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India Stoker’s father is killed in a car accident on her 18th birthday. She’s already a surly teenager locked in perma-conflict with her appearances-obsessed mother. Now she’s also grief-stricken while her childish mother attempts to get her to be pleasant for the funeral guests. One of those guests turns out to be an uncle she never knew she had. He’s a younger, handsomer version of her father and he basically moves right in. He’s a charmer, and may even be a killer.

Park Chan Wook’s new film, Stoker, is a riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s early masterpiece, Shadow of a Doubt, although this one gets a lot a darker. It’s a psychological thriller in the old-school mode: who’s crazy and where does evil come from and what feeds it and why is it so often tangled up with sex and love? But where Shadow of a Doubt let its creeping menace enter into the pleasantest of 50’s Norman Rockwell American towns, Stoker is not so convinced that darkness doesn’t already lie everywhere, waiting for some evil entrepeneur to come along and mine it. The Stokers are quite wealthy, but nobody seems to dust the basement.

This unhealthy atmosphere, with murderous tensions woven into the fabric of every day life, is so sumptuously rendered that despite the plot similarities to Shadow of a Doubt, the film feels more like Hitchcock’s other masterpiece, Vertigo, that voluptuous collage of pure cinema, of colour, lighting, music and camerawork incarnating the essence of angry melancholy. This weird dichotomy (a simple overcoming-the-monster tale vs a complicated existential take on longing and evil) really hinders the movie: on the one hand it’s too slow to be a thriller, and on the other it’s too pulpy to be an art film about dysfunctional family. But as miscalculated enterprises go, this might be the most worthy ever. You shouldn’t make a movie like this, but if you have to, here’s how to do it!

I happen to believe that Park Chan Wook is among the finest living artists. His vengeance trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, OldBoy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance) and its miraculous antidote (Thirst) are special works of art. He’s in the company of Euripides, Shakespeare, Beethoven and Dickens. Brilliant refinement of technique at the service of raw passion. That said, he’s made at least one terrible film (I’m a Cyborg), so I wasn’t sure what to expect from this movie, his first in English, especially because it stars Nicole Kidman (who’s getting harder and harder to take seriously) and Matthew Goode (who I thought was the uninteresting pop star, but that’s the Good without the e.)

Turns out they aren’t the problem; they’re both quite good! Kidman plays the boozey, somewhat silly mom, never loved enough by her husband and her daughter, unsure of what to do with her role(s) as rich-architect’s-wife and mother-of-a-sensitive-child. Of course, she sees in handsome Uncle Charlie a chance to win some overdue love for herself.

Matthew Goode does a superb job of being a charming creep. Perhaps he is one in real life! And also a superb job when the veneer comes down and we see the needy child underneath. A more skilled actor would have been able to give glimpses of each side of the character around the edges of the other side, but Goode can’t really do that, can’t really let us see how the monster grew out of the wounded child. It’s a very effecting performance and the camera loves him.

Unfortunately, the camera loves everything in this movie a little too much: the way a brush moves through hair, the way a daddy-long-legs crawls up a stocking, the way a lit phone-booth in a dark motel parking lot steams up when someone is being strangled to death in it. It’s sort of a problem, isn’t it, when blood splatter is so so so pretty? How are you supposed to feel? This movie is sumptuous—the music, the camera angles, the cinematography, the editing—its as colourful and languid as a Mahler Symphony slow movement. A part of me resented that—as if the movie were a high-budget TV commercial for nihilism. Malignant narcissism has never looked so good. Evil as a Lexus, sleek, shiny, powerful and GORGEOUS!

The centre of the picture is a young girl turning into a woman within this disturbed family. Playing India is Mia Wasikowska, a young actress who’s impressed me with everything she’s been in, and this is her best role yet. She’s more complicated than the other characters. It’s hard to say whether Uncle Charlie is teaching her to be evil—it’s not giving too much of the plot away to say that she is drawn to his dark side and appears poised to be become his—or whether she’s been disturbed from the beginning, due to the household tensions she was brought up in, or worse—disturbed from even earlier, from her genetics. Uncle Bad Seed and Niece Bad Seed. Its also even more complicated than that, because she might be something of a good person. It’s hard to say. She gives us both. She may be a sensitive soul in a terrible world. Her school life is, if anything, even worse than her family life—she is bullied and sexually harassed. And again, it’s even more complicated than that, because there are moments that hint that some of what we’ve seen on screen is her fantasy only.  She might be crazy, not just good and/or bad.

Wasikowsa runs with it all despite the confusion. Every sulky eye roll is joined by a tentative reaching out for love. Every pulling back in disgust is joined by a leaning forward in longing. Every rigid dead-eyed stare is joined by a sensual crossing or uncrossing of the legs. There isn’t a frame in the film where she isn’t doing opposite things at once, some awkwardly, some skillfully, all perfectly in character. If the film works at all (and it almost does!—at the beginning I was thinking it wasn’t, and by the end I was thinking that it was—) it’s because she pulls you into it. She’s the raw heart of this highly stylized artifice.

So: there are a lot of good things in this movie—it really is gorgeous, a feast for the eyes and ears, the acting is truly disturbing in the best ways, the story is a good one with a real plot to it, and its subject is an important one. But those pieces don’t fit together in a satisfying way—the gorgeousness slows the plot down (imagine a 90 minute Hitchcock thriller morphed with a 3 hour National Geographic Special,) the plot cheapens the subject (imagine a philosophical tome on the nature of evil but with pesky sheriffs,) and the whole enterprise, despite its originality of execution seems embalmed from the opening sequence. And there’s the problem: you can’t generate suspense if everyone and everything’s already dead, you can’t brew up worry about the arrival in town of a charming psychopath if the town he’s come to menace is charming-psychopath-ville, and you can’t have your blood splatter be cruel and quaint at the same time. Not even Park Chan Wook. Or at least, not yet.

Cinema Guyd: “Stoker”‘s Stroke of Genius?

So a gas guy walks into the sketchy kitchen of a rundown house and, in answer to the lady of the house’s question, “What’s up?”, delivers a long monologue about something or other.

"Hope" for TV Sitcoms?

When he pauses to breathe, Martha Plimpton says, “I meant, What’s up with the wrench?”

Gas guy looks at the tool in his hand and says, “Oh yeah. I’m so so sorry to bother you, but I’m here to shut off your gas.”

Martha: “The gas bill cannot be overdue. I always go into the check cashing place next to pharmacy to pay it when I’m picking up Maw-Maw’s prescriptions. And I do that whenever I have to go into the bathroom cupboard for a tampon. And I cannot be late because my friend hasn’t arrived yet.”

Gas man: “Says here you’re two weeks late” (as he pats dad, Garett Dillahunt, on the shoulder).

Plimpton does the quickest, realist, most complicated double take in the history of television and then pops her buggy eyes out enough to practically give me a concussion sitting at home in Toronto on the other side of the TV.

Ah! All praise Working Class Comedy!

Canadian Netflix is so lame. It has 13 and 1/2 movies to pick from, and three of them are Mr. Mom. So I end up dipping into ridiculous television shows that Netflix thinks I’ll like. Well, they got one right out of ten. I love Raising Hope. If I knew the show had Plimpton and Chloris Leachman on it I’d have started watching earlier. And the adorable Dillahunt is always a much-watch—so cute!

We like escapism in our TV shows, programs that take us away from our cares and troubles and into the cares and troubles of people who are richer and more attractive than we are. But this mainstream tendency leaves a huge hole for comedy to shock us with a more accurate portrait of our lives. Among the earliest sitcoms was The Honeymooners, a double concerto of squabbling between Jackie Gleason’s bus driver and Audrey Meadow’s housewife (who does get a bit of a job when Hubby’s laid off — which was its own kind of tectonic shift into realism).

The bickerfest in their grubby kitchen was funny because nothing was glamorized, not even the abuse. You laughed because it was uncomfortable, not because you were comforted. And of course this turned out to be so real, wives being punched by husbands, that it’s impossible to find it charming anymore. Although I don’t think the sitcom gets enough praise for being honest when every other representation of the ’50s marriage was not.

In the ’70s, Norman Lear gave us a troika of shows chronicling the mid- to low-end of the economic spectrum, All in the Family, Maude, and Good Times, updating the realness of working class comedy by including the complex social stresses landing on the poor after the upheavals of the Sixties. Economic issues intersect powerfully with issues of gender, race, and sexuality. Does it sound more like a masters-of-social-work thesis than a comedy? The experiment might have tanked, but Lear made sure to ground his social explorations in the freshest of character comedies. These were real people impacted and reacting to the real world. And damn funny!

Generation X-ellent

For a long time comedy retreated from the real, enabling Roseanne Barr’s plus-size body and heart to push aside the fake with a huge and funny blast of the way we actually live. In interviews, Barr recounts the pressures on her to tame her realness, pressures from network execs to sanitize her vision of working class America, pressures that almost drove her crazy. But she resisted, only to see her honesty translate into the most popular show for years. Networks typically aren’t brave, especially pre-cable ascendancy. They nudge everything to the middle of the road in the hopes that if no one is offended or surprised they’ll keep watching. And that’s why we have so many terrible sitcoms.

With Raising Hope we are lucky to have a fresh entry into the pantheon of “povcom,” my term for comedy that rises from the trials and travails of poverty. Or at least one-and-a-half-paychecks away from poverty, which is where most of us live.

Plimpton’s mom-character scrubs richer people’s toilets for a living. Dillahunt’s dad-character cleans their pools. They live with their slacker son and their senile maw-maw. When the boy accidentally impregnates a serial killer, they are left with baby, post-execution. Like poor people everywhere, they roll with the punches, making room for the new life in their dysfunctional (utterly functioning!) family. The actors on this show, Plimpton, Dillahunt, and a glorious Leachman as the (now great-) grandma are geniuses.

They play the characters with as much grit and commitment as others bring to Shakespeare. Not for them the half-hearted knowing winks of ironic cool shows. These idiots are full bore. So real you can practically smell them. Boyish new dad is the perfect still center for the crazy to revolve around. Anarchic comedy seems best tethered to an easy access point, someone a little more moral, a little more self-aware, and someone who–like us–is stunned by the shenanigans of the nuts around him. We all feel like the sane center of a crazy world (even though we are also somebody else’s unreasonable problem).

In fact, most of the plots stem from the boy’s efforts to change the family to be a better environment for his baby girl to grow up in. Things typically resolve with him realizing his family’s genuineness was right all along, but occasionally the people around him grow a bit and change. It gives the show a bit of a heartwarming overarching through-line; these are good people who are doing their best and adapting to a difficult world. Again, like most of us. Little changes. Little evolutions. And hopefully some joy in the process.

I can’t stress enough that this is the most ethical sitcom on TV. Watching most other shows requires acts of penance; you feel you’ve been a bad person to enjoy vegetating in front of such dumb crap. This one will make you a better person.

TV Guyd: “Raising Hope” for the Rest of Us

A year ago some gay guy couldn’t believe I hadn’t been watching Spartacus. I rolled my eyes and ignored him. But then it happened again. And again. Suddenly it was like I hadn’t heard of Barbra Streisand. I continued to resist out of sheer obstinacy. But then when I was in bed with someone, post-orgasm when I’m especially amenable, I was offered a cuddle and a show. Sure. Spartacus? Sure. And so I opened my mind to it.

Let me say that it took awhile to warm up to it. It’s cartoonish. It’s gory, in a cartoonish way. But it has charms and not all of them are the beefcake. But, yeah, there’s the beefcake. Pound for pound, more man muscle than anything on TV.

It’s the story of some gladiator slaves who rebel. Like a longer, gayer version of the Kubrick film. It has plenty of political maneuvering, like Falcon Studios doing I Claudius. It has very literate dialogue, like Treasure Island Studios doing Julius Caesar. It even has fully realized gay couples, completely accepted by their colleagues, like no-one from no-where doing nothing-real. But you gotta like that. If you’re gonna have cartoonish violence why not have utopian sexuality? The thesis being that ancient Rome had few sexual hang-ups. There’s some historical truth to that, of course, but the hallmark of the show isn’t academic integrity. My secret thrill is thinking about the meatheads and wrestling fans who can’t stop themselves watching and are getting a stealth lesson in LGBTQ+ acceptance.

Originally, Spartacus was played by Andy Whitfield, but, sadly, he died of cancer after the first season. They did a prequel season and then found a suitable replacement in Liam McIntyre (sent first to the gym to muscle up). Of course, if you were an Andy-fan no one’s gonna cut it. Me, I started watching in the third season and back-tracked, so Liam’s my first Sparta-crush and he’s all I ever want in a slave.

The good news: If you can stomach the early episodes it gets better and better. The production values increased as the show became a hit and the budget went up. The writers found their way after a shaky start. And now, we have the return of the show for Season Four. Which is sometimes called Season Three because of the prequel being non-numbered, or sometimes called Season Two because of people only starting from the Liam days, or sometimes called Season One by people with short-term memory problems, but best called Spartacus: War of the Damned since that’s less confusing.

Did I mention the beefcake? They like to take long baths together, these gladiators. They are sometimes ordered to up the hotness in the crowd at the master’s orgies, and sometimes it’s just too damned humid to fight with cloths on. Naked wrestle much? Why were they rebelling exactly?

Is the new season any good? I don’t know. I can only watch it in eight-minute spurts. You’ll have to let me know. But I’ll retroactively give season three (or two, or Vengeance) an A-, and hope this season’s plot gets brewing well enough to take my mind off the scenery. They’re about to have another bath, so I’ve gotta run.

TV Guyd: The “Spartacus” Hand Book

“Excuse me. I don’t mean to bother you but I’m a nymphomaniac virgin widow and I just completed my year of mourning. I’ve got a hotel room and a latex allergy and I’m just wondering what you were doing for the next twelve to fourteen hours.”

30 Rock is coming to an end, and according to the numbers almost no one will care. It’s kind of amazing that a critics’ darling show that nobody watches has survived seven seasons. I know! I know! Your best faghag watches it—the one who wears the bulky black glasses as if she’s in publishing although she only works at the ministry of transportation (DMV for you American readers, Automobilbürokratie for you Germans), but still…she’s not anyone who buys things influenced by advertising so she doesn’t matter. Yeah, but she and I are sad because line-for-line it’s the best show that’s ever existed in the history of the universe.

“How dare you say such things so close to the statue of Santa Lucia, patron saint of judgmental statues!”

A good comedy series should have characters you like who say funny things. What are the great ones? I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Friends. For smart people: Arrested Development; for dumb people, The Big Bang Theory, and the original lost Dutch masterpiece Yes Nurse! No Nurse! (not the film, which they turned into a musical, forgetting that you can’t make a Dutch musical because their consonants are too phlegmy). To that illustrious list I’d add 30 Rock, because I like the characters and they say funny things.

“Female jealousy is an evolutionary fact, Lemon. If you try to breed it out of them, you wind up with a lesbian with hip dysplasia.”

If you haven’t ever seen it, and most of you haven’t, you should get the DVDs or do some weird illegal on-line streaming thing and start at episode one and work your way through to the most recent last gasps. That way you can cry along with the A-list when the whole thing shudders to a stop a few weeks from now. It’s really good to watch in marathon recovering from plastic surgery. Who wants to go outside their apartment when their eyes are black and their nose is in a sling? Stay home and watch Liz Lemon try to be cool and fail and fail and fail, miserably, hilariously, week after week. Oh, Tina Fey! What will you do when this is all over?

“Who hasn’t made mistakes? I once french-kissed a dog at a party to try to impress what turned out to be a very tall 12-year-old.”

But my favourite character is Jack—a racist, homophobic, rich, privileged Republican with mommy issues. Because the secret secret to a good sitcom is a character that you should hate but that you actually love who says funny things. (Hello, Karen Walker as portrayed by Megan Mullally.)

“Michael Kors is a friend—we own a gay racehorse together—and I convinced him to make wizard cloaks fashionable this winter.”

And there’s the crazy black guy, the self-centered blond, the hillybilly, and the put-upon bald guy—as if Good Times, WKRP in Cincinnati, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show had a foursome-baby. Everywhere you turn on this show there’s a stereotype that deconstructs a stereotype.

“I love this cornbread so much I want to take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant.”

For gay people, this show is completely insulting because they don’t have any sympathetic gay characters that are better than the undeserving straight people around them. Hello, every other show! We get picked on just as much! Come on. We’ve been through a lot—let us come to dinner! Nope.

Liz’s gay nephew: “I’m not going home until I give my cool cousin a makeover!”

Liz:”Is it gonna be fierce?”

Liz’s gay nephew: “It would be if it was 2006.”

Even after real-life-person Tracey Morgan, who plays Tracey Jordan on the show, said some stupid stupid homophobic things, the show made fun of the whole fru-fru-ah by having the character in trouble for saying some stupid stupid homophobic things. Despite its likeable veneer,30 Rock is the most radical thing on-air. Nothing is sacred. And in this era of cow-tow-ing to the sacred, that’s something quite special. Especially with Denise Richards championing that idiots are people too!

“Idiots aren’t just strippers or stay at home moms. Idiots are all around us!”

Because it’s not popular, there’ll never be anything like it. There’ll be lots of things like Three and a Half Men, so don’t worry about that show. But there will be nothing like this. So, catch up and suck on the bittersweet arc that ends it all. Come to my house and we’ll laugh/cry together as it goes out with a whimper/bang. I hope Kim Jong-il gets the last line!

TV Guyd: 30 Rock‘s Off

I am Tibbetts son of Tibbetts son of Tibbetts. My people forge our criticism deep in the mines of the Black Country. In honour of my ancestors I must hold firm and not let crappy movies pass, despite the delusions of the many. I’m looking at you, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Back of the line! Yes, the very back! The hammer of Moklock, the Goblin Queen, and the chisel of Lermanghaster, the Goblin Queen’s second cousin, have carved a place for you in the stone of Nurmanthalas, the Goblin Queen’s second cousin’s dry cleaner’s nephew: You are the worst film of 2012. Seal yourself up in there and breed no sequels, prequels, or trilogy-sister-wives.

Sorry, like this film, I'm just a troll.

I can forgive the Lord of the Rings being a trilogy, even if the third one seemed interminably bloated, because there were three long books as source material. But The Hobbit is a short, single book. Why has Jackson blown it up to trilogy proportions? Cynics will say for three times the mega-money. But I think it’s worse than that. I think he’s a true believer. He means this.

Is it well done at least? Not as well as LOTR — the camerawork and editing have a new sloppiness, gone is the crispness of the epic set pieces. Jackson could mash-up a stampede of elephants and a single quicksilver archer and always give you a sense of where everything was. The big fights in The Hobbit are murky and chaotic, you lose the suspense and find yourself waiting patiently for the Jackson Pollacking mud to settle. You know who’s gonna win, so what’s the bother if you can’t enjoy the details.

Bilbo gets more dwarves than Snow White but ones with less character. They have to do a lot of shtick with comical bumbling because there are no funny lines. Their hairdos are hilarious but it’s a long joke at over three hours. And this is just part 1. There’re no females, dwarf or other species. Although Cate Blanchett beams in for a scene to little effect. Maybe this movie is for ten-year-old boys. Anyone with a sex drive is going to find it lackluster. No Viggo; no Liv. Not even the odd barmaid. Even the goblins appear to be a boys’club.

The enemies in this film are monsters, orcs, goblins, trolls, dragons, what have you. It’s a very infantile view of conflict. At this place and time we need films that are subtle and nuanced. We need to develop our capacity to understand the causes of the people we are in conflict with. Demonizing our foes leads to war. Children growing up with this garbage won’t be able to champion diplomacy, compromise, empathy, understanding. They’ll want to chop goblins’ heads off. If we must have villains can’t they at least be charming like Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham or fascinating like Alan Rickman’s Snape. Yeah, this movie needed Alan Rickman, and a character for him to play.

Dull movies are a dime a dozen, even super-expensive ones, but this movie is also wrong. Its hypocrisy makes it especially unforgivable. Gandalf keeps saying things like “the brave can spare a life instead of slaying one” and “it is the small kindnesses that truly keep evil at bay,” and yet the second he’s face to face with a goblin he cuts its head off — of course! Stop pretending to be pacifists, middle-earthers. The entire structure of the plot is geared to power, violence, vanquishing, warfare. If Jackson were truly interested in small kindnesses he would have made The Sessions or Monsieur Lazhar, not this epic nonsense. A case could be made that this whole thing is some kind of allegory, somehow pro-Zionist and yet anti-Semitic. But that might be giving it too much credit for thought. It doesn’t have an idea in its head.

I read The Hobbit out loud to my kids back in the day. And it was entertaining. Somehow Jackson has sucked the life out of it, and launched another bloated dreary franchise with an evilly stupid sense of morality. The whole thing should put on a magic ring and disappear.

Cinema Guyd: The Hobbit‘s Trilogy of Terrible

The first season of American Horror Story was just about the most fun thing on TV last year. Rent the DVD if you missed it. Jessica Lange’s disturbed Southern matriarch alone is worth the price. This season has a completely new story set in an asylum run by nuns in the early Sixties. Lange and Zachary Quinto are back in brand new roles. Along for the ride are some other great actors—James Cromwell (as a mad scientist) and Chloe Sevigny (as a nymphomanic.) Nuns, nymphos, and ne’er-do-wells, oh my!

Nun in the morning, nun at night? Jessica Lange in "American Horror Story: Asylum."

Lange and Cromwell battle it out for influence in the asylum, sucking up to the monsenior priest played by Joseph Fiennes, who’s obviously got some disturbing secrets of his own. Whether science or religion wins the battle, it’s bad news for the inmates–would you rather have a caning or a medical experiment done on you? Don’t answer until you see those experiments. I pick the spanking.

A few episodes into season two and it’s hard to say if they’re going to completely pull it off. There may be one too many story-lines (back stories for all the inmates and the staff, aliens, monsters, ghosts, serial killers, and baking.) But they’ve got time. If it all pulls together, it may top the first season, just by risking more. Even if it stays a bit of a mess, plot-wise, it has tons of great acting (this time out, Lange does a Boston accent and a whole new flavor of human villainy) and a truly creepy atmosphere.

As well, there are some deeply evocative social themes. In case we are undervaluing the social changes the late sixties brought about, this show’ll remind us of the kind of unchecked power fuelled by repression that damaged so many lives. A religious mental institution is the perfect metaphor for the social order of the first half of the twentieth century. Racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia—choose your poison—it’s all here in full bloom. Don’t let the current crop of frightened conservatives glorify the Fifties. The old days sucked.

For laughs, two mockumentaries: Modern Family just keeps on going and going. It’s Anne Romney’s favorite show, for goodness sakes! It does a couple of things really well. The laughs come steadily from odd angles and the picture of contemporary America includes gays and Hispanics woven into the fabric. From a gay perspective, it’s nice to see we’ve arrived solidly enough to be poked fun at just like everybody else. Eric Stonestreet’s flamboyant gay househusband might have seemed too much of a scary caricature half a decade earlier, but there are enough boring gay accountants on TV who are perfectly masculine (aren’t there?) that the Cam’s of the world can grab a chunk of airtime without implying that all gays are self-absorbed swishy drama queens (aren’t they?) In many ways, this show, and Will & Grace before it, have probably done more for queer acceptance in the mainstream than a hoard of earnest advocates and outraged protestors. Luckily, we can have it all.

Despite its post-modern get-up, the show has extremely traditional sitcom bones–there’s nothing radical about making fun of Spanish accents, grumpy codgers, and bickering couples, whether they are gay, straight, or intergenerational. If it wasn’t so damn funny, and such a stealth vehicle for diversity rights, it’d be junk. But, nope, well be laughing at it while it changes Americans minds about gay people.

Much more worthy from a purely aesthetic point of view is Parks and Recreation. Amy Poehler plays a gung-ho municipal civil servant. She’s surrounded by a cast of quirky colleagues. Again, despite the mockumentary freshness, it’s not too far from The Mary Tyler Moore Show or other quirky workplace comedies. What makes it so good is the character acting and writing. It’s brilliantly done. And they don’t shy away from celebrating friendship and good hard work. So much TV comedy is sour, people bitching, whining, and insulting one another to a robotic laugh track. This one is about something – civic engagement as an extension of friendship and community – and it’s good hearted.

For something a little less “studio” you might want to check out the British series Threesome. It’s getting a little paler in the second season, but the first year had a loving portrait of a group of friends—a straight couple and their gay roommate—that didn’t attempt to airbrush out the darker aspects of contemporary life (drugs, sex, apathy) while celebrating the construction of an alternative family. Unfortunately, it appears to be getting too safe now that the baby’s arrived. Although, that might just be realism. I’ve seen enough parents cease being interesting in real life.

Speaking of the truth: Reality shows are scooping up an increasing amount of the TV universe and most of them are utterly revolting. Their cinematic cousin, the documentary film, is exemplary, subtle, and inspiring, for the most part. But on the small screen, it’s all dumbnuts and storage lockers. The only one I like is Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Yeah, I’m shocked, too. I was dragged to watch it and I thought the only fun would be the giggly sense of superiority I’d feel watching redneck toddler pageant families do nothing much of anything worthwhile. Yeah, it’s all that. But Mama’s a folk-philosopher of the stoic Marcus Aurelius school and the family is all kinds of love.

Honey, I shrunk America.

They don’t mean anybody any harm and they cook along trying to make life better for one another and their community. I fell in love with them and I bet you might too. The Kardashians however, will make you long for Dante’s underworld. It’ll be interesting to see the difference in the upcoming season. After a year of mega-fame, will the family be different? And will TLC pay their most lucrative reals more than four grand an episode? Have yourself a redneck party and soak up season one before the clan descends for round two.

For period drama nothing beats Downton Abbey. The nobles and their servants in the great old house get up to serious mischief. The great fun is who’s the biggest bitch, Maggie Smith’s Dowager snob or O’Brien the Machiavellian lady’s maid? Class is one thing, psychology another. The show is as much about the upstairs/downstairs parallels as it is about the distinctions. There’s some juicy gayness too! Put on your ascots and have a marathon viewing party. Three seasons of domestic intrigue, class warfare, sex and betrayal; add World War One for pathos, and Maggie Smith’s glorious zingers for comedy.

While we wait eagerly for the return and finale to Breaking Bad and to see if Doctor Who will keep up its giddy-twilight-zone creativity (these two shows being the most worthy things on television and better than most of what’s on the big screen too these days), these series (AHS, ModFam, P’n'R, BooBoo, Downton and 3-some) should tide you over with their many delights and surprises. Stay tuned.

TV Guyd: The New Season Falls Forward

I saw The Sessions a few days ago but it’s taken me time to put my response into words. The first draft was (maybe) a little over the top — “OMG OMG OMG best movie ever!”–and might have been more about how starved I am for a smart, sexy movie about real people than a purely constructive review. Too bad these “smaller” movies are overlooked in the media’s rush to the Twilight trough and the Comic-book cornucopia. Has ever so much attention been lavished on such garbage?

I thought the increase in different kinds of media was supposed to result in celebrating niches. Instead, everyone seems herded together around one bad book, one stupid movie, one dumb celebrity. So I really want to be able to promote just why this is the movie you should see this month, or in the next few months when it comes out on DVD. I can’t shake the overwhelming feeling that this is something really, really special. Seriously: OMG!

Oh, yeah, the plot: Mark O’Brien can move his head a bit, but thanks to polio the rest of his body, his curly tiny body, just lies there. He has sensation, he’s not paralyzed, which means when he gets an itch he has to talk to himself (“scratch it with your mind, scratch it with your mind, scratch it with your mind”). But what about sexual itches? Pushing 40, he’s a virgin. And because he’s a poet, he’s a Romantic, and quite articulate about the painful need, what it means to his full essence as a man, with a body and a soul. Oh, he’s also a Catholic. Which means that when he gets the idea to hire a sexual surrogate, he has to run the plan by his priest.

Let’s start the laudation of the actors in this film with William H. Macy as the priest. Macy has turned in so many brilliant quirky characters in his fantastic career that one imagines he can phone it in: show up on set, be a genius, go home in time for an early dinner with the missus (Felicity!)

His Father Brendan is a pragmatic, whole-hearted philosopher, a salt-of-the-earth fully rounded human being and a bit of a slacker. If more priests were like this the Church’d be in better hands. The man brings beer on home visits! When Mark asks him if it’d be okay to hire a sex surrogate, Father’s eyes pull back under his bushy brows; you can see the thoughts and feelings battle it out in his shaggy head. He turns toward the altar and has a moment with his maker. He turns back, tilts his head to look Mark in the eye, and says, “In my heart, um, I feel God’ll give you a pass on this one (pause)–Go for it!”

And in that pause, the actor gives us the kind of human insight only actors can give us: Here is a man who has to figure out what he knows by saying it out loud first. It’s a magical pause. He goes into the line unsure and wrestling. He comes out of it majestic and convinced.

One of the many charms of this movie is the growing of this beautiful and complicated relationship between confessor and penitent. It’ll make kids wanna grow up to be ministers in the same way Top Gun made them wanna be pilots.

And so it goes: Mark hires a surrogate. A sexual surrogate is not a prostitute, but rather a sex therapist. Although some might quibble about the distinction since it involves actually doing it. But really, a surrogate is psychotherapist and a physiotherapist in one, who teaches you and heals you so that can move forward in your sex life. And it includes actually doing it.

Helen Hunt. May the universe bless her with a long life so that we can receive the glory of a long sequence of characters, fascinating women of all the “certain ages”! Here she plays Cheryl Cohen-Greene, the surrogate, with guts and vulnerability, as smart as she is sexy as she is sensitive. The actress is full-on naked half the time, physically and emotionally. Plus she does it all with a Boston accent as good as Jessica Lange’s on American Horror Story: Asylum. You can smell the saltwater. What she does for Mark in their sessions is the most profound and precious thing you’ll be privileged to witness in the cinema this year, maybe this decade, maybe in your movie-going lifetime. Kids watching this are gonna want to grow up to be sex therapists in the same way Song of Bernadette made them want to be nuns.

But there’s more to this woman than that. We get glimpses of her crackly, ordinary home life with smart-ass teenage son and phlegmatic husband. When she speaks her session notes into her tape recorder at night, we feel the counter transference she’s not sharing with the machine. This sex work is stirring and intimate in ways her family life isn’t, and it’s troubling her.

The main body of the movie is the actual sex sessions between O’Brien and Cohen-Greene. The only other American film I can think of that didn’t shy from sex in its full awkward, funny, sad, weird, gorgeous glory is Shortbus, also coincidentally about a female therapist. Although The Sessions is probably more like something you can take your mom to.

The heart of the film is the disabled man, Mark O’Brien. Limited to a few turns of his head and an adenoidal rasp of a voice, tethered to a twist of flesh, John Hawkes gives the performance of his career. He’s stunned us in little roles and ensemble pieces, but here is a full-on star-turn moment. It’s an Oscar sure win, but that’s the least of it. There’s not a whiff of sentimentality or sanctimony. His character is a human being, a lovely one, funny, good-heated, questioning, rather mild. This isn’t the full-throated symphony of Daniel Day Lewis’s Christie Brown from My Left Foot, this is a string quartet, earthy, melodic, crystal clear, and gentle. Mark O’Brien is the person you wish you could hang out with. He’s a real person and this is a true story, but he died. Which pisses me off so deeply I want to smack myself. He’s so smart and nice and progressive he’s practically Canadian.

The other characters are mostly Personal Support Workers who help Mark. He has to spend most of his time in an iron lung, although from there he can dial the phone with a stick in his mouth. I’m tired of superheroes. You know who are really heroes? Personal Support Workers. This is their Top Gun, their Song of Bernadette. Kids will grow up wanting to be them. Pushing Mark’s gurney into vintage clothing stores, holding up the various purple paisley shirts, wheeling him home, undressing him, washing him, dressing him, this is a different kind of intimacy. Kudos to Moon Bloodgood, Annika Marks, W. Earl Brown, and Rusty Schwimmer, and the real-life PSWs, nurses, and helping professionals out there!

Intimacy: that’s what this movie is about. All kinds: physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, and even community intimacy. It’s about how human beings have to connect to other human beings to fully be themselves. The enemy here is loneliness, and man!—does it have an arsenal! People have to be brave. This movie will make you brave.

Yup. What more is there to say? Ben Lewin is the director and he’s sensitive, but unobstrusive, keeping the focus on these wonderful people. The technical effects are ordinary–which means the cineastes won’t be too quick to sing the praises of this movie, but the editing is lively and the cinematography has a little shimmer around the edges. This is how realism should be done, simple, but with a heart of poetry to it. Thinking about it a few days later, telling everyone I know to go and see it, I still feel it: OMG OMG best movie ever!

Cinema Guyd: The Lesson of The Sessions

Looper is one of those “mind-bending” thrillers that comes out every few years, like Memento, Inception, The Machinist, Source Code, Fight Club, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Matrix, Donnie Darko, Brazil, eXistenZ—less of a genre (some are mysteries, some sci-fi, some fantasy, some dramas, some comedies, some are even romances) than a philosophy (the viewer should be excited by never knowing exactly what is real, and delighted as the pieces of the puzzle eventually fall together).

Theses movies work when their conceptual premises reflect some ordinary psychological process (the desire to forget painful experiences—Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—, the insight that you’ve been sleep-walking through your life unaware of the true parameters of existence—The Matrix—, the thrill of tearing the thin veneer of polite society off your animal nature—Fight Club). They work well when the other aspects of the story aren’t neglected—when there are interesting characters in compelling situations, when the dialogue is well-written and the acting is engaging—the nuts and bolts of a fun time at the movies no matter what the genre or the philosophy. Inception is a good example of how bad things turn out when you ingnore the nuts and bolts.

Looper works on the latter front—there are some well-written scenes with tense dialogue, scenes that would work just as well on stage with minimal sets and props. And the acting is exemplary. I’ve long believed that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is our best young actor, since his brilliant triptych of leading roles in Mysterious Skin, Brick, and The Lookout—three of the finest performances this decade on film. It’s hard to believe this is the silly alien teenager from TV’s 3^rd Rock from the Sun—but maybe he absorbed some John Lithgow magic from those days, because he burst onto the big screen with mad skills and wild abandon—very Lithgowesque!

Bruce Willis and Jeff Daniels impress us in smaller roles and the women, too, shine: Emily Blunt, Piper Perabo, and Qing Xu. The acting is so good that you hardly notice that all the roles are severely underwritten. Despite the writer’s ability to craft some tense interactions in the moment, he hasn’t been able to give the human scale of the picture any through-line. What exactly is Gordon-Levitt’s character anyway? We know his job—he’s a hitman. We know a little about his background—his mother gave him up, a mob-boss mentored him—and we see him revealed as an addict, as the kind of person who would choose money over his best friend’s safety. But none of those things are explored, allowed to have ramifications, nor are the contributing factors revealed.

And yet, Gordon-Levitt gives us a deeply odd person, a googley-eyed boy doing a Robert DeNiro impersonation. Willis, amazingly, gives us that same person, but grown into himself, wiser, more mature, more confident, more decisive, a better person. Willis plays Gordon-Levitt from the future, and their scenes together are magical, the same man at different ages, contemptuous of the other for being young and stupid or for being stodgy and old. And again, they do it all with very little help from the undernourished script. I sat there wondering what they’d have had to chew on if Tom Stoppard had been invited to do some script doctoring.

The sci-fi aspects of the film are fairly standard, but are styled quite freshly—this is the grubbiest future yet, held together with duct tape more than futuristic alloys. It’s a grimey dystopia—both the future that Gordon-Levitt inhabits and the even-further-into-the-future future that Willis inhabits. The conceptual premise of the movie is that time-travel is discovered but quickly made illegal, so that the only people using it are criminal organizations. It’s hard to rub someone out in a time of ubiquitous microchipped ID’s, so they send them back into the past where Loopers take them out.

Sometimes the guy the Looper is taking out is himself from the future—they call that “closing the loop.” Well? It’s ridiculous. Luckily they keep it moving fast. Time-travel is the worst sci-fi trope: There are always going to be rambling explanations of how it works and how changing the past will change the future; and there are always going to be glaring inconsistencies (some things change everything, some things change nothing). And, frankly, it’s boring. So what? Going back 30 years into the past to get shot? Isn’t it the getting shot part that matters?

The whole premise is designed so Gordon-Levitt will have to shoot his older-self, Willis. Or not shoot him. Early in the movie, one of the other Loopers lets his older-self run free. The consequences are disastrous and that sequence is the most harrowing of the film, and almost makes the ridiculous premise worthwhile. When Gordon-Levitt is faced with the same problem, we are generally excited to see how it will turn out. Let me say, the ending is good. And because of that, and because of the fine work of the art directors and the actors, this is a worthwhile popcorn flick. And yet, it’s totally empty of any real substance. I would like to go back 30 years in the past and give writer/director Rian Johnson a crash course in phenomenology. There’s no use mind-bending an empty mind.

Cinema Guyd: Looper Scooper

There’s so much going on in Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, The Master—and so much of it is great: truly superb direction, design, lighting, acting, cinematography, editing, scoring—that it’s a shock to notice that it isn’t working. The problem is that it’s the size and shape of an epic, but that in content it’s something much smaller: a character sketch. It’s as if a short story had been blown up into a novel by the addition of lots of descriptive passages and scenes that make the same small observations repeated in different settings. Or it’s like one of those joke gifts when a trifling bonbon has been concealed in a humongous and expensive sequence of packages. When the credits role, you’ll be looking through the heaps of tissue paper for the point of it all.

The milieu the film explores is fascinating—a Scientology-like cult at the point where it spreads from being a family to being an organization; the birth of a religion, so to speak. If the film had taken a Robert Altman-esque approach and broadened its canvas, following more of the characters from time to time, it would have sit more happily within its epic scope. (It would have been great to have gotten to know the rabid wife a bit better, for example, or the faith-struggles of the son, or the hypocrisy of the daughter, or the paranoia of the son-in-law—all hinted at and abandoned.)

Instead, the focus is on two people, the Master, an L Ron Hubbard-like character (played with panache by Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his most prodigal disciple, a hard-drinking psychologically damaged ex-Navy man who becomes the movement’s pit-bull (played with conflicted passion by Joaquin Phoenix). If the film had really wanted to focus on their relationship and their characters it might have benefited from a more intimate scale, with more attention to back-story. For example, the title character, a pseudo-scientific wanna-be mystic, remains an enigma, despite the focus and the revealing performance, because we don’t learn where he came from, what drives him, and what he wants from the other people. The central flaw in the film is why these two end up in such a relationship. Why does this wildly successful religious figure find himself so engaged with this inarticulate sailor? What does he see in him?

We get more of Phoenix’s character, because the film begins and ends with him, pre- and post-involvement with “The Cause,” and because during the key scenes of “processing,” which is a kind of regressive psychotherapy modeled on Scientology’s “auditing,” we learn about some of his past traumas. But even here, we don’t learn enough. Phoenix is so amazing—fully embodying this person in every molecule—that it’s only when the movie ends that you realize he’s remained an enigma too.

I hate to knock a film that’s an ambitious and skillful drama, because we surely are starving for such a thing amid the comic-book movies and cookie-cutter rom-coms. This is exactly the sort of thing talented American filmmakers should be doing—it reminded me of the heyday of American art films in the ’70s, when Scorsese, Coppola, Altman, and Cassavetes were exploding the well-made Hollywood film and forcing it to grapple with more of the American reality. There should be a movie about Scientology or a movie about people who are drawn to starting or following cults, or even a movie about a mentor-mentee relationship in any area of male-dom, but this movie wants to do so much that it forgets to do any one of those things well. In all the attention to executing his masterful direction, Anderson forgot to write one of those films.

Cinema Guyd: “Master” Pieces

ParaNorman is like Shaun of the Dead for kids. I can’t imagine a movie eleven year olds would like more. It’s as gruesome as the best fairy tales. In one moment Norman has to wrestle a book from the rigor mortised hands of a corpse, his recently deceased weird uncle. It’s a slapstick tour de force, with the poor boy momentarily tangled under the stiff as its giant tongue flops out of its mouth and unfurls across his face. “Gross!” A few kids in the audience gleefully exclaimed. I’m with ya, kids! Yuck.

While it playfully subverts the tropes of the family-strength horror movie, it also rides upon a serious and important critique of bullying. Is it subtle and original enough to be a kid-flick masterpiece? No. Is it good giddy fun nonetheless? Pretty much.  Like many wanna-be blockbusters in the Dolby-cinema age, it loses all its playfulness at the bombastic climax, which would be excruciatingly bad—Michael Bay bad—if it wasn’t for the absolutely fantastic animation, which has to fight against the shrill-child voice acting, the unmoored direction, and the truly atrocious soundtrack music. But post-climax, it regains its tone and ends with some of its wittiest subversions.

The other main weakness might be the father character, who is one-note in conception and execution. Also, some of the minor characters don’t rise above their generic roles: the homely smart girl, the sassy black cop. However, other bit parts sparkle! Elaine Stritch voices the grandma ghost beautifully and without sentimentality. Alex Borstein chews the vocal scenary as a hammy pageant director. And mostly you’ll fall in love with the fat kid, voiced by the pitch-perfect Tucker Albrizzi. If only he’d been the main character at the climax! He’d have found highs and lows, softs and louds, lines to throw away and ones to bellow. There isn’t an uninteresting line-reading in him. Funny kid!

It’s definitely a message movie. A person who is different gets picked on by others who are either scared of him or who take advantage of the opportunity to gain social footing at the weirdo’s expense. Sometimes people bully because they think it’s the right thing to do. They believe they are encouraging the outliers to return to the fold (bullying as “pro-social norming,” the film-dad in this movie suppressing his son’s ability to talk to the dead, teen Mitt Romney’s forcibly cutting off that gay kids’ hair). Sometimes people bully to preserve the assumedly fragile status-quo (oppression as “tradition maintaining,” the puritanical judge of the film’s backstory sentencing the accused witch to hang, teen Mitt Romney’s forcibly cutting off that gay kids’ hair). But don’t worry! All that message stuff is buried deep under the zombies, ghosts, and hijinks. (It could have been buried a tad deeper to have come off more subtle and nuanced, but you won’t feel hammered to death by it, much.) You have to give a movie props for a pro-diversity message like this one’s. And maybe the next time some power-mad asshole tries to cut off some marginalized kid’s hair, the people around will step in to stop it because they saw ParaNorman at an impressionable age. And I’m Marie of Romania.

In the meantime, this flick is a good bet for your entertainment buck. Don’t take any really little kids to it, because it’s kind of scary. And don’t be afraid to go as kid-less adults—there were plenty in the crowd I went with, whooping it up with the young’uns. It’s better than any of the recent popcorn flicks for grown-ups—but then, that’s a pretty low bar.

Cinema Guyd: “ParaNorman” Activity