A few amazing scenes make King of Comedy worth watching

"The King of Comedy" is a minor Martin Scorsese work but has many of the incidental pleasures and astonishments of his best work, none the less - notably the gritty and dark urban realism of New York City in the 80s-90s for one thing and the smart, inside appreciation of show biz, TV, the comedy circuit, as seen and known from the inside, as well as another portrait of a very strange, alienated, troublesome, slightly frightening loser, once again played by De Niro but this time as would-be comic, Rupert Pupkin, certainly demented and delusional, but a bit more lighthearted and goofy than the protagonists in Taxi Driver and Mean Streets - he could at any point go off the rails and become truly dangerous rather than just annoying, but the movie pulls him back from the edge and toward a softer, somewhat ambiguous conclusion. De Niro is awesome as usual, and Jerry Lewis, as a a Johnny Carson character when Tonight was nightly in NYC, is excellent, showing he had potential for some serious dramatic acting - too bad he was so type-cast as a goofball. Sandra Bernhardt is one of the weaknesses of the film, her character poorly developed (not entirely her fault) and Scorsese much less certain when filming her uppercrust "town house" than he is in the grittier environments that he uses to such good effect elsewhere in the film. A few absolutely amazing scenes make the whole movie worth watching: De Niro in Lewis sharing a limo ride as De Niro tries to sell his routine to Lewis, De Niro (spoiler!) ultimately performing on national TV - great to see how well this pro can play an amateur, bumbling comedian.

What's the real message of Weeds?

On the one hand: One could say that the overall message of the Showtime series "Weeds" is that turning to a life of crime, even the hip and attractive and victimless crime of growing a little marijuana to supply the upper-class laid-back gentry of SoCal, will inevitably lead to death and destruction and broken homes and serious jail time, will entangle you with drug gangs and Mexican drug lords and worse, because that's what happens to the erstwhile Botwin clan over the course of the six seasons of the series - crime doesn't pay. On the other hand: That message is a super-downer, and the whole point of Weeds is to get us to root for the Botwins, especially the super-cute Mary-Louise Parker, the mom who started this enterprise as a way to keep their lifestyle afloat when she was widowed (I guess anything's possible, but it always seemed to me that a woman of her obvious looks and aptitudes would have had plenty of opportunities) - that no matter how rough the going, these people are great-looking and witty and devoted to one another and fun-loving, and the message received, and presumably intended, is that some crime does pay, that this is a pretty cool life and worth the risks. I'm not a moralist or a prude, but, come on, isn't this show, entertaining as it is from time to time, a pretty low form of pandering and dishonesty? Compare it with another show about a good guy turned to the drug trade - Breaking Bad - which is by no means perfect but much more sensibly conveys the horrors and dangers and the depression that ensues for a middle-class, educated guy who thinks he can step into this world and make a quick buck and get out. One show is a serious look at contemporary life and the other is a self-serving fantasy beheath a veneer of social conscience.

Dexter: the TV show that requires the most willing suspension of disbelief

"Dexter," on Showtime, requires more willing suspension of disbelief than any other show on television, probably (I haven't seen every one show on television), but if you are willing to buy the premise and accept the improbabilities of the plot the series is very entertaining and provocative and, at least insofar as the lead, Michael C. Hall playing Dexter Morgan, very well acted, too. The premise, simply, is that Dexter, adopted by a police officer, is damaged through childhood trauma and unable to feel empathy and drawn toward killing and destruction, and his dad teaches him a moral "code" so that Dexter, unable to stop killing, does so to avenge wrongs - he's a one-man vigilante, dispatching various abusers, kidnappers, et al. The premise I find very intriguing, but what makes the show ridiculous at times is that Dexter, who btw works in the Miami PD lab, is able to kill one person after another, many of them prominent, and never leave a single clue, never be caught - it's really preposterous, makes Miami PD to be the totally stupidest PD outside of the Swedish police in Stieg Larsson's world (but that's another story). Nevertheless, when I put that disbelief aside I'm fully entertained by the Dexter episodes - haven't seen all seasons but now watching Season 6, in which he takes up the case of woman played by Julia Stiles, who has been brutalized, and they set about finding who tortured her - turns out to be a new age therapist evangelist sociopath who's smooth and cleancut, the worst types, and doing them in - all the while being spied upon by a private detective hired by another cop - maybe he'll get caught at last? I doubt that.

You've never seen a movie like this, and good for you!: Songs from the Second Floor

This movie's going to sound better than it actually is as I describe it, which in a sense is typical of many works made for the intellectual/academic marketplace: they're full of ideas that we can enjoy talking about, but did we really enjoy watching the film/reading the book? Anderson's Swedish film ca. 2000, "Songs from the Second Floor" (I think a more accurate translation would be ...from Another Floor) is full of haunting scenes and images, and you can trace the lineage of Fellini and of course the compatriot Bergman: the oddity of a traffic jam filling a city and freezing everyone in place, crowds of self-flagellants marching slowly along the streets, vast empty corridors of hospitals and factories, a huge empty plain that suddenly bursts into population, a haunting scene of a man injured on a railroad platform and nobody is able to help him, a weird scene in which a young girl (bloom of youth) is sacrificed, a poet stunned into silence, a magician whose saw trick goes horribly awry, a man fired from a factory after 30 years bursting into insane sobbing and wailing, ashen people frozen in despair - so much, so beautifully crafted, often like a DeChirico painting come to life, filled with allusions that are strange and ambiguous and just beyond our comprehension to fascism, Nazism, corporate greed - and yet, and yet - by the end I found myself yearning for intelligibility and tired of the sameness of tone. It's a movie about several indirectly related characters and I hoped for a glance toward convention, some way to bring these lives together and to drive the movie toward a conclusion or at least a climax, but that never happened. It's a film like none other, and maybe it requires more than one viewing to truly get it, but I'm afraid few viewers will give it even that much.

Tara: likable though not really credible

"The United States of Tara" is another series, now in its third season, that thrives within the Showtime formula: a story about a seemingly ordinary family that in fact lives with and undergoes some kind of extraordinary experience, the series held together and built largely upon the skills and popularity of a lead actress. In this case, Toni Collette (Tara) is a mom in a family of four in suburban middle-class Kansas and all's pretty much normal in the fam - dad (John Corbett) a mildly successful landscaper, kids are all right with the usual angst, daughter wants to move away (to Japan) to discover herself, son has come out as gay and wants to make films or videos, Tara herself going back to college for degree she never got - but Tara suffers from DID (multiple personalities). That's the hook - and though the rapid changes of personality are never quite believable they do afford an opportunity for Collette to show her acting chops. Who doesn't like Toni Collette? She makes Tara worth watching, even if it had nothing else. Other than the highly likable cast, it doesn't have a lot else going for it, unfortunately. It's treatment of Tara's illness is completely noncredible - she just kind of flips out in public from time to time and the family just sweetly obliges her and nobody in the town seems to care, particularly. The causes, cures, treatments are not dealt with seriously - DID is just a springboard from which the series can jump. Some might find the writing good, and I agree - if you can accept that everyone in an entire extended family talks pretty much like an edgy 40ish screenwriter, i.e., like multiple versions of June (thank you, Diablo Codey) - and I have to say the producer/director's idea of what a Kansas middle-class family household and milieu looks like is ridiculous - in Tara everyone seems to be living within a Pottery Barn catalog.

Is Californication the most repulsive show on TV?

Is there a more repulsive show on TV than "Californication"? Let me think - forget about the stupid reality shows which at least know what they are, cheap, tawdry diversions. No, Californication has some pretensions of being a serio-comic drama about a sex-addicted writer who hits bottom as he becomes entangled in a charge of statutory rape and is cut loose by his wife because of that notoriety but at the same time his career takes off because of the success de scandale. The writer, played by the once likable David Duchovny, proceeds to have sex with many beautiful women who throw themselves at his feet (ah, the fantasies some screenwriters come up with! writers rule the universe!) as he bumbles through life in LA being crude and cruel to every person he encounters. This series manages to make sex look bad - seriously, a half-hour of porno would probably be more entertaining and certainly would be more believable than this nonsense. There are many horrible, narcissistic people in Hollywood - maybe more than elsewhere. But trust me nowhere in Hollywood or anywhere else do people speak entirely in obscenity-laden, crude quips. If there are people like Duchovny who bumble around like alcoholic, drug-addled louts but somehow manage to charm every woman they meet - well, you wouldn't want to be anywhere near them. Fortunately, there are no such people - they are screenwriter/directors concoctions, more exploitative than reality shows, more ridiculous than porn. California oughta sue. Fornication oughta sue.

TV's favorite topic: Itself! (Episodes)

One thing Hollywood and television generally get right is how to make a show about the making of a show - this goes back as far as the great Dick Van Dyke Show (of course it wasn't entirely about the making of a TV show, but was one of the first to give us any sense of the life of a TV writer) and more recently to such varies shows as Entourage and Extras, about the lives of stars and not-such-stars. Of course the studios and networks do this well - start with write about what you know, the old adage, and then add that we are insatiably interested in looking behind the scenes at the making of a show. It's amazing there aren't more self-reflective shows and amazing that any of them are bad (some are). "Episodes," which debuted this year on Showtime, is one of the really good ones - it's about the making of what's obviously a really crappy show, Pucks!, starring Matt LeBlanc (hysterical) as a hockey coach. Unlike some others about obviously crappy shows and stars playing themselves trying to make a comeback (like that other one with Lisa Kudrow, pretty much total garbage), Episodes has a great twist, in the that bad show is an Americanization of a British success, and the British writer-producers come to Hollywood to develop the new show. Much of the comedy focuses on their interaction with each other and, more important, with the narcissistic LeBlanc and with the (somewhat stereotyped and over the top) American producers - the clash of Brit and American cultures gives Episodes its edge and panache.

The shocker at the end of Mad Men Season 4: Can you believe it?

"Mad Men" Season 4 ends with the expected ambiguity and tension - this series gets better and better as the plot lines and the characters mature. Lots of spoilers to come: I expected the season to end with some major crisis involving Don's daughter Sally, who seems to be on a collision course with adolescence, but she seems to have grown up a bit, with help from a very nice psychologist - the real tensions remain between Don and Betty, Betty now behaving with such impulsive cruelty that even her good-guy husband, Henry, has begun to call her on it - she needs to go back into therapy, but of course she was badly burned before by a therapist who unethically spilled her secrets to Don. Meanwhile, talk about impulsive, Don takes his secretary Megan (what kind of name is that for a French-Canadian?) with him to California to watch the kids. Unsurprisingly, they have sex - he's such an addict that he can't keep away from her, even though he was developing a really good relationship with a research psychologist who seemed totally right for him and devoted - OK, so if it's just sex, so what, but then, amazingly, he proposes, she, totally smitten, accepts - back in the office everyone, especially the girls, roll their eyes - falling for his secretary, the oldest one in the book. What are we to make of this? Can you even believe it? It's a little hard to accept that he would propose - but now that he's done so, what good can come of this ridiculous relationship? The wild card is that Betty is now unhappy with her marriage, and how will those two forces collide in Season 5, whenever that happens. Still totally interesting to watch the business side of advertising develop, too, as the young staff at the agency go after new accounts to keep the firm from crumbling. A really good series that could possibly go on for many years. Let's hope.

Making the preposterous look classy : Merci pour le chocolat

Claude Chabrol's "Merci pour le chocolat" (2000) would seem to have it all, a well-respected French director and writer (Chabrol), a classy star (Isabelle Huppert), and the quintessentially French quality of sophisticated, educated, mature adult characters (a la Renoir, Rohmer, and a million other), they are scientists and CEOs and concert pianists and they engage in easy repartee about their multiple marriages and exes and troubled teens all over drinks or espresso or simple but beautiful cafe food, great setting in a lakeside town in the Swiss Alps, even the business people have a cool and socially acceptable profession (they make Swiss chocolate), lots of info given right from the top in smart dialogue, in other words, completely civilized and smart, and yet, and yet - it's a lousy movie. Too bad, and I'm not sure what anyone could have done with this material, adapted from an (English?) potboiler whodunit, completely noncredible: in essence, the chocolate heiress/CEO (Huppert - Mika) controls the behavior of her stepson by lacing his evening chocolate with Rx, apparently she did away with her rival by the same way, leading to a fatal mountain car crash, now through a misstep she almost does in the wrong person, but, helas!, it lead only to a crash, not a fatality - she's a ridiculous femme fatale, and though the characters and setting are totally believable the actions of the heroine and thus the plot of the story itself is ridiculous - Chabrol can be blamed for choosing the material, even if he did an adequate job of making the preposterous look classy.

Everyone loves to watch Laura Linney, but ...

Who doesn't love to watch Laura Linney in just about anything? What a great actor, what a great voice, what a fine presence in movies or on TV. But is she enough to carry the Showtime series "The Big C"? Not for me, unfortunately. Showtime seems to have a formula for success down pretty well, and I guess it's working for them: get an actor (or more often an actress) who's not glamorous but who's hugely popular and likable from previous TV or, better, movies, and build the show around her: Linney, Edie Falco in Nurse Jackie, Tonie Collette in The United States of Tara, to a lesser extent Marie-Louise Parker in Weeds. For me, in each of these, beyond the stars the plots are so weak, the scripts so tenuous, and the supporting cast so ordinary (I've liked Oliver Platt a lot since he starred in the Showtime series Huff, but he seems to just bumble through The Big C) that the shows just don't work. As noted in an earlier post, HBO and Showtime have very different production philosophies. To oversimplify, HBO takes what appears to be a totally unusual family - a mob family, undertakers - and shows how they're actually kind of ordinary, just like us. Showtime does the opposite: takes what on the surface appears to be an ordinary, generally suburban household and shows that once you get inside they're really strange: multiple personalities, drug addiction, in the case of the Big C a cancer patient who decides to live her remaining days to their extreme. These plots are therefore very difficult to manage and in the Big C, as I go through the first season, I find I believe in it less and less - as with too many Showtime series, I'm lost.

Don Draper hits his lowest point, and Peggy Olson continues to surprise : Mad Men

Season 4 of "Mad Men" part 2 (episodes 6-9) brings Don Draper to his lowest point and from there can only build him up. The terrific episode 7, probably the best-scripted in the entire series, takes place in one harrowing 24-hour span, the day that Clay KO's Liston, a hot May night, Don and Peggy working late, Peggy standing up her boyfriend and standing up to her parents, some sexual tension between Don and Peggy, ends with Don drunk and puking, then clumsily wrestling with the loathsome drunk Duck, and dawn and last and a fresh start. From this point, Don realizes he has to cut back on the drinking - but how can he do so in this heavy-drinking culture? The one guy who quit, Fred, is considered a square and a pariah. As Don tries, a little, to clean up, his family life gets even worse and stranger, with at last a big blow-up with Betty over their daughter, increasingly disturbed - young girl shows up at Don's office, and she says she never wants to go back home, she hates it there. How can he deal with this? His bachelor cave is no place for daughter to stay, barely even to visit. Meanwhile, Peggy, whom everyone misunderstands and presupposes to be an uptight prude, again proves to be smarter, cannier, and actually more progressive-thinking than any of the louts around her - as she speaks out for women's rights and actually pushes back against a client that won't hire black workers in the South. We'll see if this strand of hers is just tolerated as an eccentricity or gets her in trouble, marginalized, or canned.

Showtime v HBO : who wins?

To generalize and overstate, HBO takes unrealistic premises and makes them feel incredibly real whereas Showtime takes (somewhat) realistic premises and makes them feel absurd. There are exceptions, notably the late lamented Showtime series Huff, but by and large as I look across the Showtime roster I think: none of these shows seem realistic, and maybe they're not meant to, who knows? The epitome of Showtime extravagance is probably "Shameless." I've seen only a few episodes and won't watch any more, but it does have a few strengths, including a strong lead cast: William Macy, wasted as a wasted alcoholic dad that you just want to get off the screen as soon as possible; Joan Cusak, comically funny as an agoraphobic mom; Emmy Rossum, the 21-year-old daughter holding the dysfunctional family together, barely - she's a really interested actor whom we first spotted in the unappreciated Pasionada, years back. That said, the series is almost entirely without charm and there is barely a moment in it that I found lifelike or credible. The premise is, or seems to be, that families, even a family of six sibs and half-sibs living without adults in a high-crime Chicago neighborhood, can get along on their wit and with occasional petty thefts and scams. Even if you go so far as to suspend all disbelief and accept that these people could form a family, there is nothing about the group that in any way speaks to the trouble and trauma such an assortment would endure; all of the serious issues they run up against are brushed away with comic disdain: Oh, sure, car theft, cheating on tests, having sex with a teen under the table while mom and dad chat in the kitchen, smoking dope with the principal, public drunkeness, insurance scams - all are just opportunities for hilarity. I can't even convey the absurdity of this. Shameless indeed.

Mad Men (season 4) remains totally compelling - like a car wreck

Season 4 of "Mad Men," with the crew from Sterling Cooper now set up as a new, struggling agency (thought it looks pretty well established to me) and with Betty remarried to the governor's aide and Don living in dingy bachelor quarters reamins a totally engrossing, compelling, watchable series - much as a car wreck beside a highway is totally engrossing, compelling, and watchable. The characters in Mad Men remain (almost) totally unlikable and, even when sympathetic, deeply flawed, selfish, valueless - and yet, and yet - how can you not be curious about them and even root for them to get that next contract or to meeting a nice guy or gal and settle down with their lives? One of the many pleasures of the series is how well it captures the look and the idiom of the era, now moving forward to early 1964 - though still a bit retro, even for its day. These guys are 50s throwbacks in a changing world, and Peggy is at times a window onto this changing world, the youngest of the crew and though she seems to be a total "square" she is much more than she seems, as she begins to hang out with a Village crowd (her new boyfriend assumes she's inexperienced - boy, is he wrong). Betty/January Jones has moved more toward the margins of the series, and she has become even more ice-cold and a brutal mother. Don/John Hamm remains the stolid central character, plunging ever deeper into his alcoholism - we know he'll come out of it, we know he'll establish a relation of sorts with one of the many women around him (I'm betting on the public-opinion researcher), but will it save him or destroy her?

Totally winning Harvard production of Take Her, She's Mine

Last night saw the totally cute and charming college production of "Take Her, She's Mine," the long-obscure 60s Broadway show by Phoebe and Henry Ephron that, amazingly, I had somehow seen way back then and of which I retain no memory other than the title. Was interested to see the Harvard production in the Adams Pool (a former indoor swimming pool long ago converted into a very crowded small theater) - this show still set in the 60s - a story of a Beverly Hills fam sending daughter off to college with Dad's great trepidations about what will happen to her and with typically sexist thoughts that her sole or primary purpose in college is to find a husband - original version sent her to fictional college modeled on Wellesley but in this adaptation, by the smart student-director Madeleine Bennett (sp?) she's a Radcliffe student. Apparently much else changed in the adaptation as well (which might explain why none seemed familiar to me from long-ago viewing), but they kept the (early) 60s lingo, mores, and attitudes (and soundtrack - which was maybe a few years more contemp than the show, but never mind) as well as the universal themes of family tensions, sexual tensions, and most of all of a year of pretension and maturation as the girl grows up and learns about herself. Production enormously energetic and lots of fun, including terrific scenes of guys getting ready for date night, dancing on New Year's eve, mom back in BevHills flirting with poolboy, funny period dancing and flirting, and special shoutout to the adorable Susanna Wolk, whom we've known forever and who killed as the kid sister who seems somehow wiser than her older sis and who keeps mom and dad (somewhat) sane.