Archive for December 31, 2008

Happy New Year

I can’t say it better than Tom Tomorrow.

happy new year

An historic meeting of minds


Tom, Denice, and Deborah

If you’ve been hanging around this blog long enough, you know Tom, who guest-posts here when I’m out of town. Tom and I have known each other for ten years. Ten. Years. And until yesterday, we had never met face-to-face. Tom and I are two of a group of about a dozen that met on the very first IMDb message boards (which were obscurely linked to and therefore self-selecting for persistent, smart people who read instructions with unusual skill) and are still friends. Tom was one of the last three I hadn’t met in person, and one of the remaining two is in Australia.

So about a month ago, Tom let the gang know he’d be in town for the holidays, and honestly? I never thought that would happen. I thought we’d meet when I visited the Left Coast. I mean Tom? In New York? Get real! But he came and he brought Jody and I’m not sure who I like better.

It was great. I met Denice (from the IMDb gang) and her husband Rich in New Jersey and we drove into the city together. Great weather, bad traffic. We drank at The Dead Poet (which has OMGZ! BEER!) and ate at Cafe con Leche (OMGZ! PAELLA!) and I think I persuaded Tom to write an interesting series which I won’t tell you about in case he doesn’t do it.


OMGZ! PAELLA!

So. I guess this isn’t a great story. It made me very happy but it lacks colorful anecdotes. Just, y’know, stare at the picture of paella. (OMGZ!)

Cast of Characters Trivia: All done

Whoosh, that was fast!
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Tuesday Trivia: Cast of characters

Each movie can be guessed by its cast. These are character actors and secondary roles; none of the actors named is in the top four billed actors in its movies.

1. Geraldine Chaplin, Mary Beth Hurt, Robert Sean Leonard, Jonathan Pryce
Solved by George (comment #3).

2. Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Pollak, J.T. Walsh , Christopher Guest
Solved by Christina (comment #5).

3. Dorothy Malone, Peggy Knudsen, Regis Toomey, Elisha Cook Jr.
Solved by Melville (comment #1).

4. Walter Brennan, John Ericson, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin
Solved by George (comment #2).

5. Barbara Hershey, Richard Farnsworth, Joe Don Baker, Michael Madsen
Solved by Evn (comment #6).

6. Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito, Scatman Crothers, Vincent Schiavelli
Solved by Melville (comment #1).

7. Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Dalton
Solved by Melville (comment #1).

Monday Movie Review: Frost/Nixon

Frost/Nixon (2008) 9/10
Talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen) sets out to interview disgraced former president Richard Nixon (Frank Langella). Frost is an entertainer, not a journalist, and appears to be outmatched, and to lack credibility. But Nixon’s desire to be heard becomes his undoing. Directed by Ron Howard.

Ron Howard was the right director for this project. There is a level at which Howard is disdained for being plebian, but a plebian is exactly what this movie needed; someone who could convey this material to an audience that is younger and doesn’t know the history, or is not younger but wasn’t paying all that much attention. Or knew what was going on, but didn’t get the nuance.

After all, the notion of journalistic credibility is a little more nuanced than simply turning on your TV to watch Nixon resign, or being angry that he was pardoned. Here we have two journalistic wonks (played ably by the ever-delightful Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt) worried about their careers if they get involved with a dilettante project instead of something serious. I have to wonder how many people who were adults in 1977 (as I was not) were really on top of that aspect of the event.

And the Watergate story is, after all, intensely convoluted. Crimes and dirty tricks. Conspiracy to cover-up those crimes. Secret tapes. Hearings. A massive tangle of corruption and wrong-doing and an extensive investigation into who all the players were and what they did and who they took their orders from. Most people are kind of confused about the whole thing.

So you want a director who can present complex information in a straightforward manner, without actually dumbing it down. I don’t see how Howard could have done a better job. Now, I haven’t seen the play, so I don’t know how much credit playwright Peter Morgan (who also did the screenplay) deserves, but the whole thing is commendable. It’s exciting, it’s smart, it engages the audience. There’s a seamless blend of documentary, pseudo-documentary, and drama.

And there’s that dreadful phrase about movies-from-plays, “opening up.” You don’t want the movie to look stagebound, but I have to say, I hate the artifice of forcing a play to look not stagebound. How often I’ve watched a movie and thought, Oh, here’s the “opening up” part. Yuck. That doesn’t happen here. The movement is so constant and normal that you have to stop and think to remember it’s a play. Perfectly done.

What everyone is talking about with Frost/Nixon is the performances. Sheen and Langella are great, of course. I mean, this whole movie is so watchable, so compelling, and it’s really just guys talking (there is only one important woman; the movie fails the Bechdel test).

I find Langella’s Nixon kind of problematic. Mostly, because you’re watching for the imitation; there’s just no way around that. Here’s someone not only famous, but famously imitated; they even throw that in—Oliver Platt does a quick and funny Nixon imitation, reminding us that everyone imitated Nixon, and reminding us that Langella is here to do something much more. At which, no doubt about it, he succeeds. His Nixon is complex, thoughtful, angry, sad, menacing, powerful, and smart. But what he isn’t, is charming.

After the first couple of days of interviews, we’re told one cameraman turns to another and says (paraphrasing), ‘I didn’t vote for him when I had the chance, but I would now if I could.’ Frost’s first days of interviewing Nixon were disasterous precisely because they made Nixon look so incredibly good. The world was charmed, and no one wanted the world to be charmed. But Langella doesn’t convey that.

I looked up some YouTube of Frost interviewing Nixon. Nixon was, in fact, astonishingly appealing. He had a sweet smile, he seemed clever and interesting. This is what Frost had to combat, and this is where Langella fails. He just doesn’t give us that side of the man, and without it, the audience isn’t one hundred percent sure what the problem is.

Despite this problem, I think it’s a must-see. They tell us that history is an adventure, but we rarely know it for ourselves. And those of us who were alive at the time may find it weird that it’s now “history,” but it is, and vitally important, and in Frost/Nixon, entertaining to watch.

What didn’t happen in 2008

Local NPR station (I dunno, maybe all NPR stations) is playing a year-end fundraiser commercial that starts like this:

2008. Barack Obama became the first African American President of the United States.

No.
He.
Didn’t.

Barack Obama was elected to be the first African American President of the United States.

Barack Obama became the first African American President-Elect of the United States.

Barack Obama was the first African American to win the Presidency of the United States.

Barack Obama, however, is not the President of the United States. Not for another 3 weeks.

Language problem, or wishful thinking? You decide.

I’ve been trying

I am lame at embedding video in my stupidhead blog. So just go look.

Trivia has the week off

Be non-trivial.

Monday Movie Review: Milk

Milk (2008) 9/10
Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) runs for San Francisco Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay elected official in the U.S., and is assassinated by Dan White (Josh Brolin). Directed by Gus Van Sant.

So, a few weeks ago I reviewed The Times of Harvey Milk, and now I’ve seen the biopic. It’s really an extraordinary work in many ways. It makes a slice of recent history that few know about extraordinarily accessible, it blends real news footage with documentary-style film footage with more conventional filmmaking seamlessly, and the cast is amazing.

Sean Penn is transparent as Milk, he embodies the character fully. He leaps into his portrayal with a kind of gusto, nothing held back, and there isn’t a moment of screen time that I didn’t believe. The rest of the cast is great. Emile Hirsch, whom I missed in his Oscar-nominated performance last year, is extraordinary. It was a kind of now-I-get-it revelation of a performance for me.

But the acting shouldn’t detract from Van Sant’s great work here, as well as that of screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. This isn’t an easy story to tell. There is, first of all, the decision of where to begin and end, how much to tell. And then, how personal to make it, how political. How much of Dan White’s story to tell, how much of various other activists. Include the trial and its aftermath?

They’ve chosen to focus on Milk with a fairly tight lens, and to make the story mostly political. Milk has a personal life, he has lovers (Scott Smith, played by James Franco, and Jack Lira, played by Diego Luna), but what we know of Harvey is that he is shaped entirely by his political life.

The film is a wee bit of a hagiography. The documentary made clear that Milk was hot-tempered and difficult, and yet that didn’t make anyone love him less. The biopic is afraid to go there, and without the dark side of Milk, he seems a little softer than I suspect he really was. On the other hand, there’s something very smart about how it focuses on the public record and recollections of friends and associates, it is the Harvey that people knew, not a character study that pretends to know what makes him tick.

(Which is everything that’s wrong with biopics, with their facile fictionalization of explains-it-all childhood trauma; I’m talking to you Ray and The Aviator!)

Sometimes there isn’t a formative trauma. Sometimes people dedicate their lives to activism because they know it’s necessary, and because it energizes and shapes them. That’s a good enough reason, and if the people are compelling, we’ll get it. Harvey Milk is compelling.

Bring tissues.

Majel Barrett has died

I have no cute space-pun about her death. I am genuinely saddened.

Majel Barrett was the widow of Gene Roddenberry, and was best known for her involvement with Star Trek. She was Nurse Chapel in the original series, and Lwaxana Troi in The Next Generation. In addition, she was the voice of all the computers on The Next Generation and in several of the Star Trek movies.

As a stupid aside, I named my GPS after her. I have a female voice in a machine telling me what to do? I call her Majel, what else?

She was diagnosed with leukemia a short time ago. May she be born again to those she loves.