Happy Boxing Day!

 Friday, December 24, 2021

Movie: Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: Holiday Baking Championship: Ultimate Holiday Party (Food Network); The Wheel of Time: The Eye of the World (Amazon Prime); The Witcher: What Is Lost (Netflix).

Thursday, December 25, 2021

Movie: Trouble in Mind (Alan Rudolph, 1985).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: Money Hungry (Food Network); The Witcher: Redanian Intelligence, Turn Your Back (Netflix).

Jaskier (Joey Batey) is back! The snarky, motormouth bard is just what The Witcher needs to liven it up. One of the things that set The Witcher apart from the other current fantasy streamer The Wheel of Time, whose season-ending episode I watched on Christmas Eve, is the former's occasional lightness of tone. Imagine The Lord of the Rings without the antics of Merry and Pippin, or Game of Thrones without the sarcastic wit of Tyrion and you get something like the heaviness that often makes Wheel a bit of a slog. I will probably tune in to the next season of that series, but I hope its producers find a way to lighten up. Mat (Barney Harris -- the role has been recast for the next season) provided some darkly irreverent humor in the earlier part of the series before he got left behind, and there's some mild comedy inherent in the character of the Ogier Loial (Hammed Animashaun), but the show has mostly focused on establishing its places and characters and the nature of the central quest. 

The Witcher did much of the expository work in its first season, so perhaps it can afford to get a little looser in tone, although there was humor even then, much of it centered on the role of Jaskier as sidekick to Geralt. In this season so far he's paired with Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) instead, which is even more of a mismatch than that of bard and witcher. Even before Jaskier turned up, however, there was some humor evident in the tensions of the relationship between Geralt and Ciri (Freya Allan). Henry Cavill is wonderful at showing Geralt's exasperation with her, as he did with Jaskier. 

I complained about not being able follow the Yennefer plot in the first few episodes, but I'm getting the hang of it now.

Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)

As for the movies I watched, Cool Hand Luke is one of Paul Newman's signature roles. Looking back at my comments on the movie in Oscar A to Z, I see that I regarded the film as somewhat pretentious in its treatment of Luke as a "Christ figure." I was less bothered by that on this viewing, although there is a shot of the beaten half-naked Luke with arms outstretched and feet crossed that's clearly a crucifixion pose, and a whiff of a suggestion at the end that Luke dies for his fellow prisoners' sins. But what one really remembers about the movie are its raucous moments like the egg-eating wager and of course Strother Martin's "failure to communicate" line. 

Kris Kristofferson and Divine in Trouble in Mind (Alan Rudolph, 1985)

Trouble in Mind is "stoner noir," a subset of neo-noir that also includes The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973). It's not quite as good as the Altman film, partly because it doesn't have the underpinning of Raymond Chandler's novel. Alan Rudolph, who also wrote the screenplay, tries a little too hard to be cleverly off-beat. Still, it has Divine (out of drag) as its villain, managing to accomplish the film's eccentric aims more fully than its stars do. Kris Kristofferson and Geneviève Bujold sometimes seem like they don't get the joke; on the other hand, Keith Carradine does, maybe because he had worked with Altman and is used to this sort of thing.  

Beginnings and Endings

Movie: The Long Good Friday (John Mackendrick, 1980) (Criterion Collection).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: Holiday Baking Championship: Ultimate Holiday Party (Food Network); The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC); Maid: Sky Blue (Netflix); Station Eleven: A Hawk From a Handsaw (HBO Max). 

Every actor has to start somewhere, so it's fun to see Pierce Brosnan as "1st Irishman" in The Long Good Friday, a role that gives him no lines but a couple of key moments in the unfolding of the plot. It was only his second screen appearance and his first in a theatrical film, but it's clear to see that the camera loves him. He's cast as a killer, seducing and stabbing a gay henchman of London mob boss Harold (Bob Hoskins). The plot of The Long Good Friday is complicated in the manner of such noir thriller writers as Raymond Chandler: Harold wants to go semi-straight with a property development that he bloviates will make London the capital of a new Europe, but he needs funding, so he invites a New Jersey mafioso, Charlie (Eddie Constantine), to attend a big presentation of his plans for the project. Somehow, however, things don't go as he hoped. In addition to the murder of his man Colin (Paul Freeman), Harold's mother narrowly escapes death when her Rolls-Royce is blown up, killing the chauffeur. And when he tries to take Charlie out to dinner at a pub Harold owns, it blows up just before they arrive. There's no Philip Marlowe on hand to figure out who's out to get Harold, so he has to do it on his own, with the help of his mobsters, one of whom, of course, is disloyal. The plot twists eventually involve the IRA, some stolen money, and a corrupt cop, among others. Hoskins is wonderful in the role, and the ending, in which he finds himself hoist with his own petard, is a tour de force: an extended closeup in which Hoskins's face reveals the range of emotions he's experiencing, from fear to frustration to desperation. Helen Mirren is cast as his ... I suppose "mistress" is the word, a role that doesn't give her enough to do, but she does that little bit brilliantly. 

Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren in The Long Good Friday (John Mackendrick, 1980)

Maid's conclusion was as much of a happy ending as the series could properly allow: Thanks to a somewhat unconvincing change of heart on Sean's part, Alex and Maddy are able to leave for Montana and their new life. For a bit it looks like Mama is going to join them, but as usual nothing she decides is set in stone. I liked the series -- it kept me coming back for more. But it needed a little more grit to offset the sentiment. Maddy (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet in earlier episodes, Angelina Pepper in the last three) is a little too winsomely precocious to be entirely credible as a child tossed around in a dysfunctional marriage. 

Station Eleven jumps 20 years ahead in its second episode, with Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) grown up and touring the pandemic-blighted landscape with a touring group of Shakespeare players. But the series keeps jumping back to the days of the outbreak, with young Kirsten (Matilda Lawler) living in the high-rise apartment of Jeevan (Himesh Patel) and his brother, Frank (Nabhan Rizwan). There's a stunning sequence in which Kirsten plays Hamlet with the company, her lines triggering flashbacks to the moment when she learned of the death of her family. This is shaping up to be a rich and often weird series. 

Vivat Academia!

Movie: Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000) (Cinemax).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, edited by Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: Holiday Baking Championship: Behind the Buttercream (Food Network); The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC); Landscapers: Episode Three (HBO Max); The Witcher: Kaer Morhen (Netflix). 

I've been having flashbacks to my days in academia lately. I mentioned a couple of days ago that some of them had been triggered by reading Anthony Trollope's The Warden, with its somewhat snarky allusions to the Pre-Raphaelites and mild satire on Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens. I might have missed those if I hadn't spent so many years long ago trying to become a specialist in Victorian literature and culture. But I really think the nostalgia for the old university scene was touched off a few months ago by the Netflix series The Chair, which had fun with the tempest-in-a-teapot quarrels of a college English department. It brought to mind what's known as "Sayre's law," that academic politics are especially bitter because the stakes are so low. 

My latest surge of academic memories comes from having finished The Warden and turned my attention to re-reading Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. I had a heavy dose of that story in graduate school not only from a course in Renaissance literature, but also from the earlier version I read in my Chaucer course. But what tugs at my memory is what happened at my Ph.D. orals: One of my inquisitors was the professor from that Renaissance course, for who I wrote a paper about Shakespeare's Troilus. I don't remember much about the paper except that it was something about the self-consciousness of the title characters of the play. But then, a couple of years later, as I stumbled my way through my orals, the professor (who had given me an A, or maybe an A-, on the paper), thought he was doing me a favor by asking me questions about the play. At least I think he did it out of kindness -- I hadn't slept for two nights before the exam, and it must have shown -- but I couldn't remember a thing about Troilus and Cressida. It was agonizing, but somehow I passed anyway. 

Granted, T&C is one of Shakespeare's stranger plays, often rhetorically difficult, with ambiguous, dislikable characters and lots of classical allusions that go over the heads of contemporary readers or viewers of the play's comparatively infrequent performances. But I feel it my duty to bone up on the play once again, which means reading the academic prose of the Arden edition's introduction. I haven't gotten to the play itself yet; I'm still plodding through Prof. Kenneth Palmer's discussion of its parallel structure and other features of interest mainly to scholars -- of which I am no longer one. 

My other dip into academia lately was watching Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys last night. It's set in a college in Pittsburgh, where Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas), a novelist teaching in the English department's creative writing program, goes through a variety of improbable but funny trials and tribulations, some of which pivot on his affair with the college's chancellor, who happens to be the wife of the English department chairman. The movie was well-received by the critics, especially Douglas's performance, but it bombed at the box office. I had seen it before and remembered being amused by it, but I have to say it feels a little dated. For one thing, the sexually predatory edge to the gay editor played by Robert Downey Jr. looms a bit larger than it might have 21 years, and our ability to respond with laughter to his "transvestite" girlfriend has shifted a bit toward discomfort. Still, it features some good performances by Douglas, Downey, Frances McDormand, and Tobey Maguire, as well as Bob Dylan's Oscar-winning song "Things Have Changed." They have indeed. 

Tobey Maguire and Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys (Michael Chabon, 2000)

I also watched the latest installment of HBO's beautifully performed "true crime" drama, Landscapers, which is being eked out slowly with a new installment every Monday. I don't understand why it's being released this way, as it's not a particularly suspenseful drama. Maybe HBO is just counting on our waiting eagerly for another chance to watch Olivia Colman and David Thewlis create fascinatingly complicated characters. 

On The Witcher, Geralt (Henry Cavill) and Ciri (Freya Allan) make their way to his home, which is full of other witchers who wind up fighting this week's monster, which has possessed one of their own. Great special effects, but I haven't quite figured out what's going on in the other plot of the series that involves Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), who falls in with a bunch of elves.