The mysterious Alexandra DuPont over at Aiint it Cool News is on a roll. For the second week in a row the writer has taken on the big geek movie release, this time The X-Files: I Want to Believe, but it is safe to say that this time Ms. DuPont didn’t like the movie. For those who think that all internet writing is junk, DuPont exists as a shining refutation. Especially liked her joke about the stamp collection. My much more pallid review will appear in the August Vancouver Voice.

Hey, I know that I am supposed to hate Mamma Mia!. It has but a 54 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and virtually every responsible critic (i.e., the ones who actually write for newspapers and are edited), has lambasted it, the show it is based on, and ABBA, who provided the songs the story is built around.

Apparently derived from a 1966 comedy called Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, about three soldiers who converge on an Italian village where they have been sending upkeep money to good time girl Gina Lollobrigida for the daughter each thinks is his, Mamma Mia! attempts to integrate a bunch of divergent ABBA songs into a rather slight story. Slightly reworked, Mamma Mia! concerns Donna (Meryl Streep), an aging hippie who runs a broken down hotel on a Greek island. On the day of her daughter Sophie (the wide eyed Amanda Seyfried)’s wedding, the three men who could be her father all arrive together, at Sophie’s secret invitation. The trio are writer Bill (Stellan Skarsgard) who has his own yacht, architect Sam (Pierce Brosnan), and (secretly gay?) financier Harry (Colin Firth), a man with a musical bent. For some unclear reason, Donna has not wanted to acknowledge these men for over 20 years even though one of them is the dad, and so there is a succession of push-pull scenes as the foursome interact singingly, with Sophie’s mostly forgotten fiance causing a contrived fight over being left out of the secret in order to give him something to do.

Again, I know I am not supposed to say this, but Mamma Mia! has the exuberance you want out of a summer musical movie. It’s all about giggly girls conspiring to get men, and long lost friends are unable to greet each other without screaming, hopping up and down, and racing toward each other with the speed of greyhounds for a ritual round of hugs. It takes me back to summer fun movies of the ’60s such as Where the Boys Are. Subsequently there has been a long tradition of older women in the noonday sun, from Pauline Collins in Shirley Valentine to Diane Lane in Under the Tuscan Sun. Mamma Mia! takes these premises and settings and adds the exhilaration of ABBAs produced-to-the-teeth numbers and succeeds in winning over at least one viewer.

I missed the stage show, which is supposed to be horrible, and yet has proved resilient, but I love most ABBA songs (except for half the ones they put in this film). The movie is not supposed to work, for these reasons. In addition, the producers plucked the stage director Phyllida Lloyd, a neophyte film director, to re-stage and mis-stage the movie version in its cramped living quarters and narrow white-washed Greek alleys and stairways. The dances and songs don’t jump out at you as much as they could. Yet the film has a certain ABBA energized charm. I think one has to like bad musicals to appreciate Mama Mia!, musicals with a good heart that try too hard but don’t have much going for them in the first place, oddities such as Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, or the short-lived TV musicals such as Cop Rock or Viva Laughlin, which lasted two episodes). Seyfried acquits herself well as a story-song singer, and Streep appears to have a blast leaping up and down on beds and leading chorus lines of finger clicking villagers. You have to an appetite for the bad to enjoy, say Pierce Brosnan, who gamely joins in the frolics but who has a voice like a gravel truck unleashing its load down an iron funnel.

I daresay that Mamma Mia! is a better film, for all its numerous flaws, than Sex in the City, with all its over-excused flaws, including static, over-familiar characters trapped on a treadmill of audience expectation. Mamma Mia! unleashes its actors, and they have fun with their parts in a way the sexless Sex girls won’t or can’t.

It’s making millions of dollars, it’s pleasing millions of fan boys, and it is making cinematic history (short term though movie “history” often is these days), so The Dark Knight looks to be the major topic of conversation for the next two or three days at work and on the chat boards. My response is typically perverse. I want to be contrary when others overpraise it, and I want to defend the film when skeptics attack it. The two best advocates for these opposing positions thus far are the mysterious Alexandra DuPont at AICN, writing a FAQ-as-legal-brief for the defense, and Devin Faraci’s thoughtful but not wholly unsympathetic demural at CHUD.

Part of the problem with The Dark Knight for the critical cast of mind is the fact that it is such a multifaceted film that criticisms and praise alike get swallowed up into its richly textured abundance of character, incident, politics, and pointed set design. Though its two-and-a-half hours does make up a unified whole, with a couple of digressive longheurs along the way, the film does lend itself to atomization, creating handy parcel with which the critic may make salient points sometimes relevant to the whole. In fact, there are at least 11 The Dark Knights, each self-contained units lending themselves to in-depth treatment.

1. The Dark Knight as a Film That Gives You Your Money’s Worth

At two-and-a-half hours long, with rousing music, a good cast, a complicated yet clear story that has logical motivation (though some reviewers argue against that) with periodic fits of crowd pleasing violence and action, the heavily advertised Dark Knight could hardly fail, at least at the box office. The first aspect that is immediately apparent is that The Dark Knight is not just a superhero film. It is set in the world of cops and courts and judges and cages and process and procedures with frustrated and compromised cops. It could be an episode of Law and Order. It could have been written by James Ellroy, and in their praise, some writers have likened it to LA Confidential as a perfect movie. Because of this similar, if less dark tone, The Dark Knight has reminded viewers of Mann’s Heat, possibly just because of the efficiency of the bank heist at the beginning. For me the closest analog is se7en, and not because of the coincidence of Morgan Freeman: rather, its the two films’ darkness, their bleakness, their methodical habit of taking everything away from everyone, but most of all the complete singularity of the villain, “John Doe” and the Joker, unrestrained disruptive forces of nature that shake society’s core beliefs and ethical foundations. These villains come from nowhere, have no true identity, operate with seeming impunity and in invisibility to set up elaborate performance pieces, and have a psychological advantage over their opponents. They don’t play by the rules. They bring anarchy and chaos to the city. Gotham was already in trouble, but it appears to have enjoyed an agreeable stasis, and the conflict between crime and justice was on the level of a game, though a serious one, between Harvey Dent and his gangster foes. The Joker shatters that. The stakes are raised. He is loyal to no one. As he dies, Fichter laments that the new criminals no longer believe in “honor, respect.” The Dark Knight is a film for adults, not kids. Adults interact in this movie, not teens in colorful pajamas. Serious issues are discussed and / or implied in the body of the action.

2. The Dark Knight as a Batman Adaptation

It’s a long lament, the number of times that Hollywood has taken a comic character or pulp star and essentially had their way with him, unaware of the hopeful fans out there yearning, finally, for a truly accurate account of their heroes. From Doc Savage to Spider-Man, few if any comic adaptations truly bothered to capture the essence and the spirit of the beloved comics, which in most cases had decades to build up their world. I disliked all the previous Batman movies, except for Burton’s second foray (it was actually about something), because, among other things, each one was dogged by a series of disastrous casting choices. The ne plus ultra of disastrous, ignorant comic adaptations is the pair of Alan Moore movies, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, miscues that would require books of equal length in order track down each misstep and violation of Moore’s intentions. But the situation with the Batman movies is that no one who makes them is particularly interested in anything about the series before 1985. The 40 years of Bob Kane comics are as nothing to them, except a depository of names and villain features, like the James Bond books are now, or the old Dick Tracy strip. Instead, filmmakers are interested in a vague idea of the uptight old Batman from those days as modified by the darkening vision of Frank Miller and Alan Moore. Thus it hardly matters that the crusading D.A. who becomes Two Face is actually named Harvey Kent, but thanks to a typo alternated between Kent and Dent. Nor is Kane’s fascination with the psychological effect of his ugliness on his career and romance, and of fate itself, over the course of some 12 periodic issues in the late 1940s and early 1950s of any merit to the filmmakers. If all you care about is the Moore-Miller years, than yes, The Dark Knight captures some of the spirit of the comic, of the modern version of the comic.

3. Christian Bale as the Dark Knight

When Christian Bale first appeared in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun I thought he was the best kid actor I’d ever seen. Since then I’ve wondered what the hell has happened to his mouth. His upper row seems to have been added to his facial construction, and he often appears having difficult speaking around his own teeth. If it is a disability I feel sorry for him, but no one else ever seems to mention his odd dentition. I don’t think he is the perfect Wayne / Batman but he is better than the five guys before him. Yet as DF has pointed out, he is practically a guest star in his own movie; villains and subsidiary characters have more weight. I think this is intentional and that this approach gives the film more weight. It also emphasizes the theme of the the fluid nature of identify. Wayne and everyone else in the film is suffering an identity crisis, forced to choose between impossible options or make difficult decisions, yet without the strong identity that would make those decisions easy. Identity is so fragile in Gotham that ramrod straight Dent could change into a trickster figure when the society he is committed to protect fails him. Some have criticized Batman’s gruff voice, but it is part of Wayne’s split identity. He must disguise himself in order to do his Bat tasks (and the film is successful in making Batman unassociative with Wayne, they don’t look or sound alike at all), but it also hints and his unintegrated sense of self, personified in his yearning for Rachel. Only the Joker is a fully integrated self, but he is a force of destruction, with no human “context” at all. Wayne is striving to reconcile his selves into an integrated identity, by assembling the people he needs around him,wife, successor, and so on; as an agent of chaos, a focused, heedless, rule-breaking trickster, the Joker undermines Wayne’s psychological goals.

4. Heath Ledger’s Oscar

Does anyone doubt that Heath Ledger will win an Oscar, probably a best supporting award, for this film? Hollywood sentimentality is too high and the actor contingent of the Oscar voting block too large for it not to happen. Thus, when Tilda Swinton announces Ledger’s win and Daniel Day-Lewis comes out to accept it on behalf of the family, and there is a close up of Ledger’s child in the lap of the widder Ledger, Hollywood will have reached its apotheosis of sentimentality and self-regard. OK, Ledger’s apparently drug-fueled interpretation of the Joker is innovative and intuitive, and I enjoyed the hell out of it, but frankly that’s what actors are paid for, to bring their all, and I can think of several actors from the equally dead River Phoenix to Leonardo DiCaprio who could bring the same craziness and innovation. (My ex-editor makes the cogent point that it’s too bad Warner didn’t know that Ledger was going to die after shooting, or they could have written him out of the picture better.) The crazy loose cannon has been a staple in films since at least the time Richard Widmark threw the lady down the stairs in Kiss of Death (did Ledger get his funny Joker voice from Widmark in that film?), with great turns by David Patrick Kelly in The Warriors as noble predecessors. Tom Noonan could have played the part in his sleep. One doesn’t want to argue against the performance. One wants to shrink from the self-aggrandizing sloppiness that is going to surround it next February. For some of us it is going to be the final break, and we may never watch or care about the Oscars again.

5. How Character Actors Succeed in Hollywood

The first visible actor of name in the film you see is William Fichter as the bank executive who, as so many characters do in this film, performs the unpredictable. Instead of cowering under his desk, he appears with a sawed-off shotgun and begins taking out the clown-masked bank robbers, chastising them in no uncertain terms for being stupid enough to steal, in a nod to Charley Varrick, from a mob-run bank. It’s a small part but Fichter makes the most of it. He knows that everyone else around him will be acting up a storm, so he brings a calm anger to his role. Gary Oldman must have taken the same advice. This is his most “normal” performance. While everyone else is chewing up the green screen, Oldman appears to be a memorable island of sanity.

6. The Dark Knight as a Romance

The Dark Knight describes a love triangle. Wayne loves Rachel Dawes, who has ceased waiting for Wayne and turns to new D.A. Harvey Dent. The contours of this triangle are well set out, realistic, and not easily resolved, despite the fact that they mimic set ups from other comic book movies, most notably the Spider-Man series. Mainstream movies aspiring to make over $400 million dollars need a love story to pull in the female viewers, especially if the basic template is a guy thing like Batman. That it works on its simple level is a credit to the film and yet facets of this thread of the film’s story are crucial to major plot developments and the denouement. A convention of the genre is turned into a crucial thematic foundation.

7. The Dark Knight and Politics

Some reviewers have likened The Dark Knight to a 911 movie, and there is a political debate marbled into the narrative spine of the film. It’s not just that Bruce Wayne at one point decides to go rogue with his FISA-esque NSA level cellular phone spying. Throughout the film there are debates, implicit and explicit, about how the justice system should work, what is the role of the police, how does one keep corruption at bay, how do you make your town work? The FISA part seems tacked on, a limp effort to both acknowledge immediate realities and to set up an even darker, more ruthless Batman for a third film.

8. The Curious Case of the Dogs on the Knight

How did there get to be so many canines in this movie? I can’t think of another recent film in which dogs figured in the plot so much. Though here, they don’t figure in the actual plot so much as they add more texture. The vigilantes at the beginning have dogs; The Joker has three dogs (a mythological reference?), and in the dreamy time-shifting ending Batman is pursued by police dogs through an industrial section. Bruce Wayne even has a chat with his “Q” (Morgan Freeman) about improving the bat suit to withstand dog attacks (which inspires an allusion to a possible Catwoman presence in a third film, as various talkbackers have ejaculated). These dogs are vicious but controlled, synecdoches of the ideal Gotham, creatures who are loyal, unlike cops and gangsters, and not subject to corruption except by those who train them, the corruption lying on the next level up of power.

9. Coins of the Realm

Harvey Dent-Kent was flipping coins to determine thet fate of his victims long before the Coen brothers were even born but it is an interesting coincidence that Chigurh in No Country for Old Men uses coin flipping as a way to fuck with the heads of his victims. Like The Joker, Chigurh is a man without a country, a man without a past or present, who appears and like the Terminator proceeds with his implacable quest. He’s the scariest thing that’s ever been in a Coen brothers movie and has little if any precedent. A sociologically minded critic might point out that this coincidence of relentless agents of disruption and greed reflect a national fear of the Other undermining what is left of our society. On the other hand, the seemingly casual flipping of a coin as evidence of grace under pressure has a long history, going back to George Raft, and Kane probably got it from the movies and from his interest in the statistics of dualities.

10. The Ugliness of Maggie Gyllenhaal

Talkbackers seem to be united in their joy that Katie Holmes did not repeat her role as Rachel Dawes but that Maggie Gyllenhaal is sloppy seconds. She is no invisible man. She is a woman of copious, flexible visage, a nose of cylindrical protrusion, a liquorish, ample, fluctuating mouth, and hair of bristling eccentricity. Her figure inclines to embonpoint and her short limbs accentuated this inclination. But we had better get used to her. There are no more beautiful actresses in Hollywood. Either they have the uniform possibly-medically-enhanced blandness of a Kirsten Dunst, or they have the untoward eccentricity of the kind of women you see in your home town, kinda cute but unworthy of the big screen, faces such as those belonging to Claire Danes, or Clea DuVall, or Scarlett Johansson, or the mopish Selma Blair, people plucked from the coffee bars and alternative night clubs to be in movies with their untrained voices and awkward bodies. These are college girls, not starlets, and they leave a hole in the center of the films they are in, better filled by competent, beautiful, exotic actresses of the first rank…of which, apparently, there are no more.

11. The Dark Knight as a Christopher Nolan movie

I fell asleep half way thought Batman Begins and didn’t care for The Prestige, yet all these films, including The Dark Knight continue variations on Nolan’s theme of a man being somehow controlled by another, stronger, smarter man. His first feature, Following, established this template, as a writer is swept into the complicated scheme of a professional criminal (in whom one sees Joker DNA), and Leonard is utterly controlled by Teddy Gammell in Memento. What Nolan took away from the source film Insomnia is a weakened Detective Will Dormer manipulated by serial killer Walter Finch to his death; The Prestige posits a lifelong struggle of wills and competition between an effortless magician, Alfred Borden, and his Salieri, Robert Angier, in what is essentially a rough draft of The Dark Knight. The only thing that Nolan hasn’t acquired is a signature visual style that sets off his films from the run of action narratives. In The Dark Knight he relies on the same roving, circling camera that every comic book director from Jon Favreau to Louis Leterrier exploit to disguise otherwise talky, static scenes.

12. The Prisoner’s Dilemma

One of the most interesting things about The Dark Knight is that it ends in a downbeat, almost actionless multi-layered sequence whose core is a version of The Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Game Theory puzzler that asks two prisoners to guess if each is betraying the other. Here the scale is larger (two ferries, each with the ability to blow up the other), but in a final refutation of both the Joker’s beliefs in human nature and the likely outcome of a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation, each side chooses not to eliminate the other (and in any case, the Joker was going to blow them up anyway). You don’t see game theory pop up in mainstream, multi-million dollar movies often, and it’s a measure of The Dark Knight’s depth and intellectual expansiveness that not only does the sequence exist, but it is populated with a whole other cast of interesting characters who embody the good and bad citizens of Gotham. In additional, this game of prisoner’s dilemma is a culmination of a series of similar impossible choices offered characters throughout the film, Rachel choosing between Wayne and Dent, Batman and Gordon choosing between Rachel and Dent atop explosive oil cans, gor example. As we can see from these two Dark Knights, despite codicils and quibbles, The Dark Knight is surely one of the most interesting films of the year, and certainly one of the best so far in its all-too-often-compromised genre.

Sometimes approaching the World Wide Web is like unleashing the Library of Alexandria on yourself (before it went up in flames, anyway). For example, the other day I stumbled upon something that I had been wanted to re-see since the ’60s: the short lived TV show Coronet Blue. Since it was so obscure to begin with, I never thought I’d ever have a chance to see and reassess the program, but now, here it is.

Beginning and ending its life as a summer replacement on CBS in 1967, Coronet Blue was one of the first of the shows to adopt a running mystery that teased the viewer from week to week, an ur-Lost or X-Files. Coronet Blue concerned itself with an amnesiac who takes the name Michael Alden after he is found by the riverside. What he doesn’t remember but which the viewer sees in a teaser opening to the debut episode that “precedes” Alden’s memory loss is that he appears to be either a gangster or an undercover cop. Alden is shown making his way through a Manhattan ferry just before it sets off. He spies a room with the words “Danger” written across it, and that seems to be a rendez-vous of some kind for him, but before he has a chance to enter it, a man addressing him as Chico tells him that Margaret wants to see him. He is led to the roof of the ferry, where he is confronted by Margaret as a some kind of spy, though the language is intentionally vague. He is attacked, then he is thrown overboard and the series begins. Though aired in ‘67, the show was shot in 1965, and though it was popular as a summer replacement, the lead actor, Frank Converse, had by then signed up for another show, N.Y.P.D.

The rest of the series follows Alden Fugitive - Run For your Life style as he tries to uncover his past and figure out why someone somewhere is still trying to kill him. Seeing the first few episodes after so many years can only lead to disappointment, if only in so far as the program was less interested in Alden’s mystery than in the sort of mixed, incoherent social commentary and “relevance” that shows went in for in those days. For example, the third episode, called “The Rebels,” and probably meant to be the second one aired, has Alden on a UC-Berkeley like campus willing to be subject to the experiments of a scientist (Richard Kiley). The “mystery” is deflected as Alden gets involved with a mixed bag of campus radicals, who include Jon Voight, David Carradine, and Candice Bergen. While keeping the exact nature of the students’ dissatisfaction vague, the episode manages to flatter all possible argument adherents. Though Converse was the agreeable star of the show, it’s funny to watch his fellow actors, all stage or screen competitors, flail for attention behind their waxy make-up (we must have still had a black and white TV when this show was on, as I was startled to see that it was in color). Both Bergen and Converse look like carefully sculpted Al Capp characters.

The show appears to have been youth skewed, from its subject matter and its theme song, sung by one Lenny Welch (”Coronet Blue, Coronet Blue / Deep down inside my brain I keep hearing that wild refrain / Coronet Blue, no other clue /I know that this must be the thing that can set me free /For I was born just yesterday along a misty river / Always a-moving like the river /If I lay here I will die / And as so I go my lonely way / Every day can be a danger / Even to myself a stranger / Wondering who am I.” )

One reason for film students to view the show, at least in part, is because it was created by Larry Cohen, who was very involved in TV at the time, but who later emerged as one of the key horror films specialists of the 1970s. The program was also produced by the late Kenneth Utt, who was much involved in the career of Jonathan Demme and produced The Silence of the Lambs among numerous other key films starting in the ’70s and though into the 1990s.

Coronet Blue is easy to find on the Internet if you know where to look, or is in pieces at YouTube, and is aired, or was, on TVLand.

Though only four years old, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow seems now to be a harbinger of things to come. For one thing, it is completely animated, except for the live actors who include Jude Law as the film title’s action pilot, Gwyneth Paltrow as the girl reporter, Angelina Jolie as a butch ex-lover, and even Laurence Olivier in some manipulated footage. Seeing it again today, one realizes that Kerry Conran’s film anticipated Sin City, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and even the new Indiana Jones movie in its prophetic “borrowings.” By borrowing from Wells’s War of the Worlds, it anticipated Spielberg’s take on the novel.

It’s is a film steeped in new technology in service of an imaginary pop culture past. Sky Captain looks like a cartoon, though a softly lighted one, which makes the outlandish array of villains, robots, giants, wing-flapping planes and Dr. Moreau style monsters acceptable. Conran’s script is an anthology of old movies, pulp novels, serials, and action films, referencing everything from Lang’s Metropolis to Titan A. E., with nods to Lost Horizon, and Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant among scores of other movies (Sky Captain even borrows a few lines of dialogue from Marathon Man). Unfortunately, the mass of viewers are impatient with aggressive movie referencing (is it too much like film school), and the $40 million dollar movie (a bargain today) apparently made but $37 million.

In fact, it’s somewhat hard to tell just for whom this film was made, given that it is perhaps too sophisticated in its referencing for kids and old hat to oldsters. Vancouverites will have a chance to find out, however, when Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow initiates Uptown Movie Nights latest season of summer fun films on Saturday July 19. Best of all, the first four weeks offer free movies and music (though popcorn, candy, and soda still go for $1), right there on the corner of 23rd and Main Street with Jeremy Kobel the first of the season’s musical guest. Music starts up at 7:30 PM and the movie begins at dusk, or about 8:45 PM. For more info please go to the Kiggins website or the page dedicated to the Uptown Movies events.

Let me make this clear from the outset: I am not obsessed with Conan O’Brien. I have opinions about the late night talk show host — that his show is lousy, that he is not and has never been funny, that as a replacement for Jay Leno he will be a disaster — but I am not obsessed. Rather it is Entertainment Weekly that appears to be obsessed with him.

Buried deep within its television section, EW runs SoundBites, a weekly collection of “funny” things heard on television, a column which has surprisingly survived EW’s recent disastrous, text-halving redesign. Generally the quotes are culled from “sharp” witticisms enunciated by the likes of Chuck Lorre sitcoms, or The View, or the late night talk shows. Of among these, Conan O’Brien receives an inordinate proportion of coverage. There is no rational reason for this, as the “jokes” from O’Brien that SoundBites shares with us are not funny.

Since EW invites letters to the editor, addressed to ew_letters@ew.com, I decided that I would make the occasional enquiry about the reasons for the barrage of O’Brien apercus appearing in this column. On March 12, 2007. I wrote, “Is the person who does the SoundBites column figuratively or literally in bed with Conan O’Brien? Issue No. 925 is the second issue in a row in which a witless monologue comment by O’Brien is highlighted as a quote of the week. This is the rebirth of a trend that lapsed for a few weeks (was the compiler of quotes on vacation and unable to see his or her favorite show?), but throughout last year O’Brien was probably the most quoted person in the column. This would not be a problem if he were funny, but he isn’t (God, how I dread his taking over the Tonight Show), while there are truly witty comments emanating nightly from Leno, Ferguson, Stewart, Colbert, and Maher that go ignored. Is the columnist an old pal of O’Brien’s from Holworthy Hall at Harvard University. Or maybe it’s some sad fat girl, a cog in the AOL-Warner-Time-Life empire who landed upon the SoundBites column where she realized that she could promote the career of her beloved. No matter. One has to wonder what the secret deal is between O’Brien and Sound Biter.”

Naturally the letter was ignored. All my letters to the editor are ignored. But then O’Brien popped up again, so on May 24, 2007, I wrote again, starting off with that week’s O’Brian quote: “‘One of the most popular gifts for high school graduates this year is a gift certificate for plastic surgery. Apparently, the gift certificate is a perfect way to tell a recent graduate that you can be anything you want to be but not with that giant honker.’ Huh! How curious. Yet another Sound Bites quote culled from O’Brien’s witless, insight-free monologue. What is this, the fifth week in a row? You guys act like he is Mark Twain when he is little better than Pauley Shore.”

Again, no response, except that O’Brien appear only a month later, sparking yet another (useless) letter, on June 18, 2007. “No, really, seriously, it’s got to end. No more weekly O’Brien in the SoundBites column. He’s had more than his share of space and time to win anyone over. He isn’t funny and the laborious set ups for those limp punchlines take up space — three times the space of other quotes — that could be more charitably used for actual humor. Please, insist that the compiler of this column change the channel at 12:30 to one of O’Brien’s competitors, people who really do say funny, quotable things, Jimmy Kimmel, for example, or Craig Ferguson, TV personalities who are never quoted in the column.”

Was my plea answered? No, thus this bulletin from July 16, 2007. “My missives decrying the inclusion of witless ‘jokes’ told by Conan O’Brien in the SoundBites column seems to be having the opposite effect. Instead of avoiding him like the plague, as you should, you instead print yet another ‘joke’ in issue No. 944 (for the third time out of four weeks, it should be pointed out) and even highlight it with a photo of the ‘comedian.’ So what is EW going to be like when O’Brien ascends to the Tonight show chair, simply transcribe each of his monologues in full? I also defy you to explain the current joke, which has James Hetfield of Metallica at the airport setting off the ‘heavy metal detector.’ Like all O’Brien jokes, whimsy is set before sense. If it is a ‘heavy metal detector,’ wouldn’t it be a good thing if Hetfield set it off? After all, he is a heavy metal artist. What is setting off the alarm supposed to mean in this joke? What does it mean?”

None of these pleas were answered. When EW redesigned itself (always a sign that a publication is in trouble) a couple of weeks ago, I thought that maybe either SoundBites would be dropped (casting the poor fat girl adift to write an insiders novel about Time-Life), or that O’Brien would be dropped from it, thanks to a new, anonymous composer. Instead, O’Brien appeared in the “debut” redesign issue, and now, on Friday, three weeks later, I have received my latest issue, and there he is again, illustrated with the same image the magazine used the last time. Clearly this madness will never end. We must come to endure it as a cultural condiment, something we can never escape, like “good to go” or caveman ads or the phrase “Let’s not go there” or “I could tell you but I’d have to kill you,” all cultural artifacts about as funny as Mr. O’Brien himself. .

Savage Grace is playing for three more days at the Cinema 21, and it’s the kind of movie that makes you wonder why it was made in the first place. A “true crime” film, but much briefer than a similar work you’d get on a network as a mini-series, Savage Grace tells the tale of Barbara Daly Baekeland, who was married for a time to the heir of the Bakelite plastic fortune, Brooks Baekeland. Though all of Baekelands were nouveau riche Brooks was apparently very good at looking and sounding like old money, while Barbara was an arriviste whose act of hypergamy ultimately ended in divorce, incest, and murder. Barbara was unusually close to her son Antony, and after Brooks “stole” Antony’s young Spanish girlfriend (not that he really cared, as he was gay), his own mother eventually stole his current lover, a “walker” helping Barbara get through her divorce, and in the end Barbara was her own son’s lover, if only briefly, according to the movie, before Antony stabbed her to death in the kitchen of their London flat. The police found him sitting on the floor, eating Chinese food from a carry out box over her corpse.

The time frame of the film ranges from 1947 in New York when Antony is a baby to Paris when he is a type and then Spain when he is young man smoking pot with his equally young drug smuggling boyfriend, and finally to London, where, on November 17, 1972, he killed Barbara. Apparently fascinating books have been written about the 30-year-old case, but the film is static, exterior, and obviously making a brief for Antony as a dually damaged child. Antony went on, by the way, to an insane asylum, from which he was eventually released to live with his grandmother in 1980, whom he also in turn stabbed, though not fatally. He committed suicide in Riker’s Island. It’s an expensive looking film, with all its lush, well-tailored settings, but is as episodic as a TV biopic, and just as perplexing when you contemplate what the point of the film is supposed to be in the first place, since its muted presentation obviously eschews sensationalism.

Savage Grace is directed by Tom Kalin, whose earlier true crime tale was Swoon, a supposed indie film from 1992 renderng a highly sympathetic, even envious account of Leopold and Loeb, the Chicago child murderers. In other words, Kalin is an “agenda” filmmaker whose stance appears to be that gayness excuses everything. Thus the emotional center of Savage Grace is supposed to be Antony, when in the actual experience, Barbara is the fascinating character because her motivations are much more mysterious.

Despite the muffled affect of the film, it is generally well acted, perhaps because the stars got to wear a higher class of clothing. Stephen Dillane is excellent and in his small gestures and looks fascinating as Brooks, while Julianne Moore gives yet another brave, nuanced performance. Only Eddie Redmayne as the adult Antony comes across as a dud, whiny in his voice-over letter to his father (which we learn at the end is written from the asylum), and uninteresting to look at.

Savage Grace ends on the 17th, with showtimes at 7 and 9:10 PM, with more information available at the Cinema 21 website.

For a general introduction to the Director’s Project please visit this link.

Guillermo del Toro (9 October 1964, Mexico -)
Ranking: The Near Side of Paradise

Don˜a Lupe (1985, short, and writer)
Geometria (1987, short, and writer)
Hora Marcada (TV series, four episodes, 1988-1989: Invasiô, 1988; Con todo para llevar, 1988; Caminos de Ayer, 1988; Hamburguesas, 1989, and writer)
Cronos (1993, and writer)
Mimic (1997, and writer)
The Devil’s Backbone (2001, and writer)
Blade II (2002)
Hellboy (2004, and writer)
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006, and writer)
Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008, and writer)
The Witches (2008, and writer)
Tarzan (2010)
Doctor Strange (2010)
Deadman (2010, and writer)
Champions (2010, and writer)
Saturn and the End of Days (2011, and writer)
The Hobbit (2011)
The Hobbit 2 (2012)

Guillermo del Toro appears to practice cheerfully what prominent directors of the Golden Age of Hollywood, such as John Ford, were forced to endure, that is, alternating profitable crowd pleasers with the more personal projects they were then “permitted” to do. Thus in the case of del Toro, an intended horror hit such as Mimic, made, disastrously, for the Weinstein Brothers (who instructed, by the way, local branch publicists to torment regional reviewers who handed out negative reviews), is followed by del Toro’s supremely polished and ambiguous political-horror thriller, The Devil’s Backbone, which is then followed by the studio assignment and actor vehicle Blade II, and so on. The difference is that del Toro seems to enjoy his genre oriented cartoon movies as much as the serious dramas. He doesn’t discriminate among the films narratively, visually, or morally, , and and ideally nor should the viewer.

His enthusiasm for genre pieces such as Blade II and Hellboy come from his roots in comic book culture and the fantasy make up field. Del Toro comes out of the world of special effects makeup (nine films and TV shows from 1987 to 1995), and as a fantasist he famously keeps a notebook into which he constantly works out new and different creatures, who then go on to populate his creature crowded films. With his first feature, Cronos, del Toro look like a candidate for the kind of odd, intellectual, often gross horror films that create slavish fans as the auteur himself stays mostly under the national radar, toiling in near obscurity as his fans passionately advocate for his work. The terrible Mimic nearly derailed him, but with The Devil’s Backbone, shot in Spain, del Toro revealed an unexpected depth and political sophistication that was to adrenalize his career. His addition to the Blade is widely considered the best of the franchise and did much to solidify that half of his career.

del Toro’s films tend to be about eccentric quests and about how the “underworld” invades the over-world through a porous demarcation. Hellboy literalizes this in a commercial manner, but the theme is consistent with his two masterpieces thus far, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth (though it is probably safe to say that if these two films did not have supernatural or special effects elements they wouldn’t have garnered the attention they did from his genre-inclined fans). He seems to be fascinated by the interconnections of things, and his signature image is that of interlocking gears, usually on a gigantic scale, or toys that can open up or rearrange themselves seemingly as free agents. These shifting gears, in their most cinematic use since Chaplin in Modern Times, seem to emblemize del Toros’s view of time as inexorable, relentless, irreversible, and vaguely menacing. This near despair in the face of time’s implacability is tempered only by the joy del Toro takes in populating time’s underground with his varied creatures.

Slated to take the reins of The Hobbit from Peter Jackson, who will continue to produce, del Toro’s approach is easily imaginable. While Jackson’s work is airy and light while still elegiac, del Toro’s approach tends to be dark and dense, his frames crowded with imagery rougher and striving for less “realism.” There will either be a seismic battle for control of the look of The Hobbit between these two titans, or Jackson’s producing hand, determined to maintain continuity with the trilogy, will prevail out of allegiance to the fans.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a commercial sequel, but del Toro, also credited as the writer of the script from characters created by Dark Horse comic book author Mike Mignola, brings a great deal of humor and a light touch, at least in the first half, which alleviates the film’s ultimate tedium as yet another comic based, special effects laden work proffers a second half that descends into standard anime-inspired fight scenes in which cartoon characters battle each other boringly to mounting but hollow exhilaration.

Unfortunately, the weight of del Toro’s career at this point tilts heavily toward highly commercial genre work in a tone and visual style mostly (but not completely) indistinguishable from the lot of other comic book adaptations, and less toward his highly original hybrids of genre and political thrillers, which situation keeps him thus far just out of the Pantheon. The future also seems tilted toward adaptations and fantasy (only Saturn and the End of Days indicates any continuity with Backbone and Pan). On the other hand, del Toro tends to associate himself with a lot of films that don’t necessarily come about, so the del Toro fan remains hopeful that his more complex projects will rise to the top.

<strong>Introduction</strong>
<em>As a fan and disciple of </em>The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 - 1968<em>, Andrew Sarris’s standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cut off date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris’s book came out.</em>

<em>Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. In Sarris’s book, the titles were in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics; here all titles are in italics, with key films also in bold; I’m sure that Sarris would do it that way, too, if he were writing the book today. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, Future Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, The Animators, The Documentarians, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Strained Seriousness, More Less Than Meets the Eye, The Writers, Flashes in the Pan, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of </em>American Cinema<em> are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.</em>

Like half the people on the Internet, I have just finished reading Inglorious Basterds, as the script’s author prefers to spell the word. The other half is trying to find it before the text is scrubbed from the world wide web. New York magazine’s Vulture column offers the most professional summary of the script and raise the valid question of its authenticity, which we will come to later. I read it yesterday, and then again today. The first time through, I hated it. The dialogue, for which in other films Tarantino is justifiably famous, was wretched, the plot over the top, and sprinkled with a series of outlandish characters offered little or no screen weight. Hitler makes a cameo and is such a spittle-ejecting parody of the mad Furher you think you’re reading Springtime for Hitler II. At times I even thought, No, this is a comedy, a straightforward comedy like a ’50s military comedy, this isn’t meant to be taken seriously at all. But after thinking about it a lot, and discussing it with friends, and giving it a re-read, I’ve come to the conclusion that Inglorious Basterds would be one hell of a movie, one of Tarantino’s best; that its “problem” is that the movie isn’t as much on the page as his previous films; and that it is probably the best marriage of Samuel Fuller and the nouvelle vague since Pierrot le fou.

Of course, the first thing you do with a new Tarantino script is try to catalog all the sources. It is known that the director has borrowed the irresistible title from a 1978 actioner directed by Enzo G. Castellari and starring Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson (in Italy it’s Quel maledetto treno blindato). And that the “sources” for the films are a catalog of WWII, Vietnam, and spaghetti western films directed by the likes of Sergio Corbucci, Antonio Margheriti, Lucio Fulci, and others, along with American “mission” films such as The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare (but probably not Cross of Iron; Tarantino apparently doesn’t care for Peckinpah that much). But Samuel Fuller is a key influence. As is the Godardian era of the French New Wave, the look of the women and the gritty black and white shooting style of Raoul Coutard . I even think there is a great deal of the old wonderfully chaotic Marvel comic Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos in the script, though I have no idea if Tarantino ever read the comic, or if it is a conscious influence.

I started to like the script the second time around when I realized that the movie isn’t necessarily on the page. It’s still in his head. To “feel” the movie, you have to see it the way Tarantino must be seeing it, through the Gespatzo of scores of Italian and French films. Take the first sequence, which covers about the first 18 pages, offers a good test. In essence what happens is that the film’s villain, a Nazi Colonel named Landa, nicknamed crudely “The Jew Hunter,” is visiting a French dairy farm that he suspects is hiding the Dreyfuss family, the only one of four families in the area to elude capture. The old farmer, LaPeditte, sees the convey of Nazis arriving, tries to sort out his wife and three daughters from the approaching trouble, but when Landa emerges from his car, he is all politeness, graciousness, and concern. Eventually, Landa and LaPeditte are in the farmer’s simple kitchen, drinking milk and discussing just where in the world those Jews might be. The dialogue is dragged out and methodical, and Landa is precise and highly solicitous toward the farmer. It all comes across rather flat and over long, even though the material is supposed to comprise a suspense scene. However, if the reader visualizes and audioizes the sequence the way Tarantino probably did as he composed it, as a sequence from a Sergio Leone film, such as the openings of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, or Once Upon a Time in the West, with carefully selected sound effects, huge close-ups in a gradually accreting rhythmic pace, before eventually exploding in an elating blast of Ennio Morricone-style lush and romantic music (spelled “Morriconie” in the script), then the sequence becomes “cinematic.”

For a movie about a team of WWII marauders, the story of the team’s creation and what happens to most of them is given short shrift. Those parts of the screenplay feel rushed. By contrast, Tarantino has invested a lot in Landa, the “Bill” of this equally long movie. He is erected as a cunning superNazi about four steps ahead of everybody and with hypersharp observational skills. He understands human nature better than anyone else in the film. You’d think that the leader of the marauders, Lieutenant Aldo Raine, a “hillbilly from the mountains of Tennessee,” would be the center of Tarantino’s emotional and intellectual commitment, but rather it is Landa as a mastermind, and Shosanna Dreyfuss, a girl who escapes from Landa at the beginning and within a few years ends up running a Cinematheque francaise-style movie house in Paris, where she enacts an elaborate gesture of revenge, one that utilizes cinema and announces the death of cinema. It’s an interesting moment in the film when Tarantino choses the use the destruction of 300-plus rare nitrate prints as fuel for her fiery revenge. Tarantino contrasts Shosanna’s elaborately staged revenge with the practices of Raine’s men, all of whom are Jewish and who seek to create terror among German soldiers. Like Mickey and Mallory, they like to leave one of them alive, though scared with a swastika carved in his forehead, to bear witness to other Germans about how vicious Raine’s men tend to be. Shosanna’s approach is a complex, nuanced one-time plan in which she wants to use her “big face” on the screen to rub her revenge in the noses of the Nazis. On another matter, the actual end of the movie feels abrupt, but in the manner of Death Proof which it resembles in immediacy and population.

The screenplay’s authenticity has been called into question, which is understandable since fake Tarantinos have popped up on the Internet before (in fact, this writer was fooled by a clever fake Tarantino blog back in 2003). I have it on good authority that it’s the real thing, however, and from internal evidence, it feels authentic. Lines of dialogue such as Landa’s “This being a dairy farm one would be safe in assuming you have milk?”, the habitual use of white trash conversational cliches, and the breaking up of the story into five “chapters” all sound very Tarantino to this reader (though there is little of Tarantino’s trademark narrative playfulness: this aspect of the script really does feel like someone doing a poor Tarantino imitation). But even if it is a fake, it should be filmed, and by Tarantino himself. It would be interesting to see how he pulls off the middle section of the movie, which is meant to be a visual homage to the French New Wave.

But the question, now that the script has bled all over the Internet, and therefore the world, is, Will it get made? The Weinstein Company, the film’s presumptive home, is is by all accounts going under, and the script’s leaking gives other producers an excuse to say no, the easiest word in Hollywood to utter. The 4000 other Internet “news” stories about the film are all based on Nikki Finke’s reporting, and the substance seems to be that the Weinsteins want to make the film but are seeking another studio with which to partner, which is why the script was circulated, and which is presumably how it found its way to the WWW.

Meanwhile there are other competing WWII movies with similar elements, such as the Tom Cruise movie, Valkyrie about the assassination attempt on Hitler by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg. And Inglorious Basterds will surely be an expensive movie: it’s set in the past, in Europe and Paris, with lots of costumes and explosions. Taken together, the two parts of Kill Bill apparently cost $85 million dollars. But trusting Tarantino with over $100 million for his odd film, especially when routine movies routinely cost $200 million or more, should be mostly risk free for someone in Hollywood.

There have been a surprising number of WWII movies lately and for some reason viewers seem to forget them. Downfall, Days of Glory, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Pan’s Labyrinth, and The Pianist all made some impression, but the film closet to Tarantino’s craziness is Verhoeven’s Black Book, with which Inglorious Basterds some general plot movements.

In fact once the reader gets past the nutty surface detail and extreme, nearly comic digressions that pad out the tale, Inglorious Basterds is a tragic tale of damaged people, individuals, that is, damaged long before before the war started (Aldo has a rope burn around his neck from an unexplained lynching incident). They went into it all messed up, and the decisions they make are fully informed by the twists in their psyche caused by the real world, which the world of war only exacerbates, while also distorting their sense of right and wrong. Perhaps the best text to read as a background to the eventual finished film is Nicholson Baker’s fascinating anthology, Human Smoke (Simon & Schuster, 576 pages, $30, ISBN-13: 978-1416567844), a daring collection of quotes whose cumulative effect is to call into question many of the decisions made concerning WWII and the quality of mind and morality of those who made them. In tandem with Human Smoke, and despite its roots in about 400 ’70s Italian movies, Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds gives us a whole new war.