savor it

I saw Get Low yesterday.  It was powerful and satisfying.  The film featured great production values, beautiful cinematography, and a solid script.  Comparisons will be drawn to Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?,  but Get Low is an altogether more linear and traditional period picture.  The score by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek is evocative without being syrupy, and the additional Dobro interludes by Jerry Douglas are raw and astringent rather than precious and quaint.  But really, all of that is prelude.  This movie is about the acting.

Robert Duvall has been a great actor for a long time, but since his archetypal turn as Gus McCrae in Lonesome Dove he has ripened into a well-cured ham.  I do not mean that as an insult or in disrespect.  I mean that Robert Duvall is fully aware of the fact that he is performing, and he's loving it.  Felix Bush is a role positioned just about midway between Gus McCrae and Sonny Dewey (The Apostle), and Duvall is aware of how both of those characters reside in this ornery old hermit.  Watch how the 79 year old actor relishes every gesture, how he savors each word of his dialogue like an oenophile confronted with a cherished vintage.  Every facet of his performance is considered, polished, deeply felt and perfectly tuned.  Duvall is fine smoked Virginia ham, not some watery canned substitute.  He's the real deal, an artist in full control of his abilities, and his evident delight in his gifts and powers are a tonic to the viewer.

Bill Murray's Frank Quinn is a quieter turn, but just as impressive.  Murray started out in film as a snarky, sarcastic underdog, but an ability to wring every drop of needed emotion from stillness has become a hallmark.  The man who began as Peter Venkman has become one of the great reactors in movies.  His choice to play Quinn as a close-to-the-vest type who lets out very little, and nothing that he doesn't intend, is not only the proper choice, but the only one available to him if Get Low is to succeed.  A lesser, more insecure actor would have tried to match Duvall, but Murray instead supplies a perfect counterpoint harmony, dropping impeccable fills in between the riffs in Duvall's performing rhythms.  The way Murray simply waits an extra beat to deliver a line is a thing of beauty.  These are two men who are at the point in their career where they can each do exactly what they want, and their commitment to this movie is evident and impressive.

Lucas Black is the rare child actor who hasn't shown up on a police blotter, dropped out to attend an Ivy League college, or been unable to manage the transition to adulthood.  He's now a 27-year-old veteran who has kept acting and has matured at a young age into a dependable character actor.  The little boy from American Gothic may be a handsome young man now, but he still possesses the piercing dark eyes that seem to be boring into another person's very soul.  His character, Buddy, is an indispensable part of scenes between Duvall and Murray.  With no dialogue, he makes Buddy a real presence, a man just starting out in life and trying to take the measure of two much older men, both of whom may have something to teach him.

Sissy Spacek's turn as Mattie Darrow is a reminder that we don't see nearly enough of one of the best actors of her generation.  Mattie is a small but integral piece of the story, and Spacek's history and aura are enough to sell the part, but she actually has to do some heavy lifting.  Frankly, this is the part of the story where it could have all gone off the rails, but Spacek (like Murray) knows how to not go over the top.

And then there are the small roles, performed by people like Gerald McRaney and Bill Cobbs.  Oh my, is Bill Cobbs the real deal here.  The smooth, deep-voiced veteran character actor brings an astringent presence to the part of Rev. Charlie Jackson that keeps Get Low from descending into schmaltz or sentimentality.  Lori Beth Edgeman has only a handful of scenes as Buddy's wife, Kathryn, but her breakfast confrontation with Murray is beautiful.  Plainly put, the acting in Get Low is beyond reproach.

I'm sure this movie can be nitpicked, but I don't care.  It washed over and through me like a cleansing tide, and I felt refreshed and full of joy as I left the theater.  You need to see Get Low.

chuck vs. the shaky foundation

There is a parable of Jesus that talks about the importance of building a house on the proper foundation, so that when storms come, the house may survive. The unspoken implication is that a house built on a bad foundation, no matter how ornate and beautiful, is always at risk and plagued by instability.

That message comes through loud and clear in the third season of Chuck.  I love the show, but the third season was not the equal of the first, and definitely not a patch on the delirious rush to the finish of season two.  Many of the individual episodes were solid, and the execution and acting were very good, but long patches of the story seemed mired in cliche.  There's a simple reason for that--exec producers Chris Fedak and Josh Schwartz made a fundamental mistake at the beginning of the season and no amount of hard work and talent could correct it.

Fedak and Schwartz ended S2 on a wonderful note.  Sarah chose Chuck, his father had returned, all seemed right with the world, and then Chuck downloaded Intersect 2.o (or is it 2.5?).  The awesome last line of the second season was "Hey guys, I know kung fu."

That's a heady peak.  It would have been tricky to figure out just where to go from there, and NBC's dithering about whether or not to renew the show sure didn't help.  Still, the route that they chose was the worst possible one--the Romantic Reset.  Sarah was ready to run away with Chuck, but Chuck had decided he wanted to be a spy, and when Shaw (Brandon Routh) showed up... yawn.

Again, I'm not ranking on any of the actors.  They all did yeoman work, even Routh, who many fans raked over the coals for being wooden.  The problem was not the actor; it was the conception of the character.  Shaw was so wrong, he was a seventh wheel.  The notion that Sarah would waver between Chuck and Shaw was either ludicrous or offensive, depending on whether you felt it painted her as stupid or shallow.

The sad part is that much of what Fedak and Schwartz wanted to accomplish was easily within their grasp.  Take a notion from the last six episodes: the power of the Intersect and its effect on a human brain.  Start from there.  Now S3 starts with Beckman pushing Chuck to find out the limits and capabilities of Intersect 2.0.  After all, how do you download actual physical abilities into a human rather than just knowledge/data?  Sarah believes this is a mistake, that Chuck is being pushed too fast,  and Casey is on the fence.   Now you bring in Shaw as an ally of Beckman.  Now you have a web of conflict that doesn't revolve around the Chuck and Sarah romance.  For extra spice, let's make Shaw a Ring double-agent from the jump, and as he tries to learn the secrets of the Intersect, he also attempts to drive a wedge between Chuck and Sarah.  If you want another layer, Sarah becomes suspicious of her allies, since she sees them as insufficiently protective of the man she loves.  Now she has real conflict and retains her strength and agency instead of becoming the victim of ginned-up, patently fake "romantic" conflict.  Chuck's job in all this?  Trying to understand and harness this new set of unearned abilities, a task that might be beyond him.  This is possible if you just don't make the fatal mistake of assuming that you must reset Chuck and Sarah back into "will they/won't they/are they/aren't they" modality.  Once you make that mistake, though, you're stuck with a flawed structure.  It probably says a lot about the talent of everyone involved in Chuck that they were able to right the series as much as they did.