World War, social class - there will always be an England

It's absolutely amazing to me that British literarture and film still go back again and again to World War II (and even to the First World War) as inspiration and material - more than 70 years later. These events were so traumatic and formative for Britain that they still affect they way writers and directors and actors think, generations later. Why is that? Reminds of the time when the empire still stood? England's greatest moment of heroism? The trauma of so many deaths? The challenge, however temporary, to class structure? The postwar suffering and humiliation? All? Current example is "The Deep Blue Sea," set "around 1950," and tells a very simple love-hate story (spoilers follow): begins with attempted suicide of an aristocrats wife, Hester (the excellent Rachel Weisz), and over the next 90+ minutes we learn the back story: her husband is a stiff and conventional, she has an affair with an ex-airman, and, when her husband learns, moves in with airman into a shabby rental flat. Over 10 months and many spats, he loses interest and she tries to off herself - leading to a final, sorrowful breakup. Other than Weisz, the good things about the movie are the powerful scenes in which the airman (Freddy) vents his fury and Weisz gives it back to him and the monumentally uncomfortable scene when Weisz visits with her mother-in-law (though it's puzzling, in that the scene makes it seem as if they're just meeting, when in fact she's been married for some time). At first, the movie made the contrast between the two men too obvious: of course Weisz would leave her up-tight husband for this dashing guy. But gradually, we see that the husband, though a bit feckless, is kind of sweet and caring and Freddy is a dope and a cad. He's a former military guy who, like many in his generation, feels that nothing in civilian life will ever compare with his experience of war - so he turns to drink and other adventures. The relationship between him and Weisz is purely sexual (and her marriage was strikingly asexual); when he tires of her sexually (numbed by alcohol, probably), it's over - for him. Though Weisz is really good, the pacing of the movie doesn't help her. I know that was probably a stage play originally - but at times it feels way too staged - especially Freddy's final departure. Did the director have a contract to make a film of a certain length? There were longer pauses in this final bit of dialogue - Good-bye, Freddy. Good-bye, Hester - than any I can remember: I thought my Blu-Ray had frozen in place. Movie ends with an image of a bombed out London house - a little heavy-handed symbolism, but it does return us to the world outside of Hester's head and leaves us wondering: What will become of her?

The Hour: The British take on Mad Men

The the MI6 espionage subplot is a little hard to buy into and extremely hard to follow - as these things often are - even though you can follow and accept the action step by step along the way, they dissolve as soon as you examine the premises - would the Soviets go to such murderous lengths to recruit an agent within the BBC? could a fragile wisp of a TV reporter actually kill a murderous agent? - the BBC America miniseries "The Hour" was greatly entertaining, a sassy look behind the scenes at a BBC TV news-magazine show in 1956. As noted in earlier post, it's very much a British take on the Mad Men era, replete with the fashions, the sexism, the jazz score, the smoking, the drinking, the office sex - even some of the same tropes: good-looking protagonist (Domenic West, aka McNulty) addicted to serial infidelity, ambitious young guy and gal, each with parental complications, and so on. Part of the driving force of the series is the efforts of the crew to get around some weird British law that media could not (still cannot?) report on events under debate in Parliament - almost inconceivable in the U.S. Though there are lots of plot elements, twists, surprises, it's truly a character-driven series: West for one, and in particular the guy and gal, Whishaw playing driven, eager, idealistic, self-destructive young journalist and Garai playing driven TV producer fighting the sexist stereotypes but inadvertently playing into them by engaging in a very public affair with West. Whishaw and Garai are best friends - though it's obvious that he's in love with her and torn apart by her affair - but their coltish friendship is played very nicely, a kind of relationship we rarely see on TV outside of sitcoms. Not sure if this will lead to other seasons, but the characters are strong enough that they could have a life beyond The Hour - though maybe it's best to leave it at that.

Breaking Bad gets on back on track : Season 5

It has taken a while for the current season (5?) of "Breaking Bad" to find its footing, but the current episode was very strong and has gotten the season on track. The first two or three we very slow and incremental, despite a few fine scenes the excellent writing and acting by the leads that we've come to expect from this strong series. It's as if they felt they had to move slow and recap a lot of material for the many new viewers they inevitably pick up thanks to the strong reviews. Only in this week's episode did the tensions really build and the vise-grip of the narrative take hold. First episodes showed Walter and Jesse getting back into the meth business - setting up a portable lab, with help of tough-guy Mike, the lone survivor from the Mexican-based drug ring now wiped out. He's a great, compelling character and I'm glad they've retained him: one of the best scenes in earlier episodes was his confrontation with the various other survivors of the defunct meth lab and "convincing" them to keep silent. In current episode, we get at last to the heart of the story: the tension between Walter's commitment to his family and his ever-deeper involvement in the big $ of drugs. Terrific scenes showing Skyler's growing alienation and estrangement, culminating in her plunge into a pool - obviously not a serious suicide attempt, but very deranged behavior. This followed by a torrential scene in which she (the excellent Anna Gunn) says she will do anything to get her children out of the household and away from Walter, whom she sees as increasingly dangerous. He (the equally excellent Bryan Cranston) is cool and placid through most of the episode - strangely oblivious to how much his wife is ignoring him - but he explodes in this scene, and you can see and feel that danger that Skyler is beginning to feel in his presence. All the while, the brother-in-law drug agent continues his pursuit of the drug mastermind, and we know - we've been building toward this for 5 seasons (which, oddly, seem to cover only a year in story time) - the ultimate confrontation between Hank and Walter, and what that will do to their entwined families.

Making news: Ace in the Hole

Some have called Billy Wilder's 1952 "Ace in the Hole" the best movie ever about newspapers - that's going too far, I think, as it's not about newspapers per se but more about a perverse and egocentric newspaperman (Kirk Douglas) and his misguided efforts to revive his damaged career (he's an exaggerated version of a type that all reporters will recognize, the charming but ruthless and egomaniacal careerist) - but it does capture a bit of the feeling of small-town or small-city newspapers back in the days when newspapers ruled - almost all movies about the business focus on papers in the big city, so Ace is a pleasant exception: its vision of newspapers is something that virtually every reporter and editor can relate to - we all started, and some stayed, at papers a lot like the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin that Wilder depicts. Story involves Douglas arriving (a funny scene, as he's sitting in a car being towed through the city) at the newspaper office and talking his way into a job: he admits he's been fired from many large papers and that he's here in AlbuQ to take a job for little money and work his way back up. We cut forward to a year, Douglas is frustrated at the slow pace of the paper and the paltry news. Editor sends him out of town, with a young photographer (if this were remade, the photog would be a woman) to cover a rattlesnake hunt, but they get sidetracked when they learn a man is trapped in a landslide inside some ancient Indian caves he'd been exploring. Douglas worms his way into the cave, befriends the guy, and concocts a scheme to delay the rescue effort so as to build this into a national story that will be his ticket out of New Mexico. The story does become huge (spoilers here!) - but with tragic results, as the guy dies in the cave, and Douglas has to live with the knowledge his scheme cost the man his life. Some pretty smart scenes in the movie - especially as we watch the crowd of the curious spectators grow day by day into a big mob scene carnival - and some excellent dialogue, most thanks to Wilder, one would guess. Some may recognize that the plot setup was the start point for Robert Coover's excellent novel from the 1960s, The Origin of the Brunists (which A. and I unsuccessfully tried to adapt into a screenplay). I would also assume and hope that JK is aware of this movie, which is a great example of one of his key themes: the marginalization of Native Americans in American cinema of the West. Among other things, an Indian has a lowliest job in newspaper office and is subject to various racial slurs that don't seem to bother anyone else - and the guy trapped in the cliff was seeking Indian artifacts - but the Indians won't go into the cave for fear of disturbing the spirits of their ancestors. Cool that the movie recognizes this point of view, but it does so rather derisively.

Hail, Britannia: BBC America rises to the occasion with The Hour

As noted in previous post, Americans are suckers for British accents and will cut most programs (or plays or movies) from the UK a lot of slack, mistaking those sophisticated (to us) accents for high class and high caliber; however, sometimes the Brits really do excel and high class and high caliber art - they often can turn a pretty ordinary genre premise into a rock solid entertainment - it comes, I think, from a long tradition of a love for language and an acceptance of witty and complex dialogue in art, and also from the great theatrical tradition - guessing that most British TV actors do come up from a school with a serious dramatic training (and maybe even RSC experience?), whereas American actors come from - who knows where? Advertising and modeling, mostly. Anyway, the BBC America import "The Hour" is a good example of material that could be too trite or too sensational but rises up at least one level and maybe more thanks to the always high British production values and to a really smart script - at least what I can hear of it. Compared with the other recent BBC America import, Luther, The Hour is clear as a bell - but the characters talk so fast and in such an odd melange of dialect that it's hard for an American ear to pick out all the words, let alone the nuances. That a quibble, however - the series, at least the first 3 (of 6) episodes, is really smart: a kind of Goodnight and Good Luck meets Mad Men: an homage to young and on the make urbanites in 1956 London (far less hip and prosperous than the NYC of Mad Men, however) in a group that's putting on a TV show, the eponymous Hour, that was ahead of its time and something like 60 Minutes. Show driven by the young writer - an amibitious guy who wants to focus on investigative reporting and gets drawn into a murderous conspiracy (a little too far over the top and improbable, but a lot of fun - made funnier by the fact that he's seen reading the newly published Casino Royale) and his producer and BFF, a very attractive and much more straitlaced young woman. Though we keep hoping for and wanting them to get together, they seem unable to do so - and eventually she falls for the handsome but vapid "star" of the show, known to us in the U.S. as McNulty (The Wire), and in a similar, louche part BTW. All aspects of the series are entirely entertaining and engrossing - the acting of course (mostly unfamiliar actors to Americans) and even the updated 1950s jazzy score, almost a riff on the Mad Men credit sequence.

We're suckers for a British accent : Luther

I well remember a theater director speaking to a group of us (mostly American) students in London many years ago and noting so aptly that Americans are suckers for a British accent - and it's still true, anything in British English seems to us classier, smarter, more literary right from the top. Do we associate British English with classic drama, i.e., Shakespeare? Or is it some weird and deep-seated snobbery and deference, a class deference still deep in our blood or our psyche? Or are plays, movies, TV shows from Britain just plain smarter and better than ours? "Luther" makes an interesting case study. I honestly think that if you took this entire series (I saw only a few of the first episodes) and transposed it into an American setting it would be just another one of the many police procedurals, replete with all the cliches: the cop who's smarter than everyone else but can't stay out of trouble, has major issues in his family life, and plays by his own rules (the eponymous Luther), the younger assistant who specializes in getting info through technology and the Internet, the tough as nails supervisor (in this case, a woman) who actually likes the main cop but can't show it, the sexy but beleaguered wife. And so on. It's not that Luther is a bad cop show - it's just that there's little special about it, other than its setting. Granted, these are not the posh London Oxbridgian accents that we hear on PBS - these are (I think) East End accents that, to be honest, are extremely hard for my American ear to decode, especially in that the characters often talk in conspiratorial whispers. One strength is Idris Elba, best known as Stringer Bell, my personal fave character on The Wire - here in his native British, and he's a compelling actor, but not enough to carry the show. One weakness is that instead of showing police life as it really is (which The Wire did so commendably), this show is drawn, like Dexter to a degree, to cases so lurid and weird and improbable it's obvious they're cooked up by the over-active mind of a screenwriter and not by anyone with more than a passing interest in reality - in other words, if you can accept a London police station where, week after week, they're dealing with an upper-class patricide, a serial cop killer crazed by military service, a vampirish madman who abducts women and scrawls on walls in human blood, leaving the most ridiculous possible trail of clues - that this series is for you. I hope to see Elba in many other shows, but not this one.

Films that create their own world: Onibaba

Japanese b/w classic from 1964 "Onibaba" (director: Shindo) isn't exactly a horror film - and certainly not of the Japanese export horror films of the 50s e.g. Rodin, Godzilla - but it's about as scary and horrific as any film you're likely to see - scene by scene could be one of the most visually striking films of all time, though it's kept from true greatness by the kind of thin plot and the clumsy acting - could have really benefited from Mifune in the male lead role. Still, it's a film with a style and atmosphere all its own. Simply put, movie set in Japanese feudal era, two rival emperors apparently at war, which has thrown the whole land into poverty and drawn almost all young men into the war, through forced conscription, on one side or another - entire movie takes place in on a grassy plain, with sawgrass constantly swaying, taller than any of the people - often we see only forms of people passing through the grasses or wind stirring the tops of the grass. At center of film, two women, mother and her daughter-in-law, the son gone off to war; in fabulous opening scene they chase two wounded samauri soldiers through the grasses, at last pounce on them in surprise and slay them with a few slashes of blades, then the cut off all their armor and dispose of the bodies down a deep hole. They take armor to an old man in a rough and trade for a small amount of millet - he's obviously cheating them, but he complains that it's tough to find a market; he propositions the younger woman. Eventually, a soldier shows up at the grass hut where the two women live and reports that the son/husband is dead; the soldier pursues the daughter/widow and they begin a rather torrid relationship - to the mother-in-law's anger and jealousy, as she tries in various ways to break up their relationship - attempts that end badly for all. Count among the amazing scenes in this movie: the appearance of a masked samurai at the women's hut; the mother-in-law's descent into the hole to recover the samurai's armor and mask; the mother-in-law haunting the young woman; and most distressing of all, the mother-in-law wearing the samurai mask. Won't give more than that away. Though Onibaba (it means The Demon Woman) isn't quite a great film, very few films succeed so well at creating a landscape and environment that is credible, consistent, vivid, striking, and entirely unique: possible comparisons?: Search for Fire, The Fast Runner, and The Seventh Seal - pretty good company.