Yearly Archives: 2010

July 21, 2010

16. 宮本武蔵完結篇決闘巌流島 (1956)

directed by Hiroshi Inagaki
screenplay by Tokuhei Wakao and Hiroshi Inagaki
based on Hideji Hojo’s adaptation of the novel by Eiji Yoshikawa (1935–9)

Criterion #16. This title’s so huge it takes up two cards — think of that!

I know, I know, we all love this translation busywork. It must be done — trust me — but I’m going to keep it as brief as I can.

宮本武蔵完結編決闘巌流島, pasted from Wikipedia, is identical to the title seen onscreen in the film, except for the seventh character (last character on the first screenshot above). I can find some Japanese sites that corroborate the character 篇 in place of 編, but no clear explanation of the distinction; as with last time, the dictionaries and translation sites buy the Wikipedia version and are uncertain about the film version, so maybe it’s archaic, or regional.

宮本武蔵 = “Musashi Miyamoto”
完結編 (完結篇?) = “kanketsuhen,” concluding episode or part
決闘 = “kettō,” duel (now being spelled the standard way)
巌流島 = “Ganryūjima” a real island

So: Musashi Miyamoto kanketsuhen: kettō Ganryūjima, or “Musashi Miyamoto concluded: Duel at Ganryujima.” Criterion has Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island. Fine!

Final analysis roundup: the first one stands up the best on its own, but if one is going to watch the whole series, this third one is the most compelling and interesting. The second one falls victim to the standard “middle chapter” problem — since it contains neither setup nor payoff of the main storyline, it has to depend on a secondary subplot for its sense of form, and so it feels accordingly inconsequential.

Of course, even that’s not a great excuse, because the “main storyline” of this series isn’t some kind of elegant, rigorously constructed arc — it’s more of a meandering episodic thing, where the characters crop up and down and meet and separate over many years. Hence the “Japan’s Gone with the Wind” thing that Criterion pushed in their marketing. Yeah — Gone with the Wind has always felt a little arbitrary to me, too.

It may just be that I don’t have a very well developed taste for epic structure. I think it’s probably part of my audience-member DNA that I am personally very dependent on form, balance through time, symmetry, expectations, etc. I don’t really know what to make emotionally of experiences that spool out at indefinite length. My mild sense of lostness in movies like these is I think analogous to my sense of lostness listening to, say, Japanese traditional music. The form is too relaxed and open for me to care about where we’re going, so my only recourse is to care entirely about the present moment… but then the present moments in these movies are no more nuanced or rich than in any other movies. Likewise the present moments in traditional Asian musics. Where is my heart supposed to go? It just sort of lolls around inside of me, waiting for someone to speak up and point and say “look, a future approaches — let’s go try to meet it!” Either that or “look right here, look how true this is!” But neither of those happens.

I know they’re not going to happen, of course, because the real point of a movie like this is something else — it’s about feeling some kind of transport of epic-ness. I’m not unsusceptible to transports of epic-ness, even very old-fashioned ones — like I said, I was generically moved when he walked into the sunset at the end of the first one, and I was similarly moved by moments in this one — but I don’t seek them out, nor am I inclined to seize every slight opportunity to experience them. Fantastical, unreasonable emotions have to actually come and find me; if they just hover nearby as possibilities, I am skeptical of them. This is, I think, why opera has always been hard for me.

This third movie is particularly opera-like in that one can tell by the rhythm, by the music, by the swells of unearthly intensity, whenever the story is breathing its epic breaths — and if one chooses, one can be emotionally affected by the incredible poignancy that is being telegraphed, even as one doesn’t necessarily know why the circumstances entail such poignancy. I gather that such moments are actually the most treasured and most profound to opera-lovers — the unjustifiable emotions that billow eerily outward from flimsy, clichéd events. I guess I get the appeal, but only in proportion and only within a clear framework. Man does not live by Fancy Feast alone.

Wow, that’s pretty confused, but I’m leaving it.

This movie is also opera-like in its grand-scale contrivances and absurd crises. When one of the two desperate woman tosses the other an axe, seizes her own, and declares that they are going to fight to the death for Musashi’s love, that’s, uh, really something.

Anyway, I appreciated that this episode sort of addressed my thematic problems with the last one, even if some of its answers aren’t retroactive. Yes, it was wrong for Musashi to kill all those guys! and yes, above and beyond being the best of the best, there is real life to be lived. Musashi spends a good hour of this one being a farmer, working the land and whittling holy statues out of wood. He has attained enough samurai wisdom to realize that rather than kicking ass, maybe he should be tending his garden. In light of where we had come from, I appreciated that. Of course, it is all in the interest of building up to the superhero duel of a lifetime. But even at the climax, the moral turns out to be that to kill a great man in the name of being awesome is actually tragic, and Musashi (spoiler alert: he wins) ends the trilogy with tears in his eyes. Substantive, right? Well, not really, but an honorable gesture toward substance.

Once again, it was something to look at it. The fighting continued to seem very fake, but when huge, dangerous-looking, obviously real fires blaze right nearby, it more than compensates. And the final sunset-on-the-beach duel was lovely.

These movies are not superficial or kinetic enough to be watched as action, not perceptive or well-written enough to be watched as real human drama, not thoughtful enough to be watched as philosophic or symbolic, nor even clearly-drawn enough to be really savored as melodramatic soap. But what they are is a genial mishmash of bits of all those things, in an excellently nostalgia-colored package. They didn’t mean much to me but they cannot be borne any ill will. They were as sturdy and reassuring and unworthy of criticism as a speckled linoleum floor. I feel certain that they would have bored me plenty as a kid. To an adult, such a warm boredom can be its own reward.

Let me mention the occasional narrative subtitles that don’t correspond to anything, which have been present in all three. I read that in the original US release of the first episode, William Holden’s voice was added to help connect the dots for foolish westerners, but there is no such voice to be heard here, in any language. Are these subtitles replacements for unseen Japanese subtitles, or are they just bold editorial additions by the translators? I want to believe they’re the former; they feel like they fall in places where the movie has intentionally left space for them. In any case, they were helpful.

Trivia: this is the movie from whence the “he’s so amazing that he can catch flies with chopsticks” thing comes. The Karate Kid just up and lifted it.

Farewell, Ikuma Dan. I suspect we won’t be hearing from you again. I understand you were a very successful opera composer. And why not. My listeners at home will be relieved to learn that for the third go-round, he reworked the theme to reflect Musashi’s newfound maturity, and so this, your Criterion Collection track 16, is actually different music from the preceding two. Hooray! Main title.

Okay, now that we’re at the end I’ll offer you this: it turns out that you can watch all three of these movies online, at a site that seems to agree with me that they epitomize the “movie that happens to be on TV.” One, two, three. Knock yourself out.

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July 17, 2010

15. 續宮本武蔵一乗寺の決斗 (1955)

directed by Hiroshi Inagaki
screenplay by Tokuhei Wakao and Hiroshi Inagaki
based on Hideji Hojo’s adaptation of the novel by Eiji Yoshikawa (1935–9)

Criterion #15.

I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve received since my post about Musashi Miyamoto begging me please to review the sequel. Conveniently enough, said sequel is the very next release in The Criterion Collection, and I have just watched it, so I am well equipped to meet that request. Nonetheless, those eager correspondents, if any, are going to be disappointed, because I firmly maintain that I do not write “reviews” on this here site. Sorry kids, but like the song says, I can’t be your Owen Gleiberman. My self-assignment is simply to write “responses,” or more precisely, to give an entry the same title as whatever movie I have just seen, and then put something in the body. The rest, dear reader, is up to you.

Or is it?

In any case, luckily for y’all I have fairly conservative tastes as a blogeur and the chances are slim that I will go all avant-garde and not mention the movie once. Though I am gearing up to do an apologia about how I refuse to watch one of the movies. Aficionados of the list will know what I’m talking about.

OKAY, IT’S ICHIJOJI TIME!!!

Let me and google break “続宮本武蔵一乗寺の決闘” down for you.
続 = “Zoku,” a prefix meaning “continuation” or “sequel.”
宮本武蔵 = “Miyamoto Musashi,” ah-DUH. See how it’s big and bold on the title card?
一乗寺 = “Ichijōji” (or Ichijō-ji”), the name of a real Buddhist temple
の = “no,” a basic particle that here is apparently a sort of possessive, like “of”
決闘 = “kettō,” meaning “duel” (made of characters meaning “decision” and “fight”)

(Oh, except wait, even though that’s how it’s spelled in absolutely every reference source online (though some of them omit the の), that’s not how it’s spelled on the title card. The last character is different, see? 斗, not 闘. This is a bit of a stumper for my online resources. Google translate is still willing to tell me that 決斗 means “duel,” but the transliteration site says that 決斗 is not “kettō” but “ketsu to,” and none of the dictionaries are having it. Also, I see that the preview for this movie actually has the character 閗 in that place, which if you look closely seems to be a sort of compromise.)

(Oh hey, and look at that, the first character is different too. 續 instead of 続. The sources tell me it’s just a lesser-used variant of the same. Apparently, in Japanese, the exact characters aren’t considered a essential part of titles. Or maybe something else is going on. I give up. In case you didn’t know, I DON’T SPEAK JAPANESE.)

So anyway, we (probably) have Zoku Miyamoto Musashi Ichijōji no kettō, which is something lke Musashi Miyamoto continued: Ichijōji Duel.” Criterion calls it Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple, which is fine, all things considered, though I still think they could have manned up and admitted that this trilogy is called Musashi Miyamoto and not Samurai. As mentioned last time. I’m gonna let that go, I swear.

So far, so good, my lucky readers!

If you are a lover of samurai films, you will know this film well as “the one where at the beginning he fights a guy with a chain and at the end he goes up against like 80 guys by himself.” The path between those two points is wobbly. Where the first film felt pleasantly simplistic, this one trips over its feet a little. Perhaps the problem is that the source material is overlong and overcomplicated and the task of adaptation has been occasionally fumbled.

Here is what it was like to watch this movie:

“Since when does that other woman also love Musashi desperately, and why? What is the significance of this fighting school, and why is he so dead-set on dueling the master? Is he really actually killing all these guys just to hone his skills? Is he still an outlaw? What is driving him personally? Are we supposed to see him as sensitive or insensitive? Are we supposed to feel sorry for the pathetic, cowardly former friend, or is he comic relief? Or is he actually supposed to be despicable? Does the priest want the woman to become a nun? Who was the Yoda-like guy at the beginning and why didn’t he ever reappear? Is that kid really Musashi’s apprentice or not? Why on earth does the woman rebuff Musashi when he finally tries to kiss her? What’s the deal with the mysterioso nemesis guy? Other than establishing himself for the audience so that he can duel Musashi in the next movie, what the hell is he doing? And don’t any of these samurai, like, own land or something? Didn’t being a samurai entail something beyond an endless Street Fighter II competition for fighting supremacy and soulful awesomeness?”

The answer to the last question is, “uh, I don’t think so, at least not in this movie.” Just now did some Wikipedia reading to understand what the deal is with samurai, and I see that, okay, for a time they really were sort of rogue would-be warlords who roamed around obsessing over honor and challenging each other to monster duels. Something just feels strangely untethered about that as a milieu. In westerns, there’s always something at stake — a town or a ranch or a woman or something — around which the duels crop up. The plot of Seven Samurai was about a town; that made sense to me. In detective noir there’s some client’s money that makes the thing go — the moral code, the betrayals etc. are the dust that gets stirred up by the plot. Musashi, by contrast, lives in a MacGuffinless universe. He is in it to win it and there is no ‘it’. He must fight and scowl and concentrate because that is his destiny, period.

Presumably there is some final epic duel — don’t quote me on this, but I think it just might be a Duel at Ganryu Island — beyond which lies the state of true mastery, which having been attained will allow Musashi to do something or other. But my guess is the movie will end at that point. If there is any doing in this universe, it is not our concern. These are movies about what a man will be, played out in as little context as possible. Historically accurate or not, that’s some pretty stylized subject matter, and I think your mileage will depend on how much that corresponds with your personal worldview. It’s not very close to mine. The moral question of how to be seems fairly obvious, to me, so I prefer movies that are about people figuring out what to do.

Based on youtube and amazon comments, the people who love these movies seem to be people who are moved by the idea of pursuing a moral code, and also people who are moved by heroes, heroes, heroes. Something about the appeal of the “hero” paradigm escapes me. I like a protagonist as much as the next guy, but who is a hero, really? He’s a protagonist praised for exactly what you don’t have in common with him. (Don’t Harry Potter fans realize that they’re all filthy muggles?) Musashi has an incredible talent for swordfighting. Okay, well, I totally can’t relate to that, so how about you tell me if he’s a sympathetic person. Oh, really, we’re done here?

Luckily for Musashi he’s played by Toshiro Mifune, who obviously has a solid, appealing screen presence (though it’s still an effort for me not to constantly be weighing him skeptically against the ridiculously immoderate praise heaped on him by that Seven Samurai commentary guy). Liking a character because he has a solid, appealing screen presence is much easier for me than liking him because he is a great fighter. He and the other actors fill out their tenuous characters with big, clean, obvious performances.

The photography is smart and often very attractive, with frequent and effective use of old-fashioned, well-choreographed camera movement — several lovely moments of lateral tracking through multilayered scenery. And the color, as mentioned last time, is a splendid period piece in itself. But this film seemed to me to be in significantly worse shape than the previous one — the colors are less intense and the image is generally muddier, with occasional ghosty edges. That means a lot when you’re watching for the colors above all else! Also, look how much less pretty the title screen was! Netflix told me I wouldn’t like this one quite as much as the previous, and as usual, it was right.

Still, a pleasant sort of movie to watch without interest. It seems to bring along with it the cozy fact that it is late at night, you are flipping channels, and this broad, earnest thing is just what happened to be on.

Here’s your Criterion Collection track 15: the main title. Same composer, same theme, same arrangement. Apart from the exciting trills at the beginning and end, this is almost exactly the opening cue from the previous movie, now unencumbered by sound effects so you can hear the whole thing. I know this will seem pretty redundant coming on the heels of the last track… but so does the movie so it’s only appropriate. And hey, it’s a better recording. In any case it’s our only real option.

P.S. My favorite subtitle:

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July 13, 2010

14. 宮本武蔵 (1954)

directed by Hiroshi Inagaki
screenplay by Tokuhei Wakao and Hiroshi Inagaki
based on Hideji Hojo’s adaptation of the novel by Eiji Yoshikawa (1935–9)

Criterion #14.

1. Title:
“宮本武蔵” = “Miyamoto Musashi,” the name of the hero (in standard last name, first name order). Musashi Miyamoto was a real person and is apparently fairly well-mythologized in Japanese culture (in part because of the book upon which these movies are based), so in Japan this title is probably as self-explanatory as, say, Robin Hood. Not so in the west, of course, so when the movie was released in the US (where it won the 1955 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film) it was called Samurai, which is a sensible retitling, at least for the time. The Musashi Miyamoto trilogy of which this is the first part was accordingly known in the US as the “Samurai” trilogy.

All well and good, but then Criterion goes and decides to release this movie under the needlessly roman-numerated and encolonated title Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto, which to my ear is all off-putting geeky pompousness. This overcomplicated form of the title is not only on the packaging (and the website), but actually appears as the subtitling for the lovely four-character title screen seen above, where it feels blatantly wrong and ungainly.

I am going to call this movie Musashi Miyamoto, the first film in a trilogy of the same name. Like Back to the Future, or Star Wars (at least before they retroactively loused that one up).

2. Digression:
Aren’t we all really glad that the Back to the Future sequels didn’t have subtitles? Don’t Back to the Future II: Biff’s Revenge and Back to the Future III: Doc Brown’s Return sound like really stupid, pointless movies? The answer is yes, which leads to another question — since colons and subtitles are such an obvious mistake, why do so many movies today have them?

2.1. Where does all the time go?:
Actual Wikipedia browsing transcript, departing immediately.
Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend->Mokele-mbembe->Carl Hagenbeck->Human zoo->Ota Benga->Human teeth sharpening->Dee Snider->Jesse Blaze Snider->”What am I doing?”

3. Expectations:
Were very low. Especially knowing that the genre’s most beloved masterpiece had made so weak an impression on me, I didn’t think this would be my cup of tea ceremony (that’s a ‘before and after’). And the prospect of three of these damn things meant I was anticipating true tedium.

4. So:
When it turned out to be perfectly watchable, that felt like a lovely gift. Expectations are everything in this game! If all I had known about Seven Samurai had been that it was an old Japanese period movie, I probably would have been absolutely delighted by how much fun it was. But having been told that it was the all-time greatest movie of all time, I was underwhelmed. Here, not having been told anything other than that I was going to see some technicolor samurai, I had room to find my own fun in it.

5. Me:
Ain’t that always the way, with me — when I’m alone with something, I easily find that I like it. When other people and their opinions are in play, I don’t usually get there. I guess I find people and their opinions exceedingly distracting. It’s the instinct against roaming too far from common consent — in the interest of being sociable, essentially — that tends to ruin things for me. So when there’s no common consent, I am extremely likely to have a satisfying time. Most experiences manage to be interesting when I’m free to simply have them. The world is, after all, pretty interesting.

5.1 Others like me:
I know I’m not the only one like this — this is the same principle that drives lots of people to be obnoxiously passionate about the things they’ve found off the beaten track. In fact I imagine it’s the reason that we even have an expression for the concept of “off the beaten track.” What reason could there ever be for devaluing a thing just because it’s popular? People tend to imply that it’s an attitude born of prideful ego — “I’m better than most people so I should make clear that I like different things from most people” — but I suspect that more often it’s a feeling that arises because the social obligations implicit in the beaten track are numbing. Out in the wilderness you’re free to be yourself.

5.2 Let’s not forget though:
The movie that sparked this thought is after all in the extremely well-known Criterion Collection. I’m not very far afield here. Which just goes to show how little you have to wander off on your own before things feel entirely different.

5.3 And let’s be clear:
The point here is not that it’s all that great. The point is that I had a good time because I was alone. None of you have seen this, have you? None of you that I know, anyway.

6. Correction:
This movie is not in Technicolor — it is in Eastmancolor, which you know as the cheaper, fade-ier, 50s-ier palette that followed Technicolor. I don’t know what kind of color adjustment may have been done for this transfer — the night scenes seem awfully dark — but the tints on this old film don’t feel the least bit faded. The color is extremely vivid; green forests, blue skies, and red kimonos all flame like a retouched photograph on a postcard. It all seems to lean a little yellowish. Entering that color space is a good 80% of the experience, and I was able to relish that experience. That 50s color world evokes a satisfying balance of stodginess and innocence that I find endearing and grandfatherly. It feels muscular but only in the most impotent, comical, faraway way.

7. It’s like:
It’s like watching Davy Crockett.

8. The disc:
Has nothing on it. I mean, it has subtitles, and it has the original trailer. That’s it.

9. Music:
There’s a full-Hollywood-treatment score by Ikuma Dan. It it simple and obvious and old-fashioned, just like the movie. I said about the Seven Samurai score that it was a sort of Japan-ified imitation of American standard practice; this one was hardly distinguishable from American standard practice, to my ears. In great part neither was the movie. This movie pretty much might as well be the cowboy movie that it might as well have been. This music seems never to have been released as a soundtrack; not recently anyway.

My idea with these ripped tracks is that in every movie, there’s always at least one chunk of music that’s meant to function on its own terms and have an equal share of the audience’s attention as the picture, if not more. Most often it occurs during the titles at the beginning or end (whichever is longer), though sometimes it’s elsewhere. This movie is no exception, but what’s unfortunate here is that there are no whole pieces that stand on their own — the opening title cue, our obvious choice, runs seamlessly into the first scene, which is full of noise. So in lieu of subjecting you to an awkward fade out, I have done a quick cut to the music from the very very end of the movie, which is tacked on here to provide a suitable conclusion. Luckily the movie ends with the same theme played in the same key — classical training at work, at its most reflexive!

Main Titles + Finale

The cellos are obligated to remind us about the whole Japan thing, but the theme is pure cowboy gold. Not a bad theme, as cowboy gold goes. You can rest assured that yes, he is indeed walking epically into an Eastmancolor sunset during that last bit. And I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit that I found those last moments stirring, in an entirely meaningless way.

This sounds to me like the music of a movie being watched on TV in the background of another movie. The whole movie is like a movie being watched on TV in another movie. It is, in every frame, the epitome of “some old samurai movie.”

10. Final thoughts:
Well, I have things to say about characterization and the genre and stuff, but I have two more shots at this so I feel certain that this is plenty for now.

11. P.S.
(He’s a wild young man who wants glory, he goes to battle, he becomes an outlaw, a priest sees his potential and gets him to start learning discipline, he heads off into the sunset to become a true samurai; along the way he fights some bad guys and meets some ladies.)

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July 2, 2010

13. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

directed by Jonathan Demme
screenplay by Ted Tally
based on the novel by Thomas Harris (1988)

Criterion Collection #13.

This is a much-overrated movie. It has touches of class that I think may have confused some people who don’t understand that one swallow does not a summer make, certainly not when an evil psychiatrist cannibal is helping to track a corpse-skinning pervert. What we have here is none other than an unreformed 80s-style thriller, the kind that ought to leave you feeling a little dirty. It is irredeemably grounded in the puerile pet fantasies of the genre, fixated on the baroque pathologies of outlandish serial killers just as shamelessly as superhero comics are fixated on skintight muscle suits. This is a movie where it turns out that coincidentally, Hannibal Lecter was once Buffalo Bill’s psychiatrist, and nobody thinks even to comment on the coincidence — because it’s a serial killer’s world; they probably run into each other all the time at serial killer bars. Just like nobody needs to comment on how wildly unlikely it is that Gotham City happens be home to a superhero and to any number of supervillains. A fantasy world populates itself according to its own fixations and hangups. Having seen this movie, a cruel, brilliant psychoanalyst like Hannibal Lecter could probably say a choice word or two about Thomas Harris. Not to mention the reading public.

And the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In the interest of brotherly love, I should grant that there may be nothing wrong with the hangups to which this movie caters — they’re just not mine. That would be the high road, anyway… but my heart, Clarice, but my heart! My heart tells me this is extremely suspect stuff. I think for the character of Hannibal Lecter to resonate, you have to be the type of person who thinks the whole notion of “psychology” is intrinsically gothic and finds violent cannibalism perversely fascinating. I’m proud to say that’s just not me. I got no love for zombies, neither. However, inadvertent “gotcha” cannibalism of the albatross soup and Sweeney Todd variety is another story; that I can get behind. I think maybe it’s because the emphasis there is on inflicting self-disgust on another person, rather than the physical act of eating flesh. The latter just isn’t a very rich subject for me. I understand that there are people for whom it is, and I reserve the right to be a little suspicious of them.

Ditto cutting off people’s skin — emphatic ditto! There has to be a secret savor in a horror for it to be satisfying, beyond just being pushed toward something to which you are averse. You need to feel some kind of pull, as well. For me, too much of the stuff in this movie had no secret savor. Sometimes an “ick” is just an “ick.” Again, to each his own. Also again, if that’s your own, I am uncomfortable with you.

I have another, related gripe: the movie can’t decide whether or not it’s supposed to be fun. Hitchcockian naughtiness (“I’m having an old friend for dinner”) and Eszterhasian grandstanding “hardcore” crudeness (“I can smell your cunt!”) are incompatible paradigms. If you’re going to relish mincing words, you can’t also relish not mincing words. The whole idea of “not mincing words” is rejecting mince! This movie tries to have its mince and disdain it too.

Case in point: When Clarice is about to meet Lecter for the first time, the head of the institute warns her to keep her distance by saying that he went to the infirmary once and “when the nurse leaned over him, he did this to her” — and then pulls out a photo that we don’t see but Clarice does, and suddenly they are bathed in red light. So far so good, and Hitch would approve. But then he keeps talking. “The doctors managed to reset her jaw more or less. Saved one of her eyes. His pulse never got above 85 — even when he ate her tongue.” Well, now that’s pretty on-the-nose disgusting, isn’t it? Why don’t you just show us the damn picture, while you’re at it.

Speaking of which: consider the autopsy scene. After the body bag is opened, we only see their uneasy reactions. The corpse is just an unfocused foreground blur at the very bottom of the shot as we look up at Clarice examining it — but of course our imaginations are drawn directly to the gore that we can’t see. So far it’s reminiscent of the parallel autopsy scene in Jaws, where we are meant to be uncomfortably aware of what the characters are looking at, just out of our field of view. After much teasing, that scene climaxes when a gnawed forearm is lifted into frame for just a second — which after that buildup, feels like a considerable thing to bear. That one second is the whole payoff, and it’s the correct payoff, because Jaws is a mince relish movie, unequivocally and sure-footedly so.

Now back to the Silence of the Lambs autopsy. At first, as I said, we’re spared the gore and teased with a low angle. But as the scene goes on, we start to see parts of the body more clearly and directly; and then quite casually, without any fanfare, we’re shown it at full length on the table, bloated and rotting and repulsive. Oops! Guess this wasn’t “teasing and fun” like Jaws after all! I guess it’s more “unflinching and clinical” (= “lurid and sleazy” done up in its Sunday best). But if so, why does the scene start with the teaser low angle? It just feels like borrowed business, misunderstood.

The progression from averted to direct gaze does make a certain kind of abstract sense from a character-development perspective: as Clarice gains her nerve and begins to master her professional role, what began as too horrible to contemplate becomes matter-of-fact. But if that’s the concept, it’s a dumb concept, because that’s exactly the opposite of the effect it achieves for the audience. Clarice gradually comes to terms with the corpse because she does see it immediately. But we don’t see it, so that’s a journey we can’t go on with her. We spend that time having our own experience of ascending discomfort, as we slowly lose faith that the film has any actual interest in playful teasing, any actual intention of sparing us the grossness.

The scariest movies, for me, are the ones that I don’t trust. In a well-mannered movie — like, say, the Bourne movie we just watched on TV the other day — if a razor blade gets pulled out in the middle of a fistfight, I might worry for the character but I don’t really have to worry that the movie’s gonna go all chien Andalou on me, because good manners dictate that one imply such things obliquely (except for occasionally at climaxes). But a movie that has proven that it has no breeding, and may even have a few screws loose, is a genuinely dangerous movie, because anything could happen. In the final analysis, apart from a few minor faux-pas, The Silence of the Lambs turns out to be reasonably well-behaved, but its manners are just too erratic for comfort. I wouldn’t want it to be my date to anyplace nice. Like for example the Oscars!

The 80s were a particularly ill-bred time.

Jodie Foster’s commentary on the DVD is almost entirely Joseph Campbell-type stuff about her character’s mythic journey. Her conviction is that the movie does a great cultural service by presenting a true female hero. It’s easy to smirk at this sort of talk — especially since, while hearing it, you’re watching The Silence of the Lambs — but I think the point is basically sympathetic. If you’re in the movie business and you want to nudge the cultural norms, inserting some unremarkable but non-trivial feminism into the DNA of a pop-cinema genre is probably one of the best ways to do it. Maybe only effective if that movie becomes completely iconic, but luckily enough, this one did.

So like I said, I think the movie throws up a sort of quality smokescreen by having a few unexpected touches of taste and intelligence. What are those touches? For one, a graceful camera style that is more curious than salacious, a willingness to glance around and take things in. Like the occasional color cutaway to, say, a lawn whirligig shaped like a canoeing Indian, which is part of a light sprinkling of “American history” imagery that could easily provide a freshman with material for a serviceable two-page paper. Another interesting touch is the distinctive use of tight close-ups on characters speaking directly into the camera. I guess I’m complimenting the cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, here.

And, of course, the strongest point, and the real reason this movie took off, is the odd simplicity of all the “Yes, Clarissssse!” scenes. Anthony Hopkins says on the commentary that his very first scene was what appealed to him about the part, and that he built the whole performance outward from the character’s show of power in the speech where he calls her out as white trash and cuts her down. With this in mind, it’s striking how very theatrical in conception — and performance — those scenes are. The two characters are stationary and engaged in an impossibly heightened exchange; that’s like every play I’ve ever seen. I think a big reason that the scene has lodged itself so firmly in the cultural memory and has provoked so much loving parody is that it is so durably the stuff of the stage. It feels iconic because it feels ancestral — a holdover from the great mother art out of which the cinema was born. I think deep in our guts we all feel that the things people say to each other while standing still are the most human and lasting part of film. The camera moving around, lights flashing, color and sound and so forth — that’s all more artificial and thus more suspect — and thus, we feel, less substantive — than sheer old-fashioned thespianism. This inner bias doesn’t rise to the surface all that often, but it definitely affects the sweepstakes of icon-formation. The “greatest moments” in movie history, according to common consensus, are generally moments when two people are standing near each other and one of them says something to the other one, like, “Frankly, kid, I coulda been an offer that Kansas is made of.” (“And don’t call me Frankly!”). Generally, it seems like most of the stuff that gets the Oscar ceremonies all misty about the magic of cinema is the stuff that could have been done on stage.

Look, here they are in a photo shoot just last year, in which all extraneous elements have been removed. Doesn’t this look like it might be a good play — maybe even a better play than it was a movie? Certainly Clarice’s goofy lamb monologue would be easier to accept. I think it would work well in a black box theater where the audience sat real close. They’d cut most of the non-Lecter scenes and just have them described, or suggested abstractly with artsy projections. The play would be called Ovis and take itself super-seriously. Starring Tony-award-winners Denis O’Hare and Scarlett Johansson.

Dear world, if this all comes to pass I would like a “special thanks to” credit in the program.

The Criterion edition is out of print, so no Netflix, but it’s not rare enough that anyone has felt the need to put it online. So… I had to buy it. For 8 bucks I have no regrets. It’s clearly the product of the early years of DVD, having no subtitles, and with several of the bonus features consisting of onscreen text — FBI perspectives on various serial killer cases; much of it needlessly horrific stuff, frankly, though I did find it interesting to read about how profiling works in the real world.

The only really interesting “deleted scene” is a neat solo video performance by Jim Roche as a televangelist, a clip of which is briefly seen but not heard on a TV set in the film. The commentary track (unavailable on any other edition) was pleasant enough listening though not particularly deep. Jonathan Demme seems pretty down-to-earth and unpretentious. I was struck by the fact that absolutely nothing fond is said at any point about Ted Levine. Demme doesn’t mention him at the end when he lists all the great people he had the pleasure of working with. But his tiny little performance is what stuck with me most after my first viewing years ago, and I know I’m not alone in that. I still think the best scene in the movie is when she finally shows up at Bill’s house and they have a few creepy moments together in his kitchen before she pulls her gun out.

Composer Howard Shore is pretty good about dramaturgy, but as usual he seems to be composing with a jumbo quick-dry magic marker. I’ll never forgive him for those Lord of the Rings scores with their relentless lack of nuance. Here the lack of nuance is more forgivable, though part of me still feels like the ratio of notes to instruments playing could stand to be a good bit higher. Yes, a soundtrack was released.

The main title is full of sound effects, so your Criterion compilation track 13 is the End Titles. Awfully bare stuff, no? But it does what it needs to do, as long as you’re not paying much attention.

This took much longer to write than it did to watch. I’d rather it not be that way, if I can help it.

By the way, I happened to see Demme’s utterly different Rachel Getting Married right before watching this. It was much better.

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June 24, 2010

12. This is Spinal Tap (1985)

directed by Rob Reiner
written by Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Rob Reiner

[though, as Rob Reiner himself says at the beginning of his commentary track: “Really in all fairness it should be ‘directed by’ the four of us. … It says ‘written by’ the four of us, but the writing credit should read ‘everybody who’s in the film,’ because they all made up their parts.” Later someone says that they wanted to run that credit, but the Writer’s Guild nixed it.]

Criterion Collection #12. Yeah, that’s right — remember when I was watching these in order, like, 18 months ago? You don’t? Well, the important thing is that I remember.

This is Spinal Tap is clearly better and more satisfying than any of Christopher Guest’s later directorial efforts in the same vein. While watching this time — I have seen it many times — I figured I’d try to identify why that is. What has it got that they ain’t got?

The answer I came up with: this movie is better — both funnier and a more admirable piece of filmmaking — because it takes seriously the premise that it is a documentary, and those later movies don’t. The existence of the film is itself legitimately part of the comic conceit here. The presence of Marty DiBergi may not seem all that significant, but it’s actually crucial, because even when he is not onscreen, we can still attribute the film’s perspective to him, to a character. When you watch a real documentary you can always sense the agenda, or at least the personality and philosophy, of the filmmaker. In Christopher Guest’s later movies, he tries as much as possible to eliminate this element, I imagine because he’s much more interested in actors than in films. But when an ostensible documentary has no authorial point of view, it becomes much harder to be invested in the nuanced specificity of the moments, which is where so much of the humor is meant to lie, because we can’t really believe in the space behind the camera. In Spinal Tap the comedy feels genuinely three-dimensional, extending behind us, around us, and into every aspect of what’s going on.

In fact, DiBergi and his camera might constitute the best straight man ever, because unlike most straight men he has a clear and pathetic motivation to take all the nonsense dead seriously – namely, his desperate, film-school-schlubby need to scrounge together a movie he can sell. We know that he is sweating about this project and thus is willing to work with absolutely any material he can get. He can’t afford to find any of it absurd.

That the title is the super-lame, old-fashioned, self-serious “This Is Spinal Tap” is itself comic, because we know it’s the title chosen by the kind of guy who wears a “USS Coral Sea” cap everywhere. The title card, see above, continues the joke. I don’t think there’s every been any other “mockumentary” that’s half so thoroughly realized as an artifact in itself.

Closely related is the vital contribution of cameraman Peter Smokler (seen here with the concert lighting designer, whose snapshot this is), who gives a pitch-perfect offscreen “performance” as DiBergi’s cameraman. He manages to make us believe that the guy holding the camera is really thinking on the fly and that what we are seeing is simply the result of someone scrappily trying to make the most of every situation as it unfolds. In great part he is, in fact, doing exactly that, but he never tips his hand enough to reveal that he’s really going for comic beats. He seems always only to be going for the moment, whatever it happens to be. It’s real documentary camerawork, as opposed to the tepid caricature of documentary camerawork used by later imitators. In the commentaries, everyone eventually notes in passing that Smokler had good instincts. Which is true but it seems to me like insufficient acknowledgement of the subtle trick he’s constantly pulling off. The camera is what really makes this movie feel like something special, like a place worth visiting.

I originally tried to bring up specific counterexamples from Waiting for Guffman while making the above points, but it turned out to be hard to write it that way, because what at first seems to be a matter of degree is actually a difference in kind. In the wake of This is Spinal Tap, a whole new genre has come into existence that actually doesn’t make any sense on its own terms, and Christopher Guest’s later movies are of this new type. To enumerate the thousands of ways that, say, The Office isn’t at all convincing as a documentary is to miss the boat utterly, as any fan of The Office would exasperatedly tell you. And yet at the same time, the premise that it “is” a “documentary” is absolutely essential to its functioning. It’s sort of a mimetic split-level. Having your cake and eating it too has become its own set of conventions. When the desired pitch of comedy requires that the audience be brought in close and raw enough to feel the grit of discomfort, the superficial trappings of “documentary” are now institutionalized as a viable shortcut for getting us there. (The very convenient device of solo interviews comes as a bonus.) But that’s the full extent of it; none of those movies (or TV shows) are actually the least bit interested in thinking about documentaries per se, and so they bring nothing else about documentaries with them. In a present-day “mockumentary,” there is, generally, no filmmaker and no film.

Interestingly, Curb Your Enthusiasm is a close stylistic relative yet manages to do away with the baggage of the “documentary” device. It’s improv shot handheld without pretense, and that’s that. In Waiting for Guffman, by contrast, the camera is constantly bobbling around absurdly to telegraph handheldness because, since there’s no real “movie” in the movie, in they feel obligated to remind us superficially of the “movie” conceit. Spinal Tap has no such layers of conventionalized affectation. It is a fiction, but a single cohesive fiction. Style and content are unified.

This whole issue reminds me a bit of the fact that when sound film was introduced, filmmakers were slow to feel comfortable playing incidental music without identifying a source. We seem to be similarly slow now in getting acclimated to the idea of a non-diegetic handheld camera in improv comedy. John Cassavetes and others were doing that sort of thing in an artsy way decades earlier, so I’m not sure what the problem is. In any case, even the interviews and glances at the camera on The Office are ultimately processed as existential rather than filmic, right? People are always psychically aware of both a sympathetic audience and a humiliating judgmental audience loitering somewhere nearby in social hyperspace; letting the characters glance at each of these occasionally really has nothing to do with camera crews or documentaries. Likewise the solo interview segments tend to read as exactly what they are — strange interludes.

Okay okay, back to Spinal Tap.

Much credit must be given to the editors, Kent Beyda and Kim Secrist, for their excellent balance of the various layers of comedy, and sensitivity to all sorts of nuances. They show up on the commentary and are justly proud of their work. The funniest single beat in the movie, to me, is when Nigel is in the middle of complaining about the size discrepancy between the salami and the bread, and briefly falls silent as he tries to fold the salami around the edges of the bread, as though for just a moment he has become un-self-consciously wrapped up in the problem he is attempting to solve. Watch it closely and you’ll see that the moment has been entirely created in editing.

June Chadwick is perfect as the wrong-energy girlfriend and gives a really fine performance, improvising just as fluently as the rest of them in a non-“joking” role, arguably a harder trick to pull off. Ditto Fran Drescher, but that’s less noteworthy since we all know she’s The Nanny. And ditto Tony Hendra but yick. Why didn’t Christopher Guest ever hire June Chadwick again? Why is she teaching Alexander technique instead of acting? Maybe she didn’t have range. Or maybe it’s because she’s married to a top facelift surgeon (seems like she’s gotten a couple of freebies, too) and doesn’t need that acting career anymore.

It goes without saying, I think, that: Michael McKean seems like the most versatile wit and the most astute about managing the fiction; Christopher Guest gets all the funniest and most memorable moments because he’s willing to descend into such depths of self-involvement, but he also seems genuinely, possibly unpleasantly self-involved; and Harry Shearer seems to be working in a nerdier, less subtle tradition than the others — his contributions all strike me as a little too obviously “the line he just came up with” — but that kind of mild clunkiness suits the Ringo vibe.

This Criterion edition is notoriously rare and very out of print for many years. It is much coveted for the material exclusive to it: actual behind-the-scenes commentaries by cast and crew (where the currently available version only has an in-character joke commentary track), the 20-minute demo short made to pitch the film, and a generous selection of high-quality cut material, a good chunk of which does not appear in the similarly generous selection on the current DVD. This movie is an unusual case in that several of the “deleted scenes” seem to be considered, by those that have seen them, to be a very real part of the movie. The sequence where Bruno Kirby gets stoned and sings “All The Way,” and the scene where Artie Fufkin smashes an egg on his head feel like truly essential pendants. I think what I’m responding to here is again related to the uniquely inclusive quality of this movie’s make-believe. In most movies, deleted scenes are often things that, as it turns out, didn’t actually happen in the movie’s world. Not so here! Whether or not they were in the final cut of film, those are things that actually occurred on Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove tour! They are historically every bit as real as the rest of the movie.

But hey, enough of my yakkin’!

Here’s the track for your Criterion soundtrack compilation: Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight, as heard at the start of the movie when the band is introduced, which is as close as this movie gets to a Main Title cue. Soundtrack is of course available.

Pointlessly full disclosure: my home-burned copy of the otherwise-totally-unobtainable Criterion edition is corrupted at exactly and only the spot corresponding to this snippet of music, so the above track was, by necessity, ripped from the MGM DVD instead, which I own legitimately – thus breaking my made-up rules for this cumulative soundtrack thing I’m doing. It unfortunately can be distinguished from the Criterion edition that it purports to be, in that it has crisper sound. Ah well!

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June 21, 2010

Disney Canon #29: The Rescuers Down Under (1990)

[Due to miscommunication, BETH was not present at the appointed hour for the screening; she watched the movie on her own a few days later and was coaxed into recording a few thoughts independently, without having heard ADAM and BROOM’s conversation. Her comments appear at the end.]

ADAM That was a lot more visually sophisticated than I was anticipating.

BROOM I remembered that about it, so I can’t say it was more than I anticipated. But yes, visual polish is definitely its greatest distinction.

ADAM And yet as a whole it’s distinctly inferior to both The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. Why? I don’t think it has respect for kids’ intelligence. To me, the dominant mode of this movie is a sort of wiseacre jokiness that really would have appealed to me as an eleven-year-old, but which is not wholesome.

BROOM How much jokiness was there, really?

ADAM All of the Wilbur stuff. A lot of the slapstick comedy. A lot of the Jake stuff.

BROOM Who’s Jake? Oh, the Australian mouse.

ADAM “Who’s Jake?” Exactly. When I was a kid I loved Tiny Toons, and Tiny Toons did that same kind of “wokka wokka! talking fast and using incongruous adult concepts!” — in a way that made me feel knowing, as a child, but was not wholesome or good.

BROOM I hear what you’re saying. But I also think that if I were reading this and hadn’t just seen the movie, I would be getting the wrong impression from you about how witty it was. It wasn’t witty at all. This movie wasn’t like Tiny Toons; it wasn’t full of wisecracks. It was full of things that are just as lazy, though.

ADAM When Wilbur crashes on the roof and he says, “passengers should remain seated until the flight has come to a complete stop!”… I would have cracked up at that, as a kid. Because it’s like a snippet of grown-up life inserted into this ridiculous context. That would have tickled me. But as an adult looking at it, I’m ashamed.

BROOM That’s a problem with a lot of humor, including a lot of stand-up comedy — that they just go for the laugh of recognition of what they’ve co-opted, what they’re sampling. That’s a cheap kind of humor. But I feel like there was a different cheapness at work here.

ADAM Well, there were many kinds of cheapness.

BROOM Yes.

ADAM When Bernard says, “Maybe next time we can take the train,” that’s the most inoffensive and lazy way to signal his timidity.

BROOM I didn’t even understand that line. Is the joke that you can’t take a train to Australia?

ADAM I think that’s the joke, yeah.

BROOM I think you were on the money with your first comment, that the movie doesn’t respect kids’ intelligence. Everything is just trope upon arbitrary trope. So much of childhood is the process of learning these things, and then when you return to them in adulthood you realize, “Oh, it never made sense. No wonder it was hard for me to assimilate as a child!” All these cartoon tropes, these things that always happened, I eventually picked up how they worked, what the standard playbook was. But now it’s no shock to me that so many of those things seemed so quizzical and took so long to become normalized — because they weren’t genuinely meaningful even to the adults making the cartoons.

ADAM The moment when Wilbur says “I’m never doing that!” and then, squawk!, now he’s doing it! — That’s a bit. It’s pleasing to a child not because it’s intrinsically funny but because it’s a bit that you recognize. It’s like seeing a hamburger on the menu at a strange hotel.

BROOM An example that was more central to this movie is this issue of “When is Bernard ever going to find a chance to propose to Bianca?” What is that? Why is that happening? What kind of a problem is that? The only justification for it is that it has happened in other movies. You can trace it back to basic dramatic principles — you know, tension and conflict; challenges creating empathy for characters — but that’s not actually the function that it serves in this movie. Toward the end they sort of retroactively suggest that Bernard needed to prove his bravery or else this more attractive, stronger guy really did deserve to end up with Bianca instead of him. And then of course he proves his bravery and so is now “allowed” to marry her. But the fact that he’d been comically interrupted several times before while trying to propose is really neither here nor there. As a kid watching that, you just pick up on the lazy rhythms that govern such things and you get that it’s all one big meaningless formula.

ADAM There’s also the Three’s Company routine when they’re at dinner — he says “But this is so sudden, don’t you need a gown?” and she says “No, I just need khaki shorts and hiking boots!” and he’s like “What??” I loved Three’s Company, as a kid… but that’s just not a sophisticated or, ultimately, a good-for-you kind of humor.

BROOM Isn’t that in Shakespeare too? Isn’t that just the crossed signals joke? I’m sure that goes back way before Three’s Company.

ADAM But that’s where I knew it from. Chrissie overhears Jack and Janet talking about going to dinner, but she thinks they’re talking about having sex!

BROOM “Hiking boots??” It’s actually surprisingly risque for this movie, if you take it as that. Details like that can end up a little bit out of bounds because they only crop up out of laziness in the first place. Like that second-rate Chaplin routine where the eggs get stolen out from under McLeach’s nose, which felt like it was from another movie. They put it in that one long continuous shot. That was one scene where I felt like the boldness of the visuals crossed over into the actual staging.

ADAM I liked that scene.

BROOM The movie wasn’t generally that interesting about staging, but it did have a lot of visual choices that were obviously considered. It looked cared-for.

ADAM It had a glossiness to it that looked expensive.

BROOM Yes, there was a sheen over the whole thing.

ADAM There was a pastel ugliness to a lot of it. Everything was reflective in a way that was unappealing.

BROOM It had more shadows indicating three-dimensional rounding than any movie we’ve seen yet. And possibly than any to come. But they’re definitely going to keep cranking that stuff — Pocahontas is going to look very bulbous. To me, it gives things a slightly unsavory quality. Everything is supposed to have a tactile appeal, and I feel like, “why? Why should I want to touch that kid’s boots?” or whatever we happen to be looking at that’s so lovingly rounded.

ADAM That’s what what people say it’s like to take Ecstasy. Everything has a roundness to it that’s really…

BROOM A little horny?

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM In that Huxley essay where he was on acid, he said that the legs of the table had a transcendent tubularity.

ADAM I think the lowest point in the whole movie for me was when they’re trying to take off in the snowstorm and Wilbur says “Cowabunga!” while drums are going.

BROOM That music cue was really bad.

ADAM I think that even as a kid I could see through moments like that to grown-ups trying to be kidlike for the sake of pulling one over on you. It felt like a Doritos commercial.

BROOM I know you’re particularly sensitive to that. You got pissed off at the vultures in Jungle Book for the same reason. But I feel like if you’re going to go looking for that, you can find it in every inch of this thing. Isn’t it all sort of pandering?

ADAM Yes! That’s why I’m recoiling.

BROOM Okay, but that’s not what bothers me. I would say the part of this movie that was my least favorite was when they fired a syringe into someone’s butt with a rifle. That’s a very unpleasant thing to think about, and I still don’t know why it was in this movie.

ADAM Yeah, but at least the sadistic nurse-mice had a certain novelty. Say what you will about them, but the idea of tittering mice in wimples engaging in medical torture is more genuinely funny than most of the humor here.

BROOM But why was that in this movie at all? Three scenes later, you said, “Oh look, it’s The Rescuers!” because we hadn’t seen the heroes or the main quest in such a long time. We’d been watching a seagull get tortured.

ADAM The “main quest” didn’t consist of anything but modes of transportation.

BROOM The sadism is a thing that’s been running through the 80s, but that will get turned around, right? In The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast and the rest of them, the violence isn’t as offhand as this. That stops here.

ADAM I think so. But that’s because it gets replaced with a kind of faux-nobility. It will be interesting to see if there’s any of it in Aladdin.

BROOM Aladdin is slapstick, but I don’t think its moral compass is so out to lunch.

ADAM John Candy seemed to be directly reprising his role from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.

BROOM I couldn’t identify him as John Candy! I’m pretty sure it was Dom DeLuise in the first one [ed. wrong, you’re thinking of this] and it really sounded to me like someone else was doing Dom DeLuise. I guess they’re similar voice types to begin with.

ADAM Introducing him with “Orville’s not here, now it’s Wilbur!” was like Dennis the Menace.

BROOM Like kids in 1990 are really going to remember the exact voice of Orville from 1977. Actually, I guess by then it was the age of video, so consistency mattered more. But still, the idea that kids would remember The Rescuers at all…? Why did this movie happen at all? If they wanted to make a sequel why didn’t they make a sequel to, say, Dumbo? Why on earth would they make The Rescuers Part Deux? And then “down under” of all things? It’s like the special episode of a sitcom where they spin the globe and go to some arbitrary place, just to mix things up.

ADAM It was like the Simpsons episode where they go to Australia.

BROOM Yes. The movie’s very existence is a symptom of the same kind of laziness that was in each scene. And “laziness” isn’t a good enough word for the problem. There’s no there there. It’s like to create the substance of the movie they just used some machine that churns things out. Whereas to create the individual shots, they actually used something much more interesting than what they had used for Little Mermaid.

ADAM But again: although it was superficially attractive, it all looked sort of tinselly, in a way that I found distinctly unappealing. Everything seemed like it was coated in cellophane.

BROOM I’m not endorsing the look, but it did create a point of interest in the movie. “Look at this zooooomy shot we put in here, and now look at this extreme focus-pull effect we put in here…” If you think about Little Mermaid, it doesn’t have very much of that sort of thing; it’s mostly simple, old-fashioned camerawork, which works just fine. I didn’t like it this way. This was your classic polished turd. It was highly buffed nothingness.

ADAM They discarded characters freely and randomly. What happened to the kangaroo friend from the beginning?

BROOM What happened to Frank?

ADAM We never see the international Rescuer assembly again; we never see the mother again…

BROOM Not seeing his mother at the end is a real offense, and I called in advance that they were going to commit it. It’s an offense that we should have to see the “Ma’am, your son is dead” scene and then never get to see any kind of reunion. And when the kid is released from captivity, he doesn’t go home to his mother first before he goes to save the eagle eggs? The movie didn’t take place in a world of people with emotions. Yes, I know: “duh.” But why shouldn’t it? Why should any kid have to watch a movie without a soul? I hated the way Cody looked, by the way. I hated his face.

ADAM He looked like a Toy Story object.

BROOM He looked a little like Lilo will look, but not as clean.

ADAM He looked intentionally de-eroticized.

BROOM I also thought McLeach had been clearly “de-eroticized.” What does you mean by that — you mean if they had just made him a “good looking boy” it would have been creepy to you? Has that been a problem with kid characters in the past?

ADAM No, I don’t know — maybe it wasn’t on purpose. It was just striking to me that he looked like Piglet.

BROOM He didn’t look quite human. He looked like a stuffed boy doll. And McLeach was so awkwardly ugly. His face was okay but his body looked like a milk carton. He was up there with Fagin in ugliness.

ADAM And why did he have a Texas accent?

BROOM For all that it was the point of the movie, the Australianness of it was actually pretty thin. Though they do happen to live right at the base of Ayers Rock.

ADAM It was convenient that their flight arrived right at the Sydney Opera House.

BROOM Those were the two things about Australia that they managed to get in there. And I guess they included Australian animals.

ADAM The non-speaking animals had beady black eyes whereas talking animals had whites to their eyes. It was a weird sort of racial hierarchy.

BROOM Did the mice talk openly to the girl in The Rescuers? When this kid runs into the woods and then a kangaroo says “get on my back!” to him, it was weird.

ADAM It was. No-one was talking, and then the kangaroo spoke, and it was the only voice with an Australian accent, and then none of the other animals spoke after that for like twenty-five minutes.

BROOM All this said: watching it was not as chorelike as a watching movie this worthless ought to have been, because it kept having things to look at.

ADAM That’s true. Every five minutes it paused for some swooping.

BROOM I’m not sure “give it its due” is the right phrase, because I don’t think it’s “due” anything, but… if this had been DuckTales: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, for example. we would be much angrier now because it would have given us nothing. I think this regularly gave us something. The backgrounds were pretty bad. The framing I think was pretty good!

ADAM But the visual interest was very nerdlike. I know if I had made an animated movie as a kid, I would have been extremely proud to have made an accurate representation of the New York City skyline, or of the map from Hawaii to New York. And indeed there’s a credit here: “New York City skyline data provided by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill.”

BROOM That was in Oliver & Company, too.

ADAM It’s clear they took a lot of pleasure in an accurate, toylike approach. I’m sure all the animals were anatomically accurate. It all had a “collector’s” quality to it, which is not wholesome.

BROOM You’re making a good observation here, and I think it reflects an overarching issue: I think what you’re seeing is a generational turnover in what it means to be animator. The “nine old men,” the guys we saw make Dumbo and Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland and all those movies — I think Fox and the Hound was the last one where any of those guys were leads, and they felt old, by that point — those were guys who had come out of a time where there was no “world” of animation. They were guys who knew drawing, and animation was this fresh opportunity to make drawing into acting, and they got to figure out how. That’s the task that got them going. Whereas now, these are second or third generation people who explicitly want to be making cartoons that remind them of cartoons. They’re there because of the older Disney movies. These people probably didn’t have aspirations to be painters — they’ve always wanted to be animators. It happens in any kind of art: the second generation feeds off what the first generation did, not necessarily the spirit in which they did it. And I think that inevitable process of misunderstanding is going to continue — by the time we get to The Princess and the Frog, that’s going to be yet another generation. Those people grew up on this movie!

ADAM That’s going to be weird when we get to those people, who want to restore the lost art of The Little Mermaid.

BROOM I think the wholesomeness of intention of the first generation will never be gotten back, because you have this huge powerful studio investing huge amounts of money, so of course the people who rise to the lead positions are going to be the ones who are most specifically driven to be at the top of the animation game. You’re not going to get generalists, non-nerds. They’re never going to be, like, smart fashion illustrators that Walt spotted somewhere. I don’t know what those guys’ stories were, but none of them were cartoon nuts.

ADAM Yeah. Maybe I’m imagining it, but this movie felt like it had a whiff of like, the Mary Worth phone.

BROOM Yes! I think one of the most rewarding things about older movies is that they don’t feel incestuous. Whereas almost everything these days has the thumbprints of obsessives on it. In 1994 it was still a novelty that Quentin Tarantino, a film-nerd video store guy, who totally is the Comic Book Store Guy from the Simpsons — for those of you who didn’t know what Adam was referring to — had made a movie. That he was a geek connoisseur and an actual creator. Now it seems like nobody just sort of stumbles into the business anymore. I in my real life in the theater know that there’s just oodles of theater written by those connoisseur people who love theater, and it’s terrible. The things that are the most interesting are by the people who have the fewest aspirations toward that. If you feed yourself only Disney movies, you’ll make a fetishized Disney movie.

ADAM A weird albino Disney movie.

BROOM Which is what you’ve been saying — this movie felt fetish-y.

ADAM The surfaces did.

BROOM The degree that the animators want to lick their own work has increased.

ADAM I was going to say it had sort of a RealDoll feel.

BROOM And I don’t know how that can possibly be turned back. What can a studio do to keep out the people who want to be there a little too much? If they’ve got talent, those people are going to rise.

ADAM You can go down the road to Shrek or The Emperor’s New Groove — those sorts of things seem like they’re inspired by commercials.

BROOM The diameter of the circle that must be traversed before one’s tail can be eaten gets shorter and shorter. I’m led to understand that a big part of the reason Little Mermaid felt fresh is because Ashman and Menken showed up, and guess what? They were not cartoon nerds! They were theater nerds, and theater nerdism was relatively fresh blood for this world. Whereas this movie felt like it was made by people who not only had worked on He-Man but also watched He-Man. I’m not sure what other kinds of blood can be poured into the mix to turn it back.

ADAM It would be interesting to see a Disney movie made by, like, Chris Ware; comic book people. What if a Disney cartoon was made by Marvel comics type people? Or what if you had a legitimate director, like… Alfonso Cuaron?

BROOM I’ll bet that’s been considered and I’ll bet it’s been dismissed because the task of an animation director is so completely distinct from the task of a live action director. Though there was The Nightmare Before Christmas, where Tim Burton didn’t technically direct it because they needed a real animation director, but Tim Burton sort of told them what movie to make. And people love that movie! It’s a weird movie and it has some problems, but it definitely felt fresh.

ADAM There’s also, like, Spirited Away.

BROOM That’s right. I think Miyazaki is as much of a second-generation geek as these people, but it’s filtered through a different cultural sensibility. I think it his work comes out of growing up watching Peter Pan too, but since he’s Japanese it’s all different to him. I guess the real issue is whether you have the craft so under your belt that you can waste it, or whether you have to earn what you’re doing and keep thinking about the underpinnings. I think the people who are a little fresher to the problems involved are forced to think more clearly.

ADAM Well, the upshot is that this felt like a room that had been sat in for a little too long. For whatever reason. I would have liked to say something about gender, but there was no gender of any kind in this movie.

[We read the New York Times review]

ADAM That was not very thought out.

BROOM That wasn’t on the money. And I think the fact that she “remembered” the maitre d’s name from the beginning must mean that she got most of this from looking at the press packet afterward. It didn’t feel like a very engaged review. Vincent Canby puts more on the line. And god bless Bosley Crowther; he wasn’t always right, but he was always for real.

ADAM That review was just a list of things. And what is this about the movie being too dark? I don’t agree with that.

BROOM We said it had a sadistic strain to it.

ADAM But she said the hospital scene was a more lighthearted moment.

BROOM The sadism ran throughout. For the comedy scene to be “we’re gonna get you with a chainsaw!” and for the serious scene to be “I’m gonna lower you into a crocodile’s jaws!” comes from the same careless impulse.

ADAM Itchy and Scratchy’s revenge.

BROOM It’s only appropriate if you have no investment in the characters and it’s just a series of images. Which is what it was, and which is exactly what was wrong with it.

BETH The Australian mouse was more appealing than the Bob Newhart mouse. The Bob Newhart mouse is a pathetic mumblebum. There’s nothing appealing about that mouse! And then this dashing safari mouse appears — kids would want that mouse to be her husband. Even at the end, he’s nice about the marriage proposal and gives a thumbs-up.

The hospital scene was my least favorite part of the movie. The scenes with Wilbur felt unnecessary and extraneous, like a distraction, even though at the end he does play a role. It’s like they needed to develop his character earlier on so that we cared later when he was helping them. But that scene made everyone look bad. It made the hot mouse look bad for saying that he needed to go to this hospital, which was like a crackpot hospital.

I did like the opening when they were at that restaurant hidden at the top of another restaurant. It was cool that it was in the chandelier and they had this beautiful view of the city, and it was snowing. That was a nice scene, to me. I didn’t like everything that happened there. I liked where I thought it could have gone, but then it got silly.

The whole bird adventure at the beginning was dumb. It really was ridiculous. We were working with nothing, and that’s what was given to us. You have absolutely no sense of where things are going to go from there. Then they go in a pretty pedestrian direction.

I liked the CGI at the beginning with the 3D scenery and the big zoom. It reminded me of 3-D WorldRunner. But I had questions right away about why it was in Australia. The kid in the movie didn’t have an Australian accent. His mom kinda did. Did they really use Australia very well as a setting? No! They didn’t do anything with it.

The sidekick, the minion, the lizard thing, was, you know… standard.

The breaking out of jail scene was really long. It bothered me that the little creature could easily have just gotten out, and that no one suggested that to him.

I thought it was funny that there was a “wanted” posted nailed to a tree. In the middle of the forest? This took place in modern times!

[Bonus link: Siskel & Ebert review]

Comments (2)

June 6, 2010

What Is to Be Done? (1863)

Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889)
Что делать (1863)
translated into English as What Is to Be Done? by Michael R. Katz (1989)

Roll 22 was 165, which is a blank divider row. Roll again.

Roll 23 was 995, which is What Is to be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky. There’s only one modern English translation, and there’s only one edition of it. My local libraries and bookstores couldn’t come through for me on this one so I had to purchase it online, used. The copy I got was completely pristine, except for a stamp across the closed page edges: “NON-RETURNABLE.” This tells me that in a former life, it had been a course-required purchase that the university bookshop knew was too hot a potato to allow back through its doors. Not promising!

And maybe you can’t tell from the image, but the layout and presentation of this edition breathe academia, too. I’m sure Cornell University Press can muster more appealing design when they think they have something with a wider audience. This book, to my eye, has “for only one lecture? there’s no way I’m reading that” written all over it. The interior body font is the dated and size-inappropriate Zapf Book, which made me feel like I was sitting in an itchy chair in an ugly 70s office. Waiting for professor Katz’s office hours, I guess.

I just spent like an hour working out what font it was. Thanks for nothing, identifont.com.

What Is to Be Done? was truly fascinating to read: idiosyncratic and intriguing in style, form, and content, of unique and undeniable historical interest and significance, and not without charm. Whenever I was reading it, I was full of thoughts. I would have had plenty to say in section for this class had I done the reading.

That all said and meant, I unequivocally discourage any of you from ever touching this awful book. It was a total drag. A highly rewarding total drag. Is it possible for a book to be terrible and also really interesting? The six months I spent lugging this thing around say: “Sure.” What the work was, why it was, what it was saying and how it went about saying it — essentially, everything that falls comfortably within the purview of academia — all these questions were worthwhile and the answers were interesting. And remained interesting page for page; the book was continuously revealing new facets of itself in those regards. But at a more fundamental level, as an immediate artistic experience, it was NON-RETURNABLE.

Or… well, I think that’s how it breaks down. But I must admit to being a bit stumped by this one, aesthetically. It was a puzzler.

Let me quote from early in the book itself, from one of its many passages of noodgy second-person address:

I possess not one bit of artistic talent. I even lack full command of the language. But that doesn’t mean a thing; read on, dearest public, it will be well worth your while. Truth is a good thing; it compensates for the inadequacies of any writer who serves its cause. … But then again, dear readers… When I say that I have not one bit of artistic talent and that my tale is a very weak piece of work, you should by no means conclude that I’m any worse than those authors whom you consider to be great, or that my novel is any poorer than theirs. …

You may thank me. You so love to cringe before those who abuse you; so now you can cringe before me, too.

So yes, that’s the author assuring us that his ideas are more important than his admittedly graceless writing. But that passage itself should give a nutshell impression of the reading experience: it’s interesting — to the point of being amusing — that such an absurd and obnoxious passage exists at all, right? And that sort of interest can count for a lot. I grinned when I first came to a page of the author hectoring me outright — I was having genuine fun, encountering this, contemplating it. And yet there’s no getting around the fact that you would never want to read a book by this guy. That’s how the entire book was: generous of interest, and peculiar, and unappealing.

And here’s why: The book is actually an elaborate piece of agitprop. Yes, it bears some resemblance to a novel, but it’s not a real novel — it’s a phony one, a hollowed-out book with a pistol in it. It’s a big honking “truth pill” meant to wake people from the Matrix, hidden under the dust jacket of a soapy women’s romance. Basically, it’s a call to revolution dressed up to play as a formulaic love triangle story. Chernyshevsky seems to have done this for three reasons: firstly so that it would appeal to the masses who didn’t know they needed it, secondly so that it would go down easier, and thirdly to sneak it past the censors… who nonetheless must have been complete idiots not to have sussed out that something was fishy in this flagrantly ill-formed romance novel full of radical chit-chat.

Maybe there was a fourth reason too: I think Chernyshevsky may have felt that to couch his ideas in the interpersonal affairs of a few individuals — that is, within the world of “the novel” — was intellectually and aesthetically necessary. Ideas about social justice and social reform are, at heart, ideas about the souls of people, their inner lives, their needs and struggles. That is, the same stuff art is about. From a certain perspective, casting an ideology into novelistic form is not only more marketable and more vivid than passing out dogmatic pamphlets, but also more human and well-rounded, more true.

This attitude seems to me to have been fairly widespread in the era of the great novel, especially in Russia, and I basically agree with it. Art can embody ideas in ways that transcend the limitations of “mere language,” and that includes ideas of great practical consequence. Perhaps this is the biological function of art, in fact. Yes, mere language obviously has many clear advantages over art in its capacity to convey information. Language is like Legos: complex structures of meaning can be broken down, carried anywhere, and re-built more or less exactly. But the resolution is unfortunately a little blocky; subtleties can get lost. Art, on the other hand, can embody meaning with a resolution so fine and complexity so great that “resolution” and “complexity” seem like insufficient words… but that meaning is much harder to transport, especially as it gets more elaborate, and near-impossible to reconstruct exactly after being broken down. It’s an infinitely flexible but not particularly reliable way of conveying information. My dad the communications professional would probably have some technically appropriate words for these parameters. Art has unlimited bandwidth but a very high error rate (and, sadly, rapidly decreasing standardization of codes); language has very narrow bandwidth but a low error rate and very well-documented codes. Maybe?

So, what was I…? oh right right right. I was saying the book is just propaganda, ideology disguised as “a novel,” but then I said that I think he might have written it that way in good faith, for more or less the same reason that real writers write real novels. And, hm, real novels certainly embody ideologies, too. The Grapes of Wrath has just as clear a social message as What Is to Be Done?, but I wouldn’t call it “propaganda.” So what’s the difference?

I’m not sure I know the answer. This is part of what stumped me, and likewise a big part of why this was an interesting read. I was constantly asking myself “What is this? Is it a ‘work of literature,’ or something else? Might it not be that every work of literature is really just a Trojan horse bearing an ideological payload, and the only difference is that this book is more obvious about it?” I know that “all art is politics” is a notion that appeals to a lot of critics, but I’ve always instinctively rejected it as foolish; it’s like saying saying that every animal is essentially a walking skeleton, dressed up. The problem being that first of all, that’s an idiotic observation, and second of all it’s completely untrue. I’m at least as interested in invertebrate art as I am in mammalia, if not moreso. Certainly far more than I am in a book like What Is to Be Done?.

An easy answer to why it seemed like mere propaganda rather than art would be “because it was badly written,” but that feels like a cop-out. A more interesting answer is that it didn’t feel like art because it wasn’t actually right about the world. I think that this is probably why The Grapes of Wrath and the like get a pass — because we read such things and think, “hm, yeah.” I think Chernyshevsky might actually have been on to something when he said that Truth could redeem his stylistic failings — his real problem was that he also missed the boat on Truth.

This might also be a good answer to the question “why is it sometimes pleasurable for a movie to be ‘manipulative’ and sometimes completely infuriating?”, which has been rattling in my brain since seeing Amistad (as I mentioned back here). Namely: because we really do care about Truth. Amistad and Everything Is Illuminated were opportunistically disingenuous about the nature of the human soul, which is a far more odious sin than anything committed by, say, Avatar.

I don’t have a clear enough sense of Chernyshevsky’s milieu to accuse him of being disingenuous — but I do know that he was wrong. A critic’s quote on the back cover calls the book “psychologically sharp,” but it’s actually just that it’s intricate in its wrongness. The book is all about psychology, to be sure, and the author is obviously convinced that his understanding goes very deep indeed, but it’s all distorted and willful. He saw what he wanted to see and no more. His depths are all impossible halls of mirrors, soap opera as game theory: A knows that B knows that A knows that B intends to make a noble sacrifice for A, and so A must pre-empt B from pre-empting A from making a noble sacrifice by preventing B from doing so. Etcetera! They’re all chess geniuses of being considerate of one another. All of which, he assures us, is in fact quite self-serving and in keeping with the overall theory that people pursue only that which benefits themselves — because being noble gratifies the ego. That’s all well and good, but really? Really?? This is what you see when you look at people?

Chernyshevsky seems to have been a reasonably smart guy, and there is something sort of acute in the way he tries to write about psychological nuance; the problem is just that the subjects of his investigation are ridiculous paper doll contrivances in his own didactic scheme. The behavior he is supposedly teasing apart and exploring is all poppycock to begin with, so the layers he’s uncovering just feel like a journey down some crackpot rabbit hole. It’s like being told what really motivates The Man in the Yellow Hat to keep bringing that damn monkey to inappropriate places, at great length. Twenty pages about his basic human need to become a fully-realized individual, and how bringing the monkey everywhere somehow serves that need. Would that deepen Curious George, or would it in fact make it shallower, by giving it more chances to be wrong? I think the latter.

Now, a parallel universe of elaborate bogus psychology would be perfectly excusable if it were in the service of an interesting plot, but it’s not: here, in fact, it’s in the service of half-baked proposals for total social reorganization, which makes it dangerous — or, since from my historical vantage point the danger has already come and gone, pitiful. A theory of society is only as good as its theory of the individual. And so it turns out that the very thing that makes the work artistically legitimate is also what makes it bad: yes, casting it in human terms is a good way to show the world whether your utopia makes any sense, and no, it clearly doesn’t, because you’re so utterly blinkered. Toward the end I would find myself involuntarily shaking my head “no” as I read.

I can now see Notes from the Underground as a very important rebuttal to Chernyshevsky’s cockeyed premises. No, people aren’t always rational! No, people don’t even always have their own best interests in mind! The world is full of muck, and so are human beings. You could say that Dostoevsky’s writing was about why communism would never ever be able to work the way it was supposed to. He was so right.

Toward the end of the book we get a long and detailed description/advertisement for a wonderful, wonderful seamstresses’ cooperative, from which the reader is free to extrapolate a fantastic new world built on the same principles. Here is just one of many reasons he gives why it makes fabulously good sense for co-workers to all live together and all work in the same place where they live:

… Many other expenses are either drastically reduced or completely unnecessary. Consider this, for example. To walk two or three versts a day to the store puts extra wear and tear on shoes and clothes. The following example is trivial, but it can be applied to other things of the same sort. If you don’t own an umbrella, your dress can suffer major damage as a result of rain. … Let’s say a simple cotton umbrella costs two rubles. There are twenty-five seamstresses in the workshop. Umbrellas for all would cost fifty rubles. Anyone who didn’t have one would face a loss much greater than two rubles. But since they live together and each one goes out only when it’s convenient, in bad weather it rarely happens that many of them have to leave the house at the same time. They found that five umbrellas would be quite enough. These five umbrellas are of fine silk and cost five rubles apiece. The total expenditure on umbrellas was twenty-five rubles, or one ruble per seamstress. You see, each one gets to use a fine umbrella instead of a worthless one for only half the price. So it is with a large number of things, which together result in major savings.

Hard to read that without shaking your head “no,” isn’t it? It was for me. Not for Lenin! Seriously: it was part of the communist utopia — way back before anyone had to make real plans! This was part of the utopian vision! — that there would only be one umbrella for every five people. It boggles the mind.

The workings of the new society are a just mess of snake oil doodles like this, which clearly don’t actually interest our author, except for insofar as he is utterly convinced that they are oh so brilliant and oh so simple! The thing that really interests him is that once all this new stuff — whatever it is — gets put in place and gets working, everything will be much, much, better. Toward the end of the book I found myself strangely moved by our heroine’s dream where she has a vision of a futuristic post-revolutionary society, in which people are living communally in huge crystalline palaces built of aluminum in the middle of lush, spreading fields. The people sing and smile as they work the crop; a huge flowing canopy is moved over them so that they are always in the shade; the palaces have showerheads on the roofs so that they can create rain whenever they like, and the interiors are provided with electric light so that people may party late into the night — which they do every night after eating luxurious feasts. These fairy-tale wonders are presented with a quiet, loving simplicity, and in reading that passage I finally felt some (pitying) sympathy for our author’s cause. A revolution would be solely to bring this about — and of course no sacrifice is too great if heaven on earth is the reward. I think that was the first time that I was able to understand the emotional appeal of revolution. Only if we undo everything and start again might we ever be allowed finally to embrace our hopes; not just our tight, calculated hopes, but our expansive, unbounded hopes, the hope for magic and wonder and joy to be present in all things. When the ways of the world seem clearly to preclude our hearts’ fantasies, the only way to stay true to those fantasies is to tear down the world. To make room for aluminum palaces!

Chernyshevsky gets one thing very right and must be given his due: that the inner lives of women are exactly as real as the inner lives of men, despite the fact that almost nobody in 1863 believed it. He is very clear on this point, and, I think, very insightful as to just how deep the problem goes. I.e. he understands that worshiping women as sublime and ethereal goddesses is still a kind of oppression. One section in particular, a historical pageant of women’s long, long march toward personhood, is sympathetic and nicely done. It was painful to me that at the heart of this dreadful muddle was such a fundamentally admirable observation. If this had been a pure feminist novel — if someone had cut out all the cooperatives and “materialism” and revolutionary insinuations, I would have had a very different response to it. Well, okay, they would have had to do a lot more editing than that.

Chernyshevsky walks his heroine progressively from philosophical darkness to light, presumably at the same pace as an imaginary reader would need to become slowly acclimated to the truth. This progression governs the underlying structure and timeline of the book; the ostensible love triangle plot is actually subsidiary, which results in bizarre pacing for anyone trying to read the pedestrian story advertised in the prologue. The author’s attention swerves unpredictably around this “plot” like the screwy orbit of a planet in some pre-Galilean model of the universe with the wrong body at the center. And after Vera Pavlovna has finally reached her enlightened state, he has to make some more structurally wacky choices — he suddenly lurches into the story of a brand new female character so that he can resolve the triangle happily into two couples, and then drifts into a really peculiar epilogue that introduces yet another new female character known only as “the woman in mourning,” who is apparently meant to be his (Chernyshevsky’s) wife, grieving while he languishes in prison writing this very book. We get to see these lively young people having a grand, grand old time of things, partying and whatnot, and singing songs, and wink wink, talking about certain things, wink wink. I think he honestly thought that he and his friends were absolutely the bee’s knees, but it’s actually all rather ominous. He calls the book a “tale about New People,” and by “New People” he means him and his friends, the clique of awesomeness who were finally going to set the world right.

The last pages tell us that by 1865 (2 years after publication) the revolution will have already come and all will be well on its way to wonderful. In fact what happened is that the book created a tremendous scandal but no social change, and Chernyshevsky was eventually sent to Siberia and had the spirit crushed out of him.

Harold Bloom says of his list that of non-fiction it includes only that which is “of great aesthetic interest.” On those grounds I agree with this work’s inclusion: it’s a work of great aesthetic interest. (He didn’t say “great aesthetic beauty,” after all.) This is writing that very intentionally seizes on fiction itself as a tool, but only as a tool, and wields it self-consciously — sometimes sincerely, sometimes tongue-in-cheek — to aesthetic ends. There’s a modernistic attitude in that, a bit ahead of its time; Chernyshevsky apparently came to it through his own pure inventiveness and radical heart, and it is raw indeed. When he would smirk and snark directly at me, the reader, about this strange book that he was writing and I was reading — which happened often — I couldn’t help but feel that I had really been drawn into an actual philosophical-aesthetic engagement with this strange man from 150 years ago. And yes, I enjoyed that.

The title, by the way, is a leading question to which the unspeakable answer is obviously “a revolution.” That’s one for the FAQ.

If you google about this book, you will find quite a few people writing about how the most important character is named Rakhmetov. This provides an easy way of distinguishing the people who actually read the book from those who read it in college, wink wink. Rakhmetov is in fact a walk-on; the main characters are Vera Pavlovna, Lopukhov, and Kirsanov. Rakhmetov is described, in his brief appearance, as an astounding, near-superhuman figure, a hero of idealized revolutionary strength, intelligence, and zeal… and then the author says outright that this Rakhmetov has been placed in the work solely so that a bewildered (and lowly) reader who thinks the protagonists seem extraordinary in their oh-so-forward-thinking ways will have a truly extraordinary figure to place beside them, better to see that this is in fact a story about quite ordinary people doing achievable things. As it turns out, the passage about the “extraordinary man” ended up making a strong impact on Lenin and other revolutionaries, so naturally any course that covers the book is going to talk about Rakhmetov. But make no mistake! He only appears for a few pages in the middle of a long book about other people, and anyone who implies otherwise is probably faking it.

Okay, I finally reached my 4000 word quota! No, just kidding. Really sorry about the length.

For those of you who, having read this, are now considering an intervention to stop me from reading another randomly chosen book, rest assured that the next random number has directed me to be a short and well-liked book that people actually read and that I would have wanted to read anyway. A book that some of you have already read and enjoyed. So don’t worry!

Thanks for your concern, though.

Comments (3)

May 1, 2010

Disney Canon #28: The Little Mermaid (1989)

ADAM I thought I was going to be blown away by how this looked — and it looks fine — but what I was actually impressed by was its wit. Which surprised me. I did not remember that, and I was tickled.

BETH I didn’t think it looked that amazing either, though it wasn’t bad — but it was very tight. The music was good, the story was good, and it felt like everyone working on it was excited by the idea of an under-the-sea movie. They were very inventive in coming up with fun things to animate.

ADAM There were a whole bunch of visual touches that were really pleasing to me. When Sebastian is creeping into Triton’s chamber, the camera pushes toward him and then suddenly leaps even further at him. Or I liked the way Sebastian’s eyes would bulge out just for a second. Things like that were actually funny! There was even redeeming humor in the turgid romantic parts.

BROOM I think that all of the movie’s greatest strengths were in what we would attribute in a live-action movie to “directing.” I’m not sure enough about how the process works behind the scenes to know whether the people named as directors here are the ones who deserve the credit. Probably they are. But probably a lot of other people do too. There’s a documentary out now about the process of reviving Disney in order to make this movie, and I’d be interested to see how that came about. Anyway, its new strengths were all to do with actually delivering the story and the entertainment and making it all work. Because, really, that’s what had been lost. The Fox and the Hound had a perfectly good story idea, and it looked pretty enough, and they had all the basic talent they needed — but it didn’t have any force of storytelling.

ADAM Or character.

BROOM Yes, but in movies like these where you only get about twenty seconds to establish any given character, characterization really has a lot to do with finessing individual moments. Every moment in this movie had been thought about and was smart.

ADAM The comic minor characters were funny without being just, like: “hey, it’s the French guy!” (except for the cook). Like Sebastian, and the seagull, and Grimsby — they were all pretty smartly done. And the little gag moments actually worked — like when the seagull is trying to sing romantic music and he’s singing badly — I smiled legitimately at a lot of those details. The big setpiece of “Under the Sea,” though it wasn’t as CGI-tastic as it probably would be fifteen years later, was still pretty impressive. And the song is actually pretty challenging for a Disney song. We talked about the Broadway-ification of the big numbers, and certainly “Part of That World” is totally a Broadway song — but you can’t really make out all of the lyrics to “Under the Sea” unless you’re really listening.

BROOM There were a few words I only heard now for the first time.

ADAM And the Jamaican style of the music could be hard for a little kid.

BROOM But it is definitely the Broadway version of that kind of song. I thought the whole movie was done very much like Broadway. At the very beginning, they sing one verse of “I’ll tell you a tale of the bottomless blue…” and then right at the end of the phrase, the prince comes in talking: “What a beautiful day!…” That kind of structure, where a song starts and then goes into a vamp while someone does expository lines, is Broadway. We haven’t seen it in a Disney movie before. I’m not sure anyone had seen it in a kid’s movie before. I think Howard Ashman, the lyricist, showed up and said “this is how these things are done.” He had a big part in that, so I’ve heard. There’s a very particular way that songs and lines play on Broadway, and it’s something that this movie did consistently and with confidence. And not just the songs; I felt like all of the storytelling beats were from that same school, and done exactly right so that you could just lap it all up easily. Triton destroys her little grotto and then as that’s ending, of course we pull back to see Flotsam and Jetsam waiting for the next scene. And from there they take her straight to the witch, and from that scene she gets deposited right on the shore… and so on and so on. Each thing feeds into the next one exactly as it should. It takes all kinds of story work to pare things down until they work that way.

ADAM And — to use one of your terms — there’s no business. No stupid stuff like “Flounder’s really shy around girls!”

BROOM That’s right, there was no business for its own sake — again, except for the French chef scene. But that scene is so blatantly that sort of scene, and it actually sort of telegraphs it and says, “here we go! let’s have fun with this.” When he sings “Now I stuff you with bread / it don’t hurt, ’cause you’re dead!” — that felt hilariously subversive when I first saw it. I remember that my family laughed hard at that. That lyric makes no sense except for as a wink to the audience, and that the scene was willing to be on the level of winking to the audience felt like a huge leap forward in sophistication for kid’s movies. “They know that we know what this scene is about, and we can all enjoy that together!” That was very exciting.

ADAM Beth, as a little girl watching what is probably the pre-eminent little girl’s movie of our lives… what did you think? As I ask this, your red hair is shining in the light and you’ve wrapped your legs up in a blanket, so it seems apropos.

BETH I think I was a little older than the target age for being obsessed with this movie. I mean, I liked it, but I was already moving out of the Disney phase. This was the last one I saw. Seriously, you guys, the last one — everything after this is going to be new to me. But I did like it.

ADAM I feel like I’ve often heard people say, “The Little Mermaid was so anti-feminist, and they really were trying to get out of that as they moved forward into the later movies,” but in fact, she’s exactly as spunky as Belle or any of the other heroines. She evades a shark and tricks him into getting stuck in an iron hoop; she has the balls to sign away her life on a contract. She’s just as spunky.

BROOM Well, I think the essence of the feminist objection would be that “spunk” — in some vague sense of “does she have the wherewithal to evade a shark in a cartoon chase” — is not what a girl should aspire to. It’s not an actual personhood. As we watched I was thinking a lot about the princess fetish that the Disney corporation has developed. Moreso than Cinderella, this movie is the exact performance of the little girl’s fantasy, which is that you can go and get the prince and be a glamorous grownup and live happily ever after and that you don’t have to do or know anything. Ariel doesn’t have to do or know anything in this movie. “She’s better than I thought,” Ursula says angrily when she sees her through the crystal ball… even though she hasn’t done anything. There’s a prince pacing around saying “I’m going to find that girl and I’m going to marry her!” and then she shows up and he says reverently “you look wonderful tonight!” That’s it. She has no agency at all during the entire getting-the-man part of the movie. She has no agency basically at any point after she makes the terrible, terrible decision to sign away everything in her life.

ADAM The terrible and extremely brave decision to sign away everything! And her lack of agency is explained by a plot point, which is that she doesn’t have a voice!

BROOM But she doesn’t respond to that as a challenge. She doesn’t come up with a scheme.

BETH She’s so enthralled with the human world. She doesn’t have time to come up with a scheme — she’s enjoying everything.

BROOM I know. I don’t actually think there’s anything wrong with it. But the movie could have a different thing to say about this fantasy if she showed up and thought, “even though I can’t talk, I know what I’m going to do: I’m going to do X or Y or Z.”

ADAM Tap-dance.

BROOM Something. But that’s not what happens.

BETH But she’s not able to do any of that stuff.

BROOM She has no ability to do anything. Sebastian does things, and Buddy Hackett does things, on her behalf — they set up the whole “Kiss the Girl” scene — whereas she just sits there waiting for him to kiss her. And he’s gonna, because she’s pretty. And that is the extent of the dream that it offers girls.

ADAM Yes it is! He is very handsome.

BROOM He is one of the most handsome of the princes.

BETH He is.

ADAM Ursula, too, I feel more sympathetic to than I might on one of my strident days. Yes, she sort of deals fast, but she really does spell it all out for Ariel, up front. She’s power-mad, but she’s totally legit.

BETH Except that she sabotages Ariel by showing up in disguise.

ADAM That’s not mentioned in the contract! I think Ursula is very on the level about the deal.

BROOM As a lawyer, you gotta respect Ursula the sea witch. But let’s step back and talk about the figure of Ursula, because I think this is the culmination of the conversation we’ve sort of been having about Cruella de Vil, and Madame Medusa, and Maleficent… all the way back to “Mirror, mirror on the wall.” Why do we have to see Ursula putting on lipstick and shaking her boobs? What does this have to do with her evil?

BETH and ADAM (sputtering defensively)

BETH But I enjoyed seeing her put on lipstick!

ADAM Yeah, she put it on with that cool… thing!

BROOM She happens to have a vanity right there in her living room. Also — and I hate this kind of analysis, but — she comes crawling out of a big vaginal conch shell. Am I right?

ADAM I mean, I was trying to be counter-intuitive. I would normally be totally with you on the Ariel analysis and the Ursula analysis. I think I just liked Ursula’s personality a lot.

BROOM In neither of these cases am I saying that a movie should not be made this way. My defense of such a movie would be: there are many facets to human-hood and womanhood and manhood, and you can’t learn them all from The Little Mermaid! These are some of them. Sometimes vain people can be manipulative. In the scenes with Ursula, in fact, it seems like what’s going on is that she resents the beautiful people. If Ursula got on a psychiatrist’s couch and cried, it would be about how she’s ugly, right?

ADAM Yeah. Or that she’s fat.

BETH She’s just unloved.

BROOM Well, for whatever reason she’s actually unloved, she thinks that she needs to be sexy, right?

ADAM I don’t know. When she was putting on the lipstick it felt very much like Lauren Bacall “getting down to business.”

BETH She didn’t feel like she was trying to be sexy, to me.

ADAM It’s like watching Miranda Priestly get dressed.

BETH She made a joke about “wasting away.”

ADAM She used to live in the palace, but something happened.

BROOM Wait! When does she say that?

ADAM Right at the beginning. “When I lived in the palace, we had feasts,” or something like that.

BROOM Fascinating! I’ve never processed that!

ADAM She’s more like a Lucifer character.

BROOM I see, she’s fallen! What do you think happened? When Triton shows up at the end, she fingers the tip of his trident — partially, of course, because she wants it, but it’s also a little bit like a “hello, big boy!” touch. And he’s single, right? In Little Mermaid II we don’t find out that Ursula is her mother, do we? Because we could!

BETH No.

ADAM She’s got that slinky confident quality. And she’s got those lips. To me she was much more like a drag queen than like a woman.

BROOM Yes. She looks like Harvey Fierstein. [ed.: on the commentary, the directors say she was inspired by Divine]

ADAM She knows what she wants and she knows how to get it. Through legal trickery.

BROOM And shaking her ass. You cannot deny that a major element of Ursula is that she is — or was — a sexual woman.

BETH Really? I just don’t see her as sexual.

BROOM “AND DON’T FORGET THE IMPORTANCE OF BODY LANGUAGE!!!!!”

ADAM It’s not so much that she’s sexual. She’s seen it all, and she knows how you make it in this world, but that’s just how business is done, with a little vavoom, you know?

BROOM Yes. And she’s the figure of evil in this movie. The world in which we want to live is a happy world where you go on a ride through the kingdom and see a puppet show. Prince Eric is surely going to have sex with our heroine but it’s not that kind of sex.

ADAM It’s the sex of true love.

BROOM This issue that the kiss has to be the Kiss of True Love is just a throwaway. If he had kissed her in the lagoon, would that have counted? They’re singing that he should kiss her because there’s only one way to find out if she likes him — that can’t be the Kiss of True Love, if he doesn’t even know yet whether she’ll like it.

ADAM What is the other movie where there’s True Love’s Kiss? Oh, I’m thinking of Enchanted. We should watch that at the end of the series.

BROOM What would you say is essence of the princess fantasy? Do you guys agree that this movie codified it?

BETH I think it’s exactly what you said: that being pretty is enough.

ADAM I think of the essence of the princess fantasy as being that beautiful crystals are swirling around you and you become something else that is effortless and delightful, and afterward everything is easy.

BETH I think it involves waking up and looking in the mirror and finding that you are beautiful and have pretty clothes and that the guy that you like likes you. And that everything is easy, yes.

BROOM So the royalty aspect of it is just a convenient way of summing all that up. It’s not like people actually want to be the queen.

ADAM It’s not about the exercise of state power!

BROOM But is it about that he’s powerful — that your boyfriend is like the king of something, and that’s hunky?

BETH It’s just “how nice it would be to live in a palace and not have to do anything except wear pretty dresses and eat dinner.”

BROOM When that washerwoman in the movie says “if Prince Eric is looking for a wife, I’ve got some very available women right here,” we all go “Ho ho ho ha ha ha! Of course not you hag!”

BETH I think it’s really about being the fairest of them all.

ADAM I kept thinking about Mr. Weasley as I was watching this movie. You know, he’s fascinated by Muggles, and he doesn’t understand how Muggle technology works, and everyone else is like “Humans are dangerous and unpredictable!” and he says “You just don’t understand them!” And he also has vibrant red hair.

BROOM You’re right! J.K. stole that. “Want a thingamabob? I got twenty!”

ADAM Ariel’s totally a nerd.

BROOM Well, a hot nerd.

ADAM She’s into, like, Warhammer figurines. She’s like Belle, actually. They’re both nerds.

BETH Belle is from Beauty and the Beast?

BROOM Yes. You’ll find out.

ADAM Belle’s opening number is about her love of reading.

BROOM And about how provincial her community is. It’s basically about how everyone she goes to high school with is an asshole, and she’s going to go to a fancy school. But her dad can’t afford it.

BETH I don’t know how I felt about Ariel wearing a bikini.

BROOM That’s why I mentioned her hotness. It is not a non-factor in this movie that the protagonist is mostly naked most of the time.

ADAM But she doesn’t know any better. That’s just what she wears.

BETH Some of those shots where she’s swimming up and her boobs are sort of emphasized…

ADAM And how about when the water is breaking on the rock behind her?

BROOM When she gets legs and is naked below the waist and they still show her all the way down below the curve of her hips, that feels like a bit much. I accept the shells when they go unmentioned, but I always felt uncomfortable when the seagull asks her if she got “new seashells” — it turns our attention directly on them and acknowledges that they are a removable item of clothing that is covering her near-nakedness, and not just a part of the character-design — and that always felt inappropriate. And let me explain what I mean by “always” — I have seen this movie more times than any other in this series because it was used as a substitute teacher for middle school chorus by a neglectful chorus teacher, many, many times in sixth or seventh grade. There is not a shot in this movie that isn’t very, very familiar to me.

ADAM But you said there were words you picked out now for the first time.

BROOM Words aren’t a crucial part of movies when you’re a kid. As Beth said the other day when Star Wars was on.

BETH There were also some shots of the side-boob. More than necessary.

BROOM Yes, that’s what I’m saying. She had been drawn with that certain kind of loving care that you need to be careful about managing, whenever animators are involved.

ADAM What do you think about the primacy of music in this movie? I don’t think I had ever thought abut the fact that Sebastian is the royal composer, and music is the way they try to get him to kiss her, and her singing is what draws him to her…

BROOM Sebastian’s efforts to convince her to stay under the sea and to convince the prince to kiss her are both far more compelling music than the terrible score he writes for the royal concert. I always identified Sebastian with Salieri. Sebastian’s eyes and mouth are on a part of the crab that doesn’t exist, anatomically. Every time I see it I wonder why that is. You’d think they’d just have put eyes and mouth on a crab shape. Instead they attached a glutinous mass to him that contains his personality. At first you think that it makes sense, because a clam has a goopy body like that — but a crab is not a clam. It has features already.

ADAM I don’t think I had noticed that.

BROOM As for the role of music… I like that she has a little leitmotif that her disembodied voice sings: “look at this stuff / isn’t it neat.” And I really like the effect when the ghost hands come and take it out.

ADAM And you can hear it coming out, too! How do they do that?

BROOM Regarding the animation: certainly the special effects were better than Oliver & Company, and the character designs were a little better overall…

ADAM But there was some sloppiness.

BETH There were some weird things.

BROOM I would say about one-half of the animation was better than it had been, and about half of it was about the same. We were all struck by the shots where she’s singing her reprise of “Part of Your World,” on the beach and then on the rock, some kind of rotoscoping was going on, and her shape was changing uncomfortably. Her eyes sort of drifted apart and together.

BETH Her body, too. Also, the mouth-matching for her first song wasn’t very good.

BROOM Maybe so, but I think that first song is really effective. I thought, “of course everyone wants to sing this as their audition piece in high school.” The sequence works so well.

BETH It’s a great song.

BROOM It’s a great song for that moment in that movie. When you get to that song, you know it for sure: This movie is going to be better than Oliver & Company. This movie is better than all the other animated movies I’ve seen in this decade. You know it because she’s singing about something.

ADAM Her look changes. Sometimes she looks like a young girl, and sometimes she looks like a drag queen — her lips are too red, and her hair looks like Wilma Flintstone — and sometimes she looks another way… it was uneven.

BETH It seemed like many different people were drawing her and it didn’t all work out.

BROOM What do you know about the original story by Andersen? I know that I found it very unpleasant when I had a little book of it as a kid. She loses her voice by having her tongue cut out of her mouth, and her feet hurt the whole time, and she fails… it’s all bad. Anyway, if not for the source material, would “The Little Mermaid” seem like an appropriate title for this movie? It seems a little quaint.

ADAM When I saw the title screen, I thought that if I had never heard of the movie before, I’d be excited, because a “mermaid” is this exotic thing, but “the little mermaid” sounds friendly and approachable.

BROOM To me the word “little” is like a hundred-year-old European way of signifying that something is for children.

BETH The Teenage Mermaid, it should have been. Teenage Mutant Ninja Mermaid.

BROOM Did you hear, by the way, that the film Rapunzel, due in November 2010, has been retitled Tangled? They could have had the title RAPUNZEL… but they didn’t think it would appeal to boys enough, so they rechristened it… TANGLED.

[conversation ensues about how dumb this is]

BROOM I feel like it’s in this movie’s long-term interest that it is called The Little Mermaid, even though that’s not quite what it feels like, and not, say … Getting Feet. Anyway, I thought it was great. I really enjoyed watching it, and I haven’t felt that in a long time.

ADAM Yes. I liked it for all the right reasons.

BETH It felt very fresh. Very 90s, but fresh.

BROOM And that said, it definitely wasn’t the wholesome, full-bodied thing that the original Disney movies were.

BETH Ursula did eat creatures with eyes. You had talked about the cruelty in the previous movies being a turning point.

BROOM Adam had to ask, “are they dead?” when she suddenly blew up Flotsam and Jetsam. And then little pieces of their meat fall on her. Yes, she blew them up. They are dead.

ADAM And she died pretty graphically.

BROOM The one part of this movie that’s not handled perfectly is that she gets huge and then is impaled on a boat.

ADAM You want them to be hoist on their own petard. It should have something to do with their character. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s inflated herself to this vainglorious size, and somehow she’s undone that way.

BROOM She’s undone only because she’s so distractedly set on blowing up the hot teenager. If she had the presence of mind to look to her side, she could have batted that ship away. And it still seems unlikely that the ship, going so slow, would have impaled her all the way through. It’s not a satisfying ending.

ADAM I feel like there’s another Disney movie where the king gives up his power to save some lesser person, and in so doing imperils everyone, and you realize it’s not a good decision. I don’t know what I’m thinking of. There are a lot of bits in this that are Disney pastiche but don’t feel that way in the moment. As Beth said, the “rescue by animals” scene is old hat.

BROOM That was fine because it was just a comedy bit and not the actual saving moment. Of course, the actual climactic moment was even more secondhand. Her getting big is not justified by anything in the movie. You have to have seen other movies to understand why she’s getting really big at the end.

ADAM It happens again in Aladdin too.

BROOM Not to give anything away. It basically comes from Sleeping Beauty, where she turns into a giant dragon at the end, and is, similarly, vanquished unconvincingly. It would have been better if she had been undone by her vanity somehow; or if her contract had a loophole clause in it.

ADAM Something Shylockian.

BROOM She is Jewish, isn’t she. And from New York.

[we read the review and I begin reminiscing about reading that very review back in 1989, and things devolve]

Comments (5)

April 19, 2010

Disney Canon #27: Oliver & Company (1988)

BROOM For our readership and for our future selves, we should begin by acknowledging the circumstances under which we watched this. We found at the last minute that our Netflix disc was cracked and unable to play, so we watched it on Youtube. It had been illegally uploaded at low resolution, in nine segments, by people who didn’t really care about our viewing experience.

BETH They weren’t thinking about us.

BROOM They weren’t thinking about much.

ADAM But I’m glad that they did it.

BROOM Yes, I’m glad we got to watch it, but the video quality and sound quality were terrible.

ADAM I have to say: this movie had panache.

BROOM I agree.

BETH I actually wish we had seen it in better quality.

BROOM Me too. At first I thought, “Well, it doesn’t matter how we watch this one because it’s just gonna be complete garbage.” But then it wasn’t, and I ended up wishing we could have seen more detail and been more discerning about it.

BETH It wasn’t as bad as the last two.

ADAM The last, like, ten.

BROOM I had been anticipating that we would see The Little Mermaid as a sudden rebirth out of ashes. But I actually saw this as sort of a halfway point, building toward that from where they’d been.

ADAM This is like the Cimabue before the Michelangelo.

BROOM Well, I don’t know about that. I just mean that there was all kinds of stuff going on here that we hadn’t seen in a long time.

ADAM Like it was funny.

BETH Yeah. I mean, in parts it was. And the songs were decent for once.

ADAM There are at least three songs that I am still humming right now. Even if one of them is just the phrase “You and Me Together“…

BETH I felt like they ripped off their own movies, a little bit. Like Lady and the Tramp.

BROOM I was surprised to find myself thinking that of Lady and the Tramp, Aristocats, and this, which all cover the same territory…

BETH You would pick this??

BROOM Well… just that this was more fun than Aristocats. By far.

BETH Oh, yeah. But Lady and the Tramp is better than this!

ADAM There were little touches that were really good, things that they clearly took pleasure in doing right. When Georgette jumps away in fear from Dodger, her mirror wobbles and crashes, even though it could easily have just stayed there.

BROOM I thought everything with Georgette was good. I thought her musical number was a huge blast of adrenaline for the Disney organization.

BETH That number was surprisingly good. Bette Midler was entertaining.

BROOM They’re trying to get back to putting on musicals. Snow White was a musical, Cinderella was a musical — but they’ve really lost their way. Horribly so, by The Fox and the Hound, which is the last time that we had a song. Oh, wait — there were songs in The Great Mouse Detective, but they were really awful and wrong-headed. So now they’re trying to figure out what kind of songs constitute a fun family musical in this era, and here we saw several different styles being tried — the Huey Lewis song at the beginning, the Billy Joel song… And then in the middle of this is the mock-“Broadway song,” and it lights up the screen! That kind of theatrical overkill works with animation. I’m not sure how much it’s really a throwback to where they started — Bibbidy-Bobbidy-Boo, say, isn’t really a quote-unquote “Broadway number” — though I guess it’s sort of in line with how Broadway numbers were at the time. Anyway, this new showbiz razzmatazz is really a fresh choice for them, and the animators took to it like…

ADAM Like leg-warmers.

BROOM Like leg-warmers to a poodle. And that’s the direction they’re going to go. They’re going to hire Alan Menken and Howard Ashman to do Little Mermaid, I’ll bet, because of this realization that Broadway aesthetics are their future.

BETH But the drawing style was still that sleazy, cheap style, and not what we’ll see in The Little Mermaid. Little Mermaid looks more like Cinderella than it does like this.

ADAM Well, I think Little Mermaid is not going to look as good as we think.

BROOM I think that’s right, though it’s certainly better than this.

BETH Okay, fine, but The Little Mermaid looks wholesome and not sleazy. I actually loved the bad guy in this, but I didn’t think he was appropriate for children.

ADAM This is like our eighth kidnapping of a little girl.

BETH It’s like the fourth in a row, for real! And as a kid who was afraid of kidnapping: duh, no wonder I was! Everything had kidnapping in it!

ADAM …of a little red-haired girl!

BETH Yes! That’s not good for kids!

ADAM Not for girls.

BROOM Well, really scary threats get kids involved.

BETH They tied her wrists up. Everything that I feared happened to that girl. Except that she was okay in the end.

BROOM Were you afraid of black men — slash, dogs — prowling around you?

ADAM Those dogs were pretty negro, in a way that was uncomfortable.

BROOM We always have to make a little effort to try to find some racism to talk about, but those dogs really made me go “whoa! Weird choice for 1988.” But on second thought, it’s not weird for 1988.

BETH It’s New York, you know? They had a Hispanic dog, too…

BROOM They were all diverse stereotypes, it’s true. I felt a little bad for the brunette woman dog, who really didn’t have a role.

ADAM Well, she was black too.

BROOM She was?

ADAM Rita?

BROOM I don’t know what her name was. And I didn’t know she was black. [ed: Adam is right.]

ADAM This is probably the only Disney movie that is self-consciously about New York. The Rescuers starts in New York, but they leave. It’s not really about New York like this was; it doesn’t have three songs like “New York Is Bad!” “New York Is Cool!” “New York Is Glittery!”

BETH This was definitely about a real place in contemporary times.

BROOM Yes, this is their only New York movie. Unless you count Little Toot.

ADAM Or that one… what was it called…

BROOM The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met?

ADAM No.

BROOM You’re lucky I’m here to remember this stuff.

ADAM The one about the 1890s couple…

BROOM Johnnie Fedora. Yeah, that was set in ye olde New York.

ADAM It’s striking to me, as someone who is living in New York and someone who was obsessed with depictions of New York as a kid, that this is not a movie that would be made today. This is a New York full of ethnic toughs, and crime, and graffiti in the subway, and class hatred…

BETH It felt like a pretty accurate rendition of New York as it was in 1988.

BROOM Well, it looked pretty clean. I think the city was a little more dangerous and dirty than they showed it here. Unsurprisingly.

BETH But the cars looked like that, styles looked like that, people looked like that.

ADAM I’m not saying this was inaccurate; I’m saying that it’s really striking that everything is so different now. No one would ever even think to make a movie now where the good guys are like “‘Eyyyy, get outta my way!”

BROOM That image of New York was a running thing for at least two decades. I think of that vibe as the birthplace of Sesame Street. The idea that those loud people on your block, the people that you see out on the stoop: they’re the city, and that’s wholesome. I was used to that as a kid; that’s what I thought New York meant.

BETH It’s like Muppets Take Manhattan-style New York.

BROOM Yeah, where she gets mugged in Central Park and it’s just a gag for atmosphere.

ADAM That happens in Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing, too. Well, at least that they’re all wary of muggings in Central Park because all of their friends have been mugged. I’m really grateful that that’s not what the city’s like, now! I would not particularly enjoy living in a filthy urban maelstrom.

BROOM You were laughing during the sequence with all the feet at the beginning, when a guy came out at the beginning in high tops and started doing a cool dance in the street, but I kind of enjoyed that part, because it was like, “hey, look at all the different feet from 1988!”

BETH Yeah, I thought they did a good job with that.

BROOM I wish there had been some music there, but I guess there were probably sounds that we couldn’t really hear because of the quality. I feel like we watched this while taking a shower — like it was going on in the other room. I wouldn’t mind seeing it again some day. Of course, we don’t need to gather like this and see it again together.

BETH No, we don’t.

BROOM I thought the most important thing that they’d rediscovered was timing, which I keep saying the movies lack. This one, finally, had a sense of timing. The sequences flowed.

ADAM And did not drag.

BETH It felt really fast, in fact.

BROOM It did go really fast because it didn’t have wasted time in it. It had exactly the same amount of material as — if not more than — The Great Mouse Detective, but it didn’t waste time.

BETH It was maybe four minutes shorter than the average.

BROOM So all this said, about how we were expecting total crap and it turned out to be kind of entertaining… how good was it really? Not that good, right?

BETH Not that good, no.

ADAM Well, it’s probably in the top half, honestly.

BETH How many have we seen?

BROOM This is number twenty-seven.

BETH It might be in the top twenty…

ADAM Well, is it in the bottom fifteen?

BETH I think it might be, yes.

ADAM I don’t know. Did you think that, like, Sleeping Beauty was really all that great?

BROOM I would definitely watch Sleeping Beauty over this.

ADAM That’s just because Sleeping Beauty is like “a claaaassic.”

BROOM This is a good point. Because a lot of what I would prefer about Sleeping Beauty over this is really specific to the era. I keep saying that things seem harsher in the 80s, and this does seem harsher. Sleeping Beauty puts you into more of a comforting place. Though it’s not a perfect example…

ADAM I chose Sleeping Beauty because that one was actually pretty boring.

BROOM But it looked like a million bucks. I mean, maybe this one would have looked like a million bucks if we saw it in high-definition…

BETH No. It would not have.

BROOM The background art had that grainy quality that was popular in the 80s. They gave me a really 80s feel of, like [hums “Alvin and the Chipmunks” theme]. You know how at the beginning of that show they go through a trap door and down a slide in nowhere-space? It all reminds me of that — it’s not fully-conceived space.

BETH There was a slide like that in this movie.

BROOM That’s right, in that factory. What does Sykes manufacture? Not clear.

ADAM Hooks.

BROOM Sykes’s death in a head-on train collision was a little rough for my taste.

ADAM Frankly, his dogs being electrocuted on the subway tracks wasn’t too great either.

BROOM That sequence seemed to me to have been taken from the mine cars in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which came out a couple years earlier. Also, how did the movie Annie end? Don’t they climb up a bridge at night like that?

BETH I don’t know, but the girl was dressed just like Annie.

BROOM And there was a fair amount of Annie in her whole Fifth Avenue life. Do either of you know much about the real Dickens Oliver Twist? Is Fagin just a pathetic schlub beholden to Sikes in the original source? I thought Fagin was the bad guy.

ADAM I don’t know. I thought so too.

BROOM It’s weird that this is an all-dog type of movie, and yet Fagin, Sykes, and Penny are all people.

ADAM Jenny, not Penny. You’re thinking of Inspector Gadget.

BROOM Actually I’m thinking of The Rescuers. Anyway, why did they make Fagin a person? A really ugly person, no less?

BETH That’s something I was thinking: Why would any kid want to watch a bunch of mangy animals and an ugly guy?

ADAM Well, why do you want to read about Jon and Odie? Or Dave and Alvin and Simon and Theodore? Or the man in the yellow hat?

BETH But there’s a benign quality to Garfield that wasn’t true here.

BROOM The only reason I liked reading Garfield as a kid was because it was cleanly drafted. Garfield looked like an icon, like you could click on him.

ADAM Garfield may not be pleasing to deal with, but he’s in control.

BROOM Garfield looks exactly like Garfield, and that’s gratifying. Fagin here was blobby and inconsistent. I really didn’t like looking at his scraggly teeth in his coconut mouth.

BETH He was just dirtiness and ugliness. He was hard to love looking at.

ADAM Do you think Dodger got off the hook for being such a cold-hearted villain at the beginning, when he took the sausages from Oliver? We never really had it out with him about that.

BROOM I wasn’t sure that I liked Dodger as much as the movie liked him.

BETH He was like the Tramp from Lady and the Tramp but not charming.

ADAM It sounded like Billy Joel was trying to do the voice of the Tramp.

BROOM The Tramp knew more. I don’t know what Dodger knew. This was one of those “character movies,” where you get to know a gang of characters, and for the most part they didn’t grow on me. I guess I had some kind of a soft spot for Francis.

ADAM Playing Mr. Belvedere.

BETH Well, I liked the chihuahua.

ADAM Yeah, when I wasn’t cringing.

BROOM To me there was something uncomfortable about his lust for a dog three times his size. Anyway, as I’ve said before, that appeal to character familiarity is a dangerous way to make a movie work: “You love them, don’t you?” I guess I was sort of amused by the scene when he read them their bedtime story and it was something really inane.

ADAM Eh. That was just like Wendy and the Lost Boys. Everything in the movie was a little bit of something else.

BROOM Yes. It was just garbage, but it was garbage with panache. For a change.

BETH So… two and a half stars instead of one and a half stars.

ADAM I have lots of memories specifically of the year 1988. This is a thing we could easily remember doing.

BROOM And yet not a one of us saw it when it came out.

[we read Vincent Canby’s unsparing review]

BETH That was full of residual anger for what had happened to the Disney brand.

ADAM But totally justified!

BROOM Where was he for the past 15 years, then?

BETH Yes, it didn’t acknowledge how long things had been this bad. I think if you were coming to this not having seen a Disney movie in 10 years, you’d be like “what happened?”

BROOM But look, Vincent Canby wrote that review of The Fox and the Hound in 1981.

ADAM Which was a totally cynical, offhand review.

BETH He wrote about Fox and the Hound and didn’t say it was bad?

BROOM He just didn’t really talk about what had happened to “Disney” per se.

ADAM Well, Fox and the Hound does look better than Oliver, doesn’t it?

BROOM I don’t know about that.

BETH Yes, it does. It has a style that’s cohesive with their brand.

BROOM But remember that “big mama” bird? That was awful. I think he was a little harsh on the animation in this one. I didn’t like Fagin but I was okay with several of the dogs.

BETH I think he wasn’t distinguishing between animation and character design. Character design back in Fox and the Hound was more like standard Disney, but then it took a hit and became much more Saturday-morning style.

BROOM Yes. And I don’t know if we’re going to ever get back to where we were.

BETH No, I don’t think they do get that back.

BROOM They just find something new, something suited to the 90s.

ADAM I feel like we’re at… “this could be the start of something good.”

BROOM But that review made me wonder. When he said “how dare they,” I thought, “but this is what they’re going to end up doing. They’re just going to do it better.”

ADAM Well, let’s see what happens when it’s better, and see how we feel about that!

BETH I’m prepared not to like things as much as I thought.

BROOM So: show this to your kids, or not?

ADAM I mean, if it was on TV I’d let them watch it, but I wouldn’t make a point of showing this to them.

BETH Sure, but not until they’re a little older — at least nine or ten.

BROOM To deal with the kidnapping themes.

BETH Yes, and the bad guy.

BROOM That seems a little overprotective to me. It might be a little scary but I don’t think it has its values too screwed up.

BETH I just think it’s a little bit sleazy.

BROOM The closer to the present we get, the less I’m able to feel that there’s anything dangerous in these. They might have their value systems skewed and be ugly and mean-spirited, but they also don’t get at your gut. If Bambi showed the mother being killed, with all the impact that had, and then they followed that scene by telling Bambi, “time to get revenge!” I might feel that that was dangerous because it really sends a message. These don’t have the power to send messages any more. Like, who knows what really happened on Inspector Gadget? I watched plenty of episodes of that, and I’m sure it was full of insensitivity, but who cares? It didn’t go anywhere in me.

BETH That’s much more harmless than this. I felt like this bad guy was a real bad guy. He felt scary like a real person who could kidnap me.

ADAM He was a mobster and not, like, a wizard.

BROOM I liked that the murky underworld that was supposed to be like being down in the fog by the Thames was actually DUMBO. At the time maybe that was a sleazy place.

BETH I already forget: what was the last one called? Sherlock Holmes?

BROOM Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Baby Mouse.

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March 13, 2010

Disney Canon #26: The Great Mouse Detective (1986)

BROOM I think this movie should have been called The Mouse Detective. That’s my line that I planned to say.

BETH Oh.

BROOM Because it’s not that great.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM I have other things to say.

BETH Go ahead.

BROOM I think that it was bad principally in the music and timing departments. I think a lot of what we saw and had to think about would have been bearable had it been done tightly, but it wasn’t. It also looked slick in that chintzy 80s way, which really detracted from one’s ability to get into the atmosphere. But again, I think the music and timing were the most at fault. There was a certain amount of flair in some of the animation — surprisingly so: Ratigan went into some crazy, over-the-top postures — and there was a lot of fast-beat stuff with Basil. But it wasn’t serving any greater cause, so it didn’t add up to anything good.

ADAM It’s true. The end, when he was in the gears of the clock, that was pretty flashy and sort of abstract, and they fairly reveled in it, but…

BROOM Famously the first use of CGI in traditional animation. [ed. not so sure about that…]

ADAM Well, it looked good.

BETH It didn’t look like a Disney movie, the same way that The Black Cauldron didn’t.

ADAM It looked like a Don Bluth movie.

BETH It looked like an 80s kids’ cartoon. Does it have a lower frame-rate than other Disney movies? Did they switch to 24 for a few movies and then go back?

BROOM I don’t know. I thought they were all 24.

BETH That was Disney’s point of pride. The reason they looked so lifelike is because they used 36 frames per second, and most studios used 24.

BROOM I don’t know! It didn’t look low frame-rate to me.

BETH It did to me, a little bit. Maybe I was just trying to find a reason for why it looked chintzy.

ADAM It definitely had that thing where objects in the foreground have brighter outlines, which make them look like they’re Shrinky-Dinks on a painted background.

BETH I liked a lot of the backgrounds. I thought the street scenes, the outdoor backgrounds, were nicely done. The indoor backgrounds I didn’t really like, but whenever it was nighttime outside I thought they did a nice job.

BROOM I didn’t. I thought the backgrounds looked over-airbrushed, over-textured in a way that’s not of value to me.

ADAM I would have liked this as a child because I liked anything that was lavishly about travel to a foreign city. This had a queen and Big Ben and Sherlock Holmes and all of the things that England is.

BETH This was way too scary for me as a seven-year-old.

ADAM That’s true, it was very scary.

BETH I don’t think I saw it when I was seven, but parts of it did seem familiar, especially when they were in the toy shop.

ADAM The concept of an evil toy shop is pretty scary.

BROOM As we were saying during that scene, though, the music was not at all scary and didn’t seem to support the atmosphere, and Adam suggested that probably it had been intentionally dialed back from something that had been deemed too scary. I’m not so sure, since several times the movie did things that were definitely too scary. What I remember from seeing it in the theater at the age of seven was that once the bat had stuck his face into the camera in the second minute of the movie…

ADAM The movie had three terrifying bat reveals! That, and then in the baby carriage, and then when he’s dressed as Olivia.

BETH I think that one was the worst.

BROOM The one at the beginning where the face filled the screen was the worst for me then — anyway, once that had happened, I was on edge for the rest of the movie.

BETH And rightfully so!

BROOM Because you know what they’re capable of: something ridiculously cruel.

ADAM And they do it over and over.

BETH And the dolls were very scary to me, too, so any time the dolls broke, or parts of dolls came off… ugh.

BROOM The reason the movie feels bad is because that kind of evil, that kind of eerie, otherworldly scariness, had nothing to do with this plot. Ratigan is basically a comic character, and his plot is to build a robot queen that looks obviously like a robot; there’s nothing scary actually going on.

BETH Well, he’s a kidnapper, and I was so afraid of being kidnapped, as a kid.

BROOM Well, then that opening scene, with a home invasion, is pretty brutal.

BETH That was like my worst fear as a child, that some bad guy was going to come and take away my family.

ADAM I would like to propose that we read this, as a text, alongside The Naked Gun. Because… I don’t know, the monarchism, and, uh…

BROOM They both involve juxtapositions of The Manchurian Candidate on to the Queen of England.

ADAM That’s right. But also… they both have a sort of quintessential 80s feel that’s hard to put your finger on. I don’t know — is there more to this than that, or am I just… ?

BROOM I really don’t know, but I would love to hear it if there is!

ADAM I hadn’t really worked it out — it just occurred to me. It’s been a while since I saw The Naked Gun, so it’s hard to say.

BROOM Which is also ostensibly a detective movie but not really. When I was a kid, the appeal of this movie was that it was going to take place in fog and be about following clues around. I loved “mysteries,” any Encylopedia Brown-type stuff. But the clue-following in this movie doesn’t really gratify that.

ADAM There’s just that there’s that hound, which is not really clue-following, and then just silliness, like “oh, this note comes from Ratigan…” That’s not really a clue that you could be expected to follow.

BROOM But I probably did enjoy that, because a note is clearly “a clue.” Pick it up, it’s “a clue!”

BETH There’s also the chemical stuff.

BROOM Right, where he discovers that the paper has salt water in it, although that was a little bit obscure for my taste. “There’s only one place where the sewer meets the river!” That seems unlikely. What I do remember enjoying as a child is the great escape sequence, when they’re in the Rube Goldberg trap toward the end. I liked the humorous touch of that cheesy song going while they’re about to die, though the movie sort of cried wolf by already having given us some other cheesy songs that weren’t intended to be “cheesy songs.” But it was still effective as a comic touch. I remember appreciating, then, that the logic of how they stop the machine — by closing the trap on the marble — was within the terms of the mechanical possibilities that I’d been given to imagine, when my mind was racing thinking “what should they do?” It was very satisfying that the solution was a thing I genuinely could have thought of, but hadn’t.

BETH The cabaret dancer was a little too sexy.

BROOM That was a gratuitous sequence. That woman was not a character in the movie. And yes, her ass was inappropriate.

BETH That she took her clothes off was completely inappropriate. And then saying “I will do anything you want.” Of course kids won’t get that, but — what? That has no place in this movie.

BROOM The two other songs were by Henry Mancini. That song was written and performed by… someone else.

ADAM Melissa Manchester.

BROOM It was totally extraneous to the movie. It didn’t even add to the atmosphere, because it didn’t belong in that atmosphere. At a sleazy sailor’s bar?

ADAM It was interesting that there was sort of a female burlesque, because this movie was a lot about vamping and camp. There was both a vampy evil and a vampy good at the same time. You know, Dawson with his little gold hoop earring and dry sherry is kind of like Smee.

BROOM Oh, yes — I think that was supposed to be a sort of Smee costume that he was wearing. This movie had more in-house joking and self-love than we’ve seen yet.

ADAM It had that Dumbo doll.

BROOM Bill the Lizard, from Alice in Wonderland, was in Ratigan’s entourage.

ADAM Anyway — Ratigan is pretty gay, too. “Oh, I love you in disguise!”

BROOM Vincent Price was not in fact gay, right?

BETH No, but he acted pretty gay.

ADAM I don’t really have a thesis here either, but… given that around the recent Sherlock Holmes adaptation, Robert Downey Jr. joked on a talk show that they were homos…

BROOM I heard the joke was also sort of in the movie.

ADAM Well, there’s just a lot of homo-eroticism that sort of gets teased to the surface. Now in this, they were pretty studious about making Basil of Baker Street not gay. He’s very masculine and just sort of a grump, as opposed to a fussbucket.

BROOM I appreciated that, given the Disney standards, they tried to make him at all unstable in a Holmesian way, instead of just a standard-issue hero. It didn’t add up to very much, but at least they tried. But I’m really scrounging to try to see it on its own terms…

ADAM I probably would have enjoyed this just fine as a kid, but it’s just a nothing. There’s nothing here.

BROOM I don’t think it’s right. I wouldn’t show this to my kids.

BETH Yeah, I don’t think I would have enjoyed it and I don’t think I would show it.

BROOM It gets a lot of things wrong. Those song sequences are so wrong-headed.

ADAM You’re really hung up on the music. Is this the first Disney movie where we’ve seen a murder?

BETH I thought that too!

BROOM No, because we commented on this in Peter Pan, when Captain Hook shot one of his underlings offscreen and he falls from the rigging.

BETH Well, that was a long time ago.

ADAM Yes. They’ve been few and far between.

BROOM The drunken mouse here was pretty harsh.

BETH It was upsetting.

BROOM Pointlessly so.

ADAM I remember how stunned I was as a kid when the villain in Roger Rabbit puts the poor shoe into The Dip.

BROOM I think that was a tough scene for a lot of people.

ADAM Kids didn’t have to look at that in the 40s.

BROOM It seems so obvious that it’s not worth saying, but I want to say it: there’s something more cruel about 80s stuff for kids. There’s an insensitivity — an inhumanity in it.

BETH I like “insensitivity” more, because I think the people making this stuff were just not sensitive to the fact that their ideology wasn’t acceptable for kids.

BROOM But it was “acceptable” for kids!

ADAM Is that because we’re coming out of the Kramer vs. Kramer, Paper Moon era, where childhood wasn’t venerated the way that it was 15 years later?

BROOM I don’t think it’s so much about childhood; I think it’s about the coarsening of culture.

ADAM But it dials back in 10 years. You won’t see this kind of insensitivity in 90s movies. And indeed children today are sort of coddled by comparison.

BETH The kids who were teenagers in the 70s are the people making these things.

BROOM Well, first of all, consider that it’s the same people making this who are going to make the Disney Renaissance movies after The Little Mermaid. It’s the same team. And in fact you can see a lot of their gestures here.

ADAM But the culture shifts. You know, Park Slope mommies wouldn’t let their kids… I feel like there’s a coddling of children today that wasn’t as present in the 70s and 80s. There was coddling in the 50s, and then there’s a change around our childhoods, and then it changes back.

BROOM Well, you’re right that there’s a coddling, but I’m not sure I’m willing to accept that there isn’t still an unkindness in movies now. I think that in Mulan or whatever, the most willfully PC movie, you’re still going to see bad guys slicing up good guys, as a way to up the stakes. And of course in Snow White the queen sends the huntsman to cut out her heart — of course that’s also cruel and difficult to take, but…

ADAM But you don’t see this in Cinderella or Alice or Sleeping Beauty, in that period.

BROOM I think the key for me is that in Snow White when she sends him to cut out her heart, or in Cinderella when she takes the key and cruelly locks her in her room, or in Sleeping Beauty where she’s completely terrible, the point is that they’re terrible, and you’re supposed to be horrified by it. Whereas here it’s sort of serving the plot explication, like, “then we’ll show he’s a bad guy by having him kill someone.” It’s not part of the main emotional journey of the movie, and it’s the casualness of it that feels less sensitive. Like in The Black Cauldron, at the end, the bad guy’s body is graphically torn to shreds by the evil power — that was just there as, like, coolness. Our horror at that doesn’t serve the story — the kids aren’t even necessarily supposed to experience horror at that. It’s that kind of rough-play without expectation of any particular emotional reaction that is saddening to me. And I don’t think that that’s gone away. Though I do think there has been a response — when you say that there’s coddling now, I guess that’s right, and it’s in response to what I’m talking about, but it doesn’t actually see it for what it is and address it directly.

ADAM Have we seen a rash of child-napping in these movies that will later go away? Like here, and in The Rescuers, and in… uh… well, the pig gets kidnapped in The Black Cauldron. There isn’t that same theme in the recent ones, as far as I’m aware.

BROOM There is in The Rescuers Down Under, I believe, because it’s another Rescuers movie. Another example of this direction I’m talking about: in Bambi, when Bambi’s mother is killed, it’s the turning point in Bambi’s emotional life, and the movie and you have to sit and deal with that. In The Fox and the Hound, when his mother is killed similarly right at the beginning, it’s like “… okay, so, his mother is killed, and now what’s this little guy gonna do?”

ADAM It doesn’t have the same kind of gravitas.

BROOM They don’t believe in emotional gravitas anymore, so when they do this stuff… When Snow White’s in the woods, it’s scary because that’s the scariest moment in her life! It’s not just like “let’s do a scary toy shop sequence.” The toy shop didn’t have to be the scariest scene in this movie — it was arbitrary. It wasn’t actually a doomed or haunted toy shop. It was just a toy shop, and someone just decided that would be the “scary” scene.

ADAM I appreciate what you’re saying. The horror has become casual and atmospheric and just a device, as opposed to being part of your emotional maturation as a viewer.

BROOM I think that what the Disney movies have lost, and what I’m curious to see whether I feel that they do get it back — because I’m not sure they’re going to get it back as much as they want us to think — is that emotions are at the heart of it.

ADAM As opposed to caper and sequence…

BROOM Just “makin’ a movie work.” Even in Cinderella that I accused of being totally materialistic, it is clearly about your hopes for Cinderella, that she should get what she wants. Will she get what she wants? Why does she have to deal with this injustice?

ADAM Wait for Lilo and Stitch, my friend!

BROOM I’m not sure! I’m really not sure whether those will seem more superficial or not.

ADAM Well, Hercules and The Emperor’s New Groove will strike you as more superficial.

BROOM Those aren’t in the running. Those are the equivalents of The Three Caballeros.

ADAM I’ve said my piece.

BETH Me too.

BROOM So, next up is the end of the line for the shitty ones: Oliver & Company.

ADAM That’s not true: The Rescuers Down Under follows The Little Mermaid.

BROOM That’s right, but I don’t know that The Rescuers Down Under is as bad as this.

ADAM And this was not as bad as some other things that we’ve seen.

BROOM I think that The Fox and the Hound was a real low point, despite having a more interesting story than this. This story was really stupid — stupider than The Rescuers, I daresay.

BETH I was pretty bored watching this.

BROOM I think the main thing that this didn’t have that they will get their groove back about was a sense of…

ADAM Panache?

BROOM Yes! I think that if they had rescored it and cut out extra frames… there were places where we’d see reaction shots and they’d go on twice as long as they needed to and ruin the pacing of the scene. Like at the beginning, when the girl says “My daddy’s gone missing!” and Basil says “No time for that!” and then we see her look sad for like three seconds. That mistake was made many times over. I could picture an animator at his desk with an assignment: “dejected look,” and then he works all day at the “dejected look” shot in and of itself. It’s someone else’s responsibility to make that flow with everything else, and that flow was not there. And Henry Mancini really sucks. It’s hard for me to say that because he’s a great, and I love that Touch of Evil soundtrack.

BETH He was old by this time.

ADAM Yes. This was like seeing Van Cliburn in 2000.

BROOM Right, when I saw him at Tanglewood. Oh, were you there too?

ADAM YES! You always say that!

[The original Times review is read]

ADAM That was awful. That was bad and wrong. That was an embarrassment. It just goes to show you: probably we all could get jobs as writers if we wanted.

BROOM In the 80s.

ADAM It was like it was written in an hour.

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