Glengarry Dogs
Shelley tries to persuade Williamson, while Mr. White and Mr. Pink have troubles of their own.
Time for the smackdown of the century (well, the late 20th century, anyway): 1992 Guy-movie titans Glengarry Glen Ross vs. Reservoir Dogs.
Back in 1992 I jokingly referred to Reservoir Dogs as Glengarry Glen Ross with guns, but now that I examine both films, I was closer to the mark than I suspected.
1. Both films are about “a bunch of guys” who are involved in a not-quite-legal enterprise. One group sells Florida swampland to rubes, the other robs a jewelry store.
2. Both films deal with “manly” issues of responsibility, trust, betrayal, identity and “work” as a defining trait.
3. Both films revolve around a criminal act we never see happen. One has an office robbery, the other has the jewelry-store robbery.
4. Both films deftly shift points-of-view to keep up the supense of “whodunit.” In Glengarry it’s “who robbed the office,” in Dogs it’s “who’s the cop?”
5. Both films refuse the audience the pleasure of a protagonist, a hero, or even a “central character.”
6. Both film have a central location where the climax of the narrative takes place, which makes the movie feel like a filmed play. Glengarry has the real-estate office, Dogs has the mortuary warehouse.
Now then. One would say that Dogs is not structured the same way as Glengarry, but look at what Tarantino has done.
Here is the narrative of Reservoir Dogs laid out in chronological order (spoiler alert):
1. Joe Cabot wants to rob a jewelry store.
2. He gets his gang of men together. We meet them one by one.
3. The Cops find out about the robbery and plan to stop Joe and his gang.
4. The Cops get Tim Roth to go undercover.
5. Tim Roth practices his “story” that will get him credibility with the gang.
6. He tries it out: it works!
7. Tim Roth hangs out with the gang before the job.
8. The morning of the job, the gang goes to a coffee shop. Here, they discuss Madonna and how much to tip a waitress.
9. The job happens. Something goes wrong. We don’t see what.
10. Afterthe job, everyone high-tails it back to the rendevous point
11. Everybody sooner or later makes it back to the rendevous point and hilarity ensues.
Everything after this is one full hour of the movie. The rest of it is backstory.
Tarantino could have put the movie together this way, but look what happens. You know who the mole is from the very beginning, there’s no mystery as to “what happened at the jewelry store,” and only mild suspense for about ten minutes where Tim Roth is hanging out with the gang and they don’t know he’s a cop. And then he would have gotten to the rendevous point, at which point he’s got an hour of movie left and one location to shoot it in.
Which, strangely, is exactly what happens in Glengarry Glen Ross. There is the first forty-five minutes of the movie, which chops up, expands upon, and moves around the first act of the play very nicely, and then there is the last 50 minutes of the movie, where we’re stuck in that real-estate office and might as well be watching a play. A Pulitzer-Prize-winning play, but a play nonetheless.
Just think of the movie we could have had, oh so very easily, if Mamet had Tarantino-ized his script (again, spoiler alert). What if Glengarry began with Jack Lemmon walking out ot the Nyborg’s house, having just closed his deal with them, getting in his car and heading over to the office, only to find that the place had been broken into.
Then, we could have cut to Al Pacino hustling Jonathan Pryce the evening before, stopping to wink at Ed Harris, who’s in the middle of a conversation with Alan Arkin. Then we could cut to Kevin Spacey having a conversation with Alec Baldwin while they’re waiting for the guys to show up for the sales conference. Then we could cut back to the next day, and there’s Kevin again having to deal with the police and Mitch and Murray because the place has been ripped off. Then we could cut to Jack Lemmon, the night before, trying to get his daughter on the phone at the hospital. Then we could go back to the big scene with Alec Baldwin doing his great speech, then back to Al hustling Jonathan, and so on.
It would have been a little “artier,” but jeez, the thing is already based on a play, how much artier could a movie be in 1992? It would have made it all the way to being a “real movie,” instead of half of one.
Glengarry Glen Ross is one of the great American plays of the 20th century and my second-favorite play ever written (#1 would be Endgame). But I’m afraid that in this contest, Tarantino and his time-shuffling gimmick takes the screenplay prize.
Alcott Held Hostage, day 8 — infantainment
“My children find the windows in our apartment far more fascinating than the T.V.” — 
urbaniak
This will change, and sooner than you think. When the change comes, you will want to move fast.
It is, of course, extremely important that your infants be able to identify and watch television programming at the earliest possible age. Hopefully you exposed them to TCM while they were still in the womb, so that they will already have dim racial memories of George Saunders and Claudette Colbert.
When they are what Chuck Montgomery refers to as the “canned ham” stage of life, just about anything will do. My son Sam was perfectly content to watch Kurosawa when he was three or four months old, and the two of us once whiled away an afternoon watching Rififi, which held the child spellbound through the 25-minute wordless heist sequence.
However, soon, say four months from now, your matched set of tykes will demand entertainment, and they won’t have the patience for Twentieth Century or the world-weariness to appreciate Citizen Kane (my five-year-old son upon reaching the end of Jurassic Park: “Ah well, another happy ending”).
(Honestly, the kid is a born comedian. Last night, as he was going to sleep, one of our cats came in and did something crazy. Sam, on the edge of sleep, sighed and said “Cats these days…”)
Anyway, before Clockwork Orange, before Venture Bros., before Kim Possible, before Scooby-Doo, before even Teletubbies, there is Baby Einstein.
I cannot recommend this series highly enough. They are utterly homemade, the early ones anyway, feature non-nauseating Honest-to-God classical music and, most importantly, do not feature a narrative.
I don’t actually know how when kids start to “get” narrative, but a good indicator is that a two-year-old can watch War of the Worlds and not be particularly frightened, but a three-year-old will cower under the sofa at an episode of Winx Club. It has to do with identification with the protagonist. If the protagonist is frightened, about anything, the child with the dawning narrative skills will be frightened as well. Before that point, it’s all just input, honestly you could let them watch Reservoir Dogs (although that’s probably too talky).
Anyway, BabyEinstein. I recommend starting with Baby Mozart and Baby Bach. Here’s what you get: Some Guy playing Popular Classics on a synthesizer, and random shots of toys, colors, faces, clocks, more toys, puppets, etc. Babies will find it fascinating. And the nice thing about a lack of narrative is, you won’t get tired of watching it either. Because there is no content. There’s nothing to get hooked on. And if you get that Mozart sonata stuck in your head for a day, well, that’s better than the theme song to Magical Do Re Mi.
There are some later Baby Einstein videos that stretch the concept a little too thin, and the Baby Newton video features a rhythm-and-blues song about shapes that is a little too catchy (and involves a clown), but these well-worn tapes have saved more than one afternoon in my house.
Anything with animals. There is one tape called something like Mozart Nature Symphony or something and it’s just about perfect. 30 minutes of Mozart and gorgeous “how’d they get that shot” animal photography. There are two Baby Doolittle animal tapes, which mix live animal footage, some quite good, with skits involving animal puppets which are reductive in the extreme. Like, Beckett’s Act Without Words II kind of reductive.
Oh. And Koyannisqatsi. One night when Sam couldn’t sleep, this movie kept my hands from around his neck for over an hour. I don’t think he made it all the way through it, but who could these days?
But this brings me to the real point. These videos claim to be “teaching” something to your infants. Maybe so, maybe not, and I don’t really care. The benefit, as far as I’m concerned, is not education, or even entertainment, but survival. It’s that they allow Mom and Dad to have a 30-minute conversation.
I just realized, I showed Sam Jurassic Park but refuse to show him Bambi. How ’bout that.
Venture Bros: Season 2, Episode 1
Maybe I’m just buzzed, but that didn’t feel like a new episode of The Venture Bros. That felt like a completely different show. The pacing, the complexity, the multiple layers of action and interaction, all with the typically dense saturation of pop-culture references from Batman to Poltergeist.
It’s like the concepts from Season One have been folded up, crushed into a forge and pounded with a pneumatic press to form just the bones of the new season, and then there’s actually another show on top of it.
Far too much information to take in in one viewing.
It feels like the gloves have come off. The subtext has become the text. It’s no longer hinting at ideas or alluding to them, it’s coming right out and saying “This show is about ideas, and then it has to be funny, and then there has to be some kind of adventure plot.”
Startling to see a half-hour comedy, especially an irreverent, scatological half-hour comedy supposedly produced for an audience of teenage stoners, suddenly go from episodic television to mega-narrative. The mega-narrative was always there, but it felt like if the Sopranos had started out like, say, Law and Order and then suddenly turned into the soap opera that it is.
The science/religion argument that goes by in an instant, a dozen multiple deaths in ten seconds, a prison break, introspection, a drug-laced pacifier, a jungle babe, zombies, the monarch’s makeshift costume, the look on Dr. Girlfriend’s face as she gazes longingly out the window, and that covers maybe a sixteenth of the moments that make this dizzying, electrifying television.
Special kudos to the voice work, specifically Mr. Urbaniak’s newly confident reading of Jonas Venture. It’s great to see a show not sit still but rather unfold in a dozen delightful, unpredictable ways.
Alcott Held Hostage, Day 5 : The Look of Lorne
My kids attend preschool nearby.
The school is in this weird kind of mini-mall. The mini-mall has an two parking lots. One is very small, like 15 cars, and on street level. The other is two levels deep and holds plenty of cars.
The first day I came to drop my kids off at school, there were no parking places on street level. I didn’t know where the school was located (it’s deep within this odd, twisty inner-court) so I figured I’d better park in the underground lot.
Parking in Los Angeles is a constant hassle. If they’re not trying to rip you off, charging you eight bucks an hour for parking your car, they’re trying to park it “for” you, so you have to tip the valet guys too. So there’s always a little tension around parking lots.
I pull into this parking lot. There’s an attendant there, looks like Lorne Greene, but older, maybe 70, with a grey moustache. He’s got a little desk in the middle of the entrance to the parking garage. It’s his job to hand out tickets to cars coming into his lot. Some garages have a little robot machine on a post doing this job, this place has Lorne Greene.
I roll down the window and say, perfectly cheerfully, “Hi, I’m just dropping my kids off for school.” Lorne Greene smiles at me and waves me in. No ticket, no paying. I park, I take my kids upstairs to the school, I leave, I get my car, I pull out of the garage, I wave to Lorne Greene as I go out.
Next time I go to deliver my kids to the school, I pull up to the entrance, Lorne Greene sees me coming and takes out a little ticket to give me. I roll down the window and say, again, perfectly cheerfully, “Hi, I’m just here to drop off my kids off at school.” This time, Lorne Greene gives me a look that could pierce tin. He waves me in with a wave that indicates that, if he chose to do so, he would crush me like a bug and eat my children while my severed head watched. This time, while leaving, I make a special point of trying to catch his eye so I can wave cheerfully at him. He makes a special point of avoiding looking at me altogether.
Every time after that, it’s the same thing. Lorne Greene hates me. Every time, he sees my car coming, takes out a little ticket, I roll down my window and say “Hi, I’m just here to drop my kids off at school –” and he gives me another tin-piercing look. He never says “Doesn’t matter, you have to take a ticket,” never says anything. Just that look. Every time, he hopes I’m there to park for money, and every time he’s thwarted, his unused ticket clutched useless in the iron fist of his Lorne Greene-like hands.
I know what happened. That first time, he saw a dad with a car full of kids, it was their first day at school, and he thought “Hey, I’ll givethis guy a break, show him what a swell guy I am.” But then I pulled the same stunt again and again and again, and now he feels like I’m taking advantage of his good nature. He feels like I think I’m some kind of landed gentry, rolling into his domain in my fancy carriage, doffing my snuff tin to him as he grovels in the filth for roots and berries. I can see it in his face. He’d like to murder me. He’d do it too, if he thought he could get away with it.
Look. I’m not a praying man, but this look from Lorne Greene has so unnerved me that every time I go to drop off my kids at school, I pray, I pray there is a street-level parking space available, and I rejoice whenever there is. It isn’t often.
This relationship, which has, to date, taken up a total of about 35 seconds of my life, has been haunting me all out of proportion. I’ve developed a Larry-David-level anxiety about what I’m supposed to do to make this man happy, and why he won’t tell me why he hates me so much. My wife, of course, thinks I’m crazy and imagining the whole thing.
Then, the other day, I’m hanging out with my son and a friend of his from school, and I’m talking about the school and the parking lot and his friend’s mother (her name is Susan) starts talking about Lorne Greene. Apparently I’m not the only one who approaches this man’s podium with fear. Apparently he puts the heebie-jeebies into everyone who parks there. Susan has taken it upon herself to learn the man’s biography, in the hopes of better understanding him.
It seems that Lorne Greene is Afghani, a doctor by trade, and fled his homeland during the Russian invasion back in the 70s. He came to LA with the intent of bringing his family over with him, but they were captured and killed by the Russians. Either from heartbreak or bad planning, he’s unable to practice medicine in the US, speaks little English and works at this podium in this mini-mall, handing out tickets to motorists all day. Apparently he’s one of the angriest, most miserable men on the planet, for good reason, and every time I pull up to his entrance I diminish him that much more by denying him the one miniscule action that American society has deemed him worthy to do.
Strangely, Lorne Greene is not the only “sole survivor” we know about in our neighborhood. Apparently the West Side is teeming with Iranians who fled Iran when the Shah got kicked out. My son has a friend at school whose father is a sticker magnate (yes, he manufactures stickers for a living, and a good living it is) and whose mother is some kind of actual Iranian royalty, again, whose entire rest of family was killed trying to escape on camelback.
And all I ever escaped from was Illinois. 
Kit’s favorite joke:
Kit: Knock knock!
Dad: Who’s there?
Kit: Yellow.
Dad: Yellow who?
Kit: Yellow banana!
(repeat fifty times.)
(Kit is three.)
http://images.kodakgallery.com/photos1620/3/93/58/9/47/6/647095893305_0_ALB.jpg
Sam’s favorite joke:
Sam: Knock knock.
Dad: Who’s there?
Sam: You.
Dad: You who?
Sam: You spaz!
Alcott Held Hostage — Day 2
Finally losing hope that my projector bulb might spontaneously repair itself, today I emerged from my pitch-black screening room and blinked, pale and squirming, into the sunlight on this, the first day of summer.
The grass was green, jasmine wafted on the breeze, a child batted a barrel hoop down the street, laughing and gamboling as his tiny legs pumped in joyous fury.
Not only was this all in high-definition, it was in 3-D, and interactive.
Thrilled at my discovery of this new entertainment medium called “the real world,” I hopped in my car and went for a drive.
Hit standstill traffic on Santa Monica Blvd. Some kind of construction. Turned around and went back home.
Maybe I’m taking things too fast.
Tragedy strikes
Yesterday, during a routine viewing of an episode of Transformers, my 5-year-old son Sam called to me from the screening room. I came to his call, as is required of me, and he reported that the “picture had gone out” on the TV.
My son is quite keen to learn about remotes and my home theater system is complicated and persnickety, so I assumed that he had hit some button he should not have.
Closer inspection revealed that, in fact, the bulb had blown out on my projector. Exploded even. Its little housing filled with grains of shattered glass.
Well, no problem, think I. I’ll mosey on over to my local home theater store and pick up another.
I call to make sure they have them. They do not. Nor do they think anyone in the area will have them.
They offer to order one. They say they can have it maybe by next Monday. Cool, says I. How much does that run?
$635.00.
! “Really?!” Keep in mind, I did not purchase this home theater system. Rather, it came with the house when I bought it. I know nothing about its history, legacy or place in the hierarchy of home theater systems. All I know is that I love it like I have never loved another collection of machines before.
Oh yes, the man tells me. My projector, he tells me, was top-of-the-line 4.5 years ago (when the house was built and the theater installed). The previous owner was a stickler for quality and he was willing to pay top dollar. $635.00 might sound like a lot to pay for a light bulb (in fact, it’s more than I paid for my last TV set), but (the home-theater-guy continues) keep in mind that the projector cost $10,000.00 when it was new.
Now then. Looking around my office, I’m seeing the stack of components that make up the rest of the system and doing some quick seat-of-my-pants math, and I realize that my home theater system probably cost more than my car.
Well now. What can I do? It costs what it costs. I would have said the same thing if they were talking about a pacemaker. What am I going to do, stop watching DVDs on a high-definition projector?
Born Yesterday
Judy Holliday and Broderick Crawford are riveting, jaw-dropping, heartbreaking and mesmerizing in two of the most detailed, lived-in performances I’ve ever seen committed to film in a Hollywood picture. In comparison, William Holden seems smug, condescending and two-dimensional. Holliday and Crawford mop up the screen with him.
Based on a play, it’s still a little stagebound in its execution, and its narrative strategies feel a little rushed and convenient.
Part Educating Rita and part Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The movie has a “serious message” about influence peddling, corrupt congressmen and the effect of corporate power on lawmaking. At the end, it appears that all that is on its way out, due to a popular revolt led by a newly-smart populace and the newspapermen who have educated them.
Glad that was all taken care of 56 years ago.
The picture was remade in 1993 with Melanie Griffith (way too on-the-nose), John Goodman (mmm, maybe) and Don Johnson (coffee-spit-take) . Anyone seen this?