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Category: Culture

The Savages

January 14, 2009
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One hour and twenty-three minutes into The Savages, someone does something kind for no reason other than to be kind. No guilt is involved. It’s a simple act of kindness. It’s the first time that happens in the movie, and it’s close to the last time.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance here. The category was Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy. His fellow nominees included John C. Reilly in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

The trailer is not exactly an accurate depiction of the movie.

Hollywood marketing is weird.

All that said, it’s an interesting movie. The structure — it’s minimalistic and it’s not innovative or new. Alienation and the aging process suck; there’s only so much you can say about that. The right thing to do is to get actors of the caliber of Linney and Hoffman and put them in a more or less predictable script. That works, because it’s worth watching two hours of those two painfully not bonding over the mortality of their father.

It’s also worth watching Philip Bosco as the father, mind you. He doesn’t have a lot of physical mobility to work with, and in fact I think he’s in bed for most of his screen time. He still conveys the frustrated intelligence of a man who’s fading away and knows it. The sequence in which he and Linney fly from Arizona to Buffalo is intensely painful: nobody talks to him. He’s treated like furniture, by everyone, including his daughter, and it’s humilating; all the more so because he isn’t sure he’d remember if someone did tell him where he was going.

Until the final ten minutes or so, I was going to give Tamara Jenkins credit for not using the tragedy as an excuse to solve the problems of the siblings. Then the siblings break through both their emotional barriers and move on with their lives in appropriate fashions. Plus a dog’s life is saved, which is more schmaltz than I think the movie needs to support. So partial points for omitting all the heartwarming scenes where Linney and Hoffman cooperate to take care of Dad, because that never happens; big deductions for the nice bow that ties it all together at the end.

It’s still not any kind of a comedy, no matter what the Golden Globes say.

One Of the Six Fundamental Machines

January 5, 2009
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Other than that the showrunner is a geek’s geek, who has credits in RPGs, comics, and of course television in the last year, how did I like the show?

… that was way too overworked a sentence for the sake of a couple of cheap jokes. I want to put semi-colons in it, but I can’t figure out where.

Anyway, how’s Leverage? Well, it’s not great television so far. Five episodes in, and I can’t say I have a strong emotional attachment to any of the characters. I say so far because I think the potential exists — Timothy Hutton’s a solid actor and there’s backstory to be developed there, and I’ve seen Gina Bellman dig out emotional grounding from a character who’s way more superficial than Sophie. So I think there’s potential. But it’s also the case that the characters are currently collections of quirks; in the introductory sequences, we saw what they could do rather than who they were.

Which is OK! I mean, there’s a hacker and a combat specialist and a cat burglar and an actor and a plotter, which is cool. It’s not great television, but it is great fun, and I gotta say everyone’s clearly relishing their characters. Plus the con jobs are marvelous. Rogers is doing a great job with the narrative conceits, and the mini-flashbacks to reveal how a con worked are perfect. You get a nice juicy heist every week. I also like the structure a lot: the first con always breaks down, and Nate always has to think on his feet to get out on top.

We’re also getting some subtle, which is one of the other reasons I said “so far” above. There was a nice bit in “The Bank Job,” the most recent episode, where the wrong two characters are forced to pretend to be FBI agents. They’re really bad at it. For the first five seconds, I was all “oh god that’s bad acting, this is terrible,” until I realized “wait, that’s awesome acting, it’s the characters who can’t pull that off.” So I appreciated that. There is somewhat of a roleplaying game sensibility to this sucker, as S. pointed out in reference to the characters, and which also shows itself in the zeal with which the characters get put into bad situations.

Disgression begins:

Christian Kane looked familiar for a while to me; the other night, I was watching old Angel episodes. Right! He’s Lindsey from Wolfram & Hart, the mostly evil lawyer. But it does not end there, because you know who else shows up as a Wolfram & Hart lawyer? Daniel Dae Kim, who is probably better known for playing a supreme badass on Lost. It’s almost as if actors wind up appearing on multiple shows during the course of their careers.

Leverage is on my Tivo and it’s likely to stay there. Recommended.

Donald Westlake, RIP

January 2, 2009
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2009 is not exactly getting off to a good start with the news of Donald Westlake’s death.

He was a consummate professional. The guy knew how to write mysteries; his range went from the comic caper Dortmunder books to the hardboiled Parker novels. He was primarily a novelist, but he did a few screenplays too. The Grifters was probably too quiet a flick to get noticed a ton, but it’s one of my probably top twenty movies and the last scene still disturbs me like very few other cinematic moments.

Just a smart writer. The funny in his comic mysteries came from an understanding of darkness, I think. One of his later novels, The Ax, is about a laid off paper company exec and the lengths he goes to in order to get a job. It’s bleak and understated and oddly believable, particularly right now.

I’m really bummed out about this.

What’s This Then?

December 24, 2008
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Some guy named Shane Acker apparently made a student animation film called 9, which you can see online. It’s only like 10 minutes, it got nominated for an Oscar, go ahead.

But because sometimes the right thing happens, it got picked up and now he’s directing the full-length movie version, with Elijah Wood and Crispin Glover and other people doing voices. There’s a trailer just out. I think maybe the right order is the trailer first, so your appetite is whetted, and then you can say “whoa, I can see a full version!” and watch the short, and then sit around contemplating whether or not adding voices and making it stretch longer is a mistake. It’s probably not, though.

How To Make a Thomas Kincade Movie

November 19, 2008
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Peter O’Toole? What has become of you?

Thomas Kincade is the paints with light guy. And love. He paints with love.

16) Most important concept of all — THE CONCEPT OF LOVE. Perhaps we could make large posters that simply say “Love this movie” and post them about. I pour a lot of love into each painting, and sense that our crew has a genuine affection for this project. This starts with Michael Campus as a Director who feels great love towards this project, and should filter down through the ranks. Remember: “Every scene is the best scene.”

He wrote a memo explaining how his movie should look. Which is to say: gauzy, full of light, and dark at the corners so it’s more cozy. Like this.

Kincade!

Isn’t that nice? Peter O’Toole’s looking a bit desperate in the movie poster, I think.

Kincade!

The Given Day

October 23, 2008
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I want to do a big thoughtful post on Dennis Lehane’s newest novel, The Given Day, because hey, Lehane. Mystic River remains one of my favorite books ever. But…

I liked The Given Day a lot. It’s an easy read, it’s interesting history, and Lehane’s love for Boston shines through every page. I don’t, however, think it’s quite as significant a book as Lehane seems to think. It has to carry both the weight of Lehane’s discussion of race and class, which is great as always, and of historical information, which I think weighs the book down overly.

The book jacket makes excited note of how Babe Ruth, Calvin Coolidge, and various other historical figures are characters. That was a bad sign. While Babe Ruth in particular was used really well as a framing viewpoint character, and I’d love to read Lehane’s Babe Ruth novel, I was not so interested in the game of admiring how Lehane worked the other historical figures into the narrative. Yay for gratuitous J. Edgar Hoover.

So that’s the summary. Good book, and I liked it as a historical, but as a tutorial on Boston history in 1919 it fell flat. I’d recommend in paperback rather than hardcover.