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. 

This Is the Way the World Ends

Movie: Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) (Netflix).

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

TV: Holiday Wars: Champion Cake Off (Food Network); Landscapers: Episode Four (HBO Max); Station Eleven: Hurricane (HBO Max). 

If a couple of friends whose taste I trust hadn't praised Don't Look Up I might not have watched it. My local newspaper critic gave it a rave and even put it on his top ten list for the year, but he and I don't always see eye to eye, and his opinion of Adam McKay's film was out of the mainstream. Don't Look Up currently has a 55% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the negative critics used words like "leaden," "sluggish," "slapdash," "smug," "bombastic," "frantic," "laborious," "toothless," "messy," "smarmy," and even "disastrous" to describe it. Several compared it unfavorably to Stanley Kubrick's 1964 similarly apocalyptic satire Dr. Strangelove. But this time audiences seem to be out of step with the critics: Not only did my friends praise it, but negative reviews like Peter Bradshaw's in The Guardian have been met with a barrage of online comments from people who thought the movie was brilliantly effective in its satire on the Trump era, social media, capitalistic excess, and journalistic ineptness. The movie also made the top position in viewership on Netflix, contradicting George S. Kaufman's observation that "satire is what closes on Saturday night" -- i.e., after opening on Friday. Okay, I enjoyed it, too, especially Meryl Streep's take on what Donald Trump would be like if he were a woman, and Jonah Hill's merciless parody of Donald Jr. I don't think it's the best film of this or any other year, but it hits the mark more often than not. I'm one who doesn't wholeheartedly worship Dr. Strangelove, for the reason I set forth on this blog: "It may be that reality has outstripped satire. Who could have invented Donald Trump?" All too often, our public figures, our politicians, our business leaders, our media darlings seem to be satirizing themselves. Who could have invented Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elon Musk, or Tucker Carlson, either? Who could have foreseen a time when people would be taking horse dewormer for a viral plague and calling for the head of Dr. Fauci? I credit McKay with a lot of insight and wit in even daring to take our common plight and sink his teeth into it.

Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, and Jennifer Lawrence in Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021)

Landscapers ended last night with its characteristic surreal embroidery on the crime of Susan and Christopher Edwards, imagining the two, as they sat on trial for murdering her parents, as characters in a Western movie -- an echo of their love of films like High Noon. I appreciated the series' attempt to go beyond a mere restaging of the crime and the trial, and the work of Olivia Colman and David Thewlis in portraying the couple, but I'm not sure the story demanded four hour-long episodes.

Station Eleven made another switch in time and place to tell the story of Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler) and her affair with Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) at the onset of the pandemic. I don't know how the episode links with the first two (except for Arthur's death in the first one), or what Miranda's graphic novel has to do with anything (I expect a lot), or even why the episode is called "Hurricane," but I intend to stay tuned to find out. 

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. 

Guilt-free Pleasures

Movie: Walking a Tightrope (Nikos Papatakis, 1991) (The Criterion Channel).

Book: Anthony Trollope, The Warden. 

TV: Guy's Grocery Games: Fieri Family Holiday Showdown (Food Network); Station Eleven: Wheel of Fire (HBO Max); Maid: String Cheese (Netflix).

I don't care for sports. There's too much noise and hype surrounding the efforts of people to move a ball from one place to another. But I do like competitions if they involve doing something constructive: designing a dress, decorating a room, even making tchotchkes with glue guns and papier-mâché (i.e., Making It.) And food competitions are the best, which is why my DVR fills up with the latest episodes of shows like Chopped and Top Chef, among many others. I even learn something from them about ingredients and techniques in my own piddly efforts in the kitchen.

Guy Fieri has gotten a bad rap from a lot of critics: His restaurants, they say, aren't very good. He hasn't really distinguished himself as a chef. And his personality is somewhat over the top. I'm not much interested in his explorations of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, reruns of which seem to take up a heft portion of the Food Network's real estate. But I think he's good at heart, and he's done a lot of charitable work assisting restaurants hit by the pandemic and/or burned-out by California wildfires. And like DDD, as he abbreviates it, Guy's Grocery Games is a showcase for chefs around the country who often haven't made a big name for themselves except in their own towns. 

On GGG, they compete in goofy games that test their skills by limiting the ingredients or techniques they can use in preparing food for a panel of "celebrity chefs" -- usually best known for their appearances on the Food Network or Top Chef -- like Antonia Lofaso and Alex Guarnaschelli. The most recent show, which I watched last night, was a special competition centered on the Fieri family: The competitors were Fieri's sons, Hunter and Ryder, and his nephew Jules, each of them assisted by one of the frequent judges on the show, Lofaso (Hunter), Michael Voltaggio (Ryder), and Aaron May (Jules). The judges were Guy's wife and his parents. The winner got $10,000 to donate to charity. (It was Ryder, who donated it to his high school -- not, I think, the most needy of charities.)

This sort of thing is not to everyone's taste (dubious pun intended), I know, but I find it the perfect unwinding mechanism, the sort of thing people call a "guilty pleasure." I reject that term. I feel no guilt at all watching such shows -- which I do most nights after dinner, as I drink a mug of tea, and before I submit myself to heavier fare on television. The heavier fare last night included Nikos Papatakis's Walking a Tightrope, a 1991 French drama starring Michel Piccoli as a character based on Jean Genet: a successful and famous writer who likes to pick up handsome young men, not only for sex, but also to meddle in their lives. In the film, he takes on an impoverished youth (Lilah Dadi) who works for a circus scooping up elephant dung and tries to make him a star tightrope walker. Things don't go well, as you might suspect. Much of the film is quite good, but it falls apart at the end when the complications are resolved with a suicide that feels less like a sufficiently motivated act than one that fits the themes and symbols of Papatakis's screenplay. 

Maid last night continued Alex's woes, as she struggled with her attraction to Nate (Raymond Ablack), the good Samaritan who has taken in not only Alex and Maddy, but also Alex's maddening mother, who has a spectacular breakdown at the end of the episode. It's all very well-played, but I still think the series teeters on the edge of soap opera too often. I also watched the first episode of Station Eleven, a series that has gotten good reviews, partially because it begins with a pandemic that echoes our current plight, but which was scripted and partially filmed before the Covid outbreak. Patrick Somerville, its writer-producer, made one of the most intriguing TV dramas of recent years, The Leftovers (2015-2017), so I look forward to following this one.