The more you know
Long-time reader and Confidante-Of-Alcott The Editor points me toward today’s book review.
Well, this is certainly worth a look.
Movie Night with Urbaniak: Black Narcissus
Not Richard Roundtree.
I’d never seen Black Narcissus before, but it’s come up a number of times in conversations lately (as in “You’ve never seen Black Narcissus?!” or “Well, if you’re interested in Michael Powell, the place you should start is Black Narcissus.“).
I don’t know why I’ve put off seeing it, but for some reason I always thought it was another “hip,” updated retelling of a Greek myth a la Black Orpheus. Either that or a gritty 1970s Harlem crime thriller starring Richard Roundtree. (“Narcissus is back, and this time — he’s black!“)
Anyway, it’s neither of those things. It’s an early Technicolor masterpiece about a bunch of nuns who try to open a convent on a mountain redoubt in the Himalaya. It’s photography was about ten years ahead of its time and its sexual tension was at least thirty.
Essentially an allegory about British colonialism, a group of uptight, sexually repressed British nuns (are there other kinds?) led by Sister Clodagh decide it’s a good idea to open a franchise in a “wild,” “simple” land where “the men are men, the women are women and the children are children.” The free, “childlike” ways of the locals and the clear mountain air conspire to drive all the nuns a little crazy as they struggle to reign in their desires and neuroses. English civilization crash-lands on the rocks of local superstition, the local prince falls in love with the local slut, and man trouble erupts in the form of local shirtless handyman Mr. Dean. Eventually the story devolves into a horror movie as one of the nuns, Sister Ruth, proves herself to be even more tightly wound than Sister Clodagh and becomes Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
Deborah Kerr is measured and nuanced as Sister Clodagh and Kathleen Byron is appropriately high-strung as Sister Ruth, but otherwise the acting in the movie is about as broad and hysterical as it gets. British stage actors play Indians (talk about a director missing his own metaphor!) so big it’s as if they’re waiting for the applause to follow their most outrageous moments. Jean Simmons plays the Paris Hilton of the Himalaya with teeth-baring, hip-swiveling gusto. David Farrar should smolder and seduce as Mr. Dean, but instead he just kind of stands around and poses. As
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notes, it doesn’t help that he looks like Kevin Nealon, if Kevin Nealon underwent plastic surgery to look more like Daniel Day-Lewis.
Attention World
I am now cool.
How, you may ask, has this improbable event come to pass?
The explanation is devilishly simple — I have recorded a voice for an upcoming episode of The Venture Bros. Yes, it’s true, I made the trek from Santa Monica to a sound studio in Burbank, a sound studio cleverly concealed within the converted garage in the back yard of a non-descript fake-Craftsman house on an anonymous street in an anonymous neighborhood in Southern California’s most anonymous city, not far from the Bob Hope Airport and beneath a row of enormous power lines. It was here in these secret surroundings that my transition from Fool to Cool was made complete. The lines were recited, the tape rolled and magic was created.
Needless to say, the details of the plot are highly confidential and cannot be revealed, even to me. In fact, I was not even given a script to read. Rather, for security purposes, I simply recorded a series of phonemes that will later be edited together by Mr. Publick to form words and sentences.
But Todd! you will gasp in disbelief. You suck! You suck, and voices for The Venture Bros. are only recorded by the coolest of the cool! Stephen Colbert does a voice on The Venture Bros.! Can I get a sweet gig like that?
It turns out yes, you can! The process, it turns out, is startlingly simple.
First, befriend Venture Bros. star voice-actor James
for 18 years. Then, ingratiateyourself with
by writing and publishing long, detailed, in-depth analyses of all 26 episodes of his TV show. If your analyses please him, before long, you will be invited to meet with Mr. Publick.
Your first meeting with Mr. Publick will be in a public (pun intentional) place, a bar or a restaurant in a crowded urban area. Mr. Publick will sit with his back to the wall (assassination attempts are, sadly, a daily event in his life). You are advised to bring Mr. Urbaniak along as a pacifier, a kind of racetrack goat — Publick is a true thoroughbred and is prone to irrational fears and sudden outbursts of paranoid frenzy. Bring plenty of cash — Mr. Publick has the appetite of several lions and can consume six chickens and a roast suckling pig at one sitting — and he will expect you to pick up the tab.
To keep up your end in conversation, you are also advised to research the darkest, dustiest corners of popular culture — no reference is too obscure, no quip too knowing to stump the fiery and provocative Mr. Publick, whose brain weighs over sixteen kilos (counting the one he has in his upper thigh to control his lower half).
This process may need to be repeated. Mr. Publick has many enemies with false faces and more than one shape-changing alien has tried, and failed, to get close to him in the past.
Once you’ve impressed him with your knowledge of The Eiger Sanction and Colossus: The Forbin Project, you will be required to submit a highly personal cv: allergies, fears, dislikes, loves and lusts, embarrassing anecdotes from birthday parties long past. Mr. Publick requires absolute loyalty to his cause and needs to know every single aspect of your private life in order to make sure there are no skeletons in your closet that he has not put there himself. This will require the presentation of an autobiography, a minimum of six hundred pages, which Mr. Publick will have read by the scores of Korean children who draw his cartoon show.
Then there are some sexual acts you will required to perform, which I will not recount here. Suffice to say, you will know what to do when the time comes.
Then, if all goes well, you too may be chosen to do a voice for an episode of The Venture Bros. And then you, too, will be cool.
The Killers vs The Killers
Two films based on the same story (by Ernest Hemingway), released in 1946 and 1964. Textbook examples of how different approaches to the same narrative yield substantially different results.
THE STORY: Two bad guys show up and kill a guy. Someone wants to know why, and an investigation is launched. We learn about the life of the deceased, Citizen Kane-style, through the dead guy’s friends, enemies and associates. A tragic tale of downfall and redemption, crawling with noir characters — ruthless hitmen, big-hearted lugs, fiery-eyed femmes fatale, honest cops and cold-hearted Messrs Big. In both cases, the utterly predictable plot is rescued by the unconventional presentation. Criterion (who else) has helpfully put them in the same box for you.
THE PHOTOGRAPHY: The 1946 movie is filled with enough inky shadows and expressionistic lighting to make Frank Miller go weak in the knees. The 1964 version is lit like an episode of Marcus Welby, MD. (No wonder, it was shot, for TV, on the Universal lot. So when the killers pull up to a house, it’s literally next door to Marcus Welby’s and Beaver Cleaver’s, etc, etc.) It has other things going for it, but is also flat, bright and desperately uncinematic.
THE BIG TWIST: In the 1946 version, the investigation is launched by a tough-talking, hard-knuckled insurance investigator whose brief is to make sure his company’s money is being handed over to the proper beneficiaries. This task is accomplished around the end of Act I, which leaves the insurance investigator with a good half-hour of pointless investigation to go before he stumbles onto a second reason to be doing any of this — the dead guy was also a robber of another one of his company’s clients! By investigating the robbery, he’ll be saving his company’s clients up to a fraction of a penny on their future premiums! Apparently, the insurance industry was big, exciting news back in the 1940s — the subtlety’s and vicissitudes of the insurance game also form the spine of Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic Double Indemnity. “Grab your coat honey, there’s a new insurance thriller playing at the Bijoux!”
The big idea for the 1964 remake is that the investigation of the dead guy’s murder is undertaken by the hitmen themselves — they know there’s money to be found somewhere in this mystery and they’re going to find it, even if it means killing the guy who hired them. This is a brilliant innovation that plunges an already amoral story into darker, uglier territory and does a lot to ameliorate the fact that it looks like an episode of Marcus Welby, MD. It also opens with a startling sequence involving the hit men bullying their way through a school for the blind, which has to be new record for hit-man bullying.
THE KILLERS: The dialogue between William Conrad and his accomplice in the 1946 version is just smashing as they taunt the utterly helpless inhabitants of a small New Jersey town. The moment one realizes the movie isn’t going to be about the hit men is a sad moment indeed, especially when their sneering thuggery is replaced by the adventure of a foursquare insurance investigator. So it makes perfect sense to replace the investigator with the killers themselves in the remake. And Lee Marvin is utterly Lee Marvin-like in the William Conrad part. The problem is that he’s been paired with TV mainstay Clu Gulager, who grabs the part of “second hit man” in his teeth and shakes it into a kitten. He sneers, he giggles, he plays with toys, he glowers, he menaces, he’s got his engine firing on all cylinders. Thing is, he’s miscast, looks like he should be playing the nice young doctor on Medical Center, and he’s cast opposite Lee Marvin, who gets out of bed looking like he’d kill you for stealing his newspaper. So a typical hit-man scene will be Clu Gulager chuckling and giggling and sneering and pouncing around the room, and Lee Marvin just sitting there commanding attention.
THE BIG LUG: The Killers is a tragedy about a sports figure who loses his touch and is forced into a life of crime in order to keep his femme in furs. A young Burt Lancaster is a boxer in the 1946, and he’s just amazing. Not bright at all, completely baffled by the world he’s entered into, sweet and meaty and un-clued as to why he’s so unhappy, he’s like Lenny if Of Mice and Men had been a gangster picture. For the 1964 remake, the producers had the idea to make the big lug a racecar driver who falls from grace and ends up as a getaway driver. The character arc is still the same but the casting is disastrous — John Cassavetes is obviously far too intelligent and canny to play a man in over his head. To compensate, the screenwriter has given him drive (get it?) instead of brawn as his motivating factor, but still the viewer has no choice but to sit there and say “Hey, you’re John Cassavetes, why you makin’ these bonehead choices?”
THE DAME: Ava Gardner smolders and seduces indelibly in 1946, but you know what? the surprisingly fierce Angie Dickinson kicks ass in the remake. A-plus in both cases.
THE BIG CHEESE: Perfectly okay Albert Dekker serves as an adequate Big Cheese in 1946, and for reasons unrelated to acting talent is overshadowed by Ronald Reagan in 1964, who at the time was a genial b-list lead on the downhill side of a long career. The part requires him to be cold, heartless and cruel, qualities he would go on to effortless personify in American politics, but to which he is utterly unsuited as an actor. The producers must have suspected that hewasn’t going to quite hit the mark as a ruthless gangster, so they have made his right-hand man hapless weasel Norman Fell, whose job seems to be making his boss look tough in comparison. “We gotta blow this joint babe, Ronald Reagan is here, and he’s got Norman Fell with him!”
Fred Thompson
Fred Thompson: good actor.
Look. I like Fred Thompson. I liked him in Marie, I liked him in Die Hard 2, I liked him in Cape Fear, I liked him on Law & Order. I know nothing about his political career, but all it takes is a sentence like this to allow me to completely write him off as any kind of serious candidate:
“Republican Fred Thompson said Friday that terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden is “more symbolism than anything else” as the presidential hopeful warned of possible greater al-Qaida threats within the United States.”
Got that? Osama bin Laden is not a criminal, or a terrorist, or a person, or a freedom fighter, or a psychopath, or the leader of a terrorist organization, or the murderer of 3000 Americans on our own soil, or any other concrete appellation you could give him — he’s a symbol. He’s a symbol instead of a person.
Why would Fred Thompson characterize him thus? Because you can fight a symbol forever and never win, while a person you could hunt down and capture and bring to trial. Which, by the way, Bush failed to do.
(Why did Bush fail to do this? Conventional wisdom says he could have captured bin Laden but “got distracted” by Iraq at a crucial moment and let him go. Personally, I don’t think Bush ever wanted to capture bin Laden — that would be accomplishing something, and would make a lot of his Arab friends angry. Better to attack a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and is not a theocracy — the better to create his world of endless war and profits.)
Now then, that’s just the first part of the sentence. Bin Laden is “more symbolism than anything else,” not a big deal, not worth going after, not worth thinking about, nothing to see here, move along, move along. But then, without even pausing for a breath, Thompson goes on to “warn of possible greater al-Qaida threats within the United States.” Yes, exactly. No, we’re not going to pursue bin Laden because frankly, who cares, he’s not important, he’s just a symbol, but for god’s sake YOU MUST ELECT A REPUBLICAN, OTHERWISE AL- QAIDA WILL KILL YOU IN YOUR SLEEP!!
The fact that this blatantly deceptive, manipulative crap is reported without comment, of course, is another matter altogether.
Waiting for Godot, the Classic Comic edition
click for readable view.
I have no idea who created this. I found it here, with no explanation.
I post this primarily for the edification of
, who studies comic adaptations of classics (and who’s probably already seen it). The weird thing is, based on the Classics Illustrated comics R has shown me, this doesn’t even seem like too far a stretch, more like a loving tribute.
Bartholomew and the Oobleck
click for larger view
Bartholomew and the Oobleck, for the uninitiated, is about a king who gets bored with the weather and commands his creepy magicians to make something new come down from the sky. As I read the first part of this story to my kids tonight, my son Sam (6) interrupted me to ask “Is that really a good idea?”
Oobleck was published in 1949, a time when it seemed that the kings of the world did indeed seem to be bored with the weather of the world and, aided by creepy magicians like Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, deemed it necessary, for reasons having to do with hubris and pride, to have something new fall from the sky.
The narrative tension of Oobleck is palpable as Bartholomew, the lowly page boy, tries first warn the king against his foolish whim, then waits with nameless dread for the coming apocalypse, then desperately races to warn the kingdom of the king’s disastrous mistake.
It’s hard to read this story without feeling a lot like Bartholomew. We all knew our current king’s folly was a bad idea, everyone tried to tell him so, but kings will be kings and so the creepy magicians (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Halliburton, the Carlyle group, PNAC, etc etc etc) created an apocalypse for the boy tyrant.
(With plenty of little army men for him to throw around the floor of his throne room while he made exploding noises, but don’t let me mix my metaphors.)
The effects of oobleck, it turns out, can be reversed with a simple act of humility on the part of the king. Our boy king, of course, we have learned is incapable of an act of humility, and even if he were, this particular oobleck is, alas, here to stay. Our boy king’s plan, his stated plan, is to keep the war in Iraq going long enough to become someone else’s problem, and, theoretically, never end at all.
(A canny commentator remarked recently that Bush is not, and never was, interested in being president. What he was interested in was winning the election. We’ve seen, indeed, over and over, that Bush’s main objective has always been to win, no matter what he has to do, what laws he has to break or who he has to kill to do so. We’ve also seen that he does, in fact, have no interest in leading, making decisions or doing anything remotely presidential, like treating other leaders, or anyone really, even his own mindless supporters, with anything like dignity or respect.)
Just to be clear —
“Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq”, translated, means “Bush Will Say Anything He Has To To Keep the War in Iraq Going On Forever.”
But don’t take my word for it. Watch Mr. Olbermann’s commentary instead.
(I don’t know how Keith Olbermann manages to keep up his outrage every day, but I’m glad somebody in the media is doing so.)
Please please please let this be so.
UPDATE: Apparently, in addition to being a closet case who likes anonymous sex in public restrooms, Larry Craig is bad at dialing the phone. Here is a voicemail he left at the wrong phone number.