[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on, and perhaps you should stop reading the Internet.]
Carnal Knowledge
CLOSER
I wanted to like CLOSER. I really did.
I looked forward to it. I read the script in advance. The film has a great cast. It looks good. It does something unusual for a movie these days, which is to show people talking, rather than cars speeding or buildings exploding — it's the sort of "adult" fare that Oscar breeders love.
It's adult because it is about sex. Based on Patrick Marber's play, the story covers about four years in the life of four characters.
It begins in January, when Alice (Natalie Portman), a stripper, meets Daniel (Jude Law), an obit writer, on the street when a car hits her. The film then leaps a year and a half later to June, where Anna (Julia Roberts) is snapping a photo of Daniel, who has just published a novel based on Alice's life. He develops an Insta-Crush on Anna. We then leap six months ahead, where Larry, a dermatologist, is in a sex chat group being ensorcelled by a doctor groupie who in reality is Dan. Scene four takes place the next day in an aquarium where Larry has gone to meet the on-line sylph, only to meet Anna instead. The film leaps ahead another six months to Anna's photo show opening in a trendy gallery; there we learn that Larry and Anna are a couple, and that Daniel, despite living with Alice, is obsessed with Anna.
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In the film's pivotal scene, which takes place the following June, a year later, Daniel dumps Alice, and Anna dumps her now-husband Larry, for the writer and photographer have been having an affair for several months. The next scene finds Larry three months later in a strip club where he gets a lap dance from Alice. A month later, Dan is meeting Anna at a concert where she arrives flustered from a meeting with Larry, trying to get him to finally sign their divorce papers. Larry extorts a mercy-fuck from Anna, which upsets Dan. Here the movie drops a whole scene, in which Anna and Alice have a confrontation, and instead leaps ahead two months to a confrontation between Dan and Larry in Larry's upscale office: Anna has gotten back together with Larry. A year later, Dan and Alice are having a rendezvous that turns ugly when Alice dumps Dan abruptly. In a coda, we seen Dan visiting a small park that figures in the dialogue, and we see Alice back in New York City walking down a busy street, in a scene that is much different — and less bleak — than the play.
That's about all that happens. The meat of the movie is in the dialogue, the brutal, frank, aggressive, demanding verbal missiles we shoot at each other to get what we want or to mask our disappointment when we don't get it. It's the kind of LION IN WINTER-style theatrics that actors, male and female, like to take star turns in.
But frankly the chicks in the cast have more star power. Sure, Jude Law is the "sexiest man on earth," as PEOPLE would have it, but does he really "sell" a film, the way a Tom Cruise or a Tom Hanks can? COLD MOUNTAIN, for example, made $90 million, but it cost $80 million. ALFIE is a huge disappointment.
Clive Owen is touted by wishfully thinking pundits as the new James Bond (see my remarks on 24 SEASON 3 below), but has he "opened" a picture yet? His biggest hit is THE BOURNE IDENTITY, in which he has a cameo role.
I say this not to disparage the skills of these actors. I love Clive Owen (though I'm getting a little bored with having Jude Law rammed down my cinematic throat). And after all, on stage Owen originated the role of Dan the author, though here he plays Larry, the dermatologist. Rather, I mention this to emphasize that the film is skewed toward the female half of the audience. Julia Roberts is still a No. 1 box office draw. And Natalie Portman is Queen Padmé. The IMDB notes that Roberts has earned the movie industry 1.7 billion dollars; Owen and Law have garnered about 800 million: most of their movies so far have made from $12 to $25 million.
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And then there is the position of Mike Nichols in the equation. Nichols began as a comedian, turned to play directing, and then, when he entered films as a director, started out by doing a play, WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF. The success of his second film, THE GRADUATE, and a few subsequent films such as DAY OF THE DOLPHIN and CATCH-22 (adaptations of books), have distracted viewers from the fact that he prefers to adapt plays, and has done nothing but for his last xx efforts, including the award-winning ANGELS IN AMERICA.
I used to love Nichols, in part because his films seemed stylish in a way that only '70s Hollywood films could be, drawing on the best techniques of Godard, Antonioni, and Fellini. Now what I am beginning to think that what I loved about him was his DPs, Haskell Wexler for WOLFE, and David Watkin for CATCH-22. A rough patch of bad (or at least unsuccessful) films, including THE FORTUNE, GILDA LIVE, HEARTBURN, BILOXI BLUES, POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE, REGARDING HENRY, WOLF, and PRIMARY COLORS, took the bloom off my enthusiasm through the accumulating force of their lack of distinction.
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These days I rate Nichols more what they call a metteur en scene, a good mover of human furniture but without a real and consistent vision, as you find in a Scorsese or a Ford or a Fuller, a film of whose you can almost always identify on TV even if you haven't seen it before. Instead of being in the company of Coppola, Altman, Scorsese, Milius, Schatzberg, or De Palma among directors who emerged in the 1970s, he's more like a Milos Forman, a handler of high class material, the go-to guy for play adaptations, a kind of personality-free zone in which the director is buffeted from project to project based on what's hot in the literary world rather then being impelled by anything important or interesting to say, a personal vision that demands expression.
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Meanwhile, I sat in the theater wishing that CLOSER had more bite to it. Marber is a former British TV comedy sketch writer, and there is still something of the "blackout" quality to the quick scenes that follow quickly: the only difference is that the film isn't funny, and it dives deeper into the human condition. Still, I wasn't as impressed with the play as I was supposed to be, or as much as Richard Eyre, his theatrical mentor who wrote the introduction to a published version of the play, instructed me that I should. As CLOSER unspooled I found myself wishing that Nichols had done something a little more unsparing.
Then I remembered that Nichols has. CARNAL KNOWLEDGE is still my favorite of his films. Giuseppe Rotunno shot it, and it is based on a play (never produced) by Jules Feiffer, another "comic" writer taking a detour into the despair of human relations. CARNAL KNOWLEDGE has 10 times the razor sharp wit and the moral dissection of CLOSER.
Still, CLOSER has much to recommend it. The guys are good, and Portman expands her screen persona, away from the goody two shoes of the Lucas universe to the wild sexuality of a Lindsay Lohan. But to me the revelation was Roberts. She is playing a self-destructive neurotic, but you don't really realize it at first. But slowly, gradually, as you get closer to her, you see that Roberts' Anna is a prime example of modern womanhood, fleeing what's good for her to that which is bad, ever in search of the unhappiness she thinks is due her low self image.
When the box containing the MICKEY MOUSE CLUB arrived (in a packet, really), I was delighted. It came as part of the Disney Treasures series (Disney, 1955, two discs, $32.95, Tuesday, December 7). Now, I thought, finally I will have the Mouse Club's serial of the Hardy Boys' THE MYSTERY OF THE APPLEGATE TREASURE, based on the first Hardy Boys novel, THE TWO TOWERS. Of all the things Disney that people usually say haunt them for decades — the death of Bambi's mother, the disturbing pansexuality of Peter Pan — nothing disturbed me as much as the credit sequence to the Hardy Boys serial, which aired in tiny bits at the end of each week from September 21 1956 to February 1 1957. There was a second Hardy Boys serial, THE MYSTERY OF THE GHOST FARM, but I've never seen it.
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Perhaps you will thus share my chagrin, or at least sympathize with it imaginatively, when I learned almost immediately that the box included only the show's first week! That's five episodes. That's a mere five hours. Given that the MICKEY MOUSE CLUB made its debut in fall of 1955 (on ABC, which, by the way, Disney now owns), that's one year away from when the first Hardy Boys serial begins. (Here is a place for a few more details about the show )
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I know that DVD distributors take to gouging the customer like a dog takes to his own vomit, but this is ridiculous. There were 65 MMC shows in 1955 alone, five a week for 13 weeks. Assuming that Disney doesn't escalate production to, say, four weeks per set, the whole first season will cost the Mouse geek, at $32.95 dollars a box, some $428.35; there were three seasons, which makes it $1,285.05. If the Disney Corporation could find its way to make fewer executive decisions that lead to Delaware courtrooms, maybe the masses could afford their nostalgia.
Is the first week worth even that? For pure nostalgia's sake, probably yes. What's amazing about the show is that it hit the ground running. It is as unchangingly efficient in its first hour as it was in its last, three years later. Its formula was writ in stone like Moses's tablets from its genesis and remained unvarying, even when in syndication it dropped down to half an hour. For a summary of the show go here.
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But once you get past the nostalgia factor, this is pretty lame stuff. Disney admirably wanted real but talented kids, not slick budding artistes with backstage moms, and there is an atmosphere of enthusiasm to their antics, but anytime an adult gets involved there is trouble. Take Jimmie (James Dodd), the den father of the tribe. At the end of each show he begins a homily on correct tyke behavior. Yet curiously all of his nuggets of advice have a commercial aspect. In the Wednesday show, he instructs his brethren to do something tonight for their parents. Like help wash the dishes. If tyke does that, tyke's parents thus have more free time … to watch the Walt Disney show later that night on ABC. The newsreel that the program includes also always seems to end up covering some event in the wonderful world of Disney. It doesn't help that Dodd looks like the awkward ancestor of Conan O'Brien.
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The acts that popped up tended to be awful. In this first week, there is a balloon artiste, and a British sock puppeteer. Both are execrable, with the balloonatic dying, and making jokes about dying, before turning to faintly veiled fart jokes, rather surprising for a Disney show, yet the precursor to some of the humor in modern Disney animated movies. The history of Disney fart jokes begins here.
What's good about the package is that the shows are rendered intact, even down to the sponsor moments that appear at regular moments. For example, I had completely forgotten about a cereal called Super Jets, and the catch phrase for Mattel.
Extras on the two-disc set consist of intros by Disney expert Leonard Maltin, 10 minutes of mouse memories by various surviving Mouseketeers (conducted on the studio set where the show was filmed, and in front of the actual stage curtain, now seen for the first time in color), a tribute to the creepy-sounding Jimmie Dodd, numerous galleries, color home movie footage of the Mousketeers making their physical debut at Disneyland, and the color version of the show's opening animated sequence.
One of the Mousketeers describes going to Vietnam for shows in the 1960s and describing how the soldiers responded to the theme song to the show. In a subtle way, this moment vindicates Kubrick's poignant, ironic use of the song at the end of FULL METAL JACKET.
The set comes in a white dual DVD keep case within a tin box, with various inserts, include a reproduction of the music sheet cover for the show's theme song, an eight-page insert about the show with a contents list, and a certificate of authenticity, asserting that this is one of 130, 000 copies. If every copy sells for 32.95, that's $4,283,500 dollars. Just enough to cover the Delaware lawyer fees.
Episodic television drama is no longer fun to watch.
Shows like THE SOPRANOS, THE WIRE, ALIAS, and THE SHIELD first hook you and then turn the screws on you, torturing their lead characters and you, putting them in one hazardous situation after another. It's the perils of Pauline to the Nth degree. You don't sit down to enjoy these shows; you sit down like a meth addict trying to stay up for another 48 hours. Then you spend the rest of the week worrying about Vic, Bubbles, and Tony.
This realization is brought on by watching 24: THIRD SEASON (Fox, 2003, seven discs, $69.95, Tuesday, December 7). I watched the first four or five hours of the first season, until one night I didn't tape it and never got back on track; missed the second season; and missed the third season. So when the box set arrived in the mail it was all new to me. I hadn't even seen a promo of the show.
I decided to do something really "funny." I was determined to watch in the course of the clock time as the show, starting at 1 PM and ending at 1 PM the next day. Three things interfered with this scheme. First was life itself. One has things to do. Despite what foreigners think of Americans, it is still not possible to watch 24 hours of television. The second thing is that a typical episode of 24 is not 60 minutes long. It is about 44, to accommodate 15 minutes of commercials and self-promotions. And finally, seeing the show in that manner is probably a lot like living through it; you feel dragged out and tired and that 3 am of the dark night of the soul.
This last is due to the fact that 24 tends to be very, very repetitious. First President Palmer tells his aide, his younger brother, that he doesn't want to do something unethical. Wayne tells him he has to do it. Wayne comes back an hour later, and now the President Palmer has changed his mind. He orders Wayne to go do it. But now, Wayne has changed his mind. They bicker and part, and then Wayne comes back an hour later to give in. But now, Palmer has changed his mind again. Soon it becomes very clear what President Palmer is. He's a flip-flopper.
This indecisiveness (or padding, really) is probably acceptable if you see the show only from week to week. But compressed into a two- or three-day marathon and it is maddening. The same thing happens back at CTU: someone tells someone else to do something, they bicker back and forth, change chairs, and bicker again. And what a great lot of tattletales those CTU computer nerds are! One of the first things that happens within the first few minutes in CTU in episode one is that Adam tells on Chloe. Then Chloe tells on Tony. Then Kim tells on Adam. It just goes on and on with everyone telling everyone else how to do their job. And it always turns out that none of these people are spies or anything. In fact, everyone misses the real spy in their midst.
Apparently this season was much more coherent than the first two. It comes in three large movements. The first concerns Jack Bauer's efforts to spring his nemesis out of prison, in order to stop a bio-terrorist act on Los Angeles. The second movement takes place in Mexico, with Jack attempting to break up the bio-hazard deal and seize the material. The third movement takes place back in Los Angeles as the CTU team races against time to track down what we now know is the real terrorist group, led, if you don't mind me saying, by Lothaire Bluteau (JESUS OF MONTREAL). Let me pause this review for a few seconds to say that if seeing Bluteau in the last seven hours of 24 doesn't convince you that he, not Clive Owen, should be the new James Bond, I don't know what.
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Anyway, it turns out that the real point of these three sweeping story arcs is to clean house. The producers and writers spend more time getting rid of old characters than anything else. Several of the characters are known to be X-ed out of the next season. One ends up in the slammer. And several are killed. Among them is Nina (Sarah Clarke), the exotic looking woman who became the surprise villainous of season one, then popped up in season two. I guess everyone expected her to end up in season three, and she does. She is a top-notch villainness because she never weakens. And she is smarter than everyone. Unfortunately, after the mad rush of the show is over you think back and wonder, why was she in the show? The whole second movement of the plot hinges on a bio-hazard deal going down between Nina and her cohort and someone else. But that someone else isn't really planning to sell it to her. So why were they tempting her with the deal? Please watch the show and tell me.
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Like most TV shows, 24 is really about work, a long, extended metaphor about the work place that you escaped at 5 PM and now spend three hours of prime time television watching shows about. 24 has a harsher vision of work, in that most of the people who work at CTU are annoying, especially Chloe, who is a tattle tale, a drama queen, and one of those maddening people who plays by the rule book when it is convenient, and breaks the rules at the worst time. Her goal in life is to be passive-aggressively annoying 24 hours a day, and here she is.
Fox has put together a fantastic package with this third season. The widescreen transfer is excellent. The discs come in DD English 5.1) and DD Spanish 2.0 with English subtitles. The first disc starts out with the original extended version of the season premiere, and has some xx selected audio commentary tracks. Among the chatters are Kiefer Sutherland, Sarah Clarke, and Carlos Bernard. There are six ACTs in all, one for each disc.
Disc seven has numerous extras, including several makings ofs, starting with 24: ON THE LOOSE, shot mostly during the prison break arc of the show, BOYS AND THEIR TOYS, and BIOTHREAT: BEYOND THE SERIES (an at times gross account of the differences between 24 and reality). There is also a multi-angle study, and 45 deleted or alternative scenes with optional commentary by Jon Cassar and two other directors. Finally, there is a season 4 teaser and a promo that offers original footage that offers up the backstory for season four.
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M (The Criterion Collection No. 30, 1931, two discs, $39.95, Tuesday, December 7) is one of the greatest films ever made, but it is a rather cold masterpiece. It's chilly the way a Kubrick movie can be cold, a distant, analytic look at a subject with no concession to typical Hollywood tropes such as a predictable narrative or a central character you can identify with. Fritz Lang offers a view on a serial killer that is so un-movie like that even he couldn't really admit what he was up to.
Today M, Lang's first sound film, looks like the wild precursor to everything from film noir to Hitchcock's PSYCHO, to THE WIRE, to the child kidnapping fear and mania of the 1980s. The Criterion Collection's two-disc set is a long-awaited reiteration of its original release back in 1998.
Disc One bears the film in its original 110-minute version, featuring Lang's frequently cut original ending in which a court of judges delivers its sentence and a trio of mothers in black weep that it doesn't bring back their kids, and that we must all watch the children, an ominous dictum. This version comes in the film's original aspect ration, the odd 1.19:1 ratio (windowboxed), which is long and narrow. It's from an excellent print with only a few minor glitches, and excellent sound, given the impediments. The film comes with an audio commentary track by German film and Lang experts Anton Kaes and Eric Rentschler, a continually informative track.
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Disc Two has the rest of the extras, kicking off with "Conversation with Fritz Lang," a 48-minute black-and-white film shot by William Friedkin and DP William Fraker over two days in 1975, the year before Lang's death. According to Patrick McGilligan's biography of Lang, Friedkin's film went unfinished primarily because Lang got sick of Friedkin's questions. It's true that Friedkin asks Bogdanovich-level questions of sublime obviousness, based on other interviews and summoning answers that the director has given many, many times before, but at least Friedkin asks them passionately. However, if Lang really believes, as he says, that he made the film solely to get to the moment when the mothers say Watch the children, then he was in a state of abject self-delusion. Lang seems unwilling to admit that he was evincing profound sympathy for the child molester and killer.
The disc goes on with a short film from 1982 by Claude Chabrol's called M LE MAUDIT, a 10-minute salute to M originally done for French television. This is followed by a six-minute interview with Chabrol, who surprisingly turns out to be more of a disciple of Lang than Hitchcock.
Next is a 15-minute interview with Harold Nebenzal, son of M producer Seymour Nebenzal, a man who Lang mentions without naming him during the course of the Friedkin interview. This is followed by 40-minutes of audio tapes of film editor Paul Falkenberg leading a class discussion of the film, recorded in 1976 and 1977, and offered here as scene-specific commentaries.
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THE PHYSICAL HISTORY OF M is an excellent 18 minute "making of" that charts the history of the film, from its various cuts, frame changes, and uses, including quotation in the anti-Semitic film THE ETERNAL JEW. Finally, there is a stills gallery. The dual disc keep case comes fixed with a 32-page booklet that includes an essay by Stanley Kauffmann, a two-page list of missing scenes, a contemporaneous essay by Lang, and an essay by Gabriele Tergit, a short newspaper article by a "real" criminal that appeared in a German paper when the film was released, a 1963 interview with Lang, and chapter titles, film and DVD credits, and transfer information.
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MASH (Fox, 1994, three discs, $49.95, Tuesday, December 7).
Season seven of M*A*S*H is the one in which Hot Lips finally get her divorce, and Winchester has an "affair." Airing from September 1978 until its 25th half hour in May 1979, it's also the season in which we get the show from the viewpoint of a patient, and the one about the North Korean spy, and "Inga," which won various Emmys. We also learn that the M*A*S*H unit has a 97 per cent survival rate.
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At this stage of its career, M*A*S*H was functioning like a well-oiled machine, the jokes non-stop (Winchester calling Radar a "non-com poop"; Hawkeye declaring a new bar the spot for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happy hour"), the emotional high notes moving. In fact, you can probably isolate the middle seasons of M*A*S*H as the most influential show on today's programs. With its tear-inducing blend of liberal piety, political badinage, and edgy laughs, it anticipates WEST WING. In Winchester with his intellectual braggadocio and upper-class airs, we see Frasier ab ovo.
While watching it, I played the usual games, such as watching for Radar's deformed hand, usually kept hidden, but there's a good view of it at the end of the episode where he gets a crush on a nurse and has to dance with her ("Hot Lips is Back in Town"). Fortunately, I had not seen most of these episodes so I was able to bathe again in the sly wit of the program, actually laughing out loud many times.
It's a barebones set, just three discs with all the shows (listed as in broadcast order, which is obviously not the real order). The shows tend to look brown, but then, the show did at the time of its airing. But I will say this: it's much easier getting through a season of sitcoms than it is a full hour-long adventure show.
Letters
From Jan Elvsèn:
"Regarding ALEXANDER, no review has yet pointed out one rather interesting fact: Alexander's mother says to him, 'The world is yours,' one of the central lines of SCARFACE. I do not think this is a coincidence. And what does that make Alexander? 'Paleface'?"
From Adi Tantimedh:
"You're the first person in print to compare Kinji Fukasaku to Sam Fuller, and the comparison is apt. I should also point out that GRAVEYARD OF HONOR was adapted from a book that's a true story about a gangster in the postwar years who was so out of control and unkillable that they could only wait for him to self-destruct."
NEXT TIME: THAT '70S SHOW, more Asian action films, movies on music, several STAR TREKS, and more!
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