August: Osage County

Tracy Letts' Pulitzer prize-winning play, "August, Osage County," is occasionally funny and undeniably impressive in the torrents of verbal abuse that the characters unleash on one another. But the experience has an ugly undercurrent: people hurl vituperation and calumny; the victim passively endures the insult -- an aspect of both the theater piece and its film adaptation that doesn't exactly ring true. Finally, someone snaps and there are fisticuffs and the character with the vicious tongue gets her comeuppance. The audience's reaction is similar to the pleasure that we feel when a villain is slaughtered in an action film: we get a burst of adrenalin and feel complacent indignation mingled with pleasure. The effect is powerful and, even, in an unfortunate way, pleasureable but you walk out of the picture feeling just a wee bit dirty. The central scene in "August: Osage County" employs this dynamic: it is a long bravura ensemble scene, something like Chekhov on amphetamines. Meryl Streep, playing the drug-addicted and vicious matriarch of a family with three daughters (Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis), torments everyone at the dinner table. She excuses her cruel comments as "truth-telling" but she is really just taunting everyone within ear-shot. Finally, Julia Roberts has had enough and grapples with her mother, knocking her to the floor, and yanking her pills away from her. The audience gets the kind of charge out of this violent release of action that you might feel when a nasty professional wrestler gets beaned with a folding chair by a good guy. It's theatrical all right, but a fairly low species of theater. Later in the film, which goes on and on, a virtuous Indian maiden takes a shovel to Dermot Mulrooney and knocks him senseless -- the audience gets the same charge out of this assault and, in fact, wishes that the war-like Cheyenne girl would take the shovel to the rest of the cast and put paid to their endless carping and whining. Kin to Edward Albee's "Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf," the play features all sorts of deep dark secrets including incest and every big scene involves several speeches involving embarrassing self-revelations, accusations, and Gothic accounts of assault and battery. It's no surprise that the ever-annoying Sam Shepherd, an actor who increasingly resembles in tone and diction (if not appearance) Walter Brennan has committed suicide to escape from this clan. In a fundamental way, the play (and the film) seems false. We have no idea why these characters are so bitter and cruel. Alcoholism and drug abuse don't seem sufficient causes for the torrets of vitriol that the characters unleash on one another. And the film's labored and realistic-seeming mise-en-scene doesn't really comport with the play's rather heightened speech and stylized action. Is there really a huge house baking on the west Oklahoma plains without air conditioning? And, if so, why don't the actors and actresses shed some of their outer clothing in light of the heat? (Letts seems to grasp this incongruity and provides a lame explanation of sorts: Meryl Streep makes the men put on their suit-jackets in the big luncheon scene shouting: "This is a funeral dinner, not a cock-fight.") When Streep's character plays an Eric Clapton song "Lay down Sally" near the end of the movie, we see her carefully put the needle in the groove of the record so as to start the tune at its exact beginning -- but wouldn't her hand tremble? Would she really be able to start the song at its precise beginning so accurately in a single, rather casual gesture? And the song is not the last tune on the LP. So wouldn't the record keep playing during the completely predictable scene (the audience expects this from the first five minutes of the movie) in which the abandoned matriarch is comforted by the valiant earth-mother Cheyenne maid -- an example, if ever there was one, of inverse racism in a film. Julia Roberts, who looks fantastically fierce and ugly in this film, flees her mother's home in a pick-up -- but whose pick-up? A big point is made of the fact that Roberts has arrived with her husband and daughter in the same car. Is she stealing the pick-up? And the final shot in the film, suggesting that Roberts is planning to drive 625 miles to Denver is unwittingly risible -- she's dressed in rather shabby pajamas and has left all her luggage, and, presumably, her purse, her wallet, and her money back at the ranch that she has just fled. These are minor points but the film is designed in such a way as to cause you to be troubled by mistakes of this sort. The direction by John Wells is only barely functional -- it's just shot and reverse-shot with many huge close-ups emphasizing Ms. Streep's waxy pallor and wild eyes. This is the kind of hammy role for which actresses are awarded with Oscars -- Streep looks like a zombie and her lips and eyebrows writhe with effort as she pronounces her baroque lines. And Julia Roberts vies with her for hideousness -- never a conventionally attractive actress, she is picturesquely awfu-looking in this movie: her profile resembles an angry bull-frog and her huge swollen lips seem the result of cosmetic surgery gone awry. All the acting is excellent in a showy kid of way. Poor Benedict Cumberbatch is completely wasted in the role of a sweet nitwit in love with his own sister -- the poor guy has a fine imitation American accent with, even, a trace of a south-western twang and his eyes fill up with tears when violent tongues begin to flay him.

Top of the Lake

Adapting Raymond Chandler right after World War II, Hollywood discovered a sure-fire narrataive formula in pictures like "The Big Sleep." A detective story, generally the search for a lost person or thing, provides a loose framework on which to sling vivid character portraits of eccentric and sexually deviant criminals, con-men, entertainers, millionaires, etc. These narratives employ naive, but resourceful, outsiders who gradually penetrate networks of depravity festering in remote or isolated communities. The outsider's journey of discovery simulates the viewer's participation in the story, decoding events to perceive a sinister pattern. By nature episodic, these kinds of narrtives can assume great length and, often involve, torturous plots -- Faulkner, who helped to write "The Big Sleep," claimed that neither he nor director Howard Hawks understood the story. The fascination that these stories exerts has almost nothing to do with the narrative's ostensible plot -- rather, the tale fascinates because of its unusual and menacing characters, and, frequently, its exotic, carefully observed setting. "Chinatown" ends in a place that no one can decipher; "True Detective," a noteworthy recent example of this genre, explores rural poverty in Eastern Louisiana and, of course, the tribal habits of career cops; "Top of the Lake," Jane Campion's engrossing mini-series, plunges into the multi-cultural and male chauvinist milieu of New Zealand's improbably mountainous outback. In setting, Campion's show resembles a paradigm of the genre, David Lynch's "Twin Lakes" -- both programs assemble their casts of isolates, visionaries, and monstrous villains in a remote village surrounded by sinister and majestic landscapes that threaten to engulf the characters in their malign indifference. Campion's show is more naturalistic -- at least, on the evidence of the two episodes that I review here -- and her motives are clearer than Lynch's perverse, self-generating narrative that, ultimately, had nowhere to go. Campion's subject, similar to previous films including the highly regareded "The Piano," is feminism tested by immersion in a society that is male-dominated to the point of madness. Her strength is that she doesn't really take sides -- her brutish men are, often, sexually appealing and exert a strong erotic attraction on her female characters. Her feminists are, often, loony, moon-struck dreamers and her vision of an all-female society, a feminist colony in which the women live in storage containers, genuflect to an eerie white-haired crone (brilliantly played by Holly Hunt), and sit around discussing marital traumas and masturbation all day, represents a solution to male-female conflict and masculine power that is as sinister and vicious, it seems, as the drunken all-male cameraderie of the taverns where the boys gather to plot their rapes and murders. This show is mostly atmosphere and acting -- the locations are astounding: a narrow Loch Ness-style lake, said to contain a throbbing demon's heart according to Maori legend, ensconced in mountains that look like something an eight-year-old might draw, sheer pointed peaks, glaciers, and canyons clogged with rain-forest jungle. And the acting seems to me to be pitch-perfect, although much of what is said involves New Zealand accents and argot so dense as to be inaudible to my Minnesota ears. The plot involves a pregnant 12-year old who refuses to identify the father of her child and, then, goes missing. The little girl is the daughter of a alpha-male bad guy, although as the program advances the father's motives becomes increasingly complex and his personality develops in surprising ways. The bad guy lives on a compound surrounded by gates, smokes pot openly when the detective interviews him, and seems to have impregnated half the women in the community. He menaces everyone and is a savage bully. But he also seems to love his daughter and appears to have raised her to be some sort of woman warrior, an avenger of her gender. At first, the little girl seems frail and desperate but, later, when we see her armed with a shotgun and riding a horse through the mountains, one has the sense that there is much more to this character than mere victim and pretense for the show's quest. The detective entering this unknown terrain, in fact, has come from this community, but been absent for many years -- apparently, the young woman detective seeking the identity of the man who raped the little girl lives in Sydney, the metropolis to which everyone refers, and she is estranged from her mother, probably because the older woman, a kind of aging hippie, lives with a Maori boyfrien who periodically beats her. (The relationship begs the question of the heroine's father -- a man who has drowned in the lake and whose shoes the detective caresses, murmuring "Daddy.") The young woman seems, at first, to represent feminism, the role of women in the modern world, but, in fact, she is also complex and her relationship to the men around her is ambiguous. The program suggests that the matriarch of the feminist compound (the storage container colony) is in mortal combat with the alpha-male patriarch of the male-dominated society behind the locked gates across the lake. But, in fact, the two characters, with their oracular pronouncements and their flowing white hair, seem very much alike, prophets of their respective domains doomed to collide precisely they are so similar to one another. The series is dense with interesting characters and strange confrontations. Campion understands that the two sexes, ultimately, reside in different worlds but that they are inextricably entangled -- the separatist female commune operates on bizarre principles (one matron goes into town to have sexual encounters that she has been told by the matriarch must last less than seven minutes)and one has the sense that the alpha-male's proudest possession is his warrior-daughter, fleeing the authorities, armed, dangerous and pregnant in the High Sierra. A little scene embodies the complexity of Campion's vision. A wealthy man is ferried to the compound by helicopter and drops off his teenage daugher who hates him. The wealthy man has divorced his longsuffering wife for a much younger woman and the spurned woman has fled to the compound -- she is the one with the seven-minute sexual adventures. The rich man seems brutish, ugly, and insensitive. But before he leaves in his helicopter, he comes upon his daughter seated by a stream playing her guitar. Suddenly, he begins to sing with extraordinary passion, scat-singing in which he imitates a guitar while flailing away with his own air-guitar The girl refuses to look at him but, nonetheless, imitates the sounds that he is making and plays a kind of tiny duet with him -- clearly, there is some connection between the father and daughter, probably extending far back into her childhood that all the misery of the present with its betraysls and calamities has not wholly effaced.

To the Wonder

Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder” is a film that is radically empty. The film poses beautiful people against landscapes. Generally, the camera moves as if discovering the landscape, passing through (or across) an invisible threshold as the character moves into the terrain. In many instances, the actor is alone in the frame and back-lit. Often, images of landscape or atmospheric effects or empty rooms brooding in light that is intensely specific and individualized are inserted into the film. Editing is swift, fluent, and completely non-narrative: characters appear against the sunset on an open prairie; the next shot shows the same figures, but against an urban landscape. Sequences are edited with time-jumps: we see a woman dancing, then, another angle of her lying down in a forest or park, then, another shot of her running toward the camera in that same location. The film seems to involve complicated dialogue scenes, but the editing obscures the relationship between the figures speaking and the sound-recording makes it impossible for us to hear what is being said. (A peculiar opening title tells the DVD viewer to “turn up the volume”, but, I think, to no avail since you aren’t supposed to be able to hear most of the words spoken in the film.) The movie produces the effect of being more completely silent and visual than an actual silent film -- in silent films, intertitles explained the action to the audience. In “To the Wonder,” there is no explication of any kind -- we can determine approximately what is happening and there is a consistent “tone” or mood to the film, but there is no story, no exposition and no attempt to tidy up the imagery by reducing repetition or duplication of effect. Indeed, to the contrary, the film is obsessively repetitious -- the same thing seems to happen over and over again; we see the same locations in the same “magic-hour” light repeatedly; the Good Friday music from “Parsifal” is played not once, but three times, and, about a third of the shots in the movie, show a beautiful young woman, either dark-haired or blonde, spinning ecstatically. In Griffith’s films, his heroines, Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh, never walked through a shot -- the girls either pranced or skipped or danced through the image. Malick treats his actresses the same way -- they move like sprites, dipping, leaping, and spinning in circles. The movement of the women contrasts with Ben Affleck who is directed to move slowly, stiffly, deliberately -- clad in black, Affleck’s character is like a sullen, half-submerged boulder around which the women prance. The film is visionary and remarkable -- but it is also cloying and vacant. “To the Wonder’s” vacancy is akin to Ozu’s “empty frames” -- it is a philosophical stance and Malick completely controls this aspect of the movie; the picture is designed to obstruct its own narrative and to empty story and plot into a radiant void of pure light and color. The cloying aspects of the film feel like a defect and I think represent a weakness in Malick’s temperament with respect to the feminine -- the “Ewig-Weibliche” that provides the gravitational field around which the movie’s astounding imagery orbits. Some critics have declared the film insufferably pretentious -- this is unfair to the movie and untrue to the experience of watching “To the Wonder”. Pretentiousness requires ideas and, as I have said, the film is “empty,” a vessel for light and movement that is immune to concept. I think the most precise way of describing the film is in terms of the religious notion of “kenosis” -- that is, a “pouring out” or “emptying”: the movie establishes a sort of plot, a kind of vestigial romantic triangle and, then, empties that situation of anything like character, drama or narrative. Wikipedia’s entry on the movie describes a fairly detailed narrative -- but this narrative is not apparent to someone watching the film for the first time. A man falls in love with a woman in France and there are a number of travelogue-style images of Paris and Mont St. Michael. The man induces the woman to move to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, a small city that is strangely vacant, like a down-home De Chirico painting: small brick towers, vacant lots, immensely wide streets with no traffic, throbbing oil fields and refineries seemingly in people’s back yards. There is an immense golden prairie and a suburb under a huge sky with ominous pyramid-shaped roofs of the big houses looming over cul-de-sacs. The European woman (and her daughter) are lonely and there are bad fights with Ben Aflleck’s stolid, uncommunicative character and the family disintegrates. The woman and child return to Paris. The man meets an old sweetheart and embarks on an affair with her at a ranch where there are herds of bison. (This part of the film seems nakedly autobiographical -- Malick apparently reconnected with a high school girlfriend and married her in Bartlesville, his hometown.) The love affair with old flame also collapses and, then, the European woman moves back to Bartlesville. She and the man begin to fight and the same events that earlier ruined their relationship seem to re-occur -- this time, heightened by an adulterous love affair conducted in an Econo-Lodge to the strains of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” The man confronts the woman; they fight some more; he forgives her. But she flees again, once more returning to Paris. Intercut with these events is a story -- really, just a situation -- involving a lonely and tormented Catholic priest. The priest, played by Javier Bardem, is desperately seeking Christ in the world and he spends his time in a decomposing slum interacting with criminals, meth-addicts, teenage mothers, street preachers, and homeless people -- these scenes are very beautiful and the faces of the poor folks on the street, in psych-wards, and prisons are terrible and attractive, both sublime and hideous at the same time; there is a neo-realist glory about some of this footage that reminds me of Rossellini. The priest’s desperate search for meaning, for God in the world, seems to parallel the hopeless plight of the lovers who seek the divine and ecstatic in one another but are perpetually disappointed and wounded. Documentary footage showing the film being made suggests that the priest interacted with the tormented couple and, perhaps, even counseled them in the movie’s original design -- there are a few vestiges of this aspect of the plot remaining in the film, but those encounters seem to have been mostly edited-out of the movie. Instead, we are left with an almost purely abstract, contrapuntal organization to the film in which the search for erotic love parallels the priest’s search for divine love. The film was, apparently, shot like Griffith’s silent pictures without a script, improvised on location from a broad outline of ideas in the director’s head. “To the Wonder” is more interesting to write about than to watch -- in real time, the movie’s repetitive structure is maddening. It is an important movie, perhaps, a landmark, but also a creative dead-end -- visionary emptiness is beautiful and, I think, philosophically compelling but ultimately the ineffable can’t be photographed and so the movie, a structure of pictures, necessarily must fail. The film’s unique manner of failure is its importance. “Fail again,” Beckett wrote, “fail better.”

Chasing Shackleton

A vainglorious and dim-witted PBS mini-series, this three-program special documents an attempt by six adventurers to replicate polar explorer Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated 1913-1917 Transpolar Expedition. As most everyone knows, Shackleton was a dullard who botched everything in his life except the extrication of his twenty or so men from Antarctica once his folly marooned them there. A visionary and media-savvy con-man, Shackleton planned to cross Antarctica, documenting his exploits on film. Instead of crossing the continent, his ship, the Endurance, became mired in ice and, ultimately, was destroyed. Shackleton was stranded and, ultimately, had to venture across 800 miles of frigid tempestuous seas in a tiny boat to reach help at a whaling station on South Georgia island. Making shore on the wrong side of the island, Shackleton and two of his desperate men (three of them were too weakened by their ordeal to continue) had to cross 32 miles of mountainous and heavily glaciated terrain to reach the Norwegian encampment. Achieving that objective, rescue parties were sent to pick up the three men "hors de combat" on the other side of the island and, further, dispatched across the violent seas to Elephant Island to retrieve the rest of his adventurers who had been subsisting on a diet of greasy penguin for the last two years. Everyone survived the catastrophe. Ironically, a number of Shackleton's men decided to exchange the rigors of polar exploration for the Western Front where they were killed. When the chips were down, Shackleton acted with undeniable fortitute and resolution but, of course, one must question his judgement in getting into these desperate straits in the first place. Pictures of the explorer show a man with unexpressive, stolid features, a fellow who looks like an uninspired Presbyterian minister. In recent years, a cult has grown up around Shackleton and his prowess as a leader has been extolled -- mostly to melancholy middle-aged accountants and business executives who seek to emulate their hero's determination and resolve. No one in their right mind would follow Shackleton in fair weather and under blue skies. But I suppose if you let him lead you into catastrophe, he would be an excellent fellow to follow to safety. But why put yourself in danger in the first place? Inadvertently, the idiotic "Chasing Shackleton" raises these issues. The leader of the expedition, a splendidly bearded gent named Jarvis, worships Shackleton as if he were a God. Jarvis says that he wants to prove that modern explorers have sufficient fortitude to endure the kind of hardships that Shackleton suffered and to prevail against similar challenges. Although at the end of the show, Jarvis, who at one point bravely proclaims that -- Yakuza-style -- he will trade a couple digits (pinky-toes, I think) for success, loudly and dramatically declares victory at the end of the show, the viewer is left unconvinced. First, the modern adventurers are coddled by an accompanying rescue ship, fully equipped with a modern infirmary doctors, and, wiggling out of the corner of the frame, a couple of comely nurses. On several occasions, disaster looms and the heroic explorers have to seek assistance from the rescue vessel. It is clear that the open boat in which our heros have crossed the sea from Elephant Island would have crashed into the black escarpments surrounding South Georgia Island with all hands lost but for the intervention of the GPS systems on the rescue vessel. On South Georgia Island, the six member team encounters all sorts of peculiar medical problems and people have to be evacuated from the island. Bad weather forces the three remaining explorers to huddle in cozy Gor-tex tents for several days, a luxury not available to poor Shackleton and his explorers -- they had fifty feet of frayed rope and a carpenter's adze. In short, it is pretty clear that, contrary to Jarvis' boastful proclamation of victory, his expedition has proved the exact opposite of what he purports it to have established. Jarvis tells us that modern explorers are just as tough as Shackleton. But the film shows that everyone would have perished repeatedly except for modern medical technology and the benefits of such amenities as gortex tents, satellite cartography, and GPS The show is solemn and dull, although the landscapes are beautiful. (This TV show profits by the largest screen possible -- the sheer magnificent malelovence of the polar islands and seas is diminished by a small screen: the spiky and sinister Triton Ridge on South Georgia Island, for instance, is a terrifying sight, but, undoubtedly, appears much lessened when viewed on TV.) The show takes itself and its moron adventurers too seriously. In one sequences, the men have to slide on their buttocks down a thousand foot ramp of steep snow and ice. The effect is inadvertently comical, but the narration solemnly explicates the humorous image: "The men descend from the ridge using a well-established mountaineering technique called the controlled, roped glissade" -- evidently, a technical term for tobogganing down a mountain on your ass. Much of the show is occupied with the men bitching at one another and making catty remarks. This is a staple of reality TV. Of course, one must hypothesize that Shackelton's unfortunate followers spend a lot of time whining and carping at one another also. But there was no camera around to record these conversations. Instead, the primitive movie camera that the Transpolar expedition lugged with it recorded stark and beautiful images of the crucifixion of the Endurance by ice, some of the most dignified and profound pictures made in the 20th century.

Klondike and preliminary notes on "True Detective"

For all I know, the last two hours of the Discovery channel's mini-series, "Klondike" is enthralling, inspiring, and brilliantly written. I abandoned this gargantuan absurdity after suffering through the first two parts of the six-hour show. "Klondike" represents an interesting, if perhaps, unfortunate development in television: hitherto, reality TV shows have amped-up conflict to create phony melodrama approximating the Sturm und Drang that you might expect in a rather florid fictional mini-series; now, however, reality shows are so popular that fictional melodrama seems anxious to imitate them. Periodically, the frenzied and improbable action in "Klondike" pauses for digressive conversations about geology and mining techniques. This seemed peculiar to me since the lurid subject matter of the show really has little or nothing to do with mining -- the drama is just an excuse for lots of violence and sex. But, from the ads interspersed in the proceedings, I see that "Klondike" is thematically liked with, at least, two other shows on the Discovery channel, both of them reality programs -- something called "Gold Rush" and another show called "Bering Sea Gold". These shows presumably feature low-grade morons belching insults at one another as they search in vain for the proverbial "glory-hole". (A friend of mine who has seen these shows tells me that nuggets and veins of gold are as scarce on these programs as ghosts on "TAPS" or the other paranormal programs haunting the Networks.) Furthermore, there have been a number of reality shows recently broadcast involving logging operations. "Klondike" seems 'tied-in' to these enterprises as well -- the fetching heroine of the show runs a saw-mill and, frequently, boasts that her "timber" is more valuable than the gold the other characters are trying to pluck out of the ubiquitous Klondike muck. Generally speaking, mini-series languish because they have too many characters and too few incidents -- in the middle of these programs, the producers of such shows often neglect even fundamental editing techniques: if someone says they are going to the bakery, the show kills time by filming the hero walking to his car, opening his car door, driving to the bakery, getting out of his car, walking to the shop, and, then, enjoying some light, and pointless repartee with the shop proprietor: the craft of editing is used only to jerk responses out of the viewers in various poorly conceived and implausible action sequences. Otherwise everything proceeds more or less in real-time with lots of shots of people walking across rooms and opening doors to fill out the lengthy running time of the show. "Klondike" has the same poorly conceived and implausible action scenes, many of them edited into a mismatched hash of quick cuts, but it doesn't slip into longuers -- to the contrary, "Klondike" packs so much action into its narrative that the viewer starts to look forward to the relative respite of the TV commercials. In the first forty minutes, the two feckless heros are beset by homicidal knife-wielding Chinamen in a gambling den, survive a spectacular avalanche, crash through deadly rapids and are attacked by wolves. Around the one-hour mark, one of the heros, a whiny, irritating Jewish kid, is inexplicably gunned-down and spends the next forty minutes lying on a block of ice while flies buzz around his nose and his buddy ineffectually seeks "justice" for the dead man. The best part of the show -- and I concede I don't know how it ends -- was this second hour of episode one and, on the strength of those scenes, I tuned in for a second night. Alas, part two is just more of the same and, in fact, the show's plot becomes increasingly hysterical: everyone is dying from typhus, an evil gunslinging businessman, played effectively if extremely negligently by Tim Roth (the role is clearly derived, like most of the show, from the bad guy in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"), humiliates a sublimely beautiful prostitute by making her strip in a mud-storm; this mistreatment causes the prostitute to minister to the ill who are being treated by a kindly (but wolf-slaughtering) Catholic priest played by Sam Shepherd in a part so annoying and overwritten that you long for one of the bad guys to put a bullet through his brain. Wicked bureaucrats scheme to slaughter innocent Native Americans; the mounties are pressured to hang two poor Indians whose tribe plots to attack Dawson City and everyone schemes to steal everyone else's claim. Just as the hero's mortgage is about to be foreclosed -- on a one-week redemption period! -- he and his new friend, the pale guy from "O Brother Where Art Thou" who isn't George Clooney or John Turturro, find lots of big fat nuggets which saves the day except for the fact that a crook has trapped them in their own mine where they almost suffocate before someone else digs them out. And so and so on. Every possible hot-button is touched: women give proto-feminist speeches and bad guys are variously anti-semitic or anti-American-Indian and the show's diction involves lots of cussing, people saying that "they don't give a shit" or are "pissed-off", probably idioms not much in use in the Klondike. Jack London watches the proceedings with a jaundiced eye. The show has fantastic location photography and the depiction of Dawson City as a muddy boomtown is extremely authentic as are the images of gold mining fields, muck and water wastelands with weird scaffiolding all over the place and a matte mountain range, as improbable and blue and beautiful as the hazy background of a Brueghel allegory, painted across the top of the image. But it's meretricious garbage and ultimately unwatchable. There is an unpleasant aspect of commercial TV that involves pandering to the audience's lowest and most base instincts. "Klondike" represents that tendency in the extreme, but, even, very high-quality and brilliant TV shows seem to be made by directors who feel that they must, periodically, interrupt their narrative to provide some cheap thrills that producers perceive to be necessary to maintaining market-share. In "True Detective", the astounding series on HBO (starring and jointly produced by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConnaughey), the second show predictably installed a rote, by-the-numbers sex scene in the program's first fifteen minutes. Woody Harrelson, a middle-aged and blunt-spoken cop, goes to see his nubile girlfriend. She handcuffs him to a conveniently located bracket, straddles him, and proceeds to have sex with him after taunting the lucky copper with her exceptionally large and perfectly formed breasts. (She also obligingly wiggles her perfectly formed, if a little scrawny for my taste, ass in his face -- and the camera's lens.) The woman is a typical HBO starlet, hired primarily for her figure (miraculously slender with huge breasts) and willingness to engage in kinky sex on camera and the scene, although titillating enough, completely stalls the show and distracts the viewers from the real subject matter of the series. Furthermore, the woman is so improbably beautiful that her appearance in this degraded and debased rural parish of west Louisiana makes no sense at all -- what is this miraculous sex-angel doing in these benighted boondocks surrounded by a cast entirely chosen for their ugliness, blubber, and realistically slumped shoulders and blotched, pimply faces? It's a lack of confidence, a sense that audiences are so ridiculously stupid and depraved that you have to show them hard R, strip-tease, action every ninety minutes or they will bolt the room. Critics of "True Detective" also demonstrate part of the problem with commercial (is there any other kind now that PBS is also all laced-up with ads?) TV. "True Detective" features many impressive and nightmarish soliloquies spoken by McConnaughey's character. In these speeches, the half-mad cop -- he has been driven to the brink of insanity by the death of his little girl -- expresses a profound and utterly black pessimism. He argues that human consciousness is a mistake and intones variants on the ancient Greek dictim that "not be be born is best." All of this makes perfect sense in the death-haunted milieu that the film shows. Several critics writing about the show have characterized this cop's philosophical attitude as "existentialism." But, of course, the character's musings have almost nothing to do with existentialism -- these speeches are essentially variants on Schopenhauer's pessimism, a precursor idea to existentialism but, ultimately, thought of entirely different tenor. I assume most TV critics are graduates of expensive Ivy League schools. Have we really reached such a nadir in our education that these legions of smart-phone surfing pundits don't know what existentialism is? And, if so, does this explain, to some degree, the pervasive stupidity of something like "Klondike"?

Post Tenebras Lux

You can't accuse Carlos Reygardas of not providing good value in his 2012 film "Post Tenebras Lux." The movie is crammed with all sorts of exotic incidents: an eight-foot tall red demon with the head and horns of a bull and carrying a briefcase, explores a suburban home, a sadist beats a dog to death,there is a shooting and an orgy featuring acres of naked flesh, much of it elderly; we see a Christmas party, a gathering on a beach, a rugby game between Junior High school kids, and, as a kind of climax, a bad guy rips off his own head, a remarkable feat and, then, sprawls dead and headless in a meadow where his corpse is bathed in torrential rains. Lyrical shots of nature are interpolated with this subject matter and there seems to be a theme involving environmental despoliation -- in an early sequence, the guy who pulls off his own head uses a chain-saw to cut down trees and, just before he decapitates himself, this fellow experiences a vision of a gorgeous old-growth forest in the Sierra Madre under assault, trees toppling this way and that. It's impossible to decipher what these variegated episodes are supposed to mean -- at least, I couldn't decode the movie at all and remain unsure as to whether people bearing the same names but appearing in different sequences are supposed to represent the same characters or different folks confusingly named the same. In general, there is a kind of plot, albeit time-scrambled and elliptically narrated. Natalia and Juan are Mexican suburbanites living in a rural part of their country. They have two children, Eleazar and Rut --I suspect some Biblical precedent in those names but haven't researched those meanings. Natalia and Juan's marriage seems to be collapsing -- at one point, they have a long and bitter argument about anal sex and Juan has a couple of alarming propensities: he is an addict to on-line pornography and beats dogs to death. Although the scenes narrating the film's principle plot are dispersed throughout the film, an outline of a story emerges. Juan attends a meeting of the local AA, a conclave conducted in a tin shack, and confesses he is pornography addict. He meets Seven, the guy with the chainsaw cutting down the forest. Seven is a sort of small-time hoodlum, also unhappily married -- his wife and two kids live in a shack near Juan's nice place. (Seven and his wife seem to mirror in a squalid, and poverty-stricken way, the marital problems besetting Juan and Natalie.) Seven conducts a burglary at Juan's house and is surprised when Juan suddenly shows up (Natalie has forgotten something -- we're never told what -- at the house causing Juan to return from a road-trip with his wife and kids. Juan's fat servant, Jarro, a guy who stands by impassively while Juan is beating a puppy to death, is supposed to be watching the house but he's gorging himself with his diabetic mother at a buffet nearby -- Mexicans love buffets.) When Juan confronts Seven about the burglary, he gets shot and loses a lung. Juan survives but is an invalid. His wife serenades him by singing (out-of-tune and arythmically) a Neil Young song. Seven's wife leaves him. Juan, apparently, dies. Some alien force begins knocking down trees in the forest and, after his wife leaves him, abandoning their shack and taking the kids, Seven pulls off his own head. The demon reappears and Juan and Natalie's children wander around, both of their parent's mysteriously absent and, probably, dead. The film ends with footage of boys enthusiastically playing rugby, possibly a game between two private schools near Montreal. The movie has an extraordinary opening sequence -- a little girl alone wanders around in a flooded meadow full of cows and barking dogs and, in real time, the sun sets behind some green cliffs shaggy with tropical jungle. (The movie is shot in the landscape where "The Magnificent Seven" was filmed -- lush jungle, sudden downpours, and strangely-shaped eroded mountains.) One of the film's themes is endangerment -- the little girl seems obscurely endangered in the long, bravura opening shot; she ends up lost in total darkness among the big cows. Later, we see the two small children playing alone next to a raging sea and, at the end of the film, both children are playing by their house and babbling that their parents are dead. One lengthy sequence involves the camera pointlessly tracking a speeding motorcyle -- we expect the motorcyle to crash but it doesn't. The suspense is transferred, like referred pain it originates in some other kind of peril -- in fact, Juan is in his car following the motorcycle; he turns around to go back home to pick up something and gets shot. But I am rationalizing the film by this account -- there are many inserted scenes, for instance, the rugby game, that appear to be occurring in an entirely different place and time and the scenes of the Christmas party (upper-crust Mexicans discussing Chekhov and Tolstoy) have characters with the same names (Juan, Natalie, Rut, and Eleazar) but they appear to be different people. I have no way of accounting for the spectacular orgy and sex scenes -- this seems to involve Natalie and Juan as well, but, again, in some sort of dream or science-fiction setting: the orgy involves a sacrificial and ritualistic deflowering of Natalie in a steam-bath called the "Duchamp room" -- is this the "bride and the bachelors?" The characters had previously stumbled into another orgy in the "Hegel room' but were told to go elsewhere. The film bears some resemblance to Tarkovsky with sudden and inexplicable changes in weather, torrential downpours, and peculiar flooded landscapes. A stronger influence seems to me to be the films of Apichatpong Weeresethakul, the Filipino director, who specializes in discontinuous, multiple narratives in places inhabited by all sorts of weird and spectral beings. But I wasn't able to form even a hypothesis about what this movie is supposed to be about.

The Wolf of Wall Street

What's wrong with Martin Scorsese's bloated, elephantine "Wolf of Wall Street" is epitomized in the movie's last scene. The hero, a crooked stock broker, has become a motivational speaker. In the final scene, he is teaching forty or fifty hapless-looking wannabe tycoons how to make sales in a Holiday Inn banquet hall in Auckland, New Zealand. He displays a pen and demands that a man seated in the first row sell him that pen. The man stammers and stutters and is embarassed. Scorsese is reprising a scene in the first half-hour of the movie, a gag about how to get someone to buy a pen and so the audience watching the movie knows the punch-line. Turning from the first poor fool, the hero shoves the pen in the face of the man seated next to him and demands that he sell him the pen. This guy also is baffled and stammers something completely witless. At this stage, the movie has made its point -- and, in fact, made it twice: most people don't know how to sell anything and a man who is a good salesman has certain advantages in the world. But the film goes on to have Leonardo DiCaprio, playing the disgraced "Wolf of Wall Street," push the pen into the hands of a third man and, once again, demand that he sell him the pen. This is the problem: we understand the rather simple and obvious point that the movie is making and, yet, Scorsese, and the screenwriter, Terrence Winter, keep hammering away, treating the audience as if we are as stupid as the marks that DiCaprio has been defrauding for our entertainment throughout the picture. It's the third iteration of this situation ("sell me the pen!") that exposes the movie's major problem -- it's three hours long but with plot insufficient to support a two hour running time, let alone this movie's epic length. The first iteration of the gag with the pen was sufficient and an alert viewer would understand what Scorsese intends by the scene; the second iteration can be chalked-up to Scorsese's Italian-American volubility, his tendency to say everything once and, then, repeat himself in a louder voice. But the third iteration is completely unnecessary, dull and, further, condescending -- it assumes that the audience has to have everything shown to them three times to grasp even elemental thematic aspects of the film. (This is part and parcel of the movie's condescending approach to the audience -- at this stage in his career, Scorsese must think that he audience for his films is comprised of idiots. Throughout the movie, DiCaprio talks to the camera and, on several occasions, says in an avuncular tone that he doesn't expect the viewers to understand the details of his various scams and frauds but that they are all illegal -- this is also significant: Scorsese doesn't trust the audience to grasp the intricacies of high finance and tells them so.) The first 45 minutes or so of the film are good, raucous and vulgar fun -- we enjoy seeing rogues at work and the movie-making is exuberant. The last hour of the picture is pretty much a drag, but this part of the film is clearly a Scorsese picture and has some merit: we get to see some domestic abuse (Marty Scorsese loves to show beautiful women being beat up) and there is a certain intensity to some of the scenes between DiCaprio's character and his trophy wife. But the film's middle hour is completely redundant and, worse, boring in an almost baffling way -- who would have thought that orgies and spectacular excess could be so dull? Curiously, Scorsese completely loses any sense of rhythm, a peculiar failing because, if nothing else, the old master's films have always been brilliantly and incisively edited. The movie has no dramatic arc and there is no conflict of any sort. It's nothing more than spectacle, as hollow in some ways as a typical Hollywood blockbuster involving the Iron Man or the Fantastic Four or Batman. Scorsese is enamoured with DiCaprio's hammy acting -- he's like a less appealing Ray Liotta -- and he indulges his star with innumerable close-ups, allowing DiCaprio to make not one, but, at least, three St. Cripin's Day speeches to his assembled minions, the last of them almost unbearably sentimental and maudlin. Furthermore, these St. Crispin's day speeches, particularly the last are almost comically inept, sub-Mamet posturing. In the last speech, in particular, an entire sub-plot involving a female employee is referenced -- but we have never seen this woman before and have no idea who she is and Scorsese hasn't bothered to lay any foundation for this maudlin sequence. (Of course, I understand Scorsese's point, a theme that like everything else in this movie is ridiculously over-determiend -- he wants to show that the same man tearfully addressing his loyal troops is willing to betray them at the drop of a hat, but, surely, this message could be more economically conveyed.) At every juncture, DiCaprio is allowed to emote and shriek obscenities; the problem with the performance is that it has literally no place to go. DiCaprio just screams more and more loudly and grits his teeth as if suffering a severely uncomfortable bowel movement and, sometimes, throws tantrums so impressive that the veins in this throat stand out and his face turns red -- this is neat to see but it has nothing to do with acting. Every plot point is repeated four or five times and the endless orgies and sex scenes end up being completely flaccid -- this is because nothing in the film seems even remotely true to life. DiCaprio's character is so incomprehensibly stupid that he tries to bribe an FBI man and has to have the distinction between the SEC and the FBI explained to him. In the big crowd scenes, every member of DiCaprio's organization seems slavishly obedient to their boss and absurdly gung-ho -- is it true that there wasn't a single sane person in DiCaprio's entire, massive trading operation, a single person who didn't obediently cry "Sieg Heil!" to their Fuehrer's machinations? -- the scenes showing the devotion of DiCaprio's lieutenants and employees are totally unconvincing and poorly staged to boot. There are scenes that don't make any sense at all: in one sequence, Rob Reiner, playing the hero's father, discusses female pubic hair with his son -- the conversation is so glaringly unconvincing that the audience cringes in dismay. no father and son in the world have ever had a conversation of this kind. The orgies involving crowds of perfect movie-star bodies are the purest fantasy and not even convincing as pornography. (I've been at cocaine parties with crooked and super-wealthy people and the kind of stuff shown in the movie isn't even remotely true to life.) Even worse, the sequences involving plea bargaining with the Feds simply recycle hoary cliches from third-rate TV shows about cops and robbers -- no wealthy man would ever act the way DiCaprio behaves in these sequences. It's all totally and complete phony and, worse, morally meretricious. Most people who see this film will admire DiCaprio's character and want to emulate him -- this is the same problem afflicting Brian DePalma's "Scarface," a film that "The Wolf of Wall Street" resembles in its ambivalent approach to its hero. The moral point is completely buried under a mountain of footage encouraging the audience to admire the antics of the vicious main character. In fact, Scorsese clearly allies himself with DiCaprio's character and the corrupt one percent against the rest of us: this is evident in a sequence equating the FBI man's ride on the subway with DiCaprio's transportation to jail on a similar public conveyance, a bus -- the FBI man with his limited salary is perceived by the film as a fool, a chump, and a prisoner; this point is rammed home by the cut from the FBI man on the subway to a shot showing DiCaprio transported to prison. "The Wolf of Wall Street" is surprisingly bad and, even, incompetent. In one scene, Scorsese puts two equally bland blonde bombshells on the screen -- one is Latvian and the other is the hero's wife -- and we literally can't tell them apart. There is nothing in this picture that Scorsese hasn't done better, more authentically, and with more pictorial authority in other movies. "The Wolf of Wall Street" suggests that Scorsese needs to extricate himself from Leonardo DiCaprio's baleful influence -- the two men have made five films together; this should be their last.