MovieWatch: "Michael Clayton"

"Michael Clayton"
Director: Tony Gilroy
Fien Print Rating (Out of 100): 64
In a Nutshell: [It's been a week that I've been batting "Michael Clayton" around in my head reflecting on whether or not I actually liked it more than I initially thought I liked it. I couldn't put my thoughts together well enough because I didn't of the kernel of why it fell short for me. Then, in the midst of a comment over at A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago" something clicked. Maybe not fully, but enough to write a blog post.]

Yes, "Michael Clayton" is a thoughtful and serious movie, a movie made with brains and aesthetic precision, a movie full of strong acting and cracklingly well-composed dialogue.

At its most basic level, though, it's also just a pilot for an intriguing FX or Showtime or HBO TV show, nothing more or less.

Go through after the bump for the rest of my thoughts.

Click through...

More frequently than movies, TV shows can be based on a central ironic character construction. She's a matchmaker, but she's also a divorce attorney and she can't find love herself... It's "Miss/Match." He's a shrink, but he's crazier than any of his patients... It's "Huff." He's a cop, but he's more dangerous than most of the criminals... It's too many different shows to list. Movies aren't immune to the formula, by any means, but movies are, by their nature, more narrative driven, while TV shows can be more character-driven. And "Michael Clayton" is a movie that's more character-driven.

For better or for worse, though, it's driven by a surprisingly banal character construct. Our main character, Michael Clayton (George Clooney), is a fixer for an all-powerful New York law film. He's the guy who can get you out of any situation, no matter how awful. But guess what? Michael may be able to fix anything in his professional life, but in his personal life... HE'S A MESS!!! Bet you never would have seen that coming. He was a bad husband and now he's a well-intentioned but fairly weak father. He has a by-the-numbers gambling addiction -- in the past week, I've seen the exact same underground poker den in "Michael Clayton," "Gossip Girl" and "Journeyman," suggesting that it's zeitgeisty, but over-done -- and a by-the-numbers assortment of estranged siblings (One's a cop! One's a drug addict! Yawn...). Now, suddenly, the man who has never given ethics a second though in either his personal or professional life has run into a professional problem he can't fix and it's going to change his life forever.

I don't wanna be a pill, but if you find the right under-employed movie star or well-traveled veteran TV star -- Maybe Bradley Whitford? Or Bill Pullman? Or Matthew Modine? -- and they could star in "Michael Clayton: The Series." Each week, Michael does his fixing duties for his real job, while working on the sly to root out corporate corruption and repair the tattered shards of his personal life. In a TV series, he could dedicate whole episodes to bonding with his son or fighting off the desire to place a bet.

It would take bullshit movie snobbery to begin to suggest that Michael Clayton is in any way a more complicated character than Vic Mackey or Brenda Johnson or Dexter Morgan. And with those characters, you know that each week's generic or vague procedural plotline is just a means to a character end and that something different or better will be along next week. The critics who are most impressed with "Michael Clayton" are, I suspect, exactly the sort of cinema elitists who don't watch TV.

In "Michael Clayton," though, the superficially and ironically conflicted title character is caught up in a generic and vague court case and, because this is a movie, there isn't anything else. You're stuck with Michael Clayton versus the Environmental Meanies, because that's all there is.

By just being another movie about a court case involving an evil chemical company poisoning the groundwater, "Michael Clayton" ends up occasionally feeling like a more smug version of "A Civil Action," which was already a pretty smug movie to begin with. The biggest difference is that "A Civil Action" (or "Erin Brokovich") were actually about their court cases and their political actions, at least to some degree. In "Michael Clayton," the court case is 100% a red herring. It doesn't have an iota of meaning. Why, then, not come up either with a different kind of court case involving an identical ethical crisis, or else provide no information at all about the case that's pushing the action, make it a complete MacGuffin. If you keep referring to "The U-North Case," people can either draw their own assumptions or not and you don't need to bog the plot down with generic legal procedural stuff.

[In that respect, actually, "Michael Clayton" is almost the reverse of "Syriana." Steven Gaghan's movie was so overly invested in the meat of its subject matter that the half-dozen characters experiencing Clayton-esque ethical dilemmas were somewhat undersold. I may actually prefer "Michael Clayton" to the cluttered "Syriana." A comparable movie that I prefer to "Michael Clayton," though, is Roger Michell's "Changing Lanes."]

As a writer, Gilroy made his bones on ethical thrillers [a genre that also includes "Changing Lanes"] that were too high minded to be actual thrillers. I'm thinking of things like "Extreme Measures" and "Proof of Life," both movies with more on their minds than typical popcorn movies, but also less corn than a good popcorn movie needs.

As a director of his own material, Gilroy actually proves more capable than either Michael Apted or Taylor Hackford were with the aforementioned scripts (though less capable than Dough Liman and Paul Greengrass were with his "Bourne" scripts). He coaxes a great leading performance from Clooney and good work from Tilda Swinton and the assortment of less recognizable supporting players (lots of New York theater types, I'm assuming). Depending on your tolerance for scenery chewing, you'll either find Tom Wilkinson Oscar-worthy or else you'll wonder why, in a movie where everything else is muted, he's bellowing like this was finally his chance to play King Lear. Wilkinson is such a good actor that I can't begrudge people for continuing to cast him as Americans even though he's utterly incapable of doing an American accent.

We've now reached the point at which I could keep rambling or walk away.

Since the Red Sox are obviously requiring more of my attention, I'm going to walk away.

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A Bicentennial Baby

At Ralphs on my way home from a late day at work (maybe later I'll get to a review of either "Michael Clayton" [I can't seem to review George Clooney movies, since "Ocean's Thirteen" went unremarked upon this summer since my reaction of "Meh" couldn't really be expanded to 500 words] or "Margot at the Wedding," which I saw this morning to interview Noah Baumbach [smart guy, maybe too smart] for Filter). I'm grabbing a sandwich from their deli. Turkey. Cheese. Mustard. Mayo. Tomato, just for luck.

Going through the check-out line. In front of me is an absurd looking woman -- short, well-along in pregnancy, wearing a low-cut top exposing her fake breast, skin leathery from a fake tan, could have been any age. Well, maybe not any age. She looks used up. Formerly cute. She gets carded. Strikes me as odd, both that she's purchasing alcohol in her delicate condition, but also that the register guy could have guessed her under 21. I'd have put her age closer to 35. We're both wrong.

The guy at the register looks over her ID. Perhaps a picture of a dewier, cuter, less baked woman. He comments, "Oh, a bicentennial baby!"

I don't know why he thinks it's was worth mentioning. He might just as well share memories of the Tall Ships. Actually, in this case, he might just as well be speaking Swedish.

Blank stare.

"Huh?"

"A bicentennial baby."

I don't know why he repeats it. No light goes on in her eyes. He'd have better luck reaching over, taking her head in his hands and shaking. But she giggles supportively.

"Huh?"

"You were born in 1976."

The cashier doesn't look like he has vivid memories of 1976 either. Maybe when I get to the register, I'll card him. Equally pointless.

Still no lights.

"That was the bicentennial."

"What now? Oh. Umm... Yeah."

He doesn't know what to say to that. Would it be insulting if he adds "...of The United States" or "That means its 200th birthday." What is he hoping for? "Hells yeah! Us '76ers gonna roll!" Or "Ah yes. Breast feeding. Good times."

She walks out, still mostly oblivious I'm guessing.

These are the people reproducing in the City of Angels.

Time to eat my sandwich. Turkey. Cheese. Mustard. Mayo. Tomato, just for luck.

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'Pushing' Dandelions as well as 'Daisies'

In a blog post last week, Ken Levine did a fine job of explaining why second episodes are often more complicated or challenging than pilots and why we need to cut our friendly neighborhood showrunners a little more slack.

This season has provided ample evidence to back him up. For every "Dirty Sexy Money" or "Chuck," which basically stayed on creative par or dipped only slightly in quality, there have been three or four shows like "Bionic Woman," "Journeyman" or "Big Bang Theory," which either squandered initial affections or confirmed initial dread.

I've been nervous about the second episode of "Pushing Daisies" since May. While my initial instinct -- that audiences would run scurrying from the stench of twee like Mormons from a rum-and-coke, leading the near-instant cancellation -- appears not to have come true, I still had qualitative worries.

Short answer: Wednesday's second episode of "Pushing Daisies" didn't make me as happy as the pilot, but it made me far happier than most of what I've been watching on TV these past couple weeks.

Follow after the bump for more thoughts on "Pushing Daisies" and my other Wednesday TV viewing.

Click through...

Let's look at some of the concerns one-by-one.

Week-to-Week Plot Sustainability -- How would the show handle the need to go to its forensic fairy tale week-to-week structure? So far, so good. Episode two had a mystery, but nobody put much effort into investigating the murder in question. It was more about letting the story of the crime be told. That meant a lot of monologuing, first from the victim, then from the victim's beloved and finally from the killer. The key, I guess, is in presenting that monologuing in an appealing fashion (flashbacks and fantasy sequences and whatnot), rather than in watching Chi McBride's character follow clues. If he were that good a detective, he wouldn't need Ned, would he? A bigger roadblock in the week-to-week sustainability is Chuck-Ned dynamic and their very distracting inability to make direct contact. I know I'm not the only viewer who wondered why they walk in stride together, why they walk through doorways together, why they sit across from each other at tables. I've been known to accidentally bump into people when I'm walking next to them. It rarely causes death, but then again, I lack special powers. It'd be in Ned's best interest to constantly be wearing long-sleeve turtlenecks and gloves and it would behoove Chuck to do the same. Full body spandex suits? The best ways to avoid the death problem probably aren't very actor-friendly (look at poor Wentworth Miller, who has to over-dress for his sweltering Panamanian prison just his character's pesky tattoos probably haven't vanished).

Week-to-Week Stylistic Sustainability -- Week two of "Pushing Daisies" wasn't quite as saturatedly colorful as the pilot. The camera wasn't as free. There were fewer flights of visual fancy. Those of use who do this for a living are all "Oooh, this just goes to reflect the budgetary and creative restrictions ABC is putting on the show and on Barry Sonnefeld." I wonder what people who just watch TV programming when it comes on their TV and don't think about TV for 17 or 18 hours out of every day are able to notice. I'm a big fan of the Orson Welles quote "The enemy of art is the absence of limitation." That's to say that real artists see limitations and look for ways to accomplish the same goals in different ways. If a fish-eye camera lense can convey a similar sense of disorientation as a more expensive and time-consuming crane shot, let's do that. If Kristin Chenoweth breaking into a marvelous rendition of "Hopelessly Devoted" can convey a similar sense of not-of-this-world whimsy as an extended claymation sequence, let's do that. In its second week, "Pushing Daisies" still looked and felt pretty close to unique, even if it wasn't the exact same uniqueness as the first time around.

Week-to-Week Smartness Sustainability -- In his recap over at Zap2it, my colleague Rick groused a bit about Jim Dale's voice-over and the frequency with which we were being told things they should have shown us instead. Do I think there's too much voice-over? Yup. But I'm happy to put up with three or four instances where the voice-over falls flat for the following transition from Digby licking Olive's love-lorn tears: "While Olive considered how much she loved Digby for paying attention to her when the piemaker would not, and Digby considered how much he liked salt..." That's just great writing. The characters continue to talk fast and talk clever ("You love secrets. You want to marry secrets and have little half-secret, half-human babies.") and the universe of the show continues to be mighty savvy. It's a town that features not just The Pie Hole, but also Pies R Us, Pie City and Thousands of Pies in One Place. I love that.

Week-to-Week Tweeness Sustainability -- I've heard episode two described as even more twee than the first episode. That's what happens when your plot revolves around a dandelion-powered car ("The spores car of tomorrow!) and the main guest character is a bulimic woman who dresses as a flower. So far, though, I remain tolerant of a young girl learning to say "The Jarlsberg is on the table" in many languages. I'm content with Chi McBride's character being an art school drop-out who knit himself a sweatervest and handgun cozies. And I'll even put up with a woman in a full-body cast putting on make-up and asking if her bandages make her look fat. So far, I'm right there with "Pushing Daisies."

The transition from pilot fairy tale exposition to weekly proceduralism hurt the show's charm just a bit, but McBride and Lee Pace were every bit as good, Anna Friel was even more adorable and Chenoweth can break into song whenever she wants, as far as I'm concerned. The casting of guest stars will be key going forward, but the second episode's Riki Lindhome (as Janine the flower girl) and Patrick Fabian (as the mastermind of the Dany Lion SX) slid into the show's rhythms perfectly.

I don't know if it's ever going to be possible to sit back, relax and rest assured that "Pushing Daisies" will be able to maintain its quality, but so far so good.

Other Wednesday viewing?

"Back to You" -- OK. I gave this one four weeks to stop being generic and to find some of the intelligence that Christopher Lloyd brought to "Frasier" or even some of the workplace humor Steve Levitan brought to "Just Shoot Me." I think I'm done. It's odd that Ty Burrell is the funniest part of the cast and that when he isn't in an episode (like last night's), the show suffers. That shouldn't happen if you're giving all of that money to Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton.

"Bionic Woman" -- Back on track after an awful second episode. The third episode was credited to David Eick and it shouldn't be surprising that it was the season's first episode to have any sort of consistency at all. It also shouldn't be surprising that part of why the episode worked so well was that it was heavy on Katee Sackhoff. It was also a better showcase episode for Michelle Ryan, though something has to be done to make that character stop bitching about suddenly being bionic. I get that this wasn't what she signed on for, but she needs an attitude readjustment, plus a second bionic arm, stat!

"Gossip Girl" -- Serena and Blair had better not stay friendly for long. In the short term, I enjoyed their reconciliation with its simmering underlying tensions, but the less trashy the show gets, the more it becomes "Sweet Valley High: Upper Manhattan Edition," which is a show I probably wouldn't watch. I'd have been fine with the warmer and fuzzier A-plot if the B-Plot (Chuck's Lost Weekend Party) had been as full of debauchery as the promo teasers suggested it would be. Nate's such a wet fish to begin with and I think we're much too early in the series to already be seeing Chuck's softer side.

OK. This is too long. I stop now.

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MovieWatch: "We Own the Night"

"We Own the Night"
Director: James Gray
Fien Print Rating: 60
In a Nutshell: [I saw this movie back in July for a really solid Filter magazine interview with Gray, a director I've talked to a couple times and who always impresses me as a man who may be too smart for the industry, hence his rather deliberate working pace. Because of my own rather deliberate working pace, I may have some gaps in my memory of the movie, but since it's opening on Friday, I wanted to get something up...]

A quote generally attributed to director Howard Hawks (and reproduced in so many different variable forms that it might as well have been said by Hudson Hawk) is "A good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes." It's not a quote I necessarily like, agree with or would ever use and yet it came to mind thinking back over "We Own the Night."

Actually, "We Own the Night" isn't a movie without bad scenes. It falls shocking flat in its final act. But I still find it odd that the director of the understated "Little Odessa" and "The Yards" has managed to orchestrate several of the year's very finest set pieces to date.

Follow through after the bump for my actual thoughts, with only occasional spoilers.

Click through...

When it comes to New York-set period dramas about cops and gangsters, the movie that'll get the most press and make the most money is "American Gangster," but there were three or four instances watching "American Gangster," where I thought "Boy, this is just like the same scene in 'We Own the Night' only blander and less impactful." While "American Gangster" may end up being a slightly more satisfying movie overall, nothing in Ridley Scott's film can compare to the "WOtN" rain-drenched car chase and in the head-to-head battle of drug den raids, the one in "WOtN" wins hands down as well.

That Gray is out-of-touch with the contemporary aesthetic of filmmaking almost goes without saying. I've seen several critics refer to his style as "neo-classical," but I think that refers more to what he doesn't do -- showy camera moves, ADD editing, etc -- than what he does. He's a slow and methodical director who concentrates on the details -- the never-haphazard art direction, the limited color palette, the complex framing -- and that makes his ability to get these two or three masterful set-pieces here all the more admirable.

This is Gray's third consecutive movie about a polarized immigrant family in New York and it's certainly his most commercial. When Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix did "The Yards," they weren't box office draws and the movie was more about brooding dinner scenes in underlit rooms than about giving the audience any thrills. Sony is rightly playing up "WOtN" as a straight-forward, star-driven crime thriller, which is the strategy that's most likely to bring viewers to the theaters, but also probably most likely to leave viewers existing in disappointment.

Coasting off an Oscar nomination for "The Departed" and a confident star-turn in "Shooter," Wahlberg takes a big risk here, playing a character who becomes less dynamic and less heroic as the movie progresses. Although the two stars get equal billing on the poster, Wahlberg's role is very much supporting and Phoenix is very much the star, giving one of the finest performances of his career. Like the movie itself, Phoenix's Bobby is more interesting in the beginning and then goes down a conventional path, but the performance features few of the twitchy affectations that occasionally mar the actor's work.

This may be the first time I've ever really "gotten" Eva Mendes as a potential movie star. More than any other part of the movie, her subplot crumbles down the stretch, but for an hour or so, she's sultry and compelling every time the camera moves in her direction.

While it's hard to think of more than two or three bad performances in his entire career, Robert Duvall doesn't distinguish himself as the pater familias, perhaps because the role is too similar to ones he's played many, many times before.

The use of Russian and Polish enclaves in New York gives "We Own the Night" a richness that unfortunately amplifies the flaws of the last act. If you dedicate yourself to texture and specificity for an hour and then go strictly by-the-numbers for 30 minutes, that 30 minutes is going to seem even blander in comparison.

I could go on, but I want to get to Wednesday night TV and to "Michael Clayton." There's just too much to blog.

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Stanford 24, USC 23

When, many a moon from now, my kids or grandparents or children of friends ask me where I was the day Powerful USC's 35-game home winning streak came to an end against an academically superior, football clown college from Palo Alto, I'll be able to point to the picture above and say that I was so confident that of all of the games in the whole season, the one USC was least likely to lose would surely be against Stanford, which would surely make it the perfect day to accompany old friends and their lovely 16-month-old daughter (Hi Sonya!) to the Happiest Place on Earth. Lemme tell you, the happiest place on earth becomes less happy when you're constantly checking your cell phone for updates on a football tragedy (not to be confused with a genuine tragedy... don't think I don't know the difference) in the making. I'd been hoping I could check the score once, go "35-0 USC five minutes in? Nifty" and tuned it out. Oh well. Does this mean the Mark Sanchez Era begins next week for USC? I've cheered for John David Booty in the past, but four interceptions against Stanford? People have been justifiably benched for a quarter of that.

As you can see, if you look closely, I *am* wearing my USC colors in the picture. Spirit did no good. And lest you get the impression otherwise, Disneyland was still great fun. The new Space Mountain rocks, even though I wish the Haunted Mansion hadn't been barfed all over by "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and that Johnny Depp hadn't infiltrated Pirates of the Caribbean.

My shooting partner from the picture above gave me a "Sleepy" pin (of the "Seven Dwarfs" fame), seeing as how generalized insomnia and the weight of my insignificant world often have me yawning my way through my days.

It strikes me, though, that I cannot be encapsulated in a single dwarf. I am a legion of dwarfs. I have a multitude of dwarfs inside me -- I am at times Sleepy. I'm often Grumpy. When I run out of Claritin, I'm Sneezy. The instances in which I'm Dopey and Bashful are obvious to those who know me. And I'm even at times Happy. I'm never Doc.

Anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge today's USC football loss (and Disney expedition) in some manner. My apologies for the intellectual detour. Tomorrow I'll try to review "Michael Clayton," a movie other critics seem to like more than I do.

[EDITED: It strikes me that this post, or at least its tone, isn't particularly clear if you don't actually know me and if you don't know that I went to grad school at USC and that my every Saturday in the autumn is set aside for watching USC football and that today was one of the very, very, very rare Saturdays in which I had an activity that I found important enough not to watch the USC football game...]

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So about that "Friday Night Lights" premiere...

I spent nine months last year on this blog and Zap2it's myriad outlets trying to get everybody I know to watch "Friday Night Lights." I told my friends. I told my family. I told the occasional people who would interview me for the radio or whatever. I would occasionally shake random strangers in the street, grab them by the shoulders and yell, "You fool! Why aren't you watching 'Friday Night Lights'?"

So I'm not going to sit here at my keyboard and say, "I'm not sure that the 'Friday Night Lights' that's premiering tonight is really the 'Friday Night Lights' I wanted you to watch last season." I'm not going to tell you that you should skip tonight's season premiere, because what are you gonna do instead, watch "Moonlight"? Watch "K-Ville" repeats on FOX? Seriously?

Everybody else I know (I only know odd people) has already written their "Why I'm uncomfortable with the start of the 'Friday Night Lights' season" article, review or blog post, so here's another. I hate to be original.

Follow through after the bump. There are going to be huge spoilers for the premiere and rather vague spoilers about the next two episodes, which have also been sent to critics. You've been warned.

Click through...

In the past week, the industry trade paper Variety has run both a review of "Friday Night Lights" and a roundtable critical discussion of the show's opening episodes. In the process, at least three alleged critics have said almost the exact same thing: The things that happen at the end of the season premiere are bad, but I can't say anything negative about them because the show's creative team has earned my faith and my unqualified acceptance that if they make mistakes, they'll fix them so fast that they weren't mistakes at all.

Bullshit.

That's not the job of a critic, kids.

The producers of "24" start off every single season with six great episodes, dick around for 12 episodes and then close with six strong episodes, during which fans say, "Yeah, those middle episodes *all* sucked, but I had faith that the producers would right the ship." But. But. But. But those 12 episodes were horrible, they floundered and stumbled and bumbled and meandered and maybe they righted the ship and maybe they didn't, but the half a season in the middle was worse that "Threat Matrix." Fans have faith in show creators to fix things, they have confidence that they'll make things right. Critics look at what's there and that's what they address.

One fabulous season of TV hasn't earned the producers of "Friday Night Lights" a pass. Unfortunately, it's raised expectations. The first three episodes of "FNL" for this second season are *not* bad. It really hasn't become "One Tree Hill" while it was on vacation.

The things that work in the first few episodes still work gloriously. Eric and Tami Taylor remain my favorite couple on TV and an Emmy-giving universe in which television professionals fail to recognize that Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton are at the very peak of the profession doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. The new season finds Coach and Mrs. Coach separated just at the moment they need each other most, him with a new job in the big city and her (within minutes of the start of the premiere) with a new baby.

As their daughter Julie, Aimee Teegarden is sculpting the most believable portrait of teenage femininity since Claire Danes in "My So-Called Life" and the relationship between Julie and Zach Gilford's Matt Saracen has always rung true. The premiere finds Julie and Matt experiencing their own tension and distance, as Julie deals with the changes in her family and Matt faces another season of football.

While there were plenty of moments early last season when certain actors -- Minka Kelly, Taylor Kitsch, Scott Porter -- did show certain signs of just how green they were, every member of the cast has the chance to shine before the end.

If I'm being frank, the show's problems began with the finale of the first season. As I wrote extensively at the time, they made a finale that felt like they almost hoped the show didn't come back. They let the Panthers win, which was a mistake. They let wheelchair-bound QB Jason Street suddenly become a football strategic mastermind, which was a mistake. They pushed Landry (the marvelous Jessie Plemons) and Tyra (the always better-than-expected Adrianne Palicki) in the direction of a romance, which was a mistake. They did a bunch of things that were aimed at bringing the show to a happy, hopeful, satisfying series conclusion. And then NBC brought them back (and canned Kevin Reilly, the man who brought them back).

The second season begins roughly eight months later, which has allowed the show's producers to reboot several characters in ways that dismiss the journeys they went on last season. It was a long road for Gaius Charles' Smash to regain the support of viewers and become a smarter, more humble, heroic character, but in the eight months we were away, he's back to being the brash, ego-driven Smash from the pilot. It was a long road for Kitsch's Riggins to go from a drunk, womanizing burn-out to a mostly sober, responsible teammate, but in the eight months we were away, he's back to being that guy who shows up at practice drunk and takes pleasure in bedding twins, just because he can. Here again, the producers obviously realized that they'd made everything too stable by the first season finale, so they pushed the reset button. The transitions for Teegarden's Julie (more pouty than we remember), Kelly's Lyla (more Christian than we remember), for Brad Leland's Buddy Garrity (more drunk than we remember) are all much more plausible.

When talking about what goes wrong with the premiere and what hasn't been fixed or smoothed out in the two subsequent episodes, it's necessary to talk about Tyra and Landry. But first I wanna note that lots of things happened last season that even the biggest fans had trouble defending and they were usually the biggest plotpoints, the moments of high drama amidst the minutiae of small town life and football-as-religion. "That's such a 'Star Is Born' cliche!" people cried when Jason Street was injured in the pilot, forcing Matt Saracen into a featured role. "How are they ever going to redeem that character?" people wailed when Lyla screwed her paralyzed boyfriend's best friend. "Are they seriously doing *this* plotline," folks groused when Smash began taking steroids to improve his ranking in a touting publication. The team staging a walk-out due to a racist coach, a Katrina victim nearly getting the team put on probation, Riggins and the MILF next door... The season was full of moments that seemed iffy and many of 'em (most? nearly all?) were worked out satisfactorily, albeit faster and easier than might have happened in real life.

The things that went wrong last year were, if anything, a product of being too perfectly designed for a show of this nature. They were attempts to use the conventions of the sports genre to touch on the obligatory conflicts of the genre.

[OK. Last warning. Spoilers and some such!!! STOP READING!]

Landry knocking a guy upside the head with a pipe and killing him? That's just the producers coming up with big plot points to get buzz, because even crappy buzz isn't worse than no buzz. And I don't much care what Jason Katims has said to the contrary in interviews. I blame Ben Silverman. Just on principle.

Some reviewers have said that the premiere subplot in which Tyra is arbitrarily stalked by the man who assaulted her last season and in a tragic twist he ends up [last spoiler warning!!!!] dead and, presumably, dumped in the river is less like something from "FNL" and more like something from "One Tree Hill," though as dedicated "OTH" fans know even that silly, silly show didn't go so far as to have Peyton (or any of the other Ravens) kill her crazed fake brother. It's bad enough that the stalker plot returned in the premiere. Sure, we knew it was going to return eventually, but what was the guy doing for eight months? And why is he suddenly menacing her at all hours and in relatively public places? What does he think is going to happen? And it's bad enough that the scenes with the aspiring rapist are shot like they were taken from a slasher movie, rather than from the best directed show on TV. But did Landry need to kill the guy? Did they need to reshoot the scene, in fact, so that Landry kills the guy in cold blood, as he's turning away vanquished, rather than in total self-defense as in the original version of the premiere?

The mechanics here should be beneath the writers of such a good show. For most of last season, Tyra was the strong and capable girl, the girl you'd bet could take care of herself. She reduced Landry to a stuttering boob as a girl of that sort would do to a guy of that sort. But the producers realized that Plemmons is really good and that his scenes with Tyra, however awkward, were gold. So they said, "What can we do to make this work? What can we do to make her weak enough to need him and to make him manly enough to somehow be worthy of her?" How do lazy Hollywood minds accomplish such things? Naturally, they made Tyra into a victim, a sexual victim. Even that wasn't enough. So they made Landry try out for football, despite the fact that in a community like Dillon, a kid with no athletic interests doesn't magically say, "OK, today I try out for football" and even make the JV bench, given what we've seen of Dillon's Pop Warner devotion. That's stupid and I found it nearly unforgivable when I heard it was happening. That was before I knew we'd be introduced to Landry: Killing Machine. Basically the writers realized that the only way they could bring together these two characters loved by fans was to make them into two entirely different characters, incompatible with the characters they once were. To hell with it.

It's not a little mistake. For a show even an iota less wonderful than "Friday Night Lights," it would be "Jump the Shark"-level "Bad."

[Those are only spoilers for the premiere. Here come vaguely spoilers for other upcoming episodes.]

The so-called-reviewers at Variety said they had faith that "FNL" would work things out, but the Landry-Tyra subplots get worse in subsequent episodes. The characters get further and further from where they used to be and become more and more removed from the universe of the show. A change in Julie and Matt's relationship makes sense, but the new arrival in Matt's house is laugh-out-loud silly. You knew Coach Taylor wouldn't stay away from Dillon and the Panthers all season, but his path back into fold jeopardizes some of the things I most respect about the character. And Riggins and Street are heading someplace wacky at the end of the third episode and nothing good can happen there.

You know, this is long enough. I just wanted to chime in.

Now watch "Friday Night Lights." Its problems shouldn't excused and I don't have faith that they're going to be fixed to my satisfaction, but damned if I don't want to keep the show around.

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MovieWatch: "In the Valley of Elah"

"In the Valley of Elah"
Director: Paul Haggis
Fien Print Rating (Out of 100): 62
In a Nutshell: [Having a three-movie weekend in the midst of premiere season wasn't a mistake while I was doing it. Heck, I like going to the movies even if I don't like the movies and even if the still-new Westside Landmark has begun to lose just a bit of its shine with its embarrassingly poor soundproofing between theaters, occasionally frustrating in-theater sight-lines and inadequate bathroom facilities. But if I hoped to turn around blog reviews quickly, this was the wrong time to do it. Oh well. I've been pumping out content on other fronts. Content is king. Yada. Yada.]

I've made no secret of my utter and mostly unqualified hatred for Paul Haggis' Oscar-winning "Crash." Then again, lots of people made no secret of hating it. That doesn't make me courageous, just right. But that's a different issue. I was in a bit more of a minority, though, in standing behind Haggis' immediate follow-up, the NBC dud "The Black Donnellys," which was an underrated little piece of drama.

That's all the context you get for my saying that "In the Valley of Elah" is a far better movie than "Crash," but probably could have been a far better movie than it is. Know what I mean? No? Follow through after the bump...

Click Through...

The most recent movie I got around to reviewing was, of course, "The Kingdom," or as everybody's callin' it, "CSI: Riyadh." "In the Valley of Elah" is actually the flip-side of the coin from "The Kingdom," so they were a good pairing for the weekend.

In "The Kingdom," the genre pyrotechnics and procedural mechanics had to work to cover up the fact that they were being used in service of what could have been a provocative and complicated story, a piece of actual dramatic depth. With "In the Valley of Elah," it's exactly the opposite. In "Elah," the conspicuous attempts to overlay depth, meaning and contemporary resonance often covered up or bogged down what should, essentially, have been a procedural with a provocative under-current.

"Elah" is really just about a father (Tommy Lee Jones) and a local cop (Charlize Theron) investigating the disappearance and (this isn't really giving anything away) death of the man's son. This is the sort of thing that "Law & Order" and British TV do really well, a crime thriller in which the political subtext *eventually* becomes everything.

I haven't gone searching through other reviews, but has anybody compared "In the Valley of Elah" to Paul Schrader's "Hardcore"? It seems like an obvious comparison, but I'm too lazy to go look. "Hardcore" is, of course, the story of a religious father (George C. Scott) who travels to the depths of Hell (errrr... Los Angeles) to find his missing daughter, only to get sucked into the world of then-mostly-underground pornography. I guess the comparison would have worked better if Scott's "Hardcore" character had been a former porn star himself, because the military background in Jones' past is key to the plot momentum of "Elah." Jones's Hank Deerfield wasn't just military, he was a military investigator and, if the movie is correct, just about the smartest darned military investigator ever (imagine if Scott had once been Ron Jeremy or Peter North or John Holmes, I guess). But just as "Hardcore" is about Scott's character's view of the adult industry through his Lutheran eyes, "Elah" is about the way Jones' character approaches the modern military through the eyes of a man we can only assume was active in Vietnam and perhaps subsequent smaller actions. ["Elah," in fact, becomes muddled for me by how naive Hank is about post-traumatic stress and the impact of war on young soldiers. While he isn't shocked that soldiers sometimes do drugs or screw whores, the movie goes on at least an hour longer than it needs to because of his failure to see clearly.]

If Haggis had treated the movie as a thriller, first and foremost, and as a story about soldiers coming back from Iraq secondarily, I bet he'd have made the same points in a much more subtle way. Then again, even at his very best, Haggis and subtlety have gone together like peanut butter and dish washing detergent.

"In the Valley of Elah" is tanking at the box office, which didn't need to happen. But from the obscure title (and even after a week of thought, it's unclear to me who specifically Haggis wants to imply is our contemporary David and who is our contemporary Goliath [I have at least four or five possible pairings, several of which take into account outside knowledge of Haggis' politics and religious background] through every aspect of the style, "Elah" works awfully hard to be taken more seriously than you might have taken, say, "A Few Good Men," which could be the most popcorn-y equivalent of what Haggis' movie could have been. Everybody frowns through the entire movie and delivers their dialogue as slowly and deliberately as possible. Every edit is half-a-second slow, lest your mind too quickly move away from whatever has just transpired. Cinematographer Roger Deakins was entrusted with sucking all life-like color from the movie, leaving blues and grays and other cold, steely tones (and he does his job wonderfully, because that's what Deakins does).

I would describe the film's performances as universally somber and sour, from the "Eat a Lemon" school of ultra-important dramatic acting. Don't take that as implying that I dislike the work done by Jones, Theron or Susan Sarandon, who all do variations on their standard character types (or, in Theron's case, a variation on her standard "I'm not wearing make-up, so take me seriously" character type). If these people have any shadings at all, it's the acting and not the writing. In fact, Haggis seems purposely to have filled as many supporting roles as possible with familiar faces as a shortcut. If you plunk James Franco, Jason Patric, Josh Brolin (building a resume as this fall's Most Improved Actor), Frances Fisher or Barry Corbin in a one or two scene part, you can underwrite those characters, since the actors bring their own strengths and baggage.

I gotta say that my overall rating for this movie took three big hits at the very end, with Haggis' refusal to believe that he'd made his point with his storytelling. The final shot, the closing credits dedication and the Annie Lennox final dirge were unnecessary, since it's not like Haggis was making some deeply provocative, insightful or controversial point. His argument is as safe and wishy-washy as you'd expect from the man behind the "Everyone's a little bit racist, we all need a hug" faux-complexity of "Crash."

None of the three movies I saw last week have worn very well in my mind and I'd probably lower all of their Fien Print ratings to something in the upper-50s if I could go back. But that ship done sailed...

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Twee-rrific Ratings for "Pushing Daisies"

Dear America,

Yesterday I said some, um, things. Some things I didn't mean. I blamed you for George W. Bush and criticized your lack of respect for Barry Bonds. While I stand by both comments (762 home runs... 514 steals... Get over the steroid thing, people!), I'm going to cut you a bit of slack.

Nearly 13 million of you (not my readers, since this blog would be a lot more lucrative if I had 13 million readers) tuned in for the premiere of "Pushing Daisies." That's a lot, thankfully more than tuned in to "Cavemen." Whew. This means several things: First, it seems unlikely that ABC will pull "Pushing Daisies" before the start of November sweeps as I'd predicted. Second, it means we're going to get to watch enough episodes to see just how difficult is is to sustain that level of intelligence, whimsy and twee, plus those production values. Yup, thanks to the endorsement of the American People, we're gonna get to see "Pushing Daisies" eventually suck. Sorry. I'm cautiously pessimistic about the show's long-term potential. But love that pilot.

Other thoughts from last night's TV? Well, you can read my reactions to "Kid Nation" (Yay Mallory!) and "Top Chef" (Yay Hung!) over at Zap2it. I haven't gotten to "Dirty Sexy Money" (on my DVR at home) or Mandy Patinkin's "Criminal Minds" exit (on my DVR at work).

But how about...

"Bionic Woman" -- The second episode was, um, muddled. My first and biggest question: Why hasn't Jamie Summers gone into her employers and asked to have her other arm bionicized? That's going to be a really annoying liability if she has to do everything left-handed (or right-handed, whichever is actually bionic). As it is, I don't exactly understand the degree of her strength. Yes, she can run 60mph and punch through brick, but in hand-to-hand combat with her Asian trainer she's got an even match? Is he bionic? And what can we do to write off Molly Price entirely? She's uncomfortably uncharismatic in that way that stars of SciFi Channel shows are entitled to be, but network stars just aren't. They have to turn up the sexy and turn down the whiny on Michelle Ryan, who is perfectly capable of being the former and not interesting as the latter. I continue to believe this show has potential, but it's not there yet.

"Gossip Girl" -- Those who know me known my policy when it comes to field hockey catfights: I fall squarely in the "Pro" camp. It then shouldn't be surprising that my sense of "Gossip Girl" is that the more trashy the show goes, the better. If it's going to be a guilty pleasure, make me guilty! I highly doubt that Blair and Serena are going to be reconciled for long, so we'll get to see more of Leighton Meester as apple-cheeked Bad Girl, which she does very very well. But maybe it's also time for Blake Lively's Serena to get to fight back? After stammering and attempting to be funny like the male leads in several different Josh Schwartz shows, Penn Badgley was ultra-serious this week, which comes across as ultra-ultra-serious, because his cheekbones are scary-defined. For the future, I'd like to request more of Ed Westwick's Chuck and less of Chace Crawford's Nate, since I forget about him whenever he's not on the screen.

OK. That "Criminal Minds" episode won't watch itself (nor will the story about Frankie Muniz guesting on "Criminal Minds" write itself).

Til later, America...

Love Daniel

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Grrr... 'Cavemen' Suck Hard... Grrr...

Dear America,

If you wonder why you make me really uncomfortable, don't look to the guy currently in the White House, or to the fact that an awful looking family comedy starring "The Rock" is the most popular movie in America (in a year in which the top overall comedy remains "Wild Hogs"), or at the fact that outside of San Francisco most of you don't respect Barry Bonds as the best baseball player of your lifetime. No, look to the ratings for the premiere of "Cavemen" on ABC.

I suppose that in a nation of 270 million (or more, possibly many more) residents, a new sitcom premiering with an audience of just under 9 million viewers shouldn't be all that impressive, really. That's still more people than will watch any comedy this week besides "Two and a Half Men" and [*sigh*] "Rules of Engagement." More than "How I Met Your Mother" or "The Office" or "30 Rock." The show did a 3.3 rating among adults 18-49, which is thankfully lower than most of the NBC comedies, but still higher than, say, FOX's "Bones" did last night.

The original "Cavemen" pilot sent to critics in May was all "Cavemen are an oppressed minority just like African-Americans, aren't we provocative?" It wasn't funny. That's why the new pilot that aired last night was all "Cavemen are just like everybody else only hairier and less funny, aren't we provocative?" And although the whole thing was declawed of its racial subtext, every once in a while somebody would make a comment about people needing to date their own kind or about the sexual potency of cavemen and I would just shrug. There's also something disturbing about watching a 30 minute show in which the actors can barely change their expressions and in which there's no sense of the performer under the make-up at all. That's Sam Huntington in the picture up there. Why is this what Sam Huntington wants to be doing now?

Are Cavemen drunk dialing or playing Wii or racquetball actually funny? If so, I may need an explanation to the subtle humor. Then you can go into what extra depths "traveler's cheque" satire got from having been delivered by Cro-Magnons.

I laughed twice at the original pilot, both times at the spectacular Julie White, a recent Tony winner who deserves some sort of even bigger award for being the only vaguely funny part of the new "Cavemen," something the producers obviously recognized, because she's a totally different character now. Still funny. Nothing else is.

I'd talk about why last night's "Reaper" was much less funny than the pilot -- something about the editing and direction not recapturing the splendidly dead-pan pacing Kevin Smith helped bring to the first episode -- but I've gotta rush to a set visit.

My Zap2it colleague Rick has gone into more depth on the suckage of "Caveman" over at the sporadically populated Gwyneth blog...

Oh and since I began this post in letter form, I guess I have to sign off...

Love Daniel

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MovieWatch: "The Kingdom"

"The Kingdom"
Director: Peter Berg
Fien Print Rating (Out of 100): 61
In a Nutshell: There's an interesting cycle to "The Kingdom." I was immediately sucked in, from the exceptional title sequence tracing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia since the discover of oil, through the horrible tragedy that leaves lots of unimportant people dead along with one FBI agent. As we all know, one FBI agent has the symbolic value of at least five American civilians and probably several hundred Middle Eastern civilians (a policy both Hollywood and the United States government has adhered to for years). I lost interest for nearly an hour as a team of FBI investigative agents -- Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper and a couple TV stars -- got to Saudi Arabia and realized that it's different investigating a crime there than in the United States (SHOCKING!!!). Then, as Peter Berg pulled out all the stops and staged a fantastically sustained final 30 minutes, including a powerful echoed final line, I was hooked again.

But 48 hours later? Some of the gut-punch from the final line has worn off, some of the adrenaline from that climax has gone out of my system.

I'm ready to step back and say that "The Kingdom" is a fine action film with just a bit of extra weight, but that there's still less human value than Berg was able to pour into "Friday Night Lights," either the feature (his last big screen effort) or the pilot for the NBC series (don't get me started on the new season's first three episodes).

Follow through after the bump for the rest of my thoughts.

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There was some sort of debate over on the often pugnacious Hollywood Elsewhere blog about just who should get the cookie for having first called "The Kingdom" "CSI: Riyadh." Not only did Jeffrey Wells demand the cookie for himself, but he demanded that all people to subsequently use said catch-title present him with new cookies, as well as other genuflection. I noted on the message boards that fellow blogger/Check the Fien Print reader Andrew Dignan had used the phrase on his Punitive Superego blog back in April and that I couldn't find any earlier uses.

But I also noted that sometimes things are so manifestly *right* that if one person didn't say it first, another would have. After viewing clips from CBS' "Cane" at network upfronts in May, I called it "'Dallas' with Rum." I don't have a clue if anybody used the phrase first, but I saw a half-dozen reviewers (including me) use it last week when the show premiered (to lower demo ratings than the all-too-swiftly cancelled "Smith," but that's a different story).

"The Kingdom" *is* "CSI: Riyadh" a reduction that encapsulates both what it does well and why it falls short. Matthew Michael Carnahan's script is full of fine quips (mostly given to Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) and reasonably intelligent and sympathetic pieces of investigative work (most from Cooper and Foxx). The pieces add up and no clue is introduced without a well-announced payoff. Shot by Mauro Fiore on locations in the United Arab Emirates, "The Kingdom" practically oozes Middle Eastern ambiance, particularly with the performances by Ashraf Barhom and Ali Suliman, stars of the Oscar-winning "Paradise Now," a fact that probably opens up another can of political worms (barrel of political monkeys?) that I don't want to get into.

What you can't get beyond is the idea that "The Kingdom" probably tiptoes around something that's much too important to be tiptoed around in a mere action film until that mere action film is something as atypically brainy and brawny as "Three Kings." [Wait. Can I pause and ask why we're just now getting around to this onslaught of movies about our current situation in Iraq, but none of them is as forward thinking and perceptive as a movie David O. Russell made back in the 20th Century about the *last* war with Iraq? At a certain point, critics are going to recognize and proclaim that "Three Kings" is the best and most important movie of the past decade. I'm just saying...]

So "The Kingdom" can't just be a grenades/bombs/chases/happy ending action movie. Berg already did a fine version of that genre with "The Rundown" and he obviously is shooting bigger political fish in a barrel (that barrel of monkeys?) here. The film's "Violence perpetuates more violence" conclusion has almost nothing to do the overall message of the film which suggests that without American interventionism the somewhat backwards and certainly procedurally disadvantaged foreigners would probably never solve any crimes at all. It's a weird breed of bleeding heard jingoism and it isn't satisfying after additional reflection.

I wonder if the movie might have been improved if it had made more use of the femininity of Garner's character and the Jewishness of Bateman's. Those character traits are just signposts to remind us, whenever we forget, that Saudi Arabia is a different world. Actually, Bateman's Jewishness never figures in at all, except perhaps to the undercurrent.

Garner and Bateman are just two of the familiar TV faces who pop up to enhance that television-plus procedural feel. You also add Jeremy Piven, Frances Fisher and Ashley Scott, plus Berg transporting two of his small screen "Friday Night Lights" stars -- Minka Kelly and Kyle Chandler -- for early cameos.

Stay tuned maybe tomorrow for my thoughts on "The Valley of Elah," another movie that uses a TV-style procedural format to try dealing with world events in a cinematic way...

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NetflixWatch: "Lucky You"

"Lucky You"
Director: Curtis Hanson
Fien Print Rating (Out of 100): 41
In a Nutshell: Hollywood romantic comedies (or dramedies, or whatever) usually only work because the writers, directors and actors collectively bend over backwards to have us love the main characters, or at least root for them to be together. I mean, if you aren't invested in a happy ending between the leads, what are you left with? "Must Love Dogs"? But as bad as "Must Love Dogs" was and as much as I wanted the two main characters to run as far away from each other as possible, you could feel the effort to make them likeable, which was perhaps why they were so very unlikeable. If I'm going to give Curtis Hanson's "Lucky You" credit for anything, it's a willingness to put two romantic leads on screen without any apparent regard for just how distasteful they are as people (the characters), just how little chemistry the two leads (Drew Barrymore and Eric Bana) have and just how unlikely they are to find any happiness together in even the short run. It's amazing (excruciating?) to watch! Given Curtis Hanson's consistent desire to subvert the character expectations of any variety of genres, I can almost believe it's all intentional, all some wicked bluff on Hanson's part.

I've got a wee bit more to say, but follow through after the bump if you care.

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"Lucky You" plays that Hanson wanted to handicap himself as much as possible and then see if he could play out. It's odd that Bana's reputation, pre-"Chopper," was as a comic actor, but since he's gone Hollywood, he appears to have lost all of his mirth and warmth, so casting him as a romantic lead (albeit not a romantic comic lead) is one recipe for disaster. Casting Barrymore as a singer (and actually letting her sing on-camera) is another recipe for disaster. And having Horatio Sanz? Well that's just masochistic. And as for the number of professional poker players popping up in the movie? I recognized about half of them, but whenever anybody appeared on-screen looking both unphotogenic and generally uncomfortable, I just assumed it was a pro. Hanson might as well have thrown in some kids and animals just to raise the stakes.

Then you have to give Hanson and co-writer Eric Roth for skipping out on the card-playing cliches that have marred films from "The Cincinnati Kid" to "Maverick" and even infiltrated mostly seemingly savvy card playing movies like "Rounders." There's a minimum of miraculous hands (the finale doesn't come down to somebody's royal straight flush to the ace beating somebody else's straight flush to the king) and once you get past the early rubes, people's tells aren't comic book-y either, nobody licks the filling from Oreos when they're nervous.

The dramatic problem, one that Hanson and Roth have no choice but to embrace, is that the World Series of Poker -- the 2003 WSoP is the movie's centerpiece -- isn't a winner-take-all event. Losers make a heap of money regardless, which plays directly into the ridiculous, and doubly unsatisfying, ending. Without contrivances, the movie's climax is just Bana and Robert Duvall starring back and forth at each other.

I don't know why Hanson and Roth decided to compensate for the lack of narrative cliches by larding up on thematic staleness. I was *shocked* that nobody at the end said to Bana's Huck, "Damn, you go boy! You finally learned to live your life and play poker in the proper ratios, because previously your priorities between poker and life-living were out of order, what with your recklessness in the former and your cautiousness in the latter." Because folks sure kept repeating the subtext earlier.

Is it any wonder Warner Bros. pushed the film's release date over and over and over before finally just burying it? Then again, what did the studio think it was bankrolling?

After an improbable winning streak that included "L.A. Confidential," "Wonder Boys," "8 Mile" *and* an episode of "Greg the Bunny," "Lucky You" represents Hanson's second dud in a row after "In Her Shoes," which some people actually liked. Not necessarily anybody I know personally, mind you, but they're out there... I still like those three winners enough that I'll keep seeing Hanson's movies.

Better not to waste too much time on "Lucky You," but since it made its way to me through Netflix...

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MovieWatch: "Into the Wild"

"Into the Wild"
Director: Sean Penn
Fien Print Rating (Out of 100): 62 (but I'm wavering up *and* down)
In a Nutshell: While waiting for a different movie this afternoon ("The Kingdom," opinion pending), I stopped by a Borders and, since it was in the 3-for-2 stack and since I was able to easily secure another two and since I barely have any time to read *anything* anymore, I grabbed a copy of Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild."

Basically, I want to read the book to try to unpack the reasons why so much of "Into the Wild" annoyed me so very, very much. I'm trying to get a grasp on whether I took issue with the story as Krakauer told it, whether I took issue with the story as the film's writer-director Sean Penn told it, or whether something about the film's main character -- tragic, glorified, pathologically egotistical Christopher McCandless -- just rubbed me the wrong way.

Of course, since my non-vacation reading pace is akin to a mentally stunted gerbil (bet you didn't know they were literate at all...), I don't have the time to read the book before reviewing the movie (if I'd been doing an actual journalistic feature on "Into the Wild," I'd surely have done my due diligence). Thus, this review is just of my reactions to the movie, which is probably what a movie review ought to be anyway, eh?

The short version of my feelings: Penn's film infuriatingly wants to have it both ways. The director wants to turn McCandless into a Christ-like figure (note the already notorious nude scene in which Penn depicts star Emile Hirsch in the Full Monty, arms outstretched) while also backtracking at the end into a "Yes, what he did was an awesome way to spend two years, a way that I wish I could spend two years, a way you should spend two years if you're COOL... But don't do this at home, because it's bad" conclusion. Somebody's gotta call bullshit on Penn here.

Follow through after the bump for my full review... Warning, though, it's gonna include spoilers, some of the "Well duh" variety.

Click through...

Granted that Chris McCandless seems to have had an awful childhood -- upper-middle-class upbringing, complete with all of its advantages and trappings aside -- but I never found myself viewing him as anything other than an arrogant ass with a classic 21-year-old's misunderstanding of Thoreau, of Tolstoy, of Pasternak. But Penn buys totally into Chris' view of the world, treating his written and spoken words as gospel, with both voice over and moments where his writing either animates across the screen or is shown in tight close-up as every pearl of wisdom is being transcribed. Accompanied by the solemn moaning of Eddie Vedder at his most earnest (which has to be just about the most earnest that any human being in history has ever been), the filmmaker offers no hints that Chris' choices are vaguely questionable. Even when Penn gives voice to Chris' cruelly abandoned sister Carine (Jena Malone), her thoughts are all weirdly understanding, weirdly robotic, weirdly retroactive and they're heard over Eric Gautier's lovely cinematography, which treats Chris' extreme lifestyle like it's nothing more than the most beautifully shot Mountain Dew commercial ever.

The film's point-of-view is a muddle. Usually, Penn just gives Chris the benefit of the doubt, treating his increasingly wiry physique like that of an absolute Vitruvian man, mens sana in corpore sano, on faith. But every once in a while, Penn sees things that his main character clearly wouldn't have noticed. He notices the underlying sadness in the way the film's male adults treat Chris. Brian Dierker's Rainey, Vince Vaughn's Wayne and particularly Hal Holbrook's Ron all love Chris, but know they can't save him.

Nowhere was I more perplexed than by Penn's depiction of Los Angeles, where Chris has a very brief. After treating hitchhiking and rural wandering as the safest possible way to see the country, Penn goes wildly overboard in depicting the threat of urban life. On one hand, you have LA's Skid Row, where Penn captures the film's only minority faces in the most threatening way possible. Compare Penn's portrayal of black city poverty to the nobility of white rural poverty and it's nearly laughable. But Penn isn't satisfied there, he also wants to show LA's downtown urban hipsters (Did LA have downtown urban hipsters in 1992?) as soulless ghouls too. I think these scenes are supposed to rely on Chris' actual point-of-view (hence the images where he sees his alternate self as a fellow hipster), but it's one of several moments where Penn's storytelling technique is just all over the place.

I hope you're sensing my ambivalence here. As I write this, I realize that many of the things that irked me within the movie were products of my distaste for main character. But it's also a distaste for the way the main character was being presented by a filmmaker who ought to be wiser, more mature, more reflective. After launching his directing career with three relatively introspective dramas, though, Penn is oddly extrospective (is that a word?) when it comes to McCandless. He just accepts the most superficial view of the guy, attempting to neither pity or understand him, just to embrace him.

Hirsch is treated as an idealistic vessel and as good as he is, I couldn't view the performance as anything other than "A series of things Sean Penn made Emile Hirsch do," from whitewater rafting to running up California mountains to dropping his weight down to a dangerous point that no piece of popular entertainment should ever require. Penn, who has always been an actors' director, gets fine work out of all of his performers, especially Holbrook, who has to be due for an honorary Oscar nomination of some type.

I'm just having a hard time evaluating this movie. If Sean Penn thinks Chris McCandless is worthy of only-slightly-cautionary adulation and I think he was probably more worthy of more of a "Grizzly Man"-style approach, am I approaching "Into the Wild" with clear eyes? Probably not. But I'm a kid who loved "My Side of the Mountain" growing up. "Easy Rider" remains one of my favorite films. Like just about every other male of a particular political incarnation, I was temporarily moved by "On the Road." Maybe there's just a certain amount of pragmatism I require from my stories of youthful rebellion and wish that Penn had been similarly pragmatic over the 145 minutes of his film.

I get the feeling I could talk in circles for hours about this one. But I've got to write up "The Kingdom" at some point...

Now back to watching USC football.

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MovieWatch: "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"

"The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
Director: Andrew Dominik
Fien Print Rating (Out of 100): 76
In a Nutshell: [Here's the part where I apologize for the delay in writing this review, as if anybody has been waiting with bated or baited breath. Premiere week is a busy time. Yes. Boo-hoo. Poor me. Anywho... Back to the review I've been trying to write for nearly a week.]

You'll excuse me while I muse on the fact that Emmanuel Lubezki and Roger Deakins, probably my picks for the best cinematographers currently working, have collectively been nominated for 9 Oscars without a win.

That's a thought I'm only having because I'm musing over similarities between Terrence Malick's "The New World" (shot by Lubezki) and Andrew Dominik's appealingly cumbersomely titled "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" (shot by Deakins), a movie that's almost certainly Malick-esque, though probably more like early Malick than later Malick. The comparison really boils down to an "Ooooh... Pretty pictures" response to both movies, as well as a "Dear Lord is this movie going to tank in Middle America" reaction.

Follow after the bump for the full review...

Click through...

"Assassination" has a robust 160 minute running time, which is almost the exact length that "The New World" was when critics saw it and when it first opened in Los Angeles and New York. By the time it played in theaters and basically tanked ($12.7 million domestic, just over $30 million worldwide), it was just over two hours.

Like "New World," "Assassination" is a piece of historical revisionism, first a foremost. It's an attempt to find something historical in a figure who has basically become an American folk legend (or the fodder for a Disney musical). Like "New World" is also probably more of an art house movie than the studio involved might have initially anticipated.

While "New World" was intentionally alienating in its depiction of the pre-colonialized America, using its seemingly hours of Q'Orianka Kilcher prancing around fields of grain as an image every bit as alien as Neil Armstrong bouncing around on the Moon, "Assassination" isn't at all inaccessible. The narrative is straight-forward and linear and the character progressions make absolute sense. It's an aesthetically lovely movie and an intellectually intriguing movie, but I can't help but wonder if a piece of "New World"-esque trimming might have benefited it. "New World" was never going to be a straight-forward romance or history or whatever Malick and New Line cut it down to being. "Assassination," while often magnificently made, is undeniably self-indulgent as well.

The obvious comparison that I assume everybody is making is to John Ford's classic "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," though "Assassination" may give an even more complicated spin on that oft quoted line: "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." The disconnect between the legendary Jesse James (Brad Pitt) and the factual Jesse James (the man introduced to us in Hugh Ross' opening voiceover and throughout) is part of what motivates Bob Ford (Casey Affleck), whose eventual actions are unlikely to shock anybody, but for me the movie got even more fascinating after the event referred to in the title. It's not that I didn't like the supporting work by folks like Paul Schneider, Jeremy Renner and particularly Garret Dillahunt, but their characters often distract from the movie's core focus.

The connection between Ross's narration -- fact-based, dispassionate -- and the imagery in those scenes was perhaps my favorite part of the whole film. They're shot with a distorted point of view, as if through either the lense of an old camera or through the thick, slightly warped, glass windows of the period homes. The voiceovers present the truth over the distortion, a truth that ultimately gets in the way of the legend, the myth.

Pitt's performance as James is similarly hard to read, similarly veering between iconically charismatic and luster-free real. Since I'm assuming that's exactly what Dominik wanted -- an A-list movie star giving a performance that's sometimes showy and sometimes blends into the background -- Pitt deserves his kudos. Ditto with Affleck, whose fall output -- this and "Gone Baby Gone" -- will assure both his stature in the creative community and his anonymity for mainstream moviegoers.

OK. I've got to post this or else it will never get posted and since I hope to catch a couple additional movies this weekend, I may never catch up.

One last thing: It ought to be against the law to waste Mary-Louise Parker as badly as she's wasted here as James' almost dialogue-free wife. There are things Parker conveys successfully through silence, but a lesser actress could have filled the part without causing me to lament the lost potential.

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"Heroes" Premiere: The American Actors Strike Back

All spring long, they were pushed around by the influx of immigrant laborers. All summer, they idled their time, watching the immigrants attempt to assimilate, learning our actions, our mannerisms. All fall, they've have to listen to the press rave about how the immigrants are better than the indigenous work force.

But on September 24, on the season premiere of NBC's "Heroes," the American actors finally struck back!

Follow through after the bump for more hyperbolic rambling about the "Heroes" premiere.

Click through...

[Spoilers coming here, obviously...]

Sorry, but I'm just loving that fact that after a development season in which NBC's casting department said "Go British!" for every possible American lead role (regardless of whether or not the otherwise excellent Kevin McKidd is even vaguely capable of speaking with a Yankee accent [he isn't]), "Heroes" finally unveiled the 17th Century Japanese warrior Kensei and not only did he turn out to be a gaijin, but he turned out to be a Brit. But rather than actually casting a British actor? Nice! They go with Oregon-born David Anders, working a different Limey accent from the one he used for years on "Alias." I like Anders, because he starred in my friend Mike Arquilla's musical, but in a world where he's British and McKidd is from San Francisco, this writer is just very confused.

"Heroes" already has Chicago-born Sendhil Ramamurthy playing Indian academic Mohinder Suresh and Sepinwall notes that the hammy Irishman -- who went looking in a crate for his Lucky Charms and instead found the unclothed (but newly buff?) Peter Patrelli covering in the corner -- was played by New York-born Holt McCallany, who in real life doesn't talk like he's auditioning for an Irish Spring commercial.

I still imagine Anders, Ramamurthy and McCallany (and Masi Oka as well, I guess, though there hasn't been a run of Japanese actors rushing to steal parts on American series) standing up, Bill Pullman-style, and declaring, "And should we win the day, the 24th of September will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the American actors declared in one voice: 'We will not go quietly into the night!' We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!"

OK. I'm done with that. Really, the "Heroes" premiere was just an episode of "Heroes," which came as a pretty big relief after a finale that everybody but the show's creators knows was disastrous. Monday's episode laid the groundwork for the season, introduced oodles of new characters and never once caused me to yell at my TV, "Stop being so stupid, 'Heroes'!"

My favorite part of the episode may have been something we didn't see, namely Matt and Mohinder raising little Molly as a well-adjusted gay couple. I would love to have been a fly on the wall (or able to read minds) at *that* custody hearing. I imagine that it was like "Chuck and Larry" only without the positives of Jessica Biel in her undies, but also the negatives of Rob Schneider as an ethnic caricature.

Or else my favorite thing in the episode may have been Adrian Pasdar's beard. As faithful Zap2it blog readers know, I had a brief and awkward discussion with Pasdar at this year's TCA press tour. The long and short of the conversation was that as an owner of a newly acquired beard, I wanted to know if his own lustrous facial hair was conditioned in some way. The long and short of his answer (as he apparently spat chaw in a cup) was that his glow was all natural. The truth, it turns out, is that his beard was conditioned by beer and tears of grief at the death of his brother.

Of course, Peter isn't actually dead. He's just become Angel from the start of Season 3 of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," all half-feral, forgetful and naked. That plotline doesn't interest me so much, sorry.

There are, of course, myriad other things to discuss. Who threw Sulu off the rooftop? Who knew that Ned Ryerson was an alchemist? What is it that A.J. Soprano's ex-near-fiance is able to do? Why was Claire's chemistry teacher lecturing on Darwin (and why did nobody else know the answer)? And can we please have more Barry Shabaka Henley in upcoming episodes?

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The Migratory Pattern of Blogs

This is just a brief post to note some blogular variation.

Not, this sporadically updated piece of blogulosity isn't going any place, nor will its blogulacious content be changed, particularly as to its blogularity.

No, this is just a quick notification to anybody who has previously sought out at least one daily recap over at Zap2it's From Inside The Box blog (p.k.a. "Gwyneth"). Starting today, recaps no longer live in Gwyneth. No, Gwyneth will be the home to periodic interviews, features, commentaries and other general observational things from Team Zap2it.

All daily (nightly?) recaps can be found in a new blog titled It Happened Last Night. Thanks to the classic '80s film "...About Last Night" (and thanks to a graphic featuring a sleeping naked woman), one might think that the new zap2it blog is all about one-night stands and a naked, young Demi Moore. Alas, tisn't the case.

In the place of those things, though, you can find things like my recap of tonight's episode of "Prison Break," already posted HERE.

Stay tuned, meanwhile, to this address, for a review of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," which will be available just as soon as it is.

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MovieWatch: "Eastern Promises" (plus "Juno" and "American Gangster")

"Eastern Promises"
Director: David Cronenberg
Fien Print Rating (Out of 100): 67
In a Nutshell: I've been going back and forth on this one since Sunday, often with great frustration, since I like blogging promptly on movies I've seen.

On one hand, I was fascinated by "Eastern Promises" through Cronenberg's bravura Russian bathhouse sequence, as excruciatingly tense a fight scene as you'll see at the movies this year, putting the barely clothed man-on-man tussling in "300" to shame. At that point, I need the movie to go some place. I need something more than a frustrating character twist and a resolution that let several characters off the hook for their actions within the film.

Anyway, follow through after the bump for both my thoughts on "Eastern Promises" and my immediate and *very* truncated reactions to both Jason Reitman's "Juno" and Ridley Scott's "American Gangster" (both too far from their releases for anything more than a gut read.

Click through...

Because nobody in "Eastern Promises" sprouts a vagina in the chest, a phallus in their armpit, has sexual congress with a scar or mutates into a fly, I've noticed several dumb-ish critics say that the film is a departure for David Cronenberg. But if you're looking for recurring themes that run through Cronenberg's work, there are few regularly revisited than the idea of body modifications and how modern technology causes people to undergo physical changes that reflect either their true identities or the way they want the world to perceive them.

From sorority girls with their inviting Tramp Stamp back tattoos to the frat boy who gets an Asian character stamped on his arm without actually knowing what it means, getting ink is a pretty meaningless concept for maybe 85% of the people who do it. It's just a cool thing you get as a decoration without having to actually commit to the meaning that you've permanently emblazoned on your flesh. In 20 or 30 years, there are going to be some ridiculous looking seniors doing calisthenics at the rest home pool, with their butterflies above their sagging asses and misshapen barbed wire on their flabby arms. I can't wait.

For the characters in "Eastern Promises," though, tattoos are more important pieces of identification than faces or voices. Because Cronenberg has always obsessed over mysterious subcultures, the Russian mob proves predictably fruitful. As long as "Eastern Promises" is an ethnographic study of masculinity among Russian immigrants in London, it's fabulous. It helped that Cronenberg has gotten his second straight shockingly good performance out of Viggo Mortensen. As great as Mortensen was in "A History of Violence," he's far better here. Not only is his Russian accent not distractingly hammy (I'd had my fears based on the trailer), it's quite respectable. More notable, though, is the way the character carries himself physically. It isn't just the bath house scene [a totally balls-out -- literally... sorry... -- a piece of committed acting], but the way his Nikolai positions himself around mobsters of different ranks, the way he intimidates, but also flirts with Naomi Watts' Anna. There isn't the slightest chance he gets an Oscar nomination out of this, but he may well deserve one. Also perhaps deserving is Armin-Mueller-Stahl, marvelously avuncular and sadistic in equal measures. Even Vincent Cassel, oddly subtle in French performances but hammy in his English language work, keeps everything tightly wound.

Watts is one of those actresses who's almost never bad (if anything, she's underrated), but her character is frustratingly predictable in her motivations and arc. My lack of interest in whether or not Anna got to whisk away the little baby (remarkably healthy for the premature baby of a drug-addicted teen) probably played into how very unimpressed I was with the direction writer Steven Knight eventually decided to take the story. As a piece of screenwriting, I far preferred Knight's "Dirty Pretty Things" script.

Come to think of it, Cronenberg probably could have done great work with "Dirty Pretty Things" as well. A movie about organs mysteriously ending up in hotel toilets? That's right in Cronenberg territory.

My rating for this movie is, I think, a smidge lower than I may feel and may just be a manifestation of my disappointment at the ending. "A History of Violence" grew on me after watching it a second time and I'd bet "Eastern Promises" does the same.

Now a couple quickies.



"Juno"
Director: Jason Reitman
Fien Print Rating: 72
In a Nutshell: The title card says "A Jason Reitman Film," one of the biggest possessionary credit lies I can imagine. The film is dominated not by Reitman's direction -- straight out of the Wes Anderson/ Jared Hess school of quirk -- but by Diablo Cody's script, which is hyper-natural and, at times, hyper-brilliant. It's showy and hilarious, even if it runs out of energy by the end. Ellen Page couldn't be better (fulfilling all of that "Hard Candy" potential and then some) and, of the fine supporting players, I want to give a big nod to J.K. Simmons, utterly fantastic. Fox Searchlight is going to see if Cody can get an Oscar nomination for this and I wouldn't be shocked to see them pull it off.



"American Gangster"
Director: Ridley Scott
Fien Print Rating: 57
In a Nutshell: Hard for me to judge what *is* here (all 160 minutes of it) because I kept yearning for it to be something different. I kept wanting a director with a tangible grasp of New York City (specifically Harlem) to be at the helm. Spike Lee would have been ideal -- it would have either been a disaster or an utter masterpiece, but it wouldn't have been middling or pedestrian. The performances are all very good (Denzel's Oscar-worthy as always), but Scott doesn't quite understand the racial or economic or geographic dynamics of the story. Rather than being an epic saga of the American city, it just ends up being a decent gangster movie. Oddly, that's what will probably help "American Gangster" play to mainstream audiences.

Anyway, I'll have fuller reviews for those two movies in a couple months when they're actually being released...

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Baseball Moaning: Gagne, Thome, etc

I don't do this very often, but I have a little baseball-based ranting I need to do.

If you prefer my TV coverage...

Here's an article on Jeff Probst and "Survivor: China" for Zap2it!

Here's my recap of last night's "Kid Nation," which isn't necessarily good, but certainly isn't evil!

And one of these days I'm going to do a MovieWatch on "Eastern Promises" (I'm having a hard time cracking how much it does or doesn't matter to me that the ending doesn't work) and perhaps a couple words on "Juno" and "American Gangster," which I also caught earlier this week.

But follow through after the bump for a rant about Eric Gagne, a meditation on Jim Thome and whatever else I feel like adding.

Click through...

No Pain, No Gagne -- Might Eric Gagne single-handedly kill my eager anticipation for the July 31 trading deadline? Heck, might Eric Gagne single-handedly kill the July 31 trading deadling for all of baseball? If so, that would be a very sad thing. It used to be that I -- like so many baseball fans -- would look at the gaps on my favorite team (the Red Sox for those who somehow don't know me) and try concocting imaginary deadline deals of my own. Last summer, with the Sox on the verge of what would become a disappointing third-place season, I even won a buck from Sepinwall for asking Sox part-owner Tom Werner about possible deadline deals during a TCA press tour session (under normal circumstances, my journalistic qualms would prevent such a thing, but Werner's two shows last fall with "Twenty Good Years" and "Happy Hour" and I refuse to feel bad about straying off topic).

This was the first year that I told anybody who'd listen that I didn't want the Red Sox to make a trade. They had the best record in baseball and no player on the market seemed capable of improving the Sox at any particular position. When the Sox ended up getting formerly top-drawer closer Gagne (a favorite from his healthier [chemically suspect] days on the Dodgers), I was concerned. In the winter, I'd have signed him to an incentive-laden deal, what with Papelbon planning to start, but in late July, he served no purpose. The conclusion I came to, with some expert help, was that the Red Sox won by keeping Gagne away from the Yankees, the team with the seemingly more suspect bullpen. Addition by subtraction from another team. Who knew that the Yankees would actually win the trade with addition via subtraction from the Red Sox?

The stats for Gagne are remarkable. Three blown saves, 14 runs in 14 innings. He has been directly responsible for losses on four days when the Yankees also won (though, amazingly, he hasn't blown any games against the Yankees), meaning that he's single-handedly cost the Sox four games of a lead that once felt insurmountable. And he's actually been worse than the statistics show. Look at the appearances in which he hasn't given up runs and you'll see that he was great in games the Red Sox were either already losing or games in which they eventually won by scores like 11-1 or 10-1.

The Red Sox are no stranger to less-than-profitable deadline deals involving middle relievers. But as much as Sox fans lament the eventual absence of Jeff Bagwell, Larry Anderson was good for 15 games, 22 innings and an ERA of under 1.25. If Eric Gagne had provided those sorts of numbers the Red Sox would have clinched the division already. I can't help but feel that Gagne's ineptitude has directly put more pressure on Hideki Okajima, who has been shut down with a "tired arm," and on Papelbon, who suddenly looks mortal again. I think his presence has put extra stress on the starters and probably disheartened the hitters. If somebody can come up with a midseason acquisition who has had a more directly negative impact on his team in the history of the game, please share.

As God is my witness, I'll never root for a midseason trade again.

Thome or Not Thome -- Is Jim Thome a Hall of Famer? The dude hit his 500th home run last week against the Angels in darned dramatic walk-off fashion and now everybody's debating whether or not the slugger belongs in Cooperstown. The simple answer is that anybody with 500 home runs belongs in the Hall of Fame and that's that, which will cause additional complications when Carlos Delgado gets to 500 home runs in a couple years. Is Carlos Delgado also a Hall of Famer then? Carlos Delgado has made two All-Star teams in his career. Jim Thome has made five, which isn't all that many in an age where the same people go back to the All-Star games over and over and over again. 500 home runs sure seems like a lot, but this is for a guy who hit 52 home runs and drove in 118 runs in a season and finished *seventh* in the MVP voting. Why did Jim Thome magically become a Hall-of-Famer this week with his 500th home run and yet Fred McGriff won't make it to Cooperstown, despite a far cooler nickname, just because he came up a half-dozen home runs short. Jeff Bagwell is 51 home runs short of 500, but he's far more obviously a Hall of Famer in my book. Then again, Jack Morris and Bert Blyleven belong in as well. Speaking of Thome, did you know that he's No. 3 all-time in strikeouts for a batter? That's impressive to me. Yup. He passed Andres Galarraga earlier this year. Sometimes I like looking at some of the odder leader boards, and it amuses me to see that Reggie Sanders stands at No. 21 all-time in strikeouts.

An Even Odder Career Leader Board -- I remember when Hoyt Wilhelm made the Hall of Fame that one of his claims to fame was that he was the all-time career leader in games played. At the time, that was awfully impressive. He currently stands at No. 5, behind the esteemed Dennis Eckersley, the perfectly respectable John Franco, the ageless Jesse Orosco (your all-time leader, with 1252, 182 more than Wilhelm, though you don't hear anybody saying Orosco belongs in Cooperstown) and, at No. 2 all-time, Mike Stanton. The immortal Mike Stanton. Granted that your Top 15 includes Lee Smith, Kent Tekulve (my favorite baseball card player ever) Rich Gossage and Rollie Fingers, but it also features Dan Plesac, Jose Mesa, Roberto Hernandez and Mike Timlin. There's totally nothing suspect about all of these pitchers throwing well into their 40s. Actually, as I think about it, it's less the fault of steroids and more the fault of Tony Larussa.

OK. Baseball blogging is out of my system.

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