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.

The NPR Effect

It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that Slumdog Millionaire will win as Best Picture tonight.  I believe that not because Entertainment Weekly tells me so, but because Nate Silver does.  Frankly, he scares me a little bit.

Now, Slumdog is a fine film, nay, a really, really good film.  It is undeniably well-directed by Danny Boyle, and his Best Director Oscar (again, I rely on fivethirtyeight.com) will be a well-deserved accolade.  Boyle is a gifted filmmaker who also has the discipline and craftsman's attitude to vault him past the Robert Rodriguez's of the world.  I can find little to say against the film.  Sure, I've argued that women who look like Frieda Pinto don't need the likes of Dev Patel to rescue them from the slum; a man in a long car would pull up beside her and say, "Hey, would you like to leave the slum?"  It's more likely that she would be taking him with her than vice versa, but the movie is a fairy tale and it doesn't treat her as a passive, virginal object of desire.  Maybe I'm just jealous.  Whatever.  I think you can dismiss that gripe as baseless, or at least horribly, horribly shallow.

So what's my beef with the movie?  Why would I be just as happy if Milk (not Benjamin Button; please Lord, not that) won?  Why am I not rooting for Slumdog?  Why am I, truth be told, harboring a little resentment toward it?

Well, I think it's the NPR effect.

What?

The NPR effect.  Let me explain.  National Public Radio was always just the least offensive alternative to for-profit media; even in its salad days, it wasn't really a rabble-rousing outfit.  In the last decade, however, it has been crunched from two sides.  Under Kenneth Tomlinson, all public broadcasting was excoriated as demonically liberal.  This was a double-edged sword, and both edges cut NPR.  First, the corporation became safer, more mainstream, in order to deflect these criticisms.  However, Tomlinson's (and others of his ilk) jeremiads also made listening to NPR seem like an act of rebellion to many middle-of-the-road types.  In a strange way, the more milk-toasty NPR became the more it was used as a stamp of "outsider" cred to the incurably middle-of-the-road listener.  You know them--the people who, at a party, mention something and then conspiratorially whisper, "I heard that on NPR!" Yes, you brave soul, you.  Tomorrow, all of us who listen to Morning Edition will be headed for the gulag.  Movie studios are not fools, at least not the kind of fools we like to think they are.   A movie like Slumdog Millionaire is squarely within the Hollywood rags-to-riches, underdog wins tradition, but start pimping it on NPR and suddenly millions of people think they are making a daring artistic choice by plunking down $8 to see it.  I have a neighbor who falls in this demographic; hearing about a movie on NPR means that ipso facto that movie will be good, or at least "quality."  It also spares her the work of really learning about cinema or music on her own.  She can just trot out her NPR-approved short list.  "Slumdog Millionaire? Check.   Amadou and Miriam?  Check.  Now I know everything that's going on in 'independent' cinema and 'world' music."

This is not a diatribe against either Slumdog Millionaire or NPR.  The movie is good and I enjoy the radio; it certainly beats listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd and Aerosmith on an endless loop of "classic rock" or cramming wacky drive-time DJs into my skull.  To be fair, the same "NPR effect" could apply to The Wrestler and to Milk, although less so to the latter, I think.  I just get irked when a movie of quality (and I believe Slumdog is quality) becomes a shorthand expression of someone's "edginess."  Slumdog is a fine, mid-priced Hollywood movie that is being pimped as "outsider" and "indie" when it's really anything but, and the people who make that possible annoy me.  Slumdog's win will seem to me to be a validation of this cynical, lazy marketing-above-all approach.

Still, it's better than Titanic.

Catch-up Time

I got around to watching Dollhouse, Joss Whedon's new joint. Two words: Pee and yuke.

Whedon is a clever, facile writer who excels at taking genre tropes and stereotypes and resurfacing them into something shiny and new-looking. At his best (season 2 of Buffy, IMO) he creates powerful pastiches that combine humor and sentiment in a novel, refreshing way. At his worst, he's convinced that he's created a work of storytelling genius when he's really just reinventing the wheel. Whatever the result, he will not be dull.

Until Dollhouse. First, Whedon chose to build the show around Eliza Dushku (Faith from BtVS and Tru from Tru Calling), an actress of limited range but real charisma (even in the craptastic Tru Calling, the camera loved her). This creates an effect exactly 180 degrees away from what Whedon intended (I think). She plays Echo, a character who has her mind wiped away after each adventure as a negotiator, an assassin, or what-have-you. Rather than seeming remotely plausible, the show kept making me think, "Hey, now Faith's pretending to be a stripper!" It doesn't help the first episode was introduced by a brief prologue that looked and sounded exactly like Faith checking into rehab. Echo needs to be character who disappears into each assignment. Dushku cannot remotely do that. It doesn't help that the "wiped" Echo was written to seem mildly retarded.

Plus, I can't figure out why this secret organization even exists. It reminds me of Tru Calling, a show with a mythology so poorly thought-out that I couldn't even begin to care about the characters or plot. Seriously, there aren't enough hookers in the world? You need women who can be "programmed" to be the perfect lover one week, a world-class athlete the next? Why?

Maybe it will get better, but right now it's a miss, not a hit.

I've checked out on 24. It's just too ludicrous and mean-spirited. On the other hand, I am digging the return of Burn Notice. Jeffrey Donovan's Michael Westin is the perfect anti-Jack Bauer. And while I'm on the subject of checking out, I've decided that Heroes can't be fixed. Until they fall out of love with Sylar, the show has nowhere to go. Maybe if Brian Fuller could get back, stat, or if Brian K. Vaughn smothered Tim Kring with a pillow, but no other way.

Four episodes of Battlestar Galactica left. Man, will I miss this show when it's over.

And, as always, the funniest show on television is Smallville.

stopping by woods on a snowy evening

It's been a long time since I've seen a movie as intense as Let the Right One In. There aren't really words to describe the film's impact; this quote from Pajiba's review is as good an introduction as I can imagine:

It’s difficult to convey the experience of watching Let the Right One In with words. It doesn’t traffic in many words itself, for one thing, and those it does use are all Swedish. It would be easier to give a sense of the movie’s tone and impact, which has stayed with me for 72 hours and promises to linger for a while longer, by sitting down to perform a haunting piece for cello, or by standing alone with you, silently, during a snowstorm near an abandoned warehouse.

LtROI does not traffic in any of the easy tropes of American horror movies. In that way it's the opposite of the excellent French thriller Tell No One. That movie so thoroughly understood and inhabited thriller conventions that it was able to use them to tell a much bigger story. LtROI will be marketed and described as a horror movie, and there is much in it that fits that description, but the intensity that I described in the opening sentence is an intensity of emotion, of disquieted alienation, not that of adrenaline-loaded thrills.

LtROI was directed by Tomas Alfredson and adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own novel. The protagonist is Oskar, a 12-year-old who is so passive and boxed-in by life (he is tormented by loathsome bullies at school and lives with his single mom in the dreariest apartment building imaginable) that he barely deserves the designation. Alfredson's presentation of Oskar's life reminded me of both Bekmanbetov's Night Watch and The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Oscar-winning German film, in its depiction of the mundane details of lives going nowhere, and how the weirdest, gravest things may be happening in those lives. When Oskar meets Eli, who says she's "been twelve for a long time" and "not really a girl" (an offhand remark that carries much more weight in the novel; there's one brief shot in the movie that really explains what the character means), even the facts and hints of her vampiric existence are introduced in scenes of surpassing banality.

I do not want to write a plot synopsis. The movie's story is well-done and involving, but it is the emotional quality, especially the growing bond between Oskar and Eli, that insinuates intself into your soul. Let the Right One In is not an easy movie, and it's not for everyone, but I found it moving and I believe it will stay with me for a long, long time.

An Embarrassment of Riches

Friday night is kind of the mother lode for the next few weeks, with Monk, Friday Night Lights, and Battlestar Galactica all residing there. The goodness is made more poignant when you remember that this is BSG's swan song and could easily be FNL's last hurrah.

Monk is not in the same league as those two, but it features a winning performance by Tony Shalhoub. He is ably assisted by Ted Levine and Jason Gray-Stanford, and I've even grown tolerant of Traylor Howard as Monk's assistant, Natalie. It's a lightweight comedy that's fine for watching with my daughter, who loves Tony Shalhoub, and my wife, who does not care about movies and TV with nearly the fervor of my daughter and myself.

FNL struggled during it's second season, but it was still head-and-shoulders above almost everything else on broadcast television. The third season has started with a strong episode and the show's trademark camera work--FNL is one of the few shows that actually feels cinematic; the producers seem to actually care about how the pictures look and how they tell the story--is as engrossing as ever. This show may construct the music montage as well as any show ever. It's good to see it back.

BSG ended with it's survivors finding Earth, and finding that Earth was a bombed-out shell. I've read reactions to "Sometimes a Great Notion" that say things like "depressing," but I disagree. It's sad, yes. It's dark, yes. But I wasn't depressed; I was exhilarated by the show's willingness to follow its chosen path to its logical place. I hope the rest of the season stays strong and wraps up this saga in a worthy manner.

"if there was a ticking time bomb..."

24 is back tonight. I enjoyed the show for the first four seasons, but 5 and 6 blew donkeys. At its best, 24 is a popcorn orgy. At its worst... well, we know what it inspires at its worst. Still, this is the funniest assessment (that I've ever read) of certain people's attitude regarding the show.


Update:

Well, I think it's extremely funny that Janeane Garafolo is on the show, and I'm looking forward to seeing Carly Pope because, well, I think she's really hot. Still, the show committed its first major bedshit. When? Oh, at about 9:55 or whenever Agent Walker said, "They deleted the files."

See, I'm no technical maven, but I know that unless you run the hard drive through a woodchipper, the data can be recovered. Of course, watching Chloe, or this season's facsimile of same, poke around a hard drive doesn't give certain people a boner like watching Jack threaten to jam a pen in a guy's ear, so I guess we go for entertainment value.