Reruns

Movie: Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) (TCM).

Book: D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr.

TV: Doctor Who: Eve of the Daleks (BBC America); Only Murders in the Building: To Protect and Serve; The Boy From 6B (Hulu). 

St. Mawr is a lumpy pudding of a novella, crammed with D.H. Lawrence's themes and obsessions. The title character is a handsome but temperamental stallion, threatened with being sold to a new owner, a woman who will geld him, before his current owner, also a woman, decides to take him to America, specifically to a ranch near Taos, New Mexico. It doesn't take much knowledge of Lawrence's biography to see the correspondence between the horse and the author. The latter wound up on a ranch near Taos owned by Mabel Dodge Luhan, a wealthy American woman whose experiences developing the ranch are reflected in a narrative aside near the end of the story. But the bulk of the story deals with the acquisition of the horse by Lou Witt, an American woman, and her husband, Rico, who inhabit the bright but empty society of postwar England. St. Mawr becomes a flash point in their marriage, which has grown stale and sexless. The situation gives Lawrence ample excuse to explore conflicts familiar to his readers: nature and civilization, men and women, race, class, national identity, and the like. In addition to Lou and Rico, there's Lou's middle-aged mother, who serves as a kind of cynical chorus, commenting on their marriage. There are also two grooms for the horses owned by the others: the part-Mexican, part-Navajo known as Phoenix (Lawrence's personal symbol) and the Welshman Lewis, who comes as part of the deal when St. Mawr is acquired by Lou and Rico; both provide their own commentary on the story's themes and events. Truth be told, St. Mawr is kind of a mess, but like most Lawrence stories it's larded with some extraordinary descriptions and narrative turns. 

The last time I watched Blade Runner on TV, about six years ago, it was on HBO, which was still showing the version of the film with a voice-over narrative and a "happy ending" that Warner Bros. demanded after poor box office response to the initial release. TCM, I'm happy to report, is now showing the so-called "Final Edit," which was put together with the director's approval in 2007. It's a darker version, but a truer one -- even to the editing out of some brand names like Pan Am that were defunct in 2019, when the film's action takes place. (Atari still remains, but maybe it was too hard to cut.) I miss a little of the whimsy involving Sebastian's "toys" -- we seem to have lost what I remember as a teddy-bear figure that bumps into things -- but the ending has more power to haunt. It also sets up Denis Villeneuve's 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049, much better. 

Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

Last night's Doctor Who was a fairly routine episode involving a time loop in which the Doctor and her companions keep getting exterminated by Daleks but coming back to life to figure out ways to survive, which of course they do at the final second. Time loop stories are irresistible to sci-fi writers, and there are some good ones like Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993), Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014), and Palm Springs (Max Barbakow, 2020). But too often they fall into the trap of being the same damn thing over and over. Doctor Who avoided that one, but didn't give us anything new either.

Only Murders in the Building did something interesting in the second episode, called The Boy From 6B, last night: Because it featured a deaf character who could communicate only in ASL, there was very little audible spoken dialogue throughout the episode, even when the scenes involved our usual protagonists. The plotting remains skillful on this series.  

Slacking Off

Movie: Slacker (Richard Linklater, 1990) (Criterion Collection).

Book: D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr. 

TV: Only Murders in the Building: Who Is Tim Kono?; How Well Do You Know Your Neighbors?; The Sting; Twist (Hulu). 

New Year's Eve in the age of Covid: What better time to stay in and watch stuff that's not too depressing but has a little edge? Slacker fits those criteria as well as any movie. It's a comic portrait of the Austin counterculture of its day, edged with a little violence. I'm a big Richard Linklater fan, and I'm surprised I've never seen his debut film before. It's a walk-and-talker like the Jesse-and-Céline trilogy, and a group portrait like Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!, with some of the experimental élan of Boyhood. The tag-you're-it structure -- one character crosses paths with another, launching that person into their own episode -- is beautifully done: Austin becomes something like the Dublin of Ulysses, an inspiration that becomes obvious in the scene in which two guys toss a tent and a typewriter off a bridge as a third reads a passage from Joyce's book. The unknown performers mostly remained unknown, except for Linklater himself, the guy in the opening scene, listed in the credits as "Should Have Stayed at the Bus Station,"  and future director Athina Rachel Tsangari, the "Cousin From Greece" listed in the cast as Rachael Reinhardt. 

Richard Linklater and Rudy Basquez in Slacker (1990)

Only Murders in the Building was also a fortuitous choice for a low-key New Year's Eve. I can't binge-watch much more than the four episodes I saw last night, but the plot is ensnaring and I like wondering which guest star is going to turn up next after Nathan Lane, Sting, and Tina Fey. 

Evil Is as Evil Does

Movie: Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973) (TCM). 
Book: D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr. 
TV: Station Eleven: Survival Is Insufficient; Goodbye My Damaged Home (HBO Max); Only Murders in the Building: True Crime (Hulu). 

Badlands is almost the only Terrence Malick movie I can watch without squirming (and sometimes snoozing). It was also his first, before he yielded to his inclination toward profundity and made movies like The Thin Red Line (1998) and The Tree of Life (2011), which take conventional genres like the war movie and the family drama and infuse them with metaphysics and cosmological speculation. In Badlands he stuck to the two main characters, the psychotic Kit (Martin Sheen) and his morally blank girlfriend Holly (Sissy Spacek), and left the philosophical import of their stories alone -- or better yet, left them for us to ponder. For the movie is in its essence a fable about the nature of evil. Kit is, in the cliché parlance, a "cold-blooded killer," one who doesn't reflect on his actions, whether it's picking up the girl he takes a fancy to, or casually gunning down anyone who stands in his way. There's mercifully little in the way of backstory psychology -- we take Kit and Holly for what they are. We can surmise about Holly's emotional blankness, since we see a little of her father (Warren Oates) who is an inept and even cruel parent (he kills her dog to punish her), but we see and learn almost nothing about what shaped Kit. The tendency of some would be to fault the environment in which the two grow up: the bleak, opportunity-starved small towns of the American heartland. But Malick lets his cinematographers -- Tak Fujimoto, Stevan Larner, and Brian Probyn -- seek out the spare beauty of the region. We're left to surmise that perhaps this kind of evil -- the kind we see often in the cruel gun stories of our day -- can find its nourishment anywhere. 

Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

Two more Station Eleven episodes last night, one of them a continuation of the story of the Traveling Symphony, in which they meet up with the survivors of the Severn City airport and we learn that the Prophet (Daniel Zovatto) is Arthur Leander's son, Tyler, grown up. Whether he's good or bad is still up in the air. The more successful episode, to my mind, is the one that takes us back to the Chicago high-rise where the young Kirsten waited out the first months of the plague with Jeevan and his brother, Frank. Except that this time, the grownup Kirsten is present as a kind of interpreter of events, talking with her younger self, guiding her through her memories, which culminate in the young girl's putting on a play based on the Station Eleven graphic novel and with the death of Frank. This is a beautifully written and directed episode: I'd be surprised if it didn't win a lot of awards for  Kim Steele's adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel's novel and the direction by Hiro Murai and Lucy Tcherniak. 

I started Only Murders in the Building last night mainly because I was looking for something not overlong that would get me to my usual bedtime. A pleasant surprise: an intriguing story about three people (Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez) who discover they're all addicted to the same true crime podcast and wind up trying to solve a murder in their own Manhattan apartment building. I'll keep tuning in.  

 

Catching Up

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Movie: Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973) (TCM).

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

TV: Station Eleven: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren't Dead; The Severn City Airport (Netflix).

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Movie: Mind Game (Masaayuki Yuasa, 2004) (Criterion Collection). 

Book: D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr.

TV: Chopped: Pasta, Pasta, Pasta (Food Network); The Book of Boba Fett: Stranger in a Strange Land (Disney+); Death to 2021 (Netflix). 

In quick succession, Peter Bogdanovich made three terrific movies: The Last Picture Show (1971), What's Up, Doc? (1972), and Paper Moon. And then ... who knows what happened? Some blame his abrupt career decline on his infatuation with Cybill Shepherd, whom he miscast in Daisy Miller (1974) and the musical At Long Last Love (1975), after which he never recovered his status as a director. Whatever the reason for Bogdanovich's decline, there's something valedictory about Paper Moon when we watch it today, and not only because it was the precipice from which he was to fall, but also because it launched the troubled career of Tatum O'Neal, who won an Oscar for her debut performance, but became fuel for gossip as she grew p. It also marked the peak of her father's career: Ryan O'Neal went from being a star of the magnitude of contemporaries like Robert Redford and Al Pacino to fodder for tabloids, winding up as a supporting player on TV series like Bones. But set aside all that, and appreciate the crispness of the black-and-white cinematography of László Kovács, the skill with which Bogdanovich brings Alvin Sargent's screenplay to life, the cherishable Trixie Delight of the great Madeline Kahn, the superb work of Polly Platt in recreating small-town Kansas in the 1930s, and the easy rapport of the two O'Neals. One quibble about the closed captioning on the movie: In the diner scene below, Moses orders what the captions call "a knee-high and a Coney Island" for Addie. The "knee-high" is actually a Nehi, a now-defunct soft drink, as you can see on the label in the film.

Tatum O'Neal and Ryan O'Neal in Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973)

After finishing Troilus and Cressida, I have to conclude that the only way it could be staged today is as a knockabout bitter comedy. Taking it seriously is to endorse either the antidemocratic politics of Ulysses's speech on order or the nihilism of Thersites. A problem play indeed. 

The two episodes of Station Eleven I watched Tuesday night brought me up to date, but left me still confused about where it's going. So far, the series has alternated scenes from the immediate outbreak of the virus and scenes from 20 years later, the group of survivors it has chosen to follow continue their journey as traveling players. The function of Station Eleven itself, the graphic novel created by Miranda Carroll and cherished by Kirsten, remains one of the more intriguing mysteries of the series. I'm beginning to glimpse how things connect: Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony, and Clark (David Wilmot), the Rosencrantz to Arthur Leander's Guildenstern, and his outpost at the Severn City airport, but there are so many characters that it's hard to keep them in mind. Thank god for IMDb. 

I've always been fascinated by the Japanese imagination, which seems to bridge surrealism and pop culture with ease. I'm no devotee of manga or anime, so I can't speak with any confidence on the subject other than to express my appreciation of what bits of it I encounter, usually filtered through the films of Hayao Miyazaki or the novels of Haruki Murakami. I stumbled last night on Mind Game, the 2004 animated film by Masaaki Yuasa which is somewhat about the afterlife, and was left grasping for stability. I can't say I enjoyed it -- the film induced eyestrain as I tried to keep the images whole -- but I can see where its cult status came from. It's certainly a barrage of styles of animation, so much so that I can't choose any one image to represent it. The one below is from a "realistic" moment in the film.

A quiet moment in Mind Game (Masaaki Yuasa, 2004)

From Shakespeare to D.H. Lawrence. St. Mawr is a short novel (or a long short story) about Lou Witt, one of Lawrence's sexually frustrated women, who buys a beautiful but high-spirited stallion named St. Mawr. There doesn't seem to be any canonical saint by that name, and Wikipedia tells me that mawr just means "large" in Welsh. I've only just begun the story, so no reliable opinions yet, other than it seems to be following the author's familiar pattern of conflict between the civilized and the wild. 

The first episode of The Book of Boba Fett was promising, setting up the characters of the bounty hunter (Temuera Morrison) and his sidekick Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen), but not giving us much clue as to the direction of the story. I also watched Death to 2021, a spoof of year-in-review shows featuring some very funny performances by actors like Lucy Liu, Stockard Channing, and William Jackson Harper playing commentators, the standouts being Hugh Grant as an über-Tory Brit outraged by what he sees as the decline of everything that made Britain great, and Tracey Ullman as a Fox News-style personality.