I remember watching The Italian Job many times in my distant past. It was always a fairly enjoyable film even as I found it almost completely wanting. One thing especially bothered me: the job absolutely had to have Professor Peach to deal with the computer aspects of the job. But the extent of his technical work was simply taking one tape off the computer and putting another tape on. And this is just the prime example of the fundamental problem: there is very little heist in this heist movie.
What the film does have is a whole lot of “ain’t Michael Caine dreamy?” nonsense. The females in the film are limited to a group of bikini clad models who welcome Caine’s release from jail with a party that would embarrass Larry Flynt, Caine’s strangely inconsistently jealous American girl friend, and the widow of his recently deceased friend who is more bothered by the idea of not spending six hours in bed when Caine than the death of her husband. There are also, of course, the various “big” women who Professor Peach can’t stop from molesting.
I suppose all of this is forgivable in that the film was made in 1969 and this kind of thing was considered charming along with the “flamboyant” gay man and the comedically terrified black man. The Italian Job manages to include the former, but for the latter, it substitutes the Jamaican cannabis smoker with a large penis. Maybe it is asking too much of a film that never intended to be serious to do anything but go along with the mores of its time. It’s still annoying to watch today.
The biggest problem with the film is the script. It was written by Troy Kennedy Martin, whose other major success was the similarly thin Kelly’s Heroes — a film so boring, I’ve never managed to make it to the end despite many attempts. The Italian Job is structured in three parts. The first part involves us learning what a cool chick-magnet Michael Caine is. This part might work better if Caine were charismatic. I’m not saying he’s bad, just something of a non-entity up there on the screen. You can see this very clearly in his breakout role in Zulu. Stanley Baker is the one with charisma.
The second part of the film is the heist. The problem is that all the planning for the heist was done by Caine’s dead friend before the movie starts. So this section of the film mostly involves us looking at his gang standing around waiting for the third act to start, which really has nothing to do with people. This part of the film is so poorly rendered that at the start of it, everyone involved meets around a conference table where Caine introduces each. If he hadn’t done so, we wouldn’t know who any of them were. Of course, we wouldn’t have cared. The heist is ultimately: guys rob an armored car and then escape.
The third part of the film is what it is all about: Mini Coopers racing around Turin doing cool things. But even here, there is no concern for continuity. The police are chasing the Mini Coopers and get left behind in a number of ways. But somehow there is always another police car to be on their tails. There is no sense of drama; it is just episodic and thus of no real relevance to the film. But there is this wonderful waltz section that was cut from the film because even these filmmakers understood how inappropriate it was in the larger context of the film:
Having watched the film recently and been so disappointed, I decided to watch the remake. This kind of film is actually very easy to make. And I suspect that people would do a better job with it now. It’s the kind of thing that F Gary Gray could do a good job with. I don’t expect much from a heist film. But the original just didn’t deliver, regardless of how adorable the Minis are. I’ll let you know what I think of the remake after it arrives.
In the early 1990s, while still in graduate school, I got an idea for a little two-minute film about a rumor I had heard that the “generic” beer they sold in the state of Washington was actually Pabst Blue Ribbon. But my nature is not to write anything short and so the screenplay got longer and longer and ended up feature-length, having little to do with the original idea but filled with many of the obsessions that are clear enough to anyone who has read this blog even a little. It was an extremely silly comedy called, “The Pabst Conspiracy.”
As a result of this, I wrote a number of other screenplays, bought a camera, and immersed myself in the craft of filmmaking. Other than being a decent writer, I was totally out of my depth. But I learned a great deal about filmmaking. And I remember going to see a film at that time, Dolores Claiborne, and thinking, “That is a perfect screenplay.” The film itself is really quite good. But you are never likely to see a more finely crafted script.
That script was one of the first of Tony Gilroy who is probably best known for having written the Bourne films. And yes, they are hardly great films, but as action films go, they are some of the best around. He also wrote and directed Michael Clayton. I really like that film, but I haven’t bothered to watch the films he’s made since. I’m sure his directing is as competent as ever.
Gilroy comes from Hollywood family. His brother John Gilroy is a very successful editor. His other brother Dan Gilroy is a successful screenwriter and the husband of Rene Russo. And his father is the great playwright and independent filmmaker Frank Gilroy. He is probably best known for his play (later made into a film) The Subject Was Roses. I know him especially from one of the films he produced, wrote, and directed, The Gig. But of most interest here is that at the time I was learning film craft and enjoying his son’s writing, I read Frank Gilroy’s I Wake Up Screening: Everything You Need to Know about Independent Films Including a Thousand Reasons Not To.
Today, I really should be writing about James Van Allen. But the truth is that I was up really late last night and I just don’t feel up to it. You just can’t write about him without getting into some hardcore physics. So instead, I say unto you: today the great comedic actor Julie Kavner is 64. If you are my age, you know her as Brenda Morgenstern on the 1970s sitcom Rhoda. If you are younger, you know her as the voice of Marge Simpson on The Simpsons. And you might also know here for her work in a number of Woody Allen films.
Her first acting job was as a regular on Rhoda, which is a remarkable start to a career. And basically everything stemmed from there. She became a regular on The Tracey Ullman Show, which I assume is how she got involved in The Simpsons. Other than that, there is nothing much to say.
Here is a very funny bit from The Tracey Ullman Show:
I was recently reminded of the line, “Mr Neutron: easily the most dangerous man the world has ever seen…” It is from one of the last Monty Phyton episodes made. The joke is that Mr Neutron is really dangerous, but all he wants to do is hang out in the London suburbs gardening and wallpapering. When I first saw it as a teenager, I didn’t find it all the funny. But it was something that stayed in my mind and it became more and more humorous over time.
I found it online and watched it again. It is entirely typical for Monty Python: it is uneven. I found some of it hysterical and some of it tired. In particular, there is a recurring bit about an American general who is obsessed with his body odors. I find it kind of creepy, but I think that is just because the British find the American obsession with hygiene to be creepy. And they are right.
Here is the first part of it:
After watching it, I did a little research and I came upon an article by J Walker on the website This Was Television, Same As It Ever Was?: You’re No Fun Anymore – Monty Python Minus One. It is about the last season of Monty Python after John Cleese had left. The writer takes special aim at “Mr Neutron,” and claims that the problem was the lack of Cleese. It isn’t anything special about Cleese — it could have been any one of the cast members — it was just that the group had some kind of magic balance.
This is nonsense. The whole article suffers from what I wrote about this weekend, No Real Reason I Liked The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The writer had just decided to have a particular outlook on the episode and so focused on the problems in it. Above all, the complaint is that the episode is not like episodes that did have Cleese, which is a true but useless observation.
My guess would be that “Mr Neutron” was primarily the work of Michael Palin and Terry Jones. It is very much in keeping with their excellent series, Ripping Yarns. Much of the “now for something completely different” transitions are gone and a coherent plot is in place. If the absence of Cleese was important, it was that it gave substantially more power to Palin-Jones to take the series in a different direction. Looking at the fourth season overall, the worst you can say is that the show was heading for a new equilibrium that it hadn’t quite reached.
The whole thing reminds me of what is absolutely most annoying about self-proclaimed critics: their tendency to find fault with a work of art because it is not what they want to see. So as far as Walker is concerned, the fourth season of Monty Python is weak because it is distinctly different from the first three seasons. But it has to be judged on its own terms. And I agree: it is not as consistent as the best of the first three seasons. But the first three seasons were not as consistent as the best of the first three seasons. It also isn’t as good as Ripping Yarns. But again: Monty Python was not as good as Ripping Yarns. And even with Cleese, the fourth seasons was bound to have been somewhat tired. Cleese thought that in the third season — that’s why he left.
I recommend checking out the fourth season episodes. But do it as you would any new comedy series. Because it isn’t the old Monty Python. But if they had gone on another two years, there might be a raging debate now among fans as to whether Python I or Python II was the best. To me, it would always be a mixed bag. You are always better off with Fawlty Towers and Ripping Yarns and the two main films.
Afterword
Here are the six episodes with (probably temporary) links:
One of the most famous episodes of The Twilight Zone is, “It’s a Good Life.” In it, Bill Mumy plays Anthony — a little boy with special mental powers that isolates a small group of people in his own world where we acts like a monster, killing and torturing at will. At the same time, he doesn’t like it when people aren’t “happy.” He is a spoiled child, but with infinite power. He reminds me of the rich in the United States.
Paul Krugman posited a few of reasons the rich are so obsessed with economic austerity even though it is not in their long-term interests, Inflation, Septaphobia, and the Shock Doctrine. As the title of the article indicates, he suggests it is because: (1) they are rentiers; (2) they are obsessed with the stagflation of the 1970s; or (3) it is just a convenient excuse to screw the working class. I think he is closest on the third point, but it does kind of beg the question. It doesn’t explain why the rich are interested in screwing the poor.
I think it is all about a kind of social psychopathy. The rich are in favor of what they see as being in their interests. It doesn’t really matter if a given policy works in an absolute sense — only that it works in a relative sense. What I mean by this is that it doesn’t matter if the rich see their income go up by 10% if they also see the poor’s income go up by 20%. They see that as losing ground. Just the same, losing 10% would be okay as long as the poor’s income decreased by 20%.
Over the last four decades, we’ve seen this more or less happen. The only time the poor have seen their situation distinctly improved was during the Clinton era and the rich hated it, even though they did vastly better. It is hard not to see it as something like childish spite. But this shouldn’t be shocking. Obama was widely supported by Wall Street when he ran in 2008. But they turned against him soon after his election. And why was that? Certainly it wasn’t because of his anti-finance policies, since he didn’t have any. It was because he called them fat cats. That’s childish nonsense.
It is also dangerous. Thanks to what was mostly racial backlash, Ronald Reagan was swept into power in the 1980s and he effectively destroyed organized labor in this country. As far as the rich were concerned, this was fantastic. But here we are in our fourth decade and we seem to have reached a new equilibrium where large numbers of people are permanently unemployed. The only time we reach full employment is when there is a stock or real estate bubble. I’m talking about secular stagnation. And what this means in the long term is that corporate profits will decline. But as William Lazonick noted in Profits Without Prosperity, many corporations are now destroying their long term profitability for short term profits.
The problem is that companies cannot be profitable if there is no market for their goods. By gutting the middle class, the rich managed to take more short term profits. That seems to have come to an end. So now they are destroying themselves in a kind of autocannibalism. But it doesn’t matter to them. The point is that they keep doing better. And it doesn’t much matter that the long term results of their actions are catastrophic. They know from experience that the government will never let them fail. They are the “right” kind of people. After they did enormous damage to the global economy, the government bailed them out, and during the recovery, almost all of the gains went to them. Most Americans are still waiting for the recovery to trickle down to them.
So at every point, regardless of how shortsighted it may be, they will pick whatever is good for themselves and bad for the rest of us. They live in a consequences-free world. Call it affluenza or spoiled brat syndrome. The problem is not them. The problem is that we continue to give them political power that allows them to continue to affect policy that enrichs them regardless of how they behave. It’s like we’re stuck in “It’s a Good Life,” and no one is willing to attack Anthony when he is vulnerable. Tomorrow ain’t gonna be a real good day.
Two weeks ago, the guys at The Q-Filmcast released an episode on, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. They are clever guys and I’m always impressed with their insights about films. But their discussion of Baron Munchausen is an especially good example of how it is that all of us who write and talk about films are just a bunch of fakers.
Most of the guys were pretty down on the film. In contrast, I really liked it. But pretty much everything they complained about was valid. The scenes go on too long, for example. I think a half hour could easily have been cut from the film. But because the producers had spent so much money on shooting the film and because Terry Gilliam seems to think that every idea he ever had is a gem, the scenes weren’t cut. There were other problems as well: the script is weak; the characters are not well rendered; and it has little dramatic momentum.
In addition to this, Savage—the one person at The Q-Filmcast who really liked the film—was also in agreement about the problems in the film. And that raises a question, “What does it mean to like a film?” I’m convinced that it doesn’t mean much. I like Baron Munchausen the same way that I like my friends: I’m inclined to focus on what is good and ignore what is bad. And I do the opposite with people and films I don’t like.
This fact makes what the The Q-Filmcast does all the more useful. Because there does seem to be a culturally agreed upon critique of what works in art. It isn’t just anyone’s opinion. So listening to their analysis of the film, one gets a good idea of what’s happening in it. And that’s the kind of stuff that comes across better with the back-and-forth of their format.
What doesn’t work—coming from anyone most definitely including me—is the ultimate conclusion. It reminds me of a great scene from A Late Quartet. In it, Christopher Walken tells a story about Pablo Casals (which I believe is more or less true), and it is something that I think all of us who pontificate about any kind of art should remember: we should take whatever joy we can find.
That’s certainly not a complaint with The Q-Filmcast. They are explicitly ombudsmen. And people want guidance as to whether they should use their time watching a film. In the case of Baron Munchausen, all listeners should come away with a good idea if they are going to like the film. There is great value in that and I think people are infinitely better in their hands than the hands of even critics that I like.
It is more an issue for me. What is it I offer to the reader? I hope that no one comes to me for recommendations. I have the luxury of writing about film from three different perspectives. First, I write about the politics in film. Second, I write about film history. And third, I write about films I admire and why I admire them. Other than when I go to movies with my brother, I am spared having to write about films I hate. And even then, I usually take a political track with them, given that action films tend to extremely (but implicitly) political.
I’m still shocked just about every day regarding how irrational I am. I’m great at rationalizing it, of course. Most people are. But ultimately, I liked The Adventures of Baron Munchausen because when I watched it I liked it. I could give you lots of reasons to justify that. There is an enormous amount to like in the film. And there is a good deal to hate. In fact, it has enough of both to effectively be a cinematic Rorschach test. Our experience of it is much more about us than it.
On this day in 1898, the great film writer and director Preston Sturges was born. It is best to think of him as a writer, although his films were energetically shot and edited. But his scripts are really some of the best ever. He wrote exclusively comedies that are generally considered screwball. And they were very often that, but I think that is a bit tight a fit for what he did.
His first film as writer-director was The Great McGinty. It tells the story of Dan McGinty, a man who rises through the ranks of the state’s corrupt political system to be governor. Along the way, he marries his secretary because he needs to be married for appearances. The problem is that he falls in love with her, decides to be honest, and has his political life fall apart. It is one of my favorite films.
Sturges next film is equally silly but more conventional, Christmas in July. Then came one of his best, The Lady Eve. It stars Barbara Stanwyck as a con artist who falls in love with her mark played by Henry Fonda:
And then came what is widely considered Sturges masterpiece, Sullivan’s Travels. I’m not that fond of it, but I do love Veronica Lake.
It tells the story of a famous comedy director who wants to travel the nation undercover and find out what life is like for the poor souls who aren’t famous movie directors. Eventually, he actually finds trouble and learns important lessons about life. The film is mostly interesting for a few references to it in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Palm Beach Story is perhaps the perfect screwball comedy. It is silly in the extreme with a wonderfully preposterous ending. It is a whole lot of fun:
Sturges next did one of the most bizarre films ever, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. Basically, it is all one big exercise in making a film about premarital sex without getting stopped by the censors.
But it is well worth checking out. Betty Hutton in the lead is irresistible. And Akim Tamiroff and Brian Donlevy reprise their roles from The Great McGinty in it.
After that came another excellent film, Hail the Conquering Hero. Sturges made a couple of films after that but I won’t talk about them because (1) they are generally not considered all that good and (2) I haven’t seen them.
I was talking to Will last night and the subject of Zero Mostel came up. It was actually a conversation about Mel Brooks and what a total jerk he is. As an example, I talked about his treatment of Mostel during the production of The Producers where the cast and crew divided into two camps: the Zero camp and the petulant manboy camp. Anyway, I had said that Mostel was a legend in New York, and he would have been a huge star had he not been blacklisted.
He was effectively blacklisted long before the official blacklist. He was briefly in the Army, where he was refused a position as entertainment director of Special Services because he was “definitely a Communist.” He went on to entertain the troops for the rest of the war via the USO. But after the war, Hollywood wouldn’t hire him until Elia Kazan hired him for Panic in the Streets. After that, he did a number of movies. It is amazing: then as now, Hollywood is run by a bunch of followers. Regardless, this only lasted for a year before Mostel was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). After that, he didn’t work in Hollywood for another 15 years.
I assume that there is video of his testimony before the HUAC, but I haven’t been able to find it. I did, however, find this amazing clip of Jim Brochu in his one-man play, Zero Hour. He does Mostel really well. Here is the part of it from his testimony before the committee. Take a look; it really is great:
It’s very funny, but it also highlights the absurdity of the committee. These really were show trials without any point but to show how powerful and important the Representatives (and the Senators in the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations) were that they could get people to grovel before them. It was public shaming for the purpose of self-aggrandizement.
Of course, there was another side to it. You can hold a whole nation in line by claiming that any liberal activity—unions, civil rights, anti-war—is really the work of the Great Existential Threat (communism then; simply “liberalism” now, because the word has been so effectively vilified). This is why it was widely claimed that Martin Luther King Jr was a communist. Martin Luther King Jr was not a communist.
And Zero Mostel wasn’t a communist. The HUAC knew this too. He probably was nominally a communist in his youth. But what did it matter in 1952? Nothing. And it is clear today. And future generations will look back on us as the fools we are. Broad swaths of the middle class have been convinced that the real America is some mythic thing that will be found if we just funnel enough money to the super rich. Above all, let us not deal with our real problems. We need more of the same! But that is America in a nutshell: in the 1950s, we pretended to save freedom by destroying it. Now we pretend to save the middle class while destroying it.
And the la-hand of the Freeeeee! And the hoooome, of thhhhhe, braaaave!
James Fillmore is a regular reader and a prolific commenter around here. I am pleased to present his first guest post. He lives in Minnesota. Despite an exhausting job, he somehow manages to write so that the rest of us may benefit. He told me he “enjoys writing reviews of movies/books on occasion” and while his “minuscule audience tires of reading him, they secretly know he is always right.” Such arrogant self-deprecation makes him a perfect fit at Frankly Curious! —FM [Update: James e-mailed me regarding this introduction, “The intro was fine, though I’d lose the noble-sounding-job shit. You’ve taught; you know as well as I do that people do difficult, useful jobs because people find them challenging and interesting. We ain’t ‘heroes.’ We just deserve a living wage and financial speculators deserve, well, I’ll halt myself at ‘severe chastisement.'” So James isn’t a hero. In case you were thinking that he is, cut it out! -FM]
In 2006, three movies were released that had very noticeable leftist leanings; that made 2006 a fun year to watch movies. Hollywood, no matter what the imposing Bill-O or your local AM radio lunatics say, isn’t generally leftist, except on social issues. Movie executives want to live in a world where their children are free from prejudice based on race, religion, or sexual orientation; they tend not to mind a world where they make gazoodles of money and their Mexican housemaids are paid quite a lot less.
So movies which suggest society is broken and could stand a serious upgrade are fairly rare. This is distinct from the more customary “society could use some tolerant enlightenment by those of us who make movies for lots of money” variety. Yes, John Sayles and Spike Lee are still alive, but they don’t count; they make their politically significant movies with duct tape and lemonade-stand funding. I’m talking about three movies with wide national releases (or two, and one that had wide release in Minnesota, a cold place you wouldn’t like) that had, as their point, “Yer cuntry iz boned! Press ‘restore.'”
In March came V For Vendetta, which is the most entertaining “Zorro blows up Parliament” film ever made. It was produced by Joel Silver (of the Lethal Weapon series, in which Mel Gibson and Danny Glover take on apartheid and exploding toilets), written by The Matrix creators the Wachowskis. The Matrix movies, at least until they stopped making any sense whatsoever, had a political undercurrent about “waking up” to tyranny. The first movie features a song by super-liberal Tom Morello called, literally, “Wake Up.” And when Joe Pantoliano’s character makes a deal with mean robots to betray humankind in return for getting his happy brainwashed state back—saying “ignorance is bliss”—the mean robot makes a point of calling him “Mr Reagan.”
In V for Vendetta, the undercurrent is made explicit. It’s 1984, or close enough with John Hurt—who was Winston Smith in the unseen movie version, playing Big Brother here—and everyone’s in a miserable daze. Enter V and humanity presumably lives happily ever after. It’s a damnably enjoyable piece of anti-Bush propaganda, with terrific performances by Hugo Weaving (the mean robot of The Matrix turned hero/savior here), Natalie Portman, Stephen Rea, and Stephen Fry (maybe Fry’s best film work), alongside others less famous and just as good. (Roger Allam, playing a Fox News-type, looks so much like Christopher Hitchens it’s spooky.) You want your demonization of “terror” as a means to enact sweeping social controls? You got it. You want an anthrax scare? You got it. The tyrants also oppress gays (the most powerful subplot in the film, for me, the Wachowskis, and Karl Rove’s 2004 election strategy—if you’re keeping score)? You got it!
The movie has affected a lot of people. V wears a Guy Fawkes mask and FedExes copies to everyone everywhere, inspiring revolution. There are a lot of protesters who wear these masks in real life today. Personally, I find the “if people wake up, they’ll riot in the streets and solve all our woes” message simplistic. Rioting in the streets makes for good television but doesn’t really get you anyplace; you need to educate and organize citizens in the old, tedious, door-to-door way. That’s what the civil-rights movement did, and it took decades of buildup before it was able to make effective large-scale demonstrations. When I saw protesters outside my front door wearing those Guy Fawkes masks during the 2008 Republican convention, I wanted to slap the kids; get out of the movies and go sign up some poor people already. But their hearts were in the right place, and that’s something.
Alan Moore, who wrote the V For Vendetta graphic novel (which I have not read), didn’t like the film. In an AV Club interview, he said that he regards both capitalism and socialism as ways to organize industrial societies which probably won’t be around much longer. On the “not much longer” front he may be right. A segue to:
In September you had Children Of Men, based on a novel by PD James, and directed by visual maestro Alfonso Cuaron. (You may have puked in your space helmet seeing his Gravity.) The novel, as far as I could tell, was about the sterility of academic leftism in the face of real-world issues; the movie is about sterility as a metaphor for all the horrible stuff each of us feels powerless to fix, like global warming or the humanitarian disasters in Iraq or Gaza or wherever the next one is.
It’s a stunningly effective exercise in visualizing, “Oh God we’re doomed!”—featuring some long takes (like the opening one in Gravity) that would make Orson Welles proud. (His line about movies being the “biggest toy-train set any boy ever had” applies to Cuaron, who digs the technical challenges of filmmaking.) Watching it, I was alternately depressed into a coma and blown away by the sheer virtuosity of the thing.
Politically, the movie isn’t a rouser like V; there are no easy solutions offered. There are no solutions offered, period; the best efforts of well-meaning people break down into factional leftist squabbling, which anyone who’s read an internet BDS debate (or anyone who’s seen Life Of Brian) will recognize. Clive Owen is a cynical public employee who drinks to numb his disillusionment. Michael Caine, in maybe his finest performance (Like Fry! It’s a trend!), plays an ex-activist living in the British equivalent of Northern California who is focused on growing killer strains of weed. The always magnetic, always unpronounceable Chiwetel Ejiofor makes a crazy factional leftist terrifying and sympathetic. And the great Julianne Moore gets the Janet Leigh part, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
If you watch the film (few did), many things stick in your memory, but one remains with me especially. Warring soldiers see a baby, the first baby anyone’s seen in 20 years, and the fighting halts; basic humanity overcomes hatred and ideology, for a moment. Then somebody shoots at somebody and everyone goes back to murderous mayhem. Yeah, that’s just about right.
The DVD of Children Of Men has an hour-long Cuaron documentary featuring the likes of Naomi Klein, James Lovelock, and Slavoj Zizek talking about the end of the world, and it’s well worth watching. Zizek in particular charms me; he has a goofy accent that makes his incredibly overbearing, pretentious use of the English language seem quirky rather than domineering—like Werner Herzog, but in a better mood. And, finally, speaking of barely decipherable Euro accents…
In December, you had Sweet Land. I can’t write about the film without tearing up; it might have been the most intense experience I’ve had at a movie theater in my adult life.
The film takes place in post-WWI Minnesota. The Swedes and Norwegians loathe each other but are attempting to put these petty differences aside to unite for a nobler cause: loathing the Germans. A Norwegian farmer (Or a Swede; I get them confused.) brings over essentially a mail-order bride from Germany, and all hell breaks loose. All heck, actually; it is Minnesota.
Sweet Land is a very difficult film to watch for the first 30 minutes or so. It seems like nobody is speaking the same language and it’s impossible to figure out what’s going on. That’s because the movie is about the immigrant experience, where nobody speaks the same language and it’s impossible to figure out what’s going on. Gradually, you get a sense of the story, and you realize the confusion was intentional; it’s meant to give you a sense of what being an immigrant in these isolated farming communities might have felt like. The movie’s very effective at bringing an isolated farm community to life. You will never take heated indoor plumbing for granted again.
The only actors you’ll recognize are Ned Beatty, as a town burgomaster, and Alan Cumming (the guy who hosts Masterpiece Mystery) as a farmer who just can’t stop screwing his wife and so has a zillion kids he can’t feed. Neither actor has had too many opportunities to really take a part and run with it in films (Beatty getting raped in Deliverance doesn’t count, as good as he was in that). So both have one of their best-ever scenes (Trend!) in a dinner sequence, where Beatty gives a bored speech obviously aimed at Cumming about the Virtues Of Thrift And Temperance or some such. Beatty’s character is insulting Cumming’s without coming out and saying it (that’s sometimes called, in these parts, “ScandiLutheran passive-aggressiveness.”) The point isn’t to dispense helpful wisdom; the point is for the powerful to demean the weak and seem noble in doing so. It’s a great scene, played beautifully by both.
Eventually the Norwegian farmer and his German mail-order bride come to the aid of Cumming, because in a tiny farming community, you’ve got to knuckle under to the burgomaster or stick with your neighbors; they choose to stick with the neighbors out of what appears to be more “American Gothic” sheer stubbornness than any political drive. (Socialism is mentioned in the movie, but the characters have more pressing concerns than dreamy ideology. Knowing your Marx won’t pay off the landlord.)
The writer/director, Ali Selim, has a German-heritage parent from Minnesota and a Muslim-heritage parent from Egypt. So the themes obviously meant a lot to him; he battled for 15 years to get Sweet Land made. He hasn’t made a feature film since, but he works a lot in TV.
When I saw Sweet Land, in a small independent theater in Saint Paul, we were a bit early and the previous showing was just ending. In the lobby, a young couple walked out, complaining that the movie was slow and boring. I assumed they were possibly right, and that’s why they were the only attendees. Then, a few minutes later, the rest of the audience came out—all older, and all wiping their faces. If you see the film, you’ll understand why: the final shot knocks you into an Old Yeller-level of absolute helpless bawling. But they are happy-sad tears.
So That’s The Year In Lefty Movies, 2006. V for Venddeta was about riots fixing stuff, Children of Men was about stuff being unfixable, and the one nobody outside Minnesota has ever seen, Sweet Land, was about how fixing stuff actually happens, by resisting one burgomaster at a time. You can watch them on the standard pay services, or get them for free from your local library. You already pay taxes to get movies from your library for free, and unless you are a colossal jerkhead you don’t mind paying these taxes, so why not actually use your local library to watch a few DVDs? Honestly, you can do this; and it’s pretty awesome.
Today is the 57th birthday of the brilliant comedian Stephen Fry. I celebrated his birthday last year in the birthday post. But I didn’t talk about him much. (That was the way with birthday posts at that time.) So he deserves a real birthday.
At 17, he stole the credit card of a family friend. If you believe Wikipedia, this was a mistake. Listening to Fry talk about on a fairly dreadful documentary, I didn’t get the impression that it was such a naive act. But it could be that Fry has an incentive to make it sound worse than it was—like reformed Christians who claim to have been Satanists before they found God. Regardless, he spent three months in jail for the crime.
But unlike, say, a young black man in the United States, Fry was given another chance. Plus, he’s incredibly smart. So after a bit of time at City College Norwich, he got a scholarship to Queens’ College, Cambridge. That was where he met Hugh Laurie, who doesn’t have nearly as interesting a back story (his father has five names). The rest, as I say all the time, is history.
Here is a sketch from A Bit of Fry and Laurie, “Welcome to the Private Police Force.” It is making fun of the privatization of services and the Americanization of Britain. It’s very funny and brilliant satire:
I’m not proud. Last night I saw the link and I clicked, 15 People Who Have Been Banned from SNL. And I learned a few things from the article. The most basic thing is that Saturday Night Live has this ridiculous thing about banning entertainers for life. I don’t know what this is about. It would seem that Lorne Michaels is a megalomaniac who thinks he is doing something more important than producing a banal comedy show. Regardless, many of the reasons for bans are petty.
The best example of this is Elvis Costello’s appearance on the show in 1977. This was right before his first album My Aim Is True was released in the United States. His record company wanted him to perform “Less than Zero.” That was the first single off the album in the UK. But the song is about the British fascist Oswald Mosley—a subject that wasn’t of particular interest to an American audience. Costello wanted to do “Radio Radio.” So on SNL, he started “Less Than Zero,” stopped the band and then did “Radio Radio.”
Why exactly this got Costello banned is not clear. I think there are two aspects of it. One is that Michaels is a corporate lackey. Another is that he hates it when anything happens that wasn’t approved His Mediocreness. The ban stayed in effect for 12 years, but was eventually lifted. According to Wikipedia, Costello was “one of only three people to have their ban from SNL lifted.” To my mind, this is kind of like a bookstore deciding to lift its ban on Stephen King and start selling his books. There are other such cases where SNL is punching much too high: Milton Berle, Frank Zappa, and Martin Lawrence, to name a few.
Another person banned was Sinead O’Connor. In 1992, the young singer-songwriter made a protest against child abuse in the Catholic Church. She ended her a cappella version of “War” by tearing a picture of Pope John Paul II. She was banned, apparently because the only thing worse than the Church covering for pedophilia among priests is talking about it. In retrospect, O’Connor looks like an oracle and SNL looks just like the purveyor of lukewarm inoffensive comedy that they have consistently been for the past four decades.
The whole thing reminds me of Tim Minchin’s foul mouthed, “The Pope Song.”
If you find me more offensive than the possibility
That the Pope protected priests when they were getting fucking fiddly
Then listen to me mother fucker this here is a fact:
You are just as morally misguided as the mother fucking,
nbsp;power hungry, self aggrandizing
nbsp;nbsp;bigot in the stupid fucking hat.
Good comedy requires taking a stand and SNL has pretty much never done that. The original head writer, Michael O’Donoghue originally left the show because the comedy was too staid and safe. He later said of the show, “It’s like watching old men die.”
But I believe the article was wrong about Charles Grodin getting banned. It says:
Before he was a political television commentator, Charles Grodin was a comedian and actor who pissed off more than a few people during his October 29, 1977, hosting gig on <i>Saturday Night Live</i>. Grodin ad-libbed much of his performance, and not well, leading up to an incident during a sketch where Grodin broke character and caused a stir.
I know the episode they are talking about, and it is one of the best ever. Grodin played an amiable buffoon. The idea for the show was that he was totally unprepared because he spent the week sightseeing and buying the cast members presents. For example, in a sketch with The Killer Bees, Grodin supposedly broke character asking if the bees were supposed to be actual bees or men dressed up as bees. Another part of the show was that John Belushi was really angry with Grodin for his lack of professionalism. Now, there could have been something behind this. But Grodin did exactly the same character when on The Tonight Show.
Regardless, before I read the article, I had a low opinion of the show. Now that opinion has slipped even lower. Saturday Night Live is truly the Sinbad of sketch comedy. Sinbad, of course, being the amusing but totally inoffensive comedian who has never been banned from SNL.
For the first time since it came out 15 years ago, I watched The Limey. It is a very simple story: a father comes to Los Angeles to get revenge for his daughter’s death, which he suspects was not an accident. But what is most interesting about the film is the way that Steven Soderbergh chose to structure it. And I still don’t know what I think about it, even though I do like the film.
The father is Wilson, played by Terence Stamp. And most of the scenes featuring him are exhilarating. Soderbergh and editor Sarah Flack really monkey with continuity. For example, a single conversation will seem to take place in two or even three places. This is combined with hand-held camera work as well as the occasional ostentatious single shot to amazingly good effect.
What is strange is that the scenes that involve the daughter’s boyfriend, Terry Valentine (played by Peter Fonda), are shot in an extremely classical way. If Soderbergh had not chosen to place them in gorgeous locations, I would call them boring. In fact, you see exactly that in The Fast and the Furious, where despite good acting, the police scenes just die on the screen compared to the rest of the film. But in The Limey, these scenes are just beautiful enough not to kill the film.
Ultimately, the film works because Wilson is such an interesting character. He’s an ex-con—a three time loser—who has been estranged from his daughter for a long time before her death. But he seems to be a nice a guy and he clearly does care about his daughter. And the relationships he develops with Eduardo (Luis Guzman) and Elaine (Lesley Ann Warren) are refreshingly adult—especially for a revenge picture.
It is good that the characters do work so well, because the script itself is kind of a muddle. Wilson’s motivation is to talk to and most likely kill Valentine. But after finding his address, he mostly just hangs out. He does manage to attend a party at Valentine’s house, but he doesn’t kill the man because he claims that it would have been too easy. That doesn’t make any sense except in that it allows the film to go on for another 45 minutes.
Another problem is that the denouement is nothing short of trite—far too tidy for a film as intelligent and subtle as this one. But as I said, it still works. What’s more, it is a film that affects the viewer: it stays with you. I’m going to have to revisit the film in another 15 years. The truth is that I still don’t know quite what to make of it. The Limey definitely shows what can be done with great cinematography, editing, and acting. But is it all style and no substance? I not only don’t know, I don’t know if it matters.
I remember watching The Italian Job many times in my distant past. It was always a fairly enjoyable film even as I found it almost completely wanting. One thing especially bothered me: the job absolutely had to have Professor Peach to deal with the computer aspects of the job. But the extent of his technical work was simply taking one tape off the computer and putting another tape on. And this is just the prime example of the fundamental problem: there is very little heist in this heist movie.
Today, I really should be writing about James Van Allen. But the truth is that I was up really late last night and I just don’t feel up to it. You just can’t write about him without getting into some hardcore physics. So instead, I say unto you: today the great comedic actor 
I was recently reminded of the line, “Mr Neutron: easily the most dangerous man the world has ever seen…” It is from one of the last Monty Phyton episodes made. The joke is that Mr Neutron is really dangerous, but all he wants to do is hang out in the London suburbs gardening and wallpapering. When I first saw it as a teenager, I didn’t find it all the funny. But it was something that stayed in my mind and it became more and more humorous over time.
On this day in 1898, the great film writer and director Preston Sturges was born. It is best to think of him as a writer, although his films were energetically shot and edited. But his scripts are really some of the best ever. He wrote exclusively comedies that are generally considered screwball. And they were very often that, but I think that is a bit tight a fit for what he did.
I was talking to Will last night and the subject of Zero Mostel came up. It was actually a conversation about Mel Brooks and what a total jerk he is. As an example, I talked about his treatment of Mostel during the production of 
Today is the 57th birthday of the brilliant comedian 
I’m not proud. Last night I saw the link and I clicked, 