Redirected: Film & TV

Schlock and Awe

By Steve Erickson — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:58:00 GMT

Illustration by Andre Carrilho

After a couple of dozen volumes about statesmen from Franklin Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan, historian Douglas Brinkley has written a new book about the life and career of Walter Cronkite, the preeminent television news anchor of the 1960s and ’70s. This may be startling for younger generations who can’t imagine Wolf Blitzer or Brian Williams or Katie Couric treated by future biographers as similarly historic figures. Reporting assassinations and moon landings, Cronkite became the voice of a national consensus at the dawn of a mass media that had yet to fracture into a hundred constituencies. The public might argue about the meaning of black Americans being beaten and beset by snarling dogs in the South, and it might argue the remedies, but few disputed the facts. Legendarily, Cronkite’s 1968 verdict delivered from Vietnam on the war there and its futility led President Lyndon Johnson to conclude that national support for the conflict had collapsed. A month later, following a victory in the New Hampshire primary so underwhelming as to resemble defeat, the president announced his decision to forgo another term in office.

With the current political campaign unfolding, this past summer I spent much of the time in southwest Michigan, the most conservative corner of a typically schizy “swing” state that tends to be dominated by one party at the executive and legislative levels but consistently votes for the other party’s presidential candidate. As surely as the Midwest prefers Pepsi to Coca-Cola, Fox News Channel is the information outlet of choice except when, on a debauched whim, someone switches the channel to CNN; if MSNBC is watched at all, it’s in the nocturnal manner of trolling the Internet for porn. Now so synonymous with TV news as to render the nightly half-hour summaries on CBS, NBC, and ABC afterthoughts, Fox, CNN, and MSNBC are the right, center, and left of the media consensus that cracked with Cronkite’s retirement three decades ago. Thus three presidential campaigns take place this year in three alternate universes, among voters who no longer can find accord on the most common reference points.

/ / / /

Even to current-events junkies, the notion of a 24-hour news channel sounded like a gimmick when the Cable News Network launched more than 30 years ago. Two subsequent incidents of import established CNN: the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, which CNN was the only network to cover as it happened, and the 1991 Gulf War, which CNN chronicled round the clock from a proximity as irresistible as it was alarming, bomb blasts and gunfire lighting up TV screens from coast to coast. By virtue of sheer ubiquity CNN came closer than anything in the post-Cronkite era to representing a consensus view of the news, but it also was a response to an anticonsensus that—due to how the media covered civil rights, Vietnam, and the Watergate scandal that drove President Richard Nixon from office—believed the media was monolithically and ideologically biased. CNN’s politics (to the extent it had any) were as idiosyncratic as the network’s founder, tycoon Ted Turner, while the network aspired to be as populist as its growing audience. Defying the maxim of Cronkite’s mentor, World War II correspondent and TV pioneer Edward R. Murrow, that truth isn’t served by always assuming two sides of an argument are equally valid—the same moral stance restated by Jeff Daniels in the HBO series The Newsroom, before the show was used to further creator Aaron Sorkin’s own political agenda—CNN epitomized a “neutral” philosophy of presidential campaign coverage. This attitude held that what campaigns say about one another would be relayed without the network feeling any obligation to verify its accuracy.

One of the subtexts of the Sorkin show (if any text in a Sorkin show is ever “sub”) is that charges of “liberal bias” over the decades have done their job, so spooking the likes of CNN that it seizes on any opportunity to prove otherwise. With breathless on-air encouragement from CNN anchor Blitzer, resident grouch Jack Cafferty was in high dudgeon this past August when the vice president made a comment on the campaign trail about the other party putting people “in chains”—clumsy phrasing to be sure in front of an audience that was substantially African American. In three years neither Blitzer nor Cafferty has expressed the same indignation over Republican insinuations and outright accusations, disavowed by none of the party’s presidential contenders other than Jon Huntsman, that the current president of the United States isn’t really an American. Over time CNN has become at once vaguely unreliable, despite Anderson Cooper’s attempts to raise the ghost of Murrow on his investigative show, 360, and dull, despite Blitzer’s frantic attempts to pump up the excitement level about, say, a new poll that concludes what the last poll concluded and the poll before it (“You won’t want to miss this next story!”). The advocacy networks of Fox and MSNBC have accelerated CNN’s descent, which began more than a decade ago and cleaved viewership still further. On a flight to New York three years ago, the woman in the seat next to mine, noting the MSNBC Web site on my laptop, challenged me about what she assumed were my political views, concluding with a rueful smile after some slightly heated words about health care, “Do you know what the difference is between us? I’m a responsible person and you’re not.” The political identities of the networks apparently have become so vivid that your laptop is now a Rorschach by which strangers can deduce the depths of your reprobation.

For the record, I find MSNBC largely populated by windbags, its most familiar figure being Hardball’s Chris Matthews, who never shuts the hell up despite my yelling at the TV screen when he interrupts guests who even I agree are morons. A smart, lively egomaniac more passionate than is good for him—he’s still living down a comment he made a few years ago about Barack Obama sending a “thrill up [his] leg”—Matthews remains nonetheless one of the rare commentators on TV or radio willing to host people with whom he disagrees, as is MSNBC’s rising star, Rachel Maddow. Though she takes an additional 15 minutes to rehash what she’s already said incisively in 10, Maddow is informed, gracious, rarely interrupts, and never, as far as I’ve seen, demonizes anyone, which in a regressively uncivil infosphere qualifies as a metaphysical occurrence. Maddow aside, however, lately MSNBC has lost its spark: Either by design or pressure from its viewers, the network’s political personality increasingly trumps the value of its talk, with Ed Schultz, Al Sharpton, and Martin Bashir safely nestled in their respective amen corners. Gradually vacating the network are the few conservatives in its ranks, including former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, alone in his dismay among the bleeding hearts on Election Night ’08. When a national contest so verges on the mythic, with characters right out of a blockbuster novel—the grizzled war hero, the steely former first lady, the charismatic novice plucked from the obscurity of backwoods Alaska, and the previously unfathomable biracial Hawaiian who brought a new poetry to the language of national unity—the dimensions of the subsequent delusion can only be matched by the complicity of the deluded. This results in half the electorate convinced that the president wakes every morning humming “The Internationale” and the other half believing he’s sold out to a Wall Street that despises him. The ’08 election was about a metaphor bigger than policy, and in the aftermath a polarized public has locked the media into roles that then polarize the public further. Polls this year show that 95 percent of us have been certain who we’re going to vote for since before the party conventions took place.

Raised a conservative Republican whose first political hero was Barry Goldwater, I watched enough of the GOP’s 20-some debates this past primary season to know unhinged when I see it, what with Roman Colosseum-like audiences booing gay U.S. soldiers laying their lives on the line in the Middle East and giving the thumbs-down to anyone stupid enough to get sick when he can’t afford it. The president has become an object of such hysteria for both left and right that he has altered the nature of television news reporting, a phenomenon best exemplified by Fox News. Started by Australian tabloid publisher Rupert Murdoch and former Nixon adviser Roger Ailes on the eve of Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996, Fox quickly picked up steam with Clinton’s impeachment two years later, only to be put on the ideological defensive when George W. Bush became president; this changed that election night four years ago when Buchanan’s appalled visage at MSNBC was matched at Fox by the look on former Bush strategist Karl Rove’s face when anchor Brit Hume informed him that Obama had taken Ohio, the Republican firewall. Whatever bearings Fox had until then were lost. If few questioned the credentials of Hume and Chris Wallace as legitimate journalists when Fox began, now the network’s rising tenor is personified by afternoon host Megyn Kelly, who routinely complains about government doing anything for anyone except when it guaranteed her maternity leave a year and a half ago. (As The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart said at the time, “Entitlements [are] really only entitlements when they’re something other people want. When they’re something you want, they’re a hallmark of a civilized society.” Kelly, who lacerates people on a daily basis, protested that Stewart was “mean.”) Indicative of how much Fox has shifted rightward in the Obama era are the ever-expanding influence of the network’s morning show Fox & Friends, with Gretchen Carlson, Brian Kilmeade, and the stupefying Steve Doocy, and the fact that onetime mad dog Bill O’Reilly has become the network’s voice of suspicious and heretic reason, going so far off the reservation as to defend the president against claims that he’s not a citizen.

The difference between MSNBC and Fox is that whereas the former is relatively up-front about its leftward slant and its function as a purveyor of opinion, the latter still sustains the pretense of not only having a “fair and balanced” perspective but of being a news network at all, which is to say, an operation dispensing data that bears some relation to fact. I have no way of confirming that since the president came into office, socialist or some variant has been the most used word on Fox. But on one random occasion recently I timed its utterance to be an average of nine minutes apart, an interval narrowed by financial reporter Eric Bolling alone, who displayed a pizza and fumed that “Obamacare” would increase the cost of each slice from 11 to 14 cents. Argue if you will that the president is ineffectual or naive, or that his economic policies have failed, or that he reveals an excessive fondness for big government, but you have to know nothing about socialism or history to believe Obama is a socialist (Bolling has called billionaire Warren Buffet a socialist as well), unless the term has been redefined to mean any government involvement in the monetary life of the country, in which case America has been a socialist country since 1791, when Alexander Hamilton created a national bank. In fairness to Bolling, he may not be old enough to realize that Obama isn’t the most radical president of, well, my ancient lifetime anyway, let alone all time; his policies are nowhere as liberal as Johnson’s or Harry Truman’s, and his health care reform is less left-wing than Nixon’s in 1974, which was rejected at the time as not left-wing enough. Why Bolling and colleagues like Sean Hannity, Dick Morris, and Stuart Varney should persist in characterizing as “socialist” someone named Barack Hussein Obama, who, as we all know, was born in a cave in Kenya before being secretly smuggled into the United States so he could become president half a century later, is perhaps best left to individual rumination rather than to any cogent explanation that those at Fox might offer. Perhaps while we’re at it we might also consider, from the vantage point of history, what it was about the civil rights struggle, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate affair that the press corps of the ’60s and ’70s got so wrong as to earn its reputation for liberal bias.

What we call “the news” always has tried to tell a story, and it’s always told the story it wanted or, put most positively, whatever story it believed needed telling. Federalist and Democrat-Republican newspapers in the early 1800s found no more consensus than do Fox and MSNBC today, but as the electronic media exploded in the 1980s and ’90s, so did whatever pacts and treaties we thought we had struck in the context of a social contract. Walter Cronkite was the last newsman everyone trusted in the same way that the Beatles were the last music everyone loved and Marilyn was the last star everyone concurred was worthy of the word. It may be inevitable that the story the news tells becomes more contradictory as the story feels more grim and people feel more is at stake; the presidential contest four years ago was between Hope and Heroism, and whatever harsh things were said, those are defining ideals that cross philosophical combat zones. This year the contest is between Discontent and Distrust—discontent with the incumbent, which surely exists, and distrust of the challenger, which surely grows—at a time when the story is more in the image of whoever tells it rather than the other way around.

Bruce Almighty

By Steve Erickson — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 16:42:00 GMT

Illustration by André Carrilho

Once you know that Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a young Bruce Willis in Looper, you can’t help expecting him to resemble David Addison, the private-eye character in the television series Moonlighting, which introduced Willis to audiences almost 30 years ago. In Rian Johnson’s brainy new science-fiction blockbuster, a “looper” is an assassin who executes victims sent from the future by a crime syndicate that doesn’t have to account for the bodies. There’s one spectacular catch: To keep matters truly tidy, at some point the syndicate sends back the “looper” himself, to be killed by his younger version, who in return spends his remaining years living the good life until his long-term death sentence

is carried out. Naturally, by the time Gordon-Levitt has grown up to be Willis, he finds the arrangement less appealing, not to mention that it’s at the expense of a woman he’s come to love in the interim. Joe the younger and Joe the senior (“Old Joe,” as Willis is identified in the credits, which must make him wince) are locked in a battle against each other and time. Gordon-Levitt’s Joe doesn’t share any of the younger Willis’s high spirits, none of his smart patter; he’s not going to serenade Cybill Shepherd with Manfred Mann songs, as Addison did. But there’s enough of the Willis smirk around Gordon-Levitt’s grim smile to suggest he’s the coolest cat in the room if not always the smartest, and if Joe is shrewder than Addison, he’s also more joyless, as would befit someone with that much blood on his hands, who’s made that sort of deal with the devil.

Listed as Looper’s star, Willis is really part of an ensemble, as he was in this past summer’s Moonrise Kingdom, where he also received top billing. With The Expendables 2 and The Cold Light of Day, Willis has half a dozen features coming out this year—more than in any previous year unless you count 2006, when he was doing cartoon voices—reigniting a career that had stalled, as most movie careers do sooner or later. Since a ’90s that included Pulp Fiction, Twelve Monkeys, The Fifth Element, and The Sixth Sense, Willis hasn’t had a hit in which he made more than a cameo appearance or wasn’t John McClane, the breakthrough role in Die Hard that he’s continued in three sequels with another on the way. McClane is Addison with the rough edges made sharper: the wise guy, amusing right up to just short of obnoxious, but also the Everyman whom contemporary tough guys Stallone and Schwarzenegger never were, having the sense to be terrified when trapped on a rooftop and shot at from helicopters. In that way Willis reminds us a bit of Bogart, who was man enough to admit he was scared in pictures like The Big Sleep and then set out to accomplish the task at hand anyhow, while still being good for a quip.

Of course enduring stars master the combination of professionalism, acting proficiency, and the distinct and winning persona that’s been the basis of Willis’s stardom. What’s striking is that except for Die Hard, Willis’s best work has been in movies where he set the wise guy aside: In Pulp Fiction he’s the boxer who’s had the wise guy beaten out of him; in The Sixth Sense he’s a man alone in a netherworld, his existentialism too profound for a bon mot—I won’t say more in case you’re the one person alive who doesn’t know what happens in the movie—and who’s bound to be upstaged by his preposterously good 11-year-old costar, Haley Joel Osment. Go back and watch The Sixth Sense again, however, knowing what you know from the first time, and you’ll realize it’s Willis who makes the movie work. If you’ve seen him in films as far back as 1991’s Mortal Thoughts, in which he was the biggest star but took third billing to play an abusive husband, you suspect he’s exactly the kind of Hollywood mainstay who has a supporting actor Oscar in his career’s twilight; he has the chops to exceed expectations and surprise a public that wouldn’t be surprised if it had paid closer attention.

It’s to Willis’s credit, and a testament to his seriousness as an actor, that in Looper his character appears molded to Gordon-Levitt’s rather than the other way around. Rare is the man who’s more defined by who he’ll become than who he’s been, and Looper has the integrity not to wind up a star vehicle. In Moonrise Kingdom the wise guy who’s peeked out of even Willis’s most subdued performances is nowhere to be seen; he exudes defeat as the local police captain searching for two runaways on a remote island. “Strange and sad” is how Captain Sharp is witheringly described by one of the kids, and it isn’t just Willis’s rat-a-tat mouth that’s quieted but his spirit: Throughout the film his whole physical being sags—until he turns out to be the story’s most sympathetic character. Willis can hide away the wise guy but not the hero, whose most valiant act in the film is the expression of a paternal instinct.

////

Moonrise Kingdom has been the indie success of the summer, and months into its release, after the mammoth Battleship, Men in Black 3, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter had come and gone, writer-director Wes Anderson’s comedy was still selling out Friday night screenings. I celebrate this in the way I cheer any such triumph by any filmmaker as individual and fearless as Anderson, of whom I consider myself a fan, more or less; my wife adores Rushmore from 1998, and I’m more partial to 2007’s shambolic The Darjeeling Limited than anyone I know. But I’ve always understood why some moviegoers are put off by him, and the Anderson they’re put off by is very much the one who made Moonrise Kingdom, in which the filmmaker’s trademark eccentricity finally becomes as arch and affected as his detractors claim. With the deadpan delivery of the actors’ lines matching the deadpan composition of the shots, the tone is whimsical to the point of cloying and the irony self-satisfied to the point of superior. All of Anderson’s movies are peopled by misfits who might be darker and more compelling if they were less sentimentalized, whether it’s Rushmore’s Jason Schwartzman as the precocious teen director of extravagant school plays or Darjeeling Limited ’s three estranged brothers reuniting in a far-off India after their father’s death. The oddballs of Moonrise’s New Penzance island are the oddest yet: married lawyers who call each other “counselor” and the Khaki Scouts led by Edward Norton and Bob Balaban’s one-man meteorological Greek chorus.

Perhaps because Schwartzman seems so clearly autobiographical in Rushmore and because the banality of the brothers’ alienation in Darjeeling offsets the idiosyncrasy that Anderson cultivates, those films are more persuasive in their emotional complexity. Tellingly, in the filmmaker’s best, The Royal Tenenbaums, he reached beyond his stock company of Schwartzman and Owen Wilson and Bill Murray to include outsiders such as Gene Hackman and Ben Stiller and Gwyneth Paltrow. Hackman’s prodigal father is Anderson’s most fully dimensional character, an uneasy collaboration between the director and actor to create someone for whom other characters and the audience have feelings both ambiguous and powerful—all of which may hint at why Willis is the best thing in Moonrise Kingdom and the one element that feels real before even he’s caught in the maw of the film’s disastrous third act. Otherwise what remains in the memory is the so-called kingdom itself, a routine island successfully imbued with the magic of Anderson’s imagination as translated by light, his muted palette typically disturbed by flashes of yellow and red. More forgettable are the kids at the story’s center who remind us, through no fault of their own because they’ve been directed this way, how Anderson is better served by actors unwilling to be as much marionettes as the stop-motion figures of Anderson’s 2009 animated feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox (a film I liked, I should add). Moonrise Kingdom is at once Anderson’s biggest hit (yay) and weakest work (groan), and unfair though it may be to suggest—but then who said life is fair?—you can’t escape the feeling that what audiences adored this summer was the way the movie flattered our sense of our own sophistication, in a cineplex alive with flying spiders and vigilante bats.

Maker’s Mark

By Steve Erickson — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 17:23:00 GMT

Illustration by Andre Carrilho

Other than The Dark Knight Rises, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus was the most anticipated movie of the season, and up until its opening a month or so ago, speculation raged as to its relationship with Alien, the 1979 film that put director Scott on the map. Sequel? Prequel? Appendix? Postscript? Safe to say, what people didn’t expect was a summer blockbuster about God. Prometheus is driven by our search for the celestial source: When Guy Pearce, unrecognizable as an ancient tycoon trying to buy eternity, talks about meeting his “Maker,” and when the robot “David,” played by Michael Fassbender, talks about meeting his, they’re at once speaking of the same God and their own respective Gods. Ultimately in Prometheus, a presumptuous human race is on the trail of its own Maker, which turns out to be another race bent on our destruction, suggesting a divine food chain that’s cavalier if not malicious. Within days of the movie’s release, the blogosphere was rife with new arguments about the movie’s meaning, including the theory—allegedly supported by a recent interview with Scott—that the human race actually is being punished for the execution of Jesus, who was an emissary sent by the aliens (or, as they’re called in the film, “Engineers”).

In Greek mythology it was Prometheus’s defiance of Zeus on behalf of human progress that got him a good smackdown from above, and in Arthur C. Clarke’s science-fiction novel Childhood’s End our upwardly mobile species gets another smackdown when visited by an “overlord,” who comes to sort out the mess we’ve made of things. Waiting half a century, the Overlord finally emerges from his spaceship to reveal himself to be…the Devil, just as we’ve always pictured him, with tail and horns. Maybe the resemblance is coincidental, maybe we caught a glimpse of the Overlord back at the Dawn of Man and the image became part of our collective unconscious and then our religious iconography. In any case, when Childhood’s End was published nearly 60 years ago, science fiction took on theological themes to match the technological and militaristic, and brought mythology full circle. Clarke’s spiritual insinuations were subversive to say the least: In his most famous short story, “The Star,” the bright light in the night sky leading the Three Wise Men to Jesus’s birth is a supernova that wipes out an extraordinarily advanced civilization on another world. Einstein’s reassurances aside, God does indeed play dice with the universe, according to Clarke; with His pick of all the suns in space, He goes for the one whose extinction is a message of peace and goodwill at the cost of galactic genocide.

Stanley Kubrick wanted to adapt Childhood’s End for the screen, but the property belonged to someone else, so he commissioned Clarke to write 2001: A Space Odyssey. While it turns out that Prometheus indeed is a prequel to Alien—you’ve been adrift on a spaceship the last month and a half if this comes as a plot spoiler—2001 is the clear inspiration, as Kubrick’s film has been for virtually every significant opus since its release in 1968. Still dividing perfectly reasonable people, 2001 is one of those rare movies about which all that’s been said—good and bad, including claims of both visionary genius and pretentious claptrap—is true. Being a pretentious-claptrap kind of guy, I’m in the visionary-genius camp on 2001, and what’s indisputable even for the less enthused is that in the eyes of the culture, 2001 brought science fiction an acceptance by serious audiences that it may previously have deserved but never received. Part of this was due to Kubrick’s stately direction and part to the film’s preoccupation with the Great Mystery of Existence in all its pretentious capitalization—though I’ll concede Kubrick cared less about the answers than about how cool the questions looked onscreen.

It doesn’t seem an accident that most science-fiction movies that have become phenomena—going back to 1931’s Frankenstein, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 19th-century novel whose subtitle, as it happens, is The Modern Prometheus—address something for which “God” is shorthand: the meaning of life, the nature of reality, the essence of humanity, the riddle of what-else, the conundrum of what-next. The best known and most lightweight is Star Wars, with its ubiquitous “force,” but these concerns also are present in the first Star Trek movie in 1979 and the reboot 30 years later as well as in other exemplars, from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (and Steven Soderbergh’s underrated if not-in-the-same-league remake) to the Wachowskis’ Matrix trilogy to Danny Boyle’s Sunshine and last year’s Melancholia from Lars von Trier. Few films pondered these enigmas more evocatively and memorably than 1982’s Blade Runner, the Ridley Scott picture with the surest shot at the pantheon. Scott isn’t exactly what most fans would consider a philosopher; like Kubrick except with a pulp sensibility, he has a reputation as an imagist—often, his detractors claim, to his films’ detriment. As any buff knows, Blade Runner was originally dismissed by critics and the public only to become to movies what the first Velvet Underground album was to rock and roll, with Scott’s indelible sense of design and lighting and every signature motif down to the steam rising off the streets eventually rendered cliché by every aspiring director whom Blade Runner influenced.

Be all that as it may, more than the story or characters, what survived Scott’s translation of Philip K. Dick’s novel to the screen were the story’s metaphysical obsessions, and a closer look at Scott’s body of work reveals a philosopher after all. He opted to freeze Thelma and Louise midair in immortality rather than follow their Icarus-like plummet into the Grand Canyon, and in Gladiator Russell Crowe is on a quest to avenge his murdered family and join them in an afterlife, of which he has recurring glimpses. That Gladiator is the most successful mainstream movie in memory to kill off the hero may lie in the fact that it constitutes, by the terms of Scott’s film, a happy ending. Unicorns—powerful creatures found in books of the Old Testament, from Psalms to Job to Isaiah—dash their way from Harrison Ford’s dreams in Blade Runner to the pagan domain of Legend, where Tim Curry is a slightly euphemistically named Satan. As with any philosopher, Scott’s faith, whatever it might be, wars with skepticism: He’s highly dubious about the Crusades in Kingdom of Heaven and Robin Hood, no more so than when they take modern-day form in Black Hawk Down’s Mogadishu, deteriorating into death and desecration. The two Napoleonic soldiers in The Duellists, feuding so long they’ve forgotten the reason for their dispute, are caught in a time-loop of fate as absurd as it is infinite.

Inevitably, considerations of God in what otherwise intend to be mass entertainments come down to the same thing they come down to in any context, which is a consideration of humanity. It’s only conspicuous in science fiction because of the general whiz-bangery that distinguishes the genre. The Asian-noir, retro-future spectacle of Blade Runner notwithstanding, what stays with you and grows more moving each time you see it is Rutger Hauer’s “tears in rain” death soliloquy. With his conflicting cylinders of menace and nobility, android Hauer is finally Blade Runner’s most human presence; and after the last third of Prometheus collapses in a rush of exposition and plot points, the scheming simulacrum of Fassbender’s David—the descendant of Hauer and the ancestor of 2001 ’s HAL, with their very human flickers of fear and disappointment, premeditation and abandonment, loyalty and treachery—gives Prometheus a heart that’s as complicated as that of a flesh-and-blood entity. While the ship hurtles through two years of space and the rest of the crew hibernates, Fassbender watches Lawrence of Arabia again and again on the home entertainment system of your dreams, studying Peter O’Toole’s flaxen affect. In the robot’s favorite scene, O’Toole, as if to prove to himself that he’s both human and maybe something more, puts out a match’s flame with his fingers (“The trick is not minding that it hurts”), reminding us that what got the ancient Prometheus in trouble was his theft from the gods of fire. Though David hasn’t been programmed to do so, one of his jobs is to remind people why they’re human, in the same way it may be our job to remind God why He/She/It is divine, before the sweep of a cosmic arm scatters the stars like sand.

Crystal Method

By Steve Erickson — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 17:01:00 GMT

Illustration by Andre Carrilho

I have this friend. Isn’t this the way all stories like this begin? I have this friend, and without going into more detail than is called for, there was a point—let’s say sometime in the last few years, after the economy collapsed—when straits got so dire, when finances were so unforgiving, when there was no more income to make or credit to borrow, that one afternoon he suddenly knew, had he the ability to hack into JP Morgan Chase without risk and add a zero or two to his balance or delete a couple zeroes from his debt, he would have done it in a heartbeat without compunction. This is somebody, I should add, who would never steal a dollar from a stranger on the street; it would never cross his mind to stiff even the most passing of acquaintances who had loaned him money. But in a situation where no other recourse existed within sight of the imagination, a choice between keeping his wife and two kids under a roof and plundering the vault of one of the robber barons of our age was a no-brainer, any formerly held notions of criminal right and wrong steamrolled by the profoundly terrifying realization that at a certain point, life cuts no more slack.

This friend of mine, though—he had nothing on Walter White. The central figure of Breaking Bad, White is a high school teacher who can see the career he might have had as a Nobel Prize chemist disappearing down the fork in the road he never took. With a son who has cerebral palsy and an unplanned daughter on the way, a second job at a car wash slipping from his soapy grasp, and recently greeted by the news that he’s dying of cancer with only months to live, Walt is a Southwestern Job for the Great Recession. His back to the wall and no legally acceptable options at his disposal, Walt joins forces with his most exasperating former student and puts his chemistry to more profitable use, producing “the blue”—the purest meth the DEA (whose ranks include Walt’s brother-in-law) and the Mexican cartel have seen. If for a while the collateral damage of this new entrepreneurship is to people who deserve what they get, like a spreading bloodstain it soon reaches those who don’t.

I’ve decided Breaking Bad may be one of the best TV shows ever, but I had to watch every last episode of the first four seasons to come to that conclusion. In terms of sheer storytelling, it is the most coherent series I’ve seen with the exception of Battlestar Galactica; like that show, Bad feels conceived in total, although given the existential nature of series that survive season to season, that can’t be the case. If creator Vince Gilligan and his writers have had to contrive plot turns in order to write themselves out of corners—as has been true over the years even with superb endeavors like The West Wing, The Sopranos, and Mad Men—I haven’t noticed; every twist seems rooted in what’s come before, every character’s actions born of natural consequences. More than this, a testament to the integrity of the show is that sometimes it’s no fun. On at least one occasion I’ve left the story altogether, unable to take anymore, before being pulled back inexorably, and there are whole scenes I still fast-forward through. This isn’t due to squeamishness over the violence, which is as explicit as any on TV. Rather, the mounting moral compromises become too naked to bear watching, as played out by a splendid cast that includes Aaron Paul as congenital loser Jesse, occasionally emerging as the conscience of the story against all expectation; Anna Gunn as Walt’s wife, Skyler, who finds her rectitude crumbling as readily as that of the husband she judges so harshly; and an array of brilliant character actors like Dean Norris as the DEA brother-in-law whose bravado masks a growing sense of panic, Betsy Brandt as Skyler’s pushy kleptomaniacal sister, Giancarlo Esposito as a meticulous drug lord whose blood runs 32 degrees and dropping, Jonathan Banks as an ex-cop turned Zen assassin, and Bob Odenkirk, who steals every scene he’s in as a sleazy attorney. All these people feel as if they have stories behind them we’ll never hear.

/ / / /

When Breaking Bad began, Bryan Cranston was known as the nincompoop father from the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle. In this six-degrees-of-separation world, I shave off four or five when it comes to Cranston: He got his start nearly 30 years ago with a community theater that my mother ran in the Valley. Legend has it that he was a pain in the ass who tried to tell everyone how to do their jobs; so perhaps for Cranston the role of a control freak vexed and finally enraged by how life refuses to conform to the predictability of a chemistry experiment is typecasting. The ultimate situationist, Walt rationalizes his escalating corruptions and compartmentalizes lapses that grow more epic in scale as he morphs from the mild mannered to the homicidal with utter conviction, consigning to the attic of the psyche his inner cold-blooded killer. At the end of the second season, watching first with alarm and then calculation the overdose of a young woman who’s tried to blackmail him, Walt crosses a line into the irredeemable, processing the transition with an effortlessness that eludes addict/slacker/self-proclaimed “bad guy” Jesse, who can’t escape his remorse no matter how much meth he takes or how loud he cranks his mega-thousand-buck sound system. In any case, Walt is the single most complex leading character in TV history. Each of his three Emmy Awards for Breaking Bad unassailable, no one is likely to think of Cranston as Malcolm’s dad again.

Of course Cranston and his show need another glowing review like a hole in the head. Let’s take note, then, of what’s gotten lost in much of the acclaim, which is the era that Breaking Bad chronicles and an audience often on the verge of its own ruin in this recession, with righteous larceny in its heart and suspicion that our institutions of higher finance remain untroubled by compassion let alone patriot-ism. Walter White’s is a desperation for our time, as familiar to the rest of us as a face in the mirror; and besides Michael Slovis’s cinematography, which catches the sagebrush and mesas of New Mexico at some hallucinatory pitch between Antonioni and Lynch, Breaking Bad’s evil genius—and I don’t use the term lightly—lies in the way Walt’s desperation keeps us rooting for him long after we’ve ceased to like him, long after we’ve stopped believing he deserves anything good. Part of this is because his core purpose for his progressively terrible deeds remains sincere, even when Walt’s wife delivers the line of the series: “Someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family.”

At the close of season four, Walt says, “I won,” and a lesser series would have ended there. Instead the makers of Breaking Bad have announced that the current fifth season, which begins airing this summer, will be the last. For Walt this can only be ominous, implying a grim accounting, a coda of ramifications. In the look on his wife’s face at Walt’s proclamation of victory lies the future: She’s uncertain whether to feel triumph or relief or horror, and so are we. If what finally claims Walt is the cancer that’s been in remission, we no longer can be sure such an outcome is tragic, fitting, or too easy.

Road to Ruin

By Steve Erickson — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 16:35:00 GMT

Illustration by André Carrilho

The lead singer of a band called Arsenal, Stacee Jaxx is a lout and a narcissist, half seducing and half raping underage girls in the bathroom of the Bourbon Room. Jaxx also may have just enough of the savvy of a floundering movie star—Tom Cruise, say—to glimpse the end of the road, which in this case is the stretch of Sunset Boulevard that runs from Crescent Heights to Doheny Drive. In the late 1980s, the reigning maestros of the Sunset Strip were the likes of Twisted Sister, Guns N’ Roses, and singers with as many xs as their names could hold; of course Jaxx’s name is no more or less real than that of Mötley Crüe’s bassist and songwriter, Nikki Sixx, and belongs to no real person at all but to the conspicuously coiffed character played by Cruise in Rock of Ages. Based on a popular stage musical, Ages celebrates some of the most spectacularly wretched music ever made, by Poison, Whitesnake, and Night Ranger, none of whom recorded a single song that anyone with any sense can remember. The real subject and star of the film, however, is the Strip itself, a sprawling soundstage that’s always been populated by actors who don’t always know they’re in a movie.

For half a century the Sunset Strip was the asphalt time line of American popular music. My most distinct memory, from more years ago than I’ll confess to, is waiting for a table at the Olde World, which occupied a wedge of territory at Sunset and Holloway Drive where the daiquiris became more vicious the longer you sat in the sun. Across the street was the country’s biggest record store, Tower, and the country’s most metaphoric billboard—emblazoned with everybody from the Doors to Angelyne—since Dr. T.J. Eckleburg’s eyes overlooked Long Island in The Great Gatsby; when you drove the Strip from west to east into the nether regions of Hollywood, the billboard had the effect of stating YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE FUTURE. At the Olde World I was so mesmerized by a beautiful woman in the line ahead of me that it was several minutes before my gaze drifted to her escort, whom I immediately recognized as Elvis Costello, down to the red shoes the angels wanted to wear; that night Costello, music’s angry young man of the moment, played two blocks up the street at the Whisky a Go Go. Of course my generation thought it invented music on the Sunset Strip, in the way we thought we invented everything, but in fact the Strip became the musical center of the West Coast in the 1930s and ’40s, courtesy of the movies. A fault line opening up on any given Saturday night would have swallowed all of Hollywood, who convened at the Trocadero in one of its several incarnations or at the Mocambo, where Frank Sinatra made his L.A. debut as a solo singer.

Somewhat famously the Mocambo also is the club Marilyn Monroe lobbied to shatter the color barrier. If it would book Ella Fitzgerald, Monroe promised to park herself at the front table every night of the engagement; more African American entertainers followed, like Lena Horne, Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, and Sammy Davis Jr. This bit of sociological upheaval anticipated what was to come just ten years later when, as I recall, my folks went out for what they presumed would be a night of sophistication only to return stupefied by the hippie invasion and clashes with cops. Ciro’s was the club of the earlier era that made the transition to the new age, with Duke Ellington and Peggy Lee giving way to the Byrds as the author of their biggest hits, Bob Dylan, watched from the crowd. Strip nomads the Doors played Ciro’s as well as the London Fog and Gazzari’s, along with Tina Turner and Sonny & Cher, before becoming the house band at the Whisky, which would inspire Rock of Ages’ Bourbon Room; the Whisky was the local stop for the British Invasion, including the Kinks, Cream, and Led Zep-pelin, and then for the punk revolution instigated by Costello, Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, and X. Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, frequented by David Bowie and Iggy Pop, was the capital of glam in a city made for it. A block or two away, the Roxy broadcast on the radio one of the most extraordinary live performances in history when Bruce Springsteen played there in 1978. Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, and various Beatles drank their way through the night at the Rainbow Bar, and a generation later a younger Hollywood descended on the Viper Room, the spot that was launched by rock star wanna-be Johnny Depp.

The Strip always was the part of Hollywood where the movies ceded dominance to the music, which told its own story in cinematic songs like Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” the Mamas & the Papas’ “Twelve-Thirty,” and Love’s “Between Clark and Hilldale.” Even when movies or TV tried to lay claim to the Strip, music took over: The first piece of popular culture to call the masses’ attention to the real estate, the late 1950s detective series 77 Sunset Strip survives in the memory for its jazz-rock theme song and the phenomenon of Edd Byrnes as Kookie, a supporting character who parked cars—Elvis as a hepcat valet. Byrnes went on to cut a Top 40 record. With music by L.A. garage protopunks the Standells, 1967’s Riot on Sunset Strip cashed in on the scene’s anarchic energy, equal parts alluring and threatening, and in Oliver Stone’s The Doors, it’s the Strip over which Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison totters on the rooftop of the Chateau Marmont, home to Leonard Cohen, Gram Parsons, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. For the Marmont, which has guarded the Strip’s entrance since Hollywood discovered sound, the boulevard is at once the king’s highway leading to the palace and the moat keeping the rest of us out.

The Strip last mattered sometime around 1987, when Rock of Ages takes place. By then the mattering had nothing to do with music because the music itself had nothing to do with music; rather, it had to do with a zeitgeist that fetishized rock to the point of cliché. Those who ran the Strip, like the club owner in Ages played by Alec Baldwin, were at an apex where everything that the music ever could procure was procured exponentially: the drugs and the girls and a sheer speed that was in love with its own velocity—everything but what once were the inexplicable possibilities the music promised, not to mention the implication of something beyond the moment. Both a cacophony and a disregard for all that had come down the Strip before, on foot or wheels, the music of that time was a white dwarf star (which could have been a band’s name, come to think of it), less light than heat before imploding. For Stacee Jaxx preparing to give his farewell performance—as it was for real-life stars from Morrison to Axl Rose—only oblivion, which is to say jail or exile someplace in the Southern Hemisphere, beckons beyond the Strip, where American music disappears as surely as does America itself, and what’s left is the pure noise of impure dreams.

Superhero Complex

By Steve Erickson — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:02:00 GMT

Illustration by André Carrilho

I was 13 when the debut issue of The Avengers was published, and if I remember correctly, it sort of sucked. Right from the cover—one of the dullest that Marvel Comics’ titanic illustrator Jack Kirby ever drew—everything about the project was perfunctory; and if at first glance The Avengers was a rip-off of rival DC Comics’ blue-chip Justice League of America, a closer examination revealed something even more calculated: a scrap heap of characters not very appealing on their own and without the clout to carry their own magazines. Thor, Iron Man, and the Wasp were consigned to the pages of Journey into Mystery, Tales of Suspense, and Tales to Astonish, and except for an occasional appearance, Captain America has been in mothballs since 1950. Only the Hulk had a title; tellingly Spider-Man, Marvel’s biggest star, was nowhere to be seen among the Avengers’ ranks. From the second issue on, other characters were swapped in and out, an indication of how dispensable they were and how cynical the enterprise was. But the gambit worked: The Avengers became a popular book, and soon Thor and Iron Man were rewarded with their own vehicles. The strategy was the reverse of what Marvel has done for its blockbuster feature The Avengers, which has been preceded by the characters’ individual films—vessels approaching the mothership. But while this has allowed for more development and investment on the part of filmmakers and audiences, as creations the characters around which the entire scheme revolves aren’t any more inspired.

Now I think we can fairly conclude that writer-director Joss Whedon didn’t make The Avengers for me. I left behind the comic book about a year after the first issue was published all those decades ago; I remember the moment with disproportionate clarity. I just had asked a girl to a dance and been turned down, and in my black mood, as I stared at the newsstand on that long walk home, suddenly comics got set aside along with other things I perceived as childish. Later my interest resurfaced fitfully with the ’80s/early-’90s renaissance of The Dark Knight Returns, Love and Rockets, American Flagg!, Swamp Thing, The Sandman, Sin City, and most notably Watchmen, the Ulysses (or maybe I mean Gravity’s Rainbow) of graphic novels. Watchmen was the Avengers and Justice League of a parallel moral universe, a meditation on the irresistible fascism of a superman myth that smacks of benign elitism at best and Nazi claims of racial superiority at worst; at the same time, calling Watchmen an indictment of the form would ignore the affection that writer Alan Moore had for it, too. Nonetheless Moore’s superheroes were damaged megalomaniacs—sociopaths on their way to becoming monsters—and the book’s revelation was that the superman is a grown-up’s fantasy rather than an adolescent’s, with the messianic resonance of 2,000-year-old religions. The original superhero, sent to Earth by a celestial father to save mankind, might be considered Christian if he weren’t the creation of two Midwestern Jewish teenagers in the depths of the Depression (with Nazism on the rise in Europe). The Kal-El story, introduced in 1938 in Action Comics and continued shortly thereafter in Superman, became the template, with tropes that became familiar in subsequent superstories with subsequent supercharacters: the violent breach between child and parents, the troubled duality between alter ego and secret identity, the impatient chasm between feckless man-made justice and divine retribution as administered by a figure of inhuman power.

The ’80s convergence of comics’ new adult sensibility with the movies’ advancing technology was bound to catch the attention of even slow-on-the-uptake Hollywood, and this particularly was true when Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns became phenomena. Both Moore and Dark Knight’s writer-artist, Frank Miller, posed the obvious question: Isn’t someone dressing up as a bat or an owl or any other vaguely pagan figure in order to avenge parental deaths half a lifetime ago a little peculiar? Hollywood, of course, either missed this finer point or ignored it, Miller’s nihilism giving way to Tim Burton’s whimsy in 1989’s Batman; in the unhandsome counterintuitiveness of his casting, Michael Kea-ton proved a very interesting Bruce Wayne (less compelling in the Batman Returns sequel for how much screen time he ceded to too many villains), but the aging and bitter vigilante of Miller’s version would more naturally have been played by a middle-aged Clint Eastwood. With Burton’s films and the adaptation of Watchmen three years ago—the latter no less a botch for all the years Hollywood spent squabbling over how to make it—a paradox presented itself that now seems inevitable: Narratively and tonally, the comic books were more like movies and the movies were more like comic books.

t the age that I was when I stopped reading comics, and with a set of talents that would seem to mark a future comic-book auteur, my son has had only a passing enthusiasm for the medium. This interest gained some intensity around the time he was ten, before he vanished into video gaming’s yawning abyss. When I ask Miles about superhero movies, he says that they’re all lame (is that a shudder that just ran through the boardrooms of Disney, Warner Bros., and 20thCentury Fox?) except Batman and Spider-Man, and when I ask why they’re exceptions, he answers, “Because they have issues.” By which he means that what’s true for all great characters is as true for those who fly and smash stuff and dispense justice: They come alive and engage us through their contradictions, maybe especially the ones who fly and smash stuff and dispense justice. I should add that since my son is young rather than Jung, he retains the values of a 14-year-old, finding the last X-Men a little too heavy on character at the expense of action; this is the delicate balance that can elude even Christopher Nolan, who directed the more recent Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, and the fanboy-in-chief behind the Spider-Man movies, Sam Raimi, not to mention those filmmakers who made the doomed likes of Thor and Green Lantern. Counting The Avengers, in the last nine years three different movies have taken three different approaches to the Hulk, a Jekyll-and-Hyde man-beast who clearly has issues but may simply defy seriousness every time he turns green (and in the process replaces an actor with a computerized creation).

While the first two parts of Nolan’s Batman-Dark Knight trilogy (with its conclusion to come this summer) are a bit overrated, they set the bar for superhero pictures because Nolan patronizes no one, aspires to connect with people who care nothing about comic books, and appears determined to plumb the story’s bleakest potential very much in the spirit of the Miller comics. These films notwithstanding—and giving the Iron Man movies their due for star Robert Downey Jr.’s élan, and allowing Captain America certain virtues as a period piece—the rest of the superhero movies feel as if Hollywood makes them only because it can. For all I know, the upcoming Amazing Spider-Man is a cinematic landmark, but otherwise it’s hard to imagine why Peter Parker is being brought back barely five years after Raimi’s last installment other than to retell an old story rather than tell a new one; the superhero in movies has completely become a function of Hollywood’s hunger for franchise motherships and the computer-generated imagery that can realize comic-book visions more spectacularly than comic books. Don’t get me wrong: The Dark Knight Rises is the film this summer that Miles and I share a great desire to see, and Avengers writer-director Whedon has a track record of infusing TV shows like Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer with wit and heart. That aside, I’m afraid the only thing that keeps me from rooting for The Avengers’ failure is the livelihoods it might cost not executives but craftsmen lower on the food chain, and my suspicion that, along with Whedon, some of these people probably worked hard to make as good a movie as they could. I can’t help sympathizing with any creative endeavor at least a little bit. Convince me, on the other hand, that the craftsmen will be left to better jobs on better movies, and I might answer that the true beneficiary of such a collapse would be moviemaking itself. With superheroes having gone the way of the western, Hollywood can move on to something new, like vampires and zombies.

Little Big Man

By Steve Erickson — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:55:00 GMT

Illustration by Andre Carrilho

I shrunk,” Dustin Hoffman announces in the opening episode of Luck, which is concluding its first season on HBO. Out of prison after three years and putting on a tie for the first time since, Chester Bern-stein notices that now his collars are too loose. Bernstein is called “Ace,” presumably because he gives the impression of having one up his sleeve; the less he says, the more authority he exudes and the more inexorable his machinations feel, even as we have little idea what they are other than that they involve avenging the fall he took on his way to jail. Only the curl of a smile and the wheels turning in his eyes seem to separate Ace from Hoffman’s autistic savant in 1988’s Rain Man. Ace walks with the same determined shuffle as Raymond, driven by a purpose we don’t yet know, but whereas Raymond is a mass of behavioral idiosyncrasies, Ace is a man of banked secrets whose revelations startle us. We’re well into Luck before he has a conversation with his parole officer about seeing Miles Davis perform in 1958 and what it meant to him; we haven’t heard a note of music in Ace’s hotel suite or on the car radio. In another show this might be a flaw of the writing, but Hoffman is good enough to convince us Ace’s passions really are that private, or that he’s read the parole officer so astutely as to have found his private passion.

For most of Luck Hoffman plays to his size, his actions and responses and gestures as small as he is. This is particularly noticeable in someone whose performances have been larger than life from the beginning, even when he was one of life’s discards in Midnight Cowboy or the socially inept virgin with the useless college degree in The Graduate. A barely known off-Broadway actor in 1967, Hoffman was cast as Benjamin Braddock when director Mike Nichols decided his other candidates, Warren Beatty and Robert Redford, were incapable of conveying insecurity about the opposite sex; Hoffman’s fumbling audition with love interest Katharine Ross was exactly what nailed the role. If the nouvelle vague camerawork and Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack of The Graduate hinted to the ’60s generation that this was the first Hollywood movie for them, Hoffman’s awkward, alienated hero confirmed it. The impact of The Graduate—as totemic to its decade as Rebel Without a Cause was to the decade before—is almost impossible to overstate, and by the lights of Hollywood, Hoffman’s subsequent stardom was no less radical, upending audiences’ notions of what a romantic lead could be. By comparison, the once unconventional Humphrey Bogart looked like Cary Grant.

If you’re someone for whom The Graduate meant so much on its release and you haven’t seen it since, you might want to leave it that way. The film now appears dated and smug, and Hoffman’s career—marked by performances that hover between constricted anxiety and explosive release—is the only thing that’s lived up to the movie’s mythos. Hoffman was one of the three American male stars to define the ’70s, and while his résumé is bereft of a single portrait that casts over film history the long shadow of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone, and though his screen personality didn’t imprint itself on the culture like Jack Nicholson’s, Hoffman proved the most versatile of the trio, burning through the decade to nearly grandstanding effect in Little Big Man, Straw Dogs, Lenny, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man, and Kramer vs. Kramer. As Nicholson and Pacino ran out of steam in the ’80s, Hoffman hit his stride with an acclaimed reinvention of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman; Rain Man, in which he was overrated enough (Tom Cruise is better) to win a second Academy Award; and his screwball masterpiece, Tootsie. Hoffman’s turn in that film is one of the classic comedic performances: He took his biggest risks, satirized his own neuroticism as a Method actor (“I was a stand-up tomato….! I did the best tomato, the best cucumber—I did an endive salad that knocked the critics on their ass!”), and gave every indication of surprising himself by what he learned.

/ / / /

Hoffman never expected to be a star. He aspired to be the working character actor that he is in Luck. What Vanity Fair would have been if Thackeray had written about a racetrack, Luck and its sprawling tableau are the creation of David Milch, who also wrote Deadwood. The series is a slow burner, its fuse winding along so leisurely through the milieu of trainers and jockeys and gamblers that by the time it reaches its end, you may not be certain anything actually blew up. With Milch writing and Michael Mann (Heat, The Insider, The Last of the Mohicans) directing, the combined temperament and ego are nearly more than Santa Anita can contain without even taking into account Hoffman, whose own perfectionism is such the irresistible stuff of legend that everyone would love to believe it even if it weren’t true. Doing his best work in 30 years, Hoffman in Luck recalls the great lost Dustin Hoffman performance in Straight Time, a small and forgotten late-’70s picture that begins just as Luck does, with Hoffman’s release from jail. Straight Time is Hoffman’s scariest performance, more convincing in its lurking murderousness than you ever thought Hoffman capable of; Straight Time’s young con has a hair-trigger rage that coexists with the same inscrutability of Ace Bernstein. It’s not hard to imagine that, three-and-a-half decades ago, Ace had the same rage and that it’s now only a trigger with the safety on.

With hindsight what’s clear is how much of Hoffman’s DNA as an actor already was on display in his breakthrough 45 years ago. The last few moments of The Graduate are the movie’s most interesting: In an exhilarating outburst, Hoffman has abducted Katharine Ross from her wedding no sooner than she’s said “I do.” At the back of their getaway bus, however, exhilaration dissipates and a stunned dismay seeps into the scene. What happens in the days, weeks, months, years after a movie’s happy ending? These final seconds in The Graduate weren’t planned; rather, director Nichols happened to leave the camera running without calling “Cut!,” then decided to leave in the film what the camera caught: the future. This couple is going to get as far as the end of the bus line and then get off, look at each other, and realize there’s no “I do” for them because they’ve already thrown all of life’s I-do’s into question. Just as Benjamin’s rebellion distilled the spirit of the time, Hoffman’s existential sense of failure as an actor anticipated what would come later; Hoffman’s performances have not only chronicled the life of a generation but anticipated its empty aftermath. Ace Bernstein is at the end of his line, too, and making the best of it by virtue of style, meticulousness, and a code we wouldn’t know he has if he didn’t openly regret having gotten someone killed that he never meant to. Not all of the subplots in Luck are created equal, and when the others exhaust themselves Hoffman is left commanding the screen even when he’s not on it. He may have changed what a movie star can be, but stars remain stars for a reason, including the accidental ones.

Silents, Please

By Steve Erickson — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:36:00 GMT

Illustration by Andre Carrilho

Lost to the ages, with no extant copy known, the first feature-length movie was made a century ago this year. A story of the Roman Empire, Quo Vadis was an Italian production replete with Coliseum scenes of lions eating Christians, who, as legend has it, included at least one extra in the wrong place at the wrong time. The few spectacular stills that survive show Quo Vadis dwarfed anything the new art form had yet produced, just as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation would dwarf it two years later. Quo Vadis also inaugurated a period of movie history that would last 17 years while laying the foundation for cinema’s hundred years to come—the era of the silent film. ¶ As it happens, the centennial coincides with the success of The Artist, which casts its quiet shadow over this year’s Academy Awards as no silent picture has since the first Best

Picture prize went to Wings in 1927. At the center of another current Oscar contender, Hugo, is cinema’s first auteur, Georges Méliès, whose extravaganza A Trip to the Moon I saw years ago at UCLA in the first film class I ever took. A groan of dismay welled up from my pagan ’60s soul when the professor announced that the course would be devoted to silent pictures; then the lights went out, the screen flickered, and I shut up. The most immediate revelations were that the antique images I had come to associate with silents, shuddering along in jerks and jumps, vanished once the film was projected at a normal speed, and that subtlety wasn’t a concept invented in whatever year I first came to understand it. Though the contention wasn’t one I entirely subscribed to, I understood the insistence of silent film’s champions that it was an aesthetic unto itself, and a purer one at that, distinct from the sound film—which is what a lot of audiences are discovering with The Artist. “Silent film opened a portal in culture that released the primitive power of image,” argues Michael Ventura, L.A.’s most influential film critic of the late ’70s and early ’80s, who’s writing a novel about the era. “It was the raw language of dreams. No one spoke of ‘living my dream’ before the silent film.”

Which is to suggest that when The Artist comes out on DVD, it shouldn’t be the only silent movie in your library. If the following start-up kit of ten DVDs doesn’t exactly constitute a mini history, it’s because I’ve bypassed “significant” films that are dated or a bit of a slog or just generally hard to get (The Birth of a Nation, Greed, Battleship Potemkin, The Crowd) in favor of the immediate and timeless.

Georges Méliès: First
Wizard of cinema
(Flicker Alley)
Shooting movies that were longer than anyone else’s at the time (A Trip to the Moon was an epic 13 minutes), the French Méliès yoked the new technology to a boundless imagination, transforming a medium into art. The key works were Trip in 1902, Kingdom of Fairies in ’03, and An Impossible Voyage in ’04, which Martin Scorsese displays and reproduces in part in Hugo—hand-colored fantasias verging on the psychedelic, imbued with whimsy and wonder. Collecting 170-plus short films, these five discs are more exhaustive than most people will need or even want, but they represent the best restoration of Méliès’s work available.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
(Image)
German director Robert Wiene’s story of obsession, insanity, and murder isn’t just the first horror film but early cinema’s most radical revolt against the literal: celluloid Munch, dadaist and nightmarish. Its jagged imagery and fragmented narrative, involving characters with multiple identities, were never forgotten by filmmakers from Alfred Hitchcock (Spellbound) to Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands).

The General
(Kino)
Actor-director Buster Keaton was the most profoundly cinematic of the early American film giants, his genius stretching from Sherlock, Jr. to The Navigator to Steamboat Bill, Jr. Like the broken clock that’s on time twice a day, the consensus that has deemed this his masterpiece sometimes gets it right: A Civil War saga in which a war-torn Mathew Brady landscape is just a lethal obstacle course to Buster winning his girl’s heart, this also remains the unsurpassed runaway train (bus/car/plane/submarine) picture, yielding one jaw-dropping stunt and demented sight gag after another.

Metropolis
(Kino)
Director Fritz Lang’s Olympian vision of proles in rebellion against the bosses in a dehumanized future looked more like a thing of marvel to Hitler and Goebbels, and you almost can’t blame them, what with the towering architecture and cast of (tens of) thousands. They might have had a thing for the female robot, too. Over the years Metropolis would prove a blueprint for reichs and blade runners alike, even when the only existing prints were copies of copies, until the earliest generation yet was discovered in Argentina three and a half years ago. Be sure to get 2010’s “Complete” version and not the one with the Giorgio Moroder soundtrack.

The Passion of Joan of Arc
(Criterion)
The greatest silent picture, and one of the ten greatest films of all time.

Flesh and the Devil
(Warner)
A triangle plot (or maybe quadrangle, depending on how you count the men) that’s the stuff of soap opera, with period-piece clichés and distinguished by competent if not remarkable direction by Clarence Brown—so what else has this got? The most incandescent female star to come out of silent pictures, in her breakout role. When she appears in a railway station, you nearly gasp, the impact is that electrifying, and it didn’t hurt that she was getting it on in reportedly torrid fashion with her costar. John Gilbert may have received top billing and the credits may read in smaller letters “with Greta Garbo,” but that changed fast: When Gilbert first sees Garbo onscreen, there’s never a doubt who’s in the thrall of whom. Screen presence is born here.

Sunrise
(20th Century Fox)
When this was released in the silent era’s sunset, it was considered by many to be cinema’s highwater mark, and its reputation has barely budged. If it’s not the love story you turn to for penetrating insights into human behavior (the setup anticipates A Place in the Sun a quarter century later), F.W. Murnau’s shimmery, elegant delirium renders the allegorical quaintness beside the point. It’s the first silent film to be released on Blu-ray, and relatively pricey at that, but without looking too hard, a limited-edition DVD issued a decade ago can be found at half the price.

Pandora’s Box
(Criterion)
This movie didn’t discover sex. The Sheik induced female swooning of a suspiciously libidinous nature, and Cecil B. De Mille already was making movies with titles like Forbidden Fruit; for that matter Méliès himself filmed turn-of-the-century soft-core erotica. But in no major picture had the essence of the sexual nature been so much its central subject, and if she didn’t finally acquire the stature of Garbo, American star Louise Brooks—as the footloose mistress whose hedonism is as natural to her as breathing even as she heedlessly flirts with doom—was the stuff that cults are made of.

The Man With a Movie Camera
(Image)
Ostensibly this is a “documentary,” but one that deserves as many quotation marks as can be placed around the word, and ostensibly it’s about the Soviet Union, while really being a tone poem and an homage to the title character—not the man but the camera. Trippier than you ever thought Bolsheviks could get, maybe because he evinces no interest in ideology, director Dziga Vertov means to reinvent cinematic language no less than did Méliès. Here is a dazzling new dictionary of jump cuts and frozen moments, divided screens and double exposures, and a movie that runs forward, backward, and practically sideways, defying standard notions of 24 frames a second as though adding or subtracting hours of the day or the earth’s revolutions.

City Lights
(Warner Bros.)
Though he didn’t have Griffith’s ambition or scope or Keaton’s inherent grasp of cinema’s possibilities, Charlie Chaplin is the colossus of the silent era anyway, the first superstar and keeper of the era’s silence even after he already was surrounded by noise with this movie’s release in 1931. Preceded by 1925’s brilliant The Gold Rush, with another masterpiece to come in 1936’s Modern Times, this is his supreme achievement, when Chaplin’s Little Tramp, laid even lower by the Depression, conspires to give a blind flower girl back her sight and also to give the movies back their hush. Critics have blown hot and cold about Chaplin over the decades, but disparate directors from Welles to Fellini to Kubrick to Tarkovsky to Woody Allen have held this film in awe, unable to break themselves free of the spell cast by what is—with all due reverence to the closing moments of Vertigo, Bicycle Thieves, and The Third Man—the most shattering final shot in movie history.

Alternate Oscars

By Steve Erickson — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 01:44:00 GMT

Photograph courtesy flickr/bgreenlee

Picture: Melancholia
This is a film to swallow up existence, not to mention block out the sun. From the opening images, it takes you someplace within the human spirit from which there’s no return, where horror makes no concession to beauty and beauty makes none to horror. A close call over The Artist and The Tree of Life, this is the movie you’ll remember 20 years from now.

Director: Lars von Trier, Melancholia
Of course this Danish filmmaker is by all evidence not the guy you want at your cocktail party, what with his infantile penchant for provocation and movies that range wildly from the hollow (Europa) to the brilliant (Breaking the Waves) to the manipulative (Dancer in the Dark) to the abusive (Antichrist). But this is the most haunting film he’s made as well as the deepest and most compassionate—and what does it say about Trier (the “von” is an affectation) that for all his bad-boy posturing, his talent for eliciting consistently remarkable performances from actresses (Emily Watson and Björk in the past, Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg here) is unsurpassed by any filmmaker?

Actress: Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn
Playing the 20th century’s most famous woman, who’s inspired countless impersonators, from drag queens to Madonna, Williams doesn’t really look like Monroe—something you’ll forget 90 seconds after she comes onscreen. What she catches is the sweetness and heartbreak of Marilyn’s eroticism, why men didn’t just want her but fell in love with her. And yes, I admit it: I would rather watch Michelle play Marilyn than Meryl play Margaret Thatcher.

Actor: Michael Shannon, Take Shelter
Here is the year’s best demonstration of how a great actor’s craft isn’t about control or lack of it but knowing when to exert it and when to lose it. By the time sand-mining operator Curtis explodes in fury—the possessed apostle of a lost book of Revelation—before his aghast family and neighbors, Shannon has earned the eruption, as dogged in his pursuit of Curtis’s humanity as Curtis has been in the construction of a shelter from the most perfect storm of all. The American actor of tomorrow, heir to Hackman, De Niro, Penn.

Supporting Actress: Shailene Woodley, The Descendants
As George Clooney’s teenage daughter embarking on a road to ruin as the film opens, the 20-year-old Woodley holds the story’s secrets, which means she holds its truths. This is the film’s crucial performance, and Woodley never has a false moment as a woman-child who navigates her father to an understanding about his wife, only to realize she’s navigating herself to an understanding about her father.

Supporting Actor: Albert Brooks, Drive
The actor’s stroke of genius is to realize that his murderous mobster, Bernie Rose, isn’t so many degrees of pathology removed from, say, the shlub of Lost in America. There’s not a more cold-blooded scene this year than when he tenderly dispatches Bryan Cranston, quietly comforting his victim to his end—which tells you as much about how savagely Rose fears he’ll die someday as anything else.

Original Screenplay: J.C. Chandor, Margin Call
Amid the year’s reveries of a reimagined past and an unspecified future, here’s an autopsy of the American present. Money is both its own currency and the currency of something bigger—if only Kevin Spacey and his entourage of capitalism’s winners and losers knew that there’s something bigger.

Adapted Screenplay: Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Whatever its popular success over the years, John le Carré’s novel is harder to understand than Gravity’s Rainbow, and if O’Connor and Straughan can’t be said to have made the plot crystal clear, that’s because its malevolent machinations flourish only in the dark. What the writers have located are the passions that never were as subterranean as Le Carré (or the BBC adaptation more than 30 years ago) implied.

Cinematography, Melancholia
This collaboration between the film’s director and Chilean-born cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro, juxtaposing the docudramatic with Kubrickian formalism, evokes next year at Marienbad.

Art Direction, Hugo
Dante Ferretti’s Paris is none where anybody ever has lived other than in one’s imagination, which, come to think of it, is the Paris where everybody lives even when actually in Paris. With the city’s inner magic running amok, the imagination in this case is as much Georges Méliès’ as Ferretti’s or director Martin Scorsese’s.

Editing: The Tree of Life
Notwithstanding his team of credited editors, director Terrence Malick certainly was the grand orchestrator of this film’s many movements, in the service of as audacious a cinematic vision as any since 2001 if not Intolerance. When this time machine of a movie opened in Italy, the first two reels got switched and played that way for a week before anyone noticed—a testament to either the film’s genius or folly. Sometimes there’s no difference.

ALSO: Read The Dark Age, Steve Erickson's review of the year in film
Click here to place your Oscar ballot

The Dark Age

By Steve Erickson — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:21:00 GMT

Illustration by Andre Carrilho

The best last line of any movie this past year was spoken by Jessica Chastain in Take Shelter. The line is: “OK.” It’s not just as big as the word “OK” can be—it’s bigger than you thought “OK” could ever be; in Chastain’s “OK” lies the end of the world. For the duration of writer-director Jeff Nichols’s film, her husband—played by Michael Shannon in a performance at once ferocious and hushed—has been tormented by apocalyptic dreams that have led him and everyone around him to question his sanity, which is exactly what leads the audience to suspect he’s not mad at all. In another 2011 movie, Hugo, an orphan boy who winds the clocks of Paris and lives within their gears and watchworks meets the “inventor of dreams,” as the film calls him—Georges Méliès, cinema’s earliest maestro, before the nightmare of his century would seem to have rendered trivial his hand-tinted celluloid wonders. Over the course of whatever time has transpired between the dreams of Méliès and of Shannon’s crazy prophet, the innocence of the former has given way to the only revelation that can dazzle us anymore, which is one of cataclysm.

You could draft a respectable best-of-2011 list composed entirely of movies about the End of the World or about The Movies themselves. If it would be glib to say they’re the same thing (though a film like Super 8 is explicitly about both), they feel born of a common impulse—to pursue a vision as far as it can go, either inward or outward—and occupy opposite ends of the same dream. Moreover, what binds Take Shelter, Melancholia, Another Earth, Contagion, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and The Tree of Life with Hugo, My Week with Marilyn, Road to Nowhere, and The Artist is how many of the films feel so 21st century—like they couldn’t have been made at any other moment—and so outside of time. With the exception of Marilyn, they’re all chronologically free floating in spirit. Stepping into the production of a movie called Road to Nowhere, the production crew of Monte Hellman’s film of the same name slips its temporal moorings; and the appearance of the parallel world (which looks just like the oncoming rogue planet of Melancholia) hovering above ours in Another Earth scrambles time’s calibrations and landmarks altogether. If anything, this may be more pronounced in movies as ostensibly period as Hugo and The Artist, which each tick to a metaclock: Their forecasts of the last century are infused with the perspective of this one. In many of these pictures there’s a sense that the act of filming itself has set Armageddon in motion. The silent world of a silent-film star in The Artist is ruptured when a water glass that he sets down on a table makes a noise. In Melancholia, the snap of director Lars von Trier’s clipboard brings on a cosmic car wreck unleashing emotional truths that are overwhelming before they become meaningless. To Terrence Malick, a family’s struggle in The Tree of Life to decode the meaning of a son’s death is futile outside the context of eons, even as the eons are sound and fury that signify nothing when unredeemed by the humanity of love and grief, resilience and grace.

////

When a theme dominates movie-years so strikingly, it’s tempting to make something of it because that’s what people like me are paid to do. But leaving aside the highlights that don’t neatly fit grand pronouncements (Tomas Alfredson’s first-rate adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, for instance), the reality is that movies take varying numbers of years to get finished, and whether the director catches something in today’s zeitgeist, or yesterday’s, or tomorrow’s, or has bent the zeitgeist to his or her will, is a crapshoot; when a bunch of movies tap into the same thing, it’s as much an alignment of the stars as any collective conclusion. The movies mentioned above are variable in style and quality, from Road to Nowhere, which veers as close to the avant-garde as anything vaguely earning the label “mainstream,” to the conventional My Week with Marilyn, distinguished wholly by Michelle Williams, who—ever since seeing her husband kiss another man in Brokeback Mountain and registering more complicated emotion in a single look than anyone since Garbo at the end of Queen Christina—appears destined for immortality with each passing performance. Hugo is the homage to cinematic delirium that you would expect of a Martin Scorsese movie that looks more like a Steven Spielberg movie than Spielberg’s War Horse, and then there’s The Artist, which manages to be radical and populist at the same time. Nothing captures the culture’s attention deficit disorder better than the backlash to The Artist already setting in, and you can only hope that as the movie increasingly is dismissed as a shameless crowd pleaser, someone remembers now and then that a year ago anybody making a black-and-white silent film would have been called insane or named Guy Maddin. French director Michel Hazanavicius not only got away with it but got the world to love it, and unless the counter assault gathers momentum, which is possible, it will win the Academy Award.

The true picture of the year is a trilogy, seven hours long and made unwittingly by its three directors. The Tree of Life, Take Shelter, and Melancholia are a biographical triptych of not just the species or the planet but of existence, ending not in mere death, which is survived by memory, but the void, which is survived by nothing. The family of The Tree of Life is very much like the one in Take Shelter; they could be next- door neighbors a few decades removed. The dead birds that fall from the sky in Take Shelter fall in Melancholia as well, and Melancholia’s doomed sisters, Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, are long-lost cousins of Shelter’s Shannon. The crashing of planets in Melancholia is alluded to by the celestial combustion of The Tree of Life, in which a wife and mother chooses ascension over primitivism, just as a wife and mother a generation or two later in Take Shelter practically and heroically chooses to overcome despair, with Chastain playing both women. Malick doesn’t think The Tree of Life is about the End at all—he thinks it’s about the Continuum—while Von Trier’s instinctive no-exit sensibility, not to mention the cruelty of his early work, are transformed by Melancholia into the kind of earthbound pity and insight that the characters in The Tree of Life never grasp until they’ve transcended its highest branches. OK, says Chastain on her back porch in Take Shelter’s final scene, to both the End of the World and her husband’s second sight that she doubted. OK, say Dunst’s eyes in Melancholia to both the End of the World and her sister’s desolation over her young son’s deliverance not to death but oblivion. OK, says Sean Penn’s face in The Tree of Life to an afterworld where all premature separations are reconciled and all paradises, once lost, are regained.

Redirected: Film & TV

Schlock and Awe

Bruce Almighty

Maker’s Mark

Crystal Method

Related

Road to Ruin

Superhero Complex

Little Big Man

Silents, Please

Alternate Oscars

The Dark Age