slavering yokels and maybe, in the next town, she could instead delight them by showing off her acting range with an evening of selected scenes from Becky Sharp?

In any case, one's hopes that the movie might pull itself together are dashed when Jeanne and her stud hit New York and drive around the streets, gawking in wonder at a series of insert shots of marquees announcing that Fanny Brice, Al Jolson, and the Barrymnores can be found on the premises. Determined to break in, Jeanne goes to see a powerful theatrical madame played by Agnes Moorehead. Getting her Endora on, Moorehead sniffs that she does not deal with "carnival or circus performers" who have only appeared alongside "gypsies, freaks, and snake charmers." "Maybe," whispers Jeanne, "all the freaks aren't in the carnival" Oh, snap! Charmed by her gumption, Moorehead takes her under her wing, and soon Jeanne is taking bows onstage while Moorehead enthuses, "She has that one necessary thing: talent!" I'm not sure whether it's meant to be an inside joke that the great acting coach is made to single out the very quality that had the least to do with making Kim Novak a star. She could barely act a lick, but in the right role, her self-consciousness and palpable uncertainty about how well she was doing. combined with her great beauty, could make her seem very touching: it wasn't so much that the camera loved her as that the camera wanted to give her a hug and buy her a kitten.

If Jeanne, as conceived here, was ever the right role, it stops being that as soon as the hungry star discovers the role that will make her big, Sadie Thompson in Rain, and hijacks it from Elsie Desmond (Virginia Grey), the faded star who is planning to use it for her comeback. (Summing up Elsie's downfall while helpfully projecting Jeanne's own, Moorehead grumbles that Elsie had everything until "she met her match--the bottle!" Her lines spun of purest camp, Moorehead manages to outclass Novak even while looking faintly ridiculous, and Virginia Grey simply acts her off the screen.) The movie doesn't make the slightest attempt to convey what a woman like Jeanne might want from acting besides the full nova of onstage attention, and any foolish hopes you might have that it will illuminate what makes someone a great performer or a major star dies when it becomes clear that Jeanne's stealing Rain out from under her rival's nose is the ultimate sin from which the rest of her life will roll downhill. There isn't much to do for the rest of the movie but watch her behave badly, and watch Novak act even worse. There's also a political angle: the selfish, hard-drinking Jeanne's ultimate villainy is her refusal to join Actors' Equity and her indifference to the fate of her fellow, union-friendly performers when her squalid boozing forces theater managers to cancel show after show. In other aspects, the picture is less enlightened. In a scene that seems meant to establish that Jeanne's former-football-star husband is a likable guy, we see him pitching a football around with a bunch of little black kids and instructing them, "See, you hold that just like you would a watermelon..."





THE STRANGE ONE (1957): This movie is based on the play End as a Man, which in turn was based on Calder Willingham's novel of that name; the film is sometimes called End as a Man too, but it mostly turns up, under this title, and generally only on Turner Classic Movies in the neighborhood of two in the morning. Set in a southern military academy, it stars Ben Gazzara (in his film debut) as a senior cadet named--get this--Jocko DeParis-- who has the kind of sadistic mastery of mind-fuck technique that makes a character so appealing to actors and invaluable to playwrights. It doesn't feel especially stage bound; it has too much energy. But it's fascinating as a filmed theatrical document, because it's cast entirely with Actor's Studio alumni (including George Peppard, who usually seemed like the oiliest guy in any movie he was in but, thanks to the presence of Gazzara, can pass for a decent and sympathetic fellow here, and the relatively lithe young Pat Hingle.) It was directed by Jack Garfein, who directed the stage version, and whose only other movie was the 1961 proto-indie Something Wild, filmed in New York and starring his then-wife, Carroll Baker.

Surprisingly, the least camera-friendly performance here is given by an actor named Arthur Storch, even though he'd had more experience in film that many of his co-stars; playing a fidgety, fretful sort, he can't seem to stop baring his big front teeth to remind you that he's closer to being a species of rodent than a man. (He does get off a pretty hilarious line reading early on, summoning up a breathy whisper to tell a football star cadet that "My favorite position is the tackle.") Gazzara gives a theatrically heightened but carefully controlled performance, reveling in his mean lines and seeming to get a buzz from his own charisma. He only goes over the top for a few moments during the climax, in which his bully gets his comeuppance and reveals his yellow streak. Since this ending was forced on Garfein and Willingham by the producer, Sam Spiegel, one can understand Gazzara feeling that he really needed to sell it. Presumably both the changed ending and title were meant to underline the idea that Jocko's pointless, self-aggrandizing cruelty, his seeing the people around him as toys to be manipulated for his amusement, and the rancid form of self-hating homoeroticism that he injects into the atmosphere are wholly untypical of the military culture from which he must be expelled. Sure. Right.

Jean Simmons (1929-2010)

Jean Simmons was the best argument I can think of that beauty isn't always just skin deep. A delicate-featured wonder, she broke into movies in her mid-teens and played Estella in the early scenes of David Lean version of Great Expectations in 1946, when she was seventeen. Seldom has it been so plausible that the hero of a movie would immediately develop a crush on a girl that he would carry the rest of his life, though both the movie and the crush become a good deal less compelling when the years pass and Simmons is replaced onscreen by Valerie Hobson. Most of Simmons's movies weren't remotely in the class of Great Expectations (or of Olivier's Hamlet, made two years later, with Simmons as Ophelia). Her first Hollywood films where made for RKO under Howard Hughes, an association that would publicly lament as a waste of time, though she did get to play black widow spider to Robert Mitchum's unlikely helpless fly. The role gave her the chance to practically play The Big Sleep's Vivian and Carmen Sternwood at the same time, but given that the movie was directed by Otto Preminger, it is not hard to understand how she might not have looked back fondly on the experience. (In one scene, Mitchum was required to slap Simmons across the face. According to Foster Hirsch's biography of Preminger, Preminger ordered take after take of the slapping scene, demanding that Mitchum hit Simmons harder, until Mitchum had the novel idea of drawing the director more firmly into the collaborative process by turning around and slapping Otto hard across his charmless kisser. Preminger stormed off to tell Hughes what had happened and tell him he had to choose between him and Mitchum. After he got tired of waiting for Hughes to stop laughing, Preminger skulked back to the set and said something to the effect that he at least hoped people would remember who was supposed to be the director around here. "Otto", Mitchum is supposed to have said, "we're all here for you.")

Even when she got out from Hughes's thumb, Simmons never had the film career she had coming to her. She had the misfortune to find herself trapped in the 1950s, known to clear-eyed film historians as "The Lobotomized Years" or "The Age of Velveeta." At that time, Simmons's unearthly grace and beauty made her seem so out of step with contemporary mass culture that she spent a lot of time stuck in godawful period epics where it must have seemed that she'd fit in better: The Robe, The Egyptian, and Desiree, where her male lead was Marlon Brando as Napoleon. (She and Brando also co-starred in the infamous film version of Guys and Dolls. The movie is barely watchable, but I'd pay a lot to watch film of them rehearsing their dance numbers.) Not the least striking thing about all these films, as well as Spartacus, the one classic she was in that was forged from that mold, is her ability to seem to be directly conferring her sweet sanity on the viewer, as if trying to say, "I'm sorry I made this, and I'm sorry you're watching it, but I got well paid and it's just a couple of hours out of your life: we'll get through it together."

Almost consistently underappreciated and miscast at the whim of people who in a just world would have been taking her lunch order, she could do amazing things as an actress, given half the chance. She got practically a 51% chance in Home Before Dark (1958), in which she played a woman whose husband (Dan O'Herlihy) has had her institutionalized and passed through a gauntlet of electroshock "treatments" to zap her out of her delusion that he's been having an affair with her stepsister--which, she begins to realize after she's returned home, was not a delusion. Overlong, badly paced and badly made (by the director Mervyn Le Roy), with dialogue that's a long way down from Dickens and Shakespeare and maybe even a bit of a drop down from Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo, Home Before Dark is a forgotten film--unavailable on DVD, and I'm not even sure that it ever came out on VHS--that deserves rediscovery just for the sake of seeing Simmons giving a mature performance as a character with real problems and textured, complicated emotions and who didn't wear a toga.

Her film career frittered itself away after 1960, when she made Spartacus and Elmer Gantry, which was directed by her second husband, Brooks. She later did Brooks, the kindness of starring in his 1969 this-marriage-is-killing-me movie, The Happy Ending, for which she got an Academy Award nomination; spent three years playing in Sondheim's A Little Night Music; played matriarchal roles on TV in The Dain Curse, North and South, The Thorn Birds, the 1991 remake of Dark Shadows, and a 1989 version of Great Expectaions, which gave her the chance to play Miss Havisham; and leant her voice to the English-language version of Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle. All in all, I would rather not know for sure how many people, upon hearing that Jean Simmons was dead, broke out their copies of Kiss Alive and had a good cry.




[edit: There's a very sweet slide show of pictures of Simmons, from many different stages of her life, here at Slate.]

Saints and Slummers

Those whom the media gods would destroy, they first declare to be perfect. That's the closest thing to a lesson that I can draw from the coverage of Tiger Woods's personal problems. So far as I can tell, Woods's image of perfection isn't something he asked for or the product of a massive public relations campaign that he'd authorized and set in motion. It just seemed to develop naturally out of his superhuman talent when combined with his easy charm, good looks, likability, and his failure to repeatedly show up for tournaments with his shirt off and coke spilling from his nose and with the legs of a dead hooker sticking out of the trunk of his car. But the other side of America's recurrent desire to believe that any mediocrity who strikes a pose they kinda dig will rise to greatness, on the strength of his good heart and the wisdom of a child, if he's given the keys to the car, seems to be an even more passionate desire to see people punished for having once seemed impressive enough that the media, never comfortable with gray areas, concluded that they must be saints, if not gods. Game Change, the book about the 2008 presidential campaign by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, makes no bones about why it considers Elizabeth Edwards, maybe more so then even her husband John, to be fair game for the meanest attacks imaginable: she was "Saint Elizabeth", a woman whose battle with cancer caused people to feel sympathetically inclined towards her. Heilemann and Halperin probably speak for a lot of people when they indicate that, because a lot of people once thought Elizabeth Edwards was an especially good person, it's important that we now see that she was never anything but a squalling monster. In some cases, the very reasons that people liked her can be used to bring her down. The authors quote an anonymous voter as saying that Elizabeth humanizes the pretty boy Edwards. Or, as she puts it: "I like that he's got a fat wife."

Heilemann writes for New York magazine, which currently features a cover story on the Edwardses that's "adapted" from the material on them in Game Change. The article is illustrated with cartoons (by Nathan Fox) that help clarify how you're supposed to see these people, in case you have some misguided tendency towards feeling sympathy towards any of them. In one drawing, Elizabeth screams through the phone at John, who looks poleaxed, amoebic, a harmless little fella on the receiving end of a shitstorm. Elizabeth is consistently depicted as a monstrous battle ax, something between a Japanese movie monster and one of Macbeth's political advisers. The book describes a scene with John refusing to ride in the same car with her; it says that, at one point, she ripped open her blouse in an airport, yelling at John, "Look at me!" At the time, she was dealing with both her husband's infidelity and the recurrence of her cancer, while trying to do everything she could to hold his campaign together. All of this earns her no sympathy from the authors, who (describing her from the point of view of the campaign staffers who resented her, or worse, for telling them how to do their jobs) see her as a pushy broad; the message that comes through in red neon reads, "CAN YOU IMAGINE PUTTING UP WITH THIS!? WOULD YOU WANT TO BE MARRIED TO IT!?" Elizabeth also lacks the common touch: "She routinely unleashed profanity-laced tirades on conference calls. 'Why the fuck do you think I’d want to go sit outside a Wal-Mart and hand out leaflets?' she snarled at the schedulers." At such moments, the A-list political journalists are basically indicting their subject for having a sensibility very similar to that of an A-list political journalist.

Heilemann and Halperin (who works for Time, thus leading to the biggest shocking revelation connected to the book, which is that somebody still publishes Time) are fairly open about their book just being a big ol' gossip wallow, which is fine. That said, the possibility exists, given these guys' resumes, that they can't tell the difference between a big ol' gossip wallow and a real journalistic coup, which isn't. It's not as if, in dividing the contents of the papers up between "news" and "gossip", there isn't some overlap. And it may well be that, once upon a time, the mainstream media was overly picky about reporting on "gossip", which meant that some people got a pass on their hypocrisy and others got roughed up a little more than their actions warranted because the media had to put too much stress on whatever aspect of their private lives could be phonied up into cause for public concern, thus convertin gossip into "scandal." (It's been said that, in the wake of the 1988 election--which was to treating gossip as news what the coming of sound was to motion pictures-- Ben Bradlee explained to some journalism students that it was important to report on Gary Hart's private life because he fucked around with young girls, which proved that he was too flaky to be president, whereas it wasn't okay to report on George Bush, Sr.'s long-term adulterous affair, even though it was common knowledge inside the Beltway, because having a long-term adulterous affair with a woman your own age is how mature men handle being married to someone like Barbara Bush. The possibility that being married to someone like George Bush, Sr. and knowing he's having a long-term adulterous affair is what turns you into a woman like Barbara Bush was not explored. Bradlee, of course, used to cover for President Kennedy' habit of fucking around with young girls when Bradlee was a Washington reporter.)

Here's one difference between a work of real journalism and a gossip wallow: in the former, the mountain of material from which the book was culled would be sifted and shaped in terms of what was of real relevance, whereas Game Change gives prominence to the material that's juiciest. This means that the book gives special attention to l'affaire Edwards, not because it was a big part of the campaign (Edwards was a non-starter in 2008, and he was pretty much done by the time the story of his illegitimate child broke: its main effect was to get him denied a speaking spot at the Democratic National Convention), or because it's politically relevant to anything that might happen in the future (Edwards has no political future), but because the authors had no problem getting people who'd been close to the Edwards campaign and felt no loyalty to someone who'd wasted months, if not years, of their lives, spill the most lurid shit they had on him. People who'd worked with McCain and Clinton and Obama and everyone else who still has a career and some power to wield would be a lot more reticent about what they know. (The other big target in the book is Palin, who presumably was a popular subject among those McCain staffers, and they are legion, who think that having Sarah Palin as the face of the Republican Party is like having a monkey with a substance-abuse problem at the controls of a nuclear-powered submarine in mine-infested waters. Presumably they've figured out since they were interviewed for the book that Palin is like one of those comic book supervillains who absorb the power of every attack hurled at her and grows stronger because of it.)





Full disclosure: I once voted for John Edwards for vice-president, and feel less than brilliant about it now. I also never really thought that much about Elizabeth Edwards, and maybe I should have. Now that I am thinking about her, now, I can't say that I can figure out why it's worth anyone's time to take what feels like such unholy, gleeful satisfaction out of seeing a woman whose greatest crime was to be venerated for facing death bravely while standing by her faithless husband and trying to reboot her image into that of a bitch on wheels, which is fast becoming the default image in the mainstream political media for any woman who has the mixed fortune to be thrust into the public eye, whether she's an actual candidate or, as is the case here, collateral damage for her husband's dreams of glory. And at the risk of sounding paranoid, I think of how little all this has meant to the future of the country--reporters who are obliged to explain why it matters tend to suddenly become alternative/speculative historians, prattling about how, if John Edwards had been the party nominee when the story broke, boy, the Democrats would've been toast!--and I think of how snugly well-connected Heilemann and Halperin are, and I can't help but wonder if they might have had anything to do with keeping the Edwards's public profile on life support since the summer of 2008, to help their book out. (Last September, New York ran a brief non-story on the possibility that Elizabeth Edwards was posting pseudonymous comments at blogs defending John and attacking "the other woman." The most disgusting thing about it was the condescending, fake-concerned tone: "We hope this isn't true," it said, "because it's a terrible waste of Mrs. Edwards's time..." If anyone deserves to be called an expert on terrible wastes of time, it's New York magazine.)

Not all of Game Change is geared specifically to those who grind their teeth at night because they're so enraged that someone like Elizabeth Edwards might have gotten better press than she deserves (and who see it as a gratifying and rewarding development when the ground shifts and she's suddenly getting worse press than John Wayne Gacy had coming to him. The excerpted article in New York ended with Elizabeth telling someone that she would continue to believe John's denials of paternity of his lover's baby, "“Because if I don’t [believe it], it means I’m married to a monster.” I thought of that yesterday, when the news broke that John had confessed to being the baby's father, a move that will either put a full stop to the story (at least until the logical next development, which will either be Elizabeth's death or the official termination of the marriage) or, more likely, set off one more hearty round of "I told you so"'s, with Elizabeth pilloried for not knowing what she should have known, for not admitting that she did know, for not keeping her husband on a shorter leash, whatever. The Game Change authors would no doubt reply that they were duty-bound to tell this story, because they had it, and knew there was an audience for it, and never mind all the more important stories that have to fight their way to the surface because A-list political journalists don't think there's an audience for them, or just because nobody serves them up to them on a platter. I could go a ways more with this, but perhaps it would be better to respect the instructions of Conan O'Brien on his final Tonight Show last night: “Please don’t be cynical… it doesn’t lead anywhere.” It's an interesting world we're living in where you get your slop bucket of misogynistic gossip from the major media journalistic outlets and your moral instruction from the creator of the Masturbating Bear.

What's Blue, Pussycat?

So I finally made it over to see James Csmeron's two-hour-forty-five-minute unauthorized 3-D sci-fi remake of The Return of a Man Called Horse. Those few of you who still retain enough short-term cultural memory to think back a month and a half will remember that this is a movie that most of the world had not only made up its mind about, but entered into pitched battles over, before anyone had seen it. I found it easy to not only withhold judgment, but to keep it withheld until the holidays were over and I was less likely to find myself trapped in a crowded theater with a bunch of screaming young hooligans, because I've apparently the only person in the world with no strong feelings about James Cameron. I don't wish him dead or anything--though I might consider leaving a banana peel in front of the next open manhole cover he was approaching, if I thought it might force Suzy Amis to return to acting. But most of his movies--Aliens, Terminator 2, Titanic--just fill me with the kind of respectful lack of interest that comes from being mostly bored by something that doesn't really play to my interests but clearly works like gangbusters for a lot of other people. (I kind of like a lot of the first Terminator and pretty much despise True Lies. Given what some much greater artists have done to break into the industry, it would be unbecomingly petty of me to hold Piranha II: The Spawning against him, though I'll admit to have chuckled when Avatar was preceded by a trailer for Piranha 3-D.) When it comes to action filmmaking in particular, I like to see strokes of editing and deft staging that will take me by surprise; Cameron, especially after the success of The Terminator made it possible for him to lay claim to any budget that suits his fancy, likes big explosions and enormous, very loud machines and weapons, and his filmmaking style is basically to make sure that you can see and hear very clearly how big and loud the explosions and machines and weapons are.

The pattern for my experience with Cameron's movies was really set with Aliens, which was supposed to be a sequel to Alien, which was a horror movie that (in the wake of Star Wars) was promoted as a science fiction movie. In the same way that generals are said to always fight the last war, the movie press sometimes reviews a new movie as if it were the successsful movie that inspired the studios to make it, and Aliens was written about as if it were a horror movie; I remember that Time magazine ran a cover story calling it the "summer's scariest movie," no small claim in a summer that also saw the release of Back to School, featuring Rodney Dangerfield in swim trunks. My first girlfriend insisted that we go see it so that she could latch onto my arm and clutch me to her as she experienced fright, which sounded like a good deal to me. When it turned out that Aliens was in fact a war movie pretending to be a horror movie, we both ended up sitting there bored to tears with our engines idling, but it must be said that the audience of Mississippi rednecks seemed to really enjoy screaming and oohing and ahhing over the big, loud explosions and machines and weapons and the big scary horrible disgusting monster. In my less generous moments, I tend to think that Cameron may well be the most thoroughly mediocre writer and director in America, but that audiences see his status as a mammoth size freak as a saving grace. It's been suggested that the secret to Jay Leno's success is that he pack so many more mediocre jokes into his monologues than his rivals that many people feel that he's working so hard that he deserves their blessings, even as they're not enjoying him. Maybe Cameron's movies are so big, and untainted by personality or real vision, that they have the built-in mass appeal of something on a supermarket shelf labeled "GENERIC BLOCKBUSTER."

So the fact that I never fully became enveloped in Avatar, and spent most of the second hour--which is very heavy on the New Age babble and otherworldly tribal mythology--in a drowsy state just this side of narcolepsy can only be offered as a highly personal reaction uncommon to the great mass of people who have seen or will see this in a theater. Even so, I have a hard time reconciling what I saw going on up there with David Denby's asssertion that "Avatar is the most beautiful film I've seen in years." Even allowing for the eye-of-the-beholder factor--really? This is a "beautiful" movie, the most beautiful one in years--an unspecified number if years, sure, but presumably enough of them to make the boast count for something. As movies that frequently look like screen savers go, it's an advance over the Star Wars prequels, but at its most eye-popping, it's still more of a carny ride than an expressive experience. For me, the strengths and limits of it all is summed up nicely by how cool the monsters and assorted critters are, as opposed to how placidly uninvolving the blue people are. As far as exotic blue primitive love objects go, Zoe Saldana's heroine is a distant second to Rae Dawn Chong in Quest for Fire. This is no reflection on Saldana's charms or her talent. It's a reflection of how hard it is to connect with an audience when you've been traced over with an assortment of sparkly blue pixels. (This may be an entirely inaccurate description of how the process actually works. Please don't bother writing in trying to explain it to me better.) The end result is that when an environmental rapist stepped into the jungle and saw a platoon of angry space rhinos coming at him at full speed, I got a little cheer going in my heart that recalled the one I felt at the second Lord of the Rings movie, when the ents did their imitation of Birnam Wood coming to Dulsinane while cracking its knuckles. ("Sir? There are some trees outside on the White House lawn, and they're thirty feet tall and they're pissed and they want to talk about the Kyoto Treaty...") But seeing the blue people falling left and right in battle was a little more like watching the bodies pile up in combat between a swarm of flies and a bug zapper.

I think the anticipatory excitement over Avatar, and the multiple attempts to define it, for good or bad, as having some greater meaning (political, religious, environmental, whatever) beyond its sci-fi adventure trappings are a sign of how badly many people wanted to wrap up this most awful of dying decades with a shared entertainment experience that would reflect everything we've been through, clarify it, and put it in experience, so that we can move on--ideally, having put aside out differences and and found something we can agree on as having summed up our times. It's an impulse I can understand, though I find it a little depressing that so many people think the best way to achieve that now is through a technological breakthrough. Like the other 2009 releases I caught in 3-D, Coraline and Up--both of which I liked a great deal more--Avatar gains something from the technology, but I'm not sure that that something deepens any of these movies artistically. At its most effective, especially in Coraline, the new, improved 3-D effects, applied to a good movie, adds to it the effect of a pop-up book come to life.

Of course, the claims I've heard made for the effects in Avatar go way beyond that; I've heard people describe it as some kind of all-enveloping hologram that comes to life in front of and around the viewer and in his lap, all at the same time. Having heard more than one person make this broad, weird claim, I have a feeling that it's one of those flailing attempts to describe the appeal of the not wholly explicable that just get repeated by people desperate to offer some explanation, until it becomes conventional wisdom, like saying that Clint Eastwood was a "minimalist" actor, or that custard pie fights in silent comedies were "balletic." Reading and listening to some of the reactions to Avatar (both from people who'd seen it and those who hadn't yet), I get the feeling that, in a gadget-happy world and in a time when so many emerging filmmakers (like those who've been lumped in with the mumblecore "movement") are looking inward and concentrating on capturing the smallest details of tiny emotional transactions, people just assume that when a movie comes along that will make them feel something special, it'll be thanks to some new computer program, a shiny new button someone has to press. Of course, the movie has its little irony, which is that, while by its very existence (and by its very hype) it is a celebration of the supposed artistic greatness that can only be achieved by pumping advanced "technology" into your overlong, underwritten, repetitive movie like steroids into a ballplayer's bloodstream, the theme of the story is that technology, which is province of the bad guys, is corrupt and corrupting. James Cameron said it, I didn't.




There's another irony built into Avatar as a political statement, which is that, while the movie goes out of its way to draw parallels between the villainous corporate-military plan to strip-mine Pandora, with Stephen Lang's self-righteous musclehead colonel suggesting a version of George W. Bush who'd actually seen combat, the hero, who steps in for his dead scientist brother because they have the same DNA, embodies the Bushian idea that skills and education and actual ability don't really count for anything: the important thing is just to have your heart in the right place. This is the paradox faced by filmmakers who want to create protagonists who are special enough to count as heroes but who are afraid that "regular people" will be put off by characters who have some hoity-toity special skills that they had to work to develop, and it wasn't invented by James Cameron. In Precious, another movie that's most interesting for the way people have reacted to it as it lurches in the direct of awards season, the title character is a morbidly obese, dead-faced 16-year-old girl (Gabourey Sidibe) who lives with her monstrous mother (Mo'Nique) and is pregnant with her second child; both pregnancies are the result of rape by her absentee father, which inspires the mother to regard her not with pity or sympathy but jealous anger, since the father has no interest in having sex with the mother. We're told that Precious's teachers have detected that she's gifted in math, which I guess is meant to give us a rooting interest in her: she's not the hopeless idiot that her mother keeps telling her that she is. But Precious never shows any real interest in math or any other subject, and she's introduced in a scene set in a math class where she tells us, in voice-over, that she looks forward to the class every day because she has a crush on her teacher and fantasizes that he'll marry her and carry her away to suburbia. The quality of Precious's fantasies, which run throughout the movie, suggest that the she has the inner life of someone who has no way of making a better life for herself and no idea how to go about it, and whose notions of what a good life might be all derive from seeing grinning zombies on the red carpet footage on Entertainment Tonight. Maybe that's supposed to help the regular slobs in the theater connect with her and feel for her, but it would seem to fly in the face of the notion that she has any creative or intellectual gifts.

A lot of the media response to Precious has come down to people congratulating themselves for being tough enough to subject themselves to it, and lamenting the fact that too few paying customers have been able to summon up that toughness in themselves: in the name of human understanding and making the world better place, I watched Mo'Nique throw a TV down the stairs at a fat girl holding a newborn, like that. Beyond that, arguments over the movie's quality have largely come down to experts on the black experience like Roger Ebert assuring us that the details are accurate: "African-American families consider macaroni and cheese all but one of the basic food groups." Ebert also wrote, "I've also read that it's unlikely anyone like her would encounter mentors as physically attractive as Mariah Carey and Paula Patton, even as 'dressed down' as they are. People making that criticism may not have been around many middle-class African-Americans. Daniels and his casting directors may have known more about the African-American norm than some audience members. Gabourey Sidibe says she has known girls like Precious and teachers like those, and I believe her. Mo'Nique's mother is also, sadly, not rare. Sapphire's novel is inspired by truth and observation." I'm sure that it is, and I wouldn't be surprised if the people in, say, Gigli began with somebody's meeting their Most Unforgettable Characters and filing the details away for later use. But all that matters in the end is whether the people who were inspired by their truthful observations had the talent and skill to make their fictionalized gloss on the real world seem believable on its own, without the footnotes telling us that there are real people who behave like this. Most people who experience fiction on a regular basis figure this out at some point, even if it has yet to sink in with Roger Ebert.

Of course, there's a thornier matter involved with Precious which accounts for why anyone who probably knows better would it defend it on the grounds that it has a basis in reality, and also accounts for why it in turn inspired some of the most pathetically mealy-mouthed reviews I've ever seen, in which such critics as David Edelstein (who likes to call himself a "Paulinista", in tribute to a reviewer who never cared too much about pissing people off for the wrong reasons--Kael wept) and Dana Stevens bent over backwards to apologize for not liking it more. (It's at times like this that I', grateful for Armond White, whose review is the movie-press equivalent of standing up and yelling "You lie!" during a Presidential State of the Union address.) There are few things more discouraging than reading a movie review whose principal message is that, despite what you may think based on what the critic thinks of this rotten movie, he or she is not a racist and, swear to God, doesn't even hate fat girls! I'm pretty sure that you don't have to hate anyone or anything except shitty movies to think that Precious is a ludicrous, ugly-looking manipulation machine that strikes out with a lot of audiences not because it's too tough to be endured but because it overplays its hand.

To watch a scene where Precious tells a social worker that her first child, who has Downs Syndrome, is named Mongo, and then, seeing the woman's slack-jawed expression, helpfully explains that "It's short for Mongoloid," is to be reminded of Oscar Wilde's line about the death of Little Nell, that only someone with a heart of stone could read it without laughing. And in fact, when I saw the movie in Times Square with an audience that consisted almost entirely of young black woman, the theater rocked with laughter as Precious toddled around New York acting surreally stupid while her new friends praised her math skills, and Mo'Nique delivered the performance that has been praised by one truthful observer as being like meeting a gargoyle. I guess that those who love the movie will see that laugh-filled theater as a shocking case of insensitivity towards the plight of the underclass, but I'm willing to consider the possibility that it was a rational response to very bad art. In the meantime, we all get to sit on the edge of our chairs waiting to see if Mo"Nique's baby-bashing, child-abusing, name-calling display will win her an Academy Award to go with the Golden Globe and the awards from the New York Film Critics Circle, San Francisco Film Critics Circle, and National Society of Film Critics that she already has. I guess that being seen that way counts as bravery of a kind, and I don't have a big ol' problem with her being rewarded for it, but it's worth pointing out that this performance was first given many years ago by W. C. Fields, and that he did it a lot more entertainingly, and when awards season came around, it didn't get him squat.



In critical circles, the most controversial Oscar bait movie released late last year may by Up in the Air. Directed by Jason Reitman, the annoying son of the super-annoying hack Ivan Reitman, and based on a novel by Walter Kirn, this is a sleek, glossy study of a hollow man (George Clooney) who works for a company that farms him out to other companies that don't have the balls to fire their own employees. The big switcheroo, and the key to Clooney's character, is that he loves living in a state of constant transit and has nothing but dread in his heart for the few days of the year when he isn't flying off to fire someone and is obliged to camp out in his empty apartment in Omaha. It's the American Beauty of 2009, a slick package that's a vehicle for a male star and that, thanks to what that star can do in a tailor-made role, is modestly enjoyable on the level of a well-executed, lightweight piece of consumer goods. In some aspects, it has an edge on American Beauty, especially in the chances it hands to the supporting cast and the women in Clooney's life: Vera Farmiga as a fellow air traveler with whom he strikes up an affair, and Anna Kendrick who plays the young developer of a computerized firing system that threatens to ground the hero for good. Mainly it benefits from Clooney--both his skill (and his willingness to play a character who, beneath the sharp veneer, turns out to be supremely self-deluded) and from the poignancy of his being a dozen years older than the hero of Kirn's novel, who had a little more time to wake up and get his priorities straight.

Up in the Air ends with the suggestion that Clooney never will, just as American Beauty ended with the wise-cracking nihilist Kevin Spacey finding that he was too good at heart to have sex with a troubled teenage girl he'd been lusting after, shortly before getting his brains blown out. That's the rub with both movies: they want to be serious studies of the malaise of our times, and they don't have it in them. (In both cases, they signal their higher intentions by having their stars try to deepen their images by subverting what's irresistible about them: Clooney turns out to be more naively dopey than we'd thought, just as Spacey turned out to be nicer. Following that career path, Spacey proceeded to kill off all the good will he'd built up since the days of Mel Profit and became one of the least welcome presences in movies.) I know a lot of people who think that Up in the Air is a goddamn outrage, because it asks you to weep for a corporate hatchet man, and maybe also because they dread what Jason Reitman will do next if he isn't stopped. (His previous film was Juno--a bigger sleeper hit, and another case where he set out with a problematic screenplay and relied on his cast to bail him out.) The movie includes montages featuring actual people talking about having lost their jobs, and the way they're used may sum up a lot of what's slippery and unlikable about Reitman's (probably unconscious) knack for shaping his material so that it points toward the commercial mother lode. He may take pride in putting these faces on the big screen so they can address us all, but when, towards the end, they begin to talk about the virtues of having had their lives shaken up, it sounds as if they're validating Clooney's bullshit lines about having liberated people to change their direction for the better, and when he cuts back to Clooney being lost and lonely, it's as if he'd suffered to give them the chance to find out what's cool about applying for work at a Tastee Freeze in your fifties. In an exceptionally miserable holiday season for moviegoing, I got some pleasure out of Up in the Air, when Clooney was being relaxed and romantic and funny, just as I got some chuckles out of American Beauty when Kevin Spacey was being sarcastic and vicious and selfish. Given the competition and the mixture of unchallenging entertainment value and unachieved higher aspirations that looks like classic cinema to the Academy, both are natural Oscar winners. But that's another way of saying that both of them could serve as textbook examples of why backlash is sometimes a necessary phenomenon.

I Am a DVR

THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK (1941) and REGISTERED NURSE (1936): Two shortish melodramas--neither is as long as seventy minutes--that were both directed by Robert Florey, a Frenchman who moved to Hollywood in the mid-1920s and worked in movies until around 1950. (He then spent another dozen years or so directing TV series. He died in 1979). Between the two of them, these give a pretty fair idea of what a talented guy whose work wasn't original enough to establish himself as a major artist, and who didn't maneuver himself onto the A-list, could establish as his range depending on which scripts and collaborators happened to fall into his lap. Florey is probably best remembered for the 1932 Murders in the Rue Morgue, starring Bela Lugosi. He worked with the cinematographer Karl Freund on that one, and together they helped establish the convention of appropriating the look and feel of German Expressionist films for Hollywood horror movies. The Face Behind the Mask stars Peter Lorre as a hopeful, wide-eyed immigrant who, fresh off the boat from Hungary, has his face destroyed in a rooming house fire. His spirit broken when he can't get anyone to suppress their shuddering over his features long enough to offer him work, Lorre contemplates suicide but is rescued by a good-hearted sneak thief, Dinky (George E. Stone), a bottom-feeding fellow loser who inducts him into a life of crime. Soon the intelligent, embittered Lorre is a criminal mastermind running his own gang.

Maybe getting his hands on the star of M inspired Florey to think back fondly on his own experiments with dark shadows and tilted sets. Handsomely shot by Franz Planer, Mask is a fanciful crime story with a damaged romantic protagonist protagonist that has the feel of a horror movie. (As a horror movie, it holds up much better than the better-known The Beast with Five Fingers, which Florey and Lorre made together five years later.) Not a noir, though: the amazing last sequence, in which Lorre's rage and despair spill over into a kamikaze attack on his enemies, takes place not in a darkly lit urban setting but a wide-open desert in broad daylight, and the sun beating down in the bright sunshine works as well as a visual representation of inexorable fate grinding the characters down as any street corner scene in the dead of night after the city of New York forgot to pay its light bill.

But if the movie is a small classic, it's because of Lorre. He starts pulling off miracles in the first scenes, when, running around the big city brimming with optimism and, when he thinks he's lost the wad of savings he's got on him, desperately approaching a cop and calling out, "Mr. Policeman! Mr. Policeman!", he builds a touching, likable character out of actions and dialogue that could easily have turned him into a funny foreigner. And when he finds love with Evelyn Keyes, he uses his edge of alienated suspicion and pessimism to pull of what must be the least mushy love scenes ever staged between a blind girl and a man who's damaged goods. For much of the movie, the character wears a "temporary" mask based on his own features to conceal his deformed appearance, which means that Lorre, his face made up to look ashen and dead, has to get his emotions through while pretending that his actual kisser is a dead facsimile of a human face. Even Bertolt Brecht never threw anything quite like that at him, though I'll bet that, if Brecht ever saw this movie, he was sorry he hadn't thought of it himself.

The Face Behind the Mask has atmosphere. Registered Nurse has as little of the stuff as any movie on record. Set mostly in a hospital, it features sets that look like so many sheets of bleached plywood lined up behind and around the actors. This was the last film that its star, Bebe Daniels, made for Warner Bros. A star of silent comedies and early talkie musicals, she was thirty-three at the time--an age that must have seemed pretty ripe for an actress in them days, because a year before, she played the temperamental, past-her-prime star who Ruby Keeler elbows aside in 42nd Street. Here, playing a woman who turns to nursing as a career and a path to redemption after her goofball husband is locked up in a sanitarium following a drunken car accident, she has a starched nobility that is barely distinguishable from the depressive mood of a woman accepting that her career is in its death throes. While she's dealing with that, she keeps her purgatorial marital status a secret while fending off the advances of two adoring doctors, one of whom is played by Lyle Talbot, a rising juvenile lead who eventually slipped to membership in Ed Wood's repertory company.

The film is perhaps most notable for two things. Sidney Toler, Warner Oland's replacement as Charlie Chan, plays a bedridden wrestling promoter, and a couple of lumbering steakheads keep barging into the picture, ostensibly to visit him, in scenes that always end with them tearing their clothes off and grappling all over the furniture. It gets to the point where you wonder if somebody at the studio got drunk enough to sign them to contracts and there was a brief period where whichever director pulled the card with the black skull out of a box had to somehow fit them into whatever movie he was making. The other thing worth mentioning is that every time the health care providers here have a free moment, they pull out a match and light up a coffin nail. It might be one of the most well-mentholated casts I've ever seen in a movie, and I've seen some dillies. The cast of Mad Men would watch them awhile, then clear their throats nervously and start muttering something about the Surgeon General's warning.

DEEP END (1971): This was made in England by the Polish expatriate Jerzy Skolimowski, who worked on the script of Polanski's Knife in the Water and has also done a fair amount of acting. (He played Naomi Watts's uncle in Eastern Promises.) I've seen some other movies he directed, including the thoughtful, politically symbolic Moonlighting (1982), and the garish, symbolic-of-God-knows-what The Lightship (1986), but this is the first film of his I've seen that has any juice in it. It's a story of a young man's confused sexual awakening that slides into black comedy. John Moulder Brown, who was eighteen at the time but looks even younger, takes a job in a seedy bathhouse and becomes fixated on Jane Asher, a lither, red-haired tease who drives him to innocently stalk her.

In one scene, he follows her and her boyfriend into a porno theater, sits behind her, and, liberated by the cover of darkness and the steamy atmosphere, reaches around and grabs hold of her breast. Claiming to be outraged, she sends her boyfriend out to fetch the manager, then turns around and kisses him. The movie doesn't treat the shallow, frustrating young woman as a bitch villainess. She's just playing around, and failing to grasp that, for the virginal boy, her notice of him (and her periodic failures to notice him) stir up feelings that seem to him like a matter of life and death. Of course, he also has to protect his belief that he's not wasting his adoration on some dirty, dirty slut, and when he finds a life-size cardboard cutout of Asher, topless, outside a strip club, he runs off with it and is torn between wanting to confront her with it and wanting to fuck it. The movie, which has a terrific feel for the squalid energy coming off the streets in the more questionable parts of town, also features a couple of memorable encounters he has with a couple of older women, one of them a smooth hooker sidelined by a leg injury--she sits up in bed throwing him come-hither smiles while pulling a sheet aside to show off her cast--and the other a heavy-breathing bathhouse customer played by England's answer to Anita Ekberg, Diana Dors (birth name Diana Mary Fluck), fifteen years after she appeared in Carol Reed and Wolf Mankowitz's A Kid for Two Farthings and three years before David Johansen name-checked her in a New York Dolls song.



DARK OF THE SUN (1968): This action adventure, set in a Congolese nation that's coming apart at the seams (while under the dubious governance of Calvin Lockhart) has been saluted by Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, and it's easy to see why: it's a mean motherfucker. Rod Taylor, a mercenary leader whose first lieutenant is played by Jim Brown, gets off a plane with a beret on his head, a stogie in his mouth, and a machine gun hanging from a strap around his arm, and is told by a fellow in a light blue helmet, "Captain Hansen, United Nations Peacekeeping Force, I'll take that gun of yours." Taylor replies, "Captain Curry, Congo Special Force, no you won't." That's as clever as the dialogue ever gets. It's not an especially good-looking movie, either--which is surprising, considering that it was shot in Jamaica and was directed by Jack Cardiff, who had a spotty career as a director but was legendary as a cinematographer. (The camera work here is credited to Edward Scaife.) What's really striking about is how nasty the action gets. Taylor takes on an extra man, a German (and ex-Nazi) played by Peter Carsten, whose English-language dialogue is delivered in what sounds suspiciously like the voice of Paul Frees. Early on, Carsten mows down a couple of local children, just to be on the safe side (he says) in case they're spies. Noticing that his boss doesn't approve, he initiates an impromptu manly sparring match between himself and Taylor, one in which he's soon wielding a chain saw. When Taylor expresses his displeasure by trying to hold Carsten's head in the path of an ongoing train, Brown yells for him to spare the German's life because "We need him!" Of course, the real reason they need him is to provide a villain in their ranks, who can provide a handy comparative example of a real scumbag mercenary while waiting for his chance to pull a double cross.

Dark of the Sun, which packs Taylor and Brown off on a mission to rescue some diamonds from the middle of somewhere while the country is busting up all around them, throws in Yvette Mimieux, Taylor's co-star from The Time Machine (1968) as a blonde who needs rescuing, but though she and Taylor shyly circle each for a few minutes of screen time, the romantic subplot doesn't deserve to be even be called half-assed. The real romance is between Taylor, the stiff-jawed Aussie macho man, and Brown, who has an emotional investment in the fate of the continent. Brown has scenes where he implores Taylor to drop the Bogart act and admit to caring about something besides his paycheck, so that Brown won't feel that he's wasting his time in selfless devotion to someone who doesn't share his love of the country they're there to protect. Actually, as stand-ins for Humphrey Bogart go, you could do a lot worse than Rod Taylor. Taylor and the movie itself generate enough ruthless energy to make for a pretty bracing pulp movie. It fails to become more than pulp because, having raised questions about what is and isn't worth fighting for and how much harm the mercenaries might be doing as they focus in on their money job, it drops all that when the Peter Carsten character makes his move. Plot developments that might have deepened the story and Taylor's character and made them really memorable are abruptly dropped in favor of a rousing climax devoted to bringing the wrath of God down on the treacherous racist German.


The writer-director Michael Almereyda made a strange, tantalizing New Orleans movie, Happy Here and Now, back in 2002. In the wake of Katrina, he made this short feature there, with Christopher Eccleston as a doctor and Elisabeth Moss, whose big, open features and long dark hair make her seem like an emblem of every healthy boho college girl I ever had a crush on in the city, as a woman who's come back to help with the clean-up effort. Former lovers, they fled the city to get away from each other, but once the city's plight has brought them back into close proximity with each other, they're soon too obsessed with each other to focus on their duties.

Eccleston's indecisive bewilderment about his feelings, what he's supposed to do about them, and just about everything else is quite touching, though it may help that I don't have to live with him. And Moss's fiery-eyed glances are enough to keep jolting the movie alive. But NO, MA does feel underdeveloped at the story level. Almareyda is a brilliant, cerebral director whose conceits can sometimes seem like a fair tradeoff for a little narrative momentum, but in his best work, he usually manages to provide more humor than the spectacle of New Orleans after the deluge seems to have aroused in him. (He might want to consider really working with a writer. One reason that his 2000 Hamlet remains his best work may be the simple fact that somebody else had been good enough to provide him with a strong story that he could then go about telling in the most thrilling way as possible.) It has some remarkable images, though, and draws on the mood and spirit of some remarkable, resilient people. It may not be fully successful as a movie, but its value as an historical record will likely only grow with time.

On Men of a Certain Age last week, Ray Romano got to fuck Sarah "Evil Nina from 24" Clarke, who really threw herself at him, which at least made some kind of sense given that he's one of the show's producers. Meanwhile, in the closing moments of House, a character with an incurable autoimmune disease resigned himself to his imminent death by cocking his head towards the camera as the soundtrack filled up with a mysterious, echoey sound that, perhaps because of the incongruity of it all, I needed a minute to recognize as Eddie Hazel's tripped-out psychedelic funk guitar solo from "Maggot Brain." Worlds are colliding.