Author: Matt

A Prairie Home farewell

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I’ve never quite warmed to Robert Altman, perhaps because 14 is too early an age to watch MASH, and I wasn’t enough of a film nerd (yet) when I saw The Player. Raymond Carver works better for me on the page than on the screen. Even if P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia was an adolescent Short Cuts on too much caffeine, it clicked for me. Altman’s films rarely did so. Yet I’ve always envied the old man his magnificent casts – you rarely get as many high-quality actors in the same film as in Altman’s ensemble pieces.

Robert Altman

When I heard of his latest – and, as it turned out, last – film, I was intrigued. I liked the cast, and what little I’d heard of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion radio show (which the film was to be based on), I enjoyed for its whimsy and its gentle irony. (What is usually called irony these days is much closer to facile sarcasm, if you ask me.)

I wasn’t sure from the trailer, though: did this look like the sort of film I’d genuinely like, or was it rather the kind of movie that I felt I should like, and that I’d be too stubborn to admit to be somewhat boring, actually? As a well-meaning cinemaphile, I knew I was supposed to like Altman.

I ended up liking the film a lot. It’s impossible to watch A Prairie Home Companion and not think that Altman was close to death when he made it. Yet it’s not a sombre film. It’s melancholy and wistful, but it’s got a lightness that is quite fitting. Some critics felt it was too hokey and corny in its folksiness. I don’t think that’s quite fair. The film does express sorrow at the passing of a certain kind of radio variety show, and perhaps a certain kind of popular culture, but I think it’s quite aware that the culture it shows may be well past its sell-by date. If there is sorrow, it’s the sort of sorrow that comes with not wanting to let go, even if you know that you will have to. I think it should be permitted to an 81-year old to say: “I don’t want to go, not yet,” which is what the film felt like to me. It’s better to go out when things are still good than to fizzle and fade and vanish, yet bowing out when you wish you could do another show, and another, an eternal farewell, hurts. Altman conveys that pain with gentle, wry humour. I hope that his angel of death had “a smile so sweet you could have poured it on your pancakes.”

It happened at the movies… (1)

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In the past year I haven’t really been to the cinema nearly as often as I would have liked to, for several reasons. All in all, this year somehow seems to have happened without me. I did catch a handful of movies that stayed with me, though, and they were all by directors whose work I’ve liked a lot in the past: David Fincher, Danny Boyle, Michael Scorsese and Christopher Nolan. Here’s the first of them:

Zodiac

Let’s get this out of the way: I like Alien 3. In many ways I like it better than Aliens; the latter is a great ride, but beneath its well-oiled craft it isn’t that different from many other ‘80s action movies, leaving gender politics aside for the moment. Most of the characters are broadly drawn cartoons. That’s okay, they don’t need to be anything else for the purpose of the film, but while it’s a fun film, it’s not an interesting film. It’s not an uncomfortable film. Alien, by comparison, has left its mark on many an impressionable filmgoer. Like its titular creature, it’s highly efficient, it’s vicious, and it gets inside you in unpleasant ways. At its best, Alien 3 also has that effect. It may be the most unsettling of the Alien movies. I’m certain that if it had followed directly from Ridley Scott’s nightmare rather than James Cameron’s rollercoaster, it would have been better received.

David Fincher is a highly talented formalist. His films are meticulously crafted and tightly controlled. Most of them are also rather show-offy. Especially Fight Club has a somewhat adolescent quality, wanting to impress you in spite of its fashionable nihilism: “Look at me! Not that I care, though.” It’s just a tad too infatuated with itself.

Zodiac is just as intricately crafted, but it doesn’t need to show off. In spite of its impressive running time, it’s a lean film that is immensely well made, and it impressed me all the more for not having to remind me again and again how well it is made. It is also an eminently frustrating film – it is about frustration, and it’s frustrating for the audience. The serial killer genre thrives on some sort of closure: at its most generic, it provides you with a neat ending, where the killer is caught (and, ideally, killed by the film’s hero). If it’s minimally clever, it’ll give you some sort of twist: it wasn’t actually John Smith after all who skinned all those women – it was Frank Jones, in the pantry, with the serrated knife! Zodiac instead doesn’t satisfy its protagonists’ obsession, nor ours: we don’t learn who the killer is. We only get a maybe. And since the suspect is dead, chances are we’ll never know for certain. Fincher’s film denies us a neat, comforting conclusion, so Robert Graysmith’s obsession isn’t validated in the end. All we’re left with is loose ends. Fincher’s Seven was already loathe to serve up a neat ending, but by comparison, it’s practically “… and they lived happily ever after.” The bad guy may win after a fashion, but he dies. We know he was the killer. In Zodiac, what we’re left with is an irresolvable question mark.

By the way, if you liked the film, you may want to check out Alan Moore’s comic From Hell. Do not confuse it with its film version, since the movie does something very different. Once you’ve read From Hell (it’ll take you a while, since it’s one big book), read the second appendix, also presented as a comic. It makes for an ideal companion piece to Zodiac.

From Hell

Also, look out for the continuation of this series in two or three days. In the meantime, we return you to our regular programme. Read you tomorrow.

The man whose career could survive a moustache

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I’ve never seen the first film version of Solaris. I have a fairly high tolerance for slow movies, but I’ve never dared to test this tolerance on Tarkovsky’s film. (Personally, I blame Russian Ark, a slow Russian film that I found offensively boring.) However, being a Steven Soderbergh fan, I’ve seen – and enjoyed – his version* several times now. I love its elliptic quality. The film isn’t willfully confusing, but neither does it believe in making everythign absolutely clear – which, more often than not, I find utterly boring and just a tad offensive. I enjoy having to use my brain at least a bit when watching a movie, I like having to put in an effort to get something out of a book or film, because in the end you tend to get more out of such books and films.

It’s also one of the first films that show George Clooney’s acting range. He’s not perfect, and there are one or two scenes that stretch his abilities perhaps a bit too much; but then, what is the convincing way to react when you’re millions of miles away from Earth and wake up to find your dead wife in bed next to you?

(Beware: the excerpt above is 9+ minutes long, but it highlights the film’s beautiful cinematography and its wonderful, hypnotic score.)

Before Solaris, I thought that Clooney was best at the Cary Grant type of role, as he does so well in Out of Sight and Ocean’s 11. To my knowledge, Solaris was the first time he didn’t put in a movie star performance, where he wasn’t suave and glamorous (much like Brad Pitt in Babel). And after that, he showed that he could pull it off convincingly in Syriana and in his lovely little performance in God Night, and Good Luck, his second directing stint. I admire his willingness to put the film and the other actors first. There are few stars with his charisma that succeed as well at letting others dominate the screen when it’s right for the film. And there are few stars that are as willing to make a complete fool of themselves when the movie requires it.

Tom Selleck called. He wants his ’stache back.

And to conclude this Clooney love-fest: if you haven’t seen his first directing stint, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, do so. It’s an intriguing, clever, highly entertaining film – and it’s got a wonderful sight gag that puts George’s mates Matt and Brad to perfect use. Talk about lead actors who can take a back seat, literally!

*I honestly wouldn’t call Soderbergh’s Solaris a remake, just as no production of Hamlet post-1603 is a remake of the original staging.

Lost, but not forgotten

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Since my love went on holiday today, we caught up on the series we’re watching yesterday, starting with Six Feet Under. One of the things I appreciate about the series is that neither the writers nor the actors feel that a story is only good if the characters are likeable. They have the courage to make the protagonists truly flawed – not the sort of flaw that you’re secretly supposed to like. (Did anyone mention Gene Hunt?)

Is that you, Butch and Sundance?

Nate, especially, has become a lot less instantly likeable. In the first season, he was the closest to an audience stand-in. He was, or seemed to be, the most normal member of the Fisher family. By season 4, he’s become self-righteous and self-pitying, but he’s still the character. He wasn’t rewritten or changed, he simply grew. And that’s one of the reasons why the series feels so real to me, in spite of a couple of melodramatic twists and turns: the characters aren’t static. Life has an impact on them, gradually shaping them, moving them in interesting directions. There are few series that manage to pull this off as well. No, scratch that – I don’t know any series that do it this well.

Lost, the second item on yesterday’s TV menu, doesn’t really do subtle character development (although it may be there, sometimes, in a handful of the characters). What it does, though, is this: the characters who die are given great send-offs. I remember finding Boone really boring… and then they went and made him interesting, and then they killed him off! It was pretty much the same with Shannon, arguably the most annoying character in the series, but then they made me think, “Hang on, perhaps she’s not that bad after all!” And then, BLAM! Cue one paranoid, pissed off Latina with a handgun, and bye-bye, Shannon!

Yesterday we watched Eko’s Last Stand. Now, Eko… Him I liked more or less from the very beginning. He was an intriguing character, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje has charisma. Eko’s spiritual side was a great foil to the increasingly fanatical Locke in season 2. His backstory made for a nice change from most of the more ‘whitebread’ character bios. But yesterday we watched him being picked up by Smoky, slammed against trees and then tossed to the ground like a broken toy. And what do we get in the way of new characters? Nikki and Paulo, the Slumber Twins. Almost makes you wish that the two of them meet a sticky end very, very soon…

The last in the trio of TV series we watched yesterday was Deadwood. I’ve written about the characters before, apart from which I’m way too tired to make this entry much longer. Let me just say, though, that I love the series’ casting. And I get a certain sly, postmodern kick out of Milch’s casting of Garret Dillahunt, first as Jack McCall in season 1 (he’s the one who shot Wild Bill Hickock), and then as Francis Wolcott, geologist, sexual deviant and the person who buys Wild Bill’s very last letter. I imagine their casting calls come on a Moebius strip.

Jack McCall…

… and Francis Walcott - twin brothers separated at birth?

That’s entertainment!

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Fists of guilt?

Let me be clear. Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are great cinema, and they deserve all the accolades they get. But they’re the kind of movies I appreciate rather than enjoy. Watching Raging Bull yesterday, for the second or third time, I was struck less by the virtuoso cinematography and editing, by Martin Scorsese’s effective use of music (yet again), or by the performances, than by the sheer masochism in the movie. LaMotta’s masochism, where especially the later fights are extended bouts of self-punishment for his dimly understood sins. De Niro’s masochism, putting on 60 pounds for the role. But there’s also an element of masochism in sitting through this masterpiece. Paul Schrader (probably more so than Scorsese) writes the most effective guilt trips, but it’s difficult not to flinch and despair a little more at mankind (it’s really the men who come off looking worst in the guilt stakes) when LaMotta punches the walls of his prison cell or when he does his “I coulda been a contender” speech, or when Travis Bickle puts a finger dripping with blood to his temple and mimes blowing his head off.

 On a less masochist note: last night’s episode of House, M.D. (“Que Sera, Sera”) featured a remarkably controlled performance by both Pruitt Taylor Vince and his fat suit, transforming him into a 600-lb patient. While the episode was far from perfect, kudos ought to go to the House team for an astute handling of what could have been eminently tasteless TV.

Demurely Wilde

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There used to be a time, in the late ’80s and early ’90s when I thought that Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry could only be booked as an ensemble. These days, both of them seem to have done well enough on their own. Laurie appears to have become more of a star, mainly thanks to his wonderful Gregory House, M.D. (Admittedly, the series wouldn’t work without him.) Fry, on the other hand, is less visible but does more different things, a small part in a movie here, writing novels there, and voicing interplanetary repositories of knowledge in between, all of which seem to fit him quite neatly.

We watched Wilde yesterday, a film for which I had fairly high expectations. Unfortunately, for me the high point of the film was seeing a teensy, pixie-ish Orlando “Not an elf yet” Bloom playing a rent boy, wearing a bowler hat twice his size. No, that’s not quite true. (Well, the bit about the bowler hat is.) Wilde isn’t a bad film: the acting’s quite good, as is to be expected with such a distinguished cast, and it’s handsomely made. But it’s basically a run-of-the-mill, all too earnest (the pun is accidental) period drama, the only difference being that the tasteful sex scenes are between men. There’s a German word that can’t really be translated – betulich – that fits the film, in my opinion. It roughly means “staid”, “respectable”, “well-meaning”. Is this what a Wilde biopic, or indeed any film, should be?

The problem mainly lies with the script. The characters are clear-cut from the beginning and remain static throughout. Oscar is sweet, witty, but too much of a doe-eyed romantic when it comes to beautiful young men. Bosie is a shallow, callous narcissist. Oscar’s wife Constance is hard done by, but loyal. The closest the film comes to character development is when one of the protagonists grows a moustache.

And while I didn’t watch the film for hot, sweaty man-on-man action, is it too much to ask that the homoerotic scenes are actually erotic? The sex scenes are entirely too coy. (There is one ironic camera pan from a Wilde coupling to the window drapes swaying in the wind, although that was perhaps the only glint of visual wit in the film.) As a result of the movie’s consistent respectability, there’s no sense of outrage at the late Victorian homophobia and hypocrisy, just a passive acceptance of Oscar’s inevitable fate, reinforced by the film’s score working hard to make it clear that we’re watching something tragic.

Oscar Wilde, looking stylishly bored

Finally, the film succeeded most in making me think that Oscar Wilde, for all his sparkling wit, may have been a sad bore. A nice guy, surely, and very sweet, but in the end faintly pathetic and faintly boring. Like one of his aphorisms on yet another souvenir mug sold cheaply.

Did that soldier just shoot the fourth wall?

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Yesterday evening I finished Metal Gear Solid 2. The ending was decidedly underwhelming, for all its action and its cascade of relevations, one topping the other. It was also facile and preachy, and it hadn’t earned the right to be preachy. I wasn’t as annoyed at it as many people seem to have been, though, based on reviews and posts on the internet.

Penny Arcade’s take on the MGS2 ending

What seemed to annoy them most, however, was the metafictional self-awareness that crept into the last 2-3 hours of the game. Your superiors, who keep contacting you via radio throughout, start to make increasingly explicit references to everything that’s gong on being a game, even telling you at one point to switch off the console. While this isn’t postmodern fiction on a par with Pynchon or Auster, it’s still a refreshingly clever take on most videogame narratives, where you, the player, are as much of a puppet as your in-game avatar, following orders that the game’s narrative imposes on you, with little or no choice. The self-referentiality is also represented quite wittily, with everything that’s overtly game-like – the ‘continue’ and ‘save game’ screens, for instance – playing into it.

Why is it, though, that people – gamers as much as readers or movie and TV audiences – hate self-awareness so much? Read IMDB comments (admittedly, hardly the most critically-minded crowd) and you’ll see that self-aware fictions tend to get extremely strong reactions. Audiences, by and large, don’t want to be told that what they’re watching or playing is a film, a game. They prefer to submit to the illusion that ‘this is real’. In fact, they resent narratives that don’t allow them the comfort of that illusion. Because if something that we want to believe to be real is actually a fiction, it raises questions that may be a tad uncomfortable. Or perhaps I’m just a snobbish post-structuralist… But I think that at its best, you can see the puppeteer’s strings and appreciate his illusion-making, yet still feel for the puppets as if they were real.

And now, so’s you don’t get bored: a movie!

On a different note: What do you do if you get a book as a present, and you want to honour the present – but you hate the book? After Miéville, I moved on to Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors, and I keep wondering whether I really want to be reading this. It’s one of those “you have to laugh to keep yourself from crying” type of memoirs, where the things that are (supposedly) tragic are drawn in an exaggerated, cartoony fashion. According to the blurb on the back, it’s “hilarious… Adrian Mole scripted by Hieronymus Bosch”. The problem is, I don’t buy any of it. I’m not saying that Burroughs concocted the whole thing from scratch, but its over-the-top, camp tone and narrative feel fake to me. Augusten, a ceaseless self-dramatiser, is one of the most annoying narrators I’ve read in a long time. Is he a poor sod? Yes. Do I want to listen to him being a poor sod? No. And for all of its outrageousness, its lurid sexuality and forthright storytelling, there’s something disappointingly conventional and even prudish to the novel. Which may be true to the young protagonist, but that doesn’t make him or the book any more interesting.

So why am I still reading it?

Surreal Snakes and heroic metafiction

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– What’s going to happen to us?
– There, there. We always end up in a universe where we exist. Remember Copenhagen?

Remember the self-aware, postmodern hospital soap opera that Nate watches in the first episode of season 3 of Six Feet Under? Well, if that network – COMA TV? – had a 24-type series, chances are it’d be pretty much like Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the PS2 game I’m currently playing.

 Quite honestly, I’m not certain whether MGS2 is a badly scripted, badly acted mess of a soap opera as done by Tony Scott, or whether it’s a clever parody of existentialist hi-tech conspiracy thrillers (ah, that old chestnut!). Whichever it is, the game is a weirdly compelling guilty pleasure. But yes, the writing makes Final Fantasy X seem a masterpiece of subtlety.

In part, the game is obviously tongue-in-cheek; the absurd conversations with Otacon when you save the game, or scenes like the one where you have to sneak across a walkway underneath a guard answering the call of nature make that clear. But what about the bathos of Otacon’s relevations concerning his quasi-incestuous relationship with his stepmother? And what about Peter Stillman (Paul Auster fans note the name!), the anti-demolitions expert who faked having a fake leg for years in order to gain sympathy? While the latter reads like bizarre black comedy, the game plays it absolutely straight-faced.

I can’t say I ‘get’ MGS2, nor can I gauge its tone most of the time, but I definitely want to know how it ends – even if people have it that it’s the sort of ending that makes you want to throw your Playstation out the window. But, dagnabit, did they have to make the cutscenes that long? I feel like I should take a day or two off in anticipation of an ending cinematic that’s bound to be (or at least feel) as long as Peter Jackson’s King Kong.

Super Coen Bros.

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The Coen Brothers’ Fargo is special to me, for two reasons: For one thing, it was the first time I went out to the cinema with the woman who ended up sharing my life and my DVDs. (Yes, the ideal date movie contains scenes of people being put through wood chippers. No wonder we only got together nine years later…) The second reason is somewhat less romantic, or weird and worrying, depending on what your ideal date movie is: Fargo was my first Coen Brothers movie. Afterwards, I worked my way through Blood Simple (perhaps the Coens’ darkest film, in more than one way), The Big Lebowski (which I thought somewhat amusing at first but have come to love), Barton Fink (the greatest David Lynch movie that Lynch never made, and proof that the face of evil is Dan Tanner’s face) and so on.

Evil John Goodman (flanked by John Turturro)

I’ve never seen Raising Arizona, and after Intolerable Cruelty I decided to give The Ladykillers a miss. Intolerable Cruelty had roughly two good scenes, namely one of the funniest, most unexpected deaths in recent movie history (an honour it shares with another George Clooney film, Out of Sight), and Clooney’s speech on the power of love at the divorce attorneys’ convention, followed by the obligatory ‘slow clap’ (which I read as ‘snow clap’ when Roger Ebert first mentioned it, and it made perfect sense to me). The last Coen Brothers film I liked was The Man Who Wasn’t There.

So what was wrong with Intolerable Cruelty? I think it’s mainly this: the Coens populate their cinematic landscape with characters that are essentially postmodern cartoons. There’s no such thing as a naturalistic Coen character. Even the more sedate protagonists – Marge Gunderson, Doris and Ed Crane – are caricatures. Their character features are exaggerated for comic effect. However, and this is what distinguishes a good Coen film from a bad one, at least in my opinion, these protagonists are deeply human caricatures. Jerry Lundegard (perhaps my favourite performance in a Coen movie, and my favourite performance by William H. Macy) is both as much of a cartoon as Wyle E. Coyote and hilariously, tragically human. He is observed with a subtlety that requires repeat viewings to fully appreciate. Consider the scene where he comes home to find that his wife has been kidnapped (as planned by him), and he practices what to say to his father-in-law, trying to get the words and intonation just right, and then is flummoxed when he dials Wade’s number and is immediately put on hold. Or his growing frustration when Marge Gunderson interviews him a second time.

Even in one of their most cartoonish films, The Big Lebowski, there’s something deeply human about the characters, so that when Donnie dies of a heart attack, it’s funny, but it’s also moving. You accept the Dude and Walter as cartoons, yet at the same time they’re real. And that’s how I tell a good Coen Brothers movie from a bad one – when they manage to maintain that tension. But enough of this Monday morning pretentiousness; I want to leave you with what may be my favourite scene from The Big Lebowski.

 

P.S.: I hope you noticed how neatly I segued from my last blog entry, which I called a mere filler, to today’s topic. That’s planning for you – almost like Lost. They’re not making things up as they go along either! (Nor do they kill of characters if the actor has a run-in with the police for one reason or another. It’s all planned!)

But is it what you would call ‘series acting’?

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I like good acting. Not Oscar-winning acting, which I often think is mainly a case of “who’s best at manipulating the audience?”. That sort of acting tends to feel acutely self-aware, to the extent that I sit there, watching it, being painfully aware of the acting. (And I usually groan when someone says that this or that actor isn’t actually very good because he’s only got two facial expressions. Being able to produce a number of different grimaces doesn’t make for good acting. Watch Ulrich Mühe in The Lives of Others for a beautiful example of acting, based pretty much on the most subtle variations of one facial expression.) 

Ulrich Mühe

Strangely enough, TV series don’t necessarily need good acting to work. Of course, atrocious acting is as painful to watch in series as it is in movies, but limited actors can still work extremely well on television. The good thing about series in this respect is that after a season or so, deeply mediocre actors become the characters. Look at Jonathan Frakes who played Will Riker in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Definitely not a good actor by any standards, and most people would hesitate even to call him mediocre; but by season 3, he was Will Riker. Any wobbles in the performance could be attributed to the character – “Ah, it’s Riker being full of himself! It’s Riker being nervous at meeting the Axitraxian ambassador! It’s Riker having had too much cheese before going to bed!” And somehow, by season 5 or 6 good old Jonathan felt comfortable enough in the part to stretch himself and surprise me with an actual good performance (!) in an episode called “Frames of Mind”.

Watching those HBO series I keep harping on about – The Sopranos, Deadwood, Six Feet Under – I am constantly amazed at the high quality of acting. Thinking back to the series I watched, and loved, as a kid and as an adolescent, though… Most of them had fairly mediocre actors, for instance David Duchovny (although he does make for a great transvestite!). Yet somehow I never felt I was watching Duchovny being mediocre. I very quickly forgot about Duchovny and was simply watching Fox Mulder.

David “Nobody’s perfect” Duchovny

For me, Lost has that very same quality. Some of the acting in Lost is good – Terry O’Quinn comes to mind, for instance. But if you look at it critically, most of it is hackneyed character work. If the series is still remembered in ten, twenty years, it won’t be for the acting. And yet… Half an hour into the pilot, and I bought the characters. I don’t know whether that is a quality of the writing, or the directing, or simply a case of the actors being close enough to the characters not to have to act too much. Perhaps it’s also just chemistry between the cast members. I don’t know. But I know that it’s the characters I keep coming back for – even if Jack is a whiny bitch, Charlie is even more annoying than he was as a hobbit (Pippin at least had the benefit of a Scottish accent – here we’ve got Desmond for that), and Nikki and Paolo deserve a horrible death (preferably something out of E.A. Poe). (Note: We haven’t seen any episodes past “Every Man For Himself” in season 3.)

Two final comments for today: 1) Why is it that the Deadwood women keep ending up on the island? I’m waiting for Alma and Jewel to turn up… 2) Was it very noticeable this was a bit of a filler blog entry? If so, I apologise – and promise that tomorrow’s episode will be better. (In that respect, perhaps my blog is a bit like Lost: a long mid-season slump, but the “huh?!”-inducing revelations at the end of the season will keep all of you coming back. Mwhaha.)