by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the 1939 movie The Roaring Twenties, a Warner Bros. production with both James Cagney and Priscilla Lane (who got a lot of plum parts she probably didn’t deserve because she was — or at least was rumored to be — studio chief Hal Wallis’s mistress) billed above the title in a major-budget film detailing the history of Prohibition in New York as seen through the eyes of three buddies who meet during World War I. The film opens with a backwards historical montage, taking us in reverse time sequence from the eve of World War II to April 1918, and then fades in on one of the most transparently phony studio “exteriors” ever shot — the entire war looks like it’s taking part inside a Warners soundstage with a painted backdrop — as our ill-assorted trio land in the same foxhole. They are Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney), former garage mechanic who’s looking forward to getting his old job back after the war; aspiring attorney Lloyd Hart (the almost terminally bland and boring Jeffrey Lynn); and George Hally (Humphrey Bogart) — “Hally” is the name on the final credit roll but during the actual movie he’s never called anything but George — who’s decided he likes killing people and fondles his rifle suggestively to indicate what he wants to do after he gets out of the service. (When Lloyd draws back at shooting a 15-year-old German soldier, George lifts his rifle and cheerily dispatches the poor kid, snarling, “He’ll never be 16.” A split-second later, the Armistice is announced.)
Like some of the real troops in World War I, our trio are held over in Germany as part of the occupation force for two years after the end of major combat operations (plus ça change, plus ça même chose … ), and by the time they finally get home the nation has returned to normalcy and forgotten all about its veterans, and the country is in the grip of a recession and Eddie’s old employer can’t (or won’t) find room for him. Eddie is saved by his former roommate, Danny Green (a relatively restrained Frank McHugh), who agrees to split not only his room but also his cab with him — they can each drive it for 12 hours a day and split the cost of gas, repairs, etc. Eddie is busted as a “mule” for delivering liquor to the high-class speakeasy run by Panama Smith (Gladys George) — a character clearly based on Texas Guinan — and suddenly realizes that Prohibition has opened up much more promising business opportunities for guys like him than normal business could ever offer. He graduates from peddling another gang’s bootleg gin to making his own to hijacking the shipments of other gangsters — particularly Nick Brown (Paul Kelly) — who were actually bothering to smuggle in decent legal drinkables from abroad. On one such run, in which Eddie and his gang have gone out in a boat posing as Coast Guardsmen, he runs into George, who’s now a part of Nick Brown’s gang but is willing to throw Nick overboard (figuratively speaking) and partner with Eddie, George to take charge of the smuggling and Eddie the merchandising.
Meanwhile, in his early scuffling days Eddie had gone out to see his pen pal during the war, Jean Sherman (Priscilla Lane), who’d sent a photo of herself in a high school play and therefore had made herself look considerably older than she actually was. When Eddie becomes a successful bootlegger, and Jean has grown old enough to interest him as a woman, he arranges with Panama to introduce her as a singer in her nightclub, and Jean becomes a star (though, oddly, she never seems to perform anywhere else) in a plot line that intriguingly anticipates Cagney’s role as Ruth Etting’s gangster manager in Love Me or Leave Me 16 years later. Lloyd, meanwhile, has served as Eddie’s attorney until Eddie and George hijack a liquor shipment that the feds had seized from Nick Brown and they in turn steal from the federal warehouse (by far the most visually interesting scene in the film, full of proto-noir atmospherics lacking in the rest), and George murders his old sergeant from the war days.
Things are going swimmingly for the principals — save for the constant arguments between good-bad guy Eddie and bad-bad guy George, and Jean’s loss of interest in Eddie in favor of the affections of good-good guy Lloyd — until the 1929 stock market crash happens, represented by a magnificent montage sequence by future director Don Siegel in which a giant ticker-tape machine hovers over Wall Street, dollar signs burst out of it as it explodes, and the buildings themselves collapse and literally melt into the street below. (This sequence is the biggest thing people remember about The Roaring Twenties and it’s been used in countless movies since, including some serious documentaries about the Depression.) Eddie is caught in the crash and loses his own empire — writers Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay and Robert Rossen could (and should) have made more of the irony that Eddie made his fortune in an illegal enterprise and lost it all in legitimate (if unethical) investments — while George takes over the gang and recruits Nick Brown’s old henchmen, who’d been cut loose after Eddie murdered Nick in an ambush at the club where Jean sang.
Under the double whammy of losing both his fortune and Jean, Eddie sinks into an alcoholic despair — my husband Charles was especially impressed with Cagney’s acting in these scenes, saying he accurately caught the drunkard’s “tic” instead of just superficially playing intoxication — from which he’s roused only by the news that George’s gang has threatened Lloyd, whereupon he shoots George only to be killed himself — though he gets a death scene that is almost operatic in its extended length, staggering through the streets of New York until he finally expires on the steps of a church. (Apparently someone at Warners had seen John Ford’s The Informer.) The Roaring Twenties is a good Warners gangster movie but somewhat laden down by its sense of Importance with a capital I; it begins with a written those-who-cannot-remember-the-past-are-doomed-to-repeat-it foreword by Mark Hellinger (whose story “The World Moves On” provided the basis for the film) and is narrated throughout by John Deering, whose stentorian voice gives us historical background we could probably have figured out for ourselves.
Raoul Walsh directed — his first job at Warners — and though The Roaring Twenties is an exciting film it’s also oddly slower than most Warners vehicles, and though the film started a fad for the music of the 1920’s (and also contributed the phrase “The Roaring Twenties” to the culture), the songs are authentic for the period but their presentation isn’t. They’re arranged like the music of 1939 — not swing but the string-laden “sweet” dance music played at hotels too upper-class in their clienteles (or at least their aspirations) to want anything that loud — and Priscilla Lane’s vocals (I presume they’re her own; they’re not good enough to sound like a voice double and neither the American Film Institute Catalog nor imdb.com credits a voice double for her) are also in 1939 rather than 1920’s style. I was amused when the first introduction of James Cagney’s character after the war scenes was set to the song “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” — also the tune heard at the end of Cagney’s star-making 1931 film The Public Enemy (also set in the early 1920’s), when his bundled corpse is dumped on his family’s doorstep. It’s not the film it could have been with more sensitive writing, more energetic direction and a better female lead (like Ann Sheridan, maybe?), but it’s still pretty good.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (Beijing New Picture Film Co. , 2005)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The library movie was the awkwardly titled Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, a Chinese-Japanese co-production credited to well-known Chinese director Zhang Yimou (though the order of his names is reversed on the imdb.com entry for the film, which also lists it under its Chinese title, Qian li zou dan qi), though in fact Zhang only shot the parts of the film that take place in China. The parts set in Japan (i.e., the framing story) were directed by Yasuo Furuhata, who was designated as “uncredited” on imdb.com even though he is credited on the closing roll.
The central character is a middle-aged Japanese man, Gou-ichi Takata (Ken Takakura), who lives in an isolated coastal fishing village but travels to Tokyo in the opening sequence (taking the bullet train, which is as cool-looking as I’ve always imagined it) to see his son Ken-ichi, who’s in a hospital dying of cancer and is so bitter about how his dad treated him during childhood and early adulthood that he refuses to see him despite the entreaties of Rie (Shinobu Terajima), Ken-ichi’s wife and one of the voices of reason in this film. Though Ken-ichi is listed in the credits as being played by actor Kiichi Nakai, he’s never shown in the film except during a flashback sequence, a video he shot during his years in the Chinese outback of a performance of a folk opera called Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles starring a legendary singer/actor, Jiamin Li (who appears as himself).
Rie gives her father-in-law a VHS tape of this (which seems a bit anachronistic for a 2005 movie) and he watches it and hears Li complain that Ken-ichi caught him on a bad day and he wants another chance to film his performance when he can do it better. So Gou-ichi decides to travel to China, find the remote village in which his son was living when he shot the tape, and film another performance of the opera featuring Li. When he arrives, not surprisingly he’s confronted by the Chinese bureaucracy — he needs approval from the Foreign Ministry and the Culture Ministry and the Bureau of Prisons, the last because in the meantime Li has been arrested and incarcerated (we’re never told for what). He’s also confronted by a female interpreter , Jasmine (Jiang Wen), since the only person in the Chinese village that knows even a little Japanese is the opera’s producer, Lingo (Lin Qiu), and even he knows only a little. The story obviously attempts to depict the culture shock facing a monolingual Japanese tourist among monolingual Chinese — and I’m sure this element of the story worked fine in both Japan and China, but to the Occidental ear (this Occidental ear, anyway) Chinese and Japanese sound too similar and neither is comprehensible. (It’s not just that I don’t know these languages, it’s that they’re both Asian and therefore farther removed from my sound world than the European languages; had the film been about a French tourist in the darkest reaches of the Black Forest and surrounded by people who speak only German, that I would have got.)
The opening parts of this movie are rather dull, but the film picks up dramatic power and punch when Gou-ichi meets Yang Yang (played by refreshingly unsentimental child actor Zhenbo Yang), Jiamin Li’s illegitimate son, whom he tried to acknowledge publicly just before he was arrested — which for some reason only got him into more trouble with the law. What’s more, Yang Yang is bitter towards his father for having abandoned him — the parallel with Gou-ichi’s situation with his own son is unstressed but readily apparent — and the bitterness extends so far that Yang Yang runs away (in a marvelous section of Chinese countryside that looks remarkably like the Grand Canyon) rather than agree to let Gou-ichi and Jasmine take him to the prison where his father is being held. Yang Yang and Gou-ichi get lost in the Chinese Grand Canyon (along the way Yang Yang has to take a dump, and for the first time in my moviegoing life I actually got to see shit come out of a person’s behind on screen — did Zhang actually cue this or was it a special effect?) and have to spend the night sleeping outside before they’re finally rescued.
After the story line involving Yang Yang, Gou-ichi finally gets permission to visit Li in prison — though in the meantime he’s received a cell phone call from Rie, who said that Ken-ichi told her to tell him that filming the opera really isn’t that important to him; the important thing was that dad was willing to go all the way to China on his behalf — though Gou-ichi is still tortured because he has no way of knowing whether his son actually said this or Rie made it up to make him feel better. By the time he arrives at the prison, he gets another call from Rie, this one telling him that Ken-ichi has died — but the special performance of the opera in prison goes on anyway, with Gou-ichi running a hand-held video camera, and it’s in progress as we fade out.
I was a bit disappointed overall by this movie — it’s good but it’s hardly in the same league as Zhang’s masterpiece, Raise the Red Lantern — though the last two story arcs are fine and moving, and portray the theme that we’d better maintain our connections to our families no matter how much grief they’ve caused us lest our relatives die or disappear on us and deprive us of the chance; and the film is also splendid visually. The scenes in Japan are shot in a cool blue tone, while the scenes in China are a riot of color highlighted by the red banners used in the opera performance; when cinematographer Xiaoding Zhao uses brown tones, it’s because he’s shooting things one would expect to be brown — rocks, soil, wood — not that it’s just his default option. I could have used a better movie yesterday afternoon, but this one was still pretty good.
The library movie was the awkwardly titled Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, a Chinese-Japanese co-production credited to well-known Chinese director Zhang Yimou (though the order of his names is reversed on the imdb.com entry for the film, which also lists it under its Chinese title, Qian li zou dan qi), though in fact Zhang only shot the parts of the film that take place in China. The parts set in Japan (i.e., the framing story) were directed by Yasuo Furuhata, who was designated as “uncredited” on imdb.com even though he is credited on the closing roll.
The central character is a middle-aged Japanese man, Gou-ichi Takata (Ken Takakura), who lives in an isolated coastal fishing village but travels to Tokyo in the opening sequence (taking the bullet train, which is as cool-looking as I’ve always imagined it) to see his son Ken-ichi, who’s in a hospital dying of cancer and is so bitter about how his dad treated him during childhood and early adulthood that he refuses to see him despite the entreaties of Rie (Shinobu Terajima), Ken-ichi’s wife and one of the voices of reason in this film. Though Ken-ichi is listed in the credits as being played by actor Kiichi Nakai, he’s never shown in the film except during a flashback sequence, a video he shot during his years in the Chinese outback of a performance of a folk opera called Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles starring a legendary singer/actor, Jiamin Li (who appears as himself).
Rie gives her father-in-law a VHS tape of this (which seems a bit anachronistic for a 2005 movie) and he watches it and hears Li complain that Ken-ichi caught him on a bad day and he wants another chance to film his performance when he can do it better. So Gou-ichi decides to travel to China, find the remote village in which his son was living when he shot the tape, and film another performance of the opera featuring Li. When he arrives, not surprisingly he’s confronted by the Chinese bureaucracy — he needs approval from the Foreign Ministry and the Culture Ministry and the Bureau of Prisons, the last because in the meantime Li has been arrested and incarcerated (we’re never told for what). He’s also confronted by a female interpreter , Jasmine (Jiang Wen), since the only person in the Chinese village that knows even a little Japanese is the opera’s producer, Lingo (Lin Qiu), and even he knows only a little. The story obviously attempts to depict the culture shock facing a monolingual Japanese tourist among monolingual Chinese — and I’m sure this element of the story worked fine in both Japan and China, but to the Occidental ear (this Occidental ear, anyway) Chinese and Japanese sound too similar and neither is comprehensible. (It’s not just that I don’t know these languages, it’s that they’re both Asian and therefore farther removed from my sound world than the European languages; had the film been about a French tourist in the darkest reaches of the Black Forest and surrounded by people who speak only German, that I would have got.)
The opening parts of this movie are rather dull, but the film picks up dramatic power and punch when Gou-ichi meets Yang Yang (played by refreshingly unsentimental child actor Zhenbo Yang), Jiamin Li’s illegitimate son, whom he tried to acknowledge publicly just before he was arrested — which for some reason only got him into more trouble with the law. What’s more, Yang Yang is bitter towards his father for having abandoned him — the parallel with Gou-ichi’s situation with his own son is unstressed but readily apparent — and the bitterness extends so far that Yang Yang runs away (in a marvelous section of Chinese countryside that looks remarkably like the Grand Canyon) rather than agree to let Gou-ichi and Jasmine take him to the prison where his father is being held. Yang Yang and Gou-ichi get lost in the Chinese Grand Canyon (along the way Yang Yang has to take a dump, and for the first time in my moviegoing life I actually got to see shit come out of a person’s behind on screen — did Zhang actually cue this or was it a special effect?) and have to spend the night sleeping outside before they’re finally rescued.
After the story line involving Yang Yang, Gou-ichi finally gets permission to visit Li in prison — though in the meantime he’s received a cell phone call from Rie, who said that Ken-ichi told her to tell him that filming the opera really isn’t that important to him; the important thing was that dad was willing to go all the way to China on his behalf — though Gou-ichi is still tortured because he has no way of knowing whether his son actually said this or Rie made it up to make him feel better. By the time he arrives at the prison, he gets another call from Rie, this one telling him that Ken-ichi has died — but the special performance of the opera in prison goes on anyway, with Gou-ichi running a hand-held video camera, and it’s in progress as we fade out.
I was a bit disappointed overall by this movie — it’s good but it’s hardly in the same league as Zhang’s masterpiece, Raise the Red Lantern — though the last two story arcs are fine and moving, and portray the theme that we’d better maintain our connections to our families no matter how much grief they’ve caused us lest our relatives die or disappear on us and deprive us of the chance; and the film is also splendid visually. The scenes in Japan are shot in a cool blue tone, while the scenes in China are a riot of color highlighted by the red banners used in the opera performance; when cinematographer Xiaoding Zhao uses brown tones, it’s because he’s shooting things one would expect to be brown — rocks, soil, wood — not that it’s just his default option. I could have used a better movie yesterday afternoon, but this one was still pretty good.
Romulus, My Father (Arenafilm , 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The library movie was Romulus, My Father, an incredibly dark coming-of-age tale from Australia supposedly based on the memoirs of writer and philosopher Raimond Gaita, who grew up in the Australian outback in such a monumentally dysfunctional family Augusten Burroughs’ upbringing looks like a model of stability by comparison. During the first half-hour or so of the movie he’s living what looks like a financially stressed but otherwise bucolic existence on a farm owned by his father, Romulus Gaita (Eric Bana, almost unrecognizable as the same actor who so beautifully played the Israelis’ avenging angel in Steven Spielberg’s Munich), but things turn dark in a hurry when we learn the real reason why Raimond’s mother isn’t part of the scene: she’s off in Melbourne living with another guy, Mitru (Russell Dykstra), whose brother Hora (Marton Csokas) comes to visit Romulus and Raimond at the farm and ends up looking after Romulus when he crashes his motorcycle and is severely injured. (One thing that’s readily apparent in this movie is that Australia, being a civilized country, offers health care to its citizens and doesn’t make them worry about a major injury or illness bankrupting them as so often happens here in the U.S., where we enjoy our much-touted “liberty” from the “oppression” of universal health care. It’s disorienting, to say the least, for an American viewer to see people in foreign movies going to hospital when they need to without the obsession Americans have with how the hell they’re ever going to be able to pay for their care.)
The film may be based on a true story, but as my husband Charles said about the film Shine (also set in Australia) the reason the filmmakers — director Richard Roxburgh (a theatrical director making his feature-film debut) and writer Nick Drake (the parallel between this story and the life of the writer’s namesake, the tortured British singer-songwriter of the early 1970’s, is almost unbearable) — picked this true story to film is that it so neatly fits into moviedom’s pet clichés. Raimond’s mom, Christina (Franka Potente), turns up on the farm, and the tension between the four adults reaches such intensity that through much of the movie the kid seems the only sane one of the bunch. Much of the film features standard-issue teenage alienation as filtered through the insanely desperate and isolated life the characters lead — about the only link to normal teenager-dom Raimond has is a phonograph owned by a girl his age and the one record she seems to have, the Australian rock song “Real Wild Child” (though heard here only in Jerry Lee Lewis’s cover — one would think an Australian would have bought the original record by Aussie singer Johnny O’Keefe instead) — and the sheer craziness of all the adult principals, particularly Christina, who’s drawn as a suicidal nymphomaniac who takes overdoses of sleeping pills twice in the film — the first time she’s rescued in time but the second suicide attempt is successful.
Romulus, My Father is the sort of movie you want to like — it’s clearly well directed and well acted (though cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson way overdoes the past-is-brown look) and is attempting to tell an “important” story, its intentions are noble and sophisticated — and yet I found it virtually unwatchable because it’s such a total downer. Even the relatively fleeting pleasures Raimond finds — mostly rowing on the local lake with his dad or (later) one of the other men in his family’s life — don’t add up to much in the way of happiness for him, and it’s only when the final American Graffiti-style where-are-they-now credits roll and we learn that Raimond Gaita became a famous writer and philosopher and wrote the autobiography on which the film is based, that we heave a sigh of relief that he avoided the incarceration in a mental institution for which the film’s events, and in particular the repeated traumas he suffered at the hands of every adult he interacted with, seemed to be preparing him. I’ll give special acknowledgment to the marvelous performance of Kodi Smit-McPhee as the young Raimond — his baby face bears an odd resemblance to the very young Bob Dylan and he’s perfect as the island of sanity in the sea of madness in which his character lives — and though his name is a bit of a tongue-twister I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him get some major credits and follow fellow Aussies Russell Crowe and the late Heath Ledger to big stardom Up Over.
The library movie was Romulus, My Father, an incredibly dark coming-of-age tale from Australia supposedly based on the memoirs of writer and philosopher Raimond Gaita, who grew up in the Australian outback in such a monumentally dysfunctional family Augusten Burroughs’ upbringing looks like a model of stability by comparison. During the first half-hour or so of the movie he’s living what looks like a financially stressed but otherwise bucolic existence on a farm owned by his father, Romulus Gaita (Eric Bana, almost unrecognizable as the same actor who so beautifully played the Israelis’ avenging angel in Steven Spielberg’s Munich), but things turn dark in a hurry when we learn the real reason why Raimond’s mother isn’t part of the scene: she’s off in Melbourne living with another guy, Mitru (Russell Dykstra), whose brother Hora (Marton Csokas) comes to visit Romulus and Raimond at the farm and ends up looking after Romulus when he crashes his motorcycle and is severely injured. (One thing that’s readily apparent in this movie is that Australia, being a civilized country, offers health care to its citizens and doesn’t make them worry about a major injury or illness bankrupting them as so often happens here in the U.S., where we enjoy our much-touted “liberty” from the “oppression” of universal health care. It’s disorienting, to say the least, for an American viewer to see people in foreign movies going to hospital when they need to without the obsession Americans have with how the hell they’re ever going to be able to pay for their care.)
The film may be based on a true story, but as my husband Charles said about the film Shine (also set in Australia) the reason the filmmakers — director Richard Roxburgh (a theatrical director making his feature-film debut) and writer Nick Drake (the parallel between this story and the life of the writer’s namesake, the tortured British singer-songwriter of the early 1970’s, is almost unbearable) — picked this true story to film is that it so neatly fits into moviedom’s pet clichés. Raimond’s mom, Christina (Franka Potente), turns up on the farm, and the tension between the four adults reaches such intensity that through much of the movie the kid seems the only sane one of the bunch. Much of the film features standard-issue teenage alienation as filtered through the insanely desperate and isolated life the characters lead — about the only link to normal teenager-dom Raimond has is a phonograph owned by a girl his age and the one record she seems to have, the Australian rock song “Real Wild Child” (though heard here only in Jerry Lee Lewis’s cover — one would think an Australian would have bought the original record by Aussie singer Johnny O’Keefe instead) — and the sheer craziness of all the adult principals, particularly Christina, who’s drawn as a suicidal nymphomaniac who takes overdoses of sleeping pills twice in the film — the first time she’s rescued in time but the second suicide attempt is successful.
Romulus, My Father is the sort of movie you want to like — it’s clearly well directed and well acted (though cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson way overdoes the past-is-brown look) and is attempting to tell an “important” story, its intentions are noble and sophisticated — and yet I found it virtually unwatchable because it’s such a total downer. Even the relatively fleeting pleasures Raimond finds — mostly rowing on the local lake with his dad or (later) one of the other men in his family’s life — don’t add up to much in the way of happiness for him, and it’s only when the final American Graffiti-style where-are-they-now credits roll and we learn that Raimond Gaita became a famous writer and philosopher and wrote the autobiography on which the film is based, that we heave a sigh of relief that he avoided the incarceration in a mental institution for which the film’s events, and in particular the repeated traumas he suffered at the hands of every adult he interacted with, seemed to be preparing him. I’ll give special acknowledgment to the marvelous performance of Kodi Smit-McPhee as the young Raimond — his baby face bears an odd resemblance to the very young Bob Dylan and he’s perfect as the island of sanity in the sea of madness in which his character lives — and though his name is a bit of a tongue-twister I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him get some major credits and follow fellow Aussies Russell Crowe and the late Heath Ledger to big stardom Up Over.
Plain Truth (Lifetime, 2004)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When I got home I decided to run a Lifetime TV-movie from 2004 I’d been curious about: Plain Truth, an intriguing knockoff of Witness with Mariska Hargitay from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in what’s essentially the Harrison Ford role. It’s set in Pennsylvania (though filmed, typically for Lifetime, in Canada) and features Hargitay as Ellie Harrison, a hot-shot attorney who’s just won an acquittal for a financier who embezzled $300 million from his company and ruined a lot of his investors in the process (a plot twist that reads far more powerfully now than it no doubt did five years ago!). She’s exhausted and takes two months off from the big firm for which she works, intending to vacation in Italy, but instead she gets embroiled in a case when an old friend of hers who left an Amish community and now works as a nurse reports that Katie Fitch (Allison Pill), the daughter of her cousin, Sarah Fitch (Kate Trotter), is being accused of murdering her son immediately after the baby was born.
Though she’s on the other side of the law this time, Hargitay’s role is not all that different from her SVU character Olivia Benson, as she has to break down Katie’s defensiveness and lies — at first Katie denies ever having had a baby or even having had sex, and it’s only as things develop that she not only did have sex, but it wasn’t with her Amish boyfriend Samuel (Andrew Martin-Smith), son of the community’s minister (Colin Fox), but with a young man named Adam Sinclair (Christopher Ralph), a friend of her brother Jacob (Alec McClure), who was disowned by their father Aaron (Jan Niklas) when he insisted on leaving the Amish community to attend college. Sensitively directed by Paul Shapiro from a script by Matthew Tabak based on a novel by Jodi Picoult (who appears in the film as an extra), Plain Truth is a far more moving piece of work than Romulus, My Father even though it’s also about an isolated farm community and a dysfunctional family; the characters are morally ambiguous, the conflicts are intelligently presented and Allison Pill turns in a gnomically subtle performance as a woman whose calm Amish-bred demeanor hides a maelstrom of internal conflict — not only between her family and the world, the punishments of her community and those of the criminal justice system, but between her upbringing and values on one side and her adolescent urges on the other. Hargitay acts with her usual authority but Pill matches the quality of her performance — indeed, the actors in general manage to become their characters in a way one rarely sees today even in far more prestigious films than this one!
Like its prototype, Witness, Plain Truth is at once a clash-of-cultures drama (thanks to a condition in the judge’s grant of bail to her client, Ellen has to live at the Amish farmhouse during the duration of the trial) and a murder mystery; Ellen convincingly argues in court that Katie’s baby wasn’t killed by her or anyone else — it died a few minutes after birth from listeriosis, an infection caused by exposure to dairy products and unpasteurized milk (though if this is such a major health risk one wonders how any Amish babies survive) — but then at the very end of the film [spoiler alert!] Katie’s mom presents her with the bloody pair of scissors with which she cut the umbilical cord, thereby letting Ellie and us know that she murdered her daughter’s baby to preserve her daughter’s place in the Amish world, and leaving Ellie with one final dilemma (unresolved at the fade-out) between her desire to see Katie back in the Amish world where she belongs and her obligation as an attorney (an officer of the court) to report a crime no matter how she hears of it, especially when the person confessing to her is not a client and therefore is not protected by attorney-client privilege. It seems odd that I could watch a prestigious independent film that’s won international awards and a Lifetime movie back-to-back and find the Lifetime production not only better entertainment but deeper and richer as drama, but that’s what happened here.
When I got home I decided to run a Lifetime TV-movie from 2004 I’d been curious about: Plain Truth, an intriguing knockoff of Witness with Mariska Hargitay from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in what’s essentially the Harrison Ford role. It’s set in Pennsylvania (though filmed, typically for Lifetime, in Canada) and features Hargitay as Ellie Harrison, a hot-shot attorney who’s just won an acquittal for a financier who embezzled $300 million from his company and ruined a lot of his investors in the process (a plot twist that reads far more powerfully now than it no doubt did five years ago!). She’s exhausted and takes two months off from the big firm for which she works, intending to vacation in Italy, but instead she gets embroiled in a case when an old friend of hers who left an Amish community and now works as a nurse reports that Katie Fitch (Allison Pill), the daughter of her cousin, Sarah Fitch (Kate Trotter), is being accused of murdering her son immediately after the baby was born.
Though she’s on the other side of the law this time, Hargitay’s role is not all that different from her SVU character Olivia Benson, as she has to break down Katie’s defensiveness and lies — at first Katie denies ever having had a baby or even having had sex, and it’s only as things develop that she not only did have sex, but it wasn’t with her Amish boyfriend Samuel (Andrew Martin-Smith), son of the community’s minister (Colin Fox), but with a young man named Adam Sinclair (Christopher Ralph), a friend of her brother Jacob (Alec McClure), who was disowned by their father Aaron (Jan Niklas) when he insisted on leaving the Amish community to attend college. Sensitively directed by Paul Shapiro from a script by Matthew Tabak based on a novel by Jodi Picoult (who appears in the film as an extra), Plain Truth is a far more moving piece of work than Romulus, My Father even though it’s also about an isolated farm community and a dysfunctional family; the characters are morally ambiguous, the conflicts are intelligently presented and Allison Pill turns in a gnomically subtle performance as a woman whose calm Amish-bred demeanor hides a maelstrom of internal conflict — not only between her family and the world, the punishments of her community and those of the criminal justice system, but between her upbringing and values on one side and her adolescent urges on the other. Hargitay acts with her usual authority but Pill matches the quality of her performance — indeed, the actors in general manage to become their characters in a way one rarely sees today even in far more prestigious films than this one!
Like its prototype, Witness, Plain Truth is at once a clash-of-cultures drama (thanks to a condition in the judge’s grant of bail to her client, Ellen has to live at the Amish farmhouse during the duration of the trial) and a murder mystery; Ellen convincingly argues in court that Katie’s baby wasn’t killed by her or anyone else — it died a few minutes after birth from listeriosis, an infection caused by exposure to dairy products and unpasteurized milk (though if this is such a major health risk one wonders how any Amish babies survive) — but then at the very end of the film [spoiler alert!] Katie’s mom presents her with the bloody pair of scissors with which she cut the umbilical cord, thereby letting Ellie and us know that she murdered her daughter’s baby to preserve her daughter’s place in the Amish world, and leaving Ellie with one final dilemma (unresolved at the fade-out) between her desire to see Katie back in the Amish world where she belongs and her obligation as an attorney (an officer of the court) to report a crime no matter how she hears of it, especially when the person confessing to her is not a client and therefore is not protected by attorney-client privilege. It seems odd that I could watch a prestigious independent film that’s won international awards and a Lifetime movie back-to-back and find the Lifetime production not only better entertainment but deeper and richer as drama, but that’s what happened here.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Flubber (Disney, 1997)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Flubber was Walt Disney Production’s 1997 remake of the 1961 The Absent-Minded Professor, itself based on a short story by Samuel W. Taylor called “A Condition of Gravity.” Richard Schickel’s biography The Disney Version said that the 1961 version was one of Walt Disney’s most personal films, and that the central character of Professor Brainard (his first name was “Ned” when Fred MacMurray played him in 1961 and “Philip” when Robin Williams played him in 1997) was based on Disney’s father, the unworldly inventor and tinkerer Elias P. Disney. (Erik Larson’s book The Devil in the White City drew an interesting connection between the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and Disneyland; it seems that among the many workers hired to build the World’s fair was Elias P. Disney, and he never tired of telling his sons Roy and Walt how beautiful it had been … and supposedly Walt carried his dad’s tales in his consciousness for decades and they inspired the design and appearance of Disneyland.)
In both movies, Prof. Brainard more-or-less accidentally invents a super-pliable, metastable solid named “Flubber” (“flying rubber” — I was amused to note that the French title for Flubber was Plaxmol!) and uses it to make his car fly, enable the basketball team at the college that employs him to win a game by putting flubber on their shoes so they jump faster and higher than anyone could naturally, and save the college from going out of business. In Flubber, Robin Williams plays the professor, and while he’s not as deadpan as MacMurray he’s a good deal funnier and seems to have taken this role at least in part to prove that he could still outdo Jim Carrey at physical comedy even though by then Williams was middle-aged. There are other changes; the Flubber itself has far more of a personality this time — in one scene it gets out, divides itself into pieces and stages its own Busby Berkeley-style production number to a tune by the film’s composer, Danny “Boingo” Elfman, called “The Flubber Mambo” (I’m not making this up, you know!), and even when it isn’t going that far to anthropomorphize itself it still has a way of forming itself into a vaguely human shape and even speaking (in the dubbed voice of Scott Martin Gershin).
Flubber is also considerably higher-tech than the previous version — though the Macintosh Plus computer Prof. Brainard works on at home is quite anachronistic for 1997 and only a sign with a Web address betrays the existence of the Internet — mainly because Brainard has two computer pals who help him maintain his home and his schedule. One, Weber, is a speech-less drone whose function is to clean his house; the other, Weebo (voiced by Jodi Benson), is sort of Tinker Bell to Brainard’s Peter Pan (also, you’ll recall, a role played by Robin Williams: in the film Hook!), a general factotum who keeps his schedule, does odd jobs around the house, and even shows him film clips (and not just from Disney films, either — working on the licensing for this film must have been a nightmare!) that mirror his current emotional state. The plot also contains the conceit that the absent-minded professor is so absent-minded that he can’t even remember to attend his wedding; he’s engaged to marry the college’s woman president, Sara Jean Reynolds (Marcia Gay Harden), but at the time the film begins he’s already abandoned her at the altar twice and she’s made up her mind that if he does it again, the engagement is off. Of course, the afternoon of their wedding he’s actually in his garage laboratory inventing Flubber, but her will is implacable and she not only dumps him, she accepts the proposal of the smarmy villain Wilson Croft (Christopher McDonald), who’s sort of like the Kent Smith character in The Fountainhead: he’s become rich, powerful and influential by stealing Brainard’s ideas and taking credit for them himself.
Actually he’s not the principal villain; that’s Chester Hoenicker (Raymond Barry), who lent the college a large sum of money in exchange for which his son Bennett (Wil Wheaton) was supposed to be given a free ride through his academics so he could play basketball and get into Harvard Business School. Only Brainard, having the same sort of integrity Ray Walston’s character had in the otherwise unwatchable Tall Story, has bravely given Bennett a flunking grade in chemistry and thus disqualified him from school athletics — so Chester announces that he’s calling the school’s loan, which will force it to close altogether at the end of the school year. It all ends happily, of course, with Brainard successfully marketing his invention, he and Sara Jean getting back together, the college being saved and Chester Hoenicker’s henchmen, Smith (Clancy Brown) and Wesson (Ted Levine) — their names are a clever touch in a script by John Hughes (yes, that John Hughes — the Pretty in Pink/Breakfast Club/Ferris Bueller’s Day Off John Hughes) and Bill Walsh that is otherwise pretty predictable — and even Weebo, who gets a Peter Pan-esque death scene (I couldn’t help but joke, “Clap three times if you believe in … robots”) and actually expires, but not before uploading a replacement “daughter” of herself, Weebette (voiced by Julie Morrison).
The earlier parts of the film suggest that Weebo is actually jealous of Sara Jean and is deliberately helping make sure Brainard doesn’t remember their wedding dates, but little or nothing is made of this potentially charming plot complication — and in a 1997 movie the idea of the professor trolling around in a Model “T” Ford as Fred MacMurray did in the original version would have seemed impossibly retro, so Williams’ incarnation of Brainard gets to drive (and fly) a late-1950’s Ford Thunderbird convertible. There’s also a character identified simply as “Window Boy” (Benjamin Brock), who has no other plot function except to happen to be looking out the window as Brainard and/or Flubber are doing something particularly outrageous and run screaming to his parents, who of course blow him off and tell him there’s nothing out there for him to be frightened about. Flubber isn’t a great comedy, and it probably would have been better if Williams had made it about 10 to 15 years earlier (when he wouldn’t have had to rely so heavily on digital effects and stunt people to do his pratfalls for him), but it’s still good fun.
Flubber was Walt Disney Production’s 1997 remake of the 1961 The Absent-Minded Professor, itself based on a short story by Samuel W. Taylor called “A Condition of Gravity.” Richard Schickel’s biography The Disney Version said that the 1961 version was one of Walt Disney’s most personal films, and that the central character of Professor Brainard (his first name was “Ned” when Fred MacMurray played him in 1961 and “Philip” when Robin Williams played him in 1997) was based on Disney’s father, the unworldly inventor and tinkerer Elias P. Disney. (Erik Larson’s book The Devil in the White City drew an interesting connection between the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and Disneyland; it seems that among the many workers hired to build the World’s fair was Elias P. Disney, and he never tired of telling his sons Roy and Walt how beautiful it had been … and supposedly Walt carried his dad’s tales in his consciousness for decades and they inspired the design and appearance of Disneyland.)
In both movies, Prof. Brainard more-or-less accidentally invents a super-pliable, metastable solid named “Flubber” (“flying rubber” — I was amused to note that the French title for Flubber was Plaxmol!) and uses it to make his car fly, enable the basketball team at the college that employs him to win a game by putting flubber on their shoes so they jump faster and higher than anyone could naturally, and save the college from going out of business. In Flubber, Robin Williams plays the professor, and while he’s not as deadpan as MacMurray he’s a good deal funnier and seems to have taken this role at least in part to prove that he could still outdo Jim Carrey at physical comedy even though by then Williams was middle-aged. There are other changes; the Flubber itself has far more of a personality this time — in one scene it gets out, divides itself into pieces and stages its own Busby Berkeley-style production number to a tune by the film’s composer, Danny “Boingo” Elfman, called “The Flubber Mambo” (I’m not making this up, you know!), and even when it isn’t going that far to anthropomorphize itself it still has a way of forming itself into a vaguely human shape and even speaking (in the dubbed voice of Scott Martin Gershin).
Flubber is also considerably higher-tech than the previous version — though the Macintosh Plus computer Prof. Brainard works on at home is quite anachronistic for 1997 and only a sign with a Web address betrays the existence of the Internet — mainly because Brainard has two computer pals who help him maintain his home and his schedule. One, Weber, is a speech-less drone whose function is to clean his house; the other, Weebo (voiced by Jodi Benson), is sort of Tinker Bell to Brainard’s Peter Pan (also, you’ll recall, a role played by Robin Williams: in the film Hook!), a general factotum who keeps his schedule, does odd jobs around the house, and even shows him film clips (and not just from Disney films, either — working on the licensing for this film must have been a nightmare!) that mirror his current emotional state. The plot also contains the conceit that the absent-minded professor is so absent-minded that he can’t even remember to attend his wedding; he’s engaged to marry the college’s woman president, Sara Jean Reynolds (Marcia Gay Harden), but at the time the film begins he’s already abandoned her at the altar twice and she’s made up her mind that if he does it again, the engagement is off. Of course, the afternoon of their wedding he’s actually in his garage laboratory inventing Flubber, but her will is implacable and she not only dumps him, she accepts the proposal of the smarmy villain Wilson Croft (Christopher McDonald), who’s sort of like the Kent Smith character in The Fountainhead: he’s become rich, powerful and influential by stealing Brainard’s ideas and taking credit for them himself.
Actually he’s not the principal villain; that’s Chester Hoenicker (Raymond Barry), who lent the college a large sum of money in exchange for which his son Bennett (Wil Wheaton) was supposed to be given a free ride through his academics so he could play basketball and get into Harvard Business School. Only Brainard, having the same sort of integrity Ray Walston’s character had in the otherwise unwatchable Tall Story, has bravely given Bennett a flunking grade in chemistry and thus disqualified him from school athletics — so Chester announces that he’s calling the school’s loan, which will force it to close altogether at the end of the school year. It all ends happily, of course, with Brainard successfully marketing his invention, he and Sara Jean getting back together, the college being saved and Chester Hoenicker’s henchmen, Smith (Clancy Brown) and Wesson (Ted Levine) — their names are a clever touch in a script by John Hughes (yes, that John Hughes — the Pretty in Pink/Breakfast Club/Ferris Bueller’s Day Off John Hughes) and Bill Walsh that is otherwise pretty predictable — and even Weebo, who gets a Peter Pan-esque death scene (I couldn’t help but joke, “Clap three times if you believe in … robots”) and actually expires, but not before uploading a replacement “daughter” of herself, Weebette (voiced by Julie Morrison).
The earlier parts of the film suggest that Weebo is actually jealous of Sara Jean and is deliberately helping make sure Brainard doesn’t remember their wedding dates, but little or nothing is made of this potentially charming plot complication — and in a 1997 movie the idea of the professor trolling around in a Model “T” Ford as Fred MacMurray did in the original version would have seemed impossibly retro, so Williams’ incarnation of Brainard gets to drive (and fly) a late-1950’s Ford Thunderbird convertible. There’s also a character identified simply as “Window Boy” (Benjamin Brock), who has no other plot function except to happen to be looking out the window as Brainard and/or Flubber are doing something particularly outrageous and run screaming to his parents, who of course blow him off and tell him there’s nothing out there for him to be frightened about. Flubber isn’t a great comedy, and it probably would have been better if Williams had made it about 10 to 15 years earlier (when he wouldn’t have had to rely so heavily on digital effects and stunt people to do his pratfalls for him), but it’s still good fun.
Friday, April 3, 2009
The Complete Buddy Holly (Purple Chick, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The DVD I ran last night was The Complete Buddy Holly, a half-hour bonus download issued by the Purple Chick entity in connection with their 10 CD’s allegedly offering the entire recorded oeuvre of this fascinating figure in early rock ’n’ roll. The CD’s — apparently only available by download (and it’s shameful that Holly’s record company, Universal née MCA née Decca née Coral, has never seen fit to put out their own comprehensive boxed set with versions of everything Holly recorded, without the posthumous overdubs that were added to virtually all the records that were still unreleased when he died, the way they did with two other artists that had major careers and were similarly influential despite their early deaths, Hank Williams and Patsy Cline) — represent an attempt to be as complete as possible; the first six discs contain the records Holly made under his own name and those of his bands, the Two-Tones (renamed “The Three Tunes” by Decca) and the Crickets.
Discs seven and eight contain the records Holly made as a session musician for other people — and with a few exceptions, they’re among the most God-awful music of the 1950’s. There are a few halfway decent rockabilly artists here — notably Gary Dale (his full name was Gary Dale Tollett, but he used just his first and middle names professionally) and Rick Tucker — and some interesting bits of sessions led by Holly’s sidemen and collaborators (Jack Neal, Ben Hall, Sonny Curtis and his drummer, Jerry “J. I..” Allison under the name “Ivan,” his middle name, doing the novelty versions of “Real Wild Child” and “Oh, You Beautiful Doll” included on the 1978 Complete Buddy Holly LP boxed set) — but only two performers Holly recorded with were really worthy of him. One was his protégé, Waylon Jennings, who was a disc jockey at Lubbock country radio station KLLL when Holly met him, got him a Coral record contract and produced his first single, “Jole Blon” b/w “When Sin Stops” (and it was startling to hear that “When Sin Stops” was recorded in the modern fashion — the instrumental backing was laid down first, then Jennings overlaid his vocal and the backup singers were added last), and was the only artist represented on these two discs to go on to a major career of his own.
The other was Carolyn Hester, one of the great enigmas of American music history and, to my knowledge, the only person who recorded with both Buddy Holly and Bob Dylan. Hester had a higher-lying voice than Joan Baez’s but was otherwise pretty much in the same style, and her single with Holly was a Coral release of “Scarlet Ribbons (For Her Hair),” which Harry Belafonte had recorded on his second RCA Victor album (and her arrangement is simply his voice-and-guitar one raised to a higher key for her voice) backed with a cover of the old country standard “Wreck of the Old 97” (a song that doesn’t suit her nearly as well). After her Coral release died in the marketplace, John Hammond heard her in New York and signed her in 1960 — and when it came time to record her first Columbia album she showed up with Dylan and insisted that he play harmonica and sing backup on three songs. The rest, as they say, was history; Hammond loved Dylan at first hearing, signed him, and he became a major star while she was almost totally ignored and forgotten (though she still has enough of a folk following that she was invited to one of the Adams Avenue Roots Festivals a few years ago). Discs nine and 10 contain interviews with Holly and the original versions of records he covered.
The DVD — I was going to get there eventually! — is about half an hour of various clips, including home movie footage of Holly and the Crickets on tour, their appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show (they did “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue” the first time out and “Oh, Boy!” the second — and the sound quality, especially on “Oh, Boy!,” is so terrible, with Holly’s vocal almost drowned out by his guitar, that I could only count the Beatles lucky that their Sullivan appearances took place six years later, and apparently in the interim Sullivan’s sound people learned how to mike a rock band properly). The opening clip was in color and was shot silent in 1955 in Oklahoma City while Holly and Elvis Presley were working the two bottom slots on a country package tour headlined by Hank Snow — and apparently represents not only the earliest film footage of Holly but that of Elvis as well (he’s dressed in a neon-bright green shirt and he’s already a physically commanding figure).
The only clips here with synchronized sound are the Sullivan shows, a brief Holly appearance on an American Bandstand-style program, and a weird bit of a New York local show MC’d by Arlene Francis (“I didn’t realize she’d ever done anything other than What’s My Line?,” Charles exclaimed, forgetting that we’ve seen her 1932 appearance as the street prostitute Bela Lugosi picks up for one of his sinister experiments in Murders in the Rue Morgue) in a patronizing fashion, telling her viewers that even if they don’t think they like rock ’n’ roll they should listen to it anyway or else they won’t “understand” young people. Francis is surrounded by a group of young women in what look like prom dresses, who stand around utterly impassively and offer no visible reaction at all while Holly and his bandmates tear into “Peggy Sue” (a better version, oddly, than the one he did on Sullivan), then applaud politely at the end. Other clips on this disc feature attempts to synchronize silent footage with Holly’s recordings (including one surprisingly effective bit of Holly performing Little Richard’s “Ready Teddy”) or to reproduce his lost British TV appearances (including Saturday Night at the London Palladium, where he’s introduced by an MC who looks startlingly like Robert Morley playing Oscar Wilde!) with still photos of him on the sets of these shows while the soundtrack is the home recordings fans made off the air.
The grimmest bit of footage is a series of shots of the plane crash that killed Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens, complete with the dead bodies of the victims lying on the ground in the snow — and what’s most grim about this footage (the soundtrack, by the way, is the undubbed version of one of Holly’s last songs, “Learning the Game”) is that the photographers (almost certainly on assignment from newspapers or wire services) were able to get so close. We’re so used to the sites of plane crashes, especially fatal ones, being cordoned off by FAA investigators determined to recover as much of the wreckage as possible so they can figure out why the plane crashed that it’s shocking that that wasn’t done on this occasion — if there’d been a soul out there sick enough to want to make off with Buddy Holly’s corpse, they probably could have. (Fortunately, the Purple Chick people stuck another five minutes’ worth of footage at the end so we didn’t have to leave with such a downer.)
The DVD I ran last night was The Complete Buddy Holly, a half-hour bonus download issued by the Purple Chick entity in connection with their 10 CD’s allegedly offering the entire recorded oeuvre of this fascinating figure in early rock ’n’ roll. The CD’s — apparently only available by download (and it’s shameful that Holly’s record company, Universal née MCA née Decca née Coral, has never seen fit to put out their own comprehensive boxed set with versions of everything Holly recorded, without the posthumous overdubs that were added to virtually all the records that were still unreleased when he died, the way they did with two other artists that had major careers and were similarly influential despite their early deaths, Hank Williams and Patsy Cline) — represent an attempt to be as complete as possible; the first six discs contain the records Holly made under his own name and those of his bands, the Two-Tones (renamed “The Three Tunes” by Decca) and the Crickets.
Discs seven and eight contain the records Holly made as a session musician for other people — and with a few exceptions, they’re among the most God-awful music of the 1950’s. There are a few halfway decent rockabilly artists here — notably Gary Dale (his full name was Gary Dale Tollett, but he used just his first and middle names professionally) and Rick Tucker — and some interesting bits of sessions led by Holly’s sidemen and collaborators (Jack Neal, Ben Hall, Sonny Curtis and his drummer, Jerry “J. I..” Allison under the name “Ivan,” his middle name, doing the novelty versions of “Real Wild Child” and “Oh, You Beautiful Doll” included on the 1978 Complete Buddy Holly LP boxed set) — but only two performers Holly recorded with were really worthy of him. One was his protégé, Waylon Jennings, who was a disc jockey at Lubbock country radio station KLLL when Holly met him, got him a Coral record contract and produced his first single, “Jole Blon” b/w “When Sin Stops” (and it was startling to hear that “When Sin Stops” was recorded in the modern fashion — the instrumental backing was laid down first, then Jennings overlaid his vocal and the backup singers were added last), and was the only artist represented on these two discs to go on to a major career of his own.
The other was Carolyn Hester, one of the great enigmas of American music history and, to my knowledge, the only person who recorded with both Buddy Holly and Bob Dylan. Hester had a higher-lying voice than Joan Baez’s but was otherwise pretty much in the same style, and her single with Holly was a Coral release of “Scarlet Ribbons (For Her Hair),” which Harry Belafonte had recorded on his second RCA Victor album (and her arrangement is simply his voice-and-guitar one raised to a higher key for her voice) backed with a cover of the old country standard “Wreck of the Old 97” (a song that doesn’t suit her nearly as well). After her Coral release died in the marketplace, John Hammond heard her in New York and signed her in 1960 — and when it came time to record her first Columbia album she showed up with Dylan and insisted that he play harmonica and sing backup on three songs. The rest, as they say, was history; Hammond loved Dylan at first hearing, signed him, and he became a major star while she was almost totally ignored and forgotten (though she still has enough of a folk following that she was invited to one of the Adams Avenue Roots Festivals a few years ago). Discs nine and 10 contain interviews with Holly and the original versions of records he covered.
The DVD — I was going to get there eventually! — is about half an hour of various clips, including home movie footage of Holly and the Crickets on tour, their appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show (they did “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue” the first time out and “Oh, Boy!” the second — and the sound quality, especially on “Oh, Boy!,” is so terrible, with Holly’s vocal almost drowned out by his guitar, that I could only count the Beatles lucky that their Sullivan appearances took place six years later, and apparently in the interim Sullivan’s sound people learned how to mike a rock band properly). The opening clip was in color and was shot silent in 1955 in Oklahoma City while Holly and Elvis Presley were working the two bottom slots on a country package tour headlined by Hank Snow — and apparently represents not only the earliest film footage of Holly but that of Elvis as well (he’s dressed in a neon-bright green shirt and he’s already a physically commanding figure).
The only clips here with synchronized sound are the Sullivan shows, a brief Holly appearance on an American Bandstand-style program, and a weird bit of a New York local show MC’d by Arlene Francis (“I didn’t realize she’d ever done anything other than What’s My Line?,” Charles exclaimed, forgetting that we’ve seen her 1932 appearance as the street prostitute Bela Lugosi picks up for one of his sinister experiments in Murders in the Rue Morgue) in a patronizing fashion, telling her viewers that even if they don’t think they like rock ’n’ roll they should listen to it anyway or else they won’t “understand” young people. Francis is surrounded by a group of young women in what look like prom dresses, who stand around utterly impassively and offer no visible reaction at all while Holly and his bandmates tear into “Peggy Sue” (a better version, oddly, than the one he did on Sullivan), then applaud politely at the end. Other clips on this disc feature attempts to synchronize silent footage with Holly’s recordings (including one surprisingly effective bit of Holly performing Little Richard’s “Ready Teddy”) or to reproduce his lost British TV appearances (including Saturday Night at the London Palladium, where he’s introduced by an MC who looks startlingly like Robert Morley playing Oscar Wilde!) with still photos of him on the sets of these shows while the soundtrack is the home recordings fans made off the air.
The grimmest bit of footage is a series of shots of the plane crash that killed Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens, complete with the dead bodies of the victims lying on the ground in the snow — and what’s most grim about this footage (the soundtrack, by the way, is the undubbed version of one of Holly’s last songs, “Learning the Game”) is that the photographers (almost certainly on assignment from newspapers or wire services) were able to get so close. We’re so used to the sites of plane crashes, especially fatal ones, being cordoned off by FAA investigators determined to recover as much of the wreckage as possible so they can figure out why the plane crashed that it’s shocking that that wasn’t done on this occasion — if there’d been a soul out there sick enough to want to make off with Buddy Holly’s corpse, they probably could have. (Fortunately, the Purple Chick people stuck another five minutes’ worth of footage at the end so we didn’t have to leave with such a downer.)
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Religulous (Lionsgate, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
One thing I didn’t get a chance to do yesterday was write my comments on the film Religulous, Bill Maher’s satirical documentary lampooning organized religion. The title is a Maher coinage obviously making a pun on the words “religious,” “incredulous” and “ridiculous,” which pretty much defines the filmmaker’s attitude towards the subject. To make Religulous, Maher hooked up with director Larry Charles, who used the same technique he had with his hit movie with Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat — essentially getting interviews with people under false pretenses and then filming the results. In this case, Charles requested interviews with various ministers, lay preachers and other religious types by saying they were for a movie called A Spiritual Journey, and only when the film crew actually showed up did the interviewees become aware that Bill Maher was going to be their interviewer and his agenda was quite different from what they’d been led to expect.
What Maher and Charles came up with was a somewhat underhanded film with a few rather nasty cheap shots, but also a quite funny one that’s less about the absurdities of religion than the absurdities of some of its practitioners. I’d have especially liked to see more of the woman televangelist who’s shown in a film clip saying that in order to be in touch with God, her congregants have to have the Holy Spirit “rammed up your ass” — a weird image indeed for a religious tendency so opposed to real live Gay people! Religulous features a wide range of weirdos, ranging from the Blacks and whites who worship together at the “Truckers’ Ministry” (and who — except for one heavy-set white guy who looks and acts like a stereotypical redneck — seem surprisingly sympathetic to Maher’s position and actually come off better than most of his ambush victims) to Jesús Miranda, a Puerto Rican minister who claims, Da Vinci Code-style, to be an actual biological descendant of Jesus Christ.
Some of Maher’s greatest scenes take place in religious installations aimed at selling the faith of their creators in theme-park style, including the infamous Creation Museum in Kentucky (whose main message seems to be that, contrary to reality-based paleontologists, humans and dinosaurs actually inhabited the earth at the same time) and a religious theme park in Florida which attracts a man who not only claims to be Jesus but even dresses like the common image of him. To his credit, this “Jesus” doesn’t seem to be living the delusion that he is Christ, merely assuming the persona as a way of winning people over to Christianity.
Christianity isn’t the only religion that gets scathed in this film; there are also the predictable critiques of Islam and especially its absurd treatment of women — according to Maher’s narration, in one Muslim country women actually had to petition the governing authorities for permission to cut eye slits in their burkas so they could actually see. Maher is also quite delightful about the absurdities of Mormonism — though Mormonism and Scientology are easier targets because their founders lived recently enough that we actually have biographical documentation of them and therefore can subject their claims to prophet-hood to more critical scrutiny than we can those of Abraham, Moses, Jesus or Muhammad. The film succeeds as entertainment and makes a lot of religious people look genuinely ridiculous, but Maher had more in mind for it than that — as he makes clear in the closing peroration he delivers at the end, he wanted it to be a grand statement to the world to reject religion and eliminate it altogether from human culture:
“The irony of religion is that because of its power to divert man to destructive courses, the world could actually come to an end... Plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge having in key decisions made by religious people. By irrationalists. By those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken. George Bush prayed a lot about Iraq, but he didn’t learn a lot about it... Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.
“Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do. Most people would think it’s wonderful when someone says, ‘I’m willing, Lord! I’ll do whatever you want me to do!’ Except that since there are no gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions and limitations and agendas... And anyone who tells you they know, they just know what happens when you die, I promise you you don’t. How can I be so sure? Because I don’t know, and you do not possess mental powers that I do not. The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble, and that’s what man needs to be, considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong...
“This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you comes at a horrible price... If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you’d resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a Mafia wife, for the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travelers. If the world does come to an end here, or wherever, or if it limps into the future, decimated by the effects of religion-inspired nuclear terrorism, let’s remember what the real problem was. We learned how to precipitate mass death before we got past the neurological disorder of wishing for it. That’s it. Grow up or die.”
I’m not a religious believer — never have been, never have had much use for it, and agree with Maher’s assumption that the reason religion persists is because we’ve never reconciled ourselves to the reality and inevitability of our own deaths, so wanting to be immortal and realizing at the same time that we must die, we accept the next best thing to real immortality: the fantasy of immortality that every religion offers, the idea that the end of this life is not the end of us (and what would be so terrible about the end of this life being the end of us? Are we all such egomaniacs that we have to believe our consciousness, or as the religious B.S.’ers call it our “soul,” is going to survive the physical death of our body?) — but even I think Maher is going too far here.
I tend to agree with Karen Armstrong in her book The Battle for God that any religious tradition is acceptable as long as it remains rooted in love and compassion; it’s when it gives that up and starts teaching that it’s O.K. to attack (by verbal abuse, institutional discrimination, or physical force) the people who believe in some other religion (or no religion at all) and/or to use the power of government to impose their beliefs on others who don’t share them (as the people who voted for Proposition 8 based on their religious beliefs did to me and Charles when they voted to deny us civil marriage because we are a same-sex couple) that it becomes illegitimate and dangerous. I would agree — and I’ve argued the point with my religious friends — that on balance, repeat on balance, religion has been a negative force in world history; the good religiously motivated people like Gandhi and King have done seems far outweighed by the evil wrought by the Torquemadas, the Cotton Mathers, the Osama bin Ladens.
But I don’t want to destroy religion — just to render it harmless by doing what the framers of the U.S. Constitution thought they were doing when they wrote the first two clauses of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law guaranteeing an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” If we take that literally, Congress — and, by extension, U.S. government in general — can’t put “In God We Trust” on our money or stick God into the Pledge of Allegiance and force atheist schoolchildren like me to swear allegiance (a word virtually no one forced to repeat it in the grade-school classroom actually knows the meaning of, just as they don’t know why the rules Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai got called “The Ten Commandments” instead of simply “The Ten Commands”) to a God we don’t believe in as well as to our country (the insertion of God into the Pledge, with its implication that an atheist or agnostic cannot be a true American, has rankled me ever since I was in grade school, and in my later years I would keep my lips pursed whenever the words “under God” came up — and I felt vindicated when I found out that they weren’t part of the original Pledge, but were added in the 1950’s to reflect the general perception of the Cold War as a battle to the death between “God-fearing” America and “Godless Communism” rather than what it was, a quite normal clash of interests between two major world powers, the U.S. and Russia), while at the same time anyone with any belief, no matter how loony-tunes it is, is entitled to it as long as they don’t start killing other people or doing other sorts of harm in its name.
I liked Religulous overall — as did my believing husband Charles (despite my concerns that it might offend him) — but there’s a certain bit of wise-guyness in its open propagandism for atheism that rubs me the wrong way even though I agree with the main point: that there’s no real evidence that God exists, and all the arguments that God does exist are based on wild assumptions, breathtaking leaps of illogic and ultimately the call to faith — “Don’t worry about whether or not it seems to make sense. Just believe.”
One thing I didn’t get a chance to do yesterday was write my comments on the film Religulous, Bill Maher’s satirical documentary lampooning organized religion. The title is a Maher coinage obviously making a pun on the words “religious,” “incredulous” and “ridiculous,” which pretty much defines the filmmaker’s attitude towards the subject. To make Religulous, Maher hooked up with director Larry Charles, who used the same technique he had with his hit movie with Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat — essentially getting interviews with people under false pretenses and then filming the results. In this case, Charles requested interviews with various ministers, lay preachers and other religious types by saying they were for a movie called A Spiritual Journey, and only when the film crew actually showed up did the interviewees become aware that Bill Maher was going to be their interviewer and his agenda was quite different from what they’d been led to expect.
What Maher and Charles came up with was a somewhat underhanded film with a few rather nasty cheap shots, but also a quite funny one that’s less about the absurdities of religion than the absurdities of some of its practitioners. I’d have especially liked to see more of the woman televangelist who’s shown in a film clip saying that in order to be in touch with God, her congregants have to have the Holy Spirit “rammed up your ass” — a weird image indeed for a religious tendency so opposed to real live Gay people! Religulous features a wide range of weirdos, ranging from the Blacks and whites who worship together at the “Truckers’ Ministry” (and who — except for one heavy-set white guy who looks and acts like a stereotypical redneck — seem surprisingly sympathetic to Maher’s position and actually come off better than most of his ambush victims) to Jesús Miranda, a Puerto Rican minister who claims, Da Vinci Code-style, to be an actual biological descendant of Jesus Christ.
Some of Maher’s greatest scenes take place in religious installations aimed at selling the faith of their creators in theme-park style, including the infamous Creation Museum in Kentucky (whose main message seems to be that, contrary to reality-based paleontologists, humans and dinosaurs actually inhabited the earth at the same time) and a religious theme park in Florida which attracts a man who not only claims to be Jesus but even dresses like the common image of him. To his credit, this “Jesus” doesn’t seem to be living the delusion that he is Christ, merely assuming the persona as a way of winning people over to Christianity.
Christianity isn’t the only religion that gets scathed in this film; there are also the predictable critiques of Islam and especially its absurd treatment of women — according to Maher’s narration, in one Muslim country women actually had to petition the governing authorities for permission to cut eye slits in their burkas so they could actually see. Maher is also quite delightful about the absurdities of Mormonism — though Mormonism and Scientology are easier targets because their founders lived recently enough that we actually have biographical documentation of them and therefore can subject their claims to prophet-hood to more critical scrutiny than we can those of Abraham, Moses, Jesus or Muhammad. The film succeeds as entertainment and makes a lot of religious people look genuinely ridiculous, but Maher had more in mind for it than that — as he makes clear in the closing peroration he delivers at the end, he wanted it to be a grand statement to the world to reject religion and eliminate it altogether from human culture:
“The irony of religion is that because of its power to divert man to destructive courses, the world could actually come to an end... Plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge having in key decisions made by religious people. By irrationalists. By those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken. George Bush prayed a lot about Iraq, but he didn’t learn a lot about it... Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.
“Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do. Most people would think it’s wonderful when someone says, ‘I’m willing, Lord! I’ll do whatever you want me to do!’ Except that since there are no gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions and limitations and agendas... And anyone who tells you they know, they just know what happens when you die, I promise you you don’t. How can I be so sure? Because I don’t know, and you do not possess mental powers that I do not. The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble, and that’s what man needs to be, considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong...
“This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you comes at a horrible price... If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you’d resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a Mafia wife, for the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travelers. If the world does come to an end here, or wherever, or if it limps into the future, decimated by the effects of religion-inspired nuclear terrorism, let’s remember what the real problem was. We learned how to precipitate mass death before we got past the neurological disorder of wishing for it. That’s it. Grow up or die.”
I’m not a religious believer — never have been, never have had much use for it, and agree with Maher’s assumption that the reason religion persists is because we’ve never reconciled ourselves to the reality and inevitability of our own deaths, so wanting to be immortal and realizing at the same time that we must die, we accept the next best thing to real immortality: the fantasy of immortality that every religion offers, the idea that the end of this life is not the end of us (and what would be so terrible about the end of this life being the end of us? Are we all such egomaniacs that we have to believe our consciousness, or as the religious B.S.’ers call it our “soul,” is going to survive the physical death of our body?) — but even I think Maher is going too far here.
I tend to agree with Karen Armstrong in her book The Battle for God that any religious tradition is acceptable as long as it remains rooted in love and compassion; it’s when it gives that up and starts teaching that it’s O.K. to attack (by verbal abuse, institutional discrimination, or physical force) the people who believe in some other religion (or no religion at all) and/or to use the power of government to impose their beliefs on others who don’t share them (as the people who voted for Proposition 8 based on their religious beliefs did to me and Charles when they voted to deny us civil marriage because we are a same-sex couple) that it becomes illegitimate and dangerous. I would agree — and I’ve argued the point with my religious friends — that on balance, repeat on balance, religion has been a negative force in world history; the good religiously motivated people like Gandhi and King have done seems far outweighed by the evil wrought by the Torquemadas, the Cotton Mathers, the Osama bin Ladens.
But I don’t want to destroy religion — just to render it harmless by doing what the framers of the U.S. Constitution thought they were doing when they wrote the first two clauses of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law guaranteeing an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” If we take that literally, Congress — and, by extension, U.S. government in general — can’t put “In God We Trust” on our money or stick God into the Pledge of Allegiance and force atheist schoolchildren like me to swear allegiance (a word virtually no one forced to repeat it in the grade-school classroom actually knows the meaning of, just as they don’t know why the rules Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai got called “The Ten Commandments” instead of simply “The Ten Commands”) to a God we don’t believe in as well as to our country (the insertion of God into the Pledge, with its implication that an atheist or agnostic cannot be a true American, has rankled me ever since I was in grade school, and in my later years I would keep my lips pursed whenever the words “under God” came up — and I felt vindicated when I found out that they weren’t part of the original Pledge, but were added in the 1950’s to reflect the general perception of the Cold War as a battle to the death between “God-fearing” America and “Godless Communism” rather than what it was, a quite normal clash of interests between two major world powers, the U.S. and Russia), while at the same time anyone with any belief, no matter how loony-tunes it is, is entitled to it as long as they don’t start killing other people or doing other sorts of harm in its name.
I liked Religulous overall — as did my believing husband Charles (despite my concerns that it might offend him) — but there’s a certain bit of wise-guyness in its open propagandism for atheism that rubs me the wrong way even though I agree with the main point: that there’s no real evidence that God exists, and all the arguments that God does exist are based on wild assumptions, breathtaking leaps of illogic and ultimately the call to faith — “Don’t worry about whether or not it seems to make sense. Just believe.”
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