Space Chimps, by guest reviewer John McCain
My friends, greetings. First off, I’d like to thank
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for giving me an opportunity to address a forum that’s generally overlooked on the campaign circuit, and for giving me a break from discussing the issues of the day. Campaigning is a tiring exercise and I, like a lot of Americans in the summertime, like nothing better to escape into the world of the movies. For the five and a half years I was held prisoner and tortured by the Vietnamese, I didn’t get a chance to see any movies at all.
Ham gets into big trouble with an alien race in Space Chimps, just as a lot of people are in big trouble today with failing mortgages and high gas prices. But Ham’s troubles, and America’s, are nothing compared to the five and a half years of torture I underwent as a POW in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” days I’m extremely reluctant to discuss. In the movie, Ham and his pals must face down the evil overlord Zartog, just as we Americans must face down the evils of international terrorism, wherever they may be, just as I had to face the evils of communism in the form of my Vietnamese captors, some of whom were homosexuals, although never towards me.
Ham gets out of his situation on the alien planet through cleverness and determination; I didn’t have that choice as a prisoner of war, I had to wait five long years until I was rescued. I don’t like to keep bringing this up, but there are people today who seem to think that being tortured for five and a half years isn’t such a big deal, there are people who think that me leaving my wife, while she’s hospitalized, to go marry an heiress, or that me having over $100 million, or that me having more houses than I can keep track of is somehow a bad thing.
There are even some who say that since the tortures inflicted on me are the same as the tortures our government is inflicting upon our detainees at Guantanamo, and since I’ve said that our detainees at Guantanamo aren’t being tortured, that I wasn’t actually tortured for five and a half years by the Vietnamese in the infamous Hanoi Hilton. Some point to stories I’ve told about being captive, about how some of them seem to be stolen from other sources, about how I’ve “changed” them to suit different audiences over the years, about how I remember things about my time as a POW that didn’t happen until years later. Well my friends, let’s lock you up and torture you for five and a half years and see how you hold up.
Ham leads his pals to freedom and victory, just as I will lead this nation to freedom and victory, even though I suffered terribly for five and a half years as a POW in the infamous Hanoi Hilton. My opponent may look more like a chimp than I do, and he may have a scary middle name and he may, like Ham, have the gift of gab, but he does not have the experience I do, and he certainly was not tortured for five and a half long years at the infamous Hanoi Hilton, and I want you to remember that when you go to the polls in November. How dare my opponent question my integrity, my great wealth, my hypocrisy and my unwavering support for the worst president in American history? He was not tortured as a prisoner of war, he has no right to say anything about anything.
In conclusion, my friends, Space Chimps is the kind of movie we can believe in, and I should know, because I was a prisoner of war who was tortured for five and a half long years by the Vietnamese in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, and I’m extremely reluctant to talk about that.
Favorite screenplays
Heads up, people: when I get done analyzing the screenplays of Steven Spielberg’s movies (hey, I’ve only got nine more to go!) I plan to move on to general analysis of some of my favorite screenplays. Some of these screenplays are universally acknowledged as masterworks of the form, others are simply my personal favorites, screenplays that, for one reason or another, changed my understanding of what a screenplay is, or could be. There are many, many screenplays I admire that are not on this list, primarily because when I think of those movies, I think of the movie first and the screenplay second. A movie like, say, 8 1/2, I think of first as a triumph of filmmaking and secondarily as a work of screenwriting. A movie like Alien has a very strong script and is a wonderful motion picture, but didn’t open my eyes the way that its sequel did. A movie like Seven has a solid script and a phenomenally talented director who really elevated it into another realm. These movies, for me anyway, are more successes of interpretation than of writing, whereas the movies on my list below I think would have been excellent, or at least watchable, no matter who was directing them. A few of them I admire in spite of, or because of, their flaws. All of them are movies I keep coming back to in order to steal things draw inspiration.
In the order their DVDs happen to be in on my shelf:
Annie Hall
Manhattan
Hannah and Her Sisters
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Husbands and Wives
Deconstructing Harry
All the President’s Men
Boogie Nights
Bambi
Ben-Hur
Winter Light
Persona
Shame
Le Femme Nikita
Raising Arizona
Barton Fink
Fargo
The Big Lebowski
The Man Who Wasn’t There
No Country for Old Men
Diabolique
Die Hard
Die Hard with a Vengeance
The Outlaw Josey Wales
Unforgiven
Fatal Attraction
The Fugitive
The Godfather
The Godfather Part II
Groundhog Day
It’s a Wonderful Life
Jacob’s Ladder
Down by Law
Mystery Train
2001: A Space Odyssey
Barry Lyndon
The Shining
Seven Samurai
The Hidden Fortress
High and Low
Sanjuro
The Bourne Identity
Dog Day Afternoon
Network
The Untouchables
Things Change
The Edge
The Mask of Zorro
The Matrix
Mona Lisa
Ocean’s 11 (2001)
One Hour Photo
Floating Weeds
Primer
The Poseidon Adventure
Rosemary’s Baby
Ringu
Snatch
Robocop
Run Lola Run
Taxi Driver
The King of Comedy
Cape Fear
Casino
The Silence of the Lambs
A Simple Plan
Jaws
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
E.T.
Star Wars
The Empire Strikes Back
The Sting
Terminator 2
The Thomas Crown Affair
Three Kings
Sunset Blvd
Some Like it Hot
The Apartment
Beauty and the Beast
The Lion King
Toy Story
Finding Nemo
And I’m sure there are more that are escaping my mind at the moment. Some of these I’ve already discussed in detail — specifically, the Coens and the Spielbergs — and I invite interested parties to seek out those entries in the index to your left. As always, I invite my readers to goad my imagination with their suggestions.
Screenwriting 101: a tale of two beginnings
With regards to yesterday’s animated discussion of prologues:
I was in my local video store the other day. I found a copy of Oliver Stone’s 2004 bio-pic Alexander for $3. My wife is a sucker for ancient Greek history and I’m a sucker for biographical drama and I said “that’s my price!” and snapped it up. I took it home, put it in the machine, and what do you know? It starts with an elaborate prologue! About the history of ancient Greece!
So instead, he goes in the exact opposite direction with equally disastrous results. First, there is an elaborate death scene where we see someone, we’re guessing Alexander (although Stone does not show us his face) dying, having not made an important decision of some sort. Everyone around the bed pleads with the dying man as strong winds blow outside and the dying man stares wildly and flails his hands and then expires. Before we have any idea what the hell that was all about, Stone then jumps forward 40 years, after Alexander’s empire has collapsed, and there’s Anthony Hopkins in a toga on a balcony near the harbor at Alexandria (we can tell it’s Alexandria because we can see the Lighthouse of Alexandria in the background) telling a scribe the story of Alexander, but not about the mysterious death scene we just watched. We’re still waiting to find out what was going on during the death scene and Hopkins is giving us a history lesson.
Now, Stone doesn’t want to give us a history lesson so he renders the dialogue through Hopkins’s character, a guy who apparently worked alongside Alexander, although we don’t know how or in what manner. Hopkins speaks of Alexander with great love, so we get that Alexander was apparently loved, but the rest of it is still just a history lesson about a bunch of people we haven’t met yet. Hopkins wanders around his back porch overlooking the harbor, and the porch is covered with Greek statuary that Hopkins fondles as he walks past. We’re supposed to be taking notes on his history lesson, but instead we’re wondering who Hopkins is and why he’s telling us all this and why he’s got a back porch covered with statuary.
After he’s wandered around his back porch for a while, Hopkins then heads inside, where there is what looks to be an Alexander Museum in his living room. There are more statues, and elaborate displays and maps and mosaics. Hopkins launches into some serious history here gesturing to this statue and that map, telling us all the same things we would have read in the text-on-black version, but instead of understanding the information we’re more lost than ever, because we’re still wondering what the death scene was all about and then we’re wondering who Hopkins is supposed to be (since he’s obviously not the elderly Alexander) and we’re wondering why he’s telling someone the story of Alexander and we’re wondering why he’s walking around his Alexander Museum gesturing to things that the guy he’s talking to already knows about. We’re now about ten minutes into the movie and we’re still waiting for it to start.
Then, just as we’re catching up to whatever the heck Anthony Hopkins is talking about, we jump back in time and now Alexander is alive and well and he’s in a tent somewhere in a desert just before a big battle of some kind against some Persians, and he’s making battle plans with his team of generals. And we think “Finally! The movie’s starting!” But no. Instead of getting some drama, we get yet another history lesson, as Alexander tells his generals all about the upcoming battle and how they’re going to win it. We don’t know where we are, why we’re fighting, who anyone in the tent is or what is at stake, we’re just getting Alexander lecturing his generals on strategy.
yesterday mentioned the “As you know, Bob” problem in narratives, and that’s what this scene is, one big long “As you know, Bob” scene. Except it’s worse, because there’s, like, six of them, and their names aren’t Bob, they’re Ptolemy and Hephaistion and Cassander and Antigonus. So you’ve got Alexander walking around the map room pointing at things and saying things like “As you know, Antigonus, you are my most trusted warrior…” These lines are there so that the Greek scholars in the house can nod in understanding and say “Aha, so that’s Antigonus, got it…” but the rest of us are just burdened with more and more information we have no idea what to do with. The scene is supposed to help us understand the big battle scene we’re about to see, but it does the opposite. Because we’re still wondering about the death scene and who Anthony Hopkins was and why he has an Alexander Museum in his living room and who all these people in the tent are supposed to be and the movie is already 15 or 20 minutes along.
We finally head out into the big battle scene, and it is very big indeed — enormous, sprawling, ridiculously elaborate. It is, in fact, so elaborate that each section of the army gets its own title card so we know where we are in the battle. Unfortunately, we’re still not following any of it because we couldn’t follow the strategy session in the tent earlier. So now there’s a hugely chaotic battle sequence featuring tens of thousands of extras in period battle gear, but we don’t know what the objective is or who they are really or what they’re fighting for or why any of this is important.
Compare this to the opening of Saving Private Ryan.
Saving Private Ryan opens with an old man in a military cemetery in France with his family. One shot of one French flag tells us we’re in France. The old man comes to a field of gravestones and collapses in tears. There is no dialogue, no museum, no scrolling text, no narrator telling us about the history of World War II, no newsreel catchingus up to the story so far, no history lesson, no room of generals discussing strategy and reminding each other of things they already know. There is an old man who is grief-stricken at the sight of a field of gravestones and that’s it.
Then, we cut to the past, where an army captain is on a boat with a bunch of other soldiers and is about to storm a beach. We think the captain is the younger version of the old man at the cemetery (the narrative, it turns out, hinges on this deliberate misdirect). The men on the boat are terrified and nauseous and the captain’s hands are shaking. A title card tells us that it’s June 6. 1944 and that we’re at Omaha Beach. It doesn’t say that it’s D-Day, an important turning point in World War II, nothing tells us who the soldiers are fighting, or why this beach is important — and it doesn’t matter. What matters is the simple physical predicament of the protagonist. The captain in the boat has a bunch of men in his charge and it’s his job to get them up the beach and kill the enemy. And that’s it. He gives no speech about the glories of freedom or the evils of Nazism, the information he gives them is technical and sparse. The tension is palpable, the concerns are immediate and physical, not historical and philosophical. Then, the front of the boat drops down and half the men in the boat are slaughtered by sniper fire, and the ensuing 25 minutes of insane, mind-shattering carnage go on to become the greatest battle sequence ever shot and one of the great opening sequences of all time. We still don’t know who anybody is (except that the captain is Tom Hanks and we like Tom Hanks), there is no dialogue where the captain says to a soldier “As you know, Billy, you are my most accurate sniper…” The captain and his team that we will follow through the rest of the movie are revealed solely by their actions.
Oliver Stone sincerely thought he was doing us a favor by giving us all this complicated information about the history of Alexander before we ever got a look at the guy, and he thought he was demonstrating his generosity and good will toward the audience by dramatising the exposition instead of just putting some text up on the screen. But instead he shot his movie in the foot before it even got started, he drew the exposition out to painful lengths and made us more confused than ever. We don’t learn anything from Stone’s prologue, our minds check out after the first minute and by the tenth minute we’ve forgotten why we came to see the movie. Spielberg knew that none of that matters — cinema is about the here and now, the simple physical predicament of the protagonist.
UPDATE:
points out in the comments that Alexander and Saving Private Ryan describe two different historical scenarios, one of which the audience might be expected to be familiar with, the other not so much. I will go further: the two movies belong to two different genres — Alexander is a biographical drama and Saving Private Ryan is a war movie — and so perhaps should not be judged side by side. Fair enough, let’s compare an apple to an apple. Alexander begins with its elaborate history lesson and Schindler’s List begins with its protagonist getting dressed for a night on the town — again, little historical context (we know only that Jews are being concentrated into cities), no scroll of text, no narrator telling us who these people are, just the immediate physical concerns of the protagonist — he’s getting dressed up for a night on the town — we never even see his face! — and his ensemble is complete when he places his Nazi pin on his lapel. The sequence that follows — Schindler impressing the local Nazi officers at the nightclub — lays out the information we need to know about Schindler and nothing else. The result is that for the first 20 minutes of Schindler we lean forward, wanting to know more about the protagonist and what he’s after, whereas the first 20 minutes of Alexander make us lean back, wanting to get out of this classroom.
Fairies and Fantasy: The Dark Crystal
First of all, let me just say that this is a much better movie than Jim Henson’s later feature-length puppet-show Labyrinth. It has a better script, a more organically-constructed world and a total lack of David Bowie in stretchpants. This does not, however, mean that it is without flaws.
First, let me make sure I’ve got the story straight:
Okay. First off, a note on explanatory introductions. You know the kind, where the movie hasn’t started yet and a deep-voiced narrator intones: “In the mystic land of Urgh, a terrible darkness has overtaken the land as the evil emperor Zugg has imprisioned the good princess Thrak in the dark dungeon of Brell, which was located in the castle Aggghhh on the mystical island of Duhhhrrr” and so on. Note to screenwriters: don’t do this. Please. Why not? Because we haven’t met Zugg or Thrak and we don’t know why anyone is doing anything so we don’t care about any of that. No one has ever in the history of movies listened to the narration at the beginning of a fantasy. It does the opposite of informing the audience; it gives them a headache. The worst example of this I’ve ever seen is at the beginning of David Lynch’s Dune, where the first lines of the movie are a narrator intoning something about how there are four different planets in this story and they all have different political goals and are peopled by different kinds of creatures. I was there for the opening weekend of Dune in 1984, and when that stuff came on the screen my heart sank and I got sweaty palms: I felt like there was going to be a test at the end of the titles. The movie trailed off from there. I remember Sting in metal underpants and Kenneth McMillan drooling on some poor actress’s face, and then taking a plug out of some teenage guy’s chest and drinking his blood. And I think Kyle McLachlan was in it and his eyes glowed. Oh yeah, and there was a giant floating slug with a big brain and a vulva for a face, who for some reason was really important to the story.
Um, where was I?
The Dark Crystal starts with one of these impenetrable paragraphs of narration, describing the planet and the titular crystal and the vulture guys who worship it, intoned whilst we look at a picture of what looks like a coral Christmas tree on the Planet of Primitive Special Effects. Then, once that’s out of the way, before we’ve learned anything about the coral Christmas tree or why the vulture-guys worship it, we shift our attention to another place where some wrinkly dude makes a sand-painting, and we get another introductory paragraph about another bunch of characters we haven’t met yet. Then, unbelievably, we shift to a third location, where an elfy-looking guy plays a flute on a stream bank, and we hear another paragraph of introduction describing another bunch of characters we havent’ met yet. And with all this narration, we haven’t yet got one lick of storytelling yet, only a bunch of descriptive passages that have almost nothing to do with the images we’re seeing.
And then, after all that, the narrative that then unfolds, it turns out, is really quite simple and would have greatly benefitted from no introduction at all, much less three. If a movie has introductory narration it means that someone, either the screenwriter or the director, didn’t do their job right, forgot to tell the story in a series of images, and so in editing they had to scrounge around and find some shots of various objects that they could show to give us something to look at, whether they’re connected to the narrative or not, while the narrator tells us about stuff we haven’t seen, characters we haven’t met and political alliances we couldn’t care less about.
Moving forward:
In the village of the Mystics, Head Mystic tells Jen, The Last Gelfling, that it’s his destiny to find the missing shard of the crystal. He doesn’t tell him what he needs to do with it, just tells him he has to go to such-and-such place and get it from so-and-so. Then he dies. As he dies, we cut to the Crystal Castle (it turns out that’s the coral Christmas tree), where the vulture-guy emperor is also dying. A struggle for the dead emperor’s scepter ensues, during which one of the competitors, Skeksil, is shamed and banished. The new vulture-guy emperor sends his army of giant crab-guys out to find Jen before he gets to the shard.
So far, so good. A little pokey, but still hanging together.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, Jen, confused and, frankly, a little miffed, heads out of town and makes it, without too much trouble, to the place he needs to get to. He gets the shard he needs from a crazy lady who runs an observatory, and she warns him that he must use it to “heal” the dark crystal or else the world will end. Because of, you know, the prophecy.
Now, I know there are always prophecies in these movies. Hell, The Matrix has a prophecy and it works just fine. But I find prophecies lazy. Who made this prophecy? When? Why? What happened to that person? But, all right, there was a prophecy and the prophecy says that only a Gelfling can fix the crystal. Why only a Gelfling? Who knows? It’s a prophecy.
Question: Head Mystic is dying, the Great Conjunction (the once-every-1000-years alignment of the three suns) is nigh, and so Head Mystic tells Jen of his destiny and dies. Here’s my question. If the Great Conjunction happens every 1000 years, doesn’t that give Head Mystic quite a bit of lead time to prepare Jen for his quest? He could have told Jen about his destiny a year earlier, he could have told him when he was a mere boy. No, he waits until the ticking clock is about to go off and he doesn’t even tell Jen everything he needs to know before he keels over and dies. Which, now that I think of it, if he had 1000 years of lead time, why didn’t Head Mystic just go get the goddamn shard himself? Jen wouldn’t have to go out of his way at all.
But, you know, you give a Mystic a 1000-year lead time and he’ll always leave everything to the last minute. So Jen sets off on his quest and, you know what? The rest of the Mystics do too! We don’t know where the Mystics are going, but every now and then we cut back to them slowly, slowly traversing the desert. Turns out, the Mystics are heading to the Crystal Castle! And they get there just in time to participate in the climax of the movie! Jen just can’t get rid of these guys!
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Jen lights out for the territories, he gets the shard, he’s one step ahead of the giant crab guys, and he meets Kira, who’s a girl Gelflling, and her dog Fizzgig. They fall in love — hardly surprising, since they are the last two Gelflings left on the planet. What is surprising is that Jen, once he’s hooked up with Kira, and about half-way through the running time, literally stumbles across an ancient Gelfling temple, which tells him everything he needs to know about his destiny. And your humble correspondent hangs his head in shame.
Really? Stumbles across an ancient Gelfling temple? No other character could have given him his instructions? Noother character could have directed him to the ancient Gelfling temple? Kira couldn’t have said “You know, the elders of this village tell me of a ruin not far from here, they said I should go there if a male Gelfling with a crystal shard came by,” and then taken him there? There couldn’t have been an ancient scroll secreted in a locket given to Kira when she was an infant? Stumbled across the ancient Gelfling temple?
Anyway, so Jen and Kira get to the Crystal Castle, and right on time (end of Act II), Kira gets kidnapped and tortured and needs to be rescued. This is sigh-worthy enough on its own, but it actually makes the villains weaker. The villains, we are told, out of the blue, some time in Act II, in addition to wanting to keep the dark crystal broken, also seek to prolong their lives. To do this, they round up the local populace and drain their “life essence” out of their bodies with a piece of equipment they keep downstairs. Once your life essence is sucked out by this machine, you become a slave of the vulture-guys.
Why is this a bad thing? For the same reason Scaramanga is a bad villain in The Man with the Golden Gun: it gives them too many motivations. A good movie villain has one goal and one goal only. A villain might have a secondary motive, but it must be related to and dependent upon the primary motive. That is, a villain might try to kill the protagonist as a part of their drive to world conquest, but they must not kill the protagonist and also plot to steal the world’s largest diamond and also have a heat ray. When you give the villain more than one motive, it dilutes their power. Think about it, we talk about a scary villain as being single-minded. The Terminator, Hannibal Lecter, Dracula. What would we think of the Terminator if, in addition to wanting to kill Sarah Connor, it also planned to take over the computer-chip market?
So the first half of Act III of The Dark Crystal involves getting Kira out of her essence-draining trap and getting Jen to where he needs to be to heal the crystal. Much import is placed on how Jen needs to fix the crystal before the suns align, but we’re never really told what happens if he doesn’t. Do all the Mystics then die? What happens then? We’ve seen that when a Mystic dies, a vulture-guy also dies — obviously the vulture-guys don’t want the Mystics to all die. One of the vulture-guys mentions how the crystal will give them all eternal life, but if your eternal life fix was just a few minutes away, why would you bother draining the essence out of a Gelfling who happened by?
Anyway (spoiler alert), there are some complications on the way, but Jen gets the crystal fixed just as the Mystics walk in the door, and the crystal turns from purple to clear, and the Mystics and the vulture guys merge into one race of really-tall translucent alien dudes. So now I’m really confused — is this what the vulture guys were trying to avoid, turning back into these tall alien dudes? Because the tall alien dudes look ten times more immortal than the vulture guys. I mean, I really don’t get it, what was so great about being vulture guys that they wanted to stay that way?
As in Labyrinth, there is some fine puppet design, although in general I find the Labyrinth puppets to be more alive than their Dark Crystal counterparts. A rubber puppet, dying, in closeup, fails to generate much sympathy for me.
The Venture Bros: The Family that Slays Together, Stays Together part 1
One of the most propulsive, dynamic scripts in the series, “The Family that Slays Together” is also one of the most sincere and thematically coherent. Its action scenes rise to a new level of excitement and there is palpable dramatic tension, which makes the bent humor pop that much more.
But first, Molotov and her Blackhearts attack. Molotov, it seems, has come to warn Brock of his impending assassination by OSI. She does not try to kill him herself, but rather says she doesn’t want to “share” his assassination with the other OSI assassins. Her love/hate for Brock, and her jealousy for his other “suitors,” will save him — for now.
Brock is on the run with his life in danger, but he’s saddled with the responsibility of family, as the Monarch pursues his love, arching Rusty, while saddled with the responsibility of his family, the Moppets, Dr. Mrs. The Monarch and his henchmen, all of whom behave on this trip as a family — the Moppets are the misbehaving children, Dr. MTM (hey! MTM! And she even has Mary Tyler Moore’s haircut!) is the wayward spouse, the henchmen are the bored, easily-distracted teenagers. Which raises the question of The Monarch’s love for Dr. MTM — is she a stabilizing influence in his life, or is she just another burden that keeps him from his true love, Rusty?
The three assassins sent for Brock have their own love issues. Herr Trigger has a dangerously perverse love for his firearms (I kept expecting him to burn his tongue on one of his just-fired weapons), Go-Fish has his love of the sea and La Tueur develops a brief affair with Hank over their mutual love of Batman.
Brock goes to see Hunter to obtain safe passage. Hunter is, of course, a self-contained love/murder contradiction, a hermaphoditic stripper who gives Brock the tools he needs while giving him a lap dance, a pretend-love ritual which which Brock is deeply uncomfortable. Hunter’s and Brock’s obvious love for each other has, paradoxically, hit a barrier due to Hunter’s sex change. Brock once loved Hunter as a man, but now that he’s a woman there will always be a wall between them.
Under attack from Trigger, Brock orders the Ventures into the X-1. To get them to go, he barks that he never loved them. Hank interprets this as “the Lassie trick,” but I’m not so sure — I could still go either way on Brock’s love of the Ventures. He neither agrees nor disagrees with Hank’s interpretation, but goes to extraordinary lengths to protect Hank anyway (even though Rusty could, theoretically anyway, clone Hank again if he needed to).
(Brock then calls the X-1 to tell Rusty that he forgot his son, and Rusty says “no, Dean’s right here,” fuelling my pet theory that Dean is Rusty’s son and Hank is Brock’s.)
The Monarch finds his love conquest foiled — there’s nobody home at the Venture compound. He shoots his darts into empty rooms — no symbolism intended there, certainly — while Dr MTM prepares herself for an evening of seduction that never occurs. Instead, there is a different love crisis — a heartbroken Sgt Hatred sobbing in the bathroom. Sgt Hatred’s love/murder problem is that his wife Princess Tinyfeet has left him, and he has decided to commit suicide-by-arch by hiding out in the Venture compound and waiting for Rusty to get home.
(And, since Rusty is unlikely to kill Hatred by himself, it’s really Brock Hatred needs to come home. Sgt Hatred’s desire hinges on Brock’s love for the Ventures — if Brock does not love the Ventures, he will solve his OSI problems and, theoretically anyway, no longer have an obligation toward them.)
Even Helper has a love/murder problem in this episode! When Brock kills his car, Helper interprets the act as a salvo in a human/machine war. Once the problem is cleared up, Helper enthusiastically embraces his would-be killer and, later, bravely proves his loyalty to his family by acting as landing gear for the X-1. (The Venture clan, true to form, forget all about him, leaving him, apparently, to the predations of The Monarch in his flying coccoon.)
“The Family that Slays Together,” in its relentless drive to include every love/murder combination possible, includes a pair of ex-OSI agents who have become born-again Christians (or, rather, they have transformed/perverted their love for each other into a love of a deity). When pressed into action, these Jesus-lovers are happy to take up weapons to kill — although they seem to be more in love with the rituals of religious belief than in any kind of reality-based action (fair enough, if you ask me). They futz around with their trappings of holy devotion while Brock, the man of action, saves himself from Go-Fish. (Hey, wait — Jesus-loving agents, a fish-centric assassin…hmmm…)
(Two other things about the Brock/Go-Fish encounter: either Brock, somehow, shaves his head in order to fake-out Go-Fish, or else he’s actually bald and wears the mullet as a wig. Either way, there is a Biblical reference in the idea of “Samson” losing his hair, and thus his power — Brock loses his hair and it gives him more power. And, once the fight is done, he shows that he’s no slouch at Bible study — the implication being that he could keep up with the Soul Mates in the God-love thing, he’s just more firmly rooted in the world of action.)
Rusty, having inadvertently turned The Monarch’s love quest into a dead-end, not just masturbation but masturbation without climax, spends the episode unattached, gripy and bothered by all the tumult around him — altogether appropriate, as he seemingly loves only himself — which is, I suppose, why he needs the conditioner. For his beard.
Movie Night with Urbaniak: Primer
came over last night, ostensibly to watch Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (United 93 had made him curious). Over burritos from Taco Plus (surely the best burritos on the west side) he told me about his experiences shooting his guest shot on Without a Trace and I told him of my adventures wading in the dark, scary waters of the 4chan message boards.
Unfortunately, the DVD of All the President’s Men I have dates back to the dawn of the digital age, and it became quickly apparent that it was a crappy transfer of an unrestored print, dark and muddy. About ten minutes in, I mentioned that I would go to the DVD store and get a remastered copy of the movie, and Urbaniak leaped in and said that he’d much rather do that than continue watching it now — watching movies on a high-definition projector on a nine-foot screen has turned both of us into frightful DVD snobs.
With both World Trade Center and All the President’s Men scotched, Urbaniak said “Hey, what about that low-budget science-fiction movie you were raving about?” I had, indeed, raved about Primer in the past, modestly touting it as one of the most incredible movies ever made. I hadn’t watched it in a few years (I saw it once in the theater, and probably three or four times on DVD) and was also eager to see how it would look on my big system. As much as I had praised it to Urbaniak, he assured me that I had not hyped it enough. The movie is flat-out unbelievable — a sheer delight and a heart-stopping sci-fi thriller from beginning to end, albeit in ways utterly unexpected and unpredictable.
First, there’s the fact that it was shot for, they say, $7000. Now, anyone who’s ever made a movie will tell you that $7000 gets you exactly nothing. For $7000, everyone is working for free and you make the movie on weekends in your living room. By all rights, a $7000 movie should look like utter crap, have non-actors giving non-performances and a script by a writer so untalented he couldn’t get any money to shoot it. None of this happens with Primer — it looks great, the script is one of the best I’ve ever seen shot and the performances are uniformly excellent — but, I mean, really, really excellent.
As far as I can tell, Shane Carruth, who wrote and directed the movie (and stars in it, and edited it, and scored it, and designed its production and sound) is an ex-engineer of some sort who used what is, apparently, his extensive understanding of technical matters to concoct this story of a couple of guys who are working on some kind of project in their garage and who accidentally discover a new application for their invention. What Wikipedia doesn’t tell you is that the guy is a born filmmaker.
When I hear “low-budget independent first feature,” you know what I think of? I think of Clerks, a movie with a loose concept and a rough shooting style that requires the logorrheic charm of its writing and the attitude of its cast to hold an audience’s attention. That ain’t Primer. Primer has a brilliant concept, finely-crafted writing that, on every level, commands attention, exudes authority and confidence, filmmaking that crackles with tension and vivid, ultra-natural performances from actors and non-actors alike.
Scenes are written without the slightest consideration of “inviting the audience in,” and cut to the bone of comprehension. The movie is about a bunch of wonks deeply involved in their world of engineering, and their conversations are full of — almost consist entirely of — long strings of technical terms as they debate this or that application of various mechanical processes. This decision creates incredible tension in the early scenes as the viewer struggles to keep up with the story, and also serves the dramatic purposes of the narrative, which is, essentially, about a start-up technical enterprise that goes bad. The characters, in some scenes, might as well be speaking in a foreign language, and so the viewer is forced to follow the non-verbal cues of the scenes closely — who is angry with whom, who no longer trusts whom, who is hiding what from whom, who is doing what behind who’s back.
This is not merely excellent genre writing, this is screenwriting of the highest order. This should be the goal of every ambitious screenwriter — to present moments of detailed, impeccably observed, unadorned, uninflected human interaction, and the camera happens to be there in the room at the time. It’s one of the hardest things to do, but Primer does it over and over again, in a narrative that relentlessly escalates into higher and higher realms of speculative fiction.
But that’s just for starters. On top of being a screenwriter of the first rank, Carruth also knows, somehow, right out of the box, where to put the camera, how to cut a scene together for maximum tension and surprise, how to place actors in the frame, how to coax subtle, lived-in performances from his cast, how to design and dress sets, how to effectively score a scene, and how to act. It all feels ridiculously “real,” which serves to make its fantastical narrative that much more creepy and suspenseful.
On the other hand, I’ve watched it four or five times now and am only now beginning to understand what the hell actually happens in it — this is a narrative so full of impressive twists and mind-bending concepts that it makes Mulholland Dr. look like Flipper. And it’s all presented in the most subtle, least melodramatic form possible — go for a handful of popcorn and you could easily miss one or two key plot points. Carruth insists that the information is all there in the movie for people to figure out, and since he’s obviously about ten times smarter than me I’m sure that’s true. The nice thing about Primer is that its scene-by-scene filmmaking is so enjoyable (and its running time so brief) that it easily invites — no, cheerfully demands — multiple viewings.
David Bowie: a subjective overview, part 3
David Bowie’s sudden right turn from freak-flag Stonesy rock to blue-eyed Philly soul remains, 35 years later, one of the more startling transitions in pop-music history. This transition is most notable on Changesonebowie, where the LP suddenly goes from “Rebel Rebel” to “Young Americans,” and if you’re not prepared it can snap your head around like a spring-loaded head-snapping machine. The transition is so complete and uncompromised, it’s hard to believe it’s even the same artist — until the distinctive voice comes in, which somehow doesn’t make the transition any easier to digest. Rather the opposite — if the Bowie of Diamond Dogs was the “real Bowie,” then this bouffanted smoothie with the gold bracelets and the smoldering cigarette must be some kind of put-on, right? Because if it’s not, what could this music possibly mean? And yet the music on Young Americans seems, if anything, more authentic and accomplished than the half-parody rock of the Ziggy Stardust era. Then, was Ziggy the real put-on? But then who was the long-haired prog-folk freak in the dress from the first three albums?
The soul influence on Young Americans is obvious and pervasive, but almost as important is the influence of the young Bruce Springsteen. Bowie recorded both “Growin’ Up” and “It’s Hard to be aSaint in the City” and the panoramic, complex lyrics of “Young Americans” shows his influences — the first verse, with its doomed, working-class lovers making out in the car under the bridge is practically parody. What makes it impressive is not that it’s imitation but that it’s so well-executed, as though it were a long-lost early Springsteen song, performed by, say, Teddy Pendergrass. And if you were to remove the ridiculous, over-emphatic cover of John Lennon’s “Across the Universe” (honestly, if there was ever a song ill-suited to the soul-man shout-out treatment, it’s “Across the Universe”) and substituted Bowie’s version of Springsteen’s “Saint,” Young Americans would be instantly improved and have a lot more cohesion. (His version of “Growin’ Up” is another story.)
The other startling thing about Young Americans is the sudden improvement of Bowie’s songwriting skills. Of the eight songs on the album, fully half of them are well-made, with nary a clunker or doff line among them. This, oddly, presents a different problem: Bowie, on Young Americans, has digested his source material so thoroughly that some of the songs feel more like genre exercises than personal statements, songs anyone could have written. It shows great dedication to form but leaves little room for expression. They’re all enjoyable, but only “Fame” bursts through with a distinctive point of view. (There are two other songs of this stripe, “It’s Gonna Be Me” and “Who Can I Be Now?” that are just as good, if not better, but weren’t on the original LP for some reason, although either could have replaced the dreaded “Across the Universe.”) After “Young Americans,” the best, most startling song is “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” where Bowie takes one of his oldest motifs, the shape-shifting Nietzschean overman, and, somehow, manages to put him into the context of a sweet soul croon.
Station to Station is to Young Americans as Aladdin Sane is to Ziggy Stardust. The material is weaker, the production more ambitious, drama again substitutes for content and focus is again a problem. The title track sounds impressive, with its multiple sections and widescreen production, its vague-yet-serious-sounding lyrics. It, like the line says, drives like a demon from station to station, but I’m telling you, I’ve been listening to this song for 30 years now and I can’t tell what the hell he’s going on about.
I’ve been reading the Wikipedia article on Station to Station, which notes that the frosty, insincere nature of the singing is apparently due to the “character” of the Thin White Duke that Bowie was “playing” through the recording of the record, who apparently is not a very nice man. Well, it’s nice to know that this is supposed to be a “character,” but that doesn’t help me enjoy the record more. There are six songs on the LP, six, all of which are quite long, as though that were some kind of guarantee of seriousness, one of which is ten minutes long, or one-fourth of the total running time. One is a cover, three others are impersonal genre exercises not unlike the ones on Young Americans, well structured and but sung with more detachment and a kind of melodrama that leaves me cold. The most baffling of these is “Word on a Wing,” which Bowie (or the character he’s playing) would have us believe that he is a passionately devout Christian. I remain unconvinced.
That leaves “TVC 15,” which is, of course, a delight — weird, personal and idiosyncratic, with a beat and arrangement that kind of comes out of nowhere and sounds like nothing else on the record. I’m not sure exactly what happens in the song, I think it’s about a man who falls in love with TV set, then loses his girlfriend inside it. It’s not “Penny Lane,” but it comes closerto my idea of what good Bowie is.
Epic fail, part 2
For the second time in a week, Epic McFail chooses to behave as though the past eight years — oh hell, the past twenty years — did not happen. The Russian/Georgian conflict, he says is “the first…serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War.”
Everyone says stupid things. I say stupid things all the time. But then again, I’m not running for president. John McCain has been saying stupid things for months now, incredibly stupid things, regarding foreign policy, the one subject he considers to be his forte. And yet somehow he’s still taken seriously by some people (the media, primarily) as a presidential candidate.
The other day I thought maybe his flatulent “in the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations” line was some kind of misstatement of chronology — after all, a man who doesn’t know what a computer does can hardly be expected to understand when the 21st century began. But now he’s decided that the two wars we’re currently fighting, the two wars his party started and promptly fucked into a cocked hat, simply don’t count as “serious international crises.” No, they aren’t crises — they are logical progressions of events that run with the precision of fine Swiss craftsmanship.
These are not gaffes, these are not misstatements. This is his point of view. The Gulf War, Afghanistan, um, 9/11, um, the war in Iraq, it seems none of those count to him, none of those are “serious international crises.” What he means, of course, is that the Russia/Georgia conflict is the first “serious international crisis since the end of the Cold War” that he has a chance of understanding, that he has any kind of frame of reference for. McCain, and the rest of the fossils dominating the crumbling Republican party, miss the Cold War oh so dearly, when we knew who the enemy was and how to fight them, and I’ve seen signs in the Washington media this week that say “Oh boy! Another war! With Russia!! Hooray!! It’s just like the good old days!!!”
