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.  

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. 

Miss Me?

 So on Christmas Eve last year, I gave up movie blogging. A lot of effort for not much return, it seemed to me at the time. But with Christmas looming again, it feels right to re-enter the blogosphere, maybe this time with a wider scope. 

Last night, I watched Death at a Funeral (Frank Oz, 2007), a sometimes amusing, sometimes stupid British farce with some performers I like, namely Matthew Macfadyen, Peter Dinklage, and Rupert Graves. It was remade in 2011, and that version lies somewhere in the queue of movies on my DVR that I've recorded. Dinklage apparently plays the same role -- a gay man who crashes the funeral of his lover after being cut out of the man's will -- in the remake. On the whole, not a total waste of his and the other actors' talents, but not a movie I'd urge upon anyone who hasn't seen the classic Brit farces like Kind Hearts and Coronets or The Lavender Hill Mob or The Ladykillers, all of which do this sort of comic larceny and mayhem with greater finesse.

Matthew Macfadyen and Peter Dinklage in Death at a Funeral

On TV I started the second season of The Witcher, a well-made Netflix fantasy series starring Henry Cavill as some kind of fantasyland soldier of fortune dedicated to killing monsters. The first episode of the season opened with highlights supposedly recapping the first season, which started two years ago. I watched that season and enjoyed it, but I have to admit that the recap didn't really refresh me on what happened then, much of which I've forgotten. No matter, the new season started off very well on its own, and I didn't really need to be au fait with the backstory to enjoy it. 

I also watched the sixth episode of Maid, an often depressing Netflix series about the struggle of a young woman, played well by Margaret Qualley, to make it on her own with her 3-year-old daughter after leaving her emotionally abusive alcoholic husband. The series focuses on the complications and contradictions of the American welfare system, as the heroine, Alex, tries to keep her head above water despite the snares of its red tape. Andie MacDowell is wonderful as Alex's air-headed, gray-haired hippie mother, who hinders more than she helps. The series often seems to be on the verge of sinking into sentimental mush, but it hasn't done that yet. 

I'm also reading Anthony Trollope's The Warden, which takes me back to my days as a Victorian literature scholar. More on that later, maybe.

The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956)

Nancy Kelly and Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed

Cast: Nancy Kelly, Patty McCormack, Evelyn Varden, Eileen Heckart, William Hopper, Henry Jones, Paul Fix, Joan Croydon, Gage Clarke, Jesse White, Frank Cady. Screenplay: John Lee Mahin, based on a play by Maxwell Anderson and a novel by William March. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: John Beckman. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Alex North. 

The Bad Seed stands out today as one of the more muddle-headed products of Production Code censorship. In the play and novel on which the movie was based, Christine Penmark, the unwitting carrier of the gene that turns her daughter, Rhoda, into a serial killer, commits suicide after giving the child an overdose of sleeping pills. One of the shocks of the novel and play is that Rhoda survives to kill again. But suicide as a positive plot resolution and crimes that go unpunished were taboo under the Code, so John Lee Mahin's adaptation blunts the ending for both characters. And then, to add farce to bathos, someone thought it a good idea to add a "curtain call" sequence in which the actress playing Christine, Nancy Kelly, gives the actress playing Rhoda, Patty McCormack, a spanking. Since spanking is hardly a punishment for murder, you have to wonder if Kelly is punishing McCormack for upstaging her. (In any case, McCormack seems to be enjoying it a little too much.) Still, if you take the movie on its own terms, it has its creepy moments, most of them involving McCormack, whom we spot as a bad kid from the moment she shows up with her braids so tight it looks like they hurt and wearing a starchy, spotless outfit that no decent child would have tolerated for a moment. There's some entertaining overplaying by Evelyn Varden as the psychologizing landlady and Henry Jones as the nosy hired man. The production is stagy and the performances often overblown, with the exception of Kelly, who strives to make her character -- and the ridiculous premise that evil is inherited -- credible. It's a role that could easily have tipped over into camp -- as the rest of the film often does -- but Kelly balances right on the edge. 

Spiritual Kung Fu (Lo Wei, 1978)

Cast: Jackie Chan, Kao Kuang, Dean Shek, James Tien, Yee Fat, Wang Yao, Jane Kwong, Hsu Hong, Chui Yuen, Peng Kang, Li Hai Lung, Li Chun Tung, Yuen Biao. Screenplay: Pan Lei. Cinematography: Chen Jung-Shu. Art direction: Chou Chih-Liang. Film editing: Liang Yung-Charn. Music: Frankie Chan. 

Ghosts in red fright wigs help Yi-Lang (Jackie Chan) develop the skills necessary to thwart a plot against the Shaolin temple where he's a martial arts student. The movie makes about as much sense as that sentence, but it's giddy fun. 

Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Geneviève Bujold, Heidi von Palleske, Barbara Gordon, Shirley Douglas, Stephen Lack. Screenplay: David Cronenberg, Norman Snider, based on a  book by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Carol Spier. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

Jeremy Irons's performance as the twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle is spectacular in its subtle differentiation between the two men. It's one of David Cronenberg's body-horror films, and is said to have given many viewers, especially women, nightmares. 

The Kid (Charles Chaplin, 1921)

Jackie Coogan and Charles Chaplin in The Kid

Cast: Charles Chaplin, Jackie Coogan, Edna Purviance, Carl Miller, Henry Bergman, Lita Grey, Jules Hanft, Raymond Lee, Walter Lynch, John McKinnon, Granville Redmond, Charles Reiser, Edgar Sherrod, Minnie Stearns, S.D. Wilcox, Tom Wilson. Screenplay: Charles Chaplin. Cinematography: Roland Totheroh. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Charles Chaplin. Music: Charles Chaplin. 

Charles Chaplin's first feature film is not as mawkish as a story about the Little Tramp's raising a foundling might have been. It includes one of Chaplin's wackier fantasy sequences, in which he dreams that he and his fellow slum denizens have become angels and must fight it out with devils. 

The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)

Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man

Cast: Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Diane Cilento, Britt Ekland, Ingrid Pitt, Lindsay Kemp, Russell Waters, Aubrey Morris, Irene Sunters. Screenplay: Anthony Shaffer, based on a novel by David Pinner. Cinematography: Harry Waxman. Art direction: Seamus Flannery. Film editing: Eric Boyd-Perkins. Music: Paul Giovanni. 

Edward Woodward plays a police officer from the mainland who goes to investigate the disappearance of a young girl on a remote Scottish island and falls into a terrible trap. This celebrated horror film benefits from some intelligent writing, particularly in the conflict of the bigoted Christian policeman and the carnally pagan islanders. Christopher Lee, who plays the island's sophisticated laird, called it one of his favorite roles, and he brings his usual suavely sinister presence to it.  

Sidewalk Stories (Charles Lane, 1989)

Charles Lane and Nicole Alysia in Sidewalk Stories

Cast: Charles Lane, Nicole Alysia, Sandye Wilson, Trula Hoosier, Darnell Williams. Screenplay: Charles Lane. Cinematography: Bill Dill. Production design: Ina Mayhew. Film editing: Charles Lane, Ann Stein. Music: Marc Marder.  

A low-budget independent classic, with writer-director-producer-editor as a homeless man who, like Charles Chaplin's Tramp in The Kid (1921), gets encumbered with a small child. It's a smart blend of neorealism and sentiment that gets its impetus not only from Chaplin's movie but also from Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). The movie is silent until the very end, when its message about homelessness is verbalized. 

Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932)

Charles Laughton in Island of Lost Souls

Cast: Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, Bela Lugosi, Kathleen Burke, Arthur Hohl, Stanley Fields, Paul Hurst, Hans Steinke, Tetsu Komai, George Irving. Screenplay: Waldemar Young, Philip Wylie, based on a novel by H.G. Wells. Cinematography: Karl Struss.  Art direction: Hans Dreier.