Throughout its 13 episode length, the Spanish heist movie, La Casa del Papel, remains exciting, clever, and surprising. Although a couple of episodes late in the game flag a wee bit, the show remains compelling. The film is effective throughout its ten-hour length because it develops characters who can only be described as extremely endearing. The Professor, the criminal mastermind who engineers the robbery of the Spanish National Mint, earnestly wishes that the robbery will succeed without any one being killed or, even, injured. Indeed, there's a quality of adolescent fantasy to the Professor, who is, after all, a character purloined it seems, from a comic book, a kind of post-pubescent boy-wonder -- he stages the robbery, in effect, as a homage to his deceased father. And, everything would probably have developed as he anticipated except for the messy nature of human emotions -- the one thing that the Professor has not factored into his schemes is that the hostages and robbers will fall in love with one another, develop strange allegiances, and, generally, behave irrationally because, after all, the human heart is unpredictable and eros too powerful to be contained by mere reason. So, the Professor ends up on a date with Raquel, the female police officer assigned the task of capturing him and, while they embrace, the woman cop's subordinate, a heavy-set bearded man who is hopelessly in love with Raquel, drunk and sloppy with his own jealous lust crashes his car -- and, thereby, delays the receipt of important information. And while this is happening, a secretary at the Mint, who is having an adulterous affair with her boss (he's also a hostage), falls in love with one of the robbers and has sex with him -- this leads to a confrontation between the boss and the robber that is both scary and hilarious. Meanwhile, a group of hostages, not properly guarded because of the romantic encounters subverting the whole project, escape from the building, triggering one of the most savage and ferocious fire-fights that I have ever seen on TV. All of these calamities occur because of the propensity of human beings to console themselves (or eliminate boredom) with sex. The interesting aspect of all this love and sex is that it's not really exploited by the filmmaker, rather the amours are rather sweet, somewhat like the roundelay of lovers in sophisticated European comedies, Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night for instance -- all these romantic complications are just a natural consequence when you put a bunch of young and attractive Spaniards together in close quarters.
Another key to the show's success, I think, is its steadfast refusal to minimize any of its characters. The heavy-set lout who enjoyed a one-night stand with Raquel, the lady hostage negotiator (also his boss) isn't villainous, just misguided and tragically, obsessively romantic. The heroine, in fact, loves him in her own way, something that merely deepens and makes more painful, the poor man's pathetic attempts to win her over to him. The most sinister of the robbers, a man who has taken the malevolent-sounding name Berlin, acquires a harem of young hostage girls around him -- he treats them cruelly but they same to regard his sadism as a kind of game and, later, when we learn that he is dying slowly of a neurological disease, we have reason to understand, if not excuse, his bombastic harangues and scarcely repressed hysteria. Most noteworthy are the two women playing Nairobi and Tokyo -- they are woman warriors with tight bonnets of slick black hair and they have glittering eyes and agile athletic bodies: they are like the bull-jumpers of Knossos and the film gives them some of the best action sequences: there's a splendid invigorating moment when Tokyo charges a breach in the wall pushing a huge heavy caliber machine gun into a hail of tracer bullets; in one scene, Nairobi leads choruses of hostages in wild wailing ululating cries while the rest of the robbers fire volleys into walls and ceilings, the gunman all wearing identical masks of a bemused, quizzical-looking Salvador Dali. Toward the end of the first season, one of wizened print-shop workers at the mint casts in his lot with Nairobi, calling her the "best boss" he ever had. In fact, as the show ripens, Stockholm syndrome sets in and the motives of hostages and captors become increasingly confused and perplexing.
Viewers should be warned that this show is addictive and that it does not end at the conclusion of the 13 episodes in the first series -- in fact, the program is left radically unresolved: the police are closing in, the relationship between Berlin and the professor seems to be explained, the Professor continues his romance with Raquel after almost murdering her mother (the woman is saved because the Professor understands that she suffers from Alzheimer's syndrome and can't recall that she has learned that he is one of the bad guys). In a flashback, the Professor and Berlin sing Bella Ciao, a song with which I was unfamiliar -- it's a partisan anti-fascist song that, apparently, has currency with resistance movements around the world. (You can hear a wonderful version of the song on You-Tube as performed by the great Argentine folk singer, Mercedes Sosa.) The song begins with the words: "as I awoke this morning, the invaders had come." Although its nominally an anti-fascist song, who are the invaders here? And who the partisans? The song brings the show to a stirring but wholly inconclusive ending -- we'll have to wait until to see how this comes out. (Obviously the 2017 series was huge hit in Spain for its station Antena 3; the program was conceived and directed by Alex Pena.)
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Saturday, January 20, 2018
Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri
Mother-love can turn to diabolical mother-rage when a woman's child is hurt or killed. I knew a mother who lost her son in a stabbing after a bar-fight. The woman carried in her purse autopsy pictures showing the boy cut apart on a stainless steel table at the hospital. She would show these pictures to strangers and ask them if they thought it unjust that the killer had not been prosecuted for stabbing her son. (The killer was acquitted on a plea of self-defense.) In the end, she confronted local law enforcement authorities who she thought had botched the case: she threatened the wives and children of those cops with the evisceration pictured in the autopsy pictures, was prosecuted for terrorist threats, and went to prison herself, snarling and proud of her loyalty to the memory of her lost son.
Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri takes this grave, and tragic subject, a mother's obsessive quest for revenge, as its theme. Frances McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, a woman whose daughter was raped and killed and her body, then, burned on a lonely road in rural Missouri. Hayes is outraged that her daughter's slaughter has not been avenged and she vents her fury on the local police chief, a man named Willoughby (played with surprising restraint by Woody Harrelson). Everyone in the small town of Ebbing knows that the much-beloved Willoughby is dying of pancreatic cancer and the local people are almost universally outraged when Hayes pays for three billboards denouncing the sheriff near the place where her daughter's body was found. Pressure is exerted on Mildred to remove the billboards but she is Nemesis herself or, perhaps, the fury Allecto --she will not be dissuaded from her righteous pursuit of justice and this leads to a cascade of violent events including, at last, several terrible beatings and the fire-bombing of the Ebbing police station. (She is a little like Michael Kohlhass in Heinrich von Kleist's ferocious novella -- Kleist calls Kohlhass "at once the most righteous and most terrifying man in Germany" and the same epithets ("righteous and terrifying") could be applied to Mildred.) Mildred's utter refusal to compromise makes her a profound and great tragic figure and the movie has an excellent beginning, a mournful and beautiful overture as it were, as well as some fairly moving scenes in its last twenty minutes. But overall the movie is botched. This is lamentable because there is the kernel of a great film in the subject and McDormand's acting is extraordinary -- she makes no effort to endear herself to the audience and, therefore, achieves a great and austere nobility. (No mind that she's essayed this kind of role before in the HBO mini-series Olive Kittridge.) Unfortunately, the whole movie is horribly spoiled by Martin McDonagh's childish self-indulgence. This is the kind of movie that confuses critics -- it's full of tremendous acting and wild harangues and the camera-work is unobtrusively beautiful (a few too many close-ups for my taste but justified by the Oscar-worthy performances in the film.) The fundamental problem with the film is that it is wholly, and inexcusably implausible and wildly over-written.
First, everyone in the film speaks in a torrent of obscenities. This is not the way people talk in the deep south. (McDonagh, whose geographical understanding of the US seems imprecise, apparently thinks that Missouri is like Mississippi or Alabama; he doesn't grasp that Missouri is a southern-inflected Midwestern state.) Everyone curses relentlessly and unrealistically -- the whole film is scripted in sub-Tarantino obscenities and, often, the need to make dirty jokes or end a confrontation with a filthy (if clever) epithet drives the action. Two examples will suffice for about a dozen instances where McDonagh's desire to lard his dialogue with politically incorrect and offensive jokes contorts what we are seeing on the screen. Mildred's ex-husband is going out with a 19 year old girl. The girl is said to be a zoo attendant. This weird vocation is a source of a baker's dozen dirty jokes about monkey shit and how the girl smells of that substance. But I have news for McDonagh -- there aren't going to be any zoos within hailing distance of the boondocks shown in the film. It's an example of McDonagh hearing a dirty joke in a pub in Dublin, let's say, and wanting to transpose that jest to the American Midwest -- it just doesn't work. Similarly, we are treated to a long and picturesque harangue about pedophile priests -- this is also totally incongruous. The people in the part of the country shown in the film are Assembly of God parishioners, Methodists, or Baptists -- it seems unwarranted and self-indulgent for McDonagh to insert in the film a long speech comparing the Catholic Church to the Bloods and the Crips. He seems to have got the speech in the wrong movie. There are inexplicable screw-ups in the plotting. Woody Harrelson's dying sheriff has a much, much younger wife -- at one point, I was confused with a erotic gesture made by Willoughby to the woman who I took to be his daughter. Worse, Willoughby's wife sometimes speaks with a southern accent -- other times, she inexplicably seems to have a strong British accent. She is so young that there is something marginally creepy about the relationship. And the role for the sheriff's wife is completely underwritten -- in one scene, Willoughby is spitting blood due to the progression of his cancer. His young wife agrees wholeheartedly that he should check himself out of the hospital notwithstanding his doctor's objections -- this is totally incredible and makes you wonder whether the girl has lost her senses. Another completely botched element in the movie relates to the cost of the billboards. The three billboards are on a rural lane that "no one but lost people and morons use" -- but, incredibly, the charge for renting those three billboards is 5000 dollars a month. (I would think you could get three billboards on the Santa Monica Freeway for 5000 a month.) The price has to be enormous because one of the plot elements involves Mildred Hayes having trouble raising the money to finance her PR campaign against the hapless sheriff. Later, Willoughby commits suicide and sends Mildred $5000 in cash so that she can keep on the campaign against him post-mortem -- but this gesture, which seems credible in context, doesn't make any sense if considered rationally: why would Willoughy deprive his widow and two little girls of the $5000 merely to play a crazy posthumous game with Mildred Hayes? (The people in the film are poor -- $5000 is regarded as a fortune to the denizens of Ebbing, Missouri). A little later, the widow confronts Mildred Hayes accusing her of causing her husband's death. But we have seen, and heard read Willoughby's suicide note in which he adamantly and with absolute accuracy denies that the billboards denouncing him had anything to do with his death. Did the widow not read the suicide note? Or is she ignoring it? Or is McDonagh amping up the volume and the vehemence in the hope that we don't notice the incongruity?
Ultimately, the problem with the film all relates to its mawkish sentimentality. There's a wide vein of Irish blarney in this film and most often it is expressed in the kind of sentimental gestures that would have embarrassed John Ford at his most expansive. All of the relentless cursing and blackguard diction is a vain attempt to conceal the film's soft underbelly of rather craven sentimentality. Willoughby takes his wife on a picnic to the river, goes off to make love with her in the woods, and, so, has to leave his two little girls fishing on the banks of the stream. He cows the little girls by bellowing at them to not leave the "goddamned blanket for any goddamned purpose" and also orders them to be careful with the rods and reels so that they don't get "hooks in (their) goddamned eye-balls." First, of course, no one would speak to children in this way (the little girls are about 4 and 6) -- second, all the intemperate cursing is just an attempt to deny the fundamentally sentimental nature of the scene, poor Willoughby's pastoral farewell to his wife and his life. (He shoots himself that night). Willoughby's suicide note is similarly flawed -- it's full of tough guy obscenity that is deployed to mask what is really a very sentimental and standard sort of love note. Once this strategy is detected by the viewer, it's abundantly obvious -- the more vehement and absurdly obscene the language, the more sentimental the gesture or action depicted. The bad language is just a smoke-screen. And, in one scene, we see a psychopathic cop (brilliantly played by Sam Rockwell) saying goodbye to his "dear old Mither." He tenderly strokes her air before departing on his vigilante quest.
McDonagh, undoubtedly believes he's a genius writing profane Mamet-style dialogue -- he uses a diction derived from Mamet, filtered through some Harold Pinter, and, then, cast in terms that derive from Tarantino films. A lot of his dialogue is fairly clever but it completely misconstrues the way people in Missouri or, for that matter, anywhere in the USA talk. (The film features high green mountains that don't look like any part of Missouri that I've scene -- in fact, the picture was shot in Appalachian mountains in one of the two Carolinas.) This film is fascinating, but it's wrecked by the director's conception of himself as a tough-guy truthteller -- he's absolutely tone-deaf with respect to the way Americans talk.
Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri takes this grave, and tragic subject, a mother's obsessive quest for revenge, as its theme. Frances McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, a woman whose daughter was raped and killed and her body, then, burned on a lonely road in rural Missouri. Hayes is outraged that her daughter's slaughter has not been avenged and she vents her fury on the local police chief, a man named Willoughby (played with surprising restraint by Woody Harrelson). Everyone in the small town of Ebbing knows that the much-beloved Willoughby is dying of pancreatic cancer and the local people are almost universally outraged when Hayes pays for three billboards denouncing the sheriff near the place where her daughter's body was found. Pressure is exerted on Mildred to remove the billboards but she is Nemesis herself or, perhaps, the fury Allecto --she will not be dissuaded from her righteous pursuit of justice and this leads to a cascade of violent events including, at last, several terrible beatings and the fire-bombing of the Ebbing police station. (She is a little like Michael Kohlhass in Heinrich von Kleist's ferocious novella -- Kleist calls Kohlhass "at once the most righteous and most terrifying man in Germany" and the same epithets ("righteous and terrifying") could be applied to Mildred.) Mildred's utter refusal to compromise makes her a profound and great tragic figure and the movie has an excellent beginning, a mournful and beautiful overture as it were, as well as some fairly moving scenes in its last twenty minutes. But overall the movie is botched. This is lamentable because there is the kernel of a great film in the subject and McDormand's acting is extraordinary -- she makes no effort to endear herself to the audience and, therefore, achieves a great and austere nobility. (No mind that she's essayed this kind of role before in the HBO mini-series Olive Kittridge.) Unfortunately, the whole movie is horribly spoiled by Martin McDonagh's childish self-indulgence. This is the kind of movie that confuses critics -- it's full of tremendous acting and wild harangues and the camera-work is unobtrusively beautiful (a few too many close-ups for my taste but justified by the Oscar-worthy performances in the film.) The fundamental problem with the film is that it is wholly, and inexcusably implausible and wildly over-written.
First, everyone in the film speaks in a torrent of obscenities. This is not the way people talk in the deep south. (McDonagh, whose geographical understanding of the US seems imprecise, apparently thinks that Missouri is like Mississippi or Alabama; he doesn't grasp that Missouri is a southern-inflected Midwestern state.) Everyone curses relentlessly and unrealistically -- the whole film is scripted in sub-Tarantino obscenities and, often, the need to make dirty jokes or end a confrontation with a filthy (if clever) epithet drives the action. Two examples will suffice for about a dozen instances where McDonagh's desire to lard his dialogue with politically incorrect and offensive jokes contorts what we are seeing on the screen. Mildred's ex-husband is going out with a 19 year old girl. The girl is said to be a zoo attendant. This weird vocation is a source of a baker's dozen dirty jokes about monkey shit and how the girl smells of that substance. But I have news for McDonagh -- there aren't going to be any zoos within hailing distance of the boondocks shown in the film. It's an example of McDonagh hearing a dirty joke in a pub in Dublin, let's say, and wanting to transpose that jest to the American Midwest -- it just doesn't work. Similarly, we are treated to a long and picturesque harangue about pedophile priests -- this is also totally incongruous. The people in the part of the country shown in the film are Assembly of God parishioners, Methodists, or Baptists -- it seems unwarranted and self-indulgent for McDonagh to insert in the film a long speech comparing the Catholic Church to the Bloods and the Crips. He seems to have got the speech in the wrong movie. There are inexplicable screw-ups in the plotting. Woody Harrelson's dying sheriff has a much, much younger wife -- at one point, I was confused with a erotic gesture made by Willoughby to the woman who I took to be his daughter. Worse, Willoughby's wife sometimes speaks with a southern accent -- other times, she inexplicably seems to have a strong British accent. She is so young that there is something marginally creepy about the relationship. And the role for the sheriff's wife is completely underwritten -- in one scene, Willoughby is spitting blood due to the progression of his cancer. His young wife agrees wholeheartedly that he should check himself out of the hospital notwithstanding his doctor's objections -- this is totally incredible and makes you wonder whether the girl has lost her senses. Another completely botched element in the movie relates to the cost of the billboards. The three billboards are on a rural lane that "no one but lost people and morons use" -- but, incredibly, the charge for renting those three billboards is 5000 dollars a month. (I would think you could get three billboards on the Santa Monica Freeway for 5000 a month.) The price has to be enormous because one of the plot elements involves Mildred Hayes having trouble raising the money to finance her PR campaign against the hapless sheriff. Later, Willoughby commits suicide and sends Mildred $5000 in cash so that she can keep on the campaign against him post-mortem -- but this gesture, which seems credible in context, doesn't make any sense if considered rationally: why would Willoughy deprive his widow and two little girls of the $5000 merely to play a crazy posthumous game with Mildred Hayes? (The people in the film are poor -- $5000 is regarded as a fortune to the denizens of Ebbing, Missouri). A little later, the widow confronts Mildred Hayes accusing her of causing her husband's death. But we have seen, and heard read Willoughby's suicide note in which he adamantly and with absolute accuracy denies that the billboards denouncing him had anything to do with his death. Did the widow not read the suicide note? Or is she ignoring it? Or is McDonagh amping up the volume and the vehemence in the hope that we don't notice the incongruity?
Ultimately, the problem with the film all relates to its mawkish sentimentality. There's a wide vein of Irish blarney in this film and most often it is expressed in the kind of sentimental gestures that would have embarrassed John Ford at his most expansive. All of the relentless cursing and blackguard diction is a vain attempt to conceal the film's soft underbelly of rather craven sentimentality. Willoughby takes his wife on a picnic to the river, goes off to make love with her in the woods, and, so, has to leave his two little girls fishing on the banks of the stream. He cows the little girls by bellowing at them to not leave the "goddamned blanket for any goddamned purpose" and also orders them to be careful with the rods and reels so that they don't get "hooks in (their) goddamned eye-balls." First, of course, no one would speak to children in this way (the little girls are about 4 and 6) -- second, all the intemperate cursing is just an attempt to deny the fundamentally sentimental nature of the scene, poor Willoughby's pastoral farewell to his wife and his life. (He shoots himself that night). Willoughby's suicide note is similarly flawed -- it's full of tough guy obscenity that is deployed to mask what is really a very sentimental and standard sort of love note. Once this strategy is detected by the viewer, it's abundantly obvious -- the more vehement and absurdly obscene the language, the more sentimental the gesture or action depicted. The bad language is just a smoke-screen. And, in one scene, we see a psychopathic cop (brilliantly played by Sam Rockwell) saying goodbye to his "dear old Mither." He tenderly strokes her air before departing on his vigilante quest.
McDonagh, undoubtedly believes he's a genius writing profane Mamet-style dialogue -- he uses a diction derived from Mamet, filtered through some Harold Pinter, and, then, cast in terms that derive from Tarantino films. A lot of his dialogue is fairly clever but it completely misconstrues the way people in Missouri or, for that matter, anywhere in the USA talk. (The film features high green mountains that don't look like any part of Missouri that I've scene -- in fact, the picture was shot in Appalachian mountains in one of the two Carolinas.) This film is fascinating, but it's wrecked by the director's conception of himself as a tough-guy truthteller -- he's absolutely tone-deaf with respect to the way Americans talk.
Monday, January 15, 2018
La Casa de Papel
La Casa de Papel is a Spanish heist movie, broadcast on Netflix in 13 episodes, each about 45 minutes long. I've seen five episodes at this point and have committed to the show -- if I look forward to streaming the show after work at night, I think I am warranted in recommending the program.
Most TV shows of this sort contain lots of dead time -- the plot doesn't sustain the running time required for a 10 or 13 episode program. This seems pretty clearly the case with La Casa de Papel, but oddly enough this series makes a virtue of its length by developing a number of extremely interesting and, even, moving subplots. The characters are so interesting and their development so belated in terms of the narrative that we find the show compelling even though, at least some of it, feels like a long and complex delaying action. La Casa de Papel works this trick in an obvious way but one that I haven't seen implemented too often in series TV shows. The show charges into the narrative without any real plot or character development. Almost all "heist" shows begin with establishing the team of criminals who will work together, or against one another, to engineer the theft -- this is the paradigm that we see in movies as disparate as The Asphalt Jungle and Riffi. The script presents us with the characters, identifies their idiosyncrasies, and, then, lays out in detail the plan for the crime that will be committed -- again, Kubrick's The Killing is a good example of this style of film-making. La Casa de Papel inverts this order of narrative -- with only a very bare sketch of the show's premises, the program advances into the complex heist. By the middle of the first episode, the protagonists are engaged in their daring scheme to rob (or do something to) Spain's National Mint. We aren't told the objective of the heist. Similarly, we aren't afforded any clear understanding of the criminals involved in the plot. The show moves forward in a kind of backhanded homage to Reservoir Dogs -- the eight criminals, acting under the direction of a genius mastermind, the Professor, are forbidden use of their real names. Instead, they are told that they must select the names of cities and will be known by those appellations -- hence, we have characters called Moscow, Berlin, Boston, Denver, and Helsinki. There's no plot development before the heist is inaugurated -- rather, the show makes the clever decision of using flashbacks to develop character as the narrative proceeds. Similarly, there are 67 employees at the National Mint who are taken prisoner and, then, held hostage as the criminal scheme is developed -- we aren't shown much, if anything, about these characters as well; rather, the hostages are also developed as characters in the course of the siege of the National Mint which seems to last for the entire 13 episodes. But, as the program proceeds, the plot takes all sorts of very interesting twists and turns and we become intensely enmeshed in the relationships between the criminals, the hostages, and the law enforcement detectives and negotiators involved in the siege. The show seems to be very well written and is a combination of extremely ferocious and disturbing confrontations and a sort of queasy comedy. There's nothing here, so far, that you haven't seen in other films -- in fact, one of the film's plot points, dressing both hostages and criminals in identical red jumpers (and masking their faces with bizarre and identical Salvador Dali masks) comes directly out of an earlier movie, Spike Lee's The Inside Man (2006). But La Casa del Papel ("The house of Paper" -- referring to the printing presses in the Mint) simply executes these motifs better and with sharper writing and more interesting characters. By the fifth episode, all sorts of fascinating things have occurred: the chief hostage negotiator, a weary female cop, is contending with her own history of domestic abuse and involved in a nasty divorce; her mother seems to have Alzheimer's although she is still vigorous and attractive, a kind of force of nature. The Professor is boyishly attractive and tempted into a relationship with the hostage negotiator (a subplot that is a bit like Gillian Anderson's relationship with the serial killer in The Fall). Told to execute one of the hostages, a young man hides the girl and seems to be falling in love with her. She, in turn, is involved in a doomed relationship with the married Arturo, the director of the mint. Arturo gets shot by accident and the father of the boy who has fallen in love with the blonde hostage -- Arturo's girlfriend, Monica -- tries to protect his son from the increasingly violent stand-off. Spanish police are boring into the Mint through ventilation tunnels while the hostages are forced to drill a hole in the floor of the factory. Berlin, one of the leaders of the criminals, seems to be degenerating into brutality -- the criminals were originally told that no one would be hurt during the heist, but Berlin seems to be some kind of sadist. Many of these elements in the show are presented in very sharp, effectively written, and, even, didactic dialogue -- there are debates about abortion, for instance, and use of violence, even terrorist violence, to make political points. All the while, the criminals, who have become the de facto heroes of the show, are printing vast amounts of unmarked money in 50 Euro denominations. Perhaps, the show will flag in the next few hours -- but, at this point, everything is moving along very effectively and the show is sufficiently exciting that I look forward to streaming an episode or two every night.
Most TV shows of this sort contain lots of dead time -- the plot doesn't sustain the running time required for a 10 or 13 episode program. This seems pretty clearly the case with La Casa de Papel, but oddly enough this series makes a virtue of its length by developing a number of extremely interesting and, even, moving subplots. The characters are so interesting and their development so belated in terms of the narrative that we find the show compelling even though, at least some of it, feels like a long and complex delaying action. La Casa de Papel works this trick in an obvious way but one that I haven't seen implemented too often in series TV shows. The show charges into the narrative without any real plot or character development. Almost all "heist" shows begin with establishing the team of criminals who will work together, or against one another, to engineer the theft -- this is the paradigm that we see in movies as disparate as The Asphalt Jungle and Riffi. The script presents us with the characters, identifies their idiosyncrasies, and, then, lays out in detail the plan for the crime that will be committed -- again, Kubrick's The Killing is a good example of this style of film-making. La Casa de Papel inverts this order of narrative -- with only a very bare sketch of the show's premises, the program advances into the complex heist. By the middle of the first episode, the protagonists are engaged in their daring scheme to rob (or do something to) Spain's National Mint. We aren't told the objective of the heist. Similarly, we aren't afforded any clear understanding of the criminals involved in the plot. The show moves forward in a kind of backhanded homage to Reservoir Dogs -- the eight criminals, acting under the direction of a genius mastermind, the Professor, are forbidden use of their real names. Instead, they are told that they must select the names of cities and will be known by those appellations -- hence, we have characters called Moscow, Berlin, Boston, Denver, and Helsinki. There's no plot development before the heist is inaugurated -- rather, the show makes the clever decision of using flashbacks to develop character as the narrative proceeds. Similarly, there are 67 employees at the National Mint who are taken prisoner and, then, held hostage as the criminal scheme is developed -- we aren't shown much, if anything, about these characters as well; rather, the hostages are also developed as characters in the course of the siege of the National Mint which seems to last for the entire 13 episodes. But, as the program proceeds, the plot takes all sorts of very interesting twists and turns and we become intensely enmeshed in the relationships between the criminals, the hostages, and the law enforcement detectives and negotiators involved in the siege. The show seems to be very well written and is a combination of extremely ferocious and disturbing confrontations and a sort of queasy comedy. There's nothing here, so far, that you haven't seen in other films -- in fact, one of the film's plot points, dressing both hostages and criminals in identical red jumpers (and masking their faces with bizarre and identical Salvador Dali masks) comes directly out of an earlier movie, Spike Lee's The Inside Man (2006). But La Casa del Papel ("The house of Paper" -- referring to the printing presses in the Mint) simply executes these motifs better and with sharper writing and more interesting characters. By the fifth episode, all sorts of fascinating things have occurred: the chief hostage negotiator, a weary female cop, is contending with her own history of domestic abuse and involved in a nasty divorce; her mother seems to have Alzheimer's although she is still vigorous and attractive, a kind of force of nature. The Professor is boyishly attractive and tempted into a relationship with the hostage negotiator (a subplot that is a bit like Gillian Anderson's relationship with the serial killer in The Fall). Told to execute one of the hostages, a young man hides the girl and seems to be falling in love with her. She, in turn, is involved in a doomed relationship with the married Arturo, the director of the mint. Arturo gets shot by accident and the father of the boy who has fallen in love with the blonde hostage -- Arturo's girlfriend, Monica -- tries to protect his son from the increasingly violent stand-off. Spanish police are boring into the Mint through ventilation tunnels while the hostages are forced to drill a hole in the floor of the factory. Berlin, one of the leaders of the criminals, seems to be degenerating into brutality -- the criminals were originally told that no one would be hurt during the heist, but Berlin seems to be some kind of sadist. Many of these elements in the show are presented in very sharp, effectively written, and, even, didactic dialogue -- there are debates about abortion, for instance, and use of violence, even terrorist violence, to make political points. All the while, the criminals, who have become the de facto heroes of the show, are printing vast amounts of unmarked money in 50 Euro denominations. Perhaps, the show will flag in the next few hours -- but, at this point, everything is moving along very effectively and the show is sufficiently exciting that I look forward to streaming an episode or two every night.
Sunday, January 14, 2018
Duck and Cover
It seemed strangely auspicious to me to watch on Turner Classic Movies, the old civil defense film Duck and Cover on the same day that people in Hawaii, apparently thought that they were about to be incinerated by Kim "Little Rocket Man" Jim Un's ICBM missiles. (It turned out to be a false alarm.) Duck and Cover is a nasty bit of Cold War kitsch that can still send chills up your spine. Bert is an animated turtle wearing a sort of World War II helmet -- when he is threatened with aerial bombardment, he retreats into his shell, thus, giving an example of how a victim of a nuclear bomb attack should shield himself from injury. The film features interracial class rooms in which the kids duck and cover under their desks to avoid the blast of a nuclear missile detonating nearby. We see various iterations of the primal scene -- an air-raid siren sounds and the kids "duck and cover". In one sequence, in a playground, the children abandon their bats, balls, and jumping rope to run inside the building and "duck and cover" -- the camera takes still-lives of the bat, ball, and jumping rope eerily abandoned in desolate empty frames worthy of a film by Ozu. In one scene, a family's supper is interrupted by the wail of sirens -- everyone ducks and covers under the table, leaving us with a good view of a 50's style meal complete with a bottle of Guelden's mustard on the table. We see kids alone in corridors and walking along sidewalks surprised by the scream of the sirens and "ducking and covering." "The attack may come," the narrator says reassuringly, "when there are no grown-ups around." The kids crumple against walls or cower in door openings. The eerie thing about the maneuver is that we don't really see the kids getting up after the exercise -- instead, we see people going about their daily activities, then, the shriek of an air-raid siren, and the actors crouching, putting knees to head in a fetal gesture, and, then, locking their hands over their necks. But I don't really recall anyone coming up out of that position -- in other words, in a flash everyone is "changed", terribly changed, but the kids who have gone into the "duck and cover" position don't ever get up; they seem to have become motionless corpses. This may not be literally true but it's the impression that the film gives -- once, you go into the "duck and cover" posture, there is simply no return from the dead. The phrase "duck and cover" comes with a little radio-TV ditty, a little rhyming jingle or theme song intoned by Bert the Turtle who seems to have wandering into this very American film from a PSA made in England. I can't see a picture like this objectively because it is part of my childhood. I recall doing "duck and cover" exercises when I was in kindergarten and through the fourth or fifth grade of elementary school. So what's on screen is entangled in lots of contractures, scar tissue and ligatures linking the images to other memories in my life.
Inferno
Inferno is a 1953 thriller starring Robert Ryan and directed Roy Ward Baker. The film is an excellent example of a low-budget B movie crime picture that succeeds on all levels. Hollywood once produced these kinds of films in great numbers -- TV hasn't quite figured-out the trick.
Inferno starts with a kick. We see a desolate landscape and a sign warning that people should not travel in this country without adequate water and gas -- notably, the sign has been shot to pieces. The camera pans and we see an elaborately dressed movie star, a big armful of early 50's pulchritude (the villainess Geraldine played by Rhonda Fleming). The woman looks horrified, angry, and menacing all at one time and this nasty, ambiguous expression is the subject of the film and its central enigma, a riddle the movie tries to solve during its modest 85 minute running time. Geraldine is involved in a love affair with a stiff, Joseph Duncan -- he's a good-natured, murderous clod who thinks he's smart enough to manage the murder of his boss and girlfriend's husband, Carson. Carson has been left to die with a broken leg on a sun-blasted cliff-top sixty miles away from where Geraldine and Duncan are planting fake evidence and intend to leave Carson's vehicle. (We see Duncan walking backward on the sandy road to leave tracks facing in the wrong direction and seeding the site with whiskey bottles -- Carson, who is said to be an irascible brute, has been known to go on two or three day benders.) While Geraldine and dull-witted Duncan drink champagne and enjoy elaborate meals in her home in Los Angeles, we see poor Carson tortured by his shattered leg and desperately marshaling all his power of hatred to survive in the terrible, arid heat of the desert. Ryan, of course, is the best thing in the movie and his torments in the desert are both frightening and weirdly inspiring -- Carson admits that he's not much of a boy scout and doesn't know anything about wilderness survival but he's rational, courageous, and exceedingly patient and, of course, ultimately he escapes his solitary ordeal to wreak vengeance on his cheating wife and her lover. (The film is similar in some respects to the excellent picture written by David Mamet and directed by Lee Tamahori, The Edge -- in that man-in-the-wilderness picture, an industrialist like Carson finds himself leading a small group of survivors through lethal Alaskan mountains; Anthony Hopkins, who plays the hero in The Edge, says that most people who are lost in the wilderness panic and "die of embarrassment" and he's not about to let that happen to him -- his mantra is "what one man has done another man can do"; this is similar to Ryan, talking to himself in the boiling sunlight, about the fact that "if someone has done this, I can do it too.") The film traffics in obvious imagery -- we see Ryan chowing down on moist sawdust-like cactus flesh while the two lovers, dressed in evening clothes (Rhonda Fleming sports an almost surrealistically beautiful emerald-colored gown) enjoy roast duckling and steak. But it's successful and film barrels along at a breakneck pace. As Robert Ryan hallucinates from thirst, the villain dives into a Santa Monica swimming pool -- it's the opposite of subtle, but effective nonetheless. At times, the film is even grimly humorous -- in his running monologue with himself, Ryan says: "I sure wish I'd kept in better shape", as he lowers himself down a twenty foot cliff toward a rattlesnake waiting on a ledge for him below. The director said that he wanted to make a "silent film" and he nearly accomplishes this feat -- the film is all texture, image, and editing; it's entirely visual with not much in the way of dialogue at all. Rhonda Fleming is convincingly vicious -- at one point, in the film, she even abandons her boyfriend in the unforgiving desert. Shot in 3D, the film features a climax in which various detritus is hurled at the camera -- this is, perhaps, the weakest part of the picture, although it's certain fierce. The movie is also very good in showing how the desert can seem to be a nightmarish inferno to one man while offering another a generous living. An old desert rat tells one of the characters "the desert's got everything a man needs if a man just knows how to get it." This picture is tough and realistic, boldly acted by Ryan and Fleming and highly recommended. (A master of Southwestern desert photography, Lucien Ballard, shot the picture in glistening Technicolor.)
Inferno starts with a kick. We see a desolate landscape and a sign warning that people should not travel in this country without adequate water and gas -- notably, the sign has been shot to pieces. The camera pans and we see an elaborately dressed movie star, a big armful of early 50's pulchritude (the villainess Geraldine played by Rhonda Fleming). The woman looks horrified, angry, and menacing all at one time and this nasty, ambiguous expression is the subject of the film and its central enigma, a riddle the movie tries to solve during its modest 85 minute running time. Geraldine is involved in a love affair with a stiff, Joseph Duncan -- he's a good-natured, murderous clod who thinks he's smart enough to manage the murder of his boss and girlfriend's husband, Carson. Carson has been left to die with a broken leg on a sun-blasted cliff-top sixty miles away from where Geraldine and Duncan are planting fake evidence and intend to leave Carson's vehicle. (We see Duncan walking backward on the sandy road to leave tracks facing in the wrong direction and seeding the site with whiskey bottles -- Carson, who is said to be an irascible brute, has been known to go on two or three day benders.) While Geraldine and dull-witted Duncan drink champagne and enjoy elaborate meals in her home in Los Angeles, we see poor Carson tortured by his shattered leg and desperately marshaling all his power of hatred to survive in the terrible, arid heat of the desert. Ryan, of course, is the best thing in the movie and his torments in the desert are both frightening and weirdly inspiring -- Carson admits that he's not much of a boy scout and doesn't know anything about wilderness survival but he's rational, courageous, and exceedingly patient and, of course, ultimately he escapes his solitary ordeal to wreak vengeance on his cheating wife and her lover. (The film is similar in some respects to the excellent picture written by David Mamet and directed by Lee Tamahori, The Edge -- in that man-in-the-wilderness picture, an industrialist like Carson finds himself leading a small group of survivors through lethal Alaskan mountains; Anthony Hopkins, who plays the hero in The Edge, says that most people who are lost in the wilderness panic and "die of embarrassment" and he's not about to let that happen to him -- his mantra is "what one man has done another man can do"; this is similar to Ryan, talking to himself in the boiling sunlight, about the fact that "if someone has done this, I can do it too.") The film traffics in obvious imagery -- we see Ryan chowing down on moist sawdust-like cactus flesh while the two lovers, dressed in evening clothes (Rhonda Fleming sports an almost surrealistically beautiful emerald-colored gown) enjoy roast duckling and steak. But it's successful and film barrels along at a breakneck pace. As Robert Ryan hallucinates from thirst, the villain dives into a Santa Monica swimming pool -- it's the opposite of subtle, but effective nonetheless. At times, the film is even grimly humorous -- in his running monologue with himself, Ryan says: "I sure wish I'd kept in better shape", as he lowers himself down a twenty foot cliff toward a rattlesnake waiting on a ledge for him below. The director said that he wanted to make a "silent film" and he nearly accomplishes this feat -- the film is all texture, image, and editing; it's entirely visual with not much in the way of dialogue at all. Rhonda Fleming is convincingly vicious -- at one point, in the film, she even abandons her boyfriend in the unforgiving desert. Shot in 3D, the film features a climax in which various detritus is hurled at the camera -- this is, perhaps, the weakest part of the picture, although it's certain fierce. The movie is also very good in showing how the desert can seem to be a nightmarish inferno to one man while offering another a generous living. An old desert rat tells one of the characters "the desert's got everything a man needs if a man just knows how to get it." This picture is tough and realistic, boldly acted by Ryan and Fleming and highly recommended. (A master of Southwestern desert photography, Lucien Ballard, shot the picture in glistening Technicolor.)
Sunday, January 7, 2018
Black Mirror: Metalhead and The Black Museum
Black Mirror's two final episodes are "Metalhead" and "The Black Museum". Both are fascinating and frightening, although not completely satisfactory.
"Metalhead" is a stripped-down chase picture, a sheer jolt of adrenalin. In a post-apocalyptic future, two men and a woman drive across a barren landscape to a warehouse. They are looking for something, a "replacement" that is never named, although it is shown in the final image. In the warehouse, the trio encounter a metallic watchdog. The watchdog is fleet and fires swarms of glowing darts that embed themselves in the flesh of its victims so that the automaton can track them. The robot is also equipped with a high-powered and lethal weapon that simulates a shotgun blast. When the drone catches you, it blows you to pieces. In the first ten minutes, the robot-dog kills the two men comprising the trio. The survivor, a tough-as-nails woman warrior, finds herself relentlessly pursued by the mechanical dog. The last 35 minutes of the episode detail the woman's increasingly gory battle with automaton. "Metalhead" looks great -- it is shot in high-definition black and white; the images are so detailed that they have a sort of cartographic, military beauty: we seem to see every pebble and every leaf on the trees. From time to time, the point-of-view switches to that of the mechanical device pursuing the woman -- we see the animal scanning the rugged and barren landscape for its prey. The show is essentially silent -- after a couple exchanges of dialogue in the car, the two men with the woman are blown apart and she is alone. (As with the Icelandic episode, "Crocodile", the characters speak in some kind of northern Scottish dialect that is literally incomprehensible -- I couldn't understand a word that they said. Thus, the purpose for the raid on the warehouse was completely unclear to me. As it turns out, viewers who could understand the dialect note that it's not necessary to hear what is said -- the show is essentially a tour-de-force of violent action deployed across an unforgiving terrain and the duel is conducted in entirely visual terms. There is absolutely no back-story as to what has happened, why people have been reduced to this state, or why human beings are relentlessly hunted and killed by the mechanical hounds.) The show is a naked example of "what you see is what you get" film making -- it's totally pure, a graphic marvel of motion, space, and the most austere of all motives: simple survival. It's as if one of Jack London's most desperate narratives -- for instance, "To light a Fire" -- were made into a short film. The film's ending is a variant on Citizen Kane's big reveal -- the camera glides away from the site of the movie's climax, roving over the terrain over which the chase has been conducted, and coming at rest at last to the warehouse to reveal what the characters were trying to steal when the mechanical dog began its relentless pursuit. The "reveal" is underwhelming, I think, but the overhead shots of other mechanical hounds loping after the first dog and sniffing around places where the woman rested or hid during the chase is spine-chilling. There never was any hope at all, a fact that we don't appreciate until we see the sheer number of automatons unleashed to track the woman.
"The Black Museum" is more ambitious and, so, I think less successful. The story splices together two ideas: the first is that sensations of pleasure and pain can be transferred by electrical impulse from one person to another. This part of the story is told in flashback -- a woman driving across a hideously arid and remote-looking desert stops to recharge her electrical car. Near the abandoned gas station where she is parked for three hours to recharge the vehicle, she finds a motel building converted into something called "The Black Museum", ostensibly a museum of crime. The creepy and, clearly, half-crazed proprietor of the museum meets her and, while giving a zany tour of the exhibits, tells her the story that comprises the first part of the show. The story, involving transfer of pleasure and pain through a receptor in the temple and a transmitter that is glowing electronic helmet, is gruesome and disturbing. A feckless doctor discovers that he can diagnose ailments better if he actually suffers what the patient is feeling. And so, he puts the transmitter helmet on the patient, feels their symptoms, and, then, successfully makes his diagnosis. One time, however, the patient dies and he experiences the exuberant release of endorphins that accompanies physical death. He becomes an addict for this sort of experience and, ends up mutilating himself horribly -- he is now a pain addict. He ends up stalking victims, putting the transmitter helmet on them, and, then, torturing them to death so that he can experience all the pleasure of being both a vicious sadist and a hopeless masochist.
The second story in "The Black Museum" is also narrated in flashback. This involves a device that allows the consciousness of one person to be transplanted into the mind of another. A young husband's wife is injured in an accident and becomes comatose. The husband consents to transplanting her consciousness into his mind. This is initially a blessing for both of them, but, predictably, enough turns into a nightmare. The wife is censorious, angry, bitter and she relentlessly nags at the husband from within. First, the husband is given a way to put her on "pause" and simply "shuts her off" for months at a time. Ultimately, he develops a relationship with a woman who is, justifiably, jealous of his former wife living in her lover's brain. The new wife orders her husband to transplant the consciousness of the former wife into a teddy bear toy that is capable of only two responses: "Give me a hug" for sadness and "I love you" for happiness. The disembodied woman's child plays excitedly with the bear for a while but, then, simply discards the toy -- and his mother who is trapped inside the stuffed animal. This tale morphs into a third story about a convict who is executed in the electric chair -- in this story, the bad guy, a mad med-tech expert (who runs the Black Museum), records the consciousness of the convict at the moment he is dying in agony in the electric chair. He, then, creates hologram of the convict that people can continuously re-execute in his museum by flipping a switch. The convict's spirit, accordingly, is trapped in a repetitive, endless hell of being continuously electrocuted -- this is the same general idea behind the first episode called "U.S.S. Callister" as well as other earlier programs in preceding seasons of Black Mirror. The girl touring the museum turns out to be an avenger and she wreaks a horrible vengeance on the smarmy med-tech guy managing the Black Museum. The show is rife with inconsistencies and logical problems and doesn't really work at all. It's scary enough and there is a foreboding sense of queasy doom about the show, but it's disappointing in the end. (At the denouement, for instance, we see that the girl who has avenged the bad guy's crimes against humanity driving home -- she has her mother's consciousness embodied in her brain. That's how she had sufficient evidence and moxie to implement her revenge scheme against the villain -- her mother aided her. The ending is supposed to be happy but we know that having someone else's mind inside your head turns out to be a nightmarish plight -- thus the "happy end" of the show is happy only if we forget what we were shown a half-hour earlier.) There is an interesting question of the origin of "Black Museum"; the show's credits name Penn Jillette, the magician, as the source for, at least, part of the hybrid show -- Jillette wrote something called "The Pain Addict" that would describe the first of the three parts in the "Black Museum". However, in Great Britain, the BBC TV presenter Karl Pilkington, is said to have originated the idea for the part of the show involving two separate consciousnesses embodied in one brain. Describing that phenomenon, the husband in the second flashback says: "I can't even masturbate. It's like having a cop in my brain who is also my mother." In fact, years ago a Harvard neurologist posited something called the "bicameral brain" to explain that the gods in the Greek myths were merely other parts of heros' brains communicated to them directives toward action: The name of the book was The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Brain by Julian Jaynes.)
"Metalhead" is a stripped-down chase picture, a sheer jolt of adrenalin. In a post-apocalyptic future, two men and a woman drive across a barren landscape to a warehouse. They are looking for something, a "replacement" that is never named, although it is shown in the final image. In the warehouse, the trio encounter a metallic watchdog. The watchdog is fleet and fires swarms of glowing darts that embed themselves in the flesh of its victims so that the automaton can track them. The robot is also equipped with a high-powered and lethal weapon that simulates a shotgun blast. When the drone catches you, it blows you to pieces. In the first ten minutes, the robot-dog kills the two men comprising the trio. The survivor, a tough-as-nails woman warrior, finds herself relentlessly pursued by the mechanical dog. The last 35 minutes of the episode detail the woman's increasingly gory battle with automaton. "Metalhead" looks great -- it is shot in high-definition black and white; the images are so detailed that they have a sort of cartographic, military beauty: we seem to see every pebble and every leaf on the trees. From time to time, the point-of-view switches to that of the mechanical device pursuing the woman -- we see the animal scanning the rugged and barren landscape for its prey. The show is essentially silent -- after a couple exchanges of dialogue in the car, the two men with the woman are blown apart and she is alone. (As with the Icelandic episode, "Crocodile", the characters speak in some kind of northern Scottish dialect that is literally incomprehensible -- I couldn't understand a word that they said. Thus, the purpose for the raid on the warehouse was completely unclear to me. As it turns out, viewers who could understand the dialect note that it's not necessary to hear what is said -- the show is essentially a tour-de-force of violent action deployed across an unforgiving terrain and the duel is conducted in entirely visual terms. There is absolutely no back-story as to what has happened, why people have been reduced to this state, or why human beings are relentlessly hunted and killed by the mechanical hounds.) The show is a naked example of "what you see is what you get" film making -- it's totally pure, a graphic marvel of motion, space, and the most austere of all motives: simple survival. It's as if one of Jack London's most desperate narratives -- for instance, "To light a Fire" -- were made into a short film. The film's ending is a variant on Citizen Kane's big reveal -- the camera glides away from the site of the movie's climax, roving over the terrain over which the chase has been conducted, and coming at rest at last to the warehouse to reveal what the characters were trying to steal when the mechanical dog began its relentless pursuit. The "reveal" is underwhelming, I think, but the overhead shots of other mechanical hounds loping after the first dog and sniffing around places where the woman rested or hid during the chase is spine-chilling. There never was any hope at all, a fact that we don't appreciate until we see the sheer number of automatons unleashed to track the woman.
"The Black Museum" is more ambitious and, so, I think less successful. The story splices together two ideas: the first is that sensations of pleasure and pain can be transferred by electrical impulse from one person to another. This part of the story is told in flashback -- a woman driving across a hideously arid and remote-looking desert stops to recharge her electrical car. Near the abandoned gas station where she is parked for three hours to recharge the vehicle, she finds a motel building converted into something called "The Black Museum", ostensibly a museum of crime. The creepy and, clearly, half-crazed proprietor of the museum meets her and, while giving a zany tour of the exhibits, tells her the story that comprises the first part of the show. The story, involving transfer of pleasure and pain through a receptor in the temple and a transmitter that is glowing electronic helmet, is gruesome and disturbing. A feckless doctor discovers that he can diagnose ailments better if he actually suffers what the patient is feeling. And so, he puts the transmitter helmet on the patient, feels their symptoms, and, then, successfully makes his diagnosis. One time, however, the patient dies and he experiences the exuberant release of endorphins that accompanies physical death. He becomes an addict for this sort of experience and, ends up mutilating himself horribly -- he is now a pain addict. He ends up stalking victims, putting the transmitter helmet on them, and, then, torturing them to death so that he can experience all the pleasure of being both a vicious sadist and a hopeless masochist.
The second story in "The Black Museum" is also narrated in flashback. This involves a device that allows the consciousness of one person to be transplanted into the mind of another. A young husband's wife is injured in an accident and becomes comatose. The husband consents to transplanting her consciousness into his mind. This is initially a blessing for both of them, but, predictably, enough turns into a nightmare. The wife is censorious, angry, bitter and she relentlessly nags at the husband from within. First, the husband is given a way to put her on "pause" and simply "shuts her off" for months at a time. Ultimately, he develops a relationship with a woman who is, justifiably, jealous of his former wife living in her lover's brain. The new wife orders her husband to transplant the consciousness of the former wife into a teddy bear toy that is capable of only two responses: "Give me a hug" for sadness and "I love you" for happiness. The disembodied woman's child plays excitedly with the bear for a while but, then, simply discards the toy -- and his mother who is trapped inside the stuffed animal. This tale morphs into a third story about a convict who is executed in the electric chair -- in this story, the bad guy, a mad med-tech expert (who runs the Black Museum), records the consciousness of the convict at the moment he is dying in agony in the electric chair. He, then, creates hologram of the convict that people can continuously re-execute in his museum by flipping a switch. The convict's spirit, accordingly, is trapped in a repetitive, endless hell of being continuously electrocuted -- this is the same general idea behind the first episode called "U.S.S. Callister" as well as other earlier programs in preceding seasons of Black Mirror. The girl touring the museum turns out to be an avenger and she wreaks a horrible vengeance on the smarmy med-tech guy managing the Black Museum. The show is rife with inconsistencies and logical problems and doesn't really work at all. It's scary enough and there is a foreboding sense of queasy doom about the show, but it's disappointing in the end. (At the denouement, for instance, we see that the girl who has avenged the bad guy's crimes against humanity driving home -- she has her mother's consciousness embodied in her brain. That's how she had sufficient evidence and moxie to implement her revenge scheme against the villain -- her mother aided her. The ending is supposed to be happy but we know that having someone else's mind inside your head turns out to be a nightmarish plight -- thus the "happy end" of the show is happy only if we forget what we were shown a half-hour earlier.) There is an interesting question of the origin of "Black Museum"; the show's credits name Penn Jillette, the magician, as the source for, at least, part of the hybrid show -- Jillette wrote something called "The Pain Addict" that would describe the first of the three parts in the "Black Museum". However, in Great Britain, the BBC TV presenter Karl Pilkington, is said to have originated the idea for the part of the show involving two separate consciousnesses embodied in one brain. Describing that phenomenon, the husband in the second flashback says: "I can't even masturbate. It's like having a cop in my brain who is also my mother." In fact, years ago a Harvard neurologist posited something called the "bicameral brain" to explain that the gods in the Greek myths were merely other parts of heros' brains communicated to them directives toward action: The name of the book was The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Brain by Julian Jaynes.)
Europa 51
Extremely earnest and strangely abstract, Roberto Rosellini's Europa 51 is defeated I think by its own seriousness and Ingrid Bergman's obvious discomfort with the part that she is required to play. The film is important, I think, and very interesting but unsuccessful. (The picture is also hard to evaluate because it is dubbed into English so very poorly -- the different accents make no sense at all. For instance, Bergman's character is the daughter of a refined American woman with spectacularly undulating hair -- but Bergman seems to be speaking her part in heavily accented English while her mother talks with a British accent.)
Rossellini's story, which the director wrote, is a parable that has the flavor of late Tolstoy. A society woman living in Rome is grief-stricken when her 12-year old son attempts suicide and, then, dies, later, in the hospital. The woman, Irene (Bergman), takes to her bed for several months and, then, associates with a Communist who preaches to her the need for revolution. Irene works with the poor, buying medicine for slum children, and tends to a dying prostitute. When her Communist friend, probably previously a lover, suggests the need for violent revolution, she abandons political solutions to human suffering. Alarmed at her asceticism and generosity to the poor, Irene's husband, George, has her committed to an insane asylum. There she devotes herself to helping the mentally ill. At a hearing, representatives of the church, society, and the doctor in charge of the mental hospital, all urge that Irene be permanently committed -- she is regarded as irredeemably insane and some sort of danger to herself and others, although, of course, there is nothing wrong with her at all. The Court orders her permanently committed. Irene is locked away and, in the final scene, looks down smiling at a crowd of poor people who have come to visit her -- she smiles slightly and the final shot shows a group of children gazing up at her intently.
Rossellini's approach to this material is austere and lucid. I don't recall any camera movement and there is no expressionistic play of light and shadow -- with a couple exceptions (night scene filmed in Roman piazzas), the movie takes place in clear, clinical light. There are some notable images of desolation but they are documentary in character -- some scenes take place on the edges of the city in the wastelands around gruesome-looking high-rises where the poor live; there is a river and industrial desolation and, at one point, a group of children play around a dead body fished out of the water. An episode in which Irene works in a factory has something of the quality of Metropolis, there are vast atriums with sinister-looking figures engaged in surveillance of the workers and enormous spinning rotors. (When Irene is asked about the factory, she is speechless; she simply bursts into tears recalling its dehumanizing nature.) Rossellini has a habit of filming characters, particularly Irene, against bare white walls, creating an effect of sanctity -- the faces appear against a white void.
A film of enormous emotional integrity, Rossellini doesn't cheat -- his characters are mostly unpleasant and his heroine, also, seems deeply flawed. Although Irene acts like a saint, I assume, that most saints were, in fact, deeply problematic people and there is no effort made to glamorize the heroine's conversion -- she is demanding and nasty as a society woman and negligent, self-centered, and irritating as a saint. Her son, who's suicide attempt precipitates the crisis, is a spoiled brat -- like little Marcel Proust, he lies in bed during his parent's dinner party, repeatedly demanding that his mother come from the gathering to comfort him. When his mother suggests that he needs to grow-up and "be a man", he impulsively flings himself down a stairwell to punish her. There are hints, some of them none too subtle, that the relationship between mother and son is potentially incestuous. The poor people that Irene helps are similarly demanding, loud, and aggressive in exploiting her. Irene's husband is selfish and suspects his wife of an affair with the brash and aggressive Communist -- in fact, there is a suggestion that Irene and the Communist have been lovers at some point before the story begins. However, the husband misses the point -- Irene's affair with the Communist precedes her emotional crisis and she turns out to be as much a pain-in-the-ass and burden to the Communist as she is to her husband when she rejects his arguments that a social utopia, a paradise on earth, can arise from violent revolution. The dying prostitute for whom Irene cares is similarly realistically conceived -- the rest of the poor people in the tenement despise her and she's a tough cookie: some of her last words are to denounce her neighbors as being a pack of thieves. (There's a good moment when a smarmy young pharmacist, who seems to have enjoyed the prostitute's favors, delivers some medication to her squalid apartment. Irene tries to pay him, but he says: "Around here, we do things on credit.") Bergman herself is shot to look gaunt and exudes a sort of thin-lipped, taut reproach -- she is filmed to appear like a harridan. Rossellini's larger point is that the spiritual crisis that Irene embodies is endemic to post-war Europe, hence the film's title. Irene and her son have been traumatized by aerial bombardments -- indeed, the boy's clinging to his mother is a result of sleeping together in bomb shelters. Europe is post-Christian and teetering between Communism and aggressive US-style capitalism; at a dinner party, Irene seats the "Marshall Plan," an American, across from the Communist.
In 1950, Rossellini explored the themes in Europa 51 in a more felicitous film, Francis, Jester of God, a bio-pic about St. Frances of Assisi -- that movie, I think, addresses the post-war crisis of faith in Europe more obliquely and, therefore, more effectively. The ambition motivating Europa 51 can not be gainsaid. But the film is not wholly successful. Nonetheless, it is an important picture -- a critic has noted that alone among the major European film makers, Rossellini emerged from the war with the idea that, although the conflict had been horrific, it should not be nihilistically dismissed as utterly futile: until the end of his life, Rossellini hoped that a better world would come about as a result of the War and died in that faith.
Rossellini's story, which the director wrote, is a parable that has the flavor of late Tolstoy. A society woman living in Rome is grief-stricken when her 12-year old son attempts suicide and, then, dies, later, in the hospital. The woman, Irene (Bergman), takes to her bed for several months and, then, associates with a Communist who preaches to her the need for revolution. Irene works with the poor, buying medicine for slum children, and tends to a dying prostitute. When her Communist friend, probably previously a lover, suggests the need for violent revolution, she abandons political solutions to human suffering. Alarmed at her asceticism and generosity to the poor, Irene's husband, George, has her committed to an insane asylum. There she devotes herself to helping the mentally ill. At a hearing, representatives of the church, society, and the doctor in charge of the mental hospital, all urge that Irene be permanently committed -- she is regarded as irredeemably insane and some sort of danger to herself and others, although, of course, there is nothing wrong with her at all. The Court orders her permanently committed. Irene is locked away and, in the final scene, looks down smiling at a crowd of poor people who have come to visit her -- she smiles slightly and the final shot shows a group of children gazing up at her intently.
Rossellini's approach to this material is austere and lucid. I don't recall any camera movement and there is no expressionistic play of light and shadow -- with a couple exceptions (night scene filmed in Roman piazzas), the movie takes place in clear, clinical light. There are some notable images of desolation but they are documentary in character -- some scenes take place on the edges of the city in the wastelands around gruesome-looking high-rises where the poor live; there is a river and industrial desolation and, at one point, a group of children play around a dead body fished out of the water. An episode in which Irene works in a factory has something of the quality of Metropolis, there are vast atriums with sinister-looking figures engaged in surveillance of the workers and enormous spinning rotors. (When Irene is asked about the factory, she is speechless; she simply bursts into tears recalling its dehumanizing nature.) Rossellini has a habit of filming characters, particularly Irene, against bare white walls, creating an effect of sanctity -- the faces appear against a white void.
A film of enormous emotional integrity, Rossellini doesn't cheat -- his characters are mostly unpleasant and his heroine, also, seems deeply flawed. Although Irene acts like a saint, I assume, that most saints were, in fact, deeply problematic people and there is no effort made to glamorize the heroine's conversion -- she is demanding and nasty as a society woman and negligent, self-centered, and irritating as a saint. Her son, who's suicide attempt precipitates the crisis, is a spoiled brat -- like little Marcel Proust, he lies in bed during his parent's dinner party, repeatedly demanding that his mother come from the gathering to comfort him. When his mother suggests that he needs to grow-up and "be a man", he impulsively flings himself down a stairwell to punish her. There are hints, some of them none too subtle, that the relationship between mother and son is potentially incestuous. The poor people that Irene helps are similarly demanding, loud, and aggressive in exploiting her. Irene's husband is selfish and suspects his wife of an affair with the brash and aggressive Communist -- in fact, there is a suggestion that Irene and the Communist have been lovers at some point before the story begins. However, the husband misses the point -- Irene's affair with the Communist precedes her emotional crisis and she turns out to be as much a pain-in-the-ass and burden to the Communist as she is to her husband when she rejects his arguments that a social utopia, a paradise on earth, can arise from violent revolution. The dying prostitute for whom Irene cares is similarly realistically conceived -- the rest of the poor people in the tenement despise her and she's a tough cookie: some of her last words are to denounce her neighbors as being a pack of thieves. (There's a good moment when a smarmy young pharmacist, who seems to have enjoyed the prostitute's favors, delivers some medication to her squalid apartment. Irene tries to pay him, but he says: "Around here, we do things on credit.") Bergman herself is shot to look gaunt and exudes a sort of thin-lipped, taut reproach -- she is filmed to appear like a harridan. Rossellini's larger point is that the spiritual crisis that Irene embodies is endemic to post-war Europe, hence the film's title. Irene and her son have been traumatized by aerial bombardments -- indeed, the boy's clinging to his mother is a result of sleeping together in bomb shelters. Europe is post-Christian and teetering between Communism and aggressive US-style capitalism; at a dinner party, Irene seats the "Marshall Plan," an American, across from the Communist.
In 1950, Rossellini explored the themes in Europa 51 in a more felicitous film, Francis, Jester of God, a bio-pic about St. Frances of Assisi -- that movie, I think, addresses the post-war crisis of faith in Europe more obliquely and, therefore, more effectively. The ambition motivating Europa 51 can not be gainsaid. But the film is not wholly successful. Nonetheless, it is an important picture -- a critic has noted that alone among the major European film makers, Rossellini emerged from the war with the idea that, although the conflict had been horrific, it should not be nihilistically dismissed as utterly futile: until the end of his life, Rossellini hoped that a better world would come about as a result of the War and died in that faith.
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