by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was
the fourth episode in the Breakthrough series, about the history of the automobile — which had some odd twists
and turns in the story line. It actually begins in Siberia, among the
indigenous people of the Russian Arctic whose main source of food and clothing was reindeer (and those of us, which is
practically everybody, who associate reindeer with the Santa Claus legend can’t
help but be disappointed by how scrawny and unassuming reindeer look “in the
flesh”). Their problem is that reindeer move considerably quicker (about 20
miles per hour) than humans do, especially humans trying to survive in an ultra-cold climate. So the early
Siberians about 9,000 years ago took the native wolves and started breeding
them for lightness and speed, essentially creating the dog. They also invented
the curved runners on which sleds have operated ever since and trained the dogs
to pull them. They quickly ran into a problem — dogsleds moved fine on ice but
you couldn’t use them once the ice melted — but the makers of this show did
establish the interesting points that dogsleds were the first vehicles humans
had that they didn’t have to power themselves and the domestication of dogs
occurred about 2,000 years before the domestication of horses and oxen,
humankind’s other principal sources of animal power. The show then worked its
way up to the discovery of the wheel — something that occurred relatively late
in human history (about 5,000 years ago) as an alternative to moving heavy
stones by rolling them over logs. The show pointed out that wheels don’t work
without axles and without a way of making them so precise that both the inside
of the wheel and the outside of the axle that carries it are perfectly round —
something that’s impossible until you invent metal tools that can do the job.
The show then cut to 18th century England and the invention of the
steam engine — which was originally designed not for locomotion but to run
water pumps that could drain the insides of coal mines so a population increasingly
demanding coal for fuel could be supplied by ever-deeper mines — and James
Watt’s improvements on it that allowed the invention of trains and the
locomotives that pulled them. (Watt’s engine needed precisely machined
cylinders and pistons to work, and the technology to make them was actually
developed under a grant from the British Navy to improve the reliability and
accuracy of shipboard cannons and keep them from jamming and/or blowing up.)
Unfortunately, railroads still had what’s now called the “last-mile problem” —
in order to get from the train station to your ultimate destination you still
had to walk or ride either on horseback or in a horse-drawn carriage. Then
there’s a fascinating segment in which a modern-day German woman rally driver
reproduces the very first long-distance trip by automobile; the original driver
was Berta Benz, wife of the device’s inventor, Karl Benz. Benz had built a
primitive car in 1885 that was the first vehicle powered by an
internal-combustion engine, but he wasn’t able to sell any until his wife
managed the feat of driving one of his contraptions 60 miles from their home to
her parents’ house in Pforzheim. She had to stop a lot along the way to keep
the car in working order and pump water into the radiator that cooled it, and
at one point in her trip she asked a leather-shop owner to put leather pads on
her brakes to make them more effective (thereby, the show argued, inventing the
brake pad). But she got there, the German papers wrote it up and the auto was,
at least for the well-to-do, an established consumer item.
The Breakthrough episode then takes an interesting turn into the
home — estate, really — of someone you’re likely to have heard of in another
context: former Tonight Show host Jay Leno, who since the breakup of casino magnate William Harrah’s
collection after his death probably owns the largest assemblage of historic
cars in private hands in the world. Leno showed off some items in his
collection, including the Stanley Steamer as well as the Baker Electric, and
discusses some of the problems with them — though oddly the show doesn’t
mention the biggest problem with the steam-powered car: it took half an hour
for the car to build up enough boiler pressure to move. During the early 20th
century would-be car buyers had a choice — put up with the half-hour it took
for a steam car to build up boiler pressure, or risk breaking your arm with the
hand crank with which an internal-combustion car had to be started. (Before
there was a hand crank there was a flywheel you had to pull — the process
wasn’t all that different from starting a lawn mower — and Leno is shown
grabbing the flywheel of one of the earliest gas-powered cars in his possession
and hoping it starts without kicking
back and risking his arm.) Then a name unmentioned in this program, Charles
Kettering, invented the “self-starter,” a way of starting a car electronically
using the battery already included to supply the sparks needed for an
internal-combustion engine to work. Once anybody could start a gas car without
risking breaking their arm, it assured internal-combustion’s victory in the
format war. The show also briefly discussed the experimental electric cars of
the early 20th century, and Thomas A. Edison’s hope that the
electric cars would be the future — which ran into the same problems electric
car owners have today: the limited range of the batteries available and the
length of time it takes to charge them (though the show argues that a new
miracle material called “graphene” — essentially graphite, the form of carbon
in pencil leads, refined to just a single layer of carbon atoms, in which form
it’s an excellent electrical conductor and a car surface made of graphene would
itself be a battery which would be recharged by the sun — will at last make the
electric car completely practical).
It then argues that one big reason cars
became as popular as they did was horseshit. The show points out that New York
City expanded so quickly in the late 19th century that not only did
its human population zoom to 3.5 million by the end of the decade, there was a
similarly dramatic increase in its population of horses — and horses were
dumping so much shit in the streets that getting rid of it seemed an unsolvable
problem. Autos solved the horseshit problem — though they substituted air
pollution and smog in its place — and made it possible for mega-metropolises
like New York to grow even faster and further without leaving mounds of shit
behind that in turn attracted flies and other insects which spread disease. The
show then featured another familiar name, Henry Ford, who not only developed the cheap Model “T”
but learned how to mass-produce it (based, this show argues, on the
observations one of Ford’s executives made in a slaughterhouse — he saw how the
carcasses of beef were moved down what narrator Patrick Stewart calls a
“disassembly line” and taken apart piece by piece, and Ford and his staff
realized you could put something together quickly in the same step-by-step way
slaughterhouses pulled animal carcasses apart). The show details the
cost-saving mechanisms Ford built into the Model “T” (no fuel pump — the fuel
was fed into the engine by gravity — and no water pump; as one writer put it,
the Model “T”’s cooling system was “based on the principle that hot water rises
and cold water sinks. It doesn’t do this very fast, but then Model ‘T’’s didn’t
go very fast, either”) — which included clinging to that dangerous hand-crank
to start the engine while more expensive cars had self-starters. Charles was
upset with the program because it didn’t discuss the bicycle as an important
precursor of the car, probably because it’s still human-powered, but not only
did a lot of bicycle technology end up in the early cars (wire wheels, rubber
tires, chain drives with various gear ratios — though gearboxes and
differentials quickly replaced driving chains for safety reasons; as late as
1926 a British racing driver, Parry Thomas, was literally decapitated during a land-speed run when his car’s
driving chain snapped at 200 miles per hour), but more importantly, as Charles
pointed out, it was the popularity of modern-style safety bicycles in the late
19th century that led to the move to pave roads with asphalt or
concrete instead of leaving them as dirt paths, which literally paved the way for cars to take over from
horse-drawn conveyances as the basic mode of individual transport in advanced
countries.
Once the story gets to Henry Ford, the rest of it is broadly
familiar: the auto became a mass-consumer item instead of a luxury (the show
did not mention that, unlike most
capitalists, Henry Ford realized that the only way people could afford his
product is if workers got paid enough to buy it, so he guaranteed his factory
workers $5 per day at a time when the prevailing wage for factory work was
one-half to one-third of that and thereby assured that they could buy the cars they made) and soon cities were
being replanned — and whole suburbs built — around the assumption that everyone
would have at least one car and rely on it for most of their transportation
needs. (The show dramatizes this with the inevitable stock footage of cars
zipping around the curves of a cloverleaf freeway intersection.) The show
doesn’t explore whether this is a good or bad thing, and among the negative
aspects of automobile culture it doesn’t explore is just what the sheer amount of the earth’s surface that has
been paved is going to do to its ecosystems and its ability to sustain human
(or any other) life long-term. It also doesn’t explore whether a world in which
each person relies on a private car for transportation does in terms of the
drain on the earth’s resources to build them, fuel them (the show ends with a
back-to-the-future note that the huge amounts of carbon dioxide emitted by
internal combustion engines may lead to the revival of the electric car and all
Thomas Edison’s hopes for it), or the philosophical notion of just what making every person responsible for his or her own
transportation does to the whole sense of community; obviously “car culture”
was a neat fit to America’s myth of self-actualizing individualism as the motivation for all human progress, and there’s not
only a disinterest but an active hatred of the entire idea of public
transportation because it puts people together in close spaces and leaves them
reliant on someone else to drive them. (I remember one Republican U.S. Senator
from Oklahoma whose name escapes me at the moment being quoted about the
California bullet-train project, “We’ve killed every other bullet train in the
U.S., and we’ll kill that one.”)
At the same time I’ve long believed in the
transistor-radio theory of technological advance — that the transistor radio,
which allowed people literally to cut themselves off from each other and consume media privately as
individuals, even when they were physically in public spaces, set the tone for
a basic change in media from “broadcasting” (a single message sent from a
single source to multiple people) to “narrowcasting” (multiple messages sent
from at least seemingly varied sources and customized to individual people),
which in turn changed the basic nature of politics from collective to
individual. I’ve argued that this is why the extreme political movements of the
first half of the 20th century — fascism on the Right and socialism and
communism on the Left — were collectivist, while the extreme political
movements of the second half of
the 20th century and since, libertarianism on the Right and
anarchism on the Left, are individualistic. The auto has been one of the key
forces in changing people’s perception of themselves from being members of a
community to being self-sufficient individuals — which has made it
extraordinarily difficult to pull people together and get them to unite for
political purposes (though Donald Trump has been a partial exception, building
a Right-wing political base through the same sorts of big, collectivist rallies
and sweeping appeals to community Mussolini, Hitler and Franco made in their rises to power). But then these kinds of political
and philosophical issues are pretty much beyond the brief of the Breakthrough series, which seems to be based on the assumption
that the technological advances that happened are the ones that should have happened and the only ones that could have happened — even though, as I’ve noted in my
comments on the previous two Breakthrough episodes I’ve watched, one of the morals of this series is that
scientific and technological advances are themselves collective processes, with researchers
continuously building on the work of their predecessors — yet more evidence
that the attempts to lock up “intellectual property” and declare individual or
corporate monopolies on certain lines of research are counterproductive and will make human progress more
difficult, not easier, since they will put legal roadblocks into the kinds of
collaborations (including cross-generational virtual collaborations) that
actually produce innovative technologies.
Thursday, May 9, 2019
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
Frontline: “Trump’s Trade War” (WGBH-TV, PBS, aired May 7, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My “feature” last night was a spectacularly well-timed documentary on PBS’s long-running Frontline show, “Trump’s Trade War,” focusing mostly on Trump’s trade war with China in particular — which just heated up again when, on the eve of negotiations between the two countries (their trade representatives had been meeting in Beijing and were scheduled to continue their talks in Washington, D.C.) Trump sent out a tweet last weekend announcing that because the U.S. economy is doing so well, he’s raising the 10 percent tariff he unilaterally imposed on a wide range of Chinese goods to 25 percent: “For 10 months, China has been paying Tariffs to the USA of 25% on 50 Billion Dollars of High Tech, and 10% on 200 Billion Dollars of other goods. These payments are partially responsible for our great economic results. The 10% will go up to 25% on Friday. 325 Billions Dollars of additional goods sent to us by China remain untaxed, but will be shortly, at a rate of 25%.” He seems to be saying that his hard line on Chinese trade is actually boosting the economy, while other, more rational capitalists are responding by bidding down the stock market, which suffered one of its biggest one-day losses ever yesterday. The Frontline show was, of course, filmed before this latest development in the U.S.-China trade relationship, but it had a number of interesting themes, including Steve Bannon (dressed as shabbily as we remember) boasting that what he hopes to achieve with a hard line against China on trade is a shift in power within China’s (nominally) Communist regime. The show also featured interviews with Chinese officials and industrialists, one of whom made the intriguing comment that China has chosen to develop their automobile industry not only because that offers direct competition with the U.S. but because modern-day cars, with their heavy reliance on computer technology and the increasing use of composite materials rather than metals to make them, are sort of an acid test for a modern economy: if you can make a state-of-the-art car, you can make just about anything. There was a brief reference to the increasing automation of manufacturing — one U.S. interviewee pointed out that American manufacturing may be shrinking in terms of its total percentage of the U.S. labor force, but it’s increasing in total output — though, as I pointed out during the 2016 campaign, it’s cold comfort to the displaced American worker whether he (or she) lost his (or her) job to a Mexican, a Chinese, or a computer.
The show also chronicled Trump’s never-evolving views on trade — in the late 1980’s he bought into the consensus view at the time that the biggest threat to U.S. economic hegemony was Japan (as did the late professor Chalmers Johnson — I went to a couple of his book events and embarrassed him by reminding him of that), and when the Japanese economy collapsed in the early 1990’s he simply shifted his animus to China. The show also mentioned that one Leitmotif of Trump’s talks about trade is his insistence that other countries are “laughing at us” over our misbegotten trade policies and our willingness to cave in to them out of some abstract commitment to “free markets.” As he told Playboy in a fascinating interview, published in March 1990, that’s probably the best expression of Trump’s world view from the man himself, “We Americans are laughed at around the world for losing a hundred and fifty billion dollars year after year, for defending wealthy nations for nothing, nations that would be wiped off the face of the earth in about fifteen minutes if it weren’t for us. Our ‘allies’ are making billions screwing us.” The Frontline show mentions the endless and unresolved “trade meetings” Trump used to hold with his advisors, and one of the interviewees, former assistant treasury secretary Gary Cole, recalled trying to explain to Trump that a “trade deficit” doesn’t actually mean we owe X amount of dollars to some other country that they can sue us to collect. Cole told Bob Woodward for the book Fear: Trump in the White House that at one point he actually tried to challenge Trump by asking him on what information he based his ideas about trade — and Trump couldn’t come up with anything. Instead he told Cole, “I don’t know why I believe those things, but I’ve believed them for 30 years.”
Aspects of the U.S.-China relationship that did not get discussed on Frontline include China’s continuing and growing investment in renewable energy technologies — while the U.S. under Trump has virtually stopped investing in renewable energy, leading to a possible future in which in order to get ourselves off fossil fuels at long last we will have to buy the technology to do so from China — and the uncomfortable fact that the Chinese government-industrial complex (though they’ve strayed incredibly far from the original ideals of socialism and communism, the Chinese have kept a connection between the state and the private economy so much that it’s hard to draw a strict dividing line between the two — as witness the interview in the Frontline program with a Silicon Valley banker who noted that Chinese investors were coming to him with billions of dollars with which to buy U.S. high-tech companies, amounts of money only the Chinese government could be supplying even though the buyers were supposedly representing “private” Chinese companies) is also the world’s largest holder of the U.S. national debt. I’ve mused in these pages before that some day we might find that China has simply foreclosed on us, and in line with the practice of China in their imperial days they might well make demands on us that amount to “suzerainty and tribute” — i.e., they will let us run our country pretty much the way we want but we’d have to acknowledge that the Chinese were in ultimate control of our destiny, and especially our foreign policy (“suzerainty”), and we’d also have to pay them large amounts of money (“tribute”) to be part of the overall Chinese protectorate.
This show, written and directed by Rick Young, would have been even stronger if it had explored the debt issue (and particularly the extent to which, while talking tough on China in other respects, the Trump administration gave China more leverage over us by funding their huge tax cut for the American rich via more borrowing from China) and the extent to which, by planning their economy for the next 10, 20 and even 50 years, China is poised to catch up with and overtake us in technology after technology. The show mentioned China’s practice of allowing foreign companies to invest in China only via co-ventures with Chinese companies, on terms that require the U.S. partners to give their Chinese co-venturers all their technological secrets (one of the big sticking points in the U.S.-China trade negotiations), but did not mention the equally important fact that the Chinese are sending their brightest students to study in the U.S. and learn our technological secrets from the source, then return with them to China and put their knowledge at the service of Chinese industry and technology to beat us at what used to be our own game. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that “industrial policy” — a measure of planning ahead for a country’s economic future, deciding which are going to be the next important sectors and guiding investments accordingly — is a much better way to run an economy than the lassiez-faire way we’ve historically done it, in which the very idea of an industrial policy routinely gets rejected as “socialistic.” The Chinese will probably beat us eventually, and self-destructive policies like Trump’s tariffs will only hasten the day when China becomes the world’s economic leader because protectionism cuts both ways: we may be shielding our companies from their competition, but we’re also forcing them to put their own resources into duplicating our achievements and ultimately surpassing them — especially since we will be facing an economic future in which the U.S. owes China tons of money we have no realistic way of paying back!
My “feature” last night was a spectacularly well-timed documentary on PBS’s long-running Frontline show, “Trump’s Trade War,” focusing mostly on Trump’s trade war with China in particular — which just heated up again when, on the eve of negotiations between the two countries (their trade representatives had been meeting in Beijing and were scheduled to continue their talks in Washington, D.C.) Trump sent out a tweet last weekend announcing that because the U.S. economy is doing so well, he’s raising the 10 percent tariff he unilaterally imposed on a wide range of Chinese goods to 25 percent: “For 10 months, China has been paying Tariffs to the USA of 25% on 50 Billion Dollars of High Tech, and 10% on 200 Billion Dollars of other goods. These payments are partially responsible for our great economic results. The 10% will go up to 25% on Friday. 325 Billions Dollars of additional goods sent to us by China remain untaxed, but will be shortly, at a rate of 25%.” He seems to be saying that his hard line on Chinese trade is actually boosting the economy, while other, more rational capitalists are responding by bidding down the stock market, which suffered one of its biggest one-day losses ever yesterday. The Frontline show was, of course, filmed before this latest development in the U.S.-China trade relationship, but it had a number of interesting themes, including Steve Bannon (dressed as shabbily as we remember) boasting that what he hopes to achieve with a hard line against China on trade is a shift in power within China’s (nominally) Communist regime. The show also featured interviews with Chinese officials and industrialists, one of whom made the intriguing comment that China has chosen to develop their automobile industry not only because that offers direct competition with the U.S. but because modern-day cars, with their heavy reliance on computer technology and the increasing use of composite materials rather than metals to make them, are sort of an acid test for a modern economy: if you can make a state-of-the-art car, you can make just about anything. There was a brief reference to the increasing automation of manufacturing — one U.S. interviewee pointed out that American manufacturing may be shrinking in terms of its total percentage of the U.S. labor force, but it’s increasing in total output — though, as I pointed out during the 2016 campaign, it’s cold comfort to the displaced American worker whether he (or she) lost his (or her) job to a Mexican, a Chinese, or a computer.
The show also chronicled Trump’s never-evolving views on trade — in the late 1980’s he bought into the consensus view at the time that the biggest threat to U.S. economic hegemony was Japan (as did the late professor Chalmers Johnson — I went to a couple of his book events and embarrassed him by reminding him of that), and when the Japanese economy collapsed in the early 1990’s he simply shifted his animus to China. The show also mentioned that one Leitmotif of Trump’s talks about trade is his insistence that other countries are “laughing at us” over our misbegotten trade policies and our willingness to cave in to them out of some abstract commitment to “free markets.” As he told Playboy in a fascinating interview, published in March 1990, that’s probably the best expression of Trump’s world view from the man himself, “We Americans are laughed at around the world for losing a hundred and fifty billion dollars year after year, for defending wealthy nations for nothing, nations that would be wiped off the face of the earth in about fifteen minutes if it weren’t for us. Our ‘allies’ are making billions screwing us.” The Frontline show mentions the endless and unresolved “trade meetings” Trump used to hold with his advisors, and one of the interviewees, former assistant treasury secretary Gary Cole, recalled trying to explain to Trump that a “trade deficit” doesn’t actually mean we owe X amount of dollars to some other country that they can sue us to collect. Cole told Bob Woodward for the book Fear: Trump in the White House that at one point he actually tried to challenge Trump by asking him on what information he based his ideas about trade — and Trump couldn’t come up with anything. Instead he told Cole, “I don’t know why I believe those things, but I’ve believed them for 30 years.”
Aspects of the U.S.-China relationship that did not get discussed on Frontline include China’s continuing and growing investment in renewable energy technologies — while the U.S. under Trump has virtually stopped investing in renewable energy, leading to a possible future in which in order to get ourselves off fossil fuels at long last we will have to buy the technology to do so from China — and the uncomfortable fact that the Chinese government-industrial complex (though they’ve strayed incredibly far from the original ideals of socialism and communism, the Chinese have kept a connection between the state and the private economy so much that it’s hard to draw a strict dividing line between the two — as witness the interview in the Frontline program with a Silicon Valley banker who noted that Chinese investors were coming to him with billions of dollars with which to buy U.S. high-tech companies, amounts of money only the Chinese government could be supplying even though the buyers were supposedly representing “private” Chinese companies) is also the world’s largest holder of the U.S. national debt. I’ve mused in these pages before that some day we might find that China has simply foreclosed on us, and in line with the practice of China in their imperial days they might well make demands on us that amount to “suzerainty and tribute” — i.e., they will let us run our country pretty much the way we want but we’d have to acknowledge that the Chinese were in ultimate control of our destiny, and especially our foreign policy (“suzerainty”), and we’d also have to pay them large amounts of money (“tribute”) to be part of the overall Chinese protectorate.
This show, written and directed by Rick Young, would have been even stronger if it had explored the debt issue (and particularly the extent to which, while talking tough on China in other respects, the Trump administration gave China more leverage over us by funding their huge tax cut for the American rich via more borrowing from China) and the extent to which, by planning their economy for the next 10, 20 and even 50 years, China is poised to catch up with and overtake us in technology after technology. The show mentioned China’s practice of allowing foreign companies to invest in China only via co-ventures with Chinese companies, on terms that require the U.S. partners to give their Chinese co-venturers all their technological secrets (one of the big sticking points in the U.S.-China trade negotiations), but did not mention the equally important fact that the Chinese are sending their brightest students to study in the U.S. and learn our technological secrets from the source, then return with them to China and put their knowledge at the service of Chinese industry and technology to beat us at what used to be our own game. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that “industrial policy” — a measure of planning ahead for a country’s economic future, deciding which are going to be the next important sectors and guiding investments accordingly — is a much better way to run an economy than the lassiez-faire way we’ve historically done it, in which the very idea of an industrial policy routinely gets rejected as “socialistic.” The Chinese will probably beat us eventually, and self-destructive policies like Trump’s tariffs will only hasten the day when China becomes the world’s economic leader because protectionism cuts both ways: we may be shielding our companies from their competition, but we’re also forcing them to put their own resources into duplicating our achievements and ultimately surpassing them — especially since we will be facing an economic future in which the U.S. owes China tons of money we have no realistic way of paying back!
Tuesday, May 7, 2019
The Triplets of Belleville (Les Armateurs, Production Champion, Vivi Films, Studio Canal+, Sony Pictures Classics, 2002)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s film at the San Diego Public Library was a sometimes engaging, sometimes frustrating movie called The Triplets of Belleville. It was presented as part of a celebration of “National Bike Month” (did you know May was National Bike Month? Me neither) and the two other Monday night movies at the library are also going to be bicycle-themed: the 1979 film Breaking Away (which I remember seeing on TV shortly after its theatrical release) and a 2012 film called Premium Rush which sounds like the sort of thing you’ve seen before even if you haven’t: “In Manhattan, a bike messenger picks up an envelope that attracts the interest of a dirty cop, who pursues the cyclist throughout the city.” The official synopsis of The Triplets of Belleville promised a much better movie than the one we got: “When her grandson is kidnapped during the Tour de France, Madame Souza and her beloved pooch Bruno team up with the Belleville Sisters — an aged song-and-dance team from the days of Fred Astaire — to rescue him.” The leaflet also told us that the film was animated, which should have been a warning sign.
Written and directed by Sylvain Chomet, The Triplets of Belleville actually starts with its most entertaining sequence, a black-and-white cartoon supposedly from the heyday of the Triplets of Belleville, a vocal group pretty obviously modeled on the marvelous Boswell Sisters, who from 1930 to 1936 made a series of records with advanced jazz harmonies and an infectious rhythmic feel (music critic Scott Yanow rates them as far better than the Andrews Sisters, who came later but sound more primitive, and I think he’s right). The film-within-the-film shows the Triplets (drawn as unusually tall; the film’s imdb.com page quotes Chomet as telling the animators to make them look like basketball players) doing their big hit song, “Belleville Rendezvous,” with a backing band that sounds like the original Quintet of the Hot Club of France with Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. Indeed, we get a scene of the band’s guitarist taking a solo, and he’s made to look like Django, and there’s a weird in-joke in which “Django” takes off his left shoe and frets his guitar with the toes of his left foot. (This is a reference to the real Django Reinhardt having had an accident in the late 1920’s in which his left hand was badly burned; as a result, three of its fingers were partially paralyzed, and though they weren’t totally useless for playing — he could still use them to make bar chords — he developed a style based on quick single-note runs instead of strummed chords that became enormously influential on later jazz guitarists.) They’re also shown as part of a floor show that features caricatures of the great African-American singer and dancer Josephine Baker (she fled to France in the late 1920’s to avoid American racism and became a huge star there) — she wears the real Baker’s famous skirt of bananas and anxiously runs off stage as the other performers seize her bananas and threaten to expose her — and Fred Astaire, whose tap shoes detach themselves from his feet and start eating him.
Then the film cuts to a later time period, established in a newspaper headline one of the imdb.com “Trivia” posters noticed as 1963, and the cartoon we’ve just seen is established as a film-within-the-film being watched by Madame Souza along with a showing of Jacques Tati’s film Jour de Fête. From there the film devolves into a virtually dialogue-less chase scene as Madame Souza and the Triplets of Belleville join forces to rescue her grandson, who apparently (I did a lot of nodding off during the film and even the parts I stayed awake for didn’t make much sense) was not only kidnapped in the middle of the Tour de France but taken on an ocean liner to New York City, while a group of three bicyclists ride in front of a process screen and bookies take bets on the outcome of the race as it’s still going on. The Triplets of Belleville has some great visual gags, including one in which the title characters plant a bomb in the middle of the ocean and, as it blows up, great quantities of marine life come billowing out. At first we assume they’re fish but they turn out to be frogs, which means that Madame Souza and the Triplets are pretty much living on frog’s legs for most of the rest of the movie (and of course the frog’s legs do a certain amount of twitching on their way into the characters’ mouths — this is not a good “date movie” if you’re dating a vegan). There’s also a dream sequence in which a pretty obvious caricature of Buster Keaton is riding a locomotive with a cannon mounted on it (a reference to his famous scene with the cannon on board his train in The General), only the track the “train” is on is actually the rim of Bruno the dog’s food bowl, and a great sequence in which one of those odd French cars of the period with a long hood and a small interior gets caught on a hill during one of the chase sequences, stands up like a bowling pin and then tumbles end-over-end back down the hill.
But overall The Triplets of Belleville seems too much like one of those aggravating stories in which, because it’s a fantasy and therefore anything can happen, it does, whether or not it makes any sense to the overall narrative. It also has a common failing among animated films of being too cute and clever for its own good, and though as animators the filmmakers could have used all the colors of the rainbow, they shoehorned most of it into the dirty browns and greens that seem to be the default colors today’s filmmakers use for everything. On the plus side is that the film has very little dialogue — which makes it more confusing but also more pure as an audio-visual diet (one suspects the Jacques Tati references were deliberate tributes from writer-director Chomet since Tati’s films were also famous for their sparing use of dialogue) — and the animation is excellent, with figures not only moving fluidly and with grace but actually casting shadows (an effect Walt Disney used in the early days but he later abandoned, and most other animators didn’t even try, because if you have a cartoon character casting a shadow, you have to animate not only the character but also the shadow). I guess I would have wanted The Triplets of Belleville to be more fun — as it stands it’s a bit too “arch” for its own good, a bit (more than a bit, actually) too much in love with its own cleverness and working too hard at being charming.
Last night’s film at the San Diego Public Library was a sometimes engaging, sometimes frustrating movie called The Triplets of Belleville. It was presented as part of a celebration of “National Bike Month” (did you know May was National Bike Month? Me neither) and the two other Monday night movies at the library are also going to be bicycle-themed: the 1979 film Breaking Away (which I remember seeing on TV shortly after its theatrical release) and a 2012 film called Premium Rush which sounds like the sort of thing you’ve seen before even if you haven’t: “In Manhattan, a bike messenger picks up an envelope that attracts the interest of a dirty cop, who pursues the cyclist throughout the city.” The official synopsis of The Triplets of Belleville promised a much better movie than the one we got: “When her grandson is kidnapped during the Tour de France, Madame Souza and her beloved pooch Bruno team up with the Belleville Sisters — an aged song-and-dance team from the days of Fred Astaire — to rescue him.” The leaflet also told us that the film was animated, which should have been a warning sign.
Written and directed by Sylvain Chomet, The Triplets of Belleville actually starts with its most entertaining sequence, a black-and-white cartoon supposedly from the heyday of the Triplets of Belleville, a vocal group pretty obviously modeled on the marvelous Boswell Sisters, who from 1930 to 1936 made a series of records with advanced jazz harmonies and an infectious rhythmic feel (music critic Scott Yanow rates them as far better than the Andrews Sisters, who came later but sound more primitive, and I think he’s right). The film-within-the-film shows the Triplets (drawn as unusually tall; the film’s imdb.com page quotes Chomet as telling the animators to make them look like basketball players) doing their big hit song, “Belleville Rendezvous,” with a backing band that sounds like the original Quintet of the Hot Club of France with Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. Indeed, we get a scene of the band’s guitarist taking a solo, and he’s made to look like Django, and there’s a weird in-joke in which “Django” takes off his left shoe and frets his guitar with the toes of his left foot. (This is a reference to the real Django Reinhardt having had an accident in the late 1920’s in which his left hand was badly burned; as a result, three of its fingers were partially paralyzed, and though they weren’t totally useless for playing — he could still use them to make bar chords — he developed a style based on quick single-note runs instead of strummed chords that became enormously influential on later jazz guitarists.) They’re also shown as part of a floor show that features caricatures of the great African-American singer and dancer Josephine Baker (she fled to France in the late 1920’s to avoid American racism and became a huge star there) — she wears the real Baker’s famous skirt of bananas and anxiously runs off stage as the other performers seize her bananas and threaten to expose her — and Fred Astaire, whose tap shoes detach themselves from his feet and start eating him.
Then the film cuts to a later time period, established in a newspaper headline one of the imdb.com “Trivia” posters noticed as 1963, and the cartoon we’ve just seen is established as a film-within-the-film being watched by Madame Souza along with a showing of Jacques Tati’s film Jour de Fête. From there the film devolves into a virtually dialogue-less chase scene as Madame Souza and the Triplets of Belleville join forces to rescue her grandson, who apparently (I did a lot of nodding off during the film and even the parts I stayed awake for didn’t make much sense) was not only kidnapped in the middle of the Tour de France but taken on an ocean liner to New York City, while a group of three bicyclists ride in front of a process screen and bookies take bets on the outcome of the race as it’s still going on. The Triplets of Belleville has some great visual gags, including one in which the title characters plant a bomb in the middle of the ocean and, as it blows up, great quantities of marine life come billowing out. At first we assume they’re fish but they turn out to be frogs, which means that Madame Souza and the Triplets are pretty much living on frog’s legs for most of the rest of the movie (and of course the frog’s legs do a certain amount of twitching on their way into the characters’ mouths — this is not a good “date movie” if you’re dating a vegan). There’s also a dream sequence in which a pretty obvious caricature of Buster Keaton is riding a locomotive with a cannon mounted on it (a reference to his famous scene with the cannon on board his train in The General), only the track the “train” is on is actually the rim of Bruno the dog’s food bowl, and a great sequence in which one of those odd French cars of the period with a long hood and a small interior gets caught on a hill during one of the chase sequences, stands up like a bowling pin and then tumbles end-over-end back down the hill.
But overall The Triplets of Belleville seems too much like one of those aggravating stories in which, because it’s a fantasy and therefore anything can happen, it does, whether or not it makes any sense to the overall narrative. It also has a common failing among animated films of being too cute and clever for its own good, and though as animators the filmmakers could have used all the colors of the rainbow, they shoehorned most of it into the dirty browns and greens that seem to be the default colors today’s filmmakers use for everything. On the plus side is that the film has very little dialogue — which makes it more confusing but also more pure as an audio-visual diet (one suspects the Jacques Tati references were deliberate tributes from writer-director Chomet since Tati’s films were also famous for their sparing use of dialogue) — and the animation is excellent, with figures not only moving fluidly and with grace but actually casting shadows (an effect Walt Disney used in the early days but he later abandoned, and most other animators didn’t even try, because if you have a cartoon character casting a shadow, you have to animate not only the character but also the shadow). I guess I would have wanted The Triplets of Belleville to be more fun — as it stands it’s a bit too “arch” for its own good, a bit (more than a bit, actually) too much in love with its own cleverness and working too hard at being charming.
Monday, May 6, 2019
The Red Line, Episodes 3 and 4 (Berlanti Productions, Forward Movement, CBS-TV, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was episodes three and four of The Red Line, a fascinating if sometimes exasperating eight-part mini-series (it was designed as eight one-hour episodes but is being shown in two-hour chunks on Sunday nights, so in order to watch it I had to miss a Lifetime “premiere” movie called Psycho Stripper, a title which practically writes itself) which began with the shooting of an unarmed African-American man, Dr. Harrison Brennan (Corey Reynolds), who had the terrible luck to shop at a convenience store just as it was being robbed by another Black man. The man at the counter was clubbed by the robber and injured, but he was conscious long enough to see that the robber was Black, and when Dr. Brennan approached him seeking to help him medically, the counterman started screaming, apparently thinking the robber had come back to finish him off. Just then police officers Paul Evans (Noel Fisher) and his white female partner arrived on the scene and Evans shot Brennan twice in the back without giving him any warning or instructions to turn around, put his hands up or any of the other things cops are supposed to do with suspects before exerting legal force. The main character in the series is actually the late Dr. Brennan’s husband, Daniel Calder (Noah Wyle) — yes, this series incorporates Blacks, Gays and Trans people in its dramatis personae — who sues the city for wrongful death and gets a $3 million settlement offer, which he promptly blows by losing his cool in a deposition hearing in which Officer Evans is repeating a carefully coached lie (coached by his older brother and his dad, both former cops — apparently there as many Evanses in the Chicago Police Department as there are Reagans in the New York one in another CBS policier, Blue Bloods) that Dr. Brennan was wearing a hoodie with the hood up and therefore Officer Evans had no idea he was Black.
Calder — who’s supposed to be a hero but gets drawn as such a ninny it’s hard to maintain sympathy for him, which I suspect is intended deliberately by this series’ writers — is also having to deal with the Black teenage girl Jira (Alison Royale), whom Brennan and Calder adopted after her real mother, Tia Young (Emayatzi Corinealdi), got pregnant as a teenager and gave up the baby to Dr. Brennan so she could go on to college and get an advanced degree in economics. Only Tia ended up returning to Chicago and “marrying down” to a bus driver, Ethan Young (Howard Charles, who at least in these episodes looks more “Black” than he did in the first two, where he was supposed to be a person of color but looked as much Latino as Black); they’ve had a son, Benny (Maximus Chase Evans). Tia has declared her candidacy for Chicago’s Board of Aldermen — their term for a city council — against entrenched Black politician Nathan Gordon (Glynn Turman), and she’s worried that the discovery that she had a kid and gave her away when she was still a teenager will be exploited by Gordon to destroy her chances. (I suspect this plot line was inspired by Barack Obama’s primary challenge to an entrenched African-American candidate for the Illinois state legislature early in his career in what turned out to be the only election Obama ever lost.) Against the opposition of her remaining dad, Tia has sought out Jira not only to get back in touch with her birth mother but because she feels she needs a Black parent now that Harrison is gone. The Red Line suffers from a coincidence-driven plot line and some jarringly quick intercuts between its stories (it’s true that the whole point of the piece is to present the same events from multiple points of view to show how differences in race, community and background can affect how people perceive things, but I wish they’d hang onto one story line longer before abruptly cutting to the next), but overall it’s a quite powerful drama.
I especially liked the scene in which two white police officers pull over Tia while she’s walking with her husband and their son and give her a veiled warning about what might happen to her if she keeps attacking the police in her campaign (one difference between her and Gordon is that Gordon wants to expand the Chicago Police Department and Tia thinks the money would better be spent on training the existing officers to be more sensitive to the Black community), and the crisis of conscience Paul Evans is going through — especially after he saves a woman who’s about to be run over by an El train (the El, short for “Elevated,” is Chicago’s trolley system) and the police department goes overboard in sending out press releases hailing his heroism so Calder will look like an insensitive money-grabber out to take down a Great American Hero if he continues his lawsuit. The final shot of episode four shows yet another of the show’s MacGuffins — a VHS tape (in 2019?) of the confrontation between Dr. Brennan and Officer Evans in the convenience store, which got seized by Evans’ original partner to protect him by keeping it from coming to light, then was stolen by Evans himself from his partner’s safe, and ended up in the hands of Evans’ current partner, Diego Carranza (Sebastian Sozzi), a Puerto Rican (we frequently hear him call home and talk to his wife in Spanish) obviously picked to partner Evans because of the optics and the way the police department will be able to boost his image by pairing him with a person of color. Carranza has stolen the tape, watched it, decided that Evans was in the wrong even though both the CPD’s own internal inquiry and a federal grand jury have cleared him, and at the end of the show we’re shown him putting the tape in an envelope and mailing it to Daniel Calder. And if that weren’t enough plot for you, there’s also the hint of a budding romance between Calder and an (East) Indian-American teacher who’s his best friend at school, and is also Gay and apparently had an unrequited crush on Calder all these years and is signaling his interest now that Calder is single again …
Our “feature” last night was episodes three and four of The Red Line, a fascinating if sometimes exasperating eight-part mini-series (it was designed as eight one-hour episodes but is being shown in two-hour chunks on Sunday nights, so in order to watch it I had to miss a Lifetime “premiere” movie called Psycho Stripper, a title which practically writes itself) which began with the shooting of an unarmed African-American man, Dr. Harrison Brennan (Corey Reynolds), who had the terrible luck to shop at a convenience store just as it was being robbed by another Black man. The man at the counter was clubbed by the robber and injured, but he was conscious long enough to see that the robber was Black, and when Dr. Brennan approached him seeking to help him medically, the counterman started screaming, apparently thinking the robber had come back to finish him off. Just then police officers Paul Evans (Noel Fisher) and his white female partner arrived on the scene and Evans shot Brennan twice in the back without giving him any warning or instructions to turn around, put his hands up or any of the other things cops are supposed to do with suspects before exerting legal force. The main character in the series is actually the late Dr. Brennan’s husband, Daniel Calder (Noah Wyle) — yes, this series incorporates Blacks, Gays and Trans people in its dramatis personae — who sues the city for wrongful death and gets a $3 million settlement offer, which he promptly blows by losing his cool in a deposition hearing in which Officer Evans is repeating a carefully coached lie (coached by his older brother and his dad, both former cops — apparently there as many Evanses in the Chicago Police Department as there are Reagans in the New York one in another CBS policier, Blue Bloods) that Dr. Brennan was wearing a hoodie with the hood up and therefore Officer Evans had no idea he was Black.
Calder — who’s supposed to be a hero but gets drawn as such a ninny it’s hard to maintain sympathy for him, which I suspect is intended deliberately by this series’ writers — is also having to deal with the Black teenage girl Jira (Alison Royale), whom Brennan and Calder adopted after her real mother, Tia Young (Emayatzi Corinealdi), got pregnant as a teenager and gave up the baby to Dr. Brennan so she could go on to college and get an advanced degree in economics. Only Tia ended up returning to Chicago and “marrying down” to a bus driver, Ethan Young (Howard Charles, who at least in these episodes looks more “Black” than he did in the first two, where he was supposed to be a person of color but looked as much Latino as Black); they’ve had a son, Benny (Maximus Chase Evans). Tia has declared her candidacy for Chicago’s Board of Aldermen — their term for a city council — against entrenched Black politician Nathan Gordon (Glynn Turman), and she’s worried that the discovery that she had a kid and gave her away when she was still a teenager will be exploited by Gordon to destroy her chances. (I suspect this plot line was inspired by Barack Obama’s primary challenge to an entrenched African-American candidate for the Illinois state legislature early in his career in what turned out to be the only election Obama ever lost.) Against the opposition of her remaining dad, Tia has sought out Jira not only to get back in touch with her birth mother but because she feels she needs a Black parent now that Harrison is gone. The Red Line suffers from a coincidence-driven plot line and some jarringly quick intercuts between its stories (it’s true that the whole point of the piece is to present the same events from multiple points of view to show how differences in race, community and background can affect how people perceive things, but I wish they’d hang onto one story line longer before abruptly cutting to the next), but overall it’s a quite powerful drama.
I especially liked the scene in which two white police officers pull over Tia while she’s walking with her husband and their son and give her a veiled warning about what might happen to her if she keeps attacking the police in her campaign (one difference between her and Gordon is that Gordon wants to expand the Chicago Police Department and Tia thinks the money would better be spent on training the existing officers to be more sensitive to the Black community), and the crisis of conscience Paul Evans is going through — especially after he saves a woman who’s about to be run over by an El train (the El, short for “Elevated,” is Chicago’s trolley system) and the police department goes overboard in sending out press releases hailing his heroism so Calder will look like an insensitive money-grabber out to take down a Great American Hero if he continues his lawsuit. The final shot of episode four shows yet another of the show’s MacGuffins — a VHS tape (in 2019?) of the confrontation between Dr. Brennan and Officer Evans in the convenience store, which got seized by Evans’ original partner to protect him by keeping it from coming to light, then was stolen by Evans himself from his partner’s safe, and ended up in the hands of Evans’ current partner, Diego Carranza (Sebastian Sozzi), a Puerto Rican (we frequently hear him call home and talk to his wife in Spanish) obviously picked to partner Evans because of the optics and the way the police department will be able to boost his image by pairing him with a person of color. Carranza has stolen the tape, watched it, decided that Evans was in the wrong even though both the CPD’s own internal inquiry and a federal grand jury have cleared him, and at the end of the show we’re shown him putting the tape in an envelope and mailing it to Daniel Calder. And if that weren’t enough plot for you, there’s also the hint of a budding romance between Calder and an (East) Indian-American teacher who’s his best friend at school, and is also Gay and apparently had an unrequited crush on Calder all these years and is signaling his interest now that Calder is single again …
Sunday, May 5, 2019
Pregnant and Deadly (Reel One Entertainment, 2018)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched the latest Lifetime “premiere” movie — though the production date on imdb.com is 2018 and Charles thought from the opening scene at an outdoor yoga class that we’d seen it before (we hadn’t, but it was so imbued with the Lifetime clichés it seemed like we had) with the spectacular misnomer of a title Pregnant and Deadly. Apparently it was filmed under the working title Dying for a Baby, which would have been closer — it seems that in the run-up to Mother’s Day Lifetime is doing a lot of stories about crazy women who either are mothers or have a fixated desire to be — because the villainess in this one, Jessica Moore (Sara Minnich — yet another modern-day actress using a name which in the glory days of Hollywood would have been changed; as I’ve pointed out here before, no one at MGM in 1939 would have thought there was a market for “The Wizard of Oz, starring Frances Gumm”), not only isn’t really pregnant but can’t be. It seems that two years before the main action Jessica and her husband Dave (uncredited on imdb.com) were involved in a car crash with another couple, Amber (Christa B. Allen, top-billed) and Kyle (Grayson Berry, tall, lanky and with a homely face but a surprisingly ample basket of which we get a lot of nice look-sees from director Lauro David Chartrand-de Valle, whose last name sounds like an especially tasty French wine) Smith.
Jessica and Dave both survive the crash, but Jessica needs an emergency hysterectomy to save her life and this leads her to go off the deep end. She figures Amber “stole” her baby — she was pregnant at the time of the crash and had already found out the gender (male) and named him Jonathan — and therefore she’s entitled to grab Amber’s baby as soon as Amber and Kyle conceive one. In order to spy on them, she rents a detached garage as a living space from a neighbor of Amber’s and Kyle’s — a college student beats her to the rental but she solves that problem by killing her — and when Amber is finally expecting, Jessica moves in on her, offering to become her best friend and “help” her, while simultaneously seducing her gynecologist into letting him take a volunteer position at the hospital so she can keep herself abreast of Amber’s care and steal her baby just after it’s born. She even forges a paper and inserts it in Amber’s file saying that Amber is schizophrenic and this led her to give up her baby as soon as it was born. Amber and Kyle make their livings as co-owners of a yoga studio that holds classes both outdoors (weather permitting) and indoors, and of course Jessica — who’s independently wealthy from the accident and an inheritance she got immediately afterwards — takes classes at Amber’s studio and ostensibly befriends her. She also hires a mixed-race girl named Taylor (Sienna Noelle Peeples) who’s just acquired an unwanted fetus of her own; she offers to pay Taylor’s medical expenses in exchange for adopting her baby when it’s born, but then reneges on the deal (without bothering to tell Taylor) when she finds out Taylor’s baby-to-be is a girl (wrong gender because she wants a boy to replace the son she lost, and of course the Smiths’ baby-to-be is a boy).
Last night Charles and I watched the latest Lifetime “premiere” movie — though the production date on imdb.com is 2018 and Charles thought from the opening scene at an outdoor yoga class that we’d seen it before (we hadn’t, but it was so imbued with the Lifetime clichés it seemed like we had) with the spectacular misnomer of a title Pregnant and Deadly. Apparently it was filmed under the working title Dying for a Baby, which would have been closer — it seems that in the run-up to Mother’s Day Lifetime is doing a lot of stories about crazy women who either are mothers or have a fixated desire to be — because the villainess in this one, Jessica Moore (Sara Minnich — yet another modern-day actress using a name which in the glory days of Hollywood would have been changed; as I’ve pointed out here before, no one at MGM in 1939 would have thought there was a market for “The Wizard of Oz, starring Frances Gumm”), not only isn’t really pregnant but can’t be. It seems that two years before the main action Jessica and her husband Dave (uncredited on imdb.com) were involved in a car crash with another couple, Amber (Christa B. Allen, top-billed) and Kyle (Grayson Berry, tall, lanky and with a homely face but a surprisingly ample basket of which we get a lot of nice look-sees from director Lauro David Chartrand-de Valle, whose last name sounds like an especially tasty French wine) Smith.
Jessica and Dave both survive the crash, but Jessica needs an emergency hysterectomy to save her life and this leads her to go off the deep end. She figures Amber “stole” her baby — she was pregnant at the time of the crash and had already found out the gender (male) and named him Jonathan — and therefore she’s entitled to grab Amber’s baby as soon as Amber and Kyle conceive one. In order to spy on them, she rents a detached garage as a living space from a neighbor of Amber’s and Kyle’s — a college student beats her to the rental but she solves that problem by killing her — and when Amber is finally expecting, Jessica moves in on her, offering to become her best friend and “help” her, while simultaneously seducing her gynecologist into letting him take a volunteer position at the hospital so she can keep herself abreast of Amber’s care and steal her baby just after it’s born. She even forges a paper and inserts it in Amber’s file saying that Amber is schizophrenic and this led her to give up her baby as soon as it was born. Amber and Kyle make their livings as co-owners of a yoga studio that holds classes both outdoors (weather permitting) and indoors, and of course Jessica — who’s independently wealthy from the accident and an inheritance she got immediately afterwards — takes classes at Amber’s studio and ostensibly befriends her. She also hires a mixed-race girl named Taylor (Sienna Noelle Peeples) who’s just acquired an unwanted fetus of her own; she offers to pay Taylor’s medical expenses in exchange for adopting her baby when it’s born, but then reneges on the deal (without bothering to tell Taylor) when she finds out Taylor’s baby-to-be is a girl (wrong gender because she wants a boy to replace the son she lost, and of course the Smiths’ baby-to-be is a boy).
About 45 minutes into the movie, a Black woman on the staff of Amber’s
and Kyle’s yoga studio stumbles onto the truth about Jessica’s plot but gets
killed for her pains — usually this doesn’t happen until two-thirds into the
running time of a Lifetime movie but the writers on this one, Lindsay Hartley[1]
and Jason Shane Scott, move the Heroine’s
African-American Best Friend Who Stumbles Onto the Villainess’s Plot but Gets
Killed Before She Can Warn the Heroine cliché up quite a bit earlier
than usual. Indeed, the film starts with Amber coming to in her own home,
finding gas on in the kitchen without the flame burning, rescuing her comatose
husband Kyle who’d already been overcome by the gas fumes (after, we learn
later when this scene is repeated, being clobbered on the head by the bad
girl), and screaming when she finds an empty crib, “Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby?” Then we get a title reading, “Eight months
earlier,” and the main part of the story begins — though writers Hartley and
Shane Scott were obviously worshiping at the shrine of St. Casey Robinson since
they then give us a few flashbacks within flashbacks, including a replay of the
accident from two years earlier (ya remember the accident from two
years earlier?) which turns out to be one
of the characters flashing back to it in a dream. It all ends up with Jessica
seducing Amber’s doctor, then giving him an injection of a knockout drug,
kidnapping him and then taking him to Amber’s place, where she forces him at
gunpoint to give Amber a drug to induce labor so Amber will give birth already
and Jessica can take the baby. (Like most kidnapped babies in Lifetime movies,
the kid screams his head off in crying when the bad girl holds him, but coos
softly when held by his actual biological mom.)
Once Amber comes to and
realizes what’s happened — including that Jessica has left the gas running in
their kitchen so she can asphyxiate both of them and the cops will see the note
in Amber’s medical chart Jessica planted there to say she was schizophrenic and
rule it a murder-suicide — she bounds from the bed with surprising energy and
traces Jessica and the baby; though the cops Amber had the good sense to call
(typically for Lifetime, it’s only at the very end of the movie that anyone has the good sense to use their ubiquitous cell
phones to call 911) arrive at the address Amber gives them, Amber arrives there
first, overpowers Jessica and regains her child, though Jessica is apprehended
alive and the final scene features Jessica in the courtyard of a mental
hospital, surrounded by all the extras Lifetime could hire to play florid
crazies, sitting and clutching a “baby” — obviously a doll, though the director
doesn’t get her camera close enough to confirm that. Pregnant and
Deadly (Charles joked the Lifetime titlers
should have taken the gimmick even further and called it Pregnant and
Deadly at 17 – to which I added, By
the Boy She Met Online!) is pretty much in
the middle range of Lifetime movies in quality: acceptably directed from a
script that relied even more on coincidence than most Lifetime plots, and
decently acted even though I’ve seen a lot of actors of both (mainstream)
genders do the Psycho from Hell roles considerably better than Sarah Minnich.
It’s the sort of movie you think
you’ve seen before even though you haven’t.
Adventures of Don Quixote (English version) (Nelson Films, Vander Films, 1933)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After last night’s Lifetime movie I ran an item Charles had been particularly interested in watching from archive.org: Adventures of Don Quixote, a 1933 film originally shot in France (at the Vittorine Studios in Nice, where Rex Ingram worked in the late 1920’s and F. Scott Fitzgerald visited him and set a key scene in Tender Is the Night) and apparently filmed in three languages, French, English and German. The director was the German G. W. Pabst, who had just fled Germany because he’d got on the Nazis’ shit-list for radical-Left movies like The Threepenny Opera, Westfront 1918 (essentially the German version of All Quiet on the Western Front) and Kameradschaft (about a group of German and Russian coal miners who each dig a rescue tunnel from their end of the mineshaft to rescue a group of miners trapped between by a cave-in). Don Quixote was his first film outside Germany (Pabst, like Fritz Lang, was actually Austrian but he’d been a leading light in Weimar Germany and had made great movies like The Joyless Street with Asta Nielsen and Greta Garbo, The Love of Jeanne Ney, Secrets of the Soul — the first film to deal with psychoanalysis, for which Pabst used Carl Jung as his technical advisor after Sigmund Freud turned him down — and the great Louise Brooks vehicles Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl) and its star was the great Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin. Unfortunately the film was subjected to several hatchet jobs (as were quite a few of Pabst’s films — The Joyless Street was originally two hours but the only version I’ve seen is a one-hour cut-down designed to make Garbo, who originally played the second female lead, look like the star) and the version we were watching was an English-language release lasting only 55 minutes. I’d much rather see a subtitled print of the 73-minute French version, not only because I suspect the plot would be more coherent (though the episodic nature of Miguel de Cervantes’ source novel would make any adaptation seem episodic as well) but because Chaliapin was familiar with French — he’d sung French operas in the original language many times — where he seems so totally at sea in English he sounds like he’s gargling through much of his dialogue (less so when he’s singing one of the five songs Jacques Ibert wrote for the film) and I suspect he didn’t actually know English and learned his lines phonetically like Bela Lugosi did. (The German version is believed to be lost, though that hasn’t stopped an imdb.com reviewer from claiming they’ve seen it.)
It’s an uneven movie, beautifully photographed by Colemar Nichols and quite well staged by Pabst — it’s similar to The Threepenny Opera in the skill with which the songs are integrated into the action instead of the movie just coming to a dead stop for a production number the way most American musicals of the time did — but it’s also a quirky one. I’ve never read Don Quixote and so I can’t vouch for the fidelity (or lack thereof) of this film to the source, but I get the impression this would be difficult material for anyone to film and it’s not surprising that major directors like Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam have come a-cropper with it. Chaliapin is a powerful presence on screen and one can readily see why he wowed ’em in the theatre (especially in his signature roles, the title characters in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Boïto’s Mefistofele), but he also gets oppressive at times. His Sancho Panza is the great British comedian George Robey, who’d become a star in the 1916 British musical The Bing Boys and whose last film — indeed, his last work of any sort — was as Sir John Falstaff in Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film of Shakespeare’s Henry V. (Shakespeare merely alluded to Falstaff’s death, but Olivier decided he needed at least a silent scene of it and seems to have called on Robey because he was really fatally ill and that would add verisimilitude — just as Edward G. Robinson’s powerful death scene in his last film, Soylent Green, was filmed when he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer and the fact that both he and everyone else on the film knew he was dying for real imbued that scene with intense, powerful emotion missing from the rest of the film.)
Robey is a marvelous foil to Chaliapin and supplies the human realism the film desperately needs, but the rest of the cast (at least in the English version — apparently Chaliapin was in all three, but his supporting actors were different in each language) is reliably good in the manner of British actors but somewhat at sea in the frankly unrealistic character of the story. One aspect of the film that rubbed me the wrong way was that it ends with the burning of Don Quixote’s book collection — the opening scenes establish that Quixote has squandered his whole fortune buying books about knight-errantry and by reading them has acquired the delusion that he is a knight-errant himself, and we’re supposed to see the burning of his books as a positive event, one that marks his return to reality and sanity. This seems a strange way to end a movie made by a director who had fled the Nazi tyranny — though, for reasons Pabst’s biographers are still arguing about, he returned to Germany in the late 1930’s or early 1940’s and made the film Paracelsus during World War II, using the legendary real-life doctor’s story as a metaphor for the Nazi ideals of an heroic superman guiding the destiny of lesser humans. Then, a decade later, he worked in his original homeland, Austria, and made The Last Ten Days, a story of Hitler’s demise in the Berlin bunker in World War II that’s often been considered one of the best biopics ever made about Der Führer, though I’ve never seen it — just the 1980 TV-movie remake with Anthony Hopkins.
After last night’s Lifetime movie I ran an item Charles had been particularly interested in watching from archive.org: Adventures of Don Quixote, a 1933 film originally shot in France (at the Vittorine Studios in Nice, where Rex Ingram worked in the late 1920’s and F. Scott Fitzgerald visited him and set a key scene in Tender Is the Night) and apparently filmed in three languages, French, English and German. The director was the German G. W. Pabst, who had just fled Germany because he’d got on the Nazis’ shit-list for radical-Left movies like The Threepenny Opera, Westfront 1918 (essentially the German version of All Quiet on the Western Front) and Kameradschaft (about a group of German and Russian coal miners who each dig a rescue tunnel from their end of the mineshaft to rescue a group of miners trapped between by a cave-in). Don Quixote was his first film outside Germany (Pabst, like Fritz Lang, was actually Austrian but he’d been a leading light in Weimar Germany and had made great movies like The Joyless Street with Asta Nielsen and Greta Garbo, The Love of Jeanne Ney, Secrets of the Soul — the first film to deal with psychoanalysis, for which Pabst used Carl Jung as his technical advisor after Sigmund Freud turned him down — and the great Louise Brooks vehicles Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl) and its star was the great Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin. Unfortunately the film was subjected to several hatchet jobs (as were quite a few of Pabst’s films — The Joyless Street was originally two hours but the only version I’ve seen is a one-hour cut-down designed to make Garbo, who originally played the second female lead, look like the star) and the version we were watching was an English-language release lasting only 55 minutes. I’d much rather see a subtitled print of the 73-minute French version, not only because I suspect the plot would be more coherent (though the episodic nature of Miguel de Cervantes’ source novel would make any adaptation seem episodic as well) but because Chaliapin was familiar with French — he’d sung French operas in the original language many times — where he seems so totally at sea in English he sounds like he’s gargling through much of his dialogue (less so when he’s singing one of the five songs Jacques Ibert wrote for the film) and I suspect he didn’t actually know English and learned his lines phonetically like Bela Lugosi did. (The German version is believed to be lost, though that hasn’t stopped an imdb.com reviewer from claiming they’ve seen it.)
It’s an uneven movie, beautifully photographed by Colemar Nichols and quite well staged by Pabst — it’s similar to The Threepenny Opera in the skill with which the songs are integrated into the action instead of the movie just coming to a dead stop for a production number the way most American musicals of the time did — but it’s also a quirky one. I’ve never read Don Quixote and so I can’t vouch for the fidelity (or lack thereof) of this film to the source, but I get the impression this would be difficult material for anyone to film and it’s not surprising that major directors like Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam have come a-cropper with it. Chaliapin is a powerful presence on screen and one can readily see why he wowed ’em in the theatre (especially in his signature roles, the title characters in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Boïto’s Mefistofele), but he also gets oppressive at times. His Sancho Panza is the great British comedian George Robey, who’d become a star in the 1916 British musical The Bing Boys and whose last film — indeed, his last work of any sort — was as Sir John Falstaff in Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film of Shakespeare’s Henry V. (Shakespeare merely alluded to Falstaff’s death, but Olivier decided he needed at least a silent scene of it and seems to have called on Robey because he was really fatally ill and that would add verisimilitude — just as Edward G. Robinson’s powerful death scene in his last film, Soylent Green, was filmed when he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer and the fact that both he and everyone else on the film knew he was dying for real imbued that scene with intense, powerful emotion missing from the rest of the film.)
Robey is a marvelous foil to Chaliapin and supplies the human realism the film desperately needs, but the rest of the cast (at least in the English version — apparently Chaliapin was in all three, but his supporting actors were different in each language) is reliably good in the manner of British actors but somewhat at sea in the frankly unrealistic character of the story. One aspect of the film that rubbed me the wrong way was that it ends with the burning of Don Quixote’s book collection — the opening scenes establish that Quixote has squandered his whole fortune buying books about knight-errantry and by reading them has acquired the delusion that he is a knight-errant himself, and we’re supposed to see the burning of his books as a positive event, one that marks his return to reality and sanity. This seems a strange way to end a movie made by a director who had fled the Nazi tyranny — though, for reasons Pabst’s biographers are still arguing about, he returned to Germany in the late 1930’s or early 1940’s and made the film Paracelsus during World War II, using the legendary real-life doctor’s story as a metaphor for the Nazi ideals of an heroic superman guiding the destiny of lesser humans. Then, a decade later, he worked in his original homeland, Austria, and made The Last Ten Days, a story of Hitler’s demise in the Berlin bunker in World War II that’s often been considered one of the best biopics ever made about Der Führer, though I’ve never seen it — just the 1980 TV-movie remake with Anthony Hopkins.
Wednesday, May 1, 2019
Eagle Eye (DreamWorks, Goldcrest Pictures, KMP Film Input, 2018)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyrigt © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I frantically looked through the backlog of DVD’s we’ve picked up on close-out tables to find something Charles and I could watch together and which would be over before Stephen Colbert’s program came on — which let out Ridley Scott’s Crusades spectacle Kingdom of Heaven and Pola X, a film I’ve wanted to run as a memorial to the great singer and composer Scott Walker (no, not that Scott Walker!), both of which were too long. The film I came up with turned out to be unexpectedly good: Eagle Eye, a 2008 War on Terror-themed thriller starring Shia LaBeouf (whose name I’ve been misspelling “LaBoeuf,” like the French word for “beef”) as Jerry Shaw, a resident of Cleveland who supports himself by working a shit job at a place called Copy Cabana (in one early scene he’s shown fielding the stupid questions real people who work at real copy centers have to deal with from customers) and “taking” his fellow employees in poker games in the break room. He’s got a twin brother, Ethan Shaw, who works on a super-secret program in the Department of Defense — throughout their childhoods Ethan was always the high-achieving go-getter and Jerry the slacker — and his life is suddenly upended after Ethan mysteriously dies in a car crash. First Jerry goes to withdraw money from his ATM, which had previously told him his account was overdrawn, and suddenly he has a bank balance of over $700,000 and the machine is frantically spitting cash at him. Next he goes to the room he rents from the stereotypical hatchet-faced landlady, and she asks him why he’s received so many deliveries lately. He enters his room and it’s full of boxes of merchandise he’s seemingly ordered from Terrorists ’R Us: state-of-the-art guns in black padded cases, ammonium nitrate fertilizer (the stuff Timothy McVeigh made the Oklahoma City bomb from, remember?), passports from several countries in several languages (recalling the multiple passports Humphrey Bogart found when he searched Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon) and just about everything else the well-equipped revolutionary cell seeking to bring down a government could want.
Then he gets a call on his cell phone (an old-style flip model that was probably considered obsolete even in 2008) telling him that if he doesn’t get out of his room in the next 20 seconds, the FBI will be there to arrest him. The FBI duly shows up, but Jerry gets away by following the instructions of the voice on the phone — a female-sounding voice evoking the inevitable comparisons with Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, though I don’t think either of those programs existed when this movie was made — and he ends up on the run along with Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan). Rachel has been forced into whatever plot that sinister phone voice is executing because her son has been kidnapped and will be killed if she doesn’t go along. Her son Sam (Cameron Boyce) is a student at a boarding school called “Peace & Love High School” and a trumpet player in the school’s band whom we see practicing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before he gets snatched. Also in the dramatis personae are FBI agent Thomas Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton, only a bit less twitchy than usual) and defense secretary Callister (Michael “Thing” Chiklis), as well as FBI agent Zoe Perez (an effective performance by Rosario Dawson), who is leading the operation to apprehend the leads but is eventually persuaded that they’re on the good side and deserve help. The whole plot was kicked into motion by an operation in the Middle East in which special forces thought they had run a prominent terrorist to ground at a funeral he was attending. ARIIA, the super-computer of the Department of Defense, relayed to Callister that the intelligence they had indicated only a 37 percent chance that the person they had sighted was indeed the terrorist they were after; later information upped that to 51 percent but ARIIA still recommended that the attack be aborted. Callister called the President, and the President gave the go-ahead signal, the attack took place, and it turned out to be an ordinary funeral without any attendees having any connection to anti-U.S. terrorism.
From these plot premises Eagle Eye turns into the sort of film you’d probably get if you could reincarnate Philip K. Dick to write a script about terrorism and if you could also reincarnate Alfred Hitchcock to direct it — scene after scene puts our reluctant hero and heroine in immediate peril as they flee for their lives and wonder whether that mysterious female voice is ultimately helping or hurting them, the sort of thing Hitchcock did in his big chase movies like The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Saboteur and North by Northwest — and the payoff is a direct ripoff from Arthur C. Clarke’s script for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It seems that the super-computer ARIIA, like HAL, was literally driven crazy by the conflicting demands made on it: following the failure of that Middle Eastern mission, ARIIA decided that the real danger to the U.S. was from the President and the entire chain of command because they’d signed onto an operation that would only hurt the U.S.’s image in the world without any benefit to the national security. So ARIIA decided to eliminate not only the President but everyone else in the chain of succession — all except Defense Secretary Callister, who earned the computer’s reprieve by going along with its decision to abort the operation until the President personally overruled him. The mass assassination is supposed to occur at the State of the Union address because all the targets will be there, and it’s supposed to be carried out with a recherché gimmick that was actually used in a couple of Charlie Chan movies in the 1930’s (and, in a satirical context, in the “Girl Hunt” ballet sequence in the 1953 film The Band Wagon): the U.S. has developed a super-powerful explosive that looks like a quartz stone, and it can be triggered by the vibrations from a certain musical note — which Sam Holloman is supposed to supply when he hits the sustained high F in the Peace and Love High School’s arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which the school’s band has been invited to perform at the State of the Union ceremony.
The good guys have to figure out how to disarm the computer without activating its self-defense mechanism and getting themselves killed, and the significance of Jerry being an identical twin is that the computer’s plot, called “Project Guillotine,” required activation either by Ethan or someone with identical genes — which is why ARIIA sucked Jerry into the plot in the first place. At the end Jerry disrupts the plot by firing a gun in the air in the middle of the State of the Union just before Sam plays the lethal high note; for this he’s gunned down by the security detail (he got a gun onto the floor of Congress by impersonating FBI agent Morgan, who in an earlier scene was killed in a car crash supposedly engineered by ARIIA — whose ability to hack into any database and assure seemingly whatever outcome it wants seems almost supernatural after a while), but somehow he turns up alive at the end and he and Rachel are reunited (it’s established that she was single after a bitter breakup with Sam’s father, who’s listed in the dramatis personae but I don’t recall him). Eagle Eye is actually a marvelous film, capably directed by music video veteran D. J. Caruso from a committee-written script (Dan McDermott, John Glenn — almost certainly not the same one — Travis Adam Wright and Hillary Seitz), well acted (for once Shia LeBeouf gets to play a character with some dramatic definition after doing his usual slacker “bit” in the early scenes) and convincing me that if Cory Doctorow’s marvelous Little Brother ever gets filmed (and it should be!), Caruso would be a good choice to direct it.
Last night I frantically looked through the backlog of DVD’s we’ve picked up on close-out tables to find something Charles and I could watch together and which would be over before Stephen Colbert’s program came on — which let out Ridley Scott’s Crusades spectacle Kingdom of Heaven and Pola X, a film I’ve wanted to run as a memorial to the great singer and composer Scott Walker (no, not that Scott Walker!), both of which were too long. The film I came up with turned out to be unexpectedly good: Eagle Eye, a 2008 War on Terror-themed thriller starring Shia LaBeouf (whose name I’ve been misspelling “LaBoeuf,” like the French word for “beef”) as Jerry Shaw, a resident of Cleveland who supports himself by working a shit job at a place called Copy Cabana (in one early scene he’s shown fielding the stupid questions real people who work at real copy centers have to deal with from customers) and “taking” his fellow employees in poker games in the break room. He’s got a twin brother, Ethan Shaw, who works on a super-secret program in the Department of Defense — throughout their childhoods Ethan was always the high-achieving go-getter and Jerry the slacker — and his life is suddenly upended after Ethan mysteriously dies in a car crash. First Jerry goes to withdraw money from his ATM, which had previously told him his account was overdrawn, and suddenly he has a bank balance of over $700,000 and the machine is frantically spitting cash at him. Next he goes to the room he rents from the stereotypical hatchet-faced landlady, and she asks him why he’s received so many deliveries lately. He enters his room and it’s full of boxes of merchandise he’s seemingly ordered from Terrorists ’R Us: state-of-the-art guns in black padded cases, ammonium nitrate fertilizer (the stuff Timothy McVeigh made the Oklahoma City bomb from, remember?), passports from several countries in several languages (recalling the multiple passports Humphrey Bogart found when he searched Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon) and just about everything else the well-equipped revolutionary cell seeking to bring down a government could want.
Then he gets a call on his cell phone (an old-style flip model that was probably considered obsolete even in 2008) telling him that if he doesn’t get out of his room in the next 20 seconds, the FBI will be there to arrest him. The FBI duly shows up, but Jerry gets away by following the instructions of the voice on the phone — a female-sounding voice evoking the inevitable comparisons with Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, though I don’t think either of those programs existed when this movie was made — and he ends up on the run along with Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan). Rachel has been forced into whatever plot that sinister phone voice is executing because her son has been kidnapped and will be killed if she doesn’t go along. Her son Sam (Cameron Boyce) is a student at a boarding school called “Peace & Love High School” and a trumpet player in the school’s band whom we see practicing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before he gets snatched. Also in the dramatis personae are FBI agent Thomas Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton, only a bit less twitchy than usual) and defense secretary Callister (Michael “Thing” Chiklis), as well as FBI agent Zoe Perez (an effective performance by Rosario Dawson), who is leading the operation to apprehend the leads but is eventually persuaded that they’re on the good side and deserve help. The whole plot was kicked into motion by an operation in the Middle East in which special forces thought they had run a prominent terrorist to ground at a funeral he was attending. ARIIA, the super-computer of the Department of Defense, relayed to Callister that the intelligence they had indicated only a 37 percent chance that the person they had sighted was indeed the terrorist they were after; later information upped that to 51 percent but ARIIA still recommended that the attack be aborted. Callister called the President, and the President gave the go-ahead signal, the attack took place, and it turned out to be an ordinary funeral without any attendees having any connection to anti-U.S. terrorism.
From these plot premises Eagle Eye turns into the sort of film you’d probably get if you could reincarnate Philip K. Dick to write a script about terrorism and if you could also reincarnate Alfred Hitchcock to direct it — scene after scene puts our reluctant hero and heroine in immediate peril as they flee for their lives and wonder whether that mysterious female voice is ultimately helping or hurting them, the sort of thing Hitchcock did in his big chase movies like The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Saboteur and North by Northwest — and the payoff is a direct ripoff from Arthur C. Clarke’s script for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It seems that the super-computer ARIIA, like HAL, was literally driven crazy by the conflicting demands made on it: following the failure of that Middle Eastern mission, ARIIA decided that the real danger to the U.S. was from the President and the entire chain of command because they’d signed onto an operation that would only hurt the U.S.’s image in the world without any benefit to the national security. So ARIIA decided to eliminate not only the President but everyone else in the chain of succession — all except Defense Secretary Callister, who earned the computer’s reprieve by going along with its decision to abort the operation until the President personally overruled him. The mass assassination is supposed to occur at the State of the Union address because all the targets will be there, and it’s supposed to be carried out with a recherché gimmick that was actually used in a couple of Charlie Chan movies in the 1930’s (and, in a satirical context, in the “Girl Hunt” ballet sequence in the 1953 film The Band Wagon): the U.S. has developed a super-powerful explosive that looks like a quartz stone, and it can be triggered by the vibrations from a certain musical note — which Sam Holloman is supposed to supply when he hits the sustained high F in the Peace and Love High School’s arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which the school’s band has been invited to perform at the State of the Union ceremony.
The good guys have to figure out how to disarm the computer without activating its self-defense mechanism and getting themselves killed, and the significance of Jerry being an identical twin is that the computer’s plot, called “Project Guillotine,” required activation either by Ethan or someone with identical genes — which is why ARIIA sucked Jerry into the plot in the first place. At the end Jerry disrupts the plot by firing a gun in the air in the middle of the State of the Union just before Sam plays the lethal high note; for this he’s gunned down by the security detail (he got a gun onto the floor of Congress by impersonating FBI agent Morgan, who in an earlier scene was killed in a car crash supposedly engineered by ARIIA — whose ability to hack into any database and assure seemingly whatever outcome it wants seems almost supernatural after a while), but somehow he turns up alive at the end and he and Rachel are reunited (it’s established that she was single after a bitter breakup with Sam’s father, who’s listed in the dramatis personae but I don’t recall him). Eagle Eye is actually a marvelous film, capably directed by music video veteran D. J. Caruso from a committee-written script (Dan McDermott, John Glenn — almost certainly not the same one — Travis Adam Wright and Hillary Seitz), well acted (for once Shia LeBeouf gets to play a character with some dramatic definition after doing his usual slacker “bit” in the early scenes) and convincing me that if Cory Doctorow’s marvelous Little Brother ever gets filmed (and it should be!), Caruso would be a good choice to direct it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)