The real star of Crocodile is the landscape in which it is set -- apparently, Iceland at its most ferocious. Similarly, the aspect of Hang the DJ that is most notable is the setting, a sort of High-Tech Isle of Cythera with posh, hushed restaurants, self-driving vehicles gliding soundlessly along sylvan lanes, carefully groomed water-features with follies set into manicured hillsides, and, of course, a vast wall as high as the sky sealing this pastoral realm of love and erotic delight from the rest of the cosmos. Both episodes of the dystopian Sci-Fi anthology Black Mirror are intriguing, but not as exciting or horrifying as some of the best shows in the series. And, in fact, neither show is intrinsically science fiction -- technology hovers around the edges of both shows but the dilemmas actually presented could be dramatized without recourse to science fiction at all.
In Crocodile, a glacially icy female architect finds herself threatened as a result of a crime in which she was complicit fifteen years earlier -- a hit and run accident on a lonely road in Arctic mountains. The protagonist kills the man driving the car when the hit-and-run accident happened when he resurfaces and wishes to confess and, then, finds herself trapped in a situation in which she has to slaughter other people to keep them from learning her secret. All of this takes place in a surreal landscape of formidable barren mountains and icy fjords -- the architect has an ultra-modernist house that sits perched on a hillside among absolutely barren peaks and glaciers. The story feels ancient and, in fact, when the wraithlike, pale murderess is stalking her victims, carrying a claw hammer with which to beat them to death, the show achieves a kind of stark, uncanny horror. The only science fiction element in the plot is an electronic device that can be used to extract and screen memories on a computer. The use of the device is subject to various legal restrictions since, after all, retrieving memories is the ultimate search and seizure and these rules seem pretty elastic -- they bend according to the plot requirements. The show is naïve about how memories are constructed -- it shows them as simple fragments of film, but I think science has shown us (as well as personal experience) that memory has nothing like that character, that it is really a collage that is manufactured by the brain. (If we could screen other people's memories, I think they would be largely unintelligible.) The notion that memory is basically a camera poised to record the work drives the climax and denouement which is silly (it involves recovering the memories of rodent). The episode takes a Psycho-type turn when the unassuming protagonist, an ethnic Indian young woman who is a claims adjuster, is beaten to death with a piece of firewood -- she is the character who runs the device used for screening memories and, accidentally, uncovers evidence of the architect's crime while investigating a personal injury claim. (The nature of the personal injury claim and how it will be adjusted has not been thoroughly imagined -- we don't know for whom the claims adjuster is working or why she has to gather all the detailed facts that lead her to discover the crime committed by the architect.) On reflection, the show is pretty stupid and its denouement irremediably silly but... the show is gripping while you're watching. (Incidentally, the program features various iterations of a song performed in the first season in one of the most memorable and horrific episodes -- this song seems to haunt later programs and surfaces from time to time, half-heard, but very evocative.) You may want to watch this show with subtitles engaged -- the characters speak in a dense Scottish brogue that I had trouble understanding. The only words that I could decipher were obscene.
Perhaps, you wonder how computerized dating services work. You identify your personal characteristics and, then, a match is provided -- some services, apparently, even specify the percentage of characteristics matched. (In Hang the DJ, the young lovers enjoy something like a 99.8 % match). So how is this feat accomplished? The show suggests that these computer match programs create a simulation of the lovers, put them in a dating pool in an idealized garden-like environment. Each lover agrees to tap a button on their control console simultaneously with his or her partner -- the console will display the length of the relationship, that is, it's expiry date. This date may be as short as a couple of hours to many years. The concept is to cycle the lovers through various couplings and uncouplings until a nearly perfect match is achieved. Hang the DJ relies on various staples of Black Mirror narrative -- the lovers emerge from darkness and, ultimately, discover that the idealized environment of gardens and luxury restaurants and cottages for sex is unreal and that they themselves are simulations, phantasms created by a computer program. The other aspect of the program that is characteristic of Black Mirror is distortion in time, that is, a disconnect between experienced time and computer time -- the lovers in the computer program cycle through a number of partners in what seems to be 14 or 15 months. However, at the end of the program, when the episode finally reveals the real flesh-and-blood counterparts to the idealized characters in the computer program it seems as if the match has been made in a matter of seconds. There are holes in the whimsical plot big enough to drive a truck through but the show is engaging and the eerie, vaguely unreal environment in which the lovers meet and interact has a strangely allegorical power.
Thursday, January 4, 2018
Tuesday, January 2, 2018
Black Mirror: Arkangel
Arkangel, the second show in the fourth season of Black Mirror is plenty disturbing until it goes off-track. Most TV shows are ruined by the absence of any thought at all. When Black Mirror fails it is due to an excess of thought, too many good ideas clogging the esthetic pipeline. The opening 15 minutes of the episode is the most frightening because clinging most closely to ordinary experience. A single mother, living with her elderly father in the house, I assume, in which she grew up, becomes intensely protective of her daughter. The neighborhood in which the family lives looks tough -- it's a crumbling blue-collar enclave in what appears to be a crumbling industrial city, possibly a place like Allenstown, Pa. The mother delivered her daughter by C-section and the child may have been distressed and, even, in danger of dying immediately after the procedure -- this is all effectively shown through the mother's eyes and we never really know what happened. (It's the phenomenon that most of us may have experienced in intensive care when a patient endures a crisis and is swarmed by doctors and nurses who quickly and efficiently screen the medical emergency from witnesses.) Her daughter wanders off while playing in a tiny playground adjacent to a frightening railroad track and there's a menacing black German shepherd behind a cyclone fence a few houses away. In order to protect her daughter, the mother participates in a test of surveillance technology made by a company named Arkangel -- her daughter has a chip injected into her brain which not only locates the girl on a map but, also, has two other dangerously invasive features: the mother can access a mode that actually lets her see through her daughter's eyes and, further, when there is a excess of cortisol, (a hormonal sign of "fight or flight syndrome") detected in the young girl's system, the mother can press a button that "filters" out the scary stimulus -- a threatening dog becomes a mere blur of motion and the sound of the beast's barking becomes a faint whisper. With her laptop, the mother can effectively hear and see what her daughter hears and sees and, further, modify her responses to frightening or dangerous stimuli. There's too much here for an hour program and the show, after a frightening half hour, slides gently off the tracks. When the girl becomes a teenager and starts dating -- of course, a boy of which the mother disapproves -- the mother begins intense and voyeuristic surveillance. This ultimately leads to awful misunderstandings and calamity. (One path not taken is the mother's possible voyeuristic involvement in her daughter's sex life -- this thematic element, too disturbing I think even for Black Mirror is carefully eschewed: the mother is given a handsome boyfriend as well so that she is not tempted to live vicariously through her daughter.) Various aspects of the show are not integrated: the idea that the mother can limit her daughter's fear reaction to dangerous stimuli is not explored in a convincing way. First, the concept is flawed: it would seem that filtering natural reactions to fearsome events would make a person more, and not less, vulnerable to danger. Second, it is suggested that the mother's hypervigilance has, somehow, induced a counter-reaction -- that is, the daughter is more interested in horrible and gory things than she would be if these had not been filtered. At the climax of the film, the daughter violently assaults her mother but can't really see what is going on because of the filter -- but we haven't seen anyone turn the filter on. And why wouldn't the mother quash her daughter's nascent sex life by simply "filtering it" to make sensations less intense. There's a whole serpent's nest of nasty ways this show could develop but which are not explored -- of course, this is due to the brevity of the episode. Most of what is on screen is brilliant but doesn't fit together -- a good example is the virgin daughter's first experience of sex which she enlivens with an enthusiastic filthy commentary. This seems implausible and disconcerts the poor boy. But he understands what is going on -- the daughter is a consumer of porn on the internet and her obscene "play-by-play" is merely her attempt to imitate what she has seen on her phone or laptop. (The boyfriend tells her that she doesn't have to vocalize in that manner and she seems relieved.) Ultimately, the film proposes this moral: those who are hyper-vigilant about their children's safety, merely end up encouraging more risky and dangerous behavior. Whether this is true is left to the viewer. Jodie Foster directed this episode skillfully -- the film has a pseudo-documentary, neo-realist feel about it.
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Jumanji -- Welcome to the Jungle
Jumanji - Welcome to the Jungle (Jake Kasdan 2017) is a fun and inspiring adventure film that does more to combat Donald Trump's form of divisive politics than a hundred strident speeches. The picture rebukes the notion that a single hero can accomplish much of anything and makes the strongest possible argument for cooperation and self-sacrifice. The picture is morally and ethically sound in every respect and, therefore, I think pretty much ideal for families with children. At the heart of divisive politics is a failure of the imagination -- a White man in Texas can't imagine what it would be like to be a Black single mother in south Chicago; a San Francisco Black Lives Matter activist can't imagine what it would be like to the Italian-American wife of Detroit police officer. When I use the hopeless verb "can't", I refer to a failure of the imagination. Most of us are sufficiently imaginative to be able to transpose ourselves emotionally, if only for a short time, into an encounter with the plight of another who is different from us. But this is a faculty that goes unused too often and, with disuse, I think, atrophies. At the heart of Jumanji is a noble thought experiment: what if a Jewish High School nerd, afflicted with all manner of neuroses were to inhabit the body of Dwayne Johnson, the Rock? What if a self-effacing studious girl were to find herself in the flesh of a sexy popular cheerleader? What if a Black jock famous for his athletic prowess were to become a weak, cowardly Black "everyman"? And what if a cute blonde bombshell were to find herself embodied in a fat, out-of-shape middle-aged man? These are the transformations fundamental to the plot in Jumanji - Welcome to the Jungle and the exercise of imagination necessary to suspending disbelief with respect to such metamorphoses, I think, is preparation for the kind of empathy has been grievously lacking in our public discourse. I recognize that I'm making large claims for a trivial Saturday matinee action-adventure. But here is my point: a lot of movies make you feel debased, exploited and stupid -- the recent installment of Star Wars had this effect on me. The audience at Jumanji walks out of the movie, I think, uplifted, having experienced a narrative that teaches important moral lessons. And, so, I recommend the film highly.
In 1981, Chris van Allsberg wrote a spooky children's book called Jumanji. The books was prescient in many ways -- it imagined a board game that sucks its players into its narrative, that is, an interactive game that is ultimately a precursor to the virtual reality featured in state-of-the-art computer games today. (It's interesting to speculate that children who read -- or had read to them -- Van Allsberg's book and who looked at its eerie high-detail black and white pictures may have grown up to be soft-ware gaming engineers in part due to the influence of that book.) In 1995, the book was adapted for a film starring Robin Williams -- I recall the movie as being merely adequate. The 2017 iteration of the story updates the story to refer to modern computer gaming. The film's premise is that four very widely disparate High School students are assigned detention and, in the course of cleaning out a storage room, hear jungle drums and are, then, sucked into the game. The first twenty minutes of the movie setting up the situation is a marvel of efficient, and complex, narrative -- the characters of the kids are established and the plot forces them together for detention. The jock, the Jewish brain, the girl scientist, and the ultra-vain and self-centered cheerleader all find themselves trapped in the jungle and embodied by avatars that are diametrically opposed in most respects to their real identities. The film, then, establishes a chase narrative, a bit like something from the Raiders of the Lost Ark series -- the characters have to cooperate to restore an emerald gem to the forehead of a huge panther statue in the midst of the jungle. There is a bad guy -- he spits scorpions at his enemies, plays with a tarantula, and has centipedes creeping and out of his ears. He is mounted on motorcycle with a horde of henchmen and they pursue the four heroes on their adventure to restore the gem to the idol's brow. The film has all the standard action tropes: the jump from a cliff into the deep water of a plunge pool of a great waterfall, the flight through a narrow canyon in a faltering helicopter, and various battles with lions and tigers and hippos and rhinos -- there are also a lot of snakes. The action is serviceably managed, but each sequence of this sort is similar to something you have seen done demonstrably better in some other movie-- probably in one of the Lost Ark movies directed by Steven Spielberg. This doesn't matter, nor does it detract from the film because of the power of the movie's uplifting message -- diversity is good, we are best when we are united in a common purpose, and each person brings unique skills and talents to the table. (The film's deep structure is The Wizard of Oz -- in that movie, we have the same trek through a hostile landscape, four heroes each with a different skill-set and exceptional powers, and a relentless chase by bad guys; in Jumanji, the winged and flying monkeys in black leather are replaced by the bad guys in leather on their motorcycles. The Wizard of Oz, in turn, is based on folk tales involving a group of heroes, each with one improbable supernatural skill -- an ability to run very fast or to fly or see with telescopic intensity. The narrative is designed to allow each hero to use his or her superpowers at least once in the story for the common good.) Jumanji is generally entertaining for its two hour length with non-stop action and some of the film is quite funny. In one scene, Jack Black inhabited by a vain and beautiful young woman teaches the studious girl, who is now in the body of a sex-bomb, how to vamp and flirt with men. When we see her put her wiles to use, the girl imitates Jack Black who, in turn, has imitated another sexy girl -- she walks wiggling her ass to the extent that someone watching from afar asks if she's twisted an ankle. This likeable film is not without faults -- the sex-bomb avatar is said to possess the skill of "Dance Fighting." We see her "dance fighting" a couple of times and it's disappointing -- she doesn't really dance, she just fights. Given the size of this film's budget and its aspirations, it seems to me that he fight scenes could have been choreographed as dances and, therefore, would have been much superior to what is shown in the film. This failing is a small one and doesn't materially detract from the comic charm of the picture.
In 1981, Chris van Allsberg wrote a spooky children's book called Jumanji. The books was prescient in many ways -- it imagined a board game that sucks its players into its narrative, that is, an interactive game that is ultimately a precursor to the virtual reality featured in state-of-the-art computer games today. (It's interesting to speculate that children who read -- or had read to them -- Van Allsberg's book and who looked at its eerie high-detail black and white pictures may have grown up to be soft-ware gaming engineers in part due to the influence of that book.) In 1995, the book was adapted for a film starring Robin Williams -- I recall the movie as being merely adequate. The 2017 iteration of the story updates the story to refer to modern computer gaming. The film's premise is that four very widely disparate High School students are assigned detention and, in the course of cleaning out a storage room, hear jungle drums and are, then, sucked into the game. The first twenty minutes of the movie setting up the situation is a marvel of efficient, and complex, narrative -- the characters of the kids are established and the plot forces them together for detention. The jock, the Jewish brain, the girl scientist, and the ultra-vain and self-centered cheerleader all find themselves trapped in the jungle and embodied by avatars that are diametrically opposed in most respects to their real identities. The film, then, establishes a chase narrative, a bit like something from the Raiders of the Lost Ark series -- the characters have to cooperate to restore an emerald gem to the forehead of a huge panther statue in the midst of the jungle. There is a bad guy -- he spits scorpions at his enemies, plays with a tarantula, and has centipedes creeping and out of his ears. He is mounted on motorcycle with a horde of henchmen and they pursue the four heroes on their adventure to restore the gem to the idol's brow. The film has all the standard action tropes: the jump from a cliff into the deep water of a plunge pool of a great waterfall, the flight through a narrow canyon in a faltering helicopter, and various battles with lions and tigers and hippos and rhinos -- there are also a lot of snakes. The action is serviceably managed, but each sequence of this sort is similar to something you have seen done demonstrably better in some other movie-- probably in one of the Lost Ark movies directed by Steven Spielberg. This doesn't matter, nor does it detract from the film because of the power of the movie's uplifting message -- diversity is good, we are best when we are united in a common purpose, and each person brings unique skills and talents to the table. (The film's deep structure is The Wizard of Oz -- in that movie, we have the same trek through a hostile landscape, four heroes each with a different skill-set and exceptional powers, and a relentless chase by bad guys; in Jumanji, the winged and flying monkeys in black leather are replaced by the bad guys in leather on their motorcycles. The Wizard of Oz, in turn, is based on folk tales involving a group of heroes, each with one improbable supernatural skill -- an ability to run very fast or to fly or see with telescopic intensity. The narrative is designed to allow each hero to use his or her superpowers at least once in the story for the common good.) Jumanji is generally entertaining for its two hour length with non-stop action and some of the film is quite funny. In one scene, Jack Black inhabited by a vain and beautiful young woman teaches the studious girl, who is now in the body of a sex-bomb, how to vamp and flirt with men. When we see her put her wiles to use, the girl imitates Jack Black who, in turn, has imitated another sexy girl -- she walks wiggling her ass to the extent that someone watching from afar asks if she's twisted an ankle. This likeable film is not without faults -- the sex-bomb avatar is said to possess the skill of "Dance Fighting." We see her "dance fighting" a couple of times and it's disappointing -- she doesn't really dance, she just fights. Given the size of this film's budget and its aspirations, it seems to me that he fight scenes could have been choreographed as dances and, therefore, would have been much superior to what is shown in the film. This failing is a small one and doesn't materially detract from the comic charm of the picture.
Black Mirror (Season 4) ; U.S.S. Callister
The dystopian science fiction anthology series, Black Mirror, apparently a product of Netflix and the BBC, is notable for having reinventing, in our secular age, the idea of hell. Several of the episodes posit that consciousness, no longer embodied, but injected into a computer system as a digital code, can be made infinite in its ability to enjoy pleasure (the heaven posited by the famous episode "San Junipero") -- and, conversely, digitized consciousness can be made to suffer infinite torment since anguish inflicted upon an disembodied mind doesn't offer the respite of physical death. This latter concept is central to the very funny and disturbing episode "U.S.S. Callister".
On its face, "U.S.S. Callister" is a clever and pitch-perfect (at first) pastiche of the old TV show Star Trek at its most primitive and threadbare. Jesse Plemons (familiar to me from his great performance as the butcher in the second season of Fargo) plays the part of a man famous for his brilliant computer coding. Plemons' character has invented a multi-player computer game named Star Fleet -- this is his, and the show's homage to the sixties TV show Star Trek. The opening scene shows the star-deck of the star fleet cruiser U.S.S. Callister -- imperiously ordering people around Plemons' character plays the part of Captain Kirk; he affects perfect diction and the slightest British accent and, after successfully destroying his nemesis, he kisses each of the comely women in his six member crew on the lips. This sequence is rendered with the utmost fidelity to the old TV show -- the set is identical and the acting is all uniformly bad with equally terrible special effects embedded in a plodding mise-en-scene. After this sequence, we see the hero riding an elevator to his place of work -- a software firm in a skyscraper somewhere. On the job, the hero is mercilessly badgered and abused by his CEO and partner. When a young woman, who turns out to be the show's heroine, arrives for her first day at work, the attractive Black woman and the blonde receptionist tell her to keep her distance from the coding genius -- he's "creepy" they say. At the outset, the show sets us up to sympathize with the poor computer-genius geek -- a sensitive soul who keeps in his office every past episode of Star Fleet and who everyone disrespects and mocks behind his back. But the script's apparent display of empathy for the computer geek turns out to be a brilliant, and disconcerting indirection. In fact, the computer geek is a monster, one of the most disturbing villains in recent TV and film history. It turns out that he has seized the DNA from the people who tease or ignore or abuse him in the workplace. Using these DNA samples, he encodes his co-workers into the video game, Star Fleet, and, then, as their commander (and also God of this realm) torments them mercilessly -- the fearful thing about this torture is that it is infinite; since the people he is tormenting feel themselves to be flesh and blood but, in fact, are merely streams of electronic data there is no end to the suffering that they can endure. In the vicious games that he plays, accordingly, the computer geek exacts a horrific revenge on the people who have mistreated him in real life. I'm not inclined to reveal much more about this 75 minute episode, which is intensely exciting, except to say that the new hire, a resourceful young programmer, finds herself trapped in the nightmare game and schemes to free herself -- she has to accomplish this by finding a way to communicate with her "real self", -- that is her embodied self who is working for the computer genius blithely unaware that he has seized her "data" and is torturing her savagely in the game that he plays at night. (The show poses a fascinating philosophical question -- what if there was another me, exactly identical to the me that I define as myself? what would I be willing to sacrifice to save this identical self from terrible torture if I didn't feel that torture myself? This is the fundamental problem of compassion and empathy because, after all, to some extent other people are, indeed, very similar to us -- the program doesn't develop this theme enough to my taste, but the idea is implicit in the story. As it turns out, the "me" that is trapped in the game has to literally blackmail the "other me", that is the real embodied "me", to get her take any meaningful action.)
The show is both terrifying and funny. The computer geek, of course, is probably celibate and he has resurrected his co-workers in the game as figures with Barbie genitalia -- that is, no genitals at all. One of the characters says that it's awful "to not even be able to take a shit." In the game, he torments his enemies by turning them into horrifying arachnid monsters or by, simply, removing their faces. But when a pizza arrives, he has to pause the game -- then, his hapless characters sit around guzzling booze or chatting about their travails. In the middle of a phaser battle with an bug-monster, a pizza is delivered to the villain in his apartment where he is playing the game and he puts the action on pause. Everyone relaxes while he is gone. Someone notes that the bug monster is really "Jenny, from the mail department -- he turned her into a bug forever because she wouldn't cooperate". When this is said, Jenny as a bug nods her head in a friendly sort of way and wags one of her tentacle tails. There's some defects in the show: the ending is a bit unresolved and the heroine has to be blackmailed into helping to defeat the villain by a threat to disclose her private photos, some which she wishes she had deleted, to all her friends and family -- this kind of electronic blackmail is a staple of the series and has been featured on other episodes. But the heroine, who is sexually aggressive, says surveying her de-sexed computer body, "He's gonna pay for taking away my pussy!", a noble enough sentiment but one that suggests that the blackmail threat would not be too effective on this specific character. There are other flaws as well, but this is the sort of TV show that once seen can't be unseen -- it will want haunt you.
On its face, "U.S.S. Callister" is a clever and pitch-perfect (at first) pastiche of the old TV show Star Trek at its most primitive and threadbare. Jesse Plemons (familiar to me from his great performance as the butcher in the second season of Fargo) plays the part of a man famous for his brilliant computer coding. Plemons' character has invented a multi-player computer game named Star Fleet -- this is his, and the show's homage to the sixties TV show Star Trek. The opening scene shows the star-deck of the star fleet cruiser U.S.S. Callister -- imperiously ordering people around Plemons' character plays the part of Captain Kirk; he affects perfect diction and the slightest British accent and, after successfully destroying his nemesis, he kisses each of the comely women in his six member crew on the lips. This sequence is rendered with the utmost fidelity to the old TV show -- the set is identical and the acting is all uniformly bad with equally terrible special effects embedded in a plodding mise-en-scene. After this sequence, we see the hero riding an elevator to his place of work -- a software firm in a skyscraper somewhere. On the job, the hero is mercilessly badgered and abused by his CEO and partner. When a young woman, who turns out to be the show's heroine, arrives for her first day at work, the attractive Black woman and the blonde receptionist tell her to keep her distance from the coding genius -- he's "creepy" they say. At the outset, the show sets us up to sympathize with the poor computer-genius geek -- a sensitive soul who keeps in his office every past episode of Star Fleet and who everyone disrespects and mocks behind his back. But the script's apparent display of empathy for the computer geek turns out to be a brilliant, and disconcerting indirection. In fact, the computer geek is a monster, one of the most disturbing villains in recent TV and film history. It turns out that he has seized the DNA from the people who tease or ignore or abuse him in the workplace. Using these DNA samples, he encodes his co-workers into the video game, Star Fleet, and, then, as their commander (and also God of this realm) torments them mercilessly -- the fearful thing about this torture is that it is infinite; since the people he is tormenting feel themselves to be flesh and blood but, in fact, are merely streams of electronic data there is no end to the suffering that they can endure. In the vicious games that he plays, accordingly, the computer geek exacts a horrific revenge on the people who have mistreated him in real life. I'm not inclined to reveal much more about this 75 minute episode, which is intensely exciting, except to say that the new hire, a resourceful young programmer, finds herself trapped in the nightmare game and schemes to free herself -- she has to accomplish this by finding a way to communicate with her "real self", -- that is her embodied self who is working for the computer genius blithely unaware that he has seized her "data" and is torturing her savagely in the game that he plays at night. (The show poses a fascinating philosophical question -- what if there was another me, exactly identical to the me that I define as myself? what would I be willing to sacrifice to save this identical self from terrible torture if I didn't feel that torture myself? This is the fundamental problem of compassion and empathy because, after all, to some extent other people are, indeed, very similar to us -- the program doesn't develop this theme enough to my taste, but the idea is implicit in the story. As it turns out, the "me" that is trapped in the game has to literally blackmail the "other me", that is the real embodied "me", to get her take any meaningful action.)
The show is both terrifying and funny. The computer geek, of course, is probably celibate and he has resurrected his co-workers in the game as figures with Barbie genitalia -- that is, no genitals at all. One of the characters says that it's awful "to not even be able to take a shit." In the game, he torments his enemies by turning them into horrifying arachnid monsters or by, simply, removing their faces. But when a pizza arrives, he has to pause the game -- then, his hapless characters sit around guzzling booze or chatting about their travails. In the middle of a phaser battle with an bug-monster, a pizza is delivered to the villain in his apartment where he is playing the game and he puts the action on pause. Everyone relaxes while he is gone. Someone notes that the bug monster is really "Jenny, from the mail department -- he turned her into a bug forever because she wouldn't cooperate". When this is said, Jenny as a bug nods her head in a friendly sort of way and wags one of her tentacle tails. There's some defects in the show: the ending is a bit unresolved and the heroine has to be blackmailed into helping to defeat the villain by a threat to disclose her private photos, some which she wishes she had deleted, to all her friends and family -- this kind of electronic blackmail is a staple of the series and has been featured on other episodes. But the heroine, who is sexually aggressive, says surveying her de-sexed computer body, "He's gonna pay for taking away my pussy!", a noble enough sentiment but one that suggests that the blackmail threat would not be too effective on this specific character. There are other flaws as well, but this is the sort of TV show that once seen can't be unseen -- it will want haunt you.
Wednesday, December 27, 2017
The Greatest Showman
It is something of an irony that 2017, the year in which "the Greatest Show on Earth," the Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey circus closed forever, ends with a splashy movie musical, The Greatest Showman that celebrates the founding of that enterprise. Hugh Jackman plays the part of Phineas T. Barnum and the film is an exuberant, exceedingly inaccurate, musical biopic. Brilliantly edited, the film blasts along for 105 minutes, most of which seem devoted to colorful and extravagant song and dance numbers. There is no particularly virtuosic dancing in the film -- nothing to rival Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire -- and elaborate dance sequences look to me like variants on the kind of large-scale ensemble dancing that characterizes Bollywood productions. The musical song-and-dance numbers are not conceived as arias apart from the action -- rather, they tend to drive the film forward, contributing to its powerful narrative thrust. There are some tender love songs and a great pas de deux involving a boy and girl alternately hoisted up fifty feet in the air or twirling vertiginously downward on a thick rope connected to a massive counterweight, but the majority of the music is infectious, if heavy-handed rock and roll, instantly forgettable tunes carried along on a stomping beat -- in fact, at least, two numbers feature the dancers rhythmically stomping on the stage. There's no denying that much of music is impressive in a driving, propulsive kind of way and the lavish dance sequences are beautifully lit and edited. The movie is cut in such a way as to jump swiftly from action to action -- a boy and a girl climb a fence, the next shot is a close-up of the boy's boot landing heavily in the garden on the other side of the fence; this type of editing is characteristic of the film -- a gesture is directed to some future place or time and we are shown the objective of the gesture without any intervening motion.
The film begins with a big production number in a circus ring. Suddenly, the cheering audience goes silent and the movie progresses into a flashback. We see Barnum's youth as a poor and despised tailor's boy. (In one scene, when he is "down and out", a woman with a freakishly deformed face hands him an apple -- later, we see the apple as an inspiration for Barnum to gather into his show as many actual freaks as possible.) He marries into a wealthy family, to the great dismay of his bride's parents -- exactly how Barnum bridges the social and wealth gap is completely unclear and unimportant as far the story is concerned. Rather, with fairy tale aplomb, we see Barnum win the girl and, using some worthless titles to sunken ships as collateral, acquire sufficient capital to open his museum. He recruits a number of freaks -- these sequences are among the best and most touching in the film. The freaks are despised and their own parents are ashamed of them; Barnum gathers them together into an ensemble that serves as a kind of chorus throughout the film, a "family" as the impressively hirsute Bearded Lady says. Encountering Charles Strattan, later famous as General Tom Thumb, Barnum responds to the boy's complaint that "people will pay to laugh at me" by saying "their already laughing, you might as well make them pay." This isn't sufficiently persuasive and so Barnum says to the shy boy: "I will make you a general, dress you in the finest uniforms, and mount you on the most beautiful horse. People will look up to you." Using a similar pitch, Barnum enlists the rest of his company, including the famous Chang and Eng, Siamese Twins, and his human oddities make him a millionaire. All is well until Barnum, happily married with two little girls, entices Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, to tour America. The showman loses his way, begins to adopt the highfalutin' ways of his critics, and, almost, succumbs to the Swedish singer's feminine wiles. She kisses him on stage and the image causes a scandal. (This element is a calumny on the good name of the historical Jenny Lind and terrifically unfair and untrue.) Barnum's freaks are constantly involved in street-fighting with local ruffians and there is a subtext involving societal disapproval of an inter-racial relationship between Barnum's partner and a comely African-American trapeze artist. In the course of a riot in which racist thugs fight the freaks, P. T. Barnum's museum of oddities burns down. Barnum seems defeated at first, but, then, his loyal freaks find him in a bar, perk up his spirits, and, revived, the great showman goes forth to win back his wife (and twin daughters) and found the Big-Top circus that bore his name until this very year 2017. While the freaks do an explosive dance under the Big Top, Barnum rides Jumbo, the immense elephant, through the snowy streets of Manhattan to join his wife for a ballet recital in which his two daughters star. And, so, there is a happy ending, pleasing to all. (Unseemly aspects of Barnum's career -- for instance, his exhibition of a tubercular and dying Black woman as the "slave who nursed George Washington", his display of the Circassian "moss-haired" women and the showman's exploitation of microcephalics and other developmentally disabled people in his shows -- are wholly suppressed.)
When the plot of The Greatest Showman is baldly recounted, it's pretty evident that the musical is heavily didactic, maudlin, and sentimental. And, I suppose, these criticism are accurate. But the film moves so swiftly and with such sure-footed grace that we are willing to accept all of its absurdities. The damned thing is so wonderfully entertaining that I am willing to forgive its manifold flaws. And, I suppose, there is something to be said for the messages of good will that the film so broadly transmits -- freaks are shown to be human and endearing and courageous, diversity is affirmed, and, even, Barnum's most hostile critic is won over -- "you seem to be celebrating the family of mankind," the priggish supercilious critic, now a fan, tells Barnum. The episodes move with lightning speed, the acting is universally good, and the ethical points that the film endorses are virtuous and worthy. Much of the dialogue is funny and epigrammatic -- it's like capitalist Brecht on steroids. This film is so purely entertaining that I'm compelled to recommend it.
The film begins with a big production number in a circus ring. Suddenly, the cheering audience goes silent and the movie progresses into a flashback. We see Barnum's youth as a poor and despised tailor's boy. (In one scene, when he is "down and out", a woman with a freakishly deformed face hands him an apple -- later, we see the apple as an inspiration for Barnum to gather into his show as many actual freaks as possible.) He marries into a wealthy family, to the great dismay of his bride's parents -- exactly how Barnum bridges the social and wealth gap is completely unclear and unimportant as far the story is concerned. Rather, with fairy tale aplomb, we see Barnum win the girl and, using some worthless titles to sunken ships as collateral, acquire sufficient capital to open his museum. He recruits a number of freaks -- these sequences are among the best and most touching in the film. The freaks are despised and their own parents are ashamed of them; Barnum gathers them together into an ensemble that serves as a kind of chorus throughout the film, a "family" as the impressively hirsute Bearded Lady says. Encountering Charles Strattan, later famous as General Tom Thumb, Barnum responds to the boy's complaint that "people will pay to laugh at me" by saying "their already laughing, you might as well make them pay." This isn't sufficiently persuasive and so Barnum says to the shy boy: "I will make you a general, dress you in the finest uniforms, and mount you on the most beautiful horse. People will look up to you." Using a similar pitch, Barnum enlists the rest of his company, including the famous Chang and Eng, Siamese Twins, and his human oddities make him a millionaire. All is well until Barnum, happily married with two little girls, entices Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, to tour America. The showman loses his way, begins to adopt the highfalutin' ways of his critics, and, almost, succumbs to the Swedish singer's feminine wiles. She kisses him on stage and the image causes a scandal. (This element is a calumny on the good name of the historical Jenny Lind and terrifically unfair and untrue.) Barnum's freaks are constantly involved in street-fighting with local ruffians and there is a subtext involving societal disapproval of an inter-racial relationship between Barnum's partner and a comely African-American trapeze artist. In the course of a riot in which racist thugs fight the freaks, P. T. Barnum's museum of oddities burns down. Barnum seems defeated at first, but, then, his loyal freaks find him in a bar, perk up his spirits, and, revived, the great showman goes forth to win back his wife (and twin daughters) and found the Big-Top circus that bore his name until this very year 2017. While the freaks do an explosive dance under the Big Top, Barnum rides Jumbo, the immense elephant, through the snowy streets of Manhattan to join his wife for a ballet recital in which his two daughters star. And, so, there is a happy ending, pleasing to all. (Unseemly aspects of Barnum's career -- for instance, his exhibition of a tubercular and dying Black woman as the "slave who nursed George Washington", his display of the Circassian "moss-haired" women and the showman's exploitation of microcephalics and other developmentally disabled people in his shows -- are wholly suppressed.)
When the plot of The Greatest Showman is baldly recounted, it's pretty evident that the musical is heavily didactic, maudlin, and sentimental. And, I suppose, these criticism are accurate. But the film moves so swiftly and with such sure-footed grace that we are willing to accept all of its absurdities. The damned thing is so wonderfully entertaining that I am willing to forgive its manifold flaws. And, I suppose, there is something to be said for the messages of good will that the film so broadly transmits -- freaks are shown to be human and endearing and courageous, diversity is affirmed, and, even, Barnum's most hostile critic is won over -- "you seem to be celebrating the family of mankind," the priggish supercilious critic, now a fan, tells Barnum. The episodes move with lightning speed, the acting is universally good, and the ethical points that the film endorses are virtuous and worthy. Much of the dialogue is funny and epigrammatic -- it's like capitalist Brecht on steroids. This film is so purely entertaining that I'm compelled to recommend it.
Don Scott's new CD "Blues and Trouble"
Don Scott is a Minnesota musician specializing in austere, acoustic blues. Scott lives near Chatfield and performs in the upper Midwest (and nationwide) during the warm months. In the winter, he works mostly in Mexico. He has toured Europe frequently where he enjoys, perhaps, more acclaim than in the States. In concert, Scott makes a modest appearance, eschewing theatrics and preferring that the music speak for him on its own merits. He sits with his guitar on a stool or chair, wears a white fedora, and looks down at his feet as he plays. Scott is usually accompanied by a musician playing harmonica or Rosanne Licciardi who provides percussion. On this CD, Scott’s songs are arranged for accompaniment by percussion, standing bass, and piano. Scott provides vocals, guitar, and plays the harmonica.
When I have seen him perform live, Don Scott has played a mixture of original 12-bar blues tunes, compelling covers of old, lesser known traditional blues, and jaunty upbeat instrumentals. Although he is undoubtedly immensely accomplished on the guitar, Scott’s playing is understated, elegant, and tasteful – he doesn’t engage in showy exercises in virtuosity. His best instrument is his voice: Scott sings in a high, piercing tenor that's highly expressive. Scott’s range is the shivery upper register most familiar to blues fans from Robert Johnson. Like Johnson, Scott’s high voice sometimes takes on a keening aspect and, at other times, exudes suave menace. Unlike the delta Blues singer, Scott articulates clearly and his words can almost always be easily understood. (And Scott doesn’t essay the spooky falsetto whoops, howls that Johnson sometimes uses.)
Don Scott’s 2017 CD, Blues and Trouble is a handsomely designed recording that simulates a set that the musician might perform live in concert or at a tavern. There are 13 tunes on the CD, six of them original compositions by Scott – three of Scott’s original songs are instrumentals. The remaining seven songs are by well-known blues artists such as T Bone Walker and Bobby "Blue" Bland – although a deep-dyed blues fan might know these tunes from the original, I hadn’t heard any of the covers on this album in other performances. The songs are all strong and varied. Some of them are funny, others are tragic, even, perhaps, horrific – the instrumentals chug away in an unassuming, and pleasant way: these numbers are, in effect, smooth jazz designed to state a theme and, then, develop improvisation by the musicians. Each instrument gets a break and Scott’s side-men (and women) play their riffs with ingenuity and style. If the CD has a defect, it’s the sonic mix on some of the songs. Scott’s voice, particularly in its lower register, sometimes gets lost in the guitar licks and keyboard. To my ear, the recording engineer should have turned Scott’s voice up about 20 % on about half of the tunes.
My critique of the mix doesn’t apply to the first song on the CD, "Street Walkin’ Woman" (T Bone Walker) which seems to be almost perfectly performed and beautifully recorded. The song is a little blues gem. Of course, it sounds familiar, like its embedded in your DNA. (As far as I can determine, a variant of the song appears on T Bone Walker’s Stormy Monday album in 1967 under the title "Cold-hearted Woman." This tune in turn relies upon Robert Johnson’s 1936 "Kind-hearted Woman Blues" in which the singer pronounces the word "kind" as to be indistinguishable from "cold" – a point that is made clear in the final verse in which we learn that the "kind-hearted woman studies evil all the time." There are only about ten or twelve 16-bar blues tunes and these melodies get recycled endlessly. In the version recorded by Mr. Scott, the "Street Walkin’ Woman" is primarily promiscuous and a drunk – instead of "studying evil all the time" she’s "she’s tall and twisted all the time," presumably from pounding the pavement.)
"Devil Ride" is a moody cover of an Aaron Neville song. The lyrics warn against taking a ride with the devil. It’s an effective song in the voodoo Delta tradition – Robert Johnson, succumbing to satan’s temptations, demanded that his body should be buried on "the highway side...so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound and ride." "Devil Ride" is less hopeless and more monitory – but it invokes the old inclination toward voodoo and the dark arts integral to the traditional blues. Almost equally dire is Jr. Parker’s morose "Mother-in-Law Blues". The name promises comic relief but, in fact, the lyrics are melancholy – a drunk loses his woman when her mother-in-law rescues her from the inebriate singer. The song is an interesting combination of angry indignation and sorrow and Scott sings with raw, authentic emotion.
The most fun song on the CD is a cover of Prince Partridge’s "How Come My Dog Don’t Bark". Scott channels Randy Newman in the way that he styles the vocals, an elaborately loquacious and paranoid rant about a dog that seems a little too fond of another man who’s been hanging around the singer’s attractive wife. This song features brilliantly eloquent keyboard work embroidering the singer’s outraged harangue. The tune reaches its climax in a hyperbolic, spine-chilling series of threats – the singer plans to kill everyone in sight and has acquired from his barber a special knife with two razor-sharp edges: "I cut you once, you bleed twice," the aggrieved husband sings.
"Black Night" is a gorgeous ‘lonesome blues’ tune. The song has morose lyrics that are both archetypal and timely – the singer’s brother is in Afghanistan." The guitar work in this song seems to emanate from a hollow cave deep underground and there is a particularly sepulchral low note in the guitar solo that resonates like an earthquake. "Lazy Walk," "Cody’s Funky Butt," and "Sunday Cruisin’" are good-natured instrumentals . To my ear, these tunes are more jazz than blues, basically opportunities for the musicians to improvise on the basis of melodies supplied by the guitar. "Sunday Cruisin" is particularly laid-back and cheerful, a brightly layered groove that sounds a bit like Pat Metheny.
Anchoring the album are two songs written by Don Scott, "Some Other Day." and "8 Days of Hell." Both tunes seem rooted in the songwriter’s personal experiences and are very powerful, perhaps, the best work on the album. "Some Other Day" is a fierce protest about social priorities that give tax breaks to the rich while systematically underfunding Veteran’s Administration hospitals. The words and import are clear and the lyrics succinctly expose the hypocrisy of "supporting the troops" when budget cuts covertly subvert the VA. Blues songs depend on repetition and here the words "come some other day," repeat in a way that suggests the frustration of the singer told over and over again that there’s no room for him at the VA – the line for admission is too long. The melody has a menacing edge and the song cuts like a knife. I’ve seen Scott perform "8 Days of Hell," one of his best songs, and was pleased to see the piece included on this CD. Although modestly entitled "8 Days of Hell", the song measures the impact of a serious war injury on a young man’s entire life. Badly burned in an explosion, the singer is hospitalized first in Saigon and, then, Tokyo where the "smell of death" surrounds the 21-year old soldier. He recovers but his body is permanently scarred and his mind damaged – he vainly tries to forget the episode with "whisky and drugs" before concluding that those means to oblivion are just "a waste of time." Presumably, transforming the experience into a blues song is healing in a way and, in fact, the tune’s melody is mild, even lyrical. On this song, the beauty of the piano and guitar solos seem, at first, incongruent to the bitter, matter-of-fact lyrics – but since the song seems itself a means for controlling the demons summoned up by the "8 days of Hell", the elegant musical accompaniment is probably justified.
"Glad to Have These Blues" is another number by Don Scott that concludes the album. It’s appropriately jocular and stands in contrast to the more anguished tunes on the CD. Rosanne Licciardi provide percussion on the album. Karyn Quinn plays the upright bass and Brian Werner’s piano eloquently supplements Scott’s work.
You can learn more about the Don Scott Duo (Don Scott and percussionist Rosanne Licciardi) at www.donscottblues.com
(Some additional notes: "Devil Ride" originated as a Gospel tune although its imagery is clearly related to Blues' tunes about transactions with the devil. Since gospel and the blues are, often, simply two sides of one coin is not surprising that the lyrics tend to bleed into one another. Scott describes Big Bill Broonzy as an influence on his music, much more so than Robert Johnson. There is a wonderful version of "How Come My Dog Don't Bark Any More" on Dr. John's album Goin' Back to New Orleans, a record that Scott highly recommends.)
When I have seen him perform live, Don Scott has played a mixture of original 12-bar blues tunes, compelling covers of old, lesser known traditional blues, and jaunty upbeat instrumentals. Although he is undoubtedly immensely accomplished on the guitar, Scott’s playing is understated, elegant, and tasteful – he doesn’t engage in showy exercises in virtuosity. His best instrument is his voice: Scott sings in a high, piercing tenor that's highly expressive. Scott’s range is the shivery upper register most familiar to blues fans from Robert Johnson. Like Johnson, Scott’s high voice sometimes takes on a keening aspect and, at other times, exudes suave menace. Unlike the delta Blues singer, Scott articulates clearly and his words can almost always be easily understood. (And Scott doesn’t essay the spooky falsetto whoops, howls that Johnson sometimes uses.)
Don Scott’s 2017 CD, Blues and Trouble is a handsomely designed recording that simulates a set that the musician might perform live in concert or at a tavern. There are 13 tunes on the CD, six of them original compositions by Scott – three of Scott’s original songs are instrumentals. The remaining seven songs are by well-known blues artists such as T Bone Walker and Bobby "Blue" Bland – although a deep-dyed blues fan might know these tunes from the original, I hadn’t heard any of the covers on this album in other performances. The songs are all strong and varied. Some of them are funny, others are tragic, even, perhaps, horrific – the instrumentals chug away in an unassuming, and pleasant way: these numbers are, in effect, smooth jazz designed to state a theme and, then, develop improvisation by the musicians. Each instrument gets a break and Scott’s side-men (and women) play their riffs with ingenuity and style. If the CD has a defect, it’s the sonic mix on some of the songs. Scott’s voice, particularly in its lower register, sometimes gets lost in the guitar licks and keyboard. To my ear, the recording engineer should have turned Scott’s voice up about 20 % on about half of the tunes.
My critique of the mix doesn’t apply to the first song on the CD, "Street Walkin’ Woman" (T Bone Walker) which seems to be almost perfectly performed and beautifully recorded. The song is a little blues gem. Of course, it sounds familiar, like its embedded in your DNA. (As far as I can determine, a variant of the song appears on T Bone Walker’s Stormy Monday album in 1967 under the title "Cold-hearted Woman." This tune in turn relies upon Robert Johnson’s 1936 "Kind-hearted Woman Blues" in which the singer pronounces the word "kind" as to be indistinguishable from "cold" – a point that is made clear in the final verse in which we learn that the "kind-hearted woman studies evil all the time." There are only about ten or twelve 16-bar blues tunes and these melodies get recycled endlessly. In the version recorded by Mr. Scott, the "Street Walkin’ Woman" is primarily promiscuous and a drunk – instead of "studying evil all the time" she’s "she’s tall and twisted all the time," presumably from pounding the pavement.)
"Devil Ride" is a moody cover of an Aaron Neville song. The lyrics warn against taking a ride with the devil. It’s an effective song in the voodoo Delta tradition – Robert Johnson, succumbing to satan’s temptations, demanded that his body should be buried on "the highway side...so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound and ride." "Devil Ride" is less hopeless and more monitory – but it invokes the old inclination toward voodoo and the dark arts integral to the traditional blues. Almost equally dire is Jr. Parker’s morose "Mother-in-Law Blues". The name promises comic relief but, in fact, the lyrics are melancholy – a drunk loses his woman when her mother-in-law rescues her from the inebriate singer. The song is an interesting combination of angry indignation and sorrow and Scott sings with raw, authentic emotion.
The most fun song on the CD is a cover of Prince Partridge’s "How Come My Dog Don’t Bark". Scott channels Randy Newman in the way that he styles the vocals, an elaborately loquacious and paranoid rant about a dog that seems a little too fond of another man who’s been hanging around the singer’s attractive wife. This song features brilliantly eloquent keyboard work embroidering the singer’s outraged harangue. The tune reaches its climax in a hyperbolic, spine-chilling series of threats – the singer plans to kill everyone in sight and has acquired from his barber a special knife with two razor-sharp edges: "I cut you once, you bleed twice," the aggrieved husband sings.
"Black Night" is a gorgeous ‘lonesome blues’ tune. The song has morose lyrics that are both archetypal and timely – the singer’s brother is in Afghanistan." The guitar work in this song seems to emanate from a hollow cave deep underground and there is a particularly sepulchral low note in the guitar solo that resonates like an earthquake. "Lazy Walk," "Cody’s Funky Butt," and "Sunday Cruisin’" are good-natured instrumentals . To my ear, these tunes are more jazz than blues, basically opportunities for the musicians to improvise on the basis of melodies supplied by the guitar. "Sunday Cruisin" is particularly laid-back and cheerful, a brightly layered groove that sounds a bit like Pat Metheny.
Anchoring the album are two songs written by Don Scott, "Some Other Day." and "8 Days of Hell." Both tunes seem rooted in the songwriter’s personal experiences and are very powerful, perhaps, the best work on the album. "Some Other Day" is a fierce protest about social priorities that give tax breaks to the rich while systematically underfunding Veteran’s Administration hospitals. The words and import are clear and the lyrics succinctly expose the hypocrisy of "supporting the troops" when budget cuts covertly subvert the VA. Blues songs depend on repetition and here the words "come some other day," repeat in a way that suggests the frustration of the singer told over and over again that there’s no room for him at the VA – the line for admission is too long. The melody has a menacing edge and the song cuts like a knife. I’ve seen Scott perform "8 Days of Hell," one of his best songs, and was pleased to see the piece included on this CD. Although modestly entitled "8 Days of Hell", the song measures the impact of a serious war injury on a young man’s entire life. Badly burned in an explosion, the singer is hospitalized first in Saigon and, then, Tokyo where the "smell of death" surrounds the 21-year old soldier. He recovers but his body is permanently scarred and his mind damaged – he vainly tries to forget the episode with "whisky and drugs" before concluding that those means to oblivion are just "a waste of time." Presumably, transforming the experience into a blues song is healing in a way and, in fact, the tune’s melody is mild, even lyrical. On this song, the beauty of the piano and guitar solos seem, at first, incongruent to the bitter, matter-of-fact lyrics – but since the song seems itself a means for controlling the demons summoned up by the "8 days of Hell", the elegant musical accompaniment is probably justified.
"Glad to Have These Blues" is another number by Don Scott that concludes the album. It’s appropriately jocular and stands in contrast to the more anguished tunes on the CD. Rosanne Licciardi provide percussion on the album. Karyn Quinn plays the upright bass and Brian Werner’s piano eloquently supplements Scott’s work.
You can learn more about the Don Scott Duo (Don Scott and percussionist Rosanne Licciardi) at www.donscottblues.com
(Some additional notes: "Devil Ride" originated as a Gospel tune although its imagery is clearly related to Blues' tunes about transactions with the devil. Since gospel and the blues are, often, simply two sides of one coin is not surprising that the lyrics tend to bleed into one another. Scott describes Big Bill Broonzy as an influence on his music, much more so than Robert Johnson. There is a wonderful version of "How Come My Dog Don't Bark Any More" on Dr. John's album Goin' Back to New Orleans, a record that Scott highly recommends.)
Tuesday, December 26, 2017
Star Wars -- The Last Jedi
The new installment in the Star Wars franchise is fairly awful. This is not surprising. The films have generally been mediocre to bad. In this regard, it is well to remember the lineage of the films. George Lucas' first episode was intentionally bad -- the director invoked campy movie-serials made thirty or forty years before producing the first picture in the series. Lucas was capable of powerful dystopian sci-fi, as witness THX1138 and could construct and effectively direct a character-driven film like American Graffiti, a serious film that can compete on some levels with Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show. But he turned away from those models and, indeed, serious science fiction when he ransacked tawdry movie serials for the cardboard characters and effects in the first film. I recall seeing Star Wars and John Boorman's Excalibur in the same week -- Boorman's movie, as badly flawed as it was, struck me as thrilling, profound, and moving; by contrast, Star Wars didn't aspire to be anything other than amplified kitsch. The movie wasn't bad by accident -- it was bad by design.
The Last Jedi continues in this tradition -- except that, after almost a half century, the film has forgotten its humble origins and aspires to grandiosity. The picture is interminable and exceedingly complex. Three plot lines are intercut ingeniously, action or a sound in one story edited to match an action or effect in the parallel narrative. In the first plot-line, the virtuous rebels against the evil New Order flee through space, suffering constant attrition through attacks orchestrated by the monstrous Admiral Snoke (pronounced "Snook"). In the narrative, the principal characters are Kilo Ren (a sort of poor man's Darth Vadar, played by Adam Driver), poor Carrie Fischer acting the role of the superannuated Princess Leia and her auxiliary, Laura Dern, in the part of another fleet commander. There's an obnoxious "fly-boy" who is so irritating that I don't know his name and can't recognize the actor playing the part.
The second narrative involves a dark-skinned former fighter with the New Order (now defected to the Good) and a Korean (or possibly Chinese) girl. These two characters are on a quest to locate a crack "thief" with the ability to smuggle them onto the flagship for the evil New Order. Their mission is to destroy equipment that is tracking the retreating rebels through warp-speed space. This narrative features an exciting chase involving camelid-like creatures through a gambling hell that seems to be modeled on Macau. This plot goes nowhere: the thief, also played by an ethnic character -- he's like the Frito Bandito -- sells out the heroes and they are captured by the bad guys. This story is insistently "ethnic", involving people of color who are trapped in a thankless, dull, and ineffectual narrative.
The third narrative takes place somewhere on the Orkney Islands in the North Atlantic. On a crest of raw stone rising out of the turbulent waves, Han Solo, the last Jedi knight, has withdraw to brood like Achilles in his tent (Solo is played by Mark Hamill who has grown into a odd bard-like beauty). A young woman who aspires to Jedi status has sought out Han Solo and tries to return him to the field of battle. In the course of this tale, the young woman develops super-human powers that later involve her in a duel with Admiral Snoke and her "brother" -- the evil Kilo Ren, also, apparently, an apprentice Jedi. The island sequence is so totally inert that the director had dream up some cute little puffin-birds and some strange-looking mole-like laborers to keep things amusing.
These three stories all lead to noisy climaxes. Then, the characters from the separate narratives all gather together in the last half hour -- there is a huge battle in outer space and, then, another huge battle in the desert. In effect, the film has no fewer than five climaxes -- this is exhausting and gratuitous and, by the last half hour, you are praying that the film will come to an end. The film's emotional structure is one hour of loud fighting and, then, another hour and a half of continuous climax.
On the plus side, the film is fantastically inventive and, often, thrilling. The first space battle is literally breath-taking. The images in the film are crammed with strange creatures, odd machines, and curious details. If we are shown a sea, you can expect that a sea monster will rear up -- even though this is wholly gratuitous: the film is not about sea monsters. (Similarly, when someone plunges into a Cenote-like underground cave, we can see the bones of Pleisosaurus-like sea creatures in the murk.) In some of the battle scenes, the combatants are posed against fully articulated and spectacular fighting between armies of droids and storm troopers -- we see the principal characters burnished by the halos of huge explosions in the background. The last space battle ends with an apocalyptic explosion so huge that it has a thermo-nuclear aspect about it -- the screen goes white and the figures and machines appear to wither to ashes in a sea of acetylene fire and there is no sound at all; this is a spectacular image. The final battle is also almost absurdly beautiful -- the opposing armies face-off on a huge salt-encrusted playa and when their treads or boot scuff the surface, the terrain underneath is blood-red. The fighters extend skids down into the lake surface and cut scarlet wounds into the earth and, a final shot of the battlefield, shows a huge, gory-looking abscess cut into the white salt, a smear of scarlet littered with burning equipment and corpses.
But these wonderful things are outweighed by the sheer ridiculousness of the project. Like Grand Opera, a film of this sort requires all kinds of fashion decisions and, about half of them are grotesque or idiotic: Laura Dern has purple hair and the New Order commanders wear little hats with a perky brim that make the allegedly fearsome enemy look like alert terrier dogs. Admiral Snoke looks like a giant and elderly Jack Palance with a deep fissure in his brow -- he is dressed like Hugh Hefner in a kind of gold lame smoking jacket. There's is nothing even approximating acting in the film -- the characters just harangue one another or shriek commands. (In the opening scene, the acting is so transcendently bad that it's hard to avoid giggling -- later, you get used to the constant screaming and shouting.) Laura Dern looks prim and proper and seems totally baffled by her lines. Carrie Fischer must have been drunk or drugged out of her mind for the shoot -- around the middle of the film, she begins to slur her lines so badly that the camera has to shoot her from behind. (Maybe she lost a tooth -- she literally can't say her "s" sounds.) The movie relies way too heavily on vast, inexpressive close-ups -- I can't recall a film more infected with close-ups. But the close-ups don't show us anything because this would require acting and acting, as a matter of course, is prohibited in a picture of this sort. (There are odd little moments that are endearingly self-critical -- in one shot, we see a strange space ship levitating as it spews steam: it turns out to be an iron pressing a New Order uniform that will be stolen by one of the characters. In another scene, Kilo Ren gives an order that is repeated by being bawled at 150 decibels by Domnall Gleeson -- Adam Driver cocks his head and looks at Gleeson with undisguised horror and contempt.)
My fundamental criticism is that we just don't care about the outcomes of the interminable light sabre duels and battles that we are shown. First, there is no element of suspense; we know exactly how everything will turn out. Second, since we don't care about the characters, we don't care about who wins the fight. Everything is weightless and wholly inconsequential, although the sound and fury tries to argue for the opposite. By the end of the film, almost all of the rebel forces have been killed -- there's only tiny number of rebels surviving; perhaps, about 20. But there's no sense of mourning or sorrow for all the hordes slaughtered. Homer's Iliad is about thirty percent funerals and grief and fury over the death of comrades -- indisputably the epic form has space for appropriate displays of grief. But there's simply no trace of any recognizable human emotions at all in this film. A good example is when Kilo Ren inexplicably kills his master, Admiral Snoke. Why does he do this? We don't have a clue and huge shots of Driver's saturnine features convulsed in weird grimaces don't tell us anything.
It's a bad movie, one of a series of bad movies that commenced with an awful movie. And this seems to be what the audience wants.
The Last Jedi continues in this tradition -- except that, after almost a half century, the film has forgotten its humble origins and aspires to grandiosity. The picture is interminable and exceedingly complex. Three plot lines are intercut ingeniously, action or a sound in one story edited to match an action or effect in the parallel narrative. In the first plot-line, the virtuous rebels against the evil New Order flee through space, suffering constant attrition through attacks orchestrated by the monstrous Admiral Snoke (pronounced "Snook"). In the narrative, the principal characters are Kilo Ren (a sort of poor man's Darth Vadar, played by Adam Driver), poor Carrie Fischer acting the role of the superannuated Princess Leia and her auxiliary, Laura Dern, in the part of another fleet commander. There's an obnoxious "fly-boy" who is so irritating that I don't know his name and can't recognize the actor playing the part.
The second narrative involves a dark-skinned former fighter with the New Order (now defected to the Good) and a Korean (or possibly Chinese) girl. These two characters are on a quest to locate a crack "thief" with the ability to smuggle them onto the flagship for the evil New Order. Their mission is to destroy equipment that is tracking the retreating rebels through warp-speed space. This narrative features an exciting chase involving camelid-like creatures through a gambling hell that seems to be modeled on Macau. This plot goes nowhere: the thief, also played by an ethnic character -- he's like the Frito Bandito -- sells out the heroes and they are captured by the bad guys. This story is insistently "ethnic", involving people of color who are trapped in a thankless, dull, and ineffectual narrative.
The third narrative takes place somewhere on the Orkney Islands in the North Atlantic. On a crest of raw stone rising out of the turbulent waves, Han Solo, the last Jedi knight, has withdraw to brood like Achilles in his tent (Solo is played by Mark Hamill who has grown into a odd bard-like beauty). A young woman who aspires to Jedi status has sought out Han Solo and tries to return him to the field of battle. In the course of this tale, the young woman develops super-human powers that later involve her in a duel with Admiral Snoke and her "brother" -- the evil Kilo Ren, also, apparently, an apprentice Jedi. The island sequence is so totally inert that the director had dream up some cute little puffin-birds and some strange-looking mole-like laborers to keep things amusing.
These three stories all lead to noisy climaxes. Then, the characters from the separate narratives all gather together in the last half hour -- there is a huge battle in outer space and, then, another huge battle in the desert. In effect, the film has no fewer than five climaxes -- this is exhausting and gratuitous and, by the last half hour, you are praying that the film will come to an end. The film's emotional structure is one hour of loud fighting and, then, another hour and a half of continuous climax.
On the plus side, the film is fantastically inventive and, often, thrilling. The first space battle is literally breath-taking. The images in the film are crammed with strange creatures, odd machines, and curious details. If we are shown a sea, you can expect that a sea monster will rear up -- even though this is wholly gratuitous: the film is not about sea monsters. (Similarly, when someone plunges into a Cenote-like underground cave, we can see the bones of Pleisosaurus-like sea creatures in the murk.) In some of the battle scenes, the combatants are posed against fully articulated and spectacular fighting between armies of droids and storm troopers -- we see the principal characters burnished by the halos of huge explosions in the background. The last space battle ends with an apocalyptic explosion so huge that it has a thermo-nuclear aspect about it -- the screen goes white and the figures and machines appear to wither to ashes in a sea of acetylene fire and there is no sound at all; this is a spectacular image. The final battle is also almost absurdly beautiful -- the opposing armies face-off on a huge salt-encrusted playa and when their treads or boot scuff the surface, the terrain underneath is blood-red. The fighters extend skids down into the lake surface and cut scarlet wounds into the earth and, a final shot of the battlefield, shows a huge, gory-looking abscess cut into the white salt, a smear of scarlet littered with burning equipment and corpses.
But these wonderful things are outweighed by the sheer ridiculousness of the project. Like Grand Opera, a film of this sort requires all kinds of fashion decisions and, about half of them are grotesque or idiotic: Laura Dern has purple hair and the New Order commanders wear little hats with a perky brim that make the allegedly fearsome enemy look like alert terrier dogs. Admiral Snoke looks like a giant and elderly Jack Palance with a deep fissure in his brow -- he is dressed like Hugh Hefner in a kind of gold lame smoking jacket. There's is nothing even approximating acting in the film -- the characters just harangue one another or shriek commands. (In the opening scene, the acting is so transcendently bad that it's hard to avoid giggling -- later, you get used to the constant screaming and shouting.) Laura Dern looks prim and proper and seems totally baffled by her lines. Carrie Fischer must have been drunk or drugged out of her mind for the shoot -- around the middle of the film, she begins to slur her lines so badly that the camera has to shoot her from behind. (Maybe she lost a tooth -- she literally can't say her "s" sounds.) The movie relies way too heavily on vast, inexpressive close-ups -- I can't recall a film more infected with close-ups. But the close-ups don't show us anything because this would require acting and acting, as a matter of course, is prohibited in a picture of this sort. (There are odd little moments that are endearingly self-critical -- in one shot, we see a strange space ship levitating as it spews steam: it turns out to be an iron pressing a New Order uniform that will be stolen by one of the characters. In another scene, Kilo Ren gives an order that is repeated by being bawled at 150 decibels by Domnall Gleeson -- Adam Driver cocks his head and looks at Gleeson with undisguised horror and contempt.)
My fundamental criticism is that we just don't care about the outcomes of the interminable light sabre duels and battles that we are shown. First, there is no element of suspense; we know exactly how everything will turn out. Second, since we don't care about the characters, we don't care about who wins the fight. Everything is weightless and wholly inconsequential, although the sound and fury tries to argue for the opposite. By the end of the film, almost all of the rebel forces have been killed -- there's only tiny number of rebels surviving; perhaps, about 20. But there's no sense of mourning or sorrow for all the hordes slaughtered. Homer's Iliad is about thirty percent funerals and grief and fury over the death of comrades -- indisputably the epic form has space for appropriate displays of grief. But there's simply no trace of any recognizable human emotions at all in this film. A good example is when Kilo Ren inexplicably kills his master, Admiral Snoke. Why does he do this? We don't have a clue and huge shots of Driver's saturnine features convulsed in weird grimaces don't tell us anything.
It's a bad movie, one of a series of bad movies that commenced with an awful movie. And this seems to be what the audience wants.
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