Oh man. I watched The Bourne Supremacy last week, and it’s still on my mind. Man, it was good, way WAY better than I expected. I remember liking the first movie alright, but I read and reread the book throughout middle and high school and beyond, and knew the story well enough that I was distracted from the movie by the adaptation, does that make sense? Robert Ludlum did write Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum books before he died, but if I’ve ever read Supremacy I can’t really remember doing so, and I know I never made it to Ultimatum. So going into the movie, I figured it was just the mediocre second chapter in a franchise, and I was looking to watch a loud action movie basically.

Which it was, definitely. But what was shocking about Bourne Supremacy the movie was how well it was told–literally, I was shocked. I’m not the most, or even the much, sophisticated movie-watcher in the world, and I kind of like it that way. I like not knowing enough about movies, so as to be genuinely transported by them, which I was during Bourne Supremacy. The story was, well, whatever–there wasn’t that much story really, just a continuation of the original superspy-killing-machine-with-amnesia plot.

But the telling! The entire story takes place on the hoof, with someone (usually Bourne) speeding or running or limping somewhere, being chased by the governments of a few nations and worse. But more than that, it’s how the director chose to show the story that made the movie so enjoyable. He moves the camera around at such a blistering speed, that you never have an opportunity to feel “placed” as an observer–it has the effect of keeping you as semi-confused and off-balance as the film’s protagonist. How easy is it for a schlub sitting on his sofa in Charlotte with Oreo crumbs on his chest to identify with an amnesiac master assassin in Berlin? I’m not really interested in violence or spies or all that, but there I was in the middle of the day with my heart in my throat. I love it!

I don’t know or understand much about cinematography, but I’ve been struggling lately in my comics with how to stage panels, how much to show, how to make the panels more interesting, change camera angles and perspectives, bring a reader into things instead of just merely reading. Watching the last big scene of the movie, the big car chase in Moscow, I was on the edge of my seat, and only afterwards realized that the reason was that I was in all the shots, I was being moved and jerked around just like the subjects of the shots. Whoever edited this scene below must have biceps in their eyeballs; I cannot imagine how long it must have taken to edit this movie.  BUT: pretty sure this scene is spoilery–it is after all the big climax. So don’t watch it if you haven’t seen the movie, or if you ever intend to.

Oh! I almost forgot, I put these three sketchbook spreads up in my Flickr set devoted to that sort of thing–I think I’m about 2/3 of the way to having that whole sketchbook up online, which is cool (maybe). I think so, anyway. Shutup.

So yesterday was my 35th birthday, and last night I did a poetry reading at Snug Harbor in honor of this auspicious occasion.  The turnout was good, I think they told me about 70 people? Which is not as good as in the old days, but pretty surprising considering I really only publicized it through Facebook and some light word-of-mouth. Plus a lot of the people I thought for sure would be there were not — so double super flattering for the ones that did. 

The last time I did this was in 97 or 98 or so, I can never remember.  I had expected to be really out of practice and clumsy, but it may be that I was doing it wrong before, and so by being out of practice at doing it wrong, I did it right? You know? Either way, everything worked, people had a good time, laughed or clapped in the right places.  But I did completely forget to thank Elizabeth Steinfels of Hong Kong Vintage, who with pretty much zero notice organized me a little kiddie desk and chair and a pulpit; not to mention carting all that there and back.  So nice. 

Anyway, lots of sweet stuff said by some of my favorite people, and it was a good night. I stayed up late talking with a pretty girl, and then true to form woke up at 8.30 this morning CLICK! and couldn’t get back to sleep. Whoa, is this too much information?  Sorry guys I’m still groggy and got paid last night to talk about myself, I guess the rush hasn’t worn off yet.

A COUPLE OF THINGS I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT:

1) A week or two ago I saw INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.  Do you know this movie?  Quentin Tarantino?  I liked it, it was fun, there are parts of it that are pretty amazing. 

BUT–the story was completely weird, filled with strange holes and dangling plotlines.  SPOILERS BELOW–There are three or four stories going on, like in a lot of Tarantino’s movies, but in this one they don’t seem to really converge at all; at best they sort of get near each other briefly, like seeing the opposing lanes of a highway flit in and out of view.  Characters are introduced and we get whole backstories and flashback sequences and all sorts of tidbits about them, and then they’re promptly snuffed out, with no discernible consequence to the larger plot.

And the end, what was the deal with that?  All the storylines converge in this theatre, and pretty much everybody dies? For no reason?  I get it that war is hell and everything, and showing the gritty, seamy underbelly of things is part of Tarantino’s schtick.  But listen: if you’re going to rewrite the end of World War II, the bloodiest conflict in mankind’s history; if you get to rearrange everything just how you like it, including a completely gratuitous execution of Hitler, Goebbels, and the entire German High Command…

Well, you could make it make sense, couldn’t you?  Just saying.  Soon I’ll be starting my first longform narrative, and I’m thinking about storytelling a lot, so maybe I’m being hypercritical. And I did enjoy the movie, except for all the talking talking talking all the time, usually just before all the talkers kill each other and a new scene starts, where the new talkers try to figure out what the old talkers were talking about…

Oh, and the Mike Myers cameo completely pretty much ruined any chance of taking the thing seriously. There are plenty of old British dudes who wouldn’t need thousands of dollars of makeup to fill that role in a way that didn’t complete rob the movie of half its gravitas, its sense of being important–especially after the INCREDIBLE opening scene, just an amazing start to the movie.

2) Battlestar Galactica. More SPOILER ALERT: the spoiler is that this show sucks. Holy Cow, it’s like a total breakdown, whoever’s in charge is insane.  How in the world did they make that little story take 4-5 seasons? Not to mention a couple of TV movie things thrown in there?  Here’s the story:

a) People make these Cylon robots, which rebel, evolve, and then rebel again, effectively destroying the human race except for a relatively small number of survivors.

b) Those survivors try to find a new home, because they get tired of flying around in a bunch of dingy spaceships pretty quick.

c) Some of the survivors are actually Cylons, but

d) It doesn’t matter, because at the last minute Starbuck magically remembers the coordinates of “Earth” and they teleport there.

e) Oh, and everyone decides to get rid of all their technology, fly their spaceships into the sun, and walk off with bindles into the mountains.

You can argue some of that.  A lot of people think the writing, acting, and music on the show were really great, really groundbreaking, exceptional stuff.  I don’t; I think it was terrible.  I think the only thing worse than the acting was the ridiculous story.  ESPECIALLY because it was obvious by the end that they just kind of wandered up to this point, and that the entire previous series was just a bunch of misdirection and plot reversals standing in for real drama.  There should be a Battlestar Galactica drinking game, where each time there’s a countdown–”okay we’ll wait just ten more seconds and then we’re outta here“–you take a drink.  You would die of cirrhosis before you ever finished the series.

SO ANYWAY.

I think what I’ve REALLY been thinking about lately is the low standards we set for things — I work in comics, and the same thing happens there.  People will talk about a story being really true-to-life and gritty and all that, really “adult”, but leave out the part where the star of the story wears a bodysuit and has a ring which lets him do anything he can imagine! Oh but it doesn’t work on the color yellow. 

Why do we accept things that aren’t good?  Or a better question, leaving out the subjective “good”: why do we take our escapist fiction, our “fun” tv shows, and try to pretend that they’re groundbreaking? Why not just be happy with our guilty pleasures and not worry about whether or not they’re genius?  It’s like if the editors of America’s Funniest Home Videos started trying to really get amazing with the cuts in their montages.  Why not just accept that Green Lantern is just a fun little thing and leave it?  Because if you look at BSG as a cool sci-fi show with a bunch of space battles and intergalactic intrigue, it’s fine.  But once you try to hang a bunch of spiritual mumbo-jumbo and karmic crapola on top of that framework, once you try to get heavy…

well I just don’t think that framework is strong enough to support all that pathos.  It’s not that BSG–or Green Lantern, or whatever–shouldn’t aspire to greatness.  But they need better, stronger, more adult underpinnings if they want to throw all that heavy weight on the girders.

Hm, even as I type that I can see problems with that argument.  But today is Labor Day, and yesterday was my birthday, and I’m already tired of talking about this.  I think I’m just grumpy because The Wire is so amazing, so well-made, well-crafted, that most other things just seems shabby in comparison.  One more season left!

Network was released in 1976. According to the well-informed staff at Wikipedia, it earned 4 Oscars, although I think the one most-deserved went to Faye Dunaway. She shares billing with a ridiculous wealth of talent that also includes a pretty amazing William Holden and Robert Duvall, not to mention dapper Ned Beatty near the end. AND it was directed by Sidney Lumet, who also did 12 Angry Men and Serpico, among a ton of others.

I won’t talk long about the movie: I don’t know much about movies, and generally like or dislike them based on my own ideas. My opinion about film as an artform should be taken with as much salt as you can find, if you take it at all. But this movie was, if nothing else, highly thought-provoking, one of the best purposes of any art. On that I think we can agree.

The rough plot is: a aging network anchorman goes barmy and starts swearing onscreen and threatening to kill himself. Rather than yank him off and have him treated for depression, some hawkish executives turn him into a national sensation and reaps buckets of money as a result. It ends about how you’d expect. At the time of its release, Network must have seemed pretty histrionic: imagine a world where the TV airwaves were consumed with crazy people spouting any old thing, which people would accept purely because it was on TV! But watching it now, it’s like writer Paddy Chayefsky was gazing (Sybil the Soothsayer-like, for those of you who have seen the movie) into the future, where he espied the likes of Survivor, the O.J. Simpson slow-motion car chase, Michael Jackson, etc.

Like a lot of movies from the 70’s, the ideas in this one are more sound than the story itself. There’s a love story in there between William Holden and Faye Dunaway that’s distracting at best, ridiculous at worst, although I get it that there needed to be a real-world analog for the whole dissolution-of-the-soul thing that all the TV worship had to lead to. But it’s not the most likely romance in the world. On the other hand, it produces some really great scenes between Holden and Dunaway, including at the first dinner of their affair, where Faye Dunaway perkily states, “I can’t tell you how many men have told me what a lousy lay I am.”

On the other hand, the writing is so overdone that you’re alternately impressed with the extraordinary vocabularies of the cast, or letdown when you realize that not even a roomful of Harvard professors talk like that. I’m reminded a lot of Being There, where a great idea was paired up with an incredible performance, but was ultimately saddled with the other 90 minutes of the movie. On the other other hand, what do I know about writing? The screenplay also won an Oscar that year, one of four (the other three went to Dunaway, Peter Finch (who plays the messianic anchorman), and Beatrice Straight, who plays Holden’s lady-cuckold wife.

I get a charge out of watching movies from the 70’s, although they’re always downers, so it’s hard to decide to watch one. I was born in 1974. I don’t remember the 70’s, of course–by the time I was old enough to start noticing, Reagan was president and the coolest thing in the world was the brand new Space Shuttle. So when I see things set in the 70’s, it’s almost like looking at a time capsule: this is how things were, this is what people looked like, these were the circumstances surrounding the beginnings of my life.

I especially like the attitude of the 70’s–everyone wearing these crazy jackets and wild hairstyles, and you can tell that the producers wanted everything to look super modern, super sleek. It’s easy to forget when looking at a Nehru jacket that at one time they were hip, right?

But best of all is the light in 70’s movies–I always notice that there’s all this actual light everywhere. I don’t mean bright light, but real light; or at least, real-appearing. Scenes will be totally dark, with just a disembodied face hanging in the frame, like the scene near the beginning where Holden and Finch are drunk in a bar. The light in a room might be obnoxiously bright, or dim and muddy; either way, it’s how it is in real life. Life is rarely lit correctly, and almost never properly composed. Of course, all those 70’s directors loved composition, so that clever sentence is only half clever.

But it’s the first thing I notice about the movies of this time period: 70’s movies are filled with the banal, unapologetically. The drama of the story is set half the time against the oppressive insipidness of life. Is this my imagination? It’s hard to say–I wasn’t really around back then. It may just be that the 1970’s look boring now; but in most of the films of the decade, the world around the action has all the life and spark and electricity of a lawyer’s bookshelf. The style of everything seems new and old at the same time–sleek, but covered in dust somehow.

The bad guy (other than just general concepts of greed and stupidity) in the movie is played by Robert Duvall, who if you put a gun to my head and forced me to name my three favorite actors, would probably be two of them. Think about Duvall in the 70’s: The Godfather I and II, MASH, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now… he was like the Phillip Seymour Hoffman of his time. Not the prettiest actor in the world, but with chops; able to imbue the most complex performances with the basic humanity they need to work.

It was strange watching Duvall play young buck to aging William Holden; as of this writing, Robert Duvall is pushing 80. But in the film he’s all fire and passion, while Holden seems tired, laconicly verbose. It’s hard to believe he has the energy for a high-powered strumpet like Faye Dunaway. But watching these three actors on the screen together seemed a little like watching the history of film up to that time. Remember that Holden was a hero of the Western and one of Hollywood’s studio stars from the 40’s on. Seeing the now-aging Duvall screaming profanity at this legend was a real mind-blower at times, further cementing the strange anachronism of the movie, post past and future.

The idea that Holden, who started acting in movies in the 30’s, played the lead in this grim 70’s polemic is a real headtwister for sure. He carries all that history around with him on the screen, making it easy to believe that he is a tired newsman who doesn’t buy all the hype and noise these days. There’s something to be said for the early years of an artform–in 1976, film as art was what? Fifty years old? Citizen Kane had come out 35 years earlier. The glory years of jazz had already wound down by the 70’s, and rock music is kind of sputtering and fizzling its way toward obscenity now. Could “Network” have been made today? I think yes, but with a lot more eye-rolling and winking, and a lot less class. I’m not sure that ANYone is making classy movies anymore.

Which Network surely is, for its strangeness and its several faults. Network is, if nothing else, a piece of art where someone had something to say and got some incredibly talented people together to help him say it. Here’s Ned Beatty saying some pretty interesting stuff, from near the end of the movie–don’t watch it if you haven’t seen it before.

Before I begin, it is important for me to make the point that I am not in any way educated, know next to nothing about film theory, and am utterly in awe of anyone who can wrestle a film crew and 3 months of often incredibly boring sweat into ANYthing, regardless of the relative quality of the product. But this movie provoked so many different streams of thought in me I thought it would be ridiculous not to think harder about them, and I’m too vain not to share. Please presume that my intentions are mainly self-educative, and only very slightly in trying to make myself look more clever.

OKAY! With that out of the way:

The Prestige has some good qualities, for sure, but they are largely drowned out by the indefatigable mediocrity of the movie in general. I was especially surprised at the overpowering so-so-ness of it, mainly because I’d heard so much good stuff about it. Probably the best part of the movie for me was Christian Bale, who I think I’ve liked in everything I’ve seen him in, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in a really GREAT movie. Where most actors do “brooding and pensive” by just sort of squinting at things more, Bale has a real intensity on film that pulls the story around him a little bit, whether he’s the good guy or the bad guy.

I’m not here to smear the movie. It’s not necessarily BAD, although anything that costs millions of dollars to make should always be GREAT, right? Right? And even if it’s not, if you’re going to poo-poo one movie, there are probably a few thousand worse ones that you need to get to first. But my problems with The Prestige are more focused than normal, and in most cases relate to what–even to a total amateur like myself–seem like egregious and needless mistakes in storytelling.

TOTAL SPOILERS BELOW.

The main problem with the story, and the uber-problem that it’s smaller problems orbit around, is patent unbelievability. The plot hinges on the idea of a magic trick as both a metaphor and a very real plot device–but fails on both counts to deliver anything like its promise.

First the metaphor, the idea of “the prestige”, the part of a trick where the effect of the illusion is produced, and even the most cynical skeptic is forced to wonder at the skill of the illusionist. At the beginning of the movie, when Michael Caine is pretty much just straight up telling us what the movie is all about in one of many many convenient expositional voice-overs, I was kind of excited. I love this sort of thing, and am the sort of person who LOVES to be surprised, and is not at all interested in knowing how a trick is performed. I like the magic, y’know?

But the great failing of The Prestige is that EVERY trick is explained. From the lowest where-did-that-bird-go trick to the big trick(s) at the end, and everything in between. And so, in a movie that ostensibly is about magic, and more specifically about how that magic drives everyone in the movie completely nutty, you’re left with no feeling for the magic itself. I can’t think of a single thing I walked away from that movie wondering about–isn’t a movie a sort of magic trick in itself? The Prestige lacks wonder. 

Okay, now the non-metaphor, although it too is wrapped up in metaphor.  One of the numerous “main” questions of the film’s plot revolves around how the Christian Bale character is pulling off this nutty trick.  The answer:  there are two of him.  If you haven’t seen the movie, I may have just ruined it for you.  Or if you’re like me, you figured it out barely halfway through the movie, and then spent the second half dreading it–”could this really be the answer?”  And again, I’m not the sort of person who is trying to guess endings and stuff.  I like to relax and be stupid when I watch movies. 

Even worse, when this big “prestige” is revealed, it is almost immediately trumped by the other “prestige”–you can see the diminishing returns at work here, I bet–which is so bizarre that it renders the first one completely forgotten.  Oh yes–and this one is ALSO revealed much earlier in the movie, so the “reveal” itself is highly anticlimactic. 

DOUBLE SECRET SPOILER WARNING!

Here’s the thing:  halfway throught the movie, the Hugh Jackman character convinces Nikola Tesla to create a big sciencey device for him, although he has no idea what it does, nor does he even ask.  Check it:

You don’t have to be the Amazing Kreskin to figure this one out, y’know? Tesla builds a device (twice?) that can basically duplicate a thing completely, plus conveniently send that duplicate off a little ways so you don’t see it right away. Organic matter? No problem. Thoughts, memories, the soul itself?  No problem!  The audience’s suspension of disbelief?  Well…

Because what does noted scientist Tesla do?  As the terrible henchman of cruel Thomas Edison himself are about to burn his laboratory to the ground?  He packs up this incredible device and gives it to this obsessed lunatic magician, and then trundles off in a stagecoach somewhere, possibly whistling “Lady Stardust.”

For me, this was the end of the movie.  The leaps of logic necessary to get to the next phase, where Hugh Jackman is setting up his big prestige using this fantastic Jules Verne device, were maybe too great for the spindly legs of my imagination.  Which leads me to the other big problem I have with this movie:  the lack of any motivation for ANY character.

I like characters.  I like books where the author creates a character so vivid that you are forced almost against your will to love or hate them, or often both.  You identify with a character; you can understand and often sympathize with their motivations, and it adds depth not only to that character, but in the world that they inhabit.

But in The Prestige, we are asked again and again to believe that each of the main characters will do extraordinary things for no reason.  And each time we are asked this, it becomes harder and harder to suspend disbelief. 

For instance:  for part of the movie (or all of it?) Hugh Jackman is motivated by the accidental death of his wife by Christian Bale’s hand in a trick-gone-wrong.  Motivated so much that he blows off part of Bale’s hand later, and the two immediately just start trying to kill/maim/ruin each other from then on.  Bale never says, “hey bro that was a total accident I tried that rope and she winked at me to do it and then well you saw what happened anyway sorry.”  Instead they decide to spend the rest of their lives trying to ruin each other over it.  I could buy it if this was the only big leap–in fact, if it was the big leap of faith in the movie, it might seem more possible.  I certainly have done ridiculously petty things for almost no reason before.

But the lengths to which they go beggar the imagination, for such a slight.  Not to mention that Hugh Jackman takes up with Scarlet Johannsen in short order, and mentions of the dead wife pretty much stop after that.  Christian Bale chops his (secret) twin’s finger off so they can switch places, and then spends the rest of that twin’s life switching back and forth so he can appear to be teleporting onstage.  Whaaaaaat?!  Hugh Jackman, who somehow makes an incredible sum of money offscreen at some point, spends months in another country convincing the world’s foremost scientist to invent 12 different brand new technologies so that he can really zing his great rival. 

And apparently, Hugh Jackman will drown himself over and over and over again in order to make this work.  So he’s so driven that he will KILL HIMSELF nightly BY DROWNING in order to “win.”  Really?  Because of some dead wife he’s already forgotten?  At the beginning of the movie these guys are little more than magician’s apprentices, but we’re supposed to believe that they’re infused with some love of magic so great that they would bend time and space itself to have the best trick?  I don’t buy it. 

In short, the “prestige” of The Prestige, the moment(s) around which the plot of the movie turned, were so dumb as to retroactively render the entire movie inert. 

I have a lot more to say about this, but I will have to save it for Part 2.  I still have drawing to do this morning.

Matchstick Menis not a good movie. It was boring most of the way through, all the plot twists make the movie worse, not better. Literally each time–”oh, now it’s worse again.” It’s a dumb premise, and the “daughter” in the movie is so Lolita-ish that you spend most of the time wondering if her and Nicholas Cage are going to start making out. Well, I did, anyway.

And the ending was so awful that I felt betrayed by Nicholas Cage himself. As if all the promise and miracle of Raising Arizona had been squandered for all time by his part in this movie. And maybe a couple of others, truth be told.

This was an excellent use of the Netflix “instant” queue. Thank you Xbox 360.

There was ONE good scene in this movie, and YouTube has kindly furnished it for us. See above. For a scene from a GREAT film starring Nicholas Cage, see below, although he isn’t in it.

I was planning to have my new site all done and premiered by the end of the day today, but it is not to be this week, I don’t think. It will probably be in the next few days, and definitely the first of the new weekly DHARBIN! strip installments will start a week from tomorrow, Monday December 8. I now have 2 strips in the can, so if I can get another one done this week I’ll be a full 2 ahead by Monday, meaning it’s more likely I’ll be able to stick to a weekly schedule.

Contributing to my not-getting-done-itude was the movie Tron, which I watched today. This is a poor excuse: Tron is barely an hour-and-a-half long, I think. It’s also so dumb in the dumb parts that you could easily do any number of things while watching it, including finish a website design, defuse a chemical bomb, and land a pilotless 747 jetliner with the help of an air-traffic controller by telephone. But when Tron is good, it’s REALLY good:

Unfortunately, when Tron is bad, it’s awful. I know that this is generally the case when you go back and watch something that was amazing and innovative when you were a kid, but Tron seems to be almost laughably crappy.

What’s funny is that the visual effects are still pretty arresting–the problems with the movie are with the story, dialogue, editing, direction, and pretty much everything else that a regular movie is judged on. In its way, Tron paved the way for other visually stunning but ultimately terrible movies like all those Star Wars prequels, etc.

But visually stunning it still is, despite being utterly obsolete as far its technology goes. In fact, as someone who’s generally a little uninterested in computer-generated stuff, I was surprised to find myself on the edge of my seat during some of the more artsy scenes–beyond the drama of some of the chases, it was just how fascinating the scenes themselves were. The design of everything in Tron is extraordinary–it’s hard to express how disappointing this makes the rest of the movie.

For one thing, if they cut out all the long clunky pauses, the movie would probably only be 45 minutes long. For serious. As a matter of fact, cutting out most of the dialogue would help as well. As soon as characters start talking, it’s like the “plot” part of a porno–boooooorrrring. I caught myself repeatedly thinking, throughout the course of the movie, of how amazing it would have been if creative people with the same amount of artistic vision and excellence as the visual designers had done the rest of the movie. This seems to be the problem most times when art and commerce share the same cart. And for its time–1982 or so, I think–Tron was like Harry Potter, as far as generating a short-lived empire of toys, video games, and swag goes.

But I don’t mean to beat up on the movie, not that the movie cares or has feelings. I think if you stick pretty much ANY movie you enjoyed as a kid up against The Godfather or The Third Man, it’s going to come off as hideously trite and childish. I mean, The Goonies is great, but..

And what IS great about Tron is its look forward–remember that in 1982, the fax machine was still on the leading edge of technological development. Watching it now, in 2008, is wistful in a way–you can’t help but think of the people designing the look of the film, trying not only to anticipate the look of the future, but to also anticipate what their audience thought the future would look like. This is both a blessing and curse of all speculative fiction–once your speculation is proven wrong, your story loses some of its teeth, but gains a sort of otherworldly alternate reality. I guess that’s redundant, huh?

Consider 2001: A Space Odyssey. Speaking in late 2008, I can say with at least 90% confidence that humans are not yet turning into Star Children out past the orbit of Mars. Nor are highly friendly computers locking us out of our own pod bays. Nor has everything turned white and become incredibly, incredibly clean. But for me this adds to the story rather than subtracts from it. While it loses some of its post-Atomic Age this-could-happen-to-us element–since clearly it has not–it becomes somehow MORE fictitious, which improbably makes it easier to buy somehow. Plus it bears noting that 2001 was also a visually stunning and highly innovative movie, like Tron. Also, a much better movie.

Another interesting parallel between 2001 and Tron is the fear element–in both movies the bad guy seems to be technology. In their separate futures, self-aware computers align themselves against humans. This is a standard trope in many sci-fi stories, which is always interesting to me: that when people think about the future, they envision menace and strangeness; sentient computers which kill them or make them drive light-cycles or lock them out of pod bays. In the 50’s it was fear of atomic weapons and the world they had created–but by the 80’s it was fear of science itself.

This is especially interesting considering the surpassingly consumer nature of technology today. Today we carry telephones in our pockets which are barely larger than credit cards, but are more powerful than the most powerful computers of the 50’s. You can get one for as little as thirty bucks, and most of them play music, run complex programs, access the Internet, and on and on. If anything, science is more and more ubiquitous today, although I’m sure I could muster up a proper dread if I had to. But if you watch the eleven o’clock news, dread should be found in every nook and cranny of modern living, most often your home somewhere.

I’m not very interested in dread, although I can handle it if it is the motive force behind a great piece of art. Which Tron is not, but it certainly has its moments. The sort of early scenes in the computer world are like a primer on German Expressionism, although with the sort of neon-heavy sensibility of the early 80’s. And somehow, it’s beautiful.

I’m not the only one who thinks so, either–while hunting the little Tron clip above, I found numerous mentions (including a fuzzy trailer) of a forthcoming Tron sequel starring Jeff Bridges, AND this Tron light-cycle game.

Okay, that’s all I have to say about Tron.  It’s fun to look at, but terrible.  And the music–whoa!  Now that I have that out of my system, back to work on comics and websites.  Huzzah!

BEING THERE
1979, starring Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine
directed by Hal Ashby
Buy from Amazon (A short parade will be thrown in my honor).

So last Saturday I wrote briefly about the movie Being There. I was so excited about the movie that I stopped about a half-hour into it just to SAVOR what I’d seen. I’ve been a fan of Peter Sellers since I was a kid, when I thought that the Pink Panther movies must certainly be the pinnacle of comedy in our times. And the adult in me has enjoyed his weird turns in movies like Dr Strangelove, Lolita, and The Mouse That Roared. But neither adult me nor kid me were prepared for how incredibly RIGHT a somewhat older Peter Sellers would be in this movie. In fact, he was so perfect that I’ll stop describing how good he was, and fall back on the fact that I stopped watching a movie 30 minutes in out of SHEER DELIGHT.

The basic shape of the movie is that Peter Sellers plays a man named Chance, a gardener for a rich man who has just died. Apparently Chance has never left the house, and while his relationship to the dead man is never explained, I get the feeling that they were related. Chance is apparently mentally handicapped in some way, although not so much like Rudy or Corky or whatever. While childlike, he never seems childish; never petulant, never selfish (except when concerning television). He seems less broken than empty. You slowly get the idea of this emptiness as the story progresses–for instance, when he leaves the house–for the first time in his life–he begins asking black women on the street for meals, thinking of the maid in the rich man’s house who fed him each day.

Peter Sellers does a fascinating thing in this movie. I’ve always thought of him as as an actor in supreme control of his body, able to use it as much as his face and voice to inform a role. Of course he’s famous for physical histrionics like those of Inspector Clouseau or Dr Strangelove. But what’s so RIVETING about his performance in Being There is that he almost does the opposite–if anything, he’s completely empty as Chance the gardener. The first hour or so of the movie is this empty cipher of a man moving through increasingly chaotic and confusing scenery. I was totally captivated just watching him move around, occasionally interacting with people, all of whom were left inevitably befuddled by said interaction. All but Chance the gardener.

There were numerous points in the first half of the movie where I really felt I was watching one of the best movies I’d ever seen. Chief among these was the moment when Chance leaves the house–the inside of which is presumably well-appointed, although most everything is covered in sheets and drapery. But when he leaves the house, we find that the front door opens onto a shabby, trash-strewn neighborhood, as the funkiest version of “Also Spake Zarathustra”–well heckfire, just watch it yourself:

The clip above closes with what to me is the end of the first part of the movie, and around where I turned the TV off last Saturday. Chance, whose every moment not gardening is spent in front of a television, is captivated by a store-window’s large television, which is connected to a videocamera.

The problem with this movie (for me) is that this is probably the emotional climax of the entire film, at around the 34 minute mark. Essentially the first half-hour is a very well-made sort of tone poem of a movie, very focused, very good at depicting a man who moves gracefully through a world he does not understand any more than he needs to. Everything is in its place, there is no wasted footage, so wasted words. Best of all, everything is so open-ended–like the performance of Peter Sellers, a cipher–that you can’t help but fill it with your own ideas, your own reactions and suspicions. When the rest of the cast enters the movie, after Shirley MacLaine’s limo backs into Chance’s leg, this openness fades and finally disappears into a more standard (although still well-made and affecting) political metaphor.

It’s not that I’m not interested in politics or the man-vs-society or man-vs-government ideas in Being There, it’s just that– hold on, it is that I’m not interested. I certainly have my own political ideas, but they are almost always external, and rarely do they ever have anything to do with art. I like to think that my imagination has both breadth and depth enough that I would eventually arrive at some of these ideas myself, and for me the political milieu of the movie doesn’t add a bit to the impact of its ideas.

Again, it’s not that it’s terrible or anything–I still enjoyed it mostly through the end. But for me the movie was ABOUT Peter Sellers as this empty gardener. It was ABOUT Peter Sellers himself, his performance–he was riveting in the same way that Marlon Brando or Orson Welles could be riveting in even the worst movies. When the movie became about how goofy rich people and politicians are, and/or how even the most powerful of men draw their ideas from the most foolish of places–well, DUH.

I am learning that the best art leaves room for its audience’s ideas. Without the room to interact with a piece of art, to puzzle through the layers of artifice and craft that a person has wrapped their idea in–to participate with the art–then it is merely communication. But when you have the room not only to interact with a piece of art, but to do so in many different ways, and over years and years–well, that’s the stuff that lasts, I think.

All the same, I liked Being There. I think this movie is worth owning, although I wouldn’t put it at the top of my list. I’ve been thinking a lot about buying all the Star Wars movies on DVD lately, if that tells you anything about how much credence to put in my ideas about art.

BEING THERE
1979, starring Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine
directed by Hal Ashby
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So lately I’ve been watching more movies, not that it’s been all that great. With the exception of “All the President’s Men” (which, to its fault, ties up the whole movie with a series of teletype news bits), they’ve all been pretty much middle of the road, above average at best.

“But Dusty,” you’ll say, “you don’t know the first thing about movies.” That’s where you’re RIGHT! But I still get to have an opinion, and my opinion is that it’s way more fun to watch season one of The Wire than any half-dozen of these murky 70’s-era movies, with their cloudy endings and their tortured, confused protagonists. Bah!

Oh, but wait… I forgot to update my Netflix queue and “Being There” showed up at my door, which I added months ago in a fit of Peter Sellers enthusiasm. Aw, heckfire, I don’t want to spend the weekend watching some downer movie. Oh well, I thought, and popped it in over dinner tonight (Totino’s Party Pizza, flavor: Combination). Almost from the very first second this movie was …

…

Gosh, what’s the word? I want to say “riveting,” but that’s not quite right, although I was definitely riveted right away. There’s something ineffably magnetic about watching Peter Sellers do anything, but watching him do nothing was instantly, well, riveting. Seriously. Sellers plays Chance, the ostensible gardener for a man at least wealthy enough to afford two servants, albeit a newly dead man when the movie opens. Chance apparently has the mental faculty of a boy, even if it’s a friendly, incredibly polite boy. He seems to focus only on his duties and the profusion of televisions littering his employer/caretaker’s home.

Let me pause here to mention that I’ve only watched the first 35 minutes of the movie. I was enjoying it so much that I stopped the movie so I could think about it. There was so much good stuff going on that I started to feel like I was missing things. I’ve always been a slow thinker, but I’m a THOROUGH thinker as well. So please don’t post anything that will ruin anything for me.

One of the other reasons I stopped was to try and draw a scene–Peter Sellers’ face is preposterously hard to draw, especially in this role. And it was while trying to draw him that I realized what was making the movie so fascinating: it was of course Peter Sellers himself. I wonder if ANY other actor could have inhabited and animated this role in the same way. Sellers’ face is both immobile and extraordinarily expressive; constantly sad-seeming without ever appearing morose. The movie (at least the first 35 minutes of it) are squarely focused on HIM, the character. The story is sort of flimsy, and seems almost an afterthought to the main idea of GETTING THIS CHARACTER ACROSS.

The scene above, in which “Chance”, when confronted with a switchblade, pulls out his remote control and tries to “click” the offender away, perfectly sums up the sort of confusing state he finds himself in, having left the house for the first time in his life. He leaves his tidy garden and collection of televisions behind, stepping out the front door of the house into a rundown, trash-strewn neighborhood. All this to the tune of that INCREDIBLY funky 70’s version of “Thus Spake Zarathustra”. Moments later, confronted with his first ever threatened violence, he of COURSE goes to switch the channel.

Another reason to stop watching for awhile: I found myself focusing A LOT on how much of the movie I thought wouldn’t work if someone else did it. I can see someone like Jim Carrey doing this sort of thing now, but hamming it all up Truman Show -style. What makes Sellers’ performance so beautiful is precisely how understated it is. Instead of adding mannerisms, behavioral tics, or idiosyncrasies, he REMOVES them. Instead of trying to explain everything going on his character’s mind, he explains nothing. The result is hard to explain–in retrospect it occurs to me that by making his character as blank as possible, he allows space for the audience to inhabit that character. To not only witness his confusion at the strangeness of the world, but to FEEL it. When he is captivated by his own image on a storefront television, captured by a videocamera in plain view, you instantly feel his amazement, to suddenly be ON television. Of course he has no conception of the camera–it may have never occurred to him that someone makes all the television he has watched all of his life.

Man, I’m rambling on. But this movie is a good, maybe a great movie. Peter Sellers is incredible. Also, Peter Sellers is impossible to draw–you just can’t catch that blank, empty, but somehow lively look in his eyes. Go on, try! I dare you! I’ll watch some more tomorrow and let you know what I think. I know you can’t wait!

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Okay, so some mysterious stomach agitation has kept me out of work today, and likely tomorrow as well. The less said the better, BUT I’ve spent most of the day on the couch, and just finished watching 3:10 To Yuma courtesy of my good friends over at Netflix.

I’m not particularly good at or interested in writing reviews, so I’ll skip all that, except to say that I liked it, and it is EXACTLY as good as a movie needs to be in order to rent it. Like most westerns, it was probably better on the big screen, but the big screen is mondo pricey.

Two things were interesting about this movie, besides the regular stuff (story, acting, etc.):

1) Like most MODERN westerns, everything was a little too clean, too shiny. Apparently tough guys in the Old West kept their beards trimmed
very neatly, pretty much everybody wore bowler hats, and everyone has teeth like a dental model’s. I still think that the real reason Deadwood was such a big hit was that the Old West in Deadwood was beyond nasty; it was filthy. Disgusting, really.

2) Unlike most modern westerns, and especially curious in spite of #1 above, is the fact that the movie did an incredible job of creating a sense of menace to the main character and his family. While he (Christian Bale) never comes across as anything other than capable, you also never lose the feeling that he and his family are in DANGER. When violence breaks out there’s actually a feeling of drama–you’re actually concerned not only that something will happen to Christian Bale, but concerned over the fact that freaking guns are going off everywhere and it’s totally screwed up. Imagine if someone–anyone–started shooting outside of your window right now; you’d be telling the story for the rest of your life. Violence is awful and changes people’s lives, and movies which trade in violence often forget how dramatic it can be.

THIS was the real saving grace of this movie. It’s easy to forget that real drama is the backbone of storytelling: the build and release of tension is the ebb and flow that creates a feeling of reality in a story. Just as your life moves and shifts from point to point, often without reason or explanation–mirroring this sloppy reality is key to great storytelling.

Good movie though. Christian Bale: surprisingly good. Russell Crowe? Who keeps hiring this guy?