Child Actor

Every now and again, I watch Two and a Half Men. In general, I don't care for the show. Charlie Sheen is not one of my favorite actors, although the show is well-acted, and Jon Cryer is an excellent straight man. (I first saw him on a Becker episode where he was fantastic.) But the show crosses the line for me from funny-if-occasionally-dirty to dirty-in-order-to-try-to-be-funny. Only the British know how to pull that off. (Actually, British comedy is unique in this regard; British sitcoms will combine scatalogical humor, puns, sarcasm, high comedy and dirty jokes without flinching. Americans try too hard. If you want a tiny, tiny taste of it, American style, watch Still Standing with the British actor Mark Addy. For the real thing, check out Black Adder, Thin Blue Line, Vicar of Dibley.)

So, I only watch Two and a Half Men once and awhile. I watch it, quite honestly, for the kid. It's one of the few shows I've ever watched due to the child talent. What I like about the kid, Angus T. Jones, is that first of all, he is ordinary: a rather pudgy boy with no pretensions to unbearable cuteness (not like those horrible children on Seventh Heaven). He is precocious but in a very real, obnoxious, brat kind of way. He is also quite a good actor. Last night, he was bothering his father and uncle about the death penalty and cannibalism and asking things like, "So, if you and your girlfriend crashed in the Andes and she died, would you eat her?" which is so precisely and exactly what a 13 year old boy would say (and his father and uncle were so precisely and exactly irritated by the questions), I practically fell off the couch laughing.

Like I say, usually I don't watch a show for the kids. Randy, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, on Home Improvement was noticeably the best of the child actors (although the actor who played his older brother, Zachery Ty Bryan, keeps showing up on forensics shows as the jerk co-ed--poor guy, talk about type casting. Tangent! Tangent! far too precious but nice guy Wil Wheaton showed up on CSI: Las Vegas as a vagrant. Talk about strange. Everybody shows up on CSI: Las Vegas, even Maury Chaykin!) but Randy couldn't have carried the show alone. Few child stars can. (Without being so saccharine, you want to vomit.) Angus T. Jones comes the closest I've ever seen.

CATEGORY: TELEVISION

Self-Help Diatribe

Actually, not from me. I've been skimming a book called Self-Help Nation: The Long Overdue, Entirely Justified, Delightfully Hostile Guide to the Snake-Oil Peddlers Who are Sapping Our Nation's Soul by Tom Tiede. Like most diatribes (and self-help books), it goes on and on and on. His first chapter "Magic Bullets" sums up his position, which is then repeated ad nauseum for the next nine chapters. He goes after various self-help writers like Schlessinger, Peck, The Rules ladies, etc. And he has a point. He just only needed to make it once. Which, to be fair, I think he knows, but hey, if other people can write long-winded books, repeating the same advice over and over, why can't he?

Basically, his point is that self-help books are giving the kind of advice you can get from your mother or the Sermon on the Mount. He blames self-help manuals for creating dysfunctions when all that is really there is life, messy but liveable. That is, people make stupid choices and get into bad relationships and take dumb jobs and hurt their families and themselves because they are human, not because they are "dysfunctional."

And he goes on from there. And he's right. And it's very refreshing. But I think he misses something in the meantime. He opens by telling a story about going to a house that had just been repossessed. The house was filled, top to bottom, with self-help guides, worth $12,000. The ex-tenant's marriage had broken up, his business had failed and his house had been, as mentioned, repossessed. Tiede points out that the guy could have used that $12,000 to keep his house. (Since the books obviously didn't help.)

What Tiede fails to realize is that buying self-help books that don't help you when you are hoping that they will is also part of the messiness that is life. I think Tiede's cardinal sore point is the creating and marketing of "dysfunctions," and I agree with him that it's kind of icky, but the market caters to readers. I think people like diagnosing themselves. We like explaining ourselves to ourselves. Some of you know that I am not a huge proponent (which is putting it mildily) of Meiers-Briggs (that test which determines that you are a ITSJ or whatever), mostly because I think it becomes (like Marxist theory) a substitute for understanding. But I'm in a minority. At least, I feel like I'm in a minority. And even I will take personality tests in magazines.

Self-help falls into the came category. Wanting to read advice that we should already know about occurrences which aren't really controllable (in a step 1, 2, 3 kind of way) in the hopes that said advice will work some kind of magic cure in our heads, that's human nature, Mr. Tiede. Get used to it.

CATEGORY: BOOKS

TV Update

I've been impressed by Bones. It is a remarkably funny show, and David Boreanaz plays the deadpan straight man very well. Unfortunately, I don't watch it that often anymore because Criminal Minds is on opposite. I actually think Bones is a better written show. Criminal Minds can get a bit clunky, and it's too full (even by CSI standards) of explanatory technobabble (where experts explain things to other experts who, in real life, wouldn't need those things explained). But I adore Mandy Patinkin. It's that voice. Actually, all the men on Criminal Minds have stellar narrator voices. But Mandy Patinkin is in a category of his own. And I like all the characters (men and women) which is really, really important to appreciating a show like that. (For instance, I loath the main male character--the character, not the actor--on Without a Trace and consequently, can barely tolerate the show. I stopped watching when Malone forced Vivian out of "his job"--instead of going to Chicago like he'd planned, wife or no wife, a circumstance that he brought on himself--and was able to get "his job" back because of the implicit old-boys' chauvinism of the agency. So it might be realistic, but it doesn't make me like the guy.)

I haven't--weep, weep--been able to watch House as much as usual since I have class Tuesday night. I caught Monday's episode. It's still House-y. It's still great.

I continue to keep up with CSI: Las Vegas, but I think the current season is pretty poor.

I was wrong about Twins not lasting; it's a cute show. I was wrong about Out of Practice lasting; it's gone. I've developed a real soft spot for How I Met Your Mother. Allyson Hannigan is a great comedic actress.

I've watched a couple of Numbers episodes and liked them okay. My problem with the show is that it quite often seems like the numbers part is simply a substitution for ordinary FBI grunt work, and that the numbers solution doesn't really get to the solution any faster. The numbers' guy is always saying, "Get me all the data." So, the FBI has to go through and cull all the data anyway? Isn't coming up with an equation about it just an extra step?

But I do think that the characterization on the show is well-done and surprisingly realistic. I believe in the brothers as brothers.

So Prison Break is coming back! I've mentioned before that I can't watch the show since, although I think it is very cool, it forces me to watch from week to week (like 24). I admit to being somewhat startled by the previews. They didn't get the brother out yet? What have they been doing?

CATEGORY: TV

Welcome to Academe

It started when the professor asked us if there is a difference between history and lore; aren't they really just the same thing?

Okay, I'm game. I spoke up and said that history, or the goal of history, works within the principle of empirical evidence while lore is an attempt to get at the emotional truth or reality of an event, which evidence can't always discover. I didn't make that last bit up. It was in our reading for Tuesday's class, which I cited in class.

At which point, a woman who I have had several classes with in the course of the program, spoke up. I'm going to call her Traci. Traci declared that it really bugged her that history is perceived as true while lore is perceived as false (myth); history, she told us, is male and patriarchal and heirarchal and part of the dominant narrative, and it's all b.s.; she wasn't really responding to me, but I responded nevertheless. I pointed out that her statement was a little over-generalized; I'm a woman, and I happen to think empirical evidence is swell (or words to that effect).

She replied by saying that she wasn't talking about my relationship to history, she was talking about history as it has come down to us (through the schools): "the way we're trained to think," she said.

"Doesn't bother me," I said. At which point, another student pointed out that lore isn't exactly non-patriarchal since many of the stories that are passed down through folk culture are male-oriented and male-told. Traci retreated to the position of "well, it's all about social class" (everyone in this college, except me, eventually retreats to the "it's all about social class" position).

I suppose anyone who has been in a college course where this topic has been discussed knows where this is headed. I knew where it was headed, although I figured the professor would push it off track before it got there. He didn't.

In any case, since I had made myself the object of attention, he directed his next few questions at me. Basically, he was arguing the concept that people live in their own heads; what they perceive as real is true to them. There is a great deal of validity to this idea, but I wasn't prepared to jump on the bandwagon whole-hog, considering the underlying assumptions. I especially wasn't willing to accept that history & lore are just two variations of the same thing: the creation of a narrative. (I realize they can be, but I was thinking of history as it had been defined in the class: male, empirical, academic, factual, etc.)

The professor brought up that book Million Little Bits, or whatever it is called. If the guy who wrote the book really believed that those things happened to him, and the book is based on his memory, can we really get into a bruhaha over his "reality."

"Yes!" I said.

Now, I honestly don't care about the book or the bruhaha, but I said, "The guy went on shows and people believed him and those 'facts' were out there, and we have a responsibility to the truth, to be accurate about things."

Anyway, at this point it was only a matter of time. Sure enough, we hit the biggest issue of them all: the Holocaust. If all reality is relative, and if Holocaust deniers really believe that the Holocaust didn't happen, doesn't that mean that, for them, that "reality" is true.

Which is why, as I tried to point out way at the beginning of the class, you don't confuse history, or the pursuit of history, no matter how male and patriarchal, with lore, or the pursuit of lore.

"After all," said one student, "does it really matter if it was 1 million or 5 million people who died?"

Now, before I continue, I should state that I do not think the student was making a deliberate anti-semitic or denial statement. I think he has no idea that most Holocaust denial centers around reducing the number of Jews who died in concentration camps in Europe. He was (simply) responding to the "it's all about the emotion of the event" relativism that was being promoted (by the professor in the class).

And I went nuts. I said, "Yes, it matters! It matters to the people who died."

"But," he said, "does it matter in terms of the stories that are collected? The stories don't have anything to do with statistics. What's the difference between 5 million and 1 million?"

Now, notice that the business of statistics (empirical history) and lore (emotional content) has gotten conflated. Have I mentioned that the two are distinct and should be dealt with as distinct?

I said, "A lot. It matters. It matters to the people who died; it matters to the families who were affected. It matters what battles were fought in what towns, and what people disappeared from where. Statisticians know--they can figure out--that 5.8 to 6 million Jews disappeared from Europe. And that matters." At which point, I got a tad more sarcastic about the flightiness of relativity.

"You keep saying it matters," he said, "but you can't say why."

And I just gaped. I'd given him some fairly solid emotional reasons. Do I actually have to defend the need for historical veracity?

Another student said, "It matters in terms of the stories that are lost," and then went on to say, "If the number isn't kept consistent, then it changes every time a story is told, and eventually that truth has been lost."

"Look," I broke in, "there is the lore, and then there is the statistical evidence, and I'm willing to say that as far as the lore is concerned, the statistical evidence isn't important," at which point another student sighed as if, well, duh, finally the whacked out chick has gotten on board. I could have hit him. I continued, "But you can't take lore and apply it to evidence. You set it aside. You don't confuse the two. You don't let lore determine evidence." Except I was a lot angrier and hostile than it sounds reading it.

And then, Traci piped up again. I think Traci was a bit dismayed by the direction the conversation had taken. History, according to Traci, isn't all b.s. anymore, but the statisticians miss things, and, she continued, looking at me, she thinks the academic world doesn't take the emotional/lore side of things seriously enough.

I just stared at her. I was so angry, I think I could have chewed concrete at that point. I wasn't the one who decided history was evil (leading to a stupid conversation in which historical facts and relativistic lore were constantly confused); I wasn't the one who made the system oppositional and binary. I never said anything that disagreed with her final statement. As the student next to me said, "We want to keep the baby and the bathwater." (Another student said, "The two [history and lore] have different functions," which I also went along with.)

I kept a very low profile for the rest of class so I wouldn't throw staplers or anything at people, and I realized, actually, yes, Traci and I do disagree. Because when Traci says, "Academe ignores the way people in history are feeling," she doesn't mean, as I do, that the academic world has a tendency to be extremely literal and label-happy. Traci is a literal, label-happy person who constantly makes negative, stereotyped and generalized statements about Christianity, history, people she disagrees with and, for that matter, stuff she does agree with, like paganism (which she romanticizes as female and environmentally friendly). When Traci says, "Academe ignores the way people are feeling," she means, "Academe ignores the lack of power that people have." Or the excessive power that people have. Or how unfair everything in history is.

And I felt, in a very literal way, sick. I honestly can't say whether, if I hadn't been there (and believe me, I wish I hadn't been), anyone would have bothered to argue with the professor's initial point (which was more of a devil's advocate position than anything else). Despite the few students who backed me up, the general attitude was that I was making a fuss out of nothing. Being historically accurate is all very well, but we here in this Master's program are more interested in saying things like, "It's all in people's heads," and bringing up the concept of ideologies: can we blame it on race, class, gender, power? If I had been absent, I think that, with maybe one or two exceptions, the professor's "aren't history and lore just variations on a theme?" idea would have been accepted as a truism.

I don't think this is a minor issue, although it is obviously a pointless battle for me to fight. I realize, in retrospect, that a great deal of confusion was caused by language: history (as an empirical study) versus history (as learned narratives) versus lore (as rumor and hearsay) versus lore (as constructed narratives) versus lore (as experienced realities). However, I was fairly clear that I was referring to history as an empirical study, and the class in general commonly mixed history as an empirical study (statistics, numbers, verifiable data) with the remaining definitions. Have I mentioned that history shouldn't be confused with . . . . oh, never mind. In any case, the difference, as far as I can tell, between me and the general consensus is that I think history (study or narrative) is held to a (male, patriarchal and, by the way, excellent) standard that lore is not. (At one point, when Traci was getting upset about history as it is taught, I said, "But how could you teach lore?" meaning not the study of lore, but the emotional resonance of any subject. Especially, since it is hard enough to get kids to understand that the Civil War happened before WWI.) I actually think lore should be held to a standard as well; to me, the emotional truth of a subject isn't the label (see below) but how well it sits with the evidence. It's all very well for Traci to say that paganism was sweet and matriarchal and environmentally gracious, but that doesn't really fit with what we know about the Roman Empire, the Greeks, Syrians, Babylonians, Celts, Huns, Vikings, Egyptians . . . However, I wasn't going to go down that path; my acceptance of lore as non-empirical and non-verifiable was my concession to the argument.

In any case, it seems to me that everyone else was far more interested in discussing things in terms of theory in which case it doesn't matter, to them at least, whether you mixed statistics with relativity. Label, label, label, who has got the label. As I have stated before, and I will say again, discussions in the academic world about class, race, gender and power are overrated, oversimplified, superficial and unbalanced. Theory and label are all very well, but if you don't accept the evidence, how can you argue about things you know nothing about? And why are you bothering? Make up your own story, already. (I was, I have to admit, really very annoying; at one point, when the teacher was talking about how scholars try to figure out why people tell the stories that they do, I said, "So scholars just throw a bunch of meanings at a folkstory and hope one of them sticks?" He didn't really like that, although Traci laughed.)

It's not like this experience is new to me. I've been in four classes with Traci, for instance, and she says the same kinds of things in every class, things that to me seem outrageously bigoted. But since empirical history is evil and male and patriarchal, she doesn't have to answer for her prejudices (which I honestly believe she thinks she doesn't have). Since she's anti-academe, she finds my anti-academe comments amusing, but knowledge, for Traci, is all about getting power back (from evil, white males). It isn't about truth: factual or emotional. She doesn't even seem to care what people actually experience since she was ready to dismiss my non-angry experience with male academic culture; what she seems to care about is whether she can label what people are experiencing in terms of power or victimhood.

I don't think that most students go as far as Traci, but Tuesday's class made it clear to me that I am even more alone in this higher education experience than I had imagined. Because if the students are more tempered, in general, than Traci, they continue to support the basic, underlying assumptions that frame Traci's thinking.

Welcome to Academe.

CATEGORY: HISTORY & LEARNING

Cryonics

The following is a review of Robert Ettinger's 1964 book The Prospect of Immortality. This review is actually part of my (much longer) thesis (which actually isn't about cryonics). But I thought the review part would make an interesting read. I would like to state upfront that although I refer to Ettinger's view of cryonics as a theology, it is not, in fact, a theology according to cryonauts. I say this because if it really were a theology--and cryonics really was a church--I wouldn't write what I've written; belief is very much a visceral, personal, wacky kind of thing. But cryonics claims to be science and not a religion. So I figure, it's fair game.

Much of cryonics theology finds its basis in Robert Ettinger's incredibly silly book, The Prospect of Immortality, which is notable for its completely sincere, and utterly naïve, complacence regarding the future. Even Star Trek, that ever optimistic science fiction drama, postulates a third World War, mass destruction of all major countries and a generation of feudalism before star travel creates the perfect future. Cryonics honestly seems to believe that the social and financial institutions that keep cryonauts frozen today will remain stable over the next hundred or so years. Do they read history, I wonder? Even if you believe in a slowly improving world, you should have noticed that it has a tendency to improve in uneven peaks and troughs: two steps forward, one step back.

The future, Ettinger believes, will be swell, a veritable Golden Age of perfection, so marvelous that we can barely imagine it today. Through genetic engineering, human intelligence, strength and health will all be enhanced, so enhanced, in fact, that frozen individuals will have to be improved, before they wake, in order to keep pace: "we shall be immediately equal to our descendents," Ettinger assures the reader. However, the issue of genetic enhancement dovetails with the issue of identity: if I am genetically altered to the point where I no longer appreciate Shakespeare's puny language (really, Ettinger says that), will I even be myself anymore, and if I am not, what's the point?

Ettinger, ever game, takes on this issue. Identity, Ettinger claims, is man-made. "We have degrees of identity," he postulates and even goes so far as to suggest that souls can share a body; a second "twin-soul" may enter the cryonically frozen body when it is revived. Which begs the question of why I can't simply be buried, leaving instructions in a vault at Alcor (popular cryonics lab) to name some future poor (but improved) slob "Katherine Woodbury." Wouldn't that satisfy Ettinger's request that I demonstrate a "strong and bold" spirit about the future by "seek[ing] growth and betterment, both for [myself] and for others"? Do I need to send my body along for the ride?

The response to the final query is answered in Ettinger's book and by current cryonauts: yes, it matters because it is my "life" or, rather, my body that has been "extended." According to cryonics, being declared dead isn't like being really dead, in the soul-leaving-my-body sense of the word (despite Ettinger's lapse into relativity) as long as the scientists get to me fast enough. I am, literally, put on ice. Eventually, I'll be revived. After all, goes the argument, people have died temporarily and been revived before and nobody squawks (they do it on House all the time). It's just a medical procedure. Penicillin preserves life; nobody bans it. Why should this be any different?

It is here that cryonics fails, to a rather startling degree, to comprehend human nature. Should I undergo hypothermia (one of the more popular examples) or suffer heart failure, I will not be gone for long. After all, if I am not revived quickly, I will die. Should I suffer a coma, my out-of-commission period may be longer, but not any longer than my body can endure. I will not last much more than a generation. I will wake up to a world that, although changed, will be fairly recognizable, and I will have suffered (albeit asleep) through the experience. In fact, I may wake up brain damaged or paralyzed; certainly, my muscles will be weak and my vision disoriented. I will have been influenced, affected, by the passage of time. I am myself because I am growing old. Ettinger would agree with this latter statement, but in Prospect he argues that we are different people at sixty than at six, why should we be surprised that we will be different people in 1,000 years? Yet, between sixty and six, I am there, present, going through the hormonal changes and life changes. I am a participant in that thing called life.

Everybody fears death, Ettinger declares. Nobody is truly courageous in the face of their mortality. Everybody wants a long life. Yet Ettinger consistently fails to appreciate what it is about death that people fear. He quotes from a doctor of psychiatry that "death can be faced more readily if there is little to lose by leaving life than if there is a great deal to lose," yet misses the implications of that good doctor's analysis. "To die, to sleep," Hamlet groaned. "To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub/For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil/Must give us pause." Any sensible person, that is. Ettinger, it seems, needs to read more Shakespeare.

With cryonics, Ettinger had simply substituted one unknown for another. If I believe in an after-life, the uncertainty of my future (what comes next) is just as strong as if I freeze myself. In both cases, I must exercise belief that something exists or will exist outside my immediate, temporal experience; at the very least, with cryonics, I must trust in people like Ettinger. (Trusting in someone like Joseph Smith is a good deal more entertaining and far more mind-blowing.) On the other hand, if I don't believe in an after-life, I am simply burdening the new and improved future with the task of reviving and enhancing me (which doesn’t strike me as very dutiful, no matter how bold) in a bid to avoid oblivion. But cryonauts claim that cryonics isn't about fear; they also claim it doesn't conflict with religion. Which it probably doesn't since frozen people are, well, dead, and you might as well be buried in ice as in a crypt (although your relations might balk at the bill).

What Ettinger and his disciples fail to appreciate, in their effort to promote the future, is the underlying non-fun aspect of cryonics. The pleasure of life is the participatory nature of the event. Once you remove the quality of participation, interest flags. There are, according to Wikipedia, only 140 frozen bodies in the U.S. David Koresh had as many people at Waco, Texas. Me thinks cryonics isn't in for the long haul (and those 140 bodies are, I'm sorry to say, going to be thawed).

(Ettinger really is amazingly fatuous. At one point, he postulates a future where there is no motherhood. Women who claim pregnancy and birth is positive and beautiful, he says, are just suffering from "a psychological trick, making a virtue of necessity," and he compares the experience to elimination. So, he's sexist and a jerk. Here's the point, though: Ettinger goes on to argue that "family life" and "the institution of marriage" will still exist and "people will still want children." So, we will be so different we won't want Shakespeare, but not so different that we won't want marriage, families and children. So, basically, Ettinger's future is whatever Ettinger is currently in favor of.)

(Yes, the Shakespeare comment rackled.)

CATEGORY: BOOKS

Commentary about Commentary

So, there's two different kinds of commentary on DVDs: unscripted and scripted. Unscripted (which may actually be more scripted than it sounds) are when the actors or committee or whoever get together in a studio and watch the movie and say things like, "Isn't this the part where you spilled jello on your shirt, Keanu?" And unless the actors or committee are actually clever conversationalists, it's like listening in on any two-hours of small-talk: deadly dull. It also proves what people should know but forget. Dave Foley is funny on-stage, on-screen. That isn't the same as sticking him in a studio and telling him to be witty and funny to a microphone. Some people can be unrelentingly funny and amusing all the time. They become radio commentators. Or Dave Barry. But a lot of actors are funny only when they are inside a part or in front of a camera. And expecting them to come up with ever so amusing commentary is very unfair.

(In the Lord of the Rings commentary, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan (Pippin and Merry) are worth listening to, being amusing people in their own right so to speak. My favorite bit is when, Hugo Weaving on-screen, they whisper, "It's . . . it's . . . the guy from the Matrix!")

Scripted commentary is when a professor of film or an expert in something reads a lecture. These can be fascinating, and they are far, far preferable to the written biographical texts sometimes included on DVDs (which I can never read). The commentary on Brigham Young (1940), for instance, is especially good. The problem here, of course, is that it's a lecture. The Brigham Young commentary made a real effort to have the lecture correspond to what you see on the screen, but the last commentary I listened to (for that great black & white film, Laura), while interesting, didn't correspond at all to the images. Which was kind of pointless. The reason I watch movies with commentary is because I want to hear the inside scoop on how a scene was put together: how many takes were involved; whether there were prior versions. (The one thing I learned from the Laura commentary was that there was a director before Preminger who had shot some footage, but Preminger had a different concept of how the film should look and eventually, scholars think, reshot almost all of the first director's material. The main thing that struck me from the commentary was how backstabbing and nasty Hollywood was--makes the Mafia look frivolous and kind-hearted in comparison. It's probably still the same, only there's more press so directors have to try harder to pretend to be nice.)

The thing I detest the most with scripted and unscripted commentary is the commentator who says, "There's Dana Andrews. Now he's walking across the floor." Yes, I can see that. I'm watching the movie! Dean Cain does this in his commentary for an episode he wrote for Lois & Clark. However, there's something incredibly guileless about Dean Cain (despite the fact that he played Scott Peterson in the made-for-TV movie). "There's me," he says at one point, and you've got to forgive so much well-meaning astonishment. I turned it off because he kept doing it: "There's Lane Smith." "There's Justin Whalin." But I put that down to the don't-expect-actors-to-be-intellectuals-and-amazing-conversationalists issue referred to above.

On the other hand, the Laura DVD has two commentaries, and the other is awful. The one I've been referring to is by Rudy Behlmer. The other commentary starts almost exactly the way I've described ("There's Dana Andrews. He's walking across the floor.") It's ridiculous. At least Behlmer says, upfront, "If you haven't watched this before, go watch it first." The commentator is not supposed to be a narrator. The whole point of a movie, especially a great movie like Laura, is that it is an entity unto itself: not flawless but whole. If a director puts in voice-over, it's because the director wants that voice-over. If a director doesn't put in voice-over (a la, the second Blade Runner), it's because the director doesn't want voice-over. It is not up to the commentator to supply it!

Frankly, I've given up on commentary. There's very few commentaries that actually do what I want: talk about the craft. The commentary for Other Side of Heaven is actually the best I've heard; the commentator addresses different parts of the movie (while you are watching them): why certain decisions were made, etc. etc. I wish M. Night Shyamalan would do commentary (especially on Signs, which I want to see again, but it's way too scary to watch without commentary: really, it scared me way more than The Village or Sixth Sense), but maybe a certain kind of director feels there shouldn't be commentary at all. Which I can respect.

CATEGORY: MOVIES

Dear Frankie

There's a lot of films out there that people never hear about. There's all those Disney releases for one thing: Pinocchio 2, Cinderella 2, Bambi 2 (really, there's a Bambi 2). And then there's the films that snap into the theatres and then snap out again. And then there's the films that you only hear about from the previews on the DVDs you rent. And some of these films are terrible. And some are uh, okay (you can see why they weren't big hits) and some of them are real gems.

Dear Frankie falls into the real gem category. It's this tender little story that takes place in Scotland. It stars Sharon Small who also plays Detective Lynley's sidekick and a woman who looks like the actress who plays Detective Lynley's wife, so at first I thought it was a Detective Lynley reunion, but in fact the second actress is Emily Mortimer, not Lesley Vickerage. There's an excellent child actor, Jack McElhone, who has this fantastic ability to express a range of emotions just by cocking his head and raising his brows. And Dear Frankie stars Gerard Butler, who also plays the Phantom but looks entirely different in this movie. Granted, most people look different when there isn't a mask covering up half their face, but he seems a lot darker (and oddly enough, taller: I think it's the clothes) than in Phantom. It doesn't take long to pick up that it's the same bloke, however. He has this kind of triangular face and possibly the sexiest mouth in history, meaning his lips, not his voice, although his voice is sexy too, but hearing his (real) voice helped me understand why his Phantom singing voice confused me a bit. He's singing with a BBC type British accent laid over a northern England/Glasgow accent. It isn't bad, mind you, just puzzling.

I'm not going to talk about the plot of Dear Frankie because it is one of those movies that I actually wish I hadn't known the premise going into (although I probably wouldn't have rented it otherwise). But the movie has a gentle, unwinding quality about it, where you are revealed certain facts at certain times, without fanfare, and I'd hate to spoil that.

What you do need to know is that it is a love story (where love encompasses more than romantic love: not less, just more) and has a quiet, whimsical quality about it. I kept expecting, because I've been inundated with so many similiar plots, for the bad guys to show up (whoever they were) or for some hideous secret to be revealed (a la Phantom) or for a huge argument to ensue. Kind of like My Big Fat Greek Wedding where you keep expecting some terrible event to prevent the marriage from taking place, when, in fact, the movie is capable of keeping your interest without resorting to histrionics. Dear Frankie is the same. It's about good people, truly good people, who are good without being sentimentalized.

I don't necessarily mind histrionics, by the way. See my post below about Phantom and my much earlier post about Jason Bourne. But now and again, it's nice to see a movie that doesn't kill people off or throw people in jail so you will learn how gritty and tough life is. I find it so much more interesting to watch people dealing with gritty and tough gracefully, which is what Dear Frankie is about. (And despite the too-good-to-be-true aspect of Butler's character, it actually makes psychological sense, when you think about it.)

CATEGORY: MOVIES

The Taste of Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks is one of my favorite actors, and I've noticed that he has a proclivity for a certain kind of movie. I figured it out when I (finally) watched That Thing You Do!--the movie is something like ten years old, but I never got around to watching it until about a month ago. And as I was sitting there, I thought, "It's Castaway!"

Not really. No tiny island in the tropics. No Fed-Ex packages. No long lost girlfriend. But the feel of the two movies is the same. Both are stories about a guy, an ordinary sort of guy. Smart, talented, employed. Not saintly or evil. I'd say, "Everyman," but I don't think "everyman" is what Tom Hanks is aiming for precisely. This guy, whoever he is, isn't supposed to represent all average, ordinary people. He is an idiosyncratic individual trying to get by in his own life.

Anyway, this ordinary individual undergoes an experience. In That Thing You Do! he's the Tom Everett Scott character, a Tom Hanks look-a-like (it's really disconcerting; he looks like a clone of Tom Hanks from Big) who takes the whole "popular boy's band" adventure in stride. The event is seen from his eyes; the experience he gains isn't negative or positive, it's just life. He gets the girl, but in an ordinary, well-yes-of-course kind of way.

Castaway, with Tom Hanks in the starring role, is very similar. The ordinary hero doesn't get the girl, but he does survive. Life unfolds around him until he is left, at the end of the movie, at a crossroads in open country. There's no huge thundering moment of climax. It's more that here, now, is another set of choices. Life will keep going.

This similarity of theme might seem like a fluke but both The Terminal and Catch Me If You Can, where Tom Hanks plays the main role and a supporting role, are the same kind of thing. The ordinary man of The Terminal is a good guy caught in a horrible situation (the scene where Viktor sees his country collapsing on T.V. but can't communicate his distress to anyone is the most haunting part of the movie). Viktor is heroic precisely because he is ordinary. He is good but not perfect. He is simple but not simple-minded. He follows the rules, but he isn't trying to make any kind of statement or win any kind of political battle. This is not Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In the end, the secret (I'm giving away a lot of endings here) isn't the cure to cancer. Viktor is only trying to carry out a father's rather small but important wish.

Catch Me If You Can is somewhat different, but what I like about Hanks in this movie is that he doesn't play the FBI man as wrong or right. I guess that is what I find so amazing about Hanks. He has this capacity to play people rather than states of mind or political opinions. Which is why he could play the romantic hero on You've Got Mail (yes, my favorite Tom Hanks' movie) without making him snotty or self-pitying or apologetic. (And yet very, very funny.)

On an end note, Hanks is turning out something like five movies this year. Talk about being in demand!

CATEGORY: MOVIES