California Split
SPOILER ALERT
American cinema doesn’t get any more behavioral than Robert Altman. This is storytelling of a very high order. Even though the film is tightly plotted, it feels like it has no plot at all. There are very few scenes that even feel like they’re scripted; it feels more improvised. Not only is the dialogue loose, a good deal of it is completely meaningless. Especially Elliott Gould’s character, who, like Shakespeare’s Gratiano, talks and talks all the time and never says anything.
The story, briefly: George Segal is a gambler on a losing streak, and he meets up with Elliott Gould, who doesn’t seem to attach much importance to winning or losing. He doesn’t see an “end game” to gambling, he just likes to gamble. But George, the second act announces, is in debt to a guy named Sparky, and has to come up with some money. George is out of money, but Elliott always seems to have enough to get by, and the two of them go to Reno and, against all odds, win over eighty thousand dollars.
Gambling, it seems to me, is a form of prayer. You put your money down, and you hope that God favors you. If you win, then your faith is rewarded. If you lose, then God is angry with you for some reason.
When you study the statistics, when you study the Racing Form, when you “bet with your head,” you’re saying that you’re not going to place your faith in anything unless you’re sure it’s a sure thing, which is another way of saying that you have no faith at all.
I think maybe that’s why cheating is so reviled, because the cheater has no faith. The cheater believes that one can be redeemed without faith.
So there’s George, and he’s on his cold streak, and he’s down on his luck, and we sympathise. Why? He’s a degenerate and a loser, why do we like him? Because we feel like we’re losers too, we feel like we’ve been shut out of some better life.
And George sells his car and his typewriter and his radio and tape recorder and takes all his money and all of Elliott’s money (which he’s gotten by hustling basketball and mugging a guy in a bathroom) and they head to Reno. And once the stakes are raised, Elliott sees everything as an omen. The snow is an omen, the carpeting is an omen, the decor is an omen. This is faith of a paranoid kind, if the carpeting is a sign that you’re blessed.
And we want George to win, because we want to win too. We place our faith in George, he’s going to win for us. He’s going to be saved, and we’re going to be saved along with him.
Think of this: all through the movie, we watch George and Elliott bet on all manner of things: cards, horses, boxers, roulette, dice. You bet on a horse, the horse doesn’t even know what money is. Cards don’t care what’s printed on them, dice don’t care how they fall. But in the audience, we’re betting on George, for the exact same irrational reason that Elliott bets on anything; he has a feeling. And if George wins, then our faith is rewarded. If he loses, then there is no God. We become complicit in the theme and message of the movie.
And guess what happens: George wins, BUT.
But after he wins, there’s a scene at a bar, just George and Elliott. And George is miserable, and Elliott is very very happy, and they have this exchange:
Elliott: You always take a win this hard?
George: There was no special feeling. I only said there was.
Elliott: I know. It doesn’t matter. We made a lot of money.
So George placed his faith, and his faith was rewarded, but in his moment of vindication, he’s realized that the dice are not God, they’re only objects, their numbers have no meaning. It took this incredible winning streak for him to finally realize that there is no vindication in winning a gamble.
Not to drag Mamet into this, but there’s a scene in his TV movie Lansky where Meyer Lansky (played by Richard Dreyfuss) goes to his gangster friends to get some money to build a hotel in Las Vegas. Gambling has been going on in Vegas for some time, but only marginally, in gas stations and bus stations and such. And Lansky holds up a sign he took off the wall of a gas station, one that was hanging over a one-armed bandit: “Higher pay means longer play.” “Gentlemen,” he says (I’m paraphrasing) “This sign is telling you that we will take all your money. What it promises is that it will take us longer to do it than others.” Mamet’s point is that there is something pleasurable and exciting about gambling itself, even in the act of losing, that people can’t get enough of, that the point of gambling isn’t winning or losing, but rather the thrill of betting itself.
After the bit about the “special feeling,” Elliott says that they have enough money to visit every track in the world, he says they have enough money to live at the track for fifty years. Because for him, there is no end to the game. Life is the game. You don’t quit the game; what else is there?
So George looks like he doesn’t like the sound of that idea, and there’s the following:
Elliott: So what do you want to do now?
George: (pause) I’m going to go home.
Elliott: Oh yeah? Where do you live?
And what he’s saying is, this is where you live, in the casino, at the dice table, at the card table, at the track. And we’re worried that he might be right.
Mr. Urbaniak will note that California Split features a three-second appearance by his Fay Grim co-star Jeff Goldblum.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
A good overview of the Enron story, its main players and their basic dramas.
Only in passing does it place the Enron phenomenon in its historical context, but there’s only so much time. For an overview of why Enron happened in the first place, I recommend The Corporation.
The key to a thing like Enron is the Milgrim experiment, which the film discusses at length. For those unfamiliar, Milgrim had one guy pose as a scientist and another guy pose as a test subject, and then asked normal people to come in and participate in some “scientific research.” He said that he wanted to learn if electrical shocks would help improve memory.
This was all a Mametesque put-on. There was no experiment, at least not involving electrical shocks.
The “scientist” was in the room with the normal person, and the “test subject” was in another room, unseen. The “scientist” would tell the normal person to increase the power of the electric shocks, the normal person would push a button and the “test subject” would scream in agony as the “shocks” got progressively worse and worse. The “experiment” would continue until the “test subject” was either dead or the normal person said that he wouldn’t push the button any more.
What Milgrim found was that over half of the normal people would gladly, even enthusiastically, kill the “test subject” just as long as the order to do so came from a legitimate enough authority figure.
A simple form of this can be found in, say, a restaurant, where you get bad service from a surly waiter. Why is the waiter angry? Probably because he’s treated badly by the manager, who is being squeezed by the owner to cut corners and maximize profits.
So the Enron story is about a handful of deeply unethical, conscience-free, amoral monsters who set the agenda for one of the largest corporations in history. They told their employees, by example and by direct order, that anything they did to make money for the corporation was not only good, but would be rewarded. And so the employees, and everyone working with the corporation, including banks and contractors and lawyers and accountants, enthusiastically participated.
Eventually, “anything” came to include a rainbow of fraud, theft, destruction and death.
Nazi Germany, same thing.
And the current administration.
And Hollywood.
Maverick
You know, I wonder why David Mamet hasn’t written a movie about poker yet, it being so popular with the young’uns these days.
Maverick starts at the protagonist’s Second-Act Low Point. He has a noose around his neck with the rope around a tree branch, atop his horse, with a burlap sack full of snakes at his feet.
The bad guys could have just shot him, but that’s the way it goes. They could have just taken out one of their guns and shot him and left him in the desert and stolen his horse. Hell, they could have just stolen his horse, that would have been enough. But no, they tie him to a tree branch, with his horse, and throw a bag of snakes at his feet. That means that the bag of snakes was part of their plan to begin with. Yes, they left town and rode out into the desert with a bag of snakes in order to put Maverick in this life-threatening position, and then they rode away.
BAD GUY 1: Okay guys, we got to stop Maverick from getting to the big card game. There’s a half a million dollars at stake, and that’s a lot of money, so it is absolutely essential that he not get to the big card game. Understand me? Okay. Here’s the plan: we capture him, hit him on the head, put a noose around his neck, put him back on his horse, find a tree in the middle of nowhere, wake him up, throw the bag of snakes on the ground, and ride away. It’s foolproof.
BAD GUY 2: Why don’t we just shoot him?
BAD GUY 1: Who asked you?
BAD GUY 3: Where do we get a bag of snakes?
BAD GUY 1: Snakes R Us, they’re having a three-for-the-price-of-two sale.
Anyway, Mel Gibson, as Maverick, is there tied to a tree, inches away from certain death. He looks up at heaven and prays to God, saying that if God will get him out of this situation, he will do anything — anything — to make it up to him.
SPOILER ALERT: Maverick makes it out of the dire situation and goes on to the big card game.
I can’t watch this scene without thinking that what is going through Mel Gibson’s head is: “Dear God, if you get me out of this grinning, happy-go-lucky movie star life of mine, I will never forget it and I will do anything — anything — to make it up to you.”
Religion, and its cousin Belief, weaves through Maverick. There are a handful of direct references to Jesus and God; Mel rides into town on an ass, and mid-way through the movie, there’s a fifteen-minute set piece where he goes out of his way to recover the money stolen from a group of women trying to set up a mission, even though they reveal themselves to be chisling, dishonest and hypocritical.
But is Maverick really about a man’s relationship to God? It’s hard to say. On the one hand, God comes through for Maverick when he needs him (and vice versa, I suppose), but on the other hand, one of the last lines of the movie is something like “There is no more deeply moving religious experience than cheating a cheater,” which, the last time I checked, does not come from the New Testament.
That line is followed by a conversation about a trick that Maverick pulls off at the climax of the movie. In this scene, Mel has 4/5 of a royal flush and is lacking only the Ace. He places his belief in the card, and lo, it is so; the Ace of spades turns up and the day, and Mel, is saved.
So, right after the joshing “religious experience” line, James Garner says to Mel something like “Hey, how did you pull off that Ace of Spades trick?” and Mel says, hardly believing it himself, “Magic.” Magic, of course, being the secular word for God.
There is a phrase that courses through Maverick (screeplay by the great William Goldman): “Just Teasing.” And in a way, the whole movie is Just Teasing. When Mel gets beaten up, it’s Just Teasing, and when he beats someone up, well, that’s Just Teasing too. When Mel acts the fool, that’s Just Teasing and when he steps up and defends someone’s life, that’s Just Teasing too. When someone says they’ll give you the money they owe you, they’re Just Teasing, and when they finally give it to you, that’s Just Teasing too. When a woman kisses you, she’s Just Teasing, and when you kiss her back, that’s Just Teasing too. Even an Indian attack is Just Teasing. Everything in the movie, it seems, is Just Teasing, except that magic Ace of Spades. That, the movie insists, is real.
If the magic Ace of Spades is the pole star for Maverick, money is the only thing that anyone cares about or respects in the young nation that Maverick journeys through. It solves problems, binds wounds, brings lovers together, builds missions, and turns the conquest of Indian lands into a farcical charade.
And I suppose that’s true of America, that all anyone cares about is money, and I suppose that money has turned the Indian’s suffering into a farcical charade.
Now, Maverick is a comedy, so let’s cut it some slack. For the Indian, the one with lines anyway, they got Graham Greene, a real live Indian, to lampoon the part he played in Dances With Wolves, and his performance is so fluid and reflexive that it reminded me of the Indians on F-Troop. So if the movie’s view of the Old West is okay with Graham Greene, I guess it’s okay with me too.
(How reflexive is Maverick? He actually refers to The Old West as “The Old West” as in: “News travels fast in The Old West,” as if people in The Old West actually referred to it as The Old West. So yes, the movie’s opinion of American History is Just Teasing.)
And while we’re at it, how about that Jodie Foster. She should do more comedy. She’s very funny in this, and she’s very funny in Inside Man too. She keeps pace great with Mel. In fact Mel, I would say, as far as big deal movie stars go, is quite generous and game to share the screen with his co-stars. And he’s hired a cast designed to remind astute audience members of great films from times gone by, and I give him (or whoever is responsible) credit for that.
But we were talking about that magic Ace of Spades. Maverick (the movie) kids about everything, everything but that. That Really Happened.
So, Maverick Believes in the Magic Ace of Spades, and even though he seems to be Just Teasing about God throughout the movie, there is, nonetheless, that miracle that allows him to win the day.
Now then, “winning the day” in Hollywood terms means that you walk off with a great deal of money. So now where are we?
I never saw The Passion of the Christ, but it seems to me that Mel pulled off his own version of Maverick here. He made a movie about Jesus, according to his lights, in Aramaic, which no one asked him to do, and he financed it with his own money. That is what folks in Hollywood would call a “fool’s gamble.” You only spend your own money on something if you’re an idiot. Right?
At the beginning of Maverick, Mel walks into a saloon and sits down at a poker table and proceeds to lose for an hour, before pulling out the stops and cleaning everyone’s clocks (whew! mixed metaphor!). I think he did something similar with Passion. He said that he would make it himself, spend his own money, and not care whether he made it back, that to make this movie was an exercise in devotion to his God. And everybody laughed and said “That Mel, he’s crazy,” forgetting that, in every movie Mel Gibson has ever made, THAT’S WHAT HE DOES. He does something ABSOLUTELY CRAZY and thus WINS.
When you think about it, it’s an incredible triumph. And, like Maverick, his act of devotion did what? Allowed him to ride off into the sunset with untold wealth.
Is this a great country or what?
Spartan
Purchased for $3.99 at Second Spin, Wilshire Blvd, Santa Monica. This price made even the clerk do a double-take.
Mamet’s smoothest, most sophisticated piece of film direction, this one feels more like a “real movie” than any of his others.
Val Kilmer is swell in the lead, William H. Macy is fine as the guy smoking the cigarette, but Ed O’Neill is a revelation as the authority guy in the big suit.
When this movie came out, some snorted with derision at the political stance of the picture, which includes the observation that the president would rather kill innocent people and sell his own daughter into slavery than risk losing an election. At this point of our national nightmare, that kind of news item would be noted on page A17.
The photography is silky smooth and seductive, and the production design is the best of Mamet’s films. You get the idea that he’s really starting to get the hang of this art form.
SPOILER ALERT:
There are a number of plot contrivances that do not detract from the overall pleasure of the experience. They are:
1. The Girl has a logo, a little emoticon [ %-) ] (so, Mr. “I only write on a portable Smith-Corona in a cabin heated with a wood fire” Mamet is familiar with the computer, after all!). This emoticon (or “device”) becomes a key plot point, as it shows up in the windows of both places where the girl is held against her will.
Derek Luke (Val’s Little Pal #1) “sees the sign” in the window and thus we know that the girl is not dead. Okay then, good enough.
But wait! Derek also found her earring at the house, so why did we need the sign?
My question: why did the girl put her logo in the window of her captor’s house? The only thing I can think of is that she was hoping that the Delta Force guys would see it and thus know that she’s in the house, without her captors knowing.
But why would she know that the Delta Force guys are coming? And if she knows they’re coming, why would she need to put the sign in the window? What would it matter? And then she does it at the second place in Dubai too, even though she knows by now that no one is coming after her. Why?
2. The Shootout At the Airport. At the end of the movie, Val Kilmer finds that he’s been followed by Bill Macy and his team of commandos. Bill and his team are there to kill Val and the girl, to protect the president.
There’s a shootout in a hangar, and much posing with guns and ducking in shadows.
Why are there no people working in the airport? It seems like you can have a shootout any old place these days.
But wait, there’s more.
During the shootout, a plane happens along. Who is it? Why, it’s a SWEDISH NEWS TEAM, led by a tall, gorgeous blond of course. Aren’t they all? And they capture the whole shootout on tape and eventually get The Girl onto the plane and out of the country. They save the day.
Why was there no Swedish News Team around when someone backed out of their driveway and rammed my car? It came down to my word against his, and he didn’t have any insurance. I sure could’ve used a Swedish News Team that day.
Why is a Swedish News Team in Dubai that day anyway? What Swedish News Team is so well-funded that they’re sending private jets to Dubai with an anchor and a camera crew? You would think a stringer in a hotel would be enough for the Swedes, but no, apparently there is an unquenchable thirst in Sweden for news from the United Arab Emirates, and their hugely well-funded News Teams jet from country to country, scouring the streets for any tidbit of news they can find.
SWEDISH CAMERAMAN: Where are we going?
ANCHOR: Today we are in Dubai, tomorrow Oman.
SC: What’s happening there?
A: Doesn’t matter. We’ve GOTTA GET THAT NEWS.
SC: Is that the thing?
A: That is the thing.
SC: Well ain’t that a kick in the head.
A: It is indeed.
I guess, because they’re Swedish, they’re guaranteed to be neutral on the subject of the president’s daughter.
Speaking of which, because they’re Swedish, they also get their plane off the ground on time, even when there are ARMED COMMANDOS HAVING A SHOOTOUT IN THE HANGAR NEXT TO THEM. This goes back to the “why are there no people working at the airport?” question. The last time I was on a plane and a shootout broke out among a bunch of commandos on the runway next to my plane, we were delayed quite a long time, let me tell you. But I guess these things happen every day in airports in Dubai.
PILOT: Excuse me, tower, but there is a shootout going on in hangar one-niner.
TOWER: Understood, proceed with takeoff.
PILOT: Um — shouldn’t you, um, “do something” about it?
TOWER: This is Dubai, chief, we don’t bother with that stuff.
PILOT: Oh my God! The guy from “Fargo” just got his throat cut! Shouldn’t you call somebody or something?
TOWER: It’s probably some American inter-agency struggle going on. Rogue agent, kidnapped president’s daughter, not our concern. Let ’em sort it out.
PILOT: Roger.
3. There’s a Female Unit Member, who is Val’s Little Pal #2 (since Pal #1 gets his head blown off at the end of Act II). FUM has a drink with Val, and Val tells her what he’s going to do.
Then he goes to Dubai, seemingly by himself, and meets up with an English guy, who becomes his Little Pal #3. (Hint: Don’t become one of Val’s Little Pals. They all get shot dead, dead, dead. So much for Leave No Man Behind.)
Anyway, so there’s the airport, Val has The Girl, Bill Macy shows up, shootout, bang bang bang, Val’s hit, Faceless Commando is killed, and bang-zoom, here comes FUM, out of the shadows, to escort The Girl to the plane (before getting shot in the back by Macy).
How did FUM get there? It seems that she was there with Macy. But why would she be with him? She was with Val at the top of the act. Did Val give her the assignment of “Stick with Macy, just in case he tails me to Dubai and tries to cut us off at the airport and kill us both?” Why would he do that?
In Heist, Gene Hackman’s character (“Bob” or “Joe” or whichever man-man name he was given this time around) always has a back-up plan. It’s part of his credo. Is FUM being with Macy Val’s backup plan?
But no, she couldn’t be, because Val’s surprised when he finds the Tracking Device (capitals intentional) in his Special Knife That We Had a Whole Scene About. So Val DIDN’T think that Macy was going to follow him to Dubai. Why then would he have FUM be with him?
Or was her mission to merely be there in the airport hangar when Val showed up with The Girl? If so, where was she at the top of the act, when he flew in on the airplane and did the thing with the shipping container?
I understand that if you have not seen the movie, the above will make no sense to you. But hey, these nits ain’t gonna pick themselves.
Heist
David Mamet is one of my favorite writers of all time. Only Samuel Beckett takes up more space on my bookshelf.
As a playwright, he’s the best America has living.
As an essayist, he is without parallel.
As a novelist, he is provocative, innovative and occasionally opaque.
As a screenwriter, he has brought us many sterling entertainments, including The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, The Untouchables, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Edge, Wag the Dog and Ronin.
Certainly, a writing career for anyone to envy, especially me.
It’s Mamet the director who presents a different kettle of fish.
House of Games, strangely, is still his most satisfying movie. The weird dialogue, the stilted Mamettian acting, all of it is of a piece, it doesn’t seem like it’s poorly done, it seems like a stylistic choice, and the script is very strong.
But every now and then Mamet the director lets Mamet the screenwriter get away with some lazy writing.
In Heist, the characters speak some of the cheesiest “tough guy” lines ever written. It’s all “Is dat th’ thing?” and “You’re burnt! You got old!” and “Walk away” and “Aren’t you as cute as a Chinese baby?” He puts an old black-and-while WB logo at the front of the movie, as if to indicate that he’s taking us back to the WB gangster movies of the 30s, but it doesn’t stick this time as a stylistic choice, it just feels false and clumsy. And not even uber-Mameteer Ricky Jay can get away with a line like: “My motherfucker is so cool, when he sleeps, sheep count HIM.” Come to think of it, I don’t even know what that means.
Maybe it’s because House of Games seems to take place in a kind of hermetically sealed Mamettian fantasy world, but Heist seems to take place in something like our real world, so it seems weird that the actors are all talking like some post-modern 40s tough-guy gangsters.
After seeing The Spanish Prisoner (his second-best movie) I joked to myself that one day, Mamet would write a screenplay that consisted entirely of aphorisms. Heist seems to come close to that.
CHARACTER 1: Waste not, want not.
CHARACTER 2: In’t dat th’ thing.
1: It is.
2: As it was in the beginning.
1: A stitch in time —
2: — is a penny earned.
1: In’t it?
2: We would say that it is.
1: And beauty is but skin deep.
2: Except when it is not.
1: Is dat th’ thing?
2: Dat is th’ thing.
1: Hold ’em or fold ’em, everybody leaves the game.
And so forth.
The script has a number of good ideas in it and plenty of dazzling lines, my favorite of which is “Everybody needs money, that’s why it’s called money,” another non-sequiter which nevertheless resonates.
Mamet the film director sometimes seems to have a certain amount of disdain for the medium he’s directing in. He will occasionally use very old-fashioned, obvious, far-fetched, nonsensical or downright silly plot points, as if to say “Well, the important thing is the drama, whatever gets us from Point A to Point B is good enough. It’s just a movie, after all.”
Hollywood Ending
Well, they can’t all be classics.
I can’t think of anyone who likes all of Woody Allen’s movies, but most of the time, even with the lopsided ones, I can find something going on in it that makes it worthwhile.
Hollywood Ending is one of the very few where, despite the sincere efforts of everyone involved, it doesn’t click.
Most of the cast is great, but there are a few key performances that just fall flat, sound off-key. Some of the writing is really sharp, really clever, but again, in a couple of key places, I have to look at it and go Huh? This is the guy who wrote Hannah and Her Sisters?
Scenes sometimes go on too long, and a few times actors even flub their lines. It’s hard to believe that the man who has somtimes re-shot entire movies decided to use some of the takes he has here.
But like I say, they can’t all be classics.
But it does remind me of how many great films Woody Allen has made. In fact, I would have to say that, of all living American directors, he has a higher percentage of great films than anyone else. Like roughly a third.
I would say, in chronological order, they are:
Sleeper
Love and Death
Annie Hall
Manhattan
Stardust Memories
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy
Zelig
Broadway Danny Rose
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Hannah and Her Sisters
Radio Days
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Husbands and Wives
Manhattan Murder Mystery
Bullets Over Broadway
Deconstructing Harry
Sweet and Lowdown
Match Point
Wow! That’s 18 great movies! And that’s not counting movies he didn’t direct, like Play it Again, Sam and (cough) Antz!
Then there are movies that kind of skate by on charm (Bananas), fine pictures with debilitating flaws (Mighty Aphrodite), and misfired experiments (Shadows and Fog).
Mostly, these later comedies (Celebrity, Small Time Crooks, Hollywood Ending, Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Anything Else) seem like scripts that he shot in order to keep working. Which is fine. Mostly they maintain the high level of technical excellence that we’re used to (Celebrity, for instance, is one of the most beautifully shot of all his movies), but every now and then there will be some scene or bit of business or performance by a major star and I’ll say “What’s up with that?”
There are a number of scenes in Hollywood Ending that really fizz and pop, but then there are bizarre lapses (like the last-minute inclusion of a long-lost son) that seem really lazy and perfunctory.
Luckily, as we can see with Match Point, his gift has not entirely lost him.
Beckett Smackdown
The New York Times has published a piece on the 100th birthday of Samuel Beckett. In the piece, they solicit comments from a number of playwrights about Beckett’s influence on their works.
One of the playwrights contributing to the piece is Will Eno, who nearly won the Pulitzer last year for his somewhat Beckettian monologue Thom Pain (based on nothing), which vaulted to legendary status with the help of Mr. James Urbaniak’s volcanic performance.
Indeed, the Times referred to Mr. Eno as “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.”
Will Eno is a wonderful writer deserving of all the success that he’s had. But I just want to point out that I was influenced by Beckett when Mr. Eno was in short pants. I yield to no man in my being influenced by Beckett, and yet somehow the New York Times never got around to asking me about it. That might have something to do with me not having a play run off-Broadway for fourteen years (and unsuccessfully at that), but I prefer to see it as blatant favoritism. Indeed, I have a sneaking suspicion that payoffs were made.
I can hear the discussions at the Theater desk:
EDITOR: So who are you gonna ask about the Beckett piece?
WRITER: Oh, the usual suspects. Mamet, Vogel, Durang, Guare, Eno.
EDITOR: What about that guy who co-wrote Antz? Isn’t he a playwright?
WRITER: Chris Weitz?
EDITOR: No, the other one.
WRITER: Paul Weitz?
EDITOR: No, the OTHER one.
WRITER: Oh, you mean that Alcott guy?
EDITOR: Yeah, didn’t he used to write plays with a heavy Beckettian influence?
WRITER: Yeah, but I didn’t get a check from him.
EDITOR: Understood.
Here are some indications of the depth and breadth of Beckett’s influence on me and my work:
1. I have read everything that Beckett has written, usually more than once, and own at least one copy of each work, in English and in French (or whichever language the piece was originally written in).
2. I have a picture of myself standing in front of Beckett’s house in Paris, as well as pictures of the front door of Les Editions du Minuit, his publishers (the door reads, in French, Please Enter, Do Not Ring).
3. I have seen productions of all of Beckett’s plays, some of them many times, including many weird, distaff productions of prose works adapted awkwardly to the stage.
4. I own a copy of the Beckett On Film DVD set (my favorite is Anthony Mingella’s film of Play).
5. I have a little metal bust of Samuel Beckett on top of my computer monitor. It features Beckett’s head on top of an open book. I got it on Ebay.
6. I have three cats, named Didi, Gogo and Lucky.
7. My son’s name is Samuel Alcott.
Your move, Mr. Eno.
Tomie
There are five of these creepy, nasty little J-horror films: Tomie, Tomie: Replay, Tomie: Reborn (I know, I know) Tomie: Another Face and Tomie: Forbidden Fruit.
Tomie (pronounced Toe-mee-ayy) is a beautiful teenage girl. She seduces every man she meets and drives them crazy, makes them hurt each other, their friends and their families. Eventually their guilt and horror get the better of them, and they turn their anger toward Tomie, and they kill her in some brutal way. Methods include decapitation, dismemberment, incineration, freezing, impalement, drowning and falls from great height.
But Tomie, it turns out, is not an ordinary teenage girl. She is, apparently, some kind of ancient demon who takes the shape of a teenage girl. She has, apparently, come into our world many times over the past millenia or so, wrecked a whole bunch of people’s lives, been destroyed, and come back, again and again and again.
So, you kill Tomie because she’s ruining your life, and a few days later Tomie shows up to ruin your life all over again. Only this time she’s really mad.
Maybe she goes after your friends or family first. And you can’t very well say “Hey! You’re not supposed to be walking around, I dismembered you in the bathtub and bury you in the woods!” Because that would tend to cast a shadow of suspicion upon you. So you kind of have to take it and go crazy as she dismantles your life and drives you to suicide.
My favorite of the series is Tomie: Replay, where she emerges from the belly of a girl in the opening credits (don’t ask me), grows to maturity in a fish tank in the basement of a hospital, and goes on to ruin the lives of some hospital administrators.
There are always a couple of great set pieces in each movie. Tomie can spring back to life from even a speck of blood, so even if you’ve incinerated her body, if a speck of her blood got on your rug while you were cutting her up, she can grow back from that. Oh my gosh it gets icky.
In Tomie: Forbidden Fruit, there’s an ugly-duckling schoolgirl whom Tomie befriends, and when the girl’s father kills Tomie with a meat cleaver, cuts her up and dumps her in the river, the girl goes to find Tomie’s head and carries it around in a gym bag while it grows little stumpy limbs again. There’s a priceless scene where the girl is pushing Tomie’s severed head around in a baby carriage and runs into a fussy matron, who bends over to coo at what she thinks is a baby, and is instead confronted with the severed head of a teenage girl, who says something like “Could you stop staring? It’s very annoying,” upon which the woman screams and runs away.
Good fun for the whole family.
Tomie: Reborn is directed by Takashi Shimizu, who later went on to direct Ju-on and its American remake, The Grudge.
Madagascar, Small Time Crooks, Schindler’s List
Boy, now that’s a marquee!
Sometimes all a movie has to be is funny, and the first two movies on this short list are funny (Schindler has its moments too, but let’s not push it). I wouldn’t confuse either Madagascar or Small Time Crooks with high art, but Madagascar is a scream. I watched it for the third or fourth time this evening (that’s how it is when you’ve got kids) and my four-year-old and we both laughed our heads off. You know a movie has got something on the ball when both the four-year-old and the forty-four-year-old are laughing at the same gags.
It has almost no plot, and for once it’s a relief. These CGI pictures are so expensive, they usually end up over-plotted and airtight, not a moment wasted. As James Urbaniak once said about Robert Redford’s Quiz Show, “You could bounce a quarter off that movie.” And as much as I like the Pixar movies (I’ve seen all of them at least 50 times), they are slick, polished and calculated compared to Madagascar, which has a loose, flexible, what-the-hell quality about it. Maybe because it’s only 75 minutes long, 60 of which passes without the semblance of a plot. It feels like a much older comedy, something like Horsefeathers perhaps, with an accent on situation and character instead of plot, which, considering its budget and construction, is a miracle. I mean, think of it. Here’s a movie that had to cost over $100 million and was developed over something like a decade, and at some point someone in charge (probably Jeffrey Katzenberg) said “You know what? The hell with plot and ‘lessons’ and heart-tugging emotion. People get that all the time from family films. Let’s just make this the funniest thing we can, let it breathe a little. Can we do that?”
And then it works, and goes on to make a billion dollars (I’m guessing).
Small Time Crooks I haven’t seen since it came out, but, like a lot of Woody Allen’s slighter movies, it holds up well over time. I would put it slightly below Manhattan Murder Mystery or Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy in terms of pure enjoyment.
Woody Allen gets lauded all the time for his writing and direction, but no one ever seems to notice what a great actor he is. And you could say “Yeah, but he’s always Woody Allen,” but so what? Cary Grant was always Cary Grant, no one ever complained about it. The detail, spontaneity and rhythm of his performances is consistently astonishing to me. How he gets the performances he does from his other cast members is another question. I’ve heard from a number of actors that he is ridiculously incommunicative as a director, but he somehow he manages to get career-best performances from people. In the case of Small Time Crooks, there’s Elaine May, who I’ve never seen work as an actor before, and she is amazing here. Yes, okay, everyone’s playing stupid, but she takes it to a whole different level. With Michael Rappaport for instance, we can see that we’re seeing a smart guy play a stupid guy, but Elaine May is completely opaque, your jaw drops when she says the things she does. I’ve actually met people who are as stupid as her character here, and that’s how they are. Not just garden-variety stupid people, I mean people where you really don’t know how they get through the day, you’re worried they’re going to forget to breathe or something.
Although the DVD transfer is only okay, the photography by Zhou Fei is typically luminescent.
And I bring up Schindler’s List only to point out that it also features the guy painting the name on the glass door again. So there you are, Hudsucker, Seven and Schindler, the basis to your next “stump the film geek” quiz.
Jurassic Park
If I ever teach a class in screenwriting, I will assign Jurassic Park for the day we discuss “Theme.”
A studio executive once said to me “Well, Jurassic Park is all well and good, but you know, in the end it’s not really about character.” And I nodded sagely as if I understood what she said and thought “No, it’s about dinosaurs.”
All of Spielberg’s films are strong on Theme, but usually there’s a lot more plot and character and incident and shape to them, so we don’t think about it so much. A lot of that is pared back to minimal levels in Jurassic Park, leaving Theme and Action to dominate.
Luckily, both Theme and Action in Jurassic Park are done pretty darn freaking well.
What is the Theme of Jurassic Park? Well, it’s not a secret. The Theme of Jurassic Park is Nature Vs. Technology (for those of you playing along, the theme of Lost World is Hunters Vs. Gatherers).
Every scene, almost every beat of every scene, practically every line of dialogue hits this theme over and over again. Sam Neill touches a computer screen and it flickers. “What’d I do?” he exclaims. “You touched it,” says Laura Dern. It plays as a spontaneous exchange but it’s subtly reinforcing the theme.
Every time someone or something tries to contain life, life breaks through and, more likely than not, goes on a rampage, with much blood and gnashing of teeth. Other times, life is cornered and killed (or nearly) with technology, as when the little boy is caught on the electric fence and zapped within an inch of his life.
On the way to the park, the helicopter plunges straight down into a canyon, and we spend about a minute watching the actors jostle and buckle their seatbelts. Why is the scene there? It contains no dinosaurs and no real suspense. No, the scene is there for one moment, when Sam Neill can’t find his seat belt buckle and has to figure out a way to strap himself in. Life, as Jeff Goldblum notes later, finds a way.
Soon afterward, the gang are locked into an amusement park ride, and respond by breaking the ride and going off on their own. Sam Neill gets out of a moving car as Jeff Goldblum notes, shocked, “Who could have predicted that?”
Even tiny little things, like when Samuel L. Jackson sits down at Wayne Knight’s desk and says “Ugh! Look at this workstation!” as he brushes a week’s worth of candy wrappers and soda cans to the floor. Wayne Knight may be a computer genius, but he’s also still a big fat slob and he will pollute his environment. (of course, the same scene features a not-so-subtle closeup of a photo of Oppenheimer, who knew a thing or two about the hazards of harnessing nature.) And while Jackson is trying to make sense of Knight’s desk, Knight is off in his Jeep (technology), being overwhelmed by a thunderstorm (nature), wiping the fog (nature) off his glasses (technology), with his hi-tech dinosaur-egg (nature) smuggling maguffin (technology) in his pocket.
See? And every scene is like that. When the gang first arrives on Jurassic Park, a shiny new Jeep pulls up with a big shiny dinosaur logo on the side. At the end, a similar Jeep pulls up to the visitor’s center, but now the logo is splattered with mud. Nature has won this battle.
Of course, the dinosaurs themselves are products of hugely sophisticated technology themselves, and the movie is a triumph of technology on its own level too.
And I have silverfish in my screening room.