Weekly Rant: Bye-Bye Boss Man (The Office)

Last Thursday, in a patriotic “Fuck you!” to terrorism that left millions of Americans in tears, Pam Beesly Halpert walked through airport security without a boarding pass. Three days later, Osama bin Laden was dead. Coincidence? I suppose. Still, the timing is interesting. Sunday night Americans were marveling at just how long it took the U.S. military to catch the godfather of the most devastating terrorist attack on American soil. A few nights earlier (or, heck, for the DVR users among us, maybe that very night), Americans watched the final moments of the Michael Scott farewell episode while wondering if the writers of The Office had been to an airport in the past 10 years. With that said, you might think the Weekly Rant has emerged from a long hiatus in order to take down The Office with Navy Seal precision, but you’d be wrong. Yes, Michael Scott’s final seconds on NBC’s hit show were a tad clumsy, what with Pam getting through security without a ticket and, apparently, without her microphone. But in spirit Michael’s departure was graceful. Or at least as graceful as this character-overloaded sitcom is capable of being.

The farewell tour for Michael Scott began in earnest with the previous episode, “Michael’s Last Dundies.” The final edition of the Michael’s-choice awards had a lot in common with our first exposure in the Season 2 premiere – same inappropriateness and insensitivity, same unpredictability and same self-centeredness. The big difference this time around is that Michael’s coworkers no longer protest the Dundies’ existence. Their willingness to roll with the punches is no doubt tied to Michael’s immanent departure. (When Toby wins the Dundie for Extreme Repulsiveness, Jim and Oscar tell the much-maligned HR director that he has to suck it up and play along.) But at least as significant is that over the years the crew at Dunder Mifflin has come to recognize the Dundies – and similar Michael antics – for what they really are: desperate pleas for acceptance. Those equally unsure of themselves (Erin, Andy, even Dwight) are the ones who emotionally connect with the Dundies, while the self-assured have learned to look the other way (Jim, Pam, Oscar, etc.) and the universally oblivious (Creed, Meredith, Kelly, etc.) remain so. Watching Michael host his final ceremony it’s clear that his show is as sophisticated as ever (complete with cue cards and a prerecorded video intro), and yet his level of effort has gone down considerably. At the final Dundies, there are no costumes or characters. Finally, it’s as if Michael realizes that he’s character enough on his own.

Michael’s almost eerie calm (relatively speaking, of course) is key to the beauty of what happens next. After the Dundies ceremony gets Michael kicked out of yet another restaurant, the crew heads back to Dunder Mifflin to let him finish the show. But it doesn’t last long. As Andy accepts his Dundie, he uses his time in the spotlight as an excuse to begin an all-staff tribute to Michael, singing “9,986,000 Minutes” to the tune of “Seasons of Love” from the musical Rent in celebration of Michael’s tenure at Dunder Mifflin. It’s a sweet gesture, but what’s especially touching is Michael’s reaction. As his staff starts to sing, Michael peeks over to the camera and says, “Something’s happening!” It’s the unsuppressed, gleeful response of a guy who has spent his life repeatedly trying to inspire, even choreograph, such outpourings of affection, only to now, at last, find himself as the genuine recipient of it. It’s a beautiful moment – touching not because Michael has completely earned it but because we know that he hasn’t. A bit unrealistic? Yeah. But this all-staff chorus is more in character than the YouTube wedding march rip-off that asked us to believe that a staff that bickered all the way up to Jim and Pam’s nuptials would be able to pull off a choreographed dance routine almost flawlessly. The performance of “9,986,000 Minutes” isn’t so much about love as about forgiveness and acceptance, letting bygones be bygones and celebrating Michael’s best intentions. For one more week, for one last song, they could suck it up and give Michael the farewell he so desperately wanted.

It’s a gesture that Michael reciprocates in the final episode, “Goodbye, Michael,” which mostly consists of him going around to each staff member to offer a small gift of thanks or advice. His heart is in the right place, but of course Michael can’t help but be Michael, which is precisely what has made him such a tremendously enjoyable character over the years. His barometer for appropriateness is better calibrated than when we first met him, but he’s hardly overcome his tendency for inappropriateness. In one scene, Michael fails to realize that by attempting to encourage Kevin not to act like a caricature he actually reduces him to one. Later, his most Michael-esque moment of the finale might be when he brings together three staff members for a group pep talk, because even on his last day he can’t be bothered to make time for them individually. Or maybe it’s the moment when he calls everyone into the conference room for one last meeting, only to be at a loss for words and fall back on his offensive Asian character Ping (think Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, minus the makup). For all the ways Michael has grown – suffering through one last meeting with Toby without insulting him, or showing a remarkable amount of self-awareness when he laughs at Oscar’s hilariously low opinion of him – he’s still mostly the same Michael we met seven years ago. We just understand him better.

The emotional highpoint of the Michael finale isn’t the silent, Lost in Translation goodbye hug with Pam at the airport. Rather, it’s the scene in which Michael quietly eats his lunch in the break room and tears up listening to his staff at the table next to him engaging in typical mundane banter. Over the years it’s been obvious how much Michael craves his staff’s approval. (No on-camera meditation got to the heart of his personality more than this one from Season 4: “Do I need to be liked? Absolutely not. I like to be liked. I enjoy being liked. I have to be liked. But it’s not like this compulsive need to be liked, like my need to be praised.”) But if these final episodes have chronicled an awakening of the Dunder Mifflin staff in regard to how much they secretly like their boss, they’ve also captured Michael realizing just how deeply he enjoys these people for who they are, rather than who they are to him. Michael’s tear-filled eyes in that break room scene say everything he can’t convey in words without embarrassing himself. The power of that simple scene far exceeds that of the episode’s boldest grasp for big emotion, the blubbering final conversation between Michael and Jim, which plays more like a meta moment between two actors while reminding us yet again of how inconsistent Jim has been in recent seasons, to the point that when he tells Michael that he’s the best boss he’s ever had we can’t tell if he’s being sincere or faking it on Michael’s behalf.

The question now is what The Office will be like without Michael Scott. Different, for sure, but I don’t think it’s doomed. Over the years, the series has become so overstuffed with characters and storylines that it hardly resembles what it was at the start in terms of structure, never mind quality. Cheers never lost Sam Malone, but it survived several other significant cast changes without a hitch because of the strength of its structure. There’s no reason The Office can’t do the same. The truth is that the Dunder Mifflin staff’s growing acceptance of Michael had become something of a hindrance. By his final episode, even Michael’s most faithful supporter, Dwight, admitted that he’d long ago given up expecting Michael to do the right or sensible thing. It’s precisely because the Dunder Mifflin staff had become so comfortable with Michael that the series had to result to extremes to make them uncomfortable: having Michael quit to start his own company, having Jim take a management position, introducing characters like Charles Minor (who worked) and Jo Bennett (who didn’t), etc. In theory, Michael’s departure could allow it to get back to basics.

Granted, the appearance of Will Ferrell’s Deangelo Vickers is a reminder that replacing Michael won’t be as simple as plucking another ignoramus from central casting. But as “Goodbye, Michael” came to a close with Deangelo having a meltdown over party cake, there was also a glimmer of hope. When Dwight looks at Jim with an expression that says, “Oh, no, not again!” it’s a reminder that the core of The Office’s humor is less about the hilarious stupidity of an inept boss’s antics than about the hilarious discomfort that those antics inspire. With the right discomforting boss, there’s still room for high comedy at Dunder Mifflin. But forgetting Michael Scott won’t be easy. As Michael says at the end of “Michael’s Last Dundies,” in what will go down as one of my favorite line readings in the show’s history, “This is going to hurt like a motherfucker.”

Weekly Rant: Missing Links

It’s not unusual for me to be irritated by reviews of Clint Eastwood films. I’ve said it several times now, though perhaps never within the main body of a post here at this blog, that I think Eastwood is the most coddled of directors. Even when his films mostly work, they have a habit of being repetitive, hokey and repulsively on-the-nose, and yet somehow critics rarely give Eastwood’s errors more than a perfunctory aside, usually on the way to another compliment. Even in the case of the sloppy and lackluster Hereafter, which despite some worshipful outliers has been significantly criticized, most of the disdain has been reserved for the screenwriter, Peter Morgan. Rightfully so, in this case, but the larger point still remains: Eastwood gets away with stuff that gets George Lucas and M. Night Shyamalan drawn and quartered.

But this week’s rant isn’t about Eastwood or the kid gloves treatment he tends to receive from critics. It’s about another troublesome trend that I noticed when reading reviews of Hereafter: the tendency to (hyper)link that film to Paul Haggis’ Crash and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel. The comparison is by no means out of bounds. Not entirely. All three films feature characters who begin the film unlinked only to have their plot lines overlap by movie’s end, sometimes in (supposedly) profound ways. In an effort to describe that basic phenomenon, it’s a fitting comparison. Trouble is, those so called “hyperlink narratives” are more unalike than they are similar, and observing them as part of one niche genre threatens to obscure what these films are really about, what they’re trying to do.

Allow me to explain …

Haggis’ Crash is specifically about interconnectivity and the Domino effect of prejudice, fear and hate. As such, it’s a film that’s essentially meaningless if the characters are unlinked, because it’s only in tying these characters together that Haggis can explore (in his very heavy-handed manner) how people carry past experiences into future interactions. The film’s thesis is that we are connected in ways that we cannot avoid and that only by reaching out to one another – by linking – can we see people for who they really are. And it’s by making the film’s characters victims and perpetrators of prejudice that Haggis conveys the cyclical nature of fear and hate. In Crash, these links aren’t just narrative devices linking these stories, they are a core component the story's theme.

Inarritu’s Babel is different. It’s about universality, not interconnectivity – and those aren’t quite the same. Sure, like Crash, its characters are connected: a Japanese businessman sells a rifle to his hunting guide in Africa, who in turn sells it to a poor Moroccan goat herder, who gives the gun to his sons, who shoots at a tour bus and wounds an American tourist, who because of her wound doesn’t get back home to the United States in time to relieve her live-in maid and child caretaker, who thus takes the American children with her to Mexico to attend the wedding of her son. But, unlike Crash, the narrative chain linking these characters together is simply a decorative ribbon that neatly binds the film’s disparate chapters. Babel, unlike Crash, is not about a Domino effect. In truth, its stories don’t need to be linked by narrative because they are already linked by theme: the frustrating isolation that comes from our cultural or linguistic differences. To suggest that Babel is about that small and insubstantial narrative thread is to suggest that the film is exploring the trickle-down dangers of selling a weapon after a hunting expedition. Or, it's to suggest that Babel is about is about its segues, which would be akin to focusing more on the dissolves between scenes than on the scenes themselves. Babel and Crash are both hyperlink films, sure, but they have entirely different reasons for using that design.

And that brings us to Eastwood’s Hereafter, which falls somewhere between those two films. For most of its running time, Hereafter isn’t a movie about the interconnectivity of Matt Damon’s George (in America), Cecile De France’s Marie (in France) and Frankie McLaren’s Marcus (in England), and so in that sense there’s no meaning to be found in the way the characters ultimately influence one another. Then again, by the end of its awkward final act, Hereafter becomes a love story, which of course makes the joining of at least two of the characters greatly meaningful. That I can’t tell whether Hereafter intends to assign significance to these links (like Crash) or simply joins these characters in order to decorate its deeper thematic examinations (like Babel) says everything about the film’s frustrating indefiniteness.

But this isn’t a review of Hereafter, it’s a warning about the dangerousness of connecting films too casually. I understand why people spot general structural similarities among Crash, Babel and Hereafter, but those similarities are just that: general and structural. In theme and intent, these "hyperlink films" are quite different. In that sense, grouping these films is as misleading as it is instructive. One of the films is specifically about interconnectivity. One of them is about universality. And the other one is about, well, you tell me.

Weekly Rant (Sort Of): Speaking in Tongues

The Last Station, based on a semi-fictional novel by Jay Parini, begins with Leo (Lev) Tolstoy in his final months of life. The year is 1910 and Tolstoy is both a famous novelist (War and Peace and Anna Karenina) and a famous spiritual figure, inspiring a religion of sorts that rejects violence, sex, wealth and private property. The film, directed by Michael Hoffman, explores both the man and his movement in a manner that is simultaneously comprehensive and scattered – much like the devotion between the film’s two main characters. Starring a very-bearded Christopher Plummer and a still stunningly beautiful (and sexy) Helen Mirren, The Last Station is at its core an examination of the complex relationship between Leo and Sofya Tolstoy, two people who loved and fought with equal passion. The film’s principal pleasure is Plummer and Mirren’s knack for playing both sides of the relationship convincingly. Screaming at one another in one scene, playfully rolling around in bed in the next, each moment between Leo and Sofya feels true, real, authentic.

What isn’t so authentic, however, is The Last Station’s Russianness. This is a film with characters named Bulgakov, Chertkov and Sergeyenko, and yet the performers speak English with accents that sound like a strange combination of flattened British and whatever accent Paul Giamatti uses in the John Adams miniseries. And that brings us to this week’s rant, which, truth be told, is more of a question (sorry, Kevin J. Olson).

Because in addition to seeing The Last Station, in recent weeks I’ve been preparing for the Steve McQueen Blog-a-thon by rewatching such classics as The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape (as if I needed an excuse), two films in which Mexican and German characters, respectively, speak exclusively in English, even amongst themselves. This use of accented English in portrayals of non-English-speaking characters used to be the norm, but in recent years, as Hollywood has warmed to the idea that subtitles don’t ensure box office ruin, the trend has shifted ever so slightly so that now even vapid popcorn fare like Avatar dabbles in some non-English dialogue. That said, the foreign-tongued speakers in any American-made film are more often than not the story’s villains, suggesting that filmmakers might be more interested in stoking their target audience’s fears of “the other” than in attainting racial, ethnic and linguistic authenticity. Nevertheless, regardless of the motivation, we have reached the point that when an art-house flick like The Last Station doesn’t go so far as to adopt Russian accents for its Russian characters it seems, well, odd.

Is it possible that Harrison Ford ruined the Russian accent for everyone with his performance in K-19: The Widowmaker? No, that’s not the question at the heart of this post. These are the questions I pose to you: (1) In this day and age is it actually inappropriate for non-English-speaking characters to be performed in English, or is it just distracting, or neither? (2) If a movie about non-English-speaking characters settles for using English, would you prefer to have the actors adopt an accent suggesting the language being spoken (like Nazis in an Indiana Jones movie or Mexican mice in a Speedy Gonzales cartoon), or would you prefer that the actors speak in their own “natural” English accents, whatever that might be? If the latter, (3) what if allowing the actors to speak in their natural voices leads to an American actor (say, Giamatti) and an English actor (say, Mirren) speaking with different accents despite playing people who speak the same language? In general, when it comes to non-English-speaking characters being performed in English, what are your thoughts?

Please, discuss …

Weekly Rant: Why Hitch Would Have Hated The Lovely Bones

“I have a problem with writers because I find that I am teaching them cinematics all the time. You have remember that with a lot of writers you have to go by what is written on the page. I have no interest in that. As the director, I have that white rectangle to fill with a succession of images, one following the other. That’s what makes a film.” – Alfred Hitchcock

Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones is a curious thing: a movie that looks just like the book that inspired it and nothing like it at the same time. Alice Sebold’s bestselling novel of same name is the story of a 14-year-old girl who after being raped and killed watches over her family (and her murderer) from the afterlife. Jackson’s film is about that, too, albeit with the rape implied rather than explicitly depicted or even stated. At the end of Jackson’s film (spoilers ahead, obviously) the killer isn’t caught but he gets his just due, and the narrator, Susie Salmon, inhabits the body of an earthling Quantum Leap-style and gets the kiss she always wanted. Sebold’s novel ends the same way, although in her book it’s not just a kiss but full-on sex, a symbol not of a childhood dream come true (Jackson’s version) but of a young woman who has overcome her sexual assault. But this post isn’t about how Jackson’s The Lovely Bones is a ridiculous, sloppy mess because of the ways it strays from the original source. This is a post about how Jackson’s film is doomed by trying to remain faithful to it.

In the argument that cinematic adaptations shouldn’t be beholden to their source material, Jackson’s film could serve as Exhibit A. In co-writing the screenplay with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, Jackson seems to have forgotten what Alfred Hitchcock knew so well: that literature and film work in significantly different ways. Note that I didn’t say “entirely” different. After all, both reading and movie-watching require us to use our imaginations. Without cognitive engagement, the images of a film could be as meaningless as a book written in foreign hieroglyphs. Of course, at the movies our imaginations can be more passive. Whereas the text of a book must be actively consumed, the images of a film are delivered to us. It’s the difference between standing under a waterfall (movies) and hand-pumping water from a well (books), not just in terms of the effort required by the audience but in the amount of information (water, in the above metaphor) delivered at one time by the source.

Often, that’s a good thing. For example, take a moment and look at the images below and ponder all the textual description it would take to fully conjure one of these stills. Would a thousand words be enough?




Probably not. Than again, more isn't always more. Sometimes the waterfall of visual data is detrimental to the intent. That’s certainly the case in Jackson’s adaptation during the scene in which Susie is lured by Mr. Harvey, her eventual rapist and murderer, into an underground lair.

Here’s how the book describes that scene, in Susie’s words:

"But on December 6, 1973, it was snowing, and I took a shortcut through the cornfield back from the junior high. It was dark out because the days were shorter in winter, and I remember how the broken cornstalks made my walk more difficult. The snow was falling lightly, like a flurry of small hands …

[Mr. Harvey appears and says he wants to show Susie something.] "Mr. Harvey said it would only take a minute, so I followed him a little farther into the cornfield, where fewer stalks were broken off because no one used it as a shortcut to the junior high."

[Mr. Harvey shows Susie the wooden door to an underground bunker.] "It was awkward to get into, that much he admitted once we were both inside the hole. But I was so amazed by how he had made a chimney that would draw smoke out if he ever chose to build a fire that the awkwardness of getting in and out of the hole wasn’t even on my mind. …

"I can still see the hole like it was yesterday, and it was. … It was the size of a small room, the mud room in our house, say, where we kept our boots and slickers and where Mom had managed to fit a washer and dryer, one on top of the other. I could almost stand up in it, but Mr. Harvey had to stoop. He’d created a bench along the sides of it by the way he’d dug it out. … I stared in amazement, at the dug-out shelf above him where he had placed matches, a row of batteries, and a battery-powered fluorescent lamp that cast the only light in the room – an eerie light that would make his features hard to see when he was on top of me.”

OK. So, based on that text, what do we know about the location of the bunker and the setting of Mr. Harvey’s attack? We know it was in a “cornfield back from the junior high,” in an area where “fewer (corn)stalks were broken off because no one used it as a shortcut to the junior high.” We also know that it’s “dark” outside. That’s all we know. The rest is entirely up to our imagination. How tall are those remaining cornstalks? How secluded is this shortcut from the junior high? How dark is it outside? My mental picture and yours are probably remarkably different except for those few explicit details from the text and one more constant: Reading the book, all of us, presumably, will imagine a tableau in which Mr. Harvey could successfully (1) create the underground bunker, (2) lure Susie into it, (3) victimize her within it and (4) escape the bunker without detection. (We also might assume that he could successfully destroy the bunker after using it, but to this point in the book or the film that isn’t mentioned or depicted.) We must imagine those four things or else the very premise of the incident is faulty. Simply put, why would a man go to all the work of creating this bunker unless he had strong reason to believe that it would decrease his likelihood of being caught and increase his likelihood of snaring his prey? With Sebold’s book the onus is on the reader to fill in the surrounding details to make the scene realistic, to make the setting suit Mr. Harvey’s plan.

Jackson’s depiction of the same scenario has familiar details – the “cornfield back from the junior high,” broken cornstalks, darkness, a wooden door and a bunker with benches carved into the earth that’s just big enough to hold them. But it has more information – explicit information that the film is giving to the audience, rather than letting us fill in the areas around the text of Sebold’s depiction. If The Lovely Bones were out on DVD, this is where I’d offer screen captures in addition to the shot atop this post, but here are some of the other details Jackson’s cinematic depiction provides: (1) when the scene begins, it’s not dark but dusky; (2) the cornfield is so close to the junior high that it might as well be part of the school grounds; (3) the cornstalks are flattened everywhere so that the cornfield offers no more seclusion than a soccer field; (4) as close to the cornfield as the high school is at least one neighboring house with an equally unobstructed view of the bunker’s location; (5) when Susie tromps into the cornfield she is seemingly the last one out of the school (though how Mr. Harvey would know this, I have no idea) but not by very much, because when she approaches the field another student can be seen wandering through it. The sum of these extra details forces us to conclude that Mr. Harvey is by no means avoiding detection by stalking children here. He hasn’t set his trap in a secluded, camouflaged corner, as the book might cause you to imagine, but in a popular thoroughfare.

Within Jackson’s film it makes absolutely no sense that Mr. Harvey could stand exposed in the middle of the cornfield and, in one night, dig his bunker by hand and conceal it while being detected. It further makes no sense that Mr. Harvey, who we later find out is an experienced child predator, would ever think that this would be an effective way of seizing his prey – especially when his plans call for removing the body afterward and collapsing the hole. Perhaps in the summer, when the cornstalks would provide cover, Mr. Harvey could have pulled it off. But in the winter? Digging through frozen ground? No. The tableau in Jackson’s film is fraudulent, and that’s before Mr. Harvey, with darkness descending, flips open the bunker’s hatch only to have light shine out from the earth like a beacon – an image that looks like something out of the TV show Lost. (Or at least I think it does; I’ve only seen commercials.) Because that wouldn’t arouse suspicion, would it?

There are many other things to criticize in Peter Jackson’s adaptation: the way the film’s vision of heaven looks so much like a screensaver that I kept expecting to see flying toasters; the way the bunker is filled with needless bric-a-brac that Mr. Harvey would have had to labor to get in and out of the hole; the way Jackson’s film softens the book’s themes; the way it miscasts Mark Wahlberg as Susie’s father, even though he appears to be playing the role of the (dramatic) sinkhole; and so on. But for a director known for his elaborate CGI spectacles, Jackson’s gravest error is forgetting that his job is to fill that “white rectangle,” and that everything he puts into that rectangle has meaning.

The Hitchcock quote that opened this piece is from a 1970 interview that can be found in the always stimulating book Conversations With The Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute. So let’s close with a little more Hitch:

"I think one of the biggest problems that we have in our business is the inability of people to visualize. What I’m about to say is hearsay, but I remember (David O.) Selznick, the producer, when he was talking about Irving Thalberg, the great name in our business. Selznick used to say, “Thalberg is great with a finished picture.” When you examine those words, they mean that the man lacked any visual sense. The visual, to me, is a vital element in the cinema and I don’t think it is studied enough.

"Go back to the early days, back to Chaplin. He once made a short film called The Pilgrim. The opening shot was the outside of a prison gate. A guard came out and posted a Wanted notice. Next cut: a very tall, thin man coming out of a river, having had a swim. He finds that his clothes are missing and have been replaced with a convict’s uniform. Next cut: a railroad station, and coming toward the camera dressed as a parson with the pants too long is Chaplin. Now there are three pieces of film, and look at the amount of story they told."

In The Lovely Bones, Jackson’s images tell a story, too. Alas, it’s an absurd one.

Weekly Rant: And You Think The iPad Has Marketing Problems

As you no doubt know, Apple announced the iPad this week. And, as you probably expected, reactions have ranged from "OMG this will change my life" to "Only one application at a time? WTF!?" There's also been a lot of chatter about the product's name and whether it's too evocative of a feminine hygiene product. Considering that I don't see much need for an iPad right now -- I laughed when Steve Jobs spoke breathlessly about what an exceptional Internet experience the iPad provides (my computer does just fine, thanks) -- I've enjoyed seeing Apple get mocked a bit here and there. Then again, if you ask me, the backlash against the iPad's name seems a wee bit over the top, considering that I've never seen anyone break into a giggle fit talking about a pad of paper. (And speaking of "wee," the Nintendo Wii seems to be doing just fine, despite a far more questionable name.) Besides, Apple has a darn good marketing record. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

As for the marketing minds dreaming up ad campaigns for Diet Dr. Pepper, I'm dubious.

Do me a favor. Spend 30 seconds watching the ad below ...



Done? OK. Apparently the commercial has been out for months, but I saw it for the first time last week. So forgive me if this has been covered elsewhere, but ... this commercial has more logic problems than The Lovely Bones. The premise is that Diet Dr. Pepper has "23 satisfying flavors and no calories" but that no one believes it. So how does Diet Dr. Pepper seek to demonstrate that a "satisfying diet drink" isn't a myth? By aligning the product with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Bigfoot, a leprechaun, a fairy and an alien. Of course!

Oh, sure, sure, sure. I get it. Within the motion-capture world of the ad, the premise is that Santa & Friends are real, thus illustrating the challenge of getting people to believe. But, see, I realize this is really nuanced and everything but ... Santa & Friends aren't fucking real. They are elements of make-believe. And consumers know that.

So, sure, snicker at Apple hucksters for being overly excited about the company's new ultra-thin pad, er, iPad. But trust that when Apple begins marketing the product, we won't get an "'I'm Necessary' Support Group" commercial with the iPad sitting in a circle with a Snuggie and Ted Williams' cryogenically frozen brain.

Weekly Rant: Best Prop Blunder

When film fans argue about the worst movies to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, the debate rarely goes on for too long before someone mentions Chariots of Fire. About the only thing that’s memorable from the 1981 film – beyond its Best Picture win – is its synthesized Vangelis score, which seems as detrimentally anachronistic today as it was wildly popular at the time. What saves Chariots of Fire from even more derision, I suspect, is that the movie is hardly ever discussed. If it isn’t one of the least impressive movies to win Best Picture, it’s at least one of the most forgotten.

That said, today’s post isn’t about whether Chariots of Fire is Oscar-worthy. (At least On Golden Pond didn’t win, I say.) Today’s post is about a filmmaking blunder so significant that it deserves an award. If you’ve never seen Chariots of Fire and want to avoid spoilers, read no further. Otherwise …

To put it in a nutshell, Chariots of Fire is about running and religion. Its climactic moment finds Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) running in the 400 meters at the Olympics because the finals of his best event, the 100 meters, will fall on Sunday. Liddell, a Christian, refuses to run on the Sabbath.

Just before the 400 is set to begin, American runner Jackson Scholz (Brad Davis) hands the British Liddell a note that reads: “It says in the Old Book, ‘He that honors me I will honor.’ Good luck.” Liddell smiles, crumples the note in his right hand and gets into his crouch for the start of the race, the letter sticking up from his right hand as if he’s carrying the Olympic torch.

For all intents and purposes, this moment is what Chariots of Fire is all about. The idea that Liddell is running to honor God, and that he’s gained the respect of others by doing so, is The Point, if you will, of the film. That’s why I find it absolutely stunning that at one point during the race – more specifically, from one camera angle – this letter magically disappears from Liddell’s hand.

Let’s go to the replay (click to enlarge as necessary):

Liddell gets ready for the race …


Scholz approaches and hands the note to Liddell …


Liddell reads it …


Crumples it …


There’s the note in his right hand …


Still there …


Still there …


Still there …


And oops …


Where did it go?


It’s back! In fact, now it sticks out of both sides of his hand like a relay baton …


But now it’s gone …


Like a magician Liddell opens his hand as if to prove it’s empty …


But when he crosses the finish line – victorious, of course – it’s back again …


I’m sure most films have at least one continuity error. But as prop blunders go, this one is especially glaring, precisely because the film has directed our attention to the note in Liddell's hand and because this is the film's Big Moment. To imagine an equivalent, picture Luke Skywalker’s confrontation with Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back and imagine if Luke’s hand suddenly reappeared after it had been sliced off. Think of the end of Die Hard and imagine John McClane firing three shots with his only two bullets. Or imagine a scene in True Grit in which Rooster Cogburn suddenly didn’t have an eye patch.

I ask you, Cooler readers, can you think of a more egregious prop error (or continuity error) in a movie?

Weekly Rant: The Blind Side

Because most sports movies are mediocre, and because most movies starring Sandra Bullock are worse than that and because I have read the book upon which it is based, I had no intention of seeing The Blind Side. That’s why I spent my lunch hour last Friday clicking through Metacritic to read about it: I wasn’t worried that my own experience with the film would be colored by my prior exposure to these reviews, because this wasn’t a film I was planning to experience. But the more reviews I read, most of them negative, the more interested I became. At a time when Precious, a sensationalistic story about a black woman who is used as a dramatic punching bag, is being widely celebrated as worthwhile art, The Blind Side, the true story of a black man who rose from homelessness to a career in the NFL with a lot of help from a white family, has been derided by some as condescending toward black people. That I had to see to understand.

And so I saw The Blind Side, only to leave the theater as confused as when I went in. Is the film offensive? Yes. If Precious takes itself too seriously, The Blind Side doesn’t take itself seriously enough. This is a film with a high school football coach who doesn’t use the headset hanging around his neck but does take a cellphone call on the sideline during a game. It’s a film in which a teenage Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), now a starting tackle for the Baltimore Ravens, gets whipped into shape by an elementary school kid. It’s a film in which Bullock’s saintly yet spicy Leigh Anne Tuohy confronts a threatening gang leader by threatening him right back – in his neighborhood, on his porch, in front of his homeboys. More often than not, The Blind Side adopts an air of preposterousness that suggests it’s more comfortable emulating a made-for-Lifetime melodrama than approximating reality. For me, at least, that’s offensive. As for the film’s supposed condescending treatment of its black main character, that’s where things get tricky.

In The Village Voice, Melissa Anderson suggests that The Blind Side “peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them.” Scott Tobias of the AV Club argues that The Blind Side “finds a new low” in the sports genre’s “long, troubled history of well-meaning white paternalism, with poor black athletes finding success through white charity.” Both critics support these arguments by citing scenes in which white people must act upon Oher in order for him to act for himself. They also note how the film treats Oher, in Tobias’ words, as a “gentle, oversized puppy in need of adoption.” Frequently their arguments are compelling. Tobias notes that the Tuohy family “literally picks (Oher) up from the streets during a rainstorm, like a stray,” quipping: “All that’s missing are the children pleading, ‘Mom, can we keep him?’” One only needs to read such descriptions to see how neatly The Blind Side rests within the shamefully deep mold created by all the tactless “whiteys”-as-“virtuous saviors” films that have come before it. But I’m not sure that means that The Blind Side is automatically as tactless or shameless as its predecessors.

The thing that struck me about John Lee Hancock’s film is how faithful it is, a few indulgences aside, to Michael Lewis’ nonfiction book. Does that mean the film is capital-T True? Of course not. As I suggested, the film has a wink-wink demeanor about it that manages to undercut even the things that are factually accurate. Nevertheless, if Lewis’ account of the story can be trusted at all, many of the elements that might seem especially condescending toward black people are in fact based on truth. Indeed, Michael Oher was taken in by a rich white family. He did attend an almost all-white school. He was given special treatment by some of his white teachers to help him along. He did have a white tutor who guided him through high school and even college. He was inward and slow to reveal his feelings and history. He had been homeless. He did lose a father he barely knew to a sad death. He did have siblings he hadn’t seen in years, if ever. He didn’t take to football immediately and really was coached to equate offensive line play with the protection of one’s family. Perhaps most important of all, the black Oher really did form a bond with the white Tuohys, and they became a genuine family in the process – not just during high school, not just for the span of the film, but then and now. Any way you slice it, Oher was in fact “rescued,” in almost every sense of the word, by white people who, through their acts, were both “virtuous” and “saviors.”

None of this is to suggest that the film doesn’t take liberties in the specific depictions of these broader truths. Nor is it to suggest that The Blind Side gives us the “whole truth,” whatever that is. Furthermore, I don’t mean to imply that this is a good film. (When the professional actor playing the high school coach delivers a performance more forced than that of the career college football coaches who make cameos in this film, you’ve got problems.) Yes, it’s true that we leave The Blind Side better understanding Leigh Anne Tuohy than Michael Oher. But explain to me why this isn’t her story as much as his? Seems to me that without a Leigh Anne Tuohy we'd never have heard of Michael Oher. Sure, it would be condescending to depict Oher as the family pet being taught to sit, stay and play football. But I’m not convinced the film portrays him that way. I’d suggest the film portrays Oher as a young man in need of a mother and a lot of guidance, which by virtue of the formula means that Oher is placed in the role of a child. Is that offensive? If untrue, I suppose. But here’s the thing: What if it's accurate? Has our political correctness gotten so out of hand that stories about whites saving blacks are now taboo? That doesn’t sound like progress.

More than a decade ago, then living in Oregon, I eagerly followed the development of another sports-related film: Robert Towne’s Without Limits, which proved to be the better of the two Steve Prefontaine biopics released almost simultaneously. One thing I remember from the prerelease buzz is that Without Limits, which dedicates quite a bit of time to Prefontaine’s efforts to medal at the 1972 Olympics, didn’t score well with test audiences. Their complaint? Prefontaine didn’t redeem himself by winning gold at the 1976 Olympics. Why? Because he died in 1975. In that instance the real story – one of promise unfulfilled – wasn’t the story that (many) audiences wanted, but it was the story of what really happened. I have a feeling that something similar is happening here. In this era of heightened sensitivity to political correctness (which is a good thing for the most part, don’t get me wrong), The Blind Side is indeed hampered by Hancock’s sometimes overly simplistic approach to his subject matter. Just as often, though, what hurts The Blind Side isn't the depiction of its subject matter but the realities of it.

Weekly Rant: The Demonizing (of) Armond White

If you’ve ever found yourself wishing that New York Press critic Armond White would be eviscerated with the kind of predatory viciousness that colors so many of his reviews, his recent interview on The Film Talk’s weekly podcast won’t do anything to satisfy your bloodlust. In fact, it has the potential to increase it. Podcast hosts Jett Loe and Gareth Higgins produce an extremely professional movie debate program on their own dime each week (for now), so it isn’t a terrible surprise that their interviewing style is network-friendly. With White they take an angle of approach that is less Frost-Nixon than Hannity-Palin. (It’s one thing to ask nonconfrontational questions. It’s another thing to also help answer them.) But in a way that’s enough, because White has some Colonel Jessep in him. He wants to talk. (We want him on that wall. We need him on that wall.) And so even without a Lieutenant Kaffee grilling him, White says some incriminating things.

Of greatest interest to me is his response to his reputation as a contrarian. Loe and Higgins seemed ready to let the interview end, but with the contrarian topic on the table White seized the opportunity to set the record straight: “That is garbage,” he said. “That whole phrase is simply, I think, a symptom of a kind of culture that has turned into automatons, where people think they are simply supposed to like whatever Hollywood dangles in front of them and that anyone who thinks for themselves is wrong. You know, in America we’re supposed to be a democracy. There’s supposed to be this thing called freedom of speech that we respect and expect of people. How is it that when someone expresses themselves that has their own opinion, they are demonized as being a contrarian? I have no interest in being contrary. My interest is in writing film criticism that helps me to understand movies better. And that’s why I keep doing it. If I was going to write movie reviews or movie critiques that said the same thing everybody else was saying, there would be no point to it. I wouldn’t do it. The only reason I do it is because I’m trying to express myself. In a civilization that says it values independent thought, that’s supposed to be the ideal. But instead when you speak for yourself about movies people think something is wrong with you. They think you are simply being contrary.”

At issue here, for me, isn’t whether White is or isn’t a contrarian. What’s interesting to me is that White objects to being “demonized” as a contrarian just a few sentences after he suggests that our culture is plagued by “automatons.” The thing that offends me about White’s criticism isn’t his tendency to break from the pack, even when he seems to be doing so out of desperation, indeed to be a contrarian (more on that later). What offends me is his habit of demonization, taking down people and films. You don’t have to do much searching to see what I’m talking about. In his recent review of Precious, White suggests that Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey signed on as producers because the film about a black woman being horribly mistreated by black people “helps contrast and highlight their achievements as black American paradigms.” In his review of The Men Who Stare at Goats, White writes that George Clooney is “among those media stars who presume that having Liberal biases make them radicals.” These observations – severe or not – have little to do with the film he’s reviewing. They are merely drive-by hits. White is a name-caller. He’s a schoolyard bully. He is talented enough and intelligent enough to review films without taking these venomous detours, but he doesn’t. (It isn’t uncommon for White to pause in the middle of a film review to take a one-sentence swipe at some other film that he hasn’t reviewed.) More than being contrary, that’s his thing. He demonizes.

I could rant at length about what I perceive to be desperation and insincerity in White’s reviews. As the above quote implies, he has painted himself into a corner – made it so that any film that gets majority support from fans or critics cannot possibly be worthy of such acclaim. I could rant about the ludicrousness of his “Better Than” lists (which are entirely contrary, by the way), the most recent of which suggests that Happy-Go-Lucky was without critical support. I could rant about how reckless he can be in the name of a takedown – such as when he describes the characters in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days as “abortionhorny.” I could even rant about how uncomfortable it is to listen to White, promoting a new book of essays about Michael Jackson, talking about the difference between “a real film critic” and someone who does it as a “hobby” while being interviewed by two guys running a pledge drive to stay afloat. But I won’t do that. I don’t want to lose sight of the big picture.

In the big picture, White makes a lot of astute arguments. Love or loath his reviews, they are often conversation starters, and I’m always in favor of passionate film discussion, regardless of how it begins. Do I doubt the sincerity of White’s motives? I do. Do I think he’s wasting his talent by using his reviews as the forum for cheap shots? I do. Do I think that White should quit condemning others for being sanctimonious when that word so often describes the tone of his reviews? I do. Do I think he has lost the right to object to his “contrarian” label when he routinely uses harsher words for others? I do. But I don’t think we should demonize White. It only gets us closer to the thing we’re demonizing.

Weekly Rant: The Black Stallion

It’s November, which means it’s time to start forecasting Academy Awards nominations. I’m not happy about it. In general, I could do without box office reports and awards season horserace analysis. Then again, I’d be lying if I suggested that critical hype hasn’t helped steer me to legitimately great films I might have otherwise overlooked while helping me avoid some bombs. Still, I find it all so uninteresting. I’ve long since outgrown the stage of my life when I got worked up over what is and isn’t nominated and awarded each year. Sure, I root for my favorites to win. Sure, every now and then the overhyping of a film will get under my skin. But the Oscars are a marketing exercise, I know. I try to embrace the good and ignore the bad.

That said, a few weeks ago when I got lost in the (occasional) scenic splendor of Where the Wild Things Are, I found myself thinking of another movie about a boy who washes up on an island and bonds with a friendly beast: The Black Stallion. And that got me thinking about what I consider to be one of the biggest Oscar crimes of the past 30 years: The Black Stallion was nominated for three Academy Awards in 1979, but none of them was Best Cinematography.

This defies explanation. It doesn’t matter whether one thinks Best Cinematography is an award recognizing excellence in cinematic storytelling or excellence in pretty filmmaking, because The Black Stallion, shot by Caleb Deschanel, is marvelous by either standard. The winner of Best Cinematography that year was Apocalypse Now, and that’s fair. But the other four nominees were All That Jazz, The Black Hole, Kramer vs. Kramer and 1941. Kramer vs. Kramer for Best Cinematography? Really?

I could hammer out a few hundred words about the magnificence of the cinematography in The Black Stallion, which goes almost entirely without dialogue for its first 45 minutes. But instead why don’t I just show you. What follows are screenshots from the two moments in which Alec (Kelly Reno) and “The Black” bond through feeding. The images alone tell the story here. And isn't that the point?