June 2007 Archives

Although I didn't approve of the way "Good Morning America" movie reviewer Joel Siegel reportedly walked out of a screening of Kevin Smith's "Clerks II" last summer (announcing: "Time to go! First movie I've walked out of in 30 [effin'] years!"), I realize now that Siegel -- who was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1997 -- was speaking as a man for whom life was, indeed, too short and too precious to waste on cruddy movies. (Even though we may not share the same definition of "cruddy.") Mainly, I just liked that he cared enough to say "NO!" Roger Ebert shares some thoughts on Siegel, who died Friday at age 63:

His cancer spread, then went into remissions, and his friends received regular medical updates. There were four kinds of e-mails from Joel: (1) Good news; (2) Bad news; (3) Encouragement involving your own problems, and (4) Jokes. Mostly we got jokes. If all else had failed, Joel could have been a stand-up comic; in early days, he was a joke writer for Robert Kennedy. On the other hand, he ran a voter registration program for Martin Luther King, Jr., in Macon, Georgia.

The rest of Ebert's piece is at RogerEbert.com, along with some of Siegel's own advice for cancer patients.

In A.O. Scott's review of "Knocked Up" in the New York Times, he expressed admiration for "a funny, knowing riff on the reluctance of movies and television shows even to use the word 'abortion.'" I thought that was one of the most brilliant bits in the movie, and not just because it emphasized the entertainment industry's squeamishness about the "a-word," but because it also captured men's unwillingness to interfere with (or face up to) "a woman's right to choose," and the way abortion has been swept under the carpet by the new right-wing Political Correctness. No longer is abortion considered a difficult and regrettable personal choice; the new PC has restored the shame and guilt from the old Scarlet Letter days of back alleys and coat hangers. That's one of the things I think "Knocked Up" was satirizing: Don't mention abortion! (The Bush administration cuts funding to any family planning counseling facility, in Africa and elsewhere, that acknowledges abortion as an option for women.)

In the Genuine Canadian Magazine (says so right on the cover) cinema scope, Associate Editor Jessica Winter offers this take:

As funny and endearing as Judd Apatow’s proudly vulgar new comedy can be, it may give the viewer nostalgia for the sequence in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982) when Jennifer Jason Leigh falls pregnant by a guy she shouldn’t be with, promptly gets an abortion, and rides back from the clinic with her brother, who takes her out for a cheeseburger. And that’s it: no apparent self-torment, no post-facto breakdown, no further discussion. Twenty-five years later—plus a nationwide swing to the right, the founding of Operation Rescue, and that deathless Ben Folds Five song—"Knocked Up" presents us with a similarly unpromising scenario: smart twentysomething who just got a big career break has inadvertently fruitful one-night stand with unemployed shlub. Yet in this case, abortion is only briefly suggested by third parties and dismissed out of hand. That’s not to say that the outcome is unrealistic: When Allison (Katherine Heigl) bursts into tears at the sight of the heartbeat on the sonogram, it’s obvious that ending the pregnancy simply isn’t an option for her—just as bearing a child simply isn’t an option for Leigh’s teenage character in "Fast Times." Still, when the closest a movie like Knocked Up comes to even saying the word is “rhymes with shmashmortion,” it’s clear that we’re considering less a depiction of life as actual people live it but rather a pop-culture product that embodies the squeamish contradictions of the mainstream moment a little too accurately. This is a movie, after all, in which Allison always has sex with her bra on but we get an extreme close-up of the baby’s head inching through Mom’s conspicuously bald vagina. Who knew the miracle of childbirth could be liberated from the dark shame of pubic hair?

Winter says that we can "blame the MPAA" for the missing pubic hair.

How will the movies handle -- or avoid mentioning -- abortion once the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, I wonder?

A "panel of experts" has compiled for The Guardian a list of 1000 Films To See Before You Die. Apparently, there's no rush. I mean, it's not films you "must see" -- just films "to see." That explains some of the choices. At least it's not restricted to British films, or even English language films. From the introduction:

Out of these million-plus movies, our team of experts has picked what we believe is the essential 1,000 - those that best sum up the dazzling achievement and variety of the movies.

Just don't plan on dying in the next few days, because they're publishing the list alphabetically, one day (and a few letters) at a time. Told you there was no hurry. As I write this, The Committee's selections for A through G have appeared.

P.S. The list, so far, is partly redeemed by the presence of "Devil in a Blue Dress," "Dazed and Confused," "The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years," "Dig!," "Boogie Nights," "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" and "Le Boucher." And it cites the right "Crash" -- the David Cronenberg one. ("Dead Ringers," too.) On the other hand, there's the smug, frat-boy-naughty "Clerks," the gooey "Ghost" and "The Faculty" -- which just makes me want to throw something out of something else or at something else.

Roger Ebert has published first Answer Man column in a year. Topics include: Ousmane Sembene, Scrooge McDuck, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," Phil Spector, Blood-Sucking Monkeys, Cormac McCarthy, "Marie Antoinette," and President Bush's stolen watch. Go ahead. He's got your answers right here.

Joni Mitchell is a gifted musician, a great songwriter, and a damn fine actress. (People always talk about her lyrics, but its her performances that make those words sing.) She's also a terrific director and cinematographer and all-around filmmaker and critic -- and I'm taking exclusively about her recorded music. I've been thinking about this for a long time, and then a thread on girish's blog a while back made me want to write about it. So, here goes. A few of my favorite examples, music and lyrics, analysis and critique (hers), composition and montage:

How about the camerawork in this shot from "The Boho Dance" (from "The Hissing of Summer Lawns"):

A camera pans the cocktail hour
Behind a blind of potted palms
And finds a lady in a Paris dress
With runs in her nylons

I see this as a horizontal dolly shot more than a "pan." And not too much zeroing in on the legs. Maybe a tilt down as the lady drops an hors d'oeuvre, just so you have a chance to notice. Or maybe somebody seated in the foreground spots the flawed stockings from across the room and there's a bit of rack focus to the lady's gams. Maybe we just see her in a full shot, with her back to us, standing in a cluster of other people who can't see the runs that are turned toward the camera. Or, if she's seated, perhaps she crosses or uncrosses her stems briefly, allowing us a glimpse of the telltale hosiery. There are lots of ways to shoot it, but Mitchell tells you what the shot needs to convey so you can come up with the specific compositions yourself.

Then there's this amazing zoom out from "Hejira" (song and album -- my personal favorite):

White flags of winter chimneys
Waving truce against the moon
In the mirrors of a modern bank
from the window of a hotel room

You see the snow-topped chimneys and the moon and you feel the mood. Then your perceptual awareness shifts. The tone drops a bit and you realize what you're seeing is a reflection off a bank building. The music slips higher and you pull back even further. These images aren't just objectively out there. You're watching them from the window of your hotel room.

It's a song about traveling, about getting away, about returning to oneself after the "possessive coupling" of a recent love affair. But it's been fairly impressionistic ("all emotions and abstractions," as she sings in "Song for Sharon") until this point: "I'm traveling in some vehicle/I'm sitting in some cafe." It's an anonymous landscape, dotted with specific observations: "... as natural as the weather/In this moody sky today," or "snow gathers like bolts of lace/Waltzing on a ballroom girl. And then, at the end, you (and the narrator) are actually back in the world, at a specific place at a particular moment, with the understanding that, even as a "defector from the petty wars," it's only until "love sucks me back that way." Jaco Pastorius' gray and wintery bass is just like that moody sky.

If Mitchell has a signature shot, it may be that hotel-room long shot. Like this one overlooking Central Park in "Song for Sharon" (from "Hejira"):

Now there are 29 skaters on Wolman Rink
Circling in singles and in pairs
In this vigorous anonymity
A blank face at the window stares and stares and stares and stares

Or this one from "Harry's House"/"Centerpiece" ("The Hissing of Summer Lawns"):

He opens up his suitcase
In the continental suite
And people third stories down
Look like colored currents in the street
A helicopter lands on the Pan Am roof
Like a dragonfly on a tomb

Mitchell is also an expert sound designer. Watch (and listen) to this, from "For the Roses" (song and album):

I heard it in the wind last night
It sounded like applause
Chilly now
End of summer
No more shiny hot nights
It was just the arbutus rustling
And the bumping of the logs
And the moon swept down black water
Like an empty spotlight

Or this atmospheric (and subjective) sound work from "Car on a Hill" (on "Court and Spark"), where the protagonist waits, anxiously and uncertainly, for her lover to arrive in the Hollywood Hills. I think of this song as a kind of sequel to the Beatles' "Blue Jay Way":

Ive been sitting up waiting for my sugar to show
Ive been listening to the sirens and the radio
He said he'd be over three hours ago
Ive been waiting for his car on the hill...

Fast tires come screaming around the bend
But theres still no buzzer
They roll on...

Can you hear that? Definitely a Surround effect. Squealing tires in the canyons, maybe emerging out of the distant sound of sirens -- you can't quite tell where the sounds are coming from up here -- getting closer, then... no buzzer. The song ends with a repeated circular figure on Fender Rhodes and guitar, with drive-by oboe (or synth), that leaves you -- and her -- hanging...

Here's Roger Ebert's take. Some oversights have been corrected since the first list was compiled (by polling film "critics, historians and experts" -- categories that are mutually exclusive?) in 1998. To me, that's "the day before yesterday."

Anyway, the good news is that "Nashville" went from 0 (i.e., not on the list) to 59. At this rate, it will easily reach its rightful place in the top ten by 2017. Buster Keaton (previously unrepresented) scored with "The General" at number 18, which means it will surpass "Citizen Kane" by next Tuesday. And "Sunrise" finally made it aboard at 82. Other new additions include: "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," "Saving Private Ryan," "Titanic," and "The Sixth Sense" (all newly eligible) and "Cabaret," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," "The Shawshank Redemption," "All The President's Men," "Spartacus," and "A Night at the Opera."

More good news: "The Searchers" leapt from 96 to 12. Maybe people are starting to understand it after 51 years.

Welcome, too, to these new arrivals in the Class of '07: "Intolerance" (much more engaging than "Birth of a Nation"), "Sullivan's Travels" (though I'd prefer "The Lady Eve" or "Miracle of Morgan's Creek"), "Cabaret," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," "All the President's Men," "A Night at the Opera," "Swing Time," "The Last Picture Show," "Do the Right Thing" and "Blade Runner" (maybe the next version Ridley Scott has planned will finally make it the masterpiece we've always wanted it to be).

Still MIA: "Miller's Crossing," "Scarlet Street," "The Woman in the Window," "Blue Velvet" (which even I don't think belongs -- though perhaps "Lost Highway," "Mulholland Dr." or "Inland Empire" would), "Lone Star," "Boogie Nights," "The Long Goodbye," [your choices here].

And where did "Fargo" go?

Also very much missed (i.e., dropped off): "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "A Place in the Sun," "The Third Man" (but isn't that a British film?), ""Stagecoach," "The Manchurian Candidate."

Not much missed: "Mutiny on the Bounty," "Patton," "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," "Fantasia," "Doctor Zhivago," "My Fair Lady," "An American in Paris."

Still unaccountably on the list: "The Sound of Music," "Tootsie," "Ben-Hur"... (And, really, "Star Wars" is lots of kiddie fun -- but one of the best American movies? Hardly. Alhough I could say that about "The Wizard of Oz," too. Both "Oz" and "Star Wars" are movies people love because they loved them as kids -- and that's wonderful. Technically, they're also quite delightful. But as artistic achievements they're pretty thin. This isn't a popularity contest. Oh, actually it is. Still, I'll take "Pinocchio" or "Babe: Pig in the City.") And, one day, "Schindler's List" will be put into perspective, ranking slightly above "1941" (and below "Always" and "Amistad") in Steven Spielberg's body of work. For that matter, "Raging Bull" belongs above "The Departed" but below "After Hours" and way below "New York, New York" in Martin Scorsese's oeuvre.

Reuters notes that D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" "fell off the list entirely because of its now unpopular ideology, despite its history of technical innovations." Well, maybe. But has anybody watched it recently? Anybody even felt like it? And did "The Jazz Singer" drop off for the same reason?

What great injustices (and justices) do you see? Take a look at the list and let me know what you think.

P.S. That reminds me: My own Top 100+list is here.

UPDATED (06/21/07): Films are nominated by the pollees and then the top 100 are selected by ballot. According to the AFI, 43 new films (released between 1996 and 2006) were eligible this time that weren't eligible in 1998.

"A Mighty Heart," Michael Winterbottom's film based on Mariane van Neyenhoff Pearl's book about her husband Daniel, a journalist who was kidnapped and executed in Karachi, Pakistan, opens this weekend. I've had my say about the casting of (Czech / Haudenosaunee / American) Angelina Jolie as (Dutch / Cuban / French) Mariane Pearl. And so has Mariane Pearl, who told Newsweek: "This is not about skin color. I wanted her to play me because I trust her. Aren't we past this?"

Well, some people are. And some aren't. Like, I guess, the people who hired Halle Berry to play white Nevada schoolteacher Tierney Cahill in the upcoming "Class Act." (Berry's at least as much white as she is black. But will she wear "whiteface" in the movie? Do you care?) Or, perhaps, the ones who hired John Travolta to play a woman in "Hairspray." Or even those who think it was just wrong for Marriane Pearl to have married a white Jew in the first place. (Miscegenation!) Let's take that logic to its inevitable extreme. Some people are sticklers for racial, cultural and gender purity. If only race, culture and gender were really that monolithic and clear-cut...

And we're talking about actors here. I'm not advocating blackface or whiteface minstrelsy (that implies bad acting, doesn't it?), but these people are supposed to be able to play characters other than themselves. That's what they do.

Maybe Jolie is terrible and totally miscast in the part. I don't know, I haven't seen the movie yet. But a commenter at the site concreteloop.com succinctly summarizes my own feelings about the matter at this stage:

At first it does seem a bit odd, because I am sure there are women of African American or Afro-Cuban descent who could play that role but I would not say this is modern day black-face. If it were some blond-hair, blue-eyed non-talented actress, I would really have a problem. However, I do think Angelina is a great actress and as a matter of fact Mariane Pearl wanted Angelina to portray her in the film. So shouldn’t her wishes be respected?

Producer Brad Pitt, who hired his honey for the part, said he was nervous about doing it, but he felt it was the right decision for the movie: "I knew the part had to be played by someone with Mariane's strength and understanding of the world, but I didn't know how to broach the subject. It feels a little like Wolfowitz trying to get his girlfriend a job. [...]

"I know that people are frustrated at the lack of great roles (for people of color), but I think they've picked the wrong example here."

I guess it also depends not only on whether you think Mariane Pearl has a (moral? contractual?) right to approve who plays her in a movie made from her own book, but whether you consider Angelina Jolie an actress or just "Brad's girlfriend" -- you know, half of "Brangelina." (Or even whether women are capable of making such important judgments, since those who cry "racism" here insist that Jolie and Pearl do not have the personal or professional credibility or authority to make such decisions for themselves.)

And whether you consider the fact that both share Northern European / Caucasian heritage. Much of the criticism I've seen has focused on the tabloid "Brangelina" phenomenon (as if that were real anywhere beyond the supermarket checkstands), or has tried to tie this casting into the history of racist portrayals of African-Americans in Hollywood movies. (In that regard, I recommend Donald Bogle's book, "Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks.") But is that really an appropriate conclusion to draw in this particular instance?

I agree that actors of color should be offered more and better roles -- including those that weren't originally written to be one race or another. (Sigourney Weaver played a man's role in "The TV Set" without changing a word. Other parts have been re-written for the actor selected for the part.) But is the problem really one of casting people with the same racial make-up as their characters? Or is it more significant that writers and directors and casting directors are not making films with enough characters of color?

On the practical side... well, a star is a star. Angelina Jolie and Halle Berry are Oscar winners, marquee names, not struggling unknowns. (Not that struggling unknowns or semi-knowns don't deserve a chance, but they're unlikely to get one in such a high-profile project.) Mariane Pearl wanted Angelina Jolie to play her, sought her out, and sold the rights to Brad Pitt's production company. Based on this "package," the film was able to get a greenlight from Paramount Vantage, with the expectation that they would make a profit. The question becomes: Is the only form of "good casting" to make sure the racial balance of the character matches that of the actor?

Is Beyonce really too light -- or too dark -- to have played a character based on Diana Ross in "Dreamgirls"? Is Denzel Washington really too dark to have played light-skinned, reddish-haired Malcolm X? Was it racist to have cast Chinese actress Gong Li as a Japanese woman in "Memoirs of a Geisha"? Were Al Pacino -- or Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio or Robert Loggia -- terrible in "Scarface" (1983) because they are not Cuban? Was it wrong for Benecio Del Toro (Puerto Rican-American) to play a Mexican cop in "Traffic"? If these actors were good or bad in those movies, was it because of their racial background, or because of the roles and their performances in them?

I wonder what happened to a sense of proportion here. This isn't exactly Mickey Rooney playing a grotesque caricature of a Chinese guy in "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Doesn't the performance itself count for anything -- or is it all about appearances? (OK, if Jennifer Aniston had been cast as Pearl, I'd be a lot more skeptical. Even though she's only two years younger than Pearl, while Jolie is seven years younger. But if Jolie is playing Pearl in 2001-2002, then she's just about the perfect age, no?)

In the 1957 case Roth v. United States, the US Supreme Court held that the First Amendment did not protect obscenity, which Justice William Brennan characterized as a form of expression that was "utterly without redeeming social importance..." and which "... to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest."

In Jacobeliis v. Ohio (1964), Justice Potter Stewart wrote his famous description of pornography:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case [Louis Malle's 1958 "The Lovers"/"Les Amants"] is not that.

Nine years later, in Miller v. California, Chief Justice Warren Burger offered his famous definition of obscenity:

The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Today, of course, porn is made for the World Wide Interwebs, and so-called "torture porn" is mainstream multiplex fare. In a post called "The 120 Days of HOSTEL PART II" at The Exploding Kinetoscope, Chris Stangl argues that the phrase "torture porn" is simply a meaningless critical buzzword, "a non-position that allows a critic not to engage the work. It's critical name-calling." Stengl writes: "Any review, op-ed piece, or coverage of 'Hostel Part II' that includes the phrase 'torture porn' as if it were a meaningful genre designation, I will not finish reading. A line must be drawn. We all have our limits." (Thanks to The House for calling my attention to Stangl's site.)

I was about to disagree with this (after all, I happen to know torture porn when I see it!) -- but then...

For years, the go-to guys for this thing of ours ("The Sopranos") have been Alan Sepinwall at Tony's hometown newspaper, The Newark Star-Ledger ("The Voice of New Jersey"), and his former Star-Ledger colleague, Matt Zoller Seitz. (Be sure to see Seitz's terrific column on the final episode and the fine comments it inspired. And, while you're at it, check out the newly built archive of "Sopranos" Mondays at The Bada-Bing Next Door.) As the TV critic for the paper at the end of Tony's driveway, Sepinwall managed to score an interview with series creator David Chase, who has gone away to France for a little while until this series ending thing blows over.

Chase says:

"I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene.

"No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds, or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.' People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them.... Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there."

Sounds a lot like the Coen Brothers in the piece I posted yesterday.

Sepinwall summarizes the ending succinctly and perfectly:

Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a good night's sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails:

Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.

Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggests that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)

I read a comment somewhere today that pointed out the B-side of the closing song (Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'") is listed on the jukebox as: "Any Way You Want It." Yeah, and whatsa matta wit dat?

P.S. Yes, I'm more interested in the last few hours -- and particularly the last hour -- of "The Sopranos" than in any movie I've seen since "Zodiac." I'd like to do a shot-by-shot of Episode 86....

It was 1991 and we were talking about "Barton Fink":

Joel Coen: ... I also don't think it's as difficult as some people think it is. I mean, some people come out going, 'I don't get it.' And I don't quite know what they're trying to 'get,' what they're struggling for.

Ethan Coen: It's a weird story, but it's a fairly straightforward story that I think can be enjoyed on its own terms... 'Barton Fink' does end up telling you what's going on to the extent that it's important to know -- you know what I mean? What isn't crystal clear isn't intended to become crystal clear, and it's fine to leave it at that.

Joel Coen: But we have had the reaction where people leave the movie sort of uncomfortable and befuddled because of that. Although that wasn't our intention to do that. I was going to say that maybe our telling of the story wasn't as clear as it should have been, but I don't think that's true. In terms of understanding the story, it comes across.

The question is: Where would it get you if something that's a little bit ambiguous in the movie is made clear? It doesn't get you anywhere.

Where would it get you? That's what I was thinking about after the "Sopranos" finale last night, and I remembered this conversation. What if Barton had opened the box? What then? I've mentioned the ways "The Sopranos" has paid tribute to the Coens' "Miller's Crossing" (particularly in "Pine Barrens," the whacking of Adriana, the lawyer named Mink), right down to the ambiguous (and perfect) ending. Which is also in the spirit of "Barton Fink." I can't imagine anything more true to the show, or more dramatically satisfying, than what happened Sunday night. (I'm also reminded of those who were desperate to know, once and for all, if Julia Sweeney's Pat character on "SNL" was a man or a woman -- when it was perfectly obvious that the whole conception of the character was that there was no answer to that question. The question is the character. That's not only the joke, it's the punchline.)

So, for those who wanted to "know what happened" in Episode 86 of "The Sopranos" (and apparently there are lots of them -- evidently casual "fans" of the show who haven't been paying any attention to what it's about for eight years), I have to ask: What did you want? If any or all of the things you expected happened, then where would that get you?

Series creator David Chase obviously knew that if he provided one or more of the usual denouements, it would color everything that came before. So, Tony gets his comeuppance, by getting whacked, or losing family members, or going to jail, or going into the Witness Protection Program like that schmuck Henry Hill in "GoodFellas." Aha! That's what this has all been leading up to! What could be more anti-climactic than any of those trite outcomes? You've seen them all before in other movies, anyway. To me, they would have spoiled "The Sopranos" by arbitrarily assigning it a hackneyed and finite "moral lesson" end-point.

"The Sopranos" has always been founded on the proposition that human nature, character arcs (Christopher: "Where is my arc?!?!") and narrative structures are roughly the shape of... I don't know, onion rings. People have breakthroughs, illuminations (Tony: "I get it!"), vow to change their ways, think they have changed... and then fall back into their old ways. Because that, fundamentally, is who they are.

AJ winds up being the same spoiled brat he was in Season One. Meadow continues to be the mildly rebellious princess (and she's the only one in the house who seems to unambiguously acknowledge and even accept what Tony does for a living -- hence her not-so-subtle dig at her father about why she wants to become a lawyer), but within bounds that will still win parental approval. Christopher straightens out, and then relapses. Carmella leaves Tony on principle, and then succumbs to the same old pattern of denial and expensive kickbacks that formed the basis of her marriage from the beginning. Dr. Melfi convinces herself that she's helping Tony, and then dumps him in an unprofessional huff when publicly exposed, simply because she got "caught," as if she were one of his mistresses. Tony the sympathetic sociopath learns to blame everything on his mother as his latest way to avoid reforming or taking any responsibility for his own behavior... Will the circle be unbroken? No way.

Remember Charles Foster Kane. Thompson, the reporter (William Alland), gives his eloquent speech: "Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get, or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything... I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a... piece in a jigsaw puzzle... a missing piece." And then, in the final seconds, we discover what "Rosebud" is, even if nobody in the movie ever does. And where does that get you? The real ending of "Citizen Kane" is Thompson's speech. The revelation of "Rosebud" is great showmanship, the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle, all right, but it doesn't really explain anything we didn't already know.

So, I ask you again: Whaddaya want?

"Ten Movies That Shook The World" (1977 - 1999), the semi-sequel to my piece on "How "Star Wars" Changed Everything," is now at MSN Movies.

Excerpt:

"Beverly Hills Cop" (1984)

It's a comedy. It's an action movie. It's a fish-out-of-water story. It has Eddie Murphy. It's the '80s in a nutshell! Here we have the quintessential example of the "high concept" movie that has lit the light which is green at studios from Burbank to Culver City. I saw it with Eszter Balint, the then-18-year-old Hungarian-American actress who played cousin Eva in "Stranger Than Paradise." She told me afterward that she felt bad for the families of all the expendable characters who were killed in the gunfight and car chase scenes. With its (some would say rather callous) synthesis of comedy and violence, "BHC" (and Walter Hill's "48 HRS") brought a slicked-up exploitation-movie sensibility into the mainstream, paving the way in the 1990s for "Pulp Fiction" and its imitators.

"Top Gun" (1986)

A breakthrough in the portrayal of homoeroticism in Hollywood movies (we've all seen Quentin Tarantino's monologue about how it's the gayest movie ever, right?), as well as the apotheosis of the slick, MTV-style action picture produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (now just Bruckheimer, since Don Simpson OD'd on Tinseltown decadence). The deliberate, disorienting music-video cutting, the contemporary pop soundtrack, the shameless celebration of testosterone-injected buddy love -- it's all here, from Tony Scott ("The Last Boy Scout," "Beverly Hills Cop II," "Domino") to Michael Bay ("Armageddon," "Pearl Harbor") and beyond. One could argue that Adrian Lyne's 1983 celluloid video about the lady welder who was "a maniac, maniac" for dancing under buckets of water at gentlemen's clubs (aka "Flashdance") deserves this spot, but it lacks the militaristic gay element that became so prevalent in popular movies. "Brokeback Mountain" may have been sired out of "Red River," but "Top Gun" also blazed a trail for it.

Go here for the complete list and overview...

"In the midst of death, we are in life, heh? ... Life goes on..."
-- Paulie Walnuts, Episode 86

Meantime life outside goes on all around you.
-- Bob Dylan, "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"

Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on
-- Journey, "Don't Stop Believin'"

Have another onion ring. Pop the first DVD of Season One into the player and press "play." "The Sopranos" is... I'm not going to say "over." Think of it as complete at last, a perfect whole. It's finished but it's not over. Life goes on.

It's not uncommon for a long-running show to get self-reflexive in its final episode: "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "St. Elsewhere," "Newhart," "Seinfeld," "Six Feet Under," to give a few famous examples. And no show has ever displayed more awareness of itself as a show than "The Sopranos." Not even "It's Garry Shandling's Show," the sitcom about being a sitcom. "The Sopranos" has always been a serial mob movie about being a serial mob movie in a culture where everybody's seen a lot of mob movies (and remakes of mob movies) and even low-level Jersey mobsters imagine themselves acting like the mobsters in the movies. And in its last seconds (which made my heart leap and had me laughing and crying at the same time), "The Sopranos" accomplished what I hoped it would, as I wrote earlier: "... I want [series creator David] Chase to come up with something I didn't anticipate, but which feels right for "The Sopranos." He's done it before. But now I'm afraid in a different way: I really, really want the ending to live up to the show."

"I'm afraid I'm going to lose my family. Like I lost the ducks."
-- Tony Soprano, Episode 1, January 10, 1999

" _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _"
-- Tony Sproano, Episode 86, June 10, 2007 (TBA)

"The Sopranos" didn't look terribly promising to me back in 1999 when I saw the first promos. Another Italian-American mob show? What could be more of a cliché? Of course, I was hooked after the first episode (the ducks, the shrink's office), and it continued to astound me week after week with how smart and savvy and rich it was. It took the pop gangster mythology of "The Godfather" and "GoodFellas" (and "Miller's Crossing," though I don't recall any characters specifically referencing it) and turned them inside out.

"The Sopranos" is about a small-time mob family in Jersey for whom "this thing of ours" is "trending downward," and who long for the legendary status of movie gangsters. They're shmucks, losers, the very definition of a dysfunctional family, and subconsciously they may even know it. But petty and corrupt as they are, they're still clinging to the American Dream, right down to the characterless and strangely empty McMansion in the suburbs. In "The Sopranos," the mob is a metaphor for contemporary capitalism and consumerism and those treasured illusions of "family" that seem like vestigal instincts. That's why I think the final tableau of the first part of Season Six was one of the series' most brilliant and haunting moments. All the trappings were there -- the festive decorations, the lovely home, the extended clan gathered 'round the hearth -- but we knew then that the greeting-card Christmas image was a sham. The tension was stomach-clenching because we (and perhaps they) could feel that this hollow moment was merely the calm before the storm of the final eight episodes. And now it's all coming down.

Since the third season or so, "The Sopranos" may have lost much of its ability to astound, but that's mainly because we now know anything is possible. Other shows kill off significant characters or rupture the storylines' major arteries, too. By the time Adrianna was wacked, it didn't seem so shocking. As with the best drama and comedy (and "The Sopranos" is an operatic tragicomedy), it seemed inevitable in retrospect. I hated losing her, but whaddaya gonna do?

"The Sopranos" made acclaimed shows like "The Wire" and "Deadwood" possible. I have friends who think "The Wire" is "better than" "The Sopranos," but that seems like a silly and fruitless comparison to me because they exist in entirely different dimensions. "The Wire" is consistently brilliant and thrilling to watch, with its teeming cast of characters and long, tangled narrative threads. I love it. But "The Sopranos" is much bigger, more deceptively complex, because it can work a meta-metaphor, make a satirical observation about contemporary politics or history or popular culture, and keep you absolutely in the moment with these characters in this particular set of circumstances. It makes your heart race, your eyes water and your head explode. It lives up to the word "masterpiece." And this single series has probably been more consistently excellent than all the rest of the American cinema over the last eight years. It hasn't just made a subscription to HBO indispensible (and an unbelievable entertainment bargain for the money), it's helped make watching television as essential as going to the movies.

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but there have been times when I didn't want to watch the next episode, because I was too fearful for the characters. I feel incredibly apprehensive about Sunday night, because I'm afraid of what I'm going to see, and how I'll feel about it. And I don't want it to be over. Maybe I should just TiVo it and then, when I'm feeling a little less vulnerable... Well, that's not going to happen. That's part of what the show is about: Having to face things you'd rather were kept out of sight (like the stashes of cash and guns around the Soprano household), and having to know that everything comes at a price.

I wonder if to say I care deeply about these characters is to say I love them, when I feel I shouldn't. I know how horrible they are. But I guess they're like family. And as we know from Season One, that doesn't guarantee love, either. (I'll admit it: for all her avarice and denial, I'm probably in love with Edie Falco's conflicted Carmella. Hey, one of the show's consistent themes is that you can't help who you fall in love with. And if I ever met James Gandolfini I would want to hug him -- the actor, for creating such a tremendous character, not Tony.) I'm sure they deserve whatever's coming to them. But series creator David Chase doesn't necessarily think that way. As he says on page 163 of "The Sopranos: The Book" (which I haven't even begun to read) in the article called "What We'll Never Know": "If you're raised on a steady diet of Hollywood movies and network television, you start to think, Obviously there's going to be some moral accounting here. That's not the way the world works. It all comes down to why you're watching...."

Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up" ought to be the most-discussed (and argument-generating) movie of the year so far -- which means it's uncommonly smart and subversive and disturbing (and funny), especially for a summer sex comedy. I happen to think Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann, as Pete and Debbie, the bitter and resentful married couple with kids (Mann is Apatow's wife, and the kids in the movie are theirs) are the funniest characters/actors in the picture (and Kristen Wiig: amazing), mainly because their material, and their performances, are so painfully true that it's not funny. Which is what makes it so funny. It helps that all three are top-flight actors with a gift for uncanny understatement. Sometimes you don't even know if the scene is funny or not (like Debbie's suburban ambush of Pete) -- and those are inevitably the most revealing and rewarding kinds of laughs, when you surprise yourself by laughing at how awful and truthful the characters are behaving.

Anyway, I've found that some women don't like the movie, for sex-specific reasons I hope to discuss at length in the near future. Let me offer a few examples now from reviews that I think "get" "Knocked Up" -- and not from my usual suspects, either.

Anthony Lane, The New Yorker:

One night, Ben [Seth Rogen] goes to a bar, picks up a girl, and goes to bed with her. Both are drunk at the time, and both, in consequence, throw up: Ben the next morning (“I just yakked,” he says winningly over breakfast), and the girl—who is no girl but a young woman named Alison (Katherine Heigl), with a growing career on television—some weeks later, into a trash can at work. Here comes the bit that will divide Apatow’s audience and (he hopes) get them arguing over the movie: Alison decides to inform the father and, little by little, to enfold him and his oafish, froggy grin in the gentle business of parenting. Call it the taming of the Shrek. Most women, I imagine, will scoff with incredulity: this is neither a last hurrah (Alison is still in her twenties) nor the ideal time (she has a good job), and Ben is the last slob on earth she would have chosen. Most men, meanwhile, will be too busy watching through their fingers. To them, this is “The Omen.”

What's interesting about this paragraph is that it's slightly wrong. We go to the bar with the women, not the men. The gals are swept inside (even though Mann's character is really too old to be there), while we catch a glimpse of Ben and his geek buddies near the front of the line. They've probably been standing out there for hours. (This doorman scene will pay off later -- though I think it's the weakest in the movie.)

My first reaction to the Ben-Alison match was that she would never want to see him again after their one-night stand. But, like so many women, Alison is someone who falls in love with a guy for who she wants him to be, not for who he really is. (She doesn't even know who he is -- and vice-versa.) At the point where she (improbably) lets him back into her life, it's because she now views him as "the father of her child" (which, in her view though not our society's, gives him some marginal rights) and as Pete and Debbie indicate cynically at the breakfast table in front of the kids, men and women who are in love get married and have babies. Or men and women who have babies get married and fall in love. Or something like that. Alison wants to be in love with the father of her child (their child, she insists), so she is determined to make herself believe that's the case, even when it isn't, because that's the way it should be. And maybe she can even make him believe it.

Yeah, I know. Stop the presses. A more startling headline might be: "Dog eats food!" It's not news that self-proclaimed morality guardian Bill O'Reilly is a source of misinformation next to whom the Weekly World News looks like a Pulitzer contender. Bat Boy has more credibility than O'Reilly.

Now he's professing to be shocked, shocked about a panel last April at Boulder High School that was part of the Conference on World Affairs. (YouTube clip here.) I was on a CWA panel at Boulder High (about "Borat") that same week, and I can only imagine what O'McCarthy could have edited from it to make me or any of my co-panelists sound like we were saying something other than what we actually said. Say we quoted something from Borat in the movie. Out of context, O'Reilly could make it appear as if we were saying it ourselves. This one-man sitcom (oh, wait, that's his term for John Edwards) stoops that low, and lower, all the time, and oops he's doing it again. Of course, O'Reilly deals only in clips and sound bites. He has no patience for complete thoughts. Perhaps he simply doesn't have the time or the inclination to read or listen to what actually occurred during the 90-minute panel discussion, but for the record I'm going to re-print his claims alongside the actual transcript of the panel. We compare, you decide. And then perhaps you'll see why Boulder High students are demanding an apology from Fox and its loudest, most irresponsible (and that's saying a lot!) Spinmeister. O'Reilly's yellow-journalism depends on distortion and misrepresentation. The easiest way to counter it is to let the facts speak for themselves.

O'Reilly introduced the subject by mentioning that the president of the University of Colorado has "finally" recommended that professor Ward Churchill be fired: "But there is another educational outrage in Boulder that makes Churchill look insignificant. At Boulder High School students were ordered to attend an assembly where a bunch of so-called educators encouraged the kids to take drugs and to have indiscriminate sex." First, students say "ordered" is not true -- or, to use more appropriate high school language, attendance was not mandatory. But on top of this, now we are also supposed to believe that O'Reilly's prolonged campaign of outrage against Churchill (which he mounted on 25 "O'Reilly Factor" shows between January and May 2005 alone) was, in retrospect, "insignificant," because... why? You decide.

O'Reilly, a secular-aggressive, does not mention that the topics for the Conference on World Affairs panels at Boulder High are selected by the students themselves, and that the panels are produced by the students, and that questions from the audience are encouraged. This event was also introduced by a student, who said: "…Boulder High is the only High School that helps plan and host panels for this Conference. As students here at Boulder High, we try to create panels that will discuss topics and issues very present in the lives of students here today. [indecipherable] and myself are the creators and producers for today’s panel, STDs, which stands for Sex, Teens, and Drugs." The panelists were provided with the results of a student body survey in which a third of Boulder High students said they'd had sex, and half of those had done so under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Some might believe that was a matter of concern, worth addressing in an open student forum.

(Aside to O'Reilly: "STD" is also an acronym for "Sexually Transmitted Diseases." See how the title turns "sex, teens and drugs" into "STDs"? That was the subject of the panel, that drugs and sex can be dangerous and have dire consequences for people in their teens.) As he makes clear again and again, facts and context don't matter much to O'Reilly, for whom an hour-and-a-half panel is too long to say what he wants it to say so he can criticize it for saying what it doesn't say.

On a show posted on YouTube May 18, 2007, in the middle of a one-sided "discussion" of the Boulder High panel with a shock jock from a Denver/Littleton Clear Channel AM station (KHOW), O'Reilly said: "It is hard to believe that in America today you can have a town as out of control as Boulder. You know about the Midyette baby -- took 14 months to get an indictment on a murder case there. You know about JonBenet Ramsey. And now we have Boulder High School. But it doesn't seem that the residents of Boulder care if their high school tells their kids to go out and have sex of all kinds, at all age, and to use narcotics. They simply don't care in Boulder."

That's right -- there's a baby death, a child murder, and now a panel discussion. All in Boulder, the Gommorah of the Rockies! O'Reilly sounds like an insane person, but is there some kind of conscious or unconscious association he's trying to make here? Turns out the only parent to have complained about the panel was Priscilla White. You may remember that she and her husband Fleet had their friends the Ramseys over for Christmas dinner the night JonBenet was murdered, and were called to the Ramsey house early the next morning. Fleet White was with John Ramsey when the latter found JonBenet's body in the house. At first the Whites defended their friends; later, they turned against them. Is that what why O'Reilly related the murder of JonBenet to the panel at Boulder High? Are the Whites Friends Of Fox, feeding them material? What is the connection O'Reilly was trying to make between the murder of a child and the panel discussion?

An architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times reviews the new Landmark multiplex at the Westside Pavilion:

... [It is] designed to compete directly with your living room — with your sofa, your flat screen and your ability to pause, rewind, turn on the lights or just give up on the movie idea altogether and switch over to "The Daily Show."

As if to acknowledge how tough it's becoming to drag people out of their houses for a night at the movies, with home-theater technology getting better and traffic getting worse, the Landmark includes a number of domestic architectural touches. The most striking are three "Living Room" theaters on the top floor that hold between 30 and 50 people each. They include sofas and side tables as well as overstuffed love seats and ottomans by the high-end French furniture company Ligne Roset. [...]

All of the Landmark's larger auditoriums are pleasingly steep and feature extra-wide seats with cup holders that will accommodate your Chardonnay as well as a Big Gulp-sized soda. They are served by top-of-the-line Sony digital projectors, which construction crews were moving carefully into place last week.

But those rooms offer a variation on an architectural experience we all know well: the big movie auditorium with cushy seats and teeth-rattling sound. What's new at the Landmark, at least for a first-run theater, are those Living Rooms — not just for their furniture but for what they reveal about the industry's attitude toward architectural space in a digital era. [...]

This time around Hollywood is openly admitting the extent to which the public now associates the movie-watching experience with the comforts of home.

Well, why should a theater be less comfortable or less aesthetically satisfying than your average big-screen TV home set-up? This kind of thing has been done for years (the beanbags or sofas and ottomans in the front row and such), but what I'll be interested in seeing is whether cozy 30- to 50-seat auditoria can bring in enough revenue to justify building them.

Television network and cable "news" in a nutshell. From The Onion today, the Wall Street Journal tomorrow:

ATLANTA—Last week, after a reported 65 million Americans learned of the bipartisan immigration bill with the breaking news report "Mexicans Stay," it became apparent that the much- ballyhooed 24-second news cycle had come into its own. [...]

CNN is widely credited with initiating the acceleration of the modern news cycle with the fall 2006 debut of its spin-off channel CNN:24, which provides a breaking news story, an update on that story, and a news recap all within 24 seconds. In addition to creating its groundbreaking format, CNN:24 broke many important stories with reports such as "Ford No Money Everyone Fired," "Iraq Bomb Kill Truck," "Country Hates Bush," "Dow High Now," and "Squirrel Water Skis."

"TV news reporting has always been about breaking the story down into only the barest, most salient facts, but the breakneck pace of contemporary reportage doesn't allow for that anymore," said Professor Robert Kubey, director of the Center for Media Studies at Rutgers University. [...]

A typical [MSNBC] News Moment segment includes seven seconds of lead stories, four seconds of developing news, the "International Second," "Weather on the 00:00:13s with Bob Van Dorn," "The Fastest Four Seconds in Sports," a two-second top stories recap, and wraps with four seconds of mixed entertainment and lifestyle pieces. In larger markets such as New York and Los Angeles, this last portion may be preempted by local news.