THESE FOOLISH THINGS

I've mentioned her before, here and there, perhaps less than I have some other women I knew, but that doesn't mean I loved her any less.  Quite the opposite, in fact--I wanted her to be here for the rest of my life.

Not talking about it, here or elsewhere, made sense.  There was a fear, perhaps, in making too much of it.  Just enjoy it, don't overthink it.  I'd done that before, I always do that, and the implosion always follows soon after.  Maybe this time, with less ornamentation, the simplicity of the design could be more easily appreciated.

Or something.  My metaphors need work.

The point is, Janie's gone.  There was a time when I would have used this space to explore everything, good and bad, and given full vent to my feelings.  But Janie is a good and private person.  You don't need to know the details.  Really, there aren't any details to know.  It's just the nature of things to end.

Hopefully, she's happy, or at least happier than she was with me.  For me, there's just a quiet, empty house.  I go to work, I come home.  I sleep, but I never feel rested.  I eat, but nothing has much flavor.  I go out, but I'm going through the motions.

And sometimes I look for my heart, only to find it gone.

AMAZING, MUNDANE, WHICHEVER

Alvin Sargent wrote the screenplays for Paper Moon and Ordinary People, and throughout his long, long career also turned out scripts for such directors as Robert Mulligan, John Frankenheimer and Sydney Pollack, guys who certainly knew how to tell a story.

Steve Kloves wrote the scripts for all but one of the Harry Potter movies, which are absolute models of skillful adaptation, compressed, streamlined but never abrupt.  In addition, Kloves has written such wonderful originals as Racing With The Moon and The Fabulous Baker Boys.

James Vanderbilt's credits are a little lighter, as many of his scripts have been written in collaboration with others.  One movie he wrote on his own, however, was Zodiac--one of the best screenplays of the last decade.

I mention these gentlemen's names and their distinguished credits because they are the credited screenwriters for The Amazing Spider-Man, which has one of the woefully misconceived scripts ever put into production.

Not that everything wrong with the movie can be blamed on the script.  The decision to reboot the entire Spider-Man franchise came from deep within the bowels of Sony Entertainment's executive suite, and starting over from the beginning, retelling the tale of social outcast Peter Parker's encounter with a radioactive spider, gives the movie a familiarity it could never wholly overcome.

Unlike the recent Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire take on the material, in which the characters were initially college students, this version has Peter in high school, and that's where the problems begin.  For one thing, Andrew Garfield, who plays Peter, can't convince as either socially maladjusted or as a high school student.  He comes off as a brashly confident movie star in his late twenties pretending to be a teenager.

Peter's love interest this time around is Gwen Stacy, and the only reason he's drawn to her is because she's played by Emma Stone, and hey, she's a movie star, too.  Otherwise, he might as well crush on any of the other students in his school, who are all remarkably attractive and also clearly past the legal drinking age.

The dazzling stupidity of the script kicks in as the plot develops.  In a reinvention of the character, Peter is no longer an average guy who develops great powers but a man of destiny, trying to unravel a sinister plot involving the disappearance of his parents.  This leads him to Dr. Curt Connors, a former cohort of his dad's, who works for a sinister but apparently world-famous bioengineering firm housed in what looks to be the tallest building in Manhattan.  Once Peter shows up there, he's surprised to discover the intern program is run by...Gwen Stacy?

I'm sorry...What?  High-tech corporations wouldn't hire high school kids to answer phones and make copies, much less allow them access to top-secret labs, as happens here.  The screenwriters will later need a character to run to the lab to develop an antidote for the villain's master plot, and since they didn't bother providing any other sidekick characters, they needed Gwen to do it--because what high school kid can't routinely crack a genetic code?--even though it makes absolutely no sense.

At this point, early on, the movie is pretty much telling you that it isn't taking place in anything resembling the real world.  Which would be fine, if the world it depicts had any internal logic of its own, but it doesn't.  Things happen just because they need to happen, or else the plot can't move forward.  But again, the plot makes no sense even on its own terms.

Dr. Connors--thanks to a DNA code supplied by Peter, because again, high school kids know so much more than learned scientists--turns into The Lizard, a villain whose evil plan is to...turn everyone in New York City into lizards?  Because they're cold-blooded?  Or something? 

Look, I realize the Spider-Man comic books resorted to some pretty dumb motivations for its villains (Thirty-five years later, I'm still bitter about the whole "Gwen is back from the dead...as a clone!" storyline) but honestly, my expectations for something cranked out on a monthly deadline are a little different from my expectations for a movie that cost two hundred million bucks to produce.  If you're going to spend that kind of money, I expect competence, at least.

And yes, on many levels, The Amazing Spider-Man is more than competent.  Despite being too old for their parts, Garfield and Stone are absolutely charming together, Martin Sheen, Sally Field and Dennis Leary provide fine support, and the whole thing looks great.  The digital effects, in particular, are much more convincing than in Raimi's films.  But so what?  If you build the Chartres Cathedral on quicksand, it's still gonna sink.

BETTER KEEP IT REAL, OR WHATEVER

Why do Christopher Nolan's Batman movies inspire such awful behavior?

Back in the long-ago past of 2008, a coterie of mouth-breathing fans of Nolan's The Dark Knight caused a minor disgrace to humanity by posting incendiary comments at the web sites of various newspapers and magazines that had the gall to print negative reviews of the film.  This week, in response to reviews of The Dark Knight Rises, they've upped the ante, threatening, among other things, sexual violence towards Associated Press critic Christy Lemire.

The obvious question: What message, exactly, are you trying to send?  Do you think threatening someone will automatically convert them to your point of view?  Wouldn't that more likely cause them to dismiss you and everything you have to say?  (Okay, that was more than one question, but you get the point.)

Even more embarrassing is the whole Bane/Bain thing.  You know the meme: Bane is the villain in the film, Bain Capital is Mitt Romney's money management firm, which one is the greater villain, ha ha ha.  Sensible people would take the whole thing about as seriously as all those Hitler-reacts-to-whatever clips on YouTube, but never doubt the ability of right-wing crazies to overreact.  This was intentional, they say, as if the makers of a movie that went into production two years ago somehow knew who the Republican presidential nominee would be in 2012, and that there would be a fuss over this particular business he ran.

This is nonsense, of course, but it would be equally ridiculous to believe The Dark Knight Rises has no political agenda.  Nolan has claimed all along that the film was inspired in part by the Occupy Wall Street movement, and it seems unlikely his sympathy will be with the 1%.

Still, most networks and cable outlets--who have inexplicably covered this story as if it somehow can be considered, you know, "news"--have treated this particular flareup as a throwaway, gently mocking some of the more rabid conspiracy nuts for believing that a movie based on a comic book could have any deeper meaning.  That "lighten up, it's a superhero" attitude is incredibly condescending, exactly the type of thing to inspire rabid Fanboys to believe no one takes them seriously, that causes them to see every bad review of something they hold dear as an affront to their very existence, thus causing them to write threatening letters--and the whole cycle starts again, a sequel to a movie nobody liked in the first place.

YOU WILL BELIEVE

I rewatched 1978's Superman the other night.  It's very much a movie of its time, in good ways and bad, but one thing can definitely be said about it: We'll never see anything like it again.

In a sense, of course, we're seeing lots of movies like it.  Every month seems to bring another big-screen superhero epic, and they're all indebted to Superman, the first mega-budget attempt to bring a comic book adaptation to the big screen.  Watching it now, one can't help but be struck by its sometimes campy attitude, as if the high-powered supporting cast couldn't quite be bothered to commit to the material, but at it best, it succeeds admirably.

What I meant was, we'll never see a movie like it again.  Many of its most impressive visual whammies were created on set, with wires, rear projection and practical floor effects.  It was made well before the CGI era.

And is all the better for it.  Recent special effects extravaganzas, from (the already-dated) 2012 to The Avengers, have showcased apocalyptic visions, buildings, forests, whole cities crumbling into dust, every meticulously-rendered pixel landing at just the right place.  It's the very perfection of these sequences that keep them from fully convincing--no matter how much the computer tries to render some sort of chaos, it looks too designed, too assembled, lacking any of the randomness we would see in real life.

Consider this sequence.  Forgive the picture quality--it seems to be from a badly-dubbed VHS source--and focus on what is shown.

The big effect here, of course, is the falling helicopter.  It's not, in most shots, a real copter--in the long shots of it dangling from the building, it's a miniature, and Lois is hanging from a fiberglass mock-up.  But it still exists, not in the digital world but in real life--when Superman lifts it, it has heft.  We don't just see it, we feel it, and it feels real.

My eye is immediately drawn to the small things that really sell this sequence--the drops of rain on the copter's windshield, the steam and the fog on top of the building, little things that we instinctively recognize as real.  CGI artists could try to simulate these things, of course--though it's amazing how often these things are overlooked --but it would remain a simulation, inorganic, processed food shaped to look like the real thing but utterly lacking the flavor.

There's more to it, though.  CGI is routinely deployed now to enhance everything--even something as prosaic as a car chase is usually somehow digitally enhanced.  But in the days of practical effects, filmmakers were limited to what a vehicle could actually do--they couldn't show it cartoonishly spinning or twirling or hurtling around in a manner defying all laws of physics.  And when real vehicles were being used, when real stunts were performed, the danger on the set was real, too.

As a result, there was a respect for human life you could see in older movies.  As silly as a movie like, say, Earthquake was even in 1974, when it shows buildings collapsing, you see people crushed and killed by the rubble, and we're meant to feel that loss.  The Avengers is a wonderful movie in many ways, but the wholesale destruction of NYC in its climax is remarkably bloodless--we see buildings shattered, but we don't see the bodies falling from them, rubble hitting the ground but no people crushed.  It's devastation as pure spectacle.  It's terrifying, alright, but not in ways the filmmakers intended.

FANBOYS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

The huge drop at the box office for the second week of Ridley Scott's Prometheus is pretty easily explained: People don't particularly want to see it.

Fanboys, however, who had inexplicably based their whole summer around this film--well, this and The Dark Knight Rises, and I'll get to that--feel compelled to offer their own tortured explanations for its less than stellar grosses.  Audiences just didn't get it, they say, what with it being so sophisticated and all, or its sophistication (they love that word, and will use it even when it doesn't apply) was somehow a bad fit for a summer movie release, thus ignoring that Alien, the very film to which Prometheus is a prequel (although don't get them started on the whole prequel thing, either) was, of course, a summer release, and was instantly iconic in a way the new film could never hope to be.

The belief that this would be a good movie despite all evidence to the contrary is a hallmark of fanboy behavior.  Harder to explain is why they thought Prometheus would be any good.  I love Alien as much as anybody, and admire Ridley Scott's direction of it, but he was clearly not the dominant voice in that film's creation.  It was screenwriter Dan O'Bannon who suggested bringing designer H.R. Giger on board, and everything so well-remembered about the film--the Space Jockey, the row of eggs, the face-hugger and, of course, the title character--seemed to have sprung fully-formed from Giger's head.  Scott filmed it all well, sure, and he assembled a great cast, but O'Bannon's script and Giger's designs are the reason the film is so beloved.

But to the fanboys, all that mattered was that the director of Alien was returning to the same universe.  Never mind that he hadn't made a wholly satisfying movie since...well, since Alien, actually, and that was over thirty years ago.  A long string of dismal work (Black Rain, 1492, Robin Hood) gave no reason to believe this was anything but a desperation move, but Fan Nation was out in full force.  Mere mentions of the film online, in any forum whatsoever, were met with unasked-for comments promising the film would be great--presumably because Harry Knowles said so--and after it came out, Fan Nation threatened to eat itself, as rabidly pro-and anti-Prometheus factions popped up to argue the merits of a film that really can't support the attention..

But hey, great news.  Soon this will all be behind us, as The United States Of Geekdom will turn its easily-provoked focus to The Dark Knight Rises.  Fans have met even the most insignificant news items about this film with orgasmic glee--It has a running time of over two-and-a-half hours!  Epic!--so by mid-July, some sort of official consensus will have formed around Prometheus, and even the fanboys themselves will be left wondering why they made such a big deal about it in the first place.

PUT DOWN THE HAMMER

Men In Black 3 may have finally knocked The Avengers from the top spot at the box office, and what with Ridley Scott's deeply unnecessary Alien prequel Prometheus opening next weekend, the summer movie season is finally here.  But however all the upcoming releases may fare financially, I doubt any of them will do what Joss Whedon does so astonishingly well with The Avengers: Make it look easy.

Make no mistake, this is just a popcorn movie, and on some level, a fairly cynical one, the latest attempt by Marvel (and its new Disney overlords) to implant its brand on the consciousness of every moviegoer everywhere.  As such, it's the culmination of a series of movies now clearly revealed to be mere prequels.  These ran the gamut from good (Captain America) to bad (Iron Man 2), with most falling somewhere in between, but they all carried the unmistakeable air of Product, branded entertainment meant to provide a momentary diversion, then be forgotten.

And yeah, The Avengers is itself just a disposeable piece of entertainment.  But what entertainment!

For TV auteur Whedon, the architect of such beloved series as Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Firefly, this is strictly a job for hire.  He's a well-known fanboy himself--hell, he's written for Marvel Comics--but this isn't one of his own creations, and he can't do anything with the characters beyond what Marvel will allow.

But he can scribble in the margins to his heart's content, and it's in these small character moments that the movie finds its heart, rising above its purely mercenary origins.  Whedon realizes that this is primarily a story of broken souls who come together to find a common purpose--the type of thing he specializes in.  And, by showing how they fall apart and reassemble, he somehow finds a way to make the whole thing--dammit--moving.

Which is great and all, but where the success of The Avengers may actually bode well for future Big Summer Movies is in its expertly unfussy storytelling.  Even its massively cliched opening sequence--Good Guys battle Bad Guys over a Macguffin, complete with a hokey "outrunning collapsing ground" bit--is thrillingly put together, its action cleanly staged and instantly readable, with none of the whip pans or frantic overediting so common to modern action cinema.

In fact, the greatest delight of The Avengers is how essentially old-fashioned it is.  Despite a huge budget and all the technology in the world, Whedon never feels the need to show off.  He's like Howard Hawks or Raoul Walsh, here to tell a story, not make a spectacle of himself.  Or, to phrase it another way, he's the Captain America of filmmakers: A solid tactician, always to the point and eminently professional.

BUT THEY ARE ALL THAT'S UNCHANGED

Janie and I drove down to the cemetery where her parents are buried, about forty-five minutes south of Des Moines, but, at first glance, a different world.

Rows of crops on either side of the lonely paved highway.  Gravel roads branching off to who knows where.  And, as we entered the town where her grandparents once lived, a modest little sign: WELCOME TO MILO, then below that:  Please Help Our Boy Scout Can Drive.  For a moment I thought I'd been transported back in time, maybe to the very small towns I'd grown up in myself.

But of course, no.  We passed by a park, where a small child played on the merry-go-round as her mother talked on a cell phone, oblivious to her.  We drove past the farm once owned by Janie's uncle.  Many of the buildings she remembered from her childhood had been torn down, and what remained had obviously been converted to other uses.  A Lexus sat in the driveway, and two pickups, but no farm equipment was in sight, and a few horses represented the only visible livestock.  The surrounding fields were obviously owned and maintained by somebody else, somebody who didn't live around here.

Sure, we all know change is the only constant in this world.  It's a given, as certain as the ultimate destination of our trip: a cemetery.  We laid flowers on the graves, the graves of people I'll never meet, then we moved on, past the same lush fields and through the same town, but somehow they didn't look as inviting as they did only a few minutes earlier.    

"I don't get down here as often as I'd like," Janie said as we headed back home.  "And every time I leave, I feel like I'm leaving something behind."

"You're not, though," I said.  "It left you.  All you can do now is live the rest of your life."

She took my hand, and we drove back in silence.

SERIOUSLY, GOOGLE, DO YOU WANT THIS TO BE A PAIN TO USE?

I've had a couple things I intended to write about, but since I never got around to actually, you know, writing, I'm beginning to think the will wasn't that strong in the first place.  So there's that.

But also, Blogger has redesigned its dashboard, and in the process made this site an absolute pain to use.  Seriously, it was fine and easily understood the way it was.  Why do a redesign that makes even the simplest function difficult?

Anyway, the combination of these two things has me pondering the future of this space.  Not going away permanently, necessarily, but...well, I don't know.  But since my words here provide no entertainment whatsoever, here's a very Early Eighties Marshall Crenshaw--check out the pink shirt!--casually knocking out an absolute classic.  Enjoy, and whenever the hell I come back, hopefully I'll actually have something to say.

SAY, MAYBE HAPPINESS REALLY IS A WARM PUPPY

As I sit at my desk, the Beagle feels the need to remind me of her presence.  She scampers up to my side while chomping a squeaky toy, which she promptly drops on the floor.  I pick up the rubber turkey leg and toss it into the living room.  Immediately, she brings it back and drops it on the floor.  I toss it back into the living room.  Immediately, she brings it back and drops it on the floor.  Changing it up, I toss it into the kitchen. 

Immediately, she brings her food dish and drops it on the floor.

A simple, perfect gag, impeccably executed.  Of all the many reasons to treasure Isabella, this may rank above all others: She makes me laugh.  Not smile warmly or chuckle fondly, but full belly laughs.  She's been in my life for two years this month, and the joy I feel for knowing her is present in that laughter.  My life is richer, more whole, in ways I could never have imagined.  No matter what nightmarish turns life may take, I know she'll be there, head tilted, tail wagging, eager to please, effortlessly sweet, eternally loved.

FEEL YOUR OWN PAIN

Sitting in a Sears Auto Center, noticing a poster for a particular brand of brakes, I turned to my wife and, adopting the hyperbolic tone of a movie trailer announcer, loudly proclaimed, "Antonio Banderas IS Raybestos!"

Without missing a beat, Sue Ellen, rolling every r, responded, "Now, Antonio Banderas returns in Raybestos 2: The Reckoning."

I mention this exchange not because it was particularly witty (though it seemed hilarious at the time) but to give an idea what my marriage was like.  Every quip had to be met with another, each one funnier or more elaborate than the last.  We'd improv entire conversations in character, or suddenly start singing and dancing in the living room.  It was like being trapped inside a mid-nineties Friends knockoff; everything we did--everything we did--became self-conscious and ironic.  We were always on.

Which, as you might imagine, was exhausting.  And doomed to failure--this month marks the ten-year anniversary of the spectacular, and spectacularly ugly, end of my marriage.

I'll skip all the details because, frankly, I don't want to remember them.  The point is, there was a lot of anger, a lot of resentment, but also a gradual realization that Sue Ellen and I were the only two people in the world who knew exactly what went down.

So we started talking again, partly to work out some lingering issues, but mostly because we realized we still had a lot in common.  We became friends, which is maybe all that we should have been all along.  Friends can trade funny lines back and forth, but then leave it alone because they don't have to live together. 

Time moved on.  We met other people, and discovered the happiness we somehow could never quite provide for each other.

And I'm very happy now with Janie, who has absolutely nothing in common with Sue Ellen beyond their shared amusement at my insistence that I'm not obsessed with Star Wars.  (I'm not, really.  Try getting me started on Batman: The Animated Series and we'll be here all day.)

Whatever my obsessions are (for that matter, you can easily get me going all day on the greatness of John Carpenter movies or Mystery Science Theater 3000), Janie doesn't share them.  That's okay, though; she has her own enthusiasms and interests.  We can be together and still live our own lives, as long as there is love and mutual respect.

As for Sue Ellen and me, we still talk occasionally, but not so often or at such length.  We had what we had, and it still matters, but not like it did.  It blends into an increasingly hazy past, a fading that is perhaps the only constant in life.

NEVER LET FACTS GET IN THE WAY

I don't read Salon.  It's the type of thing aimed at well-off kinda-sorta liberals, a slightly more interesting online version of The New Republic and not my sort of thing.  So I can't tell you if their political articles are any more well-researched or knowledgeable than this piece, a hugely uninteresting article with a questionable premise that is just wrong in every conceivable way.

Author Michael Barthel details the way movie trailers have changed in the digital era.  For the first century of film, even into the late nineties, movie previews were staid, hidebound things, designed to put seats into asses but certainly nothing innovative.  Trailers today, Barthel argues have changed in so many ways--where they used to rely on stentorian narrators, now they use onscreen text.  Whereas they used to feature dull soundscapes, now they are far more sophisticated in their aural design.  And most of all, trailers have become marvels of fast, innovative editing.  All in the last twenty years!

Uh-huh.  Here's a trailer from 1963.



Almost subliminal cutting, an inventive use of sound, no narrator (except to give the title, and even that's done as a joke)--pretty much gives the lie to everything Barthel claims, doesn't it?  Of course, maybe I'm being unfair.  Dr. Strangelove is one of the greatest films ever made, and director Stanley Kubrick personally obsessed over the ad campaigns for his films.  Barthel, presumably, is talking about more obviously commercial movies, big blockbusters, popcorn entertainment.

Specifically, he seems obsessed with the ad for Ridley Scott's upcoming Prometheus.



"It is amazing," Barthel gushes.  "There's no narration...few shots last for more than a second, and it builds from a quiet beginning to ear-shredding shrieks accompanying micro-second glimpses of huge effects shots."  That's an accurate enough description of the Prometheus trailer (though I don't find it particularly "amazing")...but it would also--right down to the shrieking soundtrack, something Barthel claims "simply didn't exist twenty years ago"--describe the 1979 trailer for Scott's Alien, the movie that inspired Prometheus.



In other words, Barthel doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.  There's been a "revolution" (his word, not mine) in the crafting of trailers in recent years, but not in the way he suggests.  Where ad campaigns used to be carefully tailored to each individual movie, the same generic style is used for pretty much every movie made these days.  Barthel's breathless description of the Prometheus trailer could as easily apply to The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers or any Michael Bay movie ever. 

In fact, sitting through the trailers has become one of the most painful aspects of moviegoing, a joyless slog through the same overly familiar editing patterns, the same library music, the same thing over and over and over again.  This type of thing doesn't make me want to see the movie.  It makes me want to run in the other direction.

COMPARED TO THIS, THAT WHOLE "GREEDO SHOOTS FIRST" THING IS NOTHING

Apparently it's been out for awhile and I just hadn't paid attention, but the "Director's Cut" of Kate & Leopold is available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

You response to this news is likely, "Wait.  What?  Huh?"  It's an understandable response, since you likely don't remember this Meg Ryan/Hugh Jackman time-travelling romcom in the first place, and even if you do, you would find it hard to believe that the world needed an alternate version.  It was directed by unambitious studio-approved auteur wannabe James Mangold, whose movies can invariably be described as adequate.

But apparently he has enough pull to issue his own version of...a Meg Ryan romcom.  I mean, look, I'm sorry, as these things go, Kate & Leopold is on the high end of the scale--based on the five minutes of it I saw on cable once--but let's not get carried away.  This isn't Diego Rivera vs. Rockefeller.  This isn't a masterpiece destroyed by philistines.  This is a piece of studio product that its director inexplicably confused with art.  We didn't need Mangold's, um, vision brought to us in full strength.

As compromised as they may be, I generally believe the released version of a movie should be the definitive version.  Yeah, Walter Murch thought he was doing the world a favor by recutting Touch Of Evil to a version closer to Orson Welles' wishes...but however heavy-handed some of the studio-imposed aspects may be, it was that original version that critics have known and loved for years.  And Francis Coppola can claim all he wants that the Apocalypse Now Redux cut is what he originally intended--though I'm pretty sure he's lying through his teeth--but it's not the movie he originally released, not the movie I saw and loved back in '79. 

Sometimes a recut version isn't a bad idea--the studio really did butcher David Lean's original cut of Lawrence Of Arabia after the film had gone into release, so his altered version of it thirty years after the fact was an attempt to put back what was originally there--but generally speaking, I'm not a big fan of changing film history after the fact.  Maybe the version we have isn't all that it could have been.  But it's what we've got.

LIKE GUARDIANS OF THE GATES OF HELL

Finally got around to seeingJohn Carter, and hey, it's really terrific.  In particular, the visuals are way more ambitious and unusual than anything that had been shown in the previews, which gave absolutely no sense of its epic scale or its sly wit.

Recent stories in both The New York Times and New York magazine have the Disney marketeers blaming director Andrew Stanton himself for the lackluster ad campaign, but that feels like finger pointing from studio lackeys who failed to do their job.  How hard could it have been to sell an adventure picture based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel?  American International Pictures knew how to do that sort of thing back in the seventies.  True, John Carter doesn't actually feature an exploding lizard--and is poorer for it, I must admit--but it should have been easy to put together a trailer featuring some exciting highlights.  Because, let's face it, this makes At The Earth's Core look like a ton of fun.

TURNED ON TO EVERYTHING BY THE TORRID TEMPO OF THE STRANGE AGE WE'RE LIVING IN!

The weekend isn't even over, but people who do such things for a living are already proclaiming the massively expensive new science fiction epic John Carter a flop.  This failure has nothing to do with the quality of the movie itself and almost everything to do with its incredibly incompetent marketing campaign.

Really, though, when was the last time the trailer for a movie made you want to see it?  If you're predisposed to see, I dunno, a Sandra Bullock romcom or a hyperactive action movie starring a bunch of real-life Navy Seals, well, the ad campaigns for such movies pretty much let you know they exist.  But they won't make you feel like you must see it, like this movie might be the most important thing in the whole world.

People don't go to the movies as often as they once did. The batch of Oscar nominees this year were all box office underperformers.  Not surprising, since even the good ones were sold in a safe, respectable manner.  Maybe if the ads for War Horse had managed to work in the phrase "A Rebellion of HUMAN GARBAGE" more people would've shown up in theaters. 

I RODE WITH HIM, AND I GOT NO COMPLAINTS

The great if unheralded cinematographer Bruce Surtees has died at the age of 74.

His dad was the Golden Age cameraman Robert Surtees, who toiled at MGM at the close of its Dream Factory days, but the son's work would be the polar opposite of the father's easily read Classical Hollywood style.  His most frequent collaborator, Clint Eastwood, dubbed him the Prince Of Darkness for a reason.

After serving as an apprentice to his father and others, Surtees' first film as director of photography was Don Siegel's The Beguiled, the first of several outstanding collaborations, including Dirty Harry, The Shootist and Escape From Alcatraz.  He provided tabloid squalor for Bob Fosse's Lenny, low-key naturalism for Arthur Penn's great Night Moves and a touch of glamour for Stanley Donen's wonderful Movie, Movie.  Why he didn't become one of the superstar cinematographers of the seventies, joining the ranks of Laszlo Kovacs or Vilmos Zsigmond or Gordon Willis, is frankly beyond me.  He could shoot in any style, and it always looked good.

But his preferred style was the underlit naturalism of his work with Eastwood, one of the great director/cameramen collaborations in movie history.  In particular, their work on three great Westerns--High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales and Pale Rider--feature some absolutely stunning imagery.

High Plains Drifter has a strange, stylized appearance, its colors just slightly oversaturated.  Pale Rider, by contrast, is almost monochromatic, its overcast skies and drab clothing giving it a feeling of black-and-white in color.  And The Outlaw Josey Wales--well, look, I pretty much consider it as close to perfection as any movie ever made, and Surtees' visuals are surely one of the major reasons for that.  I can't think of any film that so subtly conveys the passing of seasons, the feeling of moving from place to place.  Every frame is gorgeous and gritty in roughly equal measure.

Sadly, Pale Rider would be his last film for Eastwood.  He'd work with other good directors in the eighties, like Sam Fuller and Paul Brickman, but his A-list days were behind him.  He wound down his career toiling away on TV movies obviously unworthy of his talent.  But at least he kept working, a pro to the end.

UM...OKAY?

According to E! Entertainment News--the only information source that matters, if you're really, really stupid--Josh Duhamel is "not sure" he'll be back for the latest Transformers movie.

I think I speak for all Americans when I say, "Who's Josh Duhamel?"

Since I have cable TV, I've seen huge chunks of the Transformers movies, and all I remember are giant but weightless CGI robots, plenty of offensive caricatures and Shia The Beef running around screaming, "OPTIMUS!"  Whoever Josh Duhamel is, he clearly made no impression on the films whatsoever.

Then again, I'm pretty sure he's made no impact on anybody whatsoever.  I'd be willing to bet that if you asked ten random strangers who Josh Duhamel is, none of them would know.  Some of them might say, "Yeah, wasn't he the guy in Pearl Harbor who was even less interesting than Ben Affleck?" and while that was my first thought, too, it turns out that particular nonentity was Josh Hartnett, who has himself gone from being hyped as The Next Big Thing to toplining direct-to-video horror movies, a career arc that should surely give pause to Duhamel. 

What I'm saying is, Josh Duhamel should be fighting like hell to continue doing whatever minimal, uninteresting work he can get in a new Transformers movie because hey, a paycheck is a paycheck, and I'm guessing a check from a shitty Michael Bay movie has more zeroes in it than a check from some celebrity autograph fest.  Sure it may be humiliating to find yourself billed below the guy who does the voice of Optimus Prime, but it beats sitting between Billy Mumy and Jonathan Frid at a table in some suburban convention center, with a placard in front of you identifying you as a "former Transformers star" and gritting your teeth the whole time because Mumy's got a huge line in front of him and you're just sitting there.

And he deserves it, dammit, because Billy Mumy recorded Fish Heads and you...well, you're just Josh Duhamel.

NOW WE ARE SIX

Mom didn't care much for Peter Jackson's King Kong.: "Why did it take so long to get to the island?  Why was it three hours long?  And that dinosaur stampede!  What were they thinking?  And that scene on the ice--cute, cute, cute.  No, I didn't like it."

This was late December of '05.  Earlier that month, she'd been given six months to live.  As it turns out, she had considerably less.  To many of us, the reality of impending death might cause us to give in to fear, or despair, or introspection, or something.  Mom...just became more like she always was.

On the movie version of Rent: "Oh, it's terrible.  He dies of AIDS, and we're going to try to make you cry by reminding you about it over and over, 'Oh, it's so sad,' like we've forgotten what happened ten minutes ago.  Was it this bad on stage?"

On Lost, then in its first season: "Maybe there's a monster, maybe there's not a monster.  But if there's not, they need to stop pretending that there is and get on with the plot.  And if there is a monster...that would be kind of stupid, wouldn't it?"

On Brigadoon, which she's stumbled across on cable and called me immediately after just to gripe about: "It doesn't work that way.  You can't say, 'These are the rules, this is what happens,' and then do something else and say, 'It's a miracle.'  Why did you make the rules in the first place?  And I don't think Cyd Charisse was Scottish..."

Six years since her death, I admit I don't think about Mom as much as I used to.  I don't miss her anymore, not really, not like I thought I would.  But sometimes, when I'm in the middle of a rant, when I'm asking a sales clerk to stop talking to his friends and actually give me some service, when I see through the lies of a politician...These are the times when I am thankful Mom was there to teach me how to question, to stand up for myself, to see what is really there.

Mom liked everyone, and everyone liked her.  She had a sentimental streak a mile wide, any rendition of Bein' Green would automatically reduce her to tears, she had a goofy sense of humor and laughed easily.  But beneath her easygoing manner was a fierce determination to say what needed to be said.  In the wake of my divorce, I was unloading my feelings about my ex, but she seemed to be taking Sue Ellen's side.  Why, I asked, are you sticking up for her?

"Because she messed up, but she wasn't stupid.  You were stupid."

I remember that, and I've used that to guide me since, in relationships and everything else.  Because she was right, of course.  She was always right. 

Well, except for her weird obsession with Murder, She Wrote...

MEMORIES CAN HANG YOU UP AND HAUNT YOU

There are two tragedies in what will now be known as the short life of Whitney Houston.  There is the obvious one, the numbingly familiar tale of a huge star with the world at her command, who somehow finds fame isn't enough, who falls into a downward spiral of drugs and erratic behavior, who tries for the Big Comeback that never quite happens, who is found dead in a hotel room, in this case at the depressingly young age of 48. 

As sad as that story might be, there's another one that to me is even sadder: The story of a possibly major artist with an absolutely incredible talent, who let herself be led by industry professionals down a path that would strip her of any individuality, to a career of absolute inconsequence. 

I first became aware of Houston as so many people did, with her debut album, cannily assembled by blanderizing industry pro Clive Davis.  The first single, Saving All My Love For You, showed promise, especially in this performance on David Letterman's old show, assisted in no small part by the arrangement by band leader Paul Shaffer, much superior to the schlocky, overproduced version on the album.



She's incredible here, in full command of her multi-octave voice, and the vocal pyrotechnics are deployed well.  Later, of course, she'd start melisma-ing all over the place, a profound and bad influence on so many singers who would follow her.  The most obvious Whitney Wannabe, of course, was Mariah Carey, but ironically, Carey's recorded legacy is stronger than Houston's.  Saving All My Love isn't a great song, but it's at least servicable as a showcase for Houston's vocals, and it stands out on an album full of pop piffle like How Will I Know? and overwrought ballads like The Greatest Love Of All.

Unfortunately, all of her albums followed the same carefully-engineered template, machine-tooled by Davis and his minions to maximize profits.  Album, tour, album, tour, with numerous awards show appearances thrown in along the way--that became Houston's life as a musician.  Artistic concerns never entered into the picture.

But what about the path not taken?  Prior to superstardom, Houston was a working musician, which is what led her to work with the NYC collective Material, which produced this stunningly beautiful track, which showcases Houston, not even twenty, as the jazzy chanteuse she might have been, the artist she was.

THREE TIMES THAT NIGHT

First Staley--of course.  Every night when I go to bed, Staley leaps up beside me, purring loudly, head-butting me into I skritch her her, moving around constantly, making sure I pet her just as much as she wants.  Then--wump! wump! wump!--she scrambles to the foot of the bed, leaps down and runs off.

Later, Cookie appears, climbing over Janie and draping herself on my side.  I pat the bed beside me and she crawls down, snuggling beside me, tucked under the blanket.  Her entire body vibates from the force of her purring, and she's close enough to me that my body feels it, too, it's comforting, it's reassuring.  But ultimately, like Staley, Cookie is only there for herself.  Once I stop actually petting her, she's gone.

But when I wake, there he is--Delmar.  He doesn't care if I'm petting him, if I'm paying attention to him at all.  In fact, he seems happier when I'm not noticing him.  Those are the times when he can sneak in and remind me of his existence, can prove his intense, unending devotion to me. 

Sometimes that devotion is just strange, not like a pet's love for his owner but more stalkerish, like I'm Jodie Foster to his John Hinckley.  But the little feller's so sweet, and he means so well, and when I wake with his front legs wrapped around my arm, I know he's been holding me, claiming me as his own, offering his heart.  And as cats go, well, Del's pretty much the greatest thing ever.

Staley and Cookie are prettier, though.

IN THIS MOMENT FOREVER

Janie's in bed by the time I get home.  Of course she is.  I work later now.  Since I'm gone all evening and sleep later in the morning, it sometimes seems like we hardly see each other anymore.

So I walk the dog, choke down a late dinner, spend some time on the interweb.  There used to be an entire evening to decompress after work, but I've only been home a little more than an hour, and it's already 1 AM.  The bed is calling.

The radio's on, the "lite FM" station Janie favors when I'm not around.  Fine.  I leave it on.

She stirs slightly as I get into bed, a relexive action to the new presence beside her, but she doesn't actually wake up.  I claim my side, put my arm around her...and become aware of the song that's playing.

Look, I don't like Aerosmith, okay?  And especially this--I Don't Want To Miss A Thing.  A generic Diane Warren song, recorded for Michael Bay's typically awful Armageddon?  Can it get any worse, less inspired, more corporate?

No.  I hate this song.  I've always hated this song.  But at this moment...damn.



Right now, it can't be denied: These words sum up my feelings perfectly. Staley leaps over Janie and looks at me, letting out a tentative meow, and the three of us snuggle together. Maybe, I think, even the crappiest music has its place, and I drift off happily to sleep.