by Patrick Bailey
Frailty
The loving widower in this movie has two young sons whom he dotes upon. He doesn't go out drinking and neglect them. (He does drink a lot of beer at home but he never appears drunk.) He doesn't bring home one-night stands and embarrass his sons that way. He has a full-time job and they have a decent home next to a nice rose garden. He goes into their bedroom at night and talks to them just like they used to do in those old '60s family sitcoms on television.
It's his "hobby" that starts them down the wrong path. He doesn't take them fishing or to the movies. They're homebodies, mainly, with the emphasis on "bodies." The father has "visions" for his family but they don't involve the sons going to college or getting married. Dad's visions are a little more "down to earth" than that, and they need to get their shovels out on a regular basis.
I enjoyed the movie but I must say that I didn't sort it all out. It's confusing in parts, but it doesn't drag at all. The acting is great and the atmosphere is somewhere between mundane and psychotic, giving it an overall tone that I might call "eerie sublime."
The father has a rite of passage planned for his older son which the son "rebels" against. This rebellion is quelled in a harsh fashion and the son is "redeemed" into the fold. There are layers of irony here, which play out well in cinematic form.
I wouldn't call this a "good versus evil" movie. It's a movie about relationships, love, psychosis, and just wishing your parent would enjoy a normal life. The movie is mainly seen from the perspective of the older son's dilemma, and there certainly can't be much more of a dilemma for a young boy than to suspect that his own father is crazy.
The movie reaches a tidy summation, which draws heavily on the preposterous and unworldly. But this is being done in a lot of movies now, and at least this film does it well. It's not something to give any serious thought to; it's more of a fantasy. Maybe just some child's bad dream. And wouldn't it be nice if Dad was back to normal when you woke up.
Murder by Numbers
Two rich high school students decide to kill someone to "be truly free." Or because "they want to see if they can get away with it." Or because "they have these meetings in an old deserted house and don't have much else to talk about." Take your pick.
What matters is that they establish a relationship. One is smart; the other is "cool." One spouts philosophy; the other "wants some action." Together they act out their parts, with each exaggerating their roles to become "foils" for each other. Each pushes the other to either "live their identity" or to disappear and "to mean nothing." They set themselves up on a plan which will require all of their skills, all of their courage, and all of their trust. It's an evil plan but, by their "bonding," they set themselves up as "beyond good and evil." (In a way, they are like suicide-bombers; they make decisions in secret places and innocent people die to satisfy their agenda.)
Sandra Bullock, the detective, has a dark past and lots of present-day problems with co-workers (who are all men). She hides her problems and clings to all she has left: her professional expertise. She is cynical about everything else, including her straight-laced male partner. They have some "quality time" in her houseboat, but it's like she is playing the man and her partner is baffled and "wanting to talk about where their relationship is going."
Sandra does know something about adolescent desires and dreams. In high school, she fell in love with a "boy with a golden body." She senses that there is more to these arrogant teen-age boys than their their cocky and insolent explanations offer. Her "life-hardened mind" simply cannot accept the role-playing and "false consciousness" of these adolescent posers. Her intuition tells her that behind each of their facades is a corrupt void.
The movie reaches a dramatic resolution, but the problems are not at all resolved. This movie tends to hang onto the viewer. It's not like a traffic accident where eventually all the debris is cleared away.
It's a movie worth watching.
Dragonfly
You pretty much "live this movie." All that's missing is the narrator. Instead, we have Kevin Costner, who plays each scene with a subtle undercurrent which we sense will eventually bear fruit. It does. This is an excellent film.
Costner is a good-looking actor but this movie needed more than that. Pierce Brosnan is good-looking, but he would have ruined this movie. This film required a male presence which could "turn off its maleness" for the duration of the film. The role, as played by Costner, transcended the sexual into the spiritual and fit nicely into a plot which was all about the supernatural.
Generally, I don't like "missing movies" where someone is trying to find out what happened to their loved one. They tend to bog down in the usual cliches of sympathetic but long-suffering friends and useless government bureaucrats. They tend to drag. They go off on tangents and they have a lot of extra baggage which makes you lose patience.
Costner plays a doctor who is someone usually in control. But Costner is never in control in this movie. He's the victim of what is happening around him. His performance is such that you can tell that his love for his wife is so great that he doesn't care about control anymore. He just wants her back. He wants anything that has anything to do with her. There doesn't have to be a scene in the movie where he tries to kill himself or where he quits his job and becomes homeless. He doesn't have to end up as a drunk on skid row. The movie isn't heavy-handed like that. We don't need a lot of "real-life bring-downs" to know what will happen to him if he fails.
I cried at the end of this movie. It wasn't a "big cry," just a subtle one. I felt like the movie was talking directly to me. I was Costner at the end of the film and I felt like he did.
Good Advice
This movie is little and big at the same time. What makes it little is its simplicity and predictability. What makes it big is the chemistry between Charlie Sheen and Angie Harmon. I think romantic comedies are always little movies, but they "work big" if the sparks fly. "Pretty Woman" is a good example of a romantic movie with the sparks; "You've Got Mail" is an example of a little movie that stays little.
The acting in this movie is superb. It has nice flashbacks to "Wall Street," which I thought Sheen was reprising in the stock market scenes. Sheen's slickness wouldn't have carried the movie alone though. It was Harmon's acting, reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn's, that provided the emotional ambivalence so crucial to a budding romance that, once established, provides a center around which all the irrelevant details can rotate.
Sheen takes over his girlfriend's advice column and stumbles into the "public sphere" of the newspaper columnist. He's an amateur who manages to capture the public's interest by pretending to be a sensitive woman. That alone wouldn't mean a damn thing, of course, if the scenes between him and his editor weren't so volatile and promising.
There are a lot of nice turns in this movie, and there really aren't any wasted scenes. The film never drags, and its predictability never weighs on the viewer. It's one of those films like "Sabrina" (the original version) where you know what's going to happen, but you enjoy watching all the scenes which supposedly doom the romance. You ESPECIALLY like those scenes where the lovers pretend not to be lovers.
I guess we all think that love will out. Love will conquer. Love will make itself obvious. It does in this movie and it's fun to watch.
My First Mister
Like Woody Allen and Robert Klein, Albert Brooks is a philosophical comedian.
This is a movie that should have been a very funny comedy and highlighted all of Brooks' talents. As it turned out, Brooks was miscast for this movie. It called for someone like Richard Gere. He could have played up the tragedy part and we wouldn't have expected to laugh.
The scenario was perfect for a Brooks vehicle, but the comedy kept getting stifled by the serious emotional subtext. Like Woody Allen, Brooks is a born "society mocker," but he couldn't get off the ground because he was too busy acting in maudlin scenes.
It's another movie that tries to have a spiritual quality, but the spiritual angle was always teetering on the edge of a "dysfunctional relationship with the world" by the characters. Woody Allen usually is seeing a therapist in his movies, but we know that he doesn't really need one. Most of the characters in this movie DO need a therapist but none appears to have one. Woody's way is funnier.
Brooks is always "up to something" in his movies; he's active, restless, scheming, picking up the phone on impulse to plead with his agent or ex-girlfriend. He's a manipulator and glib talker and he is always "testing" those with whom he has relationships. In this movie, he's like a beached whale; he can't energize his neurotic batteries long enough to inject any humor into this "relationship movie."
The movie just sort of unravels at the end. It never established a center of gravity and so it ends up like a collage of images set to music that you might see in an advertisement for Hallmark cards.
Brooks has a terminal illness in the movie. Unfortunately in this film, his comedy dies long before he does.
Vanilla Sky
There are some movies that you should probably watch after a few beers. They might make more sense, or at least you might not being paying too much attention. You might just be able to enjoy the fact that the movie has famous actors in it and that it does have decent cinematography. It might be just a "well-done cinematic blur" that you could comfortably watch while de-stressing from work or from the fact that your wife has been acting weird lately.
But I stupidly watched this movie sober and was attentive to its every nuance and plot-turn.
Aside from the main question, which is why Kurt Russell ever agreed to do this movie, there are some other issues.
The main character, played by Tom Cruise, has a big magazine to run and a mission in life. You have to take that on faith because there is nothing in the movie to show it. He does make an appearance at his job but he looks drunk and goofy. The movie implies that he is trying to accomplish great things at his job, but these are never articulated.
Most of the things the movie actually shows are his bedroom moves. We CAN believe he's trying to accomplish something there.
We have a lot of "dream versus reality" stuff going on in this movie; a bit too much really. We have "dreams inside of dreams." Maybe there were some extra dreams that I missed; it was laid on pretty thick. Unfortunately the tight editing couldn't hide the fact that the movie didn't really make any sense. But it's not the first movie to not make sense, and that alone wouldn't turn me off.
The problem was that it thought that it made sense. I was supposed to feel satisfied at the end. But like I said I was stone sober. As the movie-watcher, I felt sort of like the Tom Cruise character. I wondered, "Is this really a major movie production?" I figured it was, but then again maybe I just dreamed that I saw it at the video store and checked it out.
There are a lot of movies out nowadays playing with psychological themes of memory, death, dreams, spirits, etc. A lot of dialogue is uttered in passing and then repeated later to give it "extra meaning." All cosmic and existential, I guess. Maybe we'll all be let in on the secret of life.
Well, it's no secret that "Vanilla Sky" is not a very good movie.
Novocaine
There are some comedians who rise above the form itself and become sort of existential philosophers of life. I don't mean Dick Gregory or Mort Sahl, because they aren't really comedians. I mean comedians who "within the art of pure comedy itself" manage to express things about the human condition.
This kind of superlative comedy can take many forms. I put Don Rickles in this category. He is the funniest philosopher I've ever heard. I would quickly add Jonathan Winters and Jerry Lewis. And rounding out the "best of the best" is Steve Martin.
I am ready to laugh at these people before they say or do anything.
In "Novocaine," however, we have a slight problem. It's a comedy that tries to be a serious murder mystery. As with many Steve Martin movies, the "perfect woman" turns out to be deceitful and uses her beauty in a manipulative and evil way.
The other woman in this movie, the drug-addict played by Helena Bonham Carter, has the worst hairdo I've seen since Annette Bening in "The Siege." I mean it's sort of like Nick Nolte's in the first half of "Simpatico."
Steve Martin does a couple pratfalls in this movie which are funny. But one is from human blood. This is a good example of why this movie is at such cross purposes. You don't have one of the funniest comedians alive doing slapstick comedy in a scene where a grisly murder is discovered.
I don't know who wrote the movie because I couldn't watch the opening credits, which are a bunch of gross dental and skull x-rays. Another bad idea, but somehow fitting after seeing the movie. The movie is full of bad ideas; in fact, it's just one big bad idea.
It could have been funny if the dentist thing would have been the foundation for hijinks and romance. It could have been another "Cactus Flower." That was a good movie.
I don't know if this kind of movie is the sign of things to come. It's a film that reminds me that there is something good about having movies fit somewhat neatly into genres, like comedy, murder mystery, etc. This movie breaks that mold completely, and I hope it's an aberration.
Steve Martin's best movie was his first, "The Jerk." Like Jerry Lewis in "The Nutty Professor," that movie put Steve Martin into a category of his own.
Steve Martin has a black belt in comedy. But "Novocaine" puts him down several degrees into white-belt territory. And that level is already glutted by the likes of Adam Chandler and Chevy Chase.
Kurt Russell Is My Favorite Actor
I think he started out in Disney movies. I never saw any of them. Later, he was in a horrible movie about a used-car salesman. He was a geek and I couldn't finish watching the movie.
Somehow or other he's turned into the best actor in Hollywood.
I first took note of him when he played Elvis. Now that was just about the most ridiculous idea I could imagine. I don't care if Ben Kingsley plays Gandhi, but I don't really want to have to watch some Disney actor playing the King of Rock and Roll.
But Kurt Russell played Elvis better than Elvis ever played himself. (Of course, Elvis never did play himself in a movie.) But after watching Kurt Russell play Elvis in that movie, I thought it would be ridiculous for Elvis to try and do a better job.
What does Kurt bring to the screen that is so special? First of all his appearance. He looks like a cross between a Greek god and a punk like Sean Penn. But his masculinity is tempered by a subtlety which is hard to put into words. Bruce Willis peppers his masculinity with good-natured whimsy but that doesn't allow him to be what Kurt is. It makes Willis "soft" whereas Russell is "hard." I'll let you work out any further metaphors in that area of masculinity.
Masculine heroes have always brought their own style to the screen. John Wayne sort of reminded me of a big grinning Irish bartender. Gary Cooper reminded me of an "extra" in any movie he was in. I always thought when he was playing the lead role it was because the lead actor didn't show up that day. But then Gary Cooper is one of my favorite actors.
Kurt Russell has a sense of humor but he doesn't really know it. That's what makes him so interesting. He's a much bigger character than any character he plays. You can just feel that watching him.
At the end of the movie "3,000 Miles from Graceland," there's a bunch of playing around by Kurt, like he was reprising some of his Elvis moves from that earlier flick. It was my favorite part of the movie.
Elvis was a kind of god. Kurt can't really be Elvis. He's more like one of us. But he's damn good at playing around at being Elvis. And there's something in Kurt's screen persona that makes "Elvis the actor" seem tiny by comparison.
Adam Smith called it the division of labor.
Kurt would have to be holding the cape and scarves during an actual performance by Elvis.
But in a movie, Kurt is King.
Jerry Lewis vs. Jim Carrey
They're both geniuses.
Sometimes it helps if you're neurotic and have a whole lot of psychological baggage to propel you into the realm of being a fool whom people will love. In this way, Jerry Lewis has to be considered the greater comedian on film.
In some ways, Jim Carrey is funnier than Jerry Lewis. He has the benefit of being out of control in a way that is unpredictable and that brings out the best in him. Jerry is never out of control. It's just that Jerry is so twisted inside that, when his rubber band starts to unwind, it's magic.
Jerry is schmaltz. He's the kind of fool that any mother would love. In fact, he appeals to the mother inside of us all. Jim is more like our funny brother. He amazes us with his cleverness, but we don't get sucked all the way in.
Jerry wants to be normal. He aches to be normal in his comedies. We feel that his klutziness is something that he can't help. He's a victim. He just wants to do his job and settle down with some nice girl. He can't help it if everything he touches turns into a major disaster, and that he can only hold jobs because people feel sorry for him and want to give him "one more chance." We know that giving Jerry Lewis one more chance is not going to work. He was born to be a klutz!
Jim's comedy is conscious. He's an "intentional fool," and he's very good at it. But he doesn't draw out our sympathy because we know we are in the presence of a master comic who invents things for us to laugh at. Jerry invented situations, surely, but he always knew that we were more interested in the kind of person he was during those situations. The lowly flunky, the patsy, the guy who would take any job and whistle while he worked. Carrey wants us to know that he is superior to any job he has. But Jerry is going to fail and cry over it later.
There's no irony in Jerry Lewis. He didn't know what it was. It's impossible to escape irony now that we are living in the age of the "talk-comedian," but Jim Carrey avoids it as much as he can. That's why the two belong together in the same category of "transcendent comedians" who don't have to look out at the audience with a knowing second glance. If they look at the screen, it's not to smirk; it's just that they are truly befuddled by what is happening. They are both human and their mishaps are what feed us laughter.
"Bacchus and Civic Order" by B. Ann Tlusty, University Press of Virginia, 2001
This is a good book. I enjoyed reading it.
It talks about drinking in the 1500s, mainly in the town of Augsburg, Germany.
The basic idea of this book is that Germanic people have always drunk a lot of beer, and other intoxicants, and that the town councils couldn't stop them if they tried. And they didn't try all that hard.
It has a chapter on "gender differences," like all academic books now have. I was deeply moved by the unfairness described in the book about how men got to do most of the tavern-visiting and women had to stay home and do the housework. It's not mentioned much, but this is as good a justification for the need for women's rights as I've heard.
There is an explanation of the male community's ideas on honor. Buying a round of beer was a form of honor that had to be performed for men to keep their craft positions, meaning their livelihoods. Your life depended on how you managed to drink in the company of your peers. Legal contracts would only be considered binding if each party had a drink in the presence of witnesses. And people really had to put on a good drunk for a wedding party, if they wanted the happy couple to be accepted by the community. Drinking had a lot of significance beyond the beer commercial back then.
Beggars, and the others at the bottom of the social scale, were banned from taverns in Augsburg. Men who spent all their paychecks at the tavern could be banned from them for periods of a year or more. There were some rules.
The nobility had their own drinking clubs, of course, where they gambled and whored away to their hearts' content and ignored all the town council rules.
The actual business of getting drunk in Augsburg could bring troubles; fights, duels, gougings, stabbings, the usual Middle Ages rough-and-tumble. But then, sometimes people were excused from crimes because drunkenness was a recognized legal defense!
The importance of wine in religious ritual, both Catholic and Protestant, is examined.
And it turns out that the city of Augsburg ended up making most of its budget money by taxing beer and wine and spirits.
"Dark Hollow" by John Connolly, Simon & Schuster, 2000
This is a book that could almost be classified as horror. It's a sequel to the author's first book, "Every Dead Thing."
A lot of people get wasted in this book and the bad people come in several categories, from just losers, to the mob heavy, to the Hannibal Lector type.
What rescues the book from being just a chronicle of nasty deeds is the emotional depth of the main character, Charley Parker, aka "Bird." He really deserves a normal life. It's been taken from him since his family was murdered in the first book. He's avenged that already, but he's still haunted. He used to drink too much, and he was in a bar the night his family was killed. But he only drinks coffee in this book. He drinks a hell of lot of coffee, about one cup for every murder I'd guess.
There is some nice description of Maine, where most of the action takes place. It presents an eerie contrast when the quiet description of the flora, fauna and weather inevitably presages another gruesome discovery. There are a lot of people in this book who act worse than animals.
I won't get into the plot since it's a mystery, but I will say that it all gets tied together in the end. It's a satisfying read for a mystery lover who doesn't mind a lot of blood on the tracks.
There's also an element of mysticism. I won't say supernatural because it's not necessarily that. Maybe it could be. There's a heavy layer of "other-worldness" that creeps in occasionally, but Bird thinks he might just be going crazy. And he would have good reason to be wiggy after what he has had to live through and combat.
Both of this author's books are worth reading and are page-turners. They put a different spin on the genre and bring something new to it. All the various elements are mixed up in the stew, but this author is a master chef and the final product is more than just the ingredients.
"Movie Crazy" by Samantha Barbas, Palgrave, 2001
This is a book which falls into that wonderful gap between "scholarly" and "intensely readable." It saves all the footnotes for the end, and its "argument" is so cogent that you manage all its details without feeling at all burdened.
It's about Hollywood and about fans. It's about stars and it's about mass culture. It's about who we are, like it or not.
I've written two fan letters in my life and this book actually made me think that maybe I should have written more. (I got responses to both my fan letters, but I think they were from publicity stooges.) This book is kind to fans and it explicates the way they evolved in response to the new thing called moving pictures.
They say that we are all common and that we are all special. But the people in movies are always a little more special and a little less common. So, we have fans, we have fan mail, we have fan magazines and we have stars. How they get mixed up together is what this book is about.
There are excerpts from fan letters to stars (the period in this book goes from the beginning of movies to 1950). Some of the letters are poignant; some of them are funny. It talks about how the social reformers all thought that movies would ruin everyone's "moral fiber" (especially the young and impressionable). It ends by touching on Sinatra's "bobbysoxers" and the hysteria they caused.
This book is yet another reminder why books in the end are more important than movies. You couldn't make a movie that explained books the way this book explains movies.
"A Is for American" by Jill Lepore, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002
I haven't read an academic book like this since "The Worldly Philosophers," which was the most interesting book I read in my economic studies in college a few years back.
This book is about people who changed the world with their quirks on. It's about language, science, politics, and how geniuses made the world over while they were trying to do other things.
It chronicles aspects of the lives of people who led remarkable lives, like that of Abd al-Rhaman Ibrahima, the son of an African chief who lived as a slave for 40 years, mostly in Natchez, Miss. He was eventually freed when someone found out he could write so beautifully in a foreign language. He ended up on a tour, displayed in a princely Moorish costume, where he would write out "The Lord's Prayer" in beautiful arabic script. (Later it was discovered that he was really writing part of the Koran, but who knew?) He was allowed to return to Africa but tragically died before being reunited with his family.
It's about Sequoyah, a Cherokee who, inspired by the story of Moses, created a "syllabary" of the Cherokee language by which his nation was able to correspond in writing. The Cherokee were forced off their land in the South and sent to Oklahoma. (The successes in this book can't all be viewed as victories for societal justice, but the author skillfully "zooms in and out from the personal to the general," showing how someone can make a positive difference while remaining helpless to stem the larger flow of history.)
It's about people who strived to refine the art of communication for their various purposes and who were successful to varying degrees. The context of their labors, the world of money and power, ran roughshod over their individual ideals, but they still changed the world. They didn't make it heaven on earth, but they made a difference.
This book is about human striving on both a personal and worldly level. Alexander Graham Bell was inspired to work for the deaf because he had a nearly deaf mother. He later became interested in eugenics and worried about "race suicide" for the white race. (Just because someone has a good technological idea doesn't mean he should run for president!)
I didn't even know that Samuel Morse was a painter until I read this book. And who would have thought Noah Webster could change the world (or at least the United States) armed with nothing but a spelling book?
This book is fascinating in its particulars yet retains its clarity when it ranges far and wide. It's a page-turner without the bloody corpses in the closet. This is "history for the masses," and just like so many of the inventions in this book, it makes the world a better place. There have been so many ways that our methods of communication have changed. But still there has to be "substance" to what we are communicating. That's what this book is.
"Odysseus in America" by Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D., Scribner, 2002
I've never read Homer's "Iliad" or "Odyssey." Now I will. This book is so interesting that it makes Homer sound like he should have written "Apocalypse Now." And all the other Vietnam War movies and books.
It's a rich blend of literary criticism and pathological veteran stories, so adeptly interwoven as to entrance the reader into a world of magical imagery, psychological insights and the fragility of the human condition.
The Greek poets and playwrights had it all at their command: beauty, humor, philosophy, human frailty, and valor in time of war. They even had gods to complicate their stories and to both rescue and bedevil their human characters.
The experience of war is transforming to the personality. The author shows how Odysseus made his homecoming from the Trojan War and experienced everything from bad seas, a Cyclops, sexy women and drugs. It was a long road home and he almost didn't make it. He was on a first-name basis with several gods, some good, some wily. (Odysseus was pretty wily himself.) There is no such thing as "reversing the effects of war experiences" as if they never occurred. But, through the bonds of humanity and love, and by the cathartic power of art and shared remembrance, the horror can be diluted enough so as not to destroy the individual's life.
The subsequent effects of combat trauma on the veteran is what this author has observed first-hand through the Department of Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic in Boston, where he works as a staff psychiatrist.
This book is a work of genius. It unravels for the civilian the strange course that a combat veteran must chart, and how it can destroy him and anyone close to him. The stories and literary references clarify our understanding of what it means to go to war, what it means to be a man, what the Greek poets thought and wrote about it, and finally, what each of us must think in our own way of this wide world with all its philosophy, art, splendor and human suffering.
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