Rules of the disaster genre : Fat people die, crude foreigners die...

Another entry in the movie as special effects marathon video game gone gargantuan is "2012," a ridiculously titled movie that will fall at the top of most alphabetical lists unfortunately. It's not a horrible movie by any means, although it ought to be - there are so many lines spoken with such grave earnestness that the script must be a hoot to read, if there even is one - because there are enourmous stretches with no words at all (good for foreign distribution!), just orchestral crescendos and amazing scenes of disgitalized disaster. The stakes just get higher with each one of these movies - back to The Day the Earth Stood Still or Godzilla, which would look so tame and lame today on through Titanic, through Independence Day and Armageddon - and now it's not a matter of seeing some buildings fall but here we see the Earth's core give way and the entire continent slides into the ocean, creating a new Waterworld (to summon another movie that was a disaster in every possible way). Guess what? It's fun to watch this stuff, for a while, until you (or I) eventually can't take any more - not from excitement but from torpor. Ugh, the plot line such as it is, so banal and so predictable - which couples will get (back) together, who will survive. Law of the genre: fat people die, crude foreigners die, sensitive/weak scientists die, lead actors survive, cute kids survive. I guess you could call this movie summer escapism, but it's escapism without a heart or a purpose - the few artful movies in the disaster genre do tell a good story and do get you to feel for the characters and root them on - but this one will keep you entertained and leave you with thrumming eardrums and that's all.

Exotic, Universal, Silent - Ozu's I Was Born, But...

Because it's Ozu, you know that one way another, even though it's a silent film (!) and probably 70 years old and a grain print and outdated in many ways - it's got to be at least worth watching once, and so it is with Ozu's "I was Born, But..." (great title!). Not a great movie but a valuable curiosity, both for its exoticism and its universality. Exotic: Japan in the 20s/30s looks almost like another planet, the suburbs (of Tokyo?) abject rural poverty, without even roads, just ruts for cars to go through, houses and buildings appearing randomly with no planning, like a spreading blight, yet families trying to make their lives clean and tidy - a picket fence and a doghouse, in the middle of nowhere! - and everywhere a chaos of poles and electrical wires overhead and most of all the trains, single cars, going back and forth all the time like a mechanical heartbeat, Ozu's true signature. As to the story, a sad and touching one of a family moving to the suburb, the two young boys having to fend off bullies at school, with no protection or sympathy from the parents who are only concerned about showing respect for the factory boss, a wealthy phony. The boys ultimately see through the dad and his pretensions and tell him he's a total failure, the family near breakdown, but then the boys realize dad is the best he can be, and there's a sweet reconciliation at the end - not a Hollywoodish thing where Dad would do something heroic, but just a quiet, unspoken understanding. By today's standards, the story is slow and the somewhat stagy - but still far, far ahead of so many other stilted silents - some beautiful shots of the family gatherings, of the boys in the landscape, of the father walking the boys to school. You can see the beginning of Ozu's sensibility - which will culminate in Tokyo Story - but he was a director with all the skills but yearning for dialog.

Mad Men v Breakfast at Tiffany - which should you watch?

Writers (specifically Maureen Dowd) have compared "Breakfast at Tiffany" with Mad Men (didn't read Dowd's column so I don't know exactly her point - maybe the same as I'm making) - and of course they share a similar world view: Manhattan circa 1960 when New York was truly the center of the world, America was an unchallenged world power, people drank heavily, smoked a lot, ate poorly, and at least a certain set partied like criazy and had no family life - and New York, from the 20s onward (cf Gatsby) had been a place where people from the small towns came to make or remake themselves - today they'd be as likely to go to Portland (either one) or Austin. So yes the two works are similar on a superficial level - but the differences between Peggy Marsh/Don Draper and Holly Golightly/Paul Varjak are profound. In Mad Men the people work for a living and they work hard and say what you will about advertising it was a driving force at the time in American prosperity - but in Breakfast they do nothing but wallow in their own self-regard. Audrey Hepburn, beautiful as always, is completely noncredible as a call girl/glamor girl from Texas - no call girl ever lived/dressed/spoke the way she does in Breakfast - the only less credible character is Paul/George Peppard who seems as much like a writer as I do like an NFL left tackle. Though some scenes are very well staged - the riotous cocktail party (not as good is the one in La Dolce Vita, but still good), the purchase at Tiffany, the "robbery" at the 5&10 - the movie is absolutely hollow at its core, these people have no values whatever, they are leeches and sponges and yet the movie glamorizes them and plays up to their so-called values, as if it's great to moon over fine but unaffordable jewelry and then to make light of literature (hey, it's so easy - buy a ribbon for your typewriter and you, too, can sell a story to the New Yorker!), criminality, marriage, on and on. Holly is in fact one of the stupidest people ever to be filmed - has ostensibly no idea she's running messages for the mob? - and the movie with its idiotic Hollywood ending totally makes light of her criminality. The novel, which I've never read, may be better or at least more honest. Finally, Mickey Rooney playing a Japanese artist is shameful and painful to watch.

Culture Wars: American Office v British Office - which is better?

"The Office" (American version) from what little I've seen of it, to be honest other than snippets just the wedding episode, Niagra, is incredibly cute and fun and very funny. Scripting of the hour-long Niagra episode was a small marvel - it really is as good as a movie and could have been a movie except then they would have made it 90 minutes or maybe 2 hours and it would have lost its charm. Keeping within the hour timeframe (about 45 minutes with commercial breaks) imposed great discipline and showed how efficiently they could tell the story - and you don't even need to be a regular viewer of the show to pick everything up right away. Many very funny scenes and concepts, including Steve Carrell's decorating his own car for the drive to the wedding (Going to a Wedding!), his terrific toast so unfunny it's hysterical (wedding toasts have become a real test of scriptwriter's skills: see the underappreciated Rachel's Getting Married sequence), the guy walking around with Kleenex-box shoes, many more. I've been a fan of the British Office and was not drawn to see the American particularly, but found it great in a different way - which (maybe?) says something about our culture or our differing senses of humor: The American much softer and sweeter, though the characters are of the same type, mostly (the guys, anyway) idiotic but thinking they're smart (cf Dumb & Dumber), the humor is light and inoffensive. The Gervais British original is much more acerbic, and the writing more self-consciously literary (Gervais even reads poems about Slough - they don't do that about Scranton I bet).

Everyone loves Toni Collette, but ... Tara is still bad

"The United States of Tara" should be good but it isn't, so why not? Everyone loves Toni Collette, and she's fabulous in the part of the multiple-personality-disordered Tara - but in a way she's too good. As she plays each of the (at least) 3 "alters" we always feel: wow, she can really play that character. What an actress! But that's not what the story needs. She plays each so well that we don't see Tara in the character - it's just like an actress doing a star turn: a prim matron, a tough guy, a saucy teen. It would be much more truthful, affecting, and scarier to see these figures emerge from the recognizably Tara - which would also mean she wouldn't have a full costume set for each alter. Let each one look like Tara - the old TV movie, Sybil, with personal fave Sally Field, was way better and scarier. Another flaw on "Tara," in my view, is that there is not a thing believable about her family (Gregsons?) - the kids, her husband, everyone in the community just blithely goes through life dealing with each alter in sequence as a minor inconvenience - oh, no, it's Buck. The kids don't seem frightened or disturbed or embarrassed to any significant extent - that is, they don't seem real, they basically Diablo Cody concoctions, the son, Marshall, (maybe the best character in the series) a retread of the boy in Juno and the daughter, Kate another precocious teen who talks like a 35-year-old stripper (and mumbles her best lines). Husband played be the valiant but terribly miscast John Corbett is an incredibly poorly conceived role: he's supposed to be, I guess, a guy's guy, drives a truck, works in landscaping, drinks beer from the bottle, but he seems like any of the various swells Corbett has played in his urban/urbane movies. Series supposed to be set in Kansas but has no sense of place whatever, and one could go on about the utterly preposterous behavior scenes, but one example will suffice: As one of the alters, Tara wears a poncho and straddles the bed where her father is sleeping and pisses on him (wife sleeping next to him, btw). Do you think maybe if a full-grown woman was standing on your mattress and pissing on your blankets you might wake up?

30 Rock is in danger of going adrift

"30 Rock" is kinda fun, I mean, who doesn't like Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin as smarmy studio exec has found the perfect role for him. Some of the secondary characters are amusing, too, in a sitcom fashion - meaning that they're all characteristics, not characters in an true sense - in other words, they are not like any human beings you will ever meet outside of a sitcom. There are always a few good laughs in each episode. However, does anyone else notice that the series has drifted too far away from its initial premise, and charm, in that its less about the actual making of an SNL-like TV show and more or a forum for the actors to display their eccentricities. The show within the show has drifted toward the background, it's become just the excuse to get these characters into the same room, or plot, and ultimately, at its worst, the show just seems like a bunch of lunatics misbehaving. It needs to be grounded more firmly in its reality - we have to know what these guys do, that despite their craziness, or because of it, they are successful at their unusual work: much like Mad Men, for that matter, and MM may suffer from the same draft, as it has gradually become more of a domestic soap and less of a workplace drama. This is less of an issue for a comedy like 30 Rock, in that we don't turn to it to learn about the craft of TV. But think of that other great sitcom based on a TV show, The Dick Van Dyke Show - which always worked because we saw the show as the glue that kept these characters together and accommodated their craziness. 30 Rock is in danger of gooing adrift.

Too long, too dark, too much suffering - but a good movie about an "outsider" artist

At more than two hour running time, "Everlasting Moments" is far too long for its material, but it's a very good, thoughtful movie that seems to truly capture the hardships of a family life in a particular time and place - southern Sweden in the early 20th century - and universally, in a working-class family where the father is alternately fun-loving and charming then a drunkard and a bully. If he were always horrible, it would be a movie of unrelenting gloom, and no doubt his long-suffering wife would have left and end of movie. But he keeps trying to reform and she keeps wanting to believe him and there are so many social pressure to keep her in the marriage. Things seem to be going well, and then he comes home drunk and the movie just explodes. Some very powerful scenes of domestic violence, and a solid political background as the father and some of the other characters get involved in a violent dockworkers' strike. The heart of the movie, though, is the mother's (Maria's?) fascination with photography - she tries to pawn a camera, but eventually starts taking pictures and has some real talent. This work helps keep the family alive, and is an artistic salvation for her - through her vision, and through a friendship she forms with a photographer in the city. This friendship almost costs her the marriage, and the relation between her and the photog remains ambiguous. The film apparently based on conversations with the woman's daughter - unclear whether the ambiguity of the relation with the photog was because of lack of info or to protect the reputation of the mother. Also not clear at all the stature of the woman's work: was she a well-known photographer in her life, or a talented amateur? Anyway, a pretty good movie but dark and full of suffering - reminds me of the many movies about the struggles of immigrants, but in this case they're the ones who didn't immigrate but should have. Also reminds me of the recent spate of movies about "outsider" artists.