Tom Watson

The Event of the Summer

Springfield TW, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

No, it's not Harry Potter (though Lance argues otherwise, quite eloquently) - it's the arrival on the big screen of television's greatest franchise. I decided to join the crowd at Moe's a little early. (Hint: you can too).

Meet the Newcritics

You may have noticed a slight slackening here the last few days, the appearance of distraction, of a mind engaged elsewhere. All true.

Friends, meet the newcritics. Newcritics.com is a fledgling effort that promises "web-based criticism in literature, music, television, film, technology, theater and art from a diverse group of bloggers."

That promise is my promise; I cobbled the site together over the past few weeks and invited a few bloggers to post. Last week, the first posts hit the clickstream.

Newcritics is an experiment for me - it came about after a gathering of political bloggers a couple of months back. What I expected to be a hard-core politicalfest actually became and meandering and fascinating discussion of culture, both high and low. I loved it, and thought about extending the conversation; newcritics is my answer to that problem.

I hope you read the posts there, subscribe to the feeds, link to them, and comment often. So far, there have been some terrific articles - here's a few:

Band of Brothers: The Game by Tony Alva, on role-playing games and soldiers
Steve Bowbrick's Crime for Kids, a review of Carl Hiaasen's latest
Talking on the WhyPhone by Brendan Tween, a reaction to Apple's media domination
Blue Girl's Promises Kept. Chapter One on Calvin Trillin's memoir of love
Sidewalks of New York, by Lance Mannion, which discusses film characters who are controlled by their appetites and emotions

Then there's what I hope will be the first of many "list" postings - argument-provoking Top 10 affairs that spur reaction. Jason Chervokas and I take a shot at the ten best American domestic sit-coms of all-time, those classic situations revolving around a home and a family. Sure, we've all got The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, and All in the Family...but what's on your list? That's the point! Read Blondie's Children: the Best Domestic Sitcoms and let us know.

Consider what's up the first week, and my reaction is this: that's a magazine I'd read. Lots of voices, shared interests, conversation. We got one comment this week from Roxtar that really hit home, and made it feel (thus far) worthwhile:

A round-table, free-wheeling discussion of popular culture, on the other hand, can spin off in an infinite number of directions. It can take you from poetry to music to television, to literature, to film, to sociology and psychology, to marketing and persuasion, to technology and its role in the future…. I suspect your dinner last November touched on most, if not all, of those areas, and more besides.

Popular culture is not a trifle, or an idle diversion. It is like water to a fish; it surrounds us and, to a large degree, it defines us. But unlike our finny friends, we can actively participate in evaluating and determining the quality of our environment. Which I suppose is what you have in mind.

Exactly. I'm not giving up blogging here by any means. This will still be my personal space, and I'll probably cross-post most media/culture pieces. I'll only blog politics here. No politics on newcritics - it's a place for discussing what unites us, not what divides us. C'mon and set a spell.

London Calling: Movies of the Year

I'm not a film completist; with three children and a limited window of screening opportunities outside of video-on-demand, my year's best, non-kiddie category, is scant by definition. So my "best of" list in the cinematic arts is limited to exactly two pictures, the only two to really cut through the mist of over-production and bad popcorn, and to stick to my intellectual ribs like butter on a toasted corn muffin.

Both are deeply English, more so in language than in culture. Both have all their crucial action scenes in and around London. And both deal with government and with the power of perception in the masses, a crucial factor in self-governance and the source of legitimacy of power.

V for Vendetta caused one right-wing reviewer to rant that the film was "a vile, pro-terrorist piece of neo-Marxist, left-wing propaganda filled with radical sexual politics and nasty attacks on religion and Christianity." Others took it as a parable of neoconservatism run wild: its core story of America in ruins, and Britain run by a brutish totalitarian regime is filled with torture, secret imprisonment, the end of fair trials, and a government spying on its citizenry.

But the nightmarish dystopian comic book tale by the brilliant Alan Moore by published more than two decades ago, during the Reagan-Thatcher era and should not be viewed as modern topical commentary, though it was certainly a product of Moore's thoughts on Cold War politics. Written by Matrix sketch artists the Wachowski brothers, the screenplay (which Moore disavowed) has the layers and depth of a masterwork - surprising because their previous work, while fun, isn't as nearly rich. Or memorable. In a movie with tremendous dialogue - and you notice it more perhaps when the leading man wears in immobile Guy Fawkes mask - the most memorable line is this:

"People shouldn't be afraid of their governments...governments should be afraid of their people."

And that sentiment is precisely at the center of the other best picture this year, The Queen. It's a different England, of course, but there's a vein of authenticity - in language, in politics, in history - that runs through both films. In V for Vendetta, a lone assassin seeks revenge for years of terror and torture in the name of order; in The Queen, a nominally powerless monarch comes to terms with mass hysteria in the modern world of media - a hysteria that strikes to the heart of what really constitutes the shifting tides of democratic power.

Helen Mirren is, as has been widely noted, in pitch-perfect form as Elizabeth II - a charismatic, sympathetic performance of truly historic proportion. Cold, forbidding, corrupted by wealth and remove from daily life, this queen is nonetheless human. And in the strange, wild times after Diana's death in Paris, Mirren's queen confronts modernity.

As Hugo Weaving's faceless V has the very human, very beautiful, very vulnerable Natalie Portman to balance his hard-crusted visage, so too does Mirren's Elizabeth have the bouncy, optimistic preen of Michael Sheen's Tony Blair to counter the cool mask of royalty. Both V and the queen are other-wordly, living outside of the real world - one with mouth turned up in paint, the other with mouth turned down in disapproving restraint.

Both films reveal the power of the mob; how ironic that the masses in each movie converge on the small patch of turf between Hyde Park and the Thames, the center of changing British power for 1,000 years. One gathers in shared grief for a superhuman celebrity none of them has ever known. The gathers to take back power, but only after their rank complicity in the loss of democratic rights has been dramatically revealed by a comic book superhero throwback to the Gunpowder Plot.

I felt drawn into both movies, and believed that the world of V was as possible, as real as the world of Queen Elizabeth; we've seen nightmares of V's world in the 30s and 40s and after. We've seen the Diana spectacle and the royals' cluelessness on cable television. As James Cromwell's wonderfully arrogant Prince Phillip announces to the household:

Sleeping in the streets and pulling out their hair for someone they never knew. And they think we're mad!

Yes we do think you're mad - and fascinating, and worthy of the finest portrayal. So my movie list is only two-deep, but they're with me still. With me in visions of people in the streets, harbingers perhaps of the coming year's headlines.

Blonde on Bond

Three minutes into the interminable Casino Royale, and the kid leans over to me and asks: "Dad, has the movie started yet?" This has never happened before in the history of Bondage and I'll admit I was somewhat in doubt myself. Usually in the Broccolli family franchise, the customer is never uncertain as to whether the previews have ended and the main action begun. But this was different. The silver hues, the BBC-style video angles, the weird television music. Was this another commercial, a tie-in to the new James Bond flick, a spot for expensive watches?

And are you trying to tell me that's James Bond up on screen - a hulking blonde who looks like a back-up linebacker for the Chargers, and sounds like one of the extras in Tony Blair's cinematic cabinet in The Queen.

Speaking of The Queen, it was wonderful, driven by Helen Mirren's spot-on portrait, which gives a person known more as a tourist postcard than a human being some real, emotional depth. As the Bond dreck dragged, I was thinking of The Queen and about the Blair era - both these flicks are really Tony Blair vehicles.

One's a throwback to when Tony Blair actually mattered, and the other is a fantasy that pretends he still does.

In the Elizabeth-Diana spectacle, Michael Sheen portrays a bounding, tail-wagging, eager terrier of a Prime Minister - fully three-dimensional as the young, suburban emblem of a younger, suburban nation. Pre-9/11 Britain was proud of its boutique size and the speed with which it could adapt to the modern. It was like the cool, smart ad agency next to the plodding old-world behemoths. (I remember vividly the kangaroo steaks in a St. John's wood dungeon-bistro, followed by a wild ride to the museum of cinema, closed for a strange dot-com party in the late 90s).

Blair is, of course, not represented in Casino Royale, but Judi Dench serves well in the portrayal (by far the best in the film) of an England beholden to America, of an intelligence agency that is easily compromised, of a Cool Britannia that has gone all cold, and gray, and failed. Terrorism is the enemy in this Bond, but it's a terrorism driven by greed - white Europeans control the more dangerous, darker-skinned elements; indeed, there's a broad hint that 9/11 itself involved a plot to short airline stocks.

In another way, Casino Royale is the perfect analogy of the Tony Blair tenure - it's too bloody long by far. The movie drags on and on and on, with several false endings, an endless game of (ugh) poker, and two - yes, two! - evil guys with only one good eye. It also features long and luscious shots of the flesh of this blondie Bond Daniel Craig (who may be best remembered for his role as a Brit bounder in one of the excellent Sharpe dramas of a decade ago; in that episode, Sergeant Harper kills Craig's character off with alacrity - the deaths in Casino Royale take much longer). I remember when this treatment was reserved for the Bond girls, and in smaller doses.

Ironically, a much thinner and less-buff Craig played a tormented Jesuit priest in the 1998 bio-pic Elizabeth. No double-0 status then, but a real role.

Then too, this Bond epic is one long (long, very long, unending) commercial - product placement is everywhere. Sony, Ford (Ford?!), Ericsson, and Virgin are splattered about more than the bad guys' blood. Look! There's Sir Richard Branson setting off the alarms at the airport security check-point....clever.

The blonde Bond doesn't work; nor does the back to the future pre-007 concept. This is no legitimate successor to Connery - it barely stacks up the George Lazenby.

And if I thought Bond's blonde locks were sacrilege, imagine the disgust my kids felt watching the previews for the forthcoming Harry Potter epic. "Dad, Harry Potter has a buzzcut!" sputtered the little guy. Is nothing sacred?

UPDATE: Jason has a post on how Bond doesn't make sense in the post-Cold War world, how hw's just another action hero who could be portrayed by Vin Diesel - which reminds me of the best line in the movie, when Dench's M proclaims: "Christ, I miss the Cold War." Shades of Condi, I'd say. Here's Jason's review in a nutshell:

As exciting as the action set pieces are (and most of them are very good), they can't distract from the ludicrous spectacle of MI6 and the CIA fighting the global war on terror by sending not-so-undercover agents to play Texas Hold 'Em in Montenegro. (Next up, Bond goes head to head with Bin Laden in a high stakes match of Rock, Paper, Scissors in Cannes.) Despite the fact that most of the events of Casino Royale come straight from the novel, they lose all meaning when ripped from the context of time and place. The grim, vaguely S&M gay torture sequence that once packed cultural punch as an expression of guilt over an unchecked libido, now is just a weak excuse for a cheesy one-liner. Meanwhile, the plot twists of the original novel are reduced to an interminable 40-minute coda whose storytelling is so obtuse as to be almost unfathomable.

Our Reasonable Doubt

There is a killer moment in Twelve Angry Men when E.G. Marshall changes his mind. The camera stays focused on his face, which is wide with surprise at how wrong he'd been, how sure, how convinced and as the dialogue swirls around him, out of frame, you see him move his eyes in thought ... and change his mind. Marshall brilliantly portrays a wealthy, well-dressed stockbroker, a reasonable man, a Republican. All very understated and pinstriped, but it's clear that his character has bought the premise, bought the case, done things the right way. The kid killed his father because the prosecutor says to, and that is how the system works. As Henry Fonda, the doubting architect, scratches away at a case that would send a young suspect to the chair (it's 1957), Marshall is one of the hold-outs. Oh, he doesn't yell and scream and descend to cruel, naked racism like some of his pro-conviction colleagues (the kid's Puerto Rican). He's not in a hurry to get to the Yankee game like Jack Warden. He takes the upper road, the law and order path.

Then he realizes just how weak the case is, how poor the witnesses really were, and how complacent he himself had been. It's a quietly terrifying scene, totally removed from some of the sweaty histrionics of the rest of the cast in Sidney Lumet's wonderful set piece.

And it's what is happening all over this country with increasing rapidity - the cold realization of not only failure in Iraq, but weakness of it all, the gullibility of us all, our failure to see, our willingness to trust and believe and follow. Like E.G. Marshall's stockbroker, a legion of upstanding citizens is realizing tehri gross, mass mistake - its happening in Connecticut, where the war far more than the game, blogging volunteers, are spelling Democratic doom for Joe Lieberman. And I think it's going to happen elsewhere, as the jurors begin to switch their votes one by one. After an 11-to-one vote in the sweltering jury room on Centre Street, Henry Fonda explains his refusal to convict:

It's not easy to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first...We're talking about somebody's life here.We can't decide in five minutes. Supposin' we're wrong.

Watching this over the weekend - a quiet, non-blogging, non-wired time away at the shore - it seemed a fitting metaphor. All those men (and they were all men, all white, and all wearing ties) on the jury taking in the obvious and going along, doing their duty. And then being overwhelmed by the evidence: not of who committed the crime or what should, in fact, happen now; but rather, how wrong and ful of holes the case for conviction was.

And being wrong matters, especially when 2,500 young men and women die, when thousands of Americans are wounded, when tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead.

Almost the entire nation is now filled with reasonable doubt about this bleeding occupation. The few holdouts are all Lee J. Cobb - irrational, clinging to discredited beliefs and ignorance, angry and loud, disdainful of thse who challenge a patriotic vision. You'll find them on FreeRepublic, and Little Green Footballs, and Pajamas Media, and in the West Wing of our Presidential residence.

Mr. Foreman, it's time to take another vote.

Tags: Ned+Lamont Joe+Lieberman War Iraq Lamont Lieberman Henry+Fonda Bush Sidney+Lumet jury

The Man of Steal

With the exception of Tobey Maguire's brooding, troubled, deeply ambiguous Spiderman, comic book super heroes brought to life on the screen tend to suffer from a kind of bland stoicism. Call it costume-doping: the cooler the threads and capes, the more the man inside tends to fade away. Then too, the requisite feats of strength divert attention from the figure to his powers - and these days, powers are written in gorgeous special effects, utterly encouraging the suspension of disbelief.

The set pieces in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns, the cinematic return of the greatest American superhero, are that gorgeous and the representation of Superman's myriad powers are beautifully rendered. I particularly loved the deft portrayal of Superman's x-ray vision: subtle, romantic, kind of scary. Then too, the melding of views of Manhattan and its rivers with computer-generated locations of Metropolis is fun for any New Yorker. Who knew there were riverfront mansions in Long Island City?

This is no classic. It's overlong, the Lois Lane-Clark Kent romance is flat, despite the ministrations of Kate Bosworth, and Brandon Routh's Superman looks more like SuperBoy (who also makes a sneaky appearance, one generation on). It would be merely fine summer fare, a good outing with the kids (the youngest in his Superman t-shirt), except for the presence of one man.

Lex Luthor. Or rather, Kevin Spacey.

This is a Spacey flick through and through, his Luthor animated by wit and violence, a true living manifestation of the great comic book villains. The plot revolves around some stolen cyrstals from Superman's Fortress of Solitude - the place is a little dusty, because the Big Man's been gone five years and the left the doors unlocked - as well as the requisite Krypnote, without which - let's face it - there would be no tension around the outcome of any villain-Superrman clash. Or as Spacey puts it: "Krrrrrryptonite!" as he fiendishly grasp the green, icy prop.

Spacey is perfectly cast as Luthor because he is, in many ways, the natural successor to the Luthor of the Christopher Reeve epics. That would be one Eugene Allen Hackman. Along with his pal Robert Duvall, Hackman is one of those titanic "everyman" actors who did their finest star turns in the 1970s but continue to work continually: nothing special to look at, thinning hair, furrowed brow, rumpled suits. Raw clay physically, but filled with talent - understated talent too, the antithesis of Pacino and DeNiro, all realistic delivery and subtle glances. They make great cops, believable victims, terrifying killers.

Spacey's Luthor is right out of the Hackman playbook - he most closely resembles the brilliant sadistic sheriff Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, a movie Hackman stole. Other key parts in the Spacey filmography (and who can deny he's one of our best film actors?) resonate with Hackman's example - Jack Vincennes in LA Confidential and Quoyle in Shipping News come to mind. Recently, I picked up The Conversation, a Hackman vehicle from 1974 written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Hackman plays an obsessed surveillance expert who stumbles upon a strange corporate murder plot in San Francisco (great location shots, by the by). His character is a sexually repressed, jazz-playing Catholic investigator with a bad temper and a warped sense of justice. The force of his portrayal carries the movie; a remake would be the perfect slot for Spacey.

The great thing about actors like Hackman and Spacey is that they arrive at their roles with nothing obvious in their possession - no snarling, shouting schtick. They inhabit the characters like men slipping on fine, hand-stitched suits: the shoulders line up and the folds fall just right. In The Conversation, Hackman tells his landlady, "I don't have anything personal, nothing of value, except my keys." Exactly.

The Lemmon Song

Late in life, the brilliant American actor Jack Lemmon had a surgical facelift that smoothed out the wrinkles, removed the bags from under his eyes and sadly, took the expression and elasticity from that wonderful face. Few people noticed, but I did. In his last few movies - the grumpy old actor bookends the poor Odd Couple II, and the even poorer Out to Sea, all with Walter Matthau, and a couple of other turns - Lemmon relied on his voice, the inflections, the tart and sarcastic reaction, the exasperrated diatribe, but it wasn't the same. He died in the pre-September 11th world in June of 2001, just a year after Matthau.

Despite the last few half-hits, Lemmon's legacy is unassailable. To me, he's the greatest actor in American cinema (or at least amidst the rare peers of Fonda, Stewart, and Grant) and for some reason, in these January doldrums, his incredible body of work came to mind like a warm breeze. Maybe it was Lance Mannion's thoughtful posts on liberal (and conservative) Hollywood conventional wisdom and the complexity that really governs cinematic politics. Perhaps it's the fact that my new Netflix account seemed to bring on an instantaneous Lemmon festival, almost unbidden. Or maybe it's the fact that Lemmon once said this:

If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable. You must reach the emotional and intellectual level of ability where you can go out stark naked, emotionally, in front of an audience.

It's very hard to do a better job of describing the thespian arts than art, and Lemmon didn't just say it - he lived it. The antic comedy of a skinny young stage actor morphed into the serious, internal stories of a middle-aged man not afraid to show his age, and his sense that the world is moving on and he cannot crontrol it. Of course, his work with Billy Wilder was among his best and they span the full range - Some Like It Hot, the Apartment, Irma La Douce, The Front Page.

But lately, I've been thinking of a handful of Lemmon dramatic roles: the father searching for his son in Missing, the nuclear engineer turned whistleblower in The China Syndrome, and the conflicted suburban parish priest in Mass Appeal. Generally, these characters are little people - or at least, the guys we don't notice next door. But Lemmon inhabits them with an incredible sense of humanity. Each has a job that comes with a conventional point of view, a set of rules that are not to be challenged - until somebody, or something, or some event does. No one expressed that transition from staid convention, to puzzlement, to anger, to inner turmoil, to rage better than Jack Lemmon - no one.

So here we were this old last weekend, firing up The Out-of-Towners on the DVD and laughing aloud at the antics of Lemmon's Ohio executive who hits the perfect New York storm of transit strike, garbage strike, and a fogged-in Kennedy Airport. (Considering he played two of the great New York characters of all time in Felix Unger and C.C. Baxter, Lemmon can be forgiven this silly anti-Gotham farce). So I started jotting down my Lemmon Top 10, and here's what I came up with (in no partiular order):

Mister Roberts
Some Like It Hot
Days of Wine and Roses
The Odd Couple
Save the Tiger
The China Syndrome
Mass Appeal
Missing
Glengarry Glen Ross
The Prisoner of Second Avenue

It's funny: Lemmon's characters can usually be divided between comedic and dramatic, but in truth each of the good ones had a bit of both. The priest in Mass Appeal was funny, as the was the failing fashion maker in Save the Tiger - but each was tragic. And in his hilarious character (Unger leaps to mind) there is something of the resignation of the clown, the knowledge of a tough life that compels humor. The man himself summed it up best:

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

UPDATE: Wintering is an indoor sport in these parts, and along with sports in pre-pitchers and catchers territory, it seems to turn fertile minds to the movies - especially these days, when downloads and Tivo and Netflix makes every easy chair into a cinema seat. James Wolcott turns his attention to movie criticism, where these days, he finds "critics living so high in their heads that they've severed themselves from the wit and physicality of good acting, or even enjoyable bad acting." Wolcott confesses to Lemmon non-fandom in the same post, but graciously turns on his traffic spigot here anyway for precisely the latter value - enjoyable bad acting. Yessir! I love enjoyable bad acting,even the loud yammering of Lemmon's goofball low-level comedies (especially in January).

Indeed, "bad" acting and film-making of a higher order is a recurring theme in the exellent pair of posts by Lance Mannion and Jason Chervokas on Woody Allen. Outside of the brilliant book-ends Annie Hall and Manhattan, my favorite Woodman moments are the goofy ones - the silly lines, the purposeful mangling of language in shining a light on all of our insecurities that Allen masters. When he is at his most pretentious, he is at his worst - the farther from humor, the farther from truth, in my view. (This does not bury the human drama in his work; it merely raises those that retain the humorous edge, the delight at the absurd). Woody Allen is a humorist - the "great director" tag has been a drag anchor on his critical acclaim, despite an incredibly prolific career - and yeah, Bananas should be on any top 10 list (but to follow Wolcott's theme, I'd put Manhattan Murder Mystery - a thin Thin Man - on the list too, because it's got some great bad acting in it). Interiors? Nah - and certainly not in January, when it could push this indoor sportsman over the freaking edge.

Alas, Poor Gromit

The reviews are in, and they're not encouraging. Oh, the critics absolutely looooove the new full-length Nick Park claymation classic Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. And they practically worship the motions and expressions of Gromit, the mouthless pooch of the British middle class. No doubt, the movie will make big bucks. But that's what's got me down.

You see, Wallace and Gromit were my family's little secret.

Alone on our block, we have the full series of W&G shorts on DVD, the W&G clock radio, the W&G comb and brush set, the W&G cookie tin, the W&G video game, the W&G fridge magnet, even the rare W&G Christmas short from the BBC a few year's back. Alone among my children's peer group of cousins and friends, we worshipped the genius of Nick Park and re-ran the "Classic Three" countless times over the last decade; indeed, they made the big move from VHS to DVD with us. They accompany us on long plane flights and longer car rides, cued up on the the laptop and the portable DVD player.

We speak in W&G tongue:

Not even Wensleydale?

Ex-Nasa, fantastic for walkers

Hold tight, lad, and think of a Lancashire hot pot!

Cracking toast, Gromit!

And so on. We didn't need a full-length feature film (with Ralph Fiennes and Helen Bonham Carter for God's sake!) but we secretly hoped it would be made, fail miserably because of poor promotion, and be added quietly to our DVD collection to be enjoyed over and over again in joyful, superior near-solitude. Alas, this appears not to be fated; the critics are raving. Times scrawler A.O. Scott was awash in clay in ecstasy, declaring an instant classic:

The animation is a marvel - all the more so because the most demanding sequences seem almost casually tossed off. The world of Wallace and Gromit is one of the few genuinely eccentric places left in the movies, a place where lumpy, doughy characters achieve a peculiar dignity in spite of their grotesque features and the ridiculousness of their circumstances.

And then there's his worship of Gromit, the smart-ass dog, all irony and dog biscuits, whose canine attitude both skewers British middle class values - and raises them up in all their productive glory. Oh, wait - that's me. Here's Scott again:

And this unassuming pooch's feature film debut, after appearances in three sublime half-hour shorts, is thus a solemn occasion (even if the movie itself is utterly silly). His face now enters the pantheon of stars whose charisma transcends speech. Keaton, Chaplin, Garbo - let them now make room for Gromit ... For me, most of all, it was Gromit's forehead, which gave me renewed appreciation for the magic of movies. If only I had a dog like that.

If only. Well, the die is cast - now we all have Gromit. So I'll join the lines and the crowd at the multiplex this weekend. And marvel.