Remember me going on repeatedly and at great length about last year’s film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford? Well, I’m happy to say that this may give the film some attention, which it definitely deserves – although from a very odd direction. Animator Edmund Earle did a beautiful, surreal take on the upcoming Yogi Bear film (which may be almost as obnoxious as the recent Alvin and the Chipmunks movies), recasting Brad Pitt’s Jesse James and Casey Affleck’s Bob Ford with Yogi and Booboo. Earle has no affiliation with the Yogi Bear movie and seems to have created this beautifully animated short in his spare time, which should get him the admiration of geeks, nerds and filmaficionados everywhere.
I’m one of the lucky ones – I was a kid when the original Star Wars trilogy came out, so I like the Star Wars movies that it’s okay to appreciate. Like so many boys of my age I wanted to fly an X-Wing or a snowspeeder, bringing down the Empire one AT-AT at a time. I got really good at making bad light sabre noises. It took me a long time to see anything other than A New Hope, because my parents were decidedly uninterested in anything sci-fi or fantasy; I still haven’t completely forgiven them for taping over the original movie the day after we got the Betamax tape from my uncle, recorded from ITV. By the time I watched Return of the Jedi, I still thought that TIE Fighters, Death Stars and raspy-breathed evil space samurai were cool, but Ewoks were just overgrown teddy bears.
I remember the original teaser for The Phantom Menace giving me goosebumps at the cinema. This wasn’t just nostalgia, it was nostalgia distilled, and then the distillation distilled again. It was all the best things from my childhood without the stuff I’d worked hard to forget or repress. It was Star Wars, for crying out loud.
Well, we all know what happened when the prequels came out and millions of nerd voices suddenly cried out in dismay. Let’s face it, though, Teddy Bear’s Picnic should have prepared us for Jar Jar & Co. In any case, if I wanted to write about the disappointment of the prequels, I’d be even more ludicrously late than I am with most of my blog posts.
What I really want to write about is this: that fine distillation of childhood with all its best bits left in exists. And next to Rock Band, it’s the best fun I’ve had with any video game playing with my girlfriend.
Lego Star Wars gets the appeal of Star Wars: its universe is a playground for overgrown kids – but while it’s childlike, it isn’t childish. It isn’t embarrassing the way the Gungans are in Episode 1, nor does it take itself as seriously as the worst moments of Episodes 2 and 3. The trials of Anakin are more relatable when he’s a mute toy figure… and the “I am your father” moment in Lego is simply perfect.
The Lego series of games extended to other fictional universes after covering the Star Wars movies in bric-a-brac glory: there’s Lego Batman, Lego Harry Potter, two Lego Indiana Jones titles… and Lego Pirates of the Caribbean is in the works. The games are all basically the same, with small variations in the designs – but for someone who grew up trying to imitate the roar of an Imperial fighter screaming past your cockpit, it’s the Star Wars game that carry a special magic. And sitting on the sofa, teaming up with my girl to dismantle the Empire brick by evil brick is bliss.
As is the ability to hit Jar Jar with an itty bitty light sabre. Again and again and again…
Yes, once again I’m months behind the real world – but opinions that are full of themselves never go past their sell-by dates! Remember when everyone was talking about that final episode of Lost? Well, they’ve now shown it in Switzerland, so here I am, ready to put forward my opinion at a point when no one’s interested anymore.
A lot has happened since Lost began – and I’m not talking only in terms of polar bear attacks, electromagnetic incidents and casual time travel. Things in my life have changed in certain fairly fundamental ways, and some of my attachment to Lost comes from associating the series with some of these changes. I’ve mostly enjoyed the series, even at its most convoluted moments, in spite of getting annoyed as hell with characters such as Shannon, Boone or Charlie. (At least the series lost its knack of making these characters worthwhile only in time to kill them off.) I was even intrigued when the series stepped up its metaphysical Überbau by introducing the ancient fratricidal conflict between Jacob, the manipulative quasi-deity of the island who’d been ‘touching’ several of the Losties since they were children, and his smokin’ Cainesque brother, Dwight. (Okay, that’s not his name, but the writers were being just a tad too cute when they did their “I only came up with one name!” in-joke.)
When they introduced their flash sideways, with intriguing glimpses of a world where the Losties hadn’t become lost, where the island was at the bottom of the ocean, I was fascinated – at first, that is. I was curious: was this parallel existence the result of the bomb exploding at the end of season 5? Was it the world Smokey (sorry, make that Dwight) was trying to escape to – or was it a world in which he’d escaped the island and Jacob’s words about how this would destroy everything had proven so much, well, smoke and mirrors?
But then the writers fell back onto their old tricks: when in doubt, introduce new ambiguous antagonists (call them Yet Other Others), make the characters re-evaluate their allegiances and have your cast trek from one side of the island to the other. The problem with those tricks is mainly that of diminishing returns: do we care about yet another group of strange people who speak in riddles (the temple dudes or Widmore’s merry men and annoying woman)? Also, if we don’t know what either side in a cosmic conflict really is about, what does it matter whether Jack’s on one side or Sawyer’s on another? And yes, the island backgrop is nice to look at, but after six seasons even that has lost its initial charm.
In the end, this isn’t the major problem with season 6 and the series ending, though. Every season of Lost had its share of filler material that would have benefitted massively from tightening the story. The problem was this: the ending – in fact, both endings, the island storyline and the “is this heaven? – It’s Los Angeles.” metaphysics-for-the-21st-century one – rendered most of the six years irrelevant. The hatch, the numbers, the polar bears, the Others, the Dharma Initiative, Widmore, time travel, basically anything… It didn’t matter for either ending. And it’s no excuse to say, “It’s all about the characters, stupid!” – least of all if you’re writing a series that, week for week, was driven by the WTF?! question. What the fuck was that polar bear doing there? What the fuck is down that hatch? what the fuck is up with those numbers? Yes, you had nice flashbacks fleshing out the characters, but that doesn’t make the series about the characters – because, let’s be honest, would we have watched the series for six years if it hadn’t been for all the weird shit going down? Would we have sat through more than one Jack or Kate episode without them dangling the answer to some of our questions at least in front of our noses?
The series tried to make the finale not only big and loud (betrayals! fights to the death! Star Wars references!) but also meaningful in some ill-defined spiritual way, but the longer the season went on, the less it was able to answer the “So what?” question – in the end the only question that matters in entertainment. Obviously it’s an unfair question, because it can be asked of anything, and in the end no stories are necessary – but that’s where, as storytellers and entertainers, you have to keep the audience interested and distracted enough so they never feel like asking the question in the first place.
To be fair, the final episode had its share of emotional moments. I enjoyed it while I was watching it, and yes, I did feel moved by Sun and Jin’s moment of revelation at the hospital, or by Hurley’s realisation that the weight of Jacobhood was going to be placed on his shoulders. But with every new burst of flashback-revelation, with every montage of people falling in love, giving birth or staring down holes on the island, our old friend, Diminishing Returns (Dimi to his mates), struck – and by the end of it, what struck me were two things: a) how quickly the sideways universe unravels if you think about it too much and b) how little it ties back to what we’ve been watching since the beginning. It was a story that didn’t need the island – and that made the series as a whole ever so slightly pointless. Basically we got an ending that said: “You know, everything you’ve been watching over the last couple of years? You enjoyed it, right? Well, beyond featuring the same characters it’s pretty much unimportant to this story we’re telling about the afterlife.” The characters weren’t in sideways LA because they had been on the island, because of Jacob and Dwight, or because of the nuclear bomb. They were there because they all had, at some point or other, died. Their island adventures were pretty much incidental to that whole storyline – all that mattered was that they had met and played important parts in each others lives.
If a series’ ending tells us that, in the end, almost everything leading up to it is irrelevant, we’re in a bit of a quandary: do we dislike the ending, reject what it seems to imply and remember the series for the bits we enjoyed? Or do we embrace the ending and in the process come to realise that the series has more or less rendered itself pointless?
And for old time’s sake, I’ll end this blog entry without answering any of those questions. Cue credits!
P.S.: I love this reply to some of the misunderstandings of the final episode:
Remember the old days, when Lost was one of my favorite non-HBO TV series, a tasty snack in between the substantial but demanding Sopranos, The Wire or Deadwood? And Fringe was basically an X-Files knockoff for the 21st century – fun enough, but flimsy and without much of a voice of its own apart from having a gooey, gorey imagination?
Well, we’re now watching the final season of Lost on TV (Switzerland may have the cheese, chocolates and watches, but we get TV series late since everything has to be dubbed), and I’m afraid I’ve lost most of my interest. Sideways universe, shmideways universe, added to which I have pretty much had my fill of Jack, Kate et al. Yes, they obviously know where they want to take the series for the finale, but so many of the answers we get for the mysteries built up in the previous five seasons are banal, boring and not particularly convincing. Case in point: how did the Black Rock end up in the middle of the jungle? Big wave. Never mind that it smashed into a gigantic statue hard enough to smash the statue, but the ship’s still mostly, well, ship-shape.
But no, the series writers tell us, Lost is not about the mysteries – it’s about the characters! Obviously! I mean, it’s not as if the series’ main driver was that what kept the series going was questions like: What is the hatch? What are the numbers? What is the black smoke? Who are the others? Yes, Lost also spent a lot of time on its characters, especially in the flashbacks (and flash-forwards, flash-sideways and quite possible flash-upside-downs), but the impetus always, always came from the mysteries.
Fringe, on the other hand… It’s still frivolous entertainment, and like so many US series it suffers from the need to do 20+ episodes per season, but they’ve definitely shifted the overall mythology up a gear or two. They’ve become much more confident with their storytelling, to the point where they play with the format and the audience in delightful ways. To give just one example, consider the usual intro of the series:
… and now check out the intro they did for one episode set roughly 30 years earlier:
There’s a winking self-awareness that Lost has, well, lost if it ever had it (well, perhaps in “Exposé”, Nikki and Paolo’s final episode). There’s an awareness that this is silly stuff, but let’s just roll with it. And most of all, while the mythology is being built into something riveting and surprisingly poignant, it is never as convoluted as Lost has become. For all the heavy-duty plotting in Fringe, it’s the characters that keep the weirdness grounded – and enjoyable. Bring on season 3 of Fringe, and finally bring Lost to an end, so we can go back to remembering its early days when it was fresh and exciting.
Yesterday evening, before we went to the cinema, we were discussing David Fincher’s other films. Which did we like best? Which least? I came up with my personal Top Three films directed by Fincher (in no particular order): Seven, Fight Club and Zodiac, with Alien 3 receiving special mention. (It’s flawed but the bits that I like I pretty much love.) Seven is probably the moodiest of his films, Fight Club the most enjoyable and Zodiac is perhaps the most perfectly crafted Fincher film.
Since yesterday evening, I’ve added The Social Network to the Top Three (which therefore contains four titles now, risking a possible world-destroying mathematical paradox), albeit on probation. Will I still like it that much in a week’s time? In a year? Once I’ve seen it as often as the other films? (Zodiac I’ve only seen three times so far, but Seven was my film for bad moods for a while when I was often in a bad mood.) We’ll see, but for now I would say this: it’s Fincher at the top of his game (Ebert rightly calls the movie “splendidly well made”), working with a script that complements his considerable skills. This makes for an interesting comparison: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was decried by some because that film’s script pulled it in the direction of a mawkish sibling to Forrest Gump (scripted by the same writer, Eric Roth, not to be confused with Eli Roth). I thought that Fincher’s cerebral approach made for a fascinating film that was pulled in two different directions, namely sentimentality on the one hand (script) and a weird sort of Verfremdung on the other (direction), resulting in a tension that didn’t always work in the film’s favour.
Aaron Sorkin’s script for The Social Network, though, is sharp and witty, with little trace of mawkishness. It’s not cold or unemotional in any way, but it doesn’t do the Spielbergian brand of emotion that requires heartwarming performances and a John Williams soundtrack so obvious it makes you feel a little queasy because the sentiment is laid on so thick. The film thrives on repartee and verbal barbs that is delivered at breakneck speed – I’ve rarely seen a movie that is so dialogue-driven and feels this fast (though not rushed).
I’ve seen TV series like this, though, especially one little known one about the president of some far away country. I think it’s called… let me see… The West Wing? Which, coincidentally, was also written by one Aaron Sorkin. Having watched the first four seasons of The West Wing (the ones during Sorkin’s time at the helm of the series), I find The Social Network‘s fictionalised Mark Zuckerberg a dark twin of Josh Lyman, deputy chief of staff to President Bartlet. Lyman is more likeable because he’s got a strong sense of ideals and ethics, but he shares so many qualities with Zuckerberg: the sense of intellectual superiority that goes hand in hand with deep-seated insecurity, the way that every conversation is seen as a battle, the intense need to win, to be right, even if it means being a dick to others – the atrophied social skills and emotional immaturity that is fun to watch with Josh because he works in an environment and with people that ground him every now and then.
While the origin story for Fincher and Sorkin’s version of the Facebook founder is perhaps too simple – Zuckerberg basically gets started on the road to Facebook because of the Girl That Got Away, throwing his social dysfunction right back in his face – it makes for an interesting foil with Josh Lyman. Without his Girl Friday, Donna Moss, would he become increasingly insufferable as Zuckerberg does, ending up a sad, pathetic geek with a brilliant mind?
Chances are that most of you (“you” being my real or imaginary readers – for all I know all of this blog’s visitors are advertising bots) won’t get a chance to see Sylvain Chomet’s L’Illusionniste, his first animated film after Les Triplettes de Belleville at the cinema. If you do get the chance, take it: there’s an additional layer of magic to seeing the film at a movie theatre, ideally one with red velvet curtains and comfy seats.
L’Illusionniste is a rare beast, a non-computer generated (although many scenes definitely received some help from the digital brush), non-3D animated film aimed primarily at an audience over the age of 12. (You won’t see L’Illusionniste lunchboxes at the shops.) It is also about a rare beast threatened by extinction: the old-fashioned, cabaret-type entertainer, in this case a stage magician. The film is set during the ’60s, at a time when the eponymous illusionist, like his fellow artists, clowns, acrobats and ventriloquists, has all but been replaced by proto-boy bands and electric Wurlitzers. (These days we’re nostalgic about the latter, even.)
The movie’s plot is of a crystalline simplicity and there are few if any surprises. The ageing illusionist, searching for the increasingly rare show he can do here and there, finds himself performing on the Hebrides, where his magic and old-school manners charm a young girl working as a cleaner. When his engagement is over, he heads for the mainland, and she follows him. The two settle in Edinburgh where he finds that his bagic has been too convincing: in order to keep the girl charmed, he provides her with more illusions, more magic – a pair of lovely shoes here, an elegant coat and Audrey Hepburn-type dress there. Except, of course, this sort of magic can’t be spirited from top hats or people’s ears, so the illusionist has to take on one deadening job after another to keep the girl in gifts. His increasing absence from her life, which he never explains to her, leads to her finding magic in another man instead, a handsome young beau, and the disillusioned illusionist moves out one day while she’s gone, leaving a card: “Magicians do not exist.”
And that summarises the film’s intriguing tension: magicians don’t exist, it is all a charming illusion, the penny in your ear comes out of the magician’s sleeve or palm, cleverly hidden, and the fat, belligerent rabbit was in the hat all along. And yet, and yet… The film, like its sad hero, is all about the charm of illusion, it magics us away to a time and place that is better, more charming than reality. It creates people that never existed, an Edinburgh that never was, and its touches of the real – the film idealises but does not Disneyfy – only add to the spell.
At the end, the illusionist acknowledges that there is no such thing as magic, and pretending that there is creates false expectations, hope and illusions of the dangerous kind: the shimmering red shoes, the beautiful dress, even the crayon miraculously regrown after it had been worn to a stump, act as gateway illusions. He is right: magicians do not exist. The film shows this – in 70 minutes of beautiful, touching magic.
Seven Samurai is probably the Kurosawa film that is most immediately enjoyable by Western audiences. The Japanese director has rarely been as culturally specific in his work as some of his compatriot film makers, finding inspiration in Hollywood westerns, and what is probably his best known film requires little in the way of cultural knowledge from audiences mostly ignorant of Japanese culture and history. (Hey, everything I know about Japan I learnt from Richard Chamberlain and Shogun!)
Which didn’t stop Hollywood director John Sturges from making a Western (in both senses of the word) remake of the film, The Magnificent Seven. Samurai (or, more accurately, ronin) become gunslingers, Japanese villagers become Mexican peasants, but the film remains largely unchanged in its broad strokes. It is perhaps more immediately iconic to Western audiences, featuring stars such as Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and James Coburn (the film feels like a The Great Escape (p)reunion at times, also sharing director and composer with the POW classic), but in terms of changes it is relatively restrained.
There are perhaps three major differences, though. The first of these is the leader of the bandits, portrayed by Eli Wallach. He has no counterpart in Kurosawa’s film and serves as an intriguing counterpoint to the gunslingers, a charismatic “There but for the grace of God” commentary on the heroes. The second, stronger change, is how the youngest, most inexperienced of the samurai and Toshiro Mifune’s peasant posing as a samurai, perhaps the actor and director’s most indelible creation, are conflated into one character in Sturges’ film, a mere boy of a gunslinger played by Horst Buchholz. While combining the two characters into one may work in theory, Buchholz is no Mifune; he manages the fanboyish kid who goes all googly-eyed over the larger-than-life heroes much better than the bumbling, cheeky but eventually most tragic character of the seven.
The change that weighs most in my mind, though, is this: in Kurosawa’s film, we believe that the time of the samurai, of sword fights and strictly regulated chivalry has come to and end. The ronintake the job of protecting the villagers because there isn’t anything else for them. As skilled as they are at what they do, they’re essentially relics of a bygone age.Brynner, Coburn, Bronson and especially McQueen are first and foremost stars. They give lip service to the passing of an era, but Brynner’s lines – “Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.” – ring false coming from him, the self-awareness sounds phony. The Magnificent Seven is magnificently entertaining and, but it doesn’t pull off the sadness that accompanied the rollicking adventure in Kurosawa’s original.
But boy, how does Steve McQueen manage to have the worst haircuts and still be so eminently sexy? Add him to the list topped by Alexander Skarsgard. (Don’t know what I mean? Watch Generation Kill with a staunchly heterosexual male, get him drunk and then ask him what he thinks of Skarsgard.)
The following blog entry was written by that most elusive of creatures, mege1, whom you may remember from blog entries such as this one. Unfortunately, tech gremlins prevented him from posting the entry himself, so I’m doing it for him, in between holidays. I’ll be back for good in a little over a week, at which point I’m hoping to post something witty, insightful and not at all redundant about Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven. The Goofy Beast – Always Ahead Of The Curve When It Comes To Being Behind.
Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Yes, David Nicholls’ books all have the same basic plot: Boy and girl seem to meet and to start liking each other, but there are obstacles and pitfalls. Hackneyed, you say? So what? You see, there’s that book about a mad captain who goes after a white whale. Oh, and another one tells us about a guy on who is stranded on an island. Boring, isn’t it? On the other hand, do you really read books for their plot? If you dismiss each and every book on the grounds of it being another love story, then an angry mob consisting of irate live readers, dead writers and led by Will Shakespeare and Jane Austen wants to seriously haunt you.
It is also blindingly obvious that David Nicholls and Nick Hornby are perfectly comparable: Both borrow heavily from contemporary music, film, and pop culture trivia; both know how to bring in a joke whenever they feel like it. Both are not likely to end up on any serious reading list, but what of that? They don’t aspire to be, I imagine.
Nicholls’ debut, Starter for Ten, is about a teenager leaving home and going to University and falling for a rather posh and glib beauty. They both end up on the hopeless team for that game show, University Challenge, and it’s clear from early on that his clumsy courtship will go unanswered. But man, can Nicholls tell you a story. The whole book is full of comedy, but at the same time, all the characters are believable and right there on the page. My main delight is the scene during that night when the teenage lover-boy is invited to the girl’s parents’ holiday cottage, gets stoned and goes for a glass of milk in the middle of the night. For reasons better left explained by the novel itself, mum and dad turn up naked in the kitchen. It could have been raucous, it could have been clumsy and slapstick-y and awkward, but Nicholls handles that moment with wit and grace – as much as there can possibly be, anyway.
The Understudy uses a lot of Nicholls’ first-hand experience as an actor. (Nicholls has pretty much given up on acting and has switched to writing screenplays – and novels, obviously). The man from the title plays extras like corpses and bystanders and is also the understudy of a conceited movie superstar who plays Lord Byron in a London stage play. The understudy falls in love with the star’s wife while keeping quiet about the star’s flings. Again, the plot may not prompt you to pick up that book; it’s in the telling. Nicholls gets a lot of the backstage atmosphere of a theatre right, at least as far as I can tell. He is not afraid to show wayward or obnoxious traits of a protagonist you are supposed to like for most of the time. The understudy starts lying, not because he’s selfish, but he wants to protect someone else and so digs himself deeper into the Pit of Failed Actors. And that, as we all know, is a deep pit indeed.
Nicholls’ latest novel, One Day, seems to be all the rage. Nicholls himself has taken on the noble task to turn it into a Hollywood screenplay, a situation he has rendered with all the acerbic wit necessary in his previous novel. One Day, again, is about a girl and a boy who almost sleep together on the night after their graduation; the novel goes on to tell us about what happens every 15th of July for twenty years. That’s quite a good concept to avoid lengthy bits, and it also allows the author to bring in all kinds of pop trivia. This novel here is more serious in tone, although there are enough comic elements left. While the first two novels can be read during a longish train ride, One Day has the good instinct to delve into the two protagonists’ psyches. All three novels are great reads, by themselves, but also if you’ve come out of some serious reading of Literature with a capital L, like I have. Go on now, have some fun. Any day now, David Nicholls’ novels will be part of pop culture. You’ll know when his name or the name of one of his novels are the answer to some question on some televised game show.
P.S.: Was I the only kid who had sort of an older-woman crush on Melinda Dillon after watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind and A Christmas Story?
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 